Maria Menozzi Blog

Academy Awards, is it really an Academy?

2010-03-07T11:06:00.000-08:00

So, it's the big day for film here in Hollywood. Below are my Predix:

Best Pix: I think there will be an upset here. I don't think it's going to be Avatar or Hurt Locker. So let's see:
Up in the Air: overrated; good flick but geez, where's the payoff?
Up: What are the odds that two films nommed for best pix have "Up" in the title? Odd. Anyway, this was really good and not what I expected but it will get Best Animated Pix for sure.
A Serious Man: who remembers this flick? This is a Coen Bros & Co. flick! Good reviews when it came out but virtually disappeared and no one is even talking about it. So, I think this will win.
The Blind Side: inspiring for sure, fun to watch Bullock for sure, great dialogue, but not a great film per se, yet, it does stand a chance.
Avatar: If the Academy goes predix-able, this will win.
Hurt Locker: If the Academy gives Director to Bigelow, this film might win.
An Education: Small but good but not that good, Molina was robbed of a nom this year.
District 9: Yes, this is a film. A weird but oddly compelling film that ultimately moved me in the end. This film is an example of what film can do to be thought-provoking and be a voice for oppressive societies. Also, just to be clear, it's a work of fiction and no one I know owns any interstellargalactic weaponry. You may know people, but I don't.
Precious: In one word, amazing. This film is the upset I think. I think the Academy may just eschew both of those other favorites for this one. This film was so amazing and moving and unbelievable that it stayed with me for days and days after I saw it. It is not relentless or a "downer", it is ultimately satisfying and uplifting. And like District 9, it is an example of what great cinema can do for the spirit.
Inglorious Basterds: As much as I wanted to hate this flick, dammit, it's good. Really good. This might be the one to win actually if I think about it.
So I predix: Precious, Inglorious Basterds, Hurt Locker, Avatar (in that order)

Best Direx: Bigelow! that's all for this category. If that stinkin' Cameron guy wins, I'll eat a second piece of baklava.

Best Actor: Bridges! Hands down and if he doesn't win, I'll eat a third piece of baklava.

Best Actrix: Bullock! (Hey, there's quite a "B" thing going on here, how did that happen?) This is her "Erin Brockovich."

Best Supporting Actor: Waltz, he's worth the price of admission alone in Basterds. Amazing. Although anyone else from this category, I'd be just as happy.

Best Supporting Actrix: Mo'Nique. You have to see her work in this film to believe how amazing it is. I'm not coming close to articulating how great.

Best Orig Screenplay: Mark Boal, Hurt Locker.
Best Adapt Scrix: What's his name and what's his name who never met each other but wrote the script for Up In The Air. Go figure.
Best Song: Who cares? Do we really hear these songs again? They used to get radio airplay, now? But it will be the Crazy Heart people and I hope so because music made that film as much as Bridges did.

Best Documentary: I don't know, if they would only show these flicks at the theaters, we could actually see them, geesh, hello distribution?
Best Foreign Flix: Une Prophet even though White Ribbon will probably win. I am dying to see both of these (and that's dying in a figurative sense for my new readers who are having a hard time with the English language syntax).
Best Short Film: I don't know because ONCE AGAIN, no one puts these great little flicks in theaters. Shame shame shame.

And is the Academy really an Academy and if not, then why do they call themselves that?
Yay, Steve Martin is hosting. Finally, someone actually funny, wry and sarcastic....

mm

THE FIDDLE AND THE DRUM AND THE NAIL ON THE HEAD

2010-03-06T01:34:00.000-08:00

I was out walking with Lilly tonite around midnight (like the song, only without the brandy, the drum brush in the background and the red lipstick), and I feel I have to write this blog.

My voice once again is trying to be silenced. I have a quote under my signature on my email: “Your silence will not protect you. Audre Lorde” I doubt these people even know who Audre Lourde is and they certainly lose out for that, great poet that she was and firm believer in speaking up for what’s right and for dignity in general. Now, for all those who know and love me, and since all this distress has happened, and I know there are many more of you than I ever could believe and for that I am truly grateful and appreciative and amazingly moved in my heart; but for all those of you who know and love me, you know that I am a kind, generous, wonderful person who would cross a war zone to help someone if I could; especially a child and an animal.

Recently one of my blogs I had written was being used against me to try to injure, once again, my good name and make me into some criminal of sorts. For people to read anything I have written here in these blogs to indicate anything other than an individual trying to make sense of the nonsensical that life sometimes throws at us and trying to do that in a humorous, irreverent, wise-cracking, compassionate way, are people who are really grasping at straws to try to save themselves from their own fragile egos.

But that’s not my point for writing this or for what I’m about to write: the only fight worth fighting is the spiritual fight. Everything else in this world is illusion. So when it seems that others are trying to purposely keep you down, see you as a threat to their fragile self-esteem and figuratively use you for a punching bag, you take a step back and when asking, the plaintive, “Why me?” you realize, it isn’t about you at all. And then that wonderful “shift” happens, that place where the seas part and the sky opens up and the burden is lifted all because you fought the good fight, not the earthly one they wanted you to fight, but the one where you could be the “detached observer” not the emotional person they want to think you are. You stepped back and said to yourself, “I see. I was blind and now I see.”

There are some people in the world who are attracted to you because of your light not because they are trying to compliment it. They have some piece missing in themselves that they find in you and they want it and they figuratively try to take it. They’ll try to shame you into silence, find a way to play you a crazy fool, and they even believe that you will behave the way they do and strike back and when you don’t, it baffles them. So they try to amp it up. This little trick didn’t work, so let’s try that one. All I can say is, try it. You’re expending your valuable physical, mental and emotional energy on an illusion. As the Course in Miracles asks and is the whole premise of its program, “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” And I answered that question a long, long time ago.

I had the pleasure and honor of attending the Alberta Ballet at UCLA Live to see their program: Joni Mitchell’s The Fiddle and The Drum. She composes music to Kipling’s poem, “If.” She writes in the Program Notes, “With our situation for all earthlings—man and animals—becoming so dire, I felt that it was frivolous to present a lighter fare….” The depiction of the beauty of the dance numbers against a backdrop of dramatizations and images of war was powerful, moving and at one point when I started actually weeping early on in the program, I found, cathartic. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in “Women Who Run With The Wolves”: “…the demon cannot enter any house where tears have been cried by a true heart…tears have done three works: called the spirits to one’s side, repelled those who would muffle and bind the simple soul, and healed the injuries of poor bargains made by humans.” And creates in us a space for the shift where we can realize what is illusion and what is worth fighting for: peace, harmony, self-respect and greater connection to self and God, an understanding that can transcend the earthly values of ego, meanness and predatory elements, that attempt to devalue and douse our light.

There is no other fight but the spiritual one: it’s time for all of us to grow up, to become cosmic adults, to realize we need to live together and to become aware of our own paths to use for good in the world, not destruction. There can be no physical destruction unless we find it in our own hearts first. Pema Chodron talks about connecting in our meditation each day with those sentient beings who are: (1) going through suffering akin to our experience, (2) causing our suffering and that of others, and (3) near and far from us, individuals, the community and finally, the whole world. This way we feel the compassion that helps us transcend the suffering and bring it to the light.

As a writer, I’ve always known: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

I will leave this blog with Rudyard Kipling’s poem for it certainly hits the nail on the head for me at this time (by the way if there are any nails out there threatened by that reference, I apologize but it’s always been a figurative saying and not real, i.e. an illusion):

If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Many blessings to everyone and welcome new readers!

MM

THE SOLO PLAY; WHERE IS IT?

2010-02-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

THE ARTIST BLOG #1

So I’ve been writing this solo play for almost 6 years now? I think, I guess, something like that. I got the idea and then the title almost immediately. I never get titles right off the bat. In fact, I have trouble with titling projects, anything I write. So why this title came to me first I’ll never know. Except I think I do know. I believe that the title of this project is what kept me going and persevering through all the bullshit I’ve had to wade through just to get this thing off the ground, out of the house and sprung from my head to the page to the stage. And it’s not there yet. I have an almost date set for a preview in July. I have the date but the woman in charge of the stage doesn’t apparently return calls. And this is what I have been dealing with for six years and umpteen number of learning experiences later.

So I have the title right? I have the idea about theme, premise, bits and pieces of scenes, dialogue, action…so I take a solo play class at IO West taught by a guy who runs the Comedy Central Stage or whatever. Everyone can teach around here. I am in class and I am getting ideas about what I’ve already thought about and listening to the other six people or however many, read their plays and talk about their ideas. We read a little bit from our plays every session and get feedback. The problem is no one wants to give me feedback. They just sit there and stare at me as if they can’t figure out whether I am a genius or a moron. The instructor gives me feedback and I take notes but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to put those notes into action. I don’t know, maybe because the instructor is talking in hieroglyphics. He must be because I’m really good at incorporating feedback into my work. I’m not defensive, I’m not argumentative, I really want this to come to fruition in the best possible way, I’ve seen umpteen number of solo plays that I have enjoyed and would like to emulate them but trying to figure this out is like trying to decipher a coded language. All I see is “SOS.” The point, though, of trying to stay on task with a class and bring in pages every week is good for me and I take the next level. Only it’s the same thing: lots of stares, no one who gets what I’m trying to say and worse yet, no one who can actually give me any kind of feedback that gets to the heart of what I want to say, or am trying to say with my piece. The instructor seems irritated that I can’t make this more theatrical instead of like an autobiographical memoir. I’m thinking, um, that’s your job, dude, to help me make this theatrical, to suggest ways of looking at the piece in a more theatrical vein so that I can make the shift from the page to the visceral, visual dynamic stage. Why do all think they can teach, I'll never know. I used to teach and I never thought for a minute if one of student couldn't get what I was saying, it was their fault. You break down and down until the light bulb over their head goes off. And it does if you do your job.

So I stop taking solo play classes. Instead I buy books on how to write a solo play and dig in to their exercises, chapter by chapter. I think I’m enlightening myself and I look for an acting class now because I’m getting withdrawal from performing since I’ve stopped doing stand up comedy and theater and need to flex my acting muscles, feed my soul. So I end up taking an acting class where the teacher allows me to utilize my time in scenes and working pieces of my solo play. I get good feed back there I think. I am realizing some items don’t work, aren’t necessary to the themes, too long, not funny enough, not funny at all, don’t play well, are pointless, are boring, and in short, need rewrites and work. I’m on the right track though and I am understanding how to make the translation to stage for the piece. It’s not there yet, but it’s possible. This is now three years in the making. But, I also get contradictory feedback, this works for some, not others, this doesn’t make any sense and yet it makes sense to me; I should take this out but I think it should stay in and be rewritten. I also get many people who tell me to keep going, they think it’s powerful and I should stick with it. This is rewarding and something that deep in my gut I already know.

I end up quitting the acting class. The teacher is interested in directing it but the teacher is also a woman who has been undermining and sabotaging me from day one in the class. Lest you think this is unspeakable, it is, but par for the course of the world of acting classes in Los Angeles. It is rare to find a class that is really truly supportive and not about the ego of the instructor. So I move on to figuring it out for myself again. I take the notes from class and do a rewrite and from 120 pages, double spaced, I get a 70 page double spaced piece which is still too long but I figure here is something I like that has problems but yet if I maybe take the jump to try to put it up I can work with a good director, dramaturge, to help me whittle it down to a stunning, work-in-progress, piece that can be molded in performance and rehearsal into shape.

Ah, the naïve ideals of the artist. So I set out to get help producing this play. The elaborate tirade on my experience will be for the book of the process of the solo play which I will start working on as soon as this gets to Broadway. Briefly, I will say that after firing two directors, firing the two producers I hired (never use two people who are obviously out of their league to do business with), watching all these people literally take over control of the piece to suit their egos and greedy little hands, I ended up canceling the whole production in the 11th hour and losing thousands of dollars in the process.

But now here’s the rub. It all worked out. Well, we really don’t know that yet but I think that it did even if I haven’t presented it yet for public forum. That’s coming soon. In the process of all these tries and trials, I met a wonderful gal who had the courage to tell me, when I was looking for a director, that she didn’t think it was ready, that it needed a lot of work, that there was a story there definitely that needed to be told and was waiting to be told, and that she couldn’t in good sense and conscience, consider taking on the piece as a director. She could, however, help me bring it to fruition and guide me through the creative process of turning it into a worthwhile play ready for production.

I cried for three days and like the resurrection, on the third day, I knew she was right and at great humiliation and expense, I told everyone connected with this play to go home and go take a hike. You could say, well, she was just trying to drum up business for herself. She was and at the same time, I felt that she wasn’t just trying to get my money. I felt she really had to speak her mind and offer her thoughts upon reading it and help me get to the right place. I didn’t have to call her back. I could have sat on it, been resentful, bitter, and decided I wasn’t going to do it at all, but like the title, I kept coming back to it. I called her and after a year of working through this piece, I can honestly say, it’s tremendous. lt is way more than I thought it could be, it’s beyond anything I could have imagined I would accomplish and I can’t wait to bring it out into the open and the world. This has not been an easy process. It has been frustrating, difficult, disappointing, doubtful, uncertain and I have thought of quitting many times. I can’t do it though. It was necessary for me to stick it out and keep going and see what happened. I learned so much about myself and my resilience, my talents, my ability to work with others and especially I learned how to work with someone in a creative capacity and that even though we have our differences of opinion, I know that this woman has my best interests at heart, that she supports me and the project and that she truly cares about this work, me, and what happens to it. She also knows that she can only hold the space for me to create and do the work, she can’t do it for me.

Who knows what will happen in the end? If I will do that one performance and decide thank you, that’s it, or maybe the world will decide that for me, I don’t know. I do know that no matter what you do in life, you have to believe that it all matters, that there’s a place for all you do and want to do in the world. Whether it lasts one minute, one day or 80 years is not the point, it’s how you get there. And I’m getting there. And I will get there, I know it.

And a slew of good reviews and ticket sales couldn’t hurt either.

MM
P.S. Title of solo play: Genius From A Blue Collar Neighborhood.
P.S.S. Name of Coach/Director: Karen Aschenbach, Creative Process Coaching

Cocooning

2010-01-18T21:41:00.000-08:00

I am balancing checkbooks, Lilly is chewing the ear on her squeaky bear toy and it is raining cats and dogs and since it is California, it’s more like puppies and kittens. The wind is blowing fiercely, the heat is up in the house and it’s, you know, like, maybe 60 degrees outside. For the life of me, ever since I moved here, I just can’t summon up the wintry cocoon that I used to live in during the Midwest winter months. There are whole weekends where you just stay in the house, under a blanket and watch endless movies until you fall asleep. I think the bears call it: hibernation. Or, we call it for the bears hibernation…whatever. I’ve been watching too many animated movies with animals talking. And they really do talk, don’t they? But it seems rather, whimpy and ungrateful, to try the cocoon in L.A. It’s more like a three hour thing here and then you go outside just to regulate the real temperature in the house.

These are not my concerns. It’s a new year and I am continuing my search for employment, rather, meaningful employment. I am very busy with academic work and requirements and am volunteering at a treatment center near my house. I went to interview with the director there and felt a sudden urge to run and also jump for joy at the new adventure. So, as usual, I’m full of confidence and self-doubt, story of my life.

What’s most important about where my life is taking me now is possibilities. I can see a better future, a future where I have options and can continue my creative path on a more stable, yet, flexible, path. Also, a path where I don’t have to suffer abuse for being in a predominantly female occupation where the prevailing attitude is that I am unintelligent, needing constant supervision and have to play the obedient female with no opinion, suggestion, thought, or choice about my work and how it is executed or anything else for that matter. In short, if you’re working for an incompetent boob, you have to play incompetent along with him/her without question and suppress all evidence of intelligence, experience, skill and personality. Don’t be smarter than your boss and quite frankly, there’s always one you’re smarter than or wiser than, meaning you have integrity and values and you have to suppress that as well in order to be the fence for your boss’s negligence, incompetence and sometimes downright malpractice. Bye bye corporate world.

I remember one place I interviewed several years ago in West L.A., a financial corporation, legal department of course, where they provided/catered lunch in everyday and the requirement was that you had to eat lunch inside the offices everyday. They acted like it was such a great thing they were providing you this catered lunch. I guess if this is a third world country, I might find that attractive. Or if I was a homeless woman without a next meal or a starving artist, but I can’t be bought with food. I’m Italian, I can cook, fix my own meals just fine and prefer them to most of the crap you get in restaurants. So if you’re going to offer a meal in return for my freedom for an hour, it better be lobster! Everyday! Then the woman was offended because I questioned the value in that and that I wasn’t that interested in the job. I mean, really, you’re offended because I don’t want a job where I have to basically keep myself chained to the office ALL DAY! like prison, without so much as a lunch break to get some fresh air? When am I supposed to run errands, take a walk, take a break, treat myself to lunch out somewhere, meet someone for lunch? I have a life and it’s not yours for the time I’m given BY LAW to use as I please. These people think because you need a job that you’ll just nod your head and take this crap. And they can do it too because there are people, especially women, who need the jobs and will take it. And it’s because of that and because women don’t know how and are too scared to stand up for their rights against these types of fascist abusive practices that this is allowed to continue in all the so-called professional positions. Pay for my lunch, ha! How about pay for a week in Paris? Then I’ll think about it.

I get so many people telling me how much less I’ll be making working as a counselor than what I was doing and it is true technically. What they don’t understand is how much your soul thrives when it’s happy doing something meaningful and purposeful rather that something that is offensive and soul-sucking everyday. You have so much more energy to do other things that could provide supplemental and eventual double income when you are not using all your energy just to get out of bed in the morning to sit at a desk under a fluorescent light that illuminates nothing, staring at a computer screen, trying to look busy, waiting to obey, raising your hand to go to the bathroom and listening to banal ego stories being told to you so you can provide insincere interest and ego-feeding, oh and driving through exhausting rush hour both ways, and this, on top of the verbal abuse.

Sigh. So, here I sit. Yes, wondering how I’m going to pay bills this month, thinking of all the homework I have yet to do, watching the rain, yet, feeling a sense of possibility in what my future actually will be a year from now, something I couldn’t look forward to a few years ago. Now my only concern is whether the world will implode before then which is also a very good possibility.

MM

Unemployment Helped My Reading Levels

2010-01-03T16:57:00.000-08:00

Truly this was the year of reading. And read I did. Not even as much as I wanted. All these books are not just from Borders or Amazon by the way. There are two or three little bookstores I like to visit from time to time and pay full price and coupons be damned! There's quite a mix here and not in any consecutive order of reading and I have an asterisk key at the bottom. I tried to enlarge my scope and genre reading this year. What a difference that's made. I also have been reading more literary works and classic works. Last year was the year of Austen. This year may be the year of Dickens? Not sure, but Great Expectations is on my list. And I have to finish Middlemarch. That is really good but hard to get through! There's also lots of Jung and Jungian-based reading, mostly for my own benefit, but also for my own interest in writing, drama, acting and therapy. I wish I had followed my heart to my divine purpose all those many years ago. Sometimes I'm overwhelmed by a sense of futility and lost time but life isn't over until it's really over and we don't know when that will be so I might as well keep on and as they say, integrate and let it flow. I am continuing all my studies this year as well. I feel like I'm being given the chance to really study and learn for the first time so that I can enjoy it like I should have when I went to college. Ah, today is all that matters. So here's the list:

BOOKS I READ THIS YEAR 2009
1. Intimacy by Osho*
2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
3. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith*
4. Notes from Underground by Dostoyefsky
5. Persuasion**
6. Sense and Sensibility**
7. Emma all by Jane Austen
8. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros*
9. The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller**
10. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
11. Monster by John Gregory Dunne
12. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion*
13. The White Album by Joan Didion*
14. The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
15. Conversations With Woody Allen by Eric Lax*
16. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
17. Paula by Isabel Allende*
18. Chosen by A Horse by Susan Richards*
19. Women in Science by Vivian Gornick
20. Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
21. Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster
22. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill*
23. Method or Madness by Robert Lewis*
24. Passion For Acting by Alan Miller**
25. A Dream of Passion by Lee Strasberg*
26. The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzberg
27. Man In Search of a Soul by Carl Jung*
28. Synchronicity by Carl Jung**
29. For Love of the World by Deborah Lubar**
30. At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard**
31. The Story of A Soul by St. Terese of Lisieux
32. Mansfield Park*
33. Northanger Abbey
34. Pride and Prejudice all by Jane Austen*
35. Jane Austen, A Life, by Carole Shields
36. Yoga by Osho
37. Start Where You Are, Pema Chodron**
38. Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
39. Olive Kittredge by Elizabeth Strout*
40. Zero Limits by Joe Vitale
41. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
42. The Miracles of Archangel Michael by Doreen Virtue
43. On Beauty by Zadie Smith
44. The Lover, by Marguerite Duras
45. Larry’s Party, Carole Shields (reread)
46. The Pregnant Virgin, Marion Woodman*
47. Home, Marilynne Robinson**
48. Medea, Euripides
49. Antigone, Aristotle
50. God’s Harvard, Hannah Rosen
51. Without Reservations, Alice Steinbach
52. Addiction to Perfection, Marion Woodman*
53. Grace, Gaia and The End of Days, Stuart Wilde
54. Sixth Sense, Stuart Wilde
55. The Art of Redemption, Stuart Wilde
56. Stop-Time, Frank Conroy*
57. Notes from the Underwire, Quinn Cummings
58. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
59. Liar’s Club, Mary Karr***
60. An Invisible Sign of My Own, Aimee Bender
61. At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman*
62. Granta 2004, Film
63. Caesar’s Way, Caesar Millan
64. The Lightworker's Way, Doreen Virtue

* I really enjoyed this work.
** I really, really, really enjoyed this work.
*** Re-read and really enjoyed it again.

Happy Still Unemployed New Year

2009-12-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

What an eventful, uneventful year! Many good things, other things, well, we call them challenges and I conquered every one so I’m proud of myself and hoping I will never have to go through any of that again.

The greatest changes this year have been the unexpected surprises that propelled me to give up in my life what wasn’t working and renew my purpose to write and finish my theater project and to make fruitful again my creative life. One of the things that helped me do that was losing my job last year and being able to collect unemployment which doesn’t really pay for anything but rent and a few bills but I’ve been able to get by. Then rethinking what I really wanted to do for work I was able to use the time to go back to school and get into a field that I’ve been interested in all my life, counseling. So I have many good things to look forward to in the new year that I hope will bear fruit because of all the hard work I’ve been able to do this past year. Where there’s danger there is opportunity, so the Chinese say and that is true.

Another major event was learning I had the added gifts of intuition and angelic guidance to help me contribute to my life purpose. Being on an intense spiritual path these last several years and especially in the last few years, has led me to open up many more areas of my life that I never knew I could use and that have existed for me all the time. I have been able to cultivate these gifts throughout the year and for myself which have been invaluable to my life and hopefully for others as well that I have spoken with and given guidance.

I was able to make music again, not just writing songs, but being able to play the piano and learn guitar and have the time to sing and make music every day. These are things I hardly ever made time for in the last ten years. What a shame.

And reading. I have indulged myself in every kind of genre, subject, and prose. I completed my goal of reading all six major Austen novels and enjoyed that immensely. I still have 18 books untouched and ten I’m in the middle of and one or two that I need to complete that I started several months ago but later on this week I will publish the list of books I read this year. It’s amazing. I haven’t read so much since…well, never. And this time of year I’m usually devouring four or five books because by the time I come back to Los Angeles, I get too busy to enjoy just reading and sitting for hours and finished a book. This has been so important for me to indulge myself in books this year. I felt this was a time of planting seeds and cultivating the soil so to speak.

The next big thing and the major, major event this year was an addition to my family. I can call myself a family now because I have Lilly. To think I almost missed having her because of my anxiety. I’m happy to say she’s been with me 3-1/2 months and she’s still alive and kicking and doing great. We took obedience classes together and she’s teaching me all about how to take care of her. She’s my buddy and I hate to leave her home at all. She’s the best thing in a long time to happen to me and I’m so grateful.

I’m grateful I passed another year in the pink of health. I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford insurance after this month but we’ll see. I’m grateful my family is also in the pink of health and my mother was able to visit me at the end of the year again, this is the third time consecutively, and we had a wonderful time. I’m grateful for all the help and support I’ve gotten this year from above and below and all the wonderful teachers in my life, both positive and negative.

My mother is fond of saying, “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” and I can see that. The trick is to keep going and keep reinventing yourself. Life is full of danger and opportunity and the key is to take care of the one with courage and intention while keeping alert for the other and having the courage and intention again to grab it. I think I finally get it. I hope and with hope for another wonderful year of great events and change. Live long and prosper. May the force be with me and you.

MM

Little Lilly

2009-11-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

It’s 5:00 a.m. and I can’t sleep. In the darkness of the room, I can see faint light. I make a move to slightly turn because I can’t toss anymore. Not because of sleep but because when I turn every so slightly, my arm might dislodge the white furry little head that is sleeping in the crook of it. How she got there, I don’t know. While I actually was sleeping, she might have edged her way up sneakily or just stretched out from the furry ball she usually sleeps in, sort of spooning me in a doggie way by pressing her little body against my chest or my thigh as I sleep. I sleep on my sides mostly so it’s not hard to do.

There she is, she lets out a little sigh, still sleeping. Once in awhile I move and she wakes to turn and look up at me as if to say, are you alright or rather, will you stop moving, I’m trying to sleep here. I can see the little snout, the short floppy ears and those big big black eyes look up to my face mopily, sleepily and not without a little pleading.

This is Lilly, my new friend, a new member of my family. And I am a family now. I have been pining for her for the last ten years. She came to me through a rescue and a longing finally so bad to have a furry friend in my home, that each time I talked with anyone about it or even thought about it, I would get teary-eyed. Now lest you think I am losing it to all sentimentality or soft-hearted ickiness, I have to say that I almost lost her forever. No, she didn’t run out into the street or anything like that, no illness, just my stupidity. Owner anxiety I should say. Owner obsessive-compulsiveness, owner neurosis, owner fear, well, owner stupidity.

First of all let me say that I think it’s criminal how many dogs and cats there are, not to mention mice, rats, snakes and geese, but I don’t really care about them right now, that are homeless and sitting in shelters. We are a cruel society towards animals. We absolutely have no conscience when it comes to animal ownership and what it entails and we don’t care. We think animals are a little entitlement when we want it and when we don’t want them, we throw them away, sometimes literally, as I can attest to more than one rescue I went to who told me so and so doggie or cat was found in the trash bin. Then there are those people who just let their animals go, bye, see you Fido, just leave, oh wait, let me put you in the car and drop you off on a street corner and leave. WHO COULD DO THAT? What is so difficult if that’s what you’re going to do than to just get in the car and drive to a shelter? I’m not even going to talk about all the heartbreaking stories of people who abuse their animals and neglect them. There’s just no excuse for it ever. They can’t speak, they can’t go anywhere, and they are domesticated so they can’t fend for themselves unless forced to and depending on the breed or mix. If they are not trained properly they become a danger to themselves, other animals and other people and children. It’s called responsibility; financial, emotional and otherwise. But I don’t have much respect for the human race, if we are still calling ourselves human. I’m getting pretty cynical in my old age. Although I think that started when I was 18 more or less.

So back to my Little Lilly, as the rescuer named her because she had so many rescues names one version or another of Lilly. And my Lilly is all of 8 pounds and a terrier mix, although they don’t know what the mix is. She is the most adorable creature I’ve ever seen. I scoop her up all day long to hold her, pet her, squeeze her and tell her I love her. She has done more for me than anyone I’ve ever known, male or female and she can’t even talk! Or drive! And I have to pick up her poo! Her cute little poo!

So I went through, ugh, I don’t know, hundreds of dogs, I mean, how do you pick really, but I had to get a small dog because of my small dwelling and if I travel in the U.S., I want her with me. I also wanted a female, probably because of my own inner feminine coming to the fore, I wanted to shelter a female. I didn’t care if the dog was young or old or middle aged, I just wanted a nice animal to come home to and give it some wonderful love. I knew I didn’t want a Chihuahua of any kind. No barking dogs, excitable personalities right now. And I didn’t want to deal with upset neighbors. This was a commitment too because I had to fork over rescue adoption fees, $1000 additional in an apartment deposit and a few hundred dollars to Petco for everything needed and on top of that initial vet fees, microchip fees and pet insurance which they now have, yay. So this was no sudden, spur of the moment idea I had to get a dog. The reason I waited so long because I didn’t have the money, the stability, nor was I home all that much in previous years and I wanted to make sure I could really take care of a pet, in all ways.

So I find a pix of Lilly on the dog adoption page, email the rescue, she responds, I go to look at Lilly and I fall in love immediately. She’s so feminine and fragile and cute and quiet. Elle, the rescue gal, comes for a house visit and says she’ll leave Lilly with me. WHAT??!! Leave the dog here, right now? Oh boy. I’m not ready for that, in any way! I rush over to Petco, buy $200 worth of stuff for a doggie, bed, crate, toys, food, cookies, leash, pee pads, collar, what have you and Lilly stays here for one night and the next night I give her back to Elle. I say, wait, no, I’m not as ready as I thought I was, and last night I thought I saw a small furry animal running around my apartment, needing constant love and attention from me, and pooping and peeing on my carpet and the middle of my living room floor. Oh boy. Nonononono. Can’t have that. There’s hair all over me, the couches, she sleeps in my bed like she owns the place, she wakes me up in the morning with her little paws stretching across my chest, and she keeps looking at me with those big black doleful eyes. Nonononono. What was I thinking? I can’t have a dog! I’m unemployed! I don’t have any money, WHAT?!!

And then I cried for two days straight and on the third day, I rose again and called Elle to ask for Lilly back. Something knocked me upside the head. It said, hey, this is it pal. This is what it’s like to care for another living thing. It’s about time you did that, it will help you and help her. You need her more than the other way around. So what if you adopt a kid, you gonna give it back if it poops it’s pants? Did I mention Lilly was 10 mos. old? I can hold her whole head in the palm of my hand and I don’t have big hands. She is the most precious, adorable, lovable creature and she’s mine. Elle let me have her back. I thought, how will I move around my day, and write and I’ll have one more thing to do with walking her and teaching her and all that. And you know what? I do move around my day and Lilly is included in that day and I do take her walking and I do teach her and I take obedience classes with her because little does she know they’re more for me than her.

And she does get hair all over the couch, she does wake me up in the morning sometimes, she does want my constant love and attention and that’s okay by me. She doesn’t poo or pee in the house ever since I got wise and started walking her. She was already housebroken, I just didn’t get it. I’ve had to learn patience again and positive reinforcement and not scolding or hitting or raising my voice to her which I don’t do. She’s giving me what I forgot could be had, unconditional love. And I give it back to her. Then I make up a hundred names for her. She’s a joy, my Lilly. She gives me compassion. I try to give it to myself and maybe when I get that part going, I will try to give it to the rest of the human race. After all, I have messed up on a lot of carpets and God didn’t throw me back.

MM

Callin' In Sick When I'm Not Sick...

2009-10-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

October 10, 2009

I called in sick today. Well, I’m unemployed and it’s Saturday so I had to call myself and pretend to have this really bad migraine headache and that’s why I couldn’t work. It worked because I went right back to bed without the headache and a smile on my face. Gosh, what a sucker I am. I disguised my voice; low, breathless and broken up. And I believed me!! What a riot.

Funny, while I was working I never called in sick unless I really did have that migraine headache. I was too worried I would lose my job. I lost it anyway. I guess the moral of the story is call in sick when you’re not sick once in awhile. You’ll probably lose your job anyway.

Nevertheless, I decided to give myself a real “me” nurturing, gentleness, not take a shower day. I stayed in bed until 1:00 p.m. Sometimes sleeping, sometimes not. Sometimes on one side of the bed, sometimes the other, sometimes just splayed across the bed under the covers and the flannel sheets which are now on the bed for autumn and winter. Lovely. It’s so lovely not to feel as if you have to get out of bed. Now I have umpteen number of things to do but as I went through the list mentally I realized I could do it tomorrow or Monday. Or even next weekend if I wanted to; I mean, hell, cleaning house and running errands can wait really. I’m not that excited about either and never are of course.

I was thinking not too long ago about how I used to spend some Sundays in my pajamas, sleeping in, making breakfast in bed, finishing a good book I couldn’t put down the night before and wanted to read all at once the last 50 pages or so and watching movies on TV all day. I haven’t done that in years. So I decided that was what I would do today with my fake migraine. I finished a book that had been on a list to read for so long and browsing a bookstore one Sunday afternoon not too long ago, I picked up. Memoir of a woman traveling alone to three different countries in Europe (no, not Eat, Pray, Love, which I enjoyed but its precursor that came out a decade earlier) and renewing her adventure and passion for life. How I envy her and her experiences. I would love to travel to Europe, London, Ireland and stay for a year and make everyday a spontaneous adventure. She even met someone on her travels. Goodness, what am I waiting for.

Quite frankly, I’m waiting for the dog adoption place to call me back. These people sure take their time for places that are trying to adopt unwanted animals. Sigh. I hate waiting. That’s my adventure right now, looking for a pet pooch. Finally. I have wanted a dog for so long and finally after that horrible person tried to break in or whatever it was, that was the final straw for me. I found a friend over the adoption website and I want her very badly and can’t wait to meet the little black furry gal. Sigh. Waiting is hard.

In any event, I shall go take a shower now. And make myself pretty for returning shoes to Macy’s that I bought a few days ago after an OB/GYN visit. After those yearly traumatic visits where the pain of taking a biopsy is suffered, I tend to want to be good to myself. Usually it’s lunch and a new book but for some reason I decided to go to the mall, big mistake. I don’t go to malls very often because I have a shopping disorder. It’s roughly like bulimia, where I binge and then purge meaning I buy by the dozens and then get home and realize, I’m not wealthy!! And end up taking 8 out of 10 items back. Which is fine. It just makes me appreciate the two items I keep and really when I get to looking at all of it, I get sick, physically. I bought four pairs of shoes and when I sat down and meditated and asked if I could keep them all, I got a visual of two pairs of the shoes to take back. A little universal reprimand. Like, hey, we’ll let you buy two but four is a bit much on the abundance scale right now. I got it, loud and clear. I don’t want them anyway. I looked in my closet when I got home and found two pairs I forgot I had. See when you’re unemployed, the wardrobe choices dwindle because where are going anyway but from the kitchen to the bathroom to the bedroom back to the living room? There’s only so much you can decide to wear in a day for all that and run through underwear to boot and have to do laundry again. Yeah, well. And I’m keeping the brown suede boots by the way. And I have to say I did get 30% off all the shoes. It’s not like I fished out the card to buy everything full price. With this economy and the stores clamoring for business if you buy something full price you must be related to Bill Gates or Bill Gates and he wouldn’t wear these boots I’m sure. His foot is probably much larger.

Oh, the book was called “Without Reservations” by Alice Steinbach. Really good. So was breakfast in bed. It was more like an early lunch but of course today I’m not paying attention to the time. Except that it is getting late and I still haven’t had a call back from the adoption place. Did I mention that? Yeah, not paying attention to the time at all.

MM

Nine Months of Unemployment and A Retort to a Comment

2009-09-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

This is my first blog that I am writing in the moment on my almost brand new laptop in Panera Bread. Actually this is my tenth month of unemployment really but who's counting. I feel like I have a whole new life and that there is so much more out there than just a job. Just a job. Words come up like: shift, transition, opportunity. Other words come up like depletion, poverty and hunger. But I tend not to pay attention to those words. I have learned to make use of my time everyday doing something creative, artistic and of course, another nook or cranny that needs cleaning. Even small one bedroom apartments get dirty, who knew? But who knew they could get dirty so often. Perhaps being at work all day left me unawares of how much dirt can really accumulate after a short period of time. Luckily, I have all the time in the world now to see that things are ship-shape, top to bottom. Sigh.

All I can say is thank god for bookstores. Small ones and big ones. And there aren't many small ones out there and they don't offer discounts but by golly I buy from them anyway. Come to think of it, I buy books all the time. Most of my savings depletion has been from the purchase of books. Here's the thing, I used to buy books three at a time at bookstores and still have them unread years later. Now, I buy two or three at a time and read them promptly, even the heavy, long, literary tomes. I read everybody! You on the bike! Do you have a book out? Can I read it? I recently read a book about reading books (yes, it has come to that). And in this book of essays about books, the author has an essay about reading anything just to read when there isn't a book around. I could understand this perfectly. She says, that she read a whole catalog of hunting equipment that wasn't even her husband's or hers but came in the mail just because she wanted to read about all the different types of things you could use for hunting. Sounds sordid to me, like reading a catalog of serial killer ideas but hey, I understood. I have done the same thing. I peruse almost every catalog I get in the mail. I will make an evening of it and sit on the couch (I have one now so I can do that) with a glass of wine or a cup of tea and settle in to look at every single picture and caption. You never know where the big idea is going to come from by golly and it just might be in that random catalog that made its way into your mailbox.

I also had the pleasure (ahem!) of a comment from someone, I don't know who, because they were chickenshit enough to sign it anonymously, who read my current (8/13) blog about visiting Michigan. The comment was hardly readable and not even proofread. Really. And it ended on that word and I don't even know what it meant. Apparently, the commenter read my 8/13 blog and thought it was a rant about how I hate Michigan. I read the blog again and realized that to my chagrin that although I wanted to make it clear that I hated Michigan, the blog did not make that clear at all. In fact, the blog didn't even mention or come near to being about hating Michigan. I'm being facetious but I found it amusing that someone could read what I wrote and infer only that from the blog. I do not hate Michigan. I love Michigan even though it's a mostly Republican state. I grew up on the southeastern shores of Michigan and the eastern portion of Detroit, yes, really in Detroit (Jane Street, Hamburg Street, go ahead, look it up!). I merely was annoyed that so many people I meet when I go back there automatically assume I shall be returning to live there as if I've had enough of my wandering around the world and could only be happy there. I think Michigan is a great place to live if that's where you want to be, I don't. I never felt at home there and I left. It's at times a difficult place for me to be and I also don't care for the "smallness" of some of the communities steeped in religion and racism still to this day. It's odd to me that the poster also commented that he/she was from Michigan but not living there but didn't want to elaborate. So if you're going to comment on my blog, be intelligent and state your case and I'm happy to either read it or reply or both. Make a point and make sure you actually read my blog and not read into it what your insecurities are and don't be gosh darn! defensive about a place you don't even live anymore. It's not utopia for cryin' out loud and I can hate it if I want to...in fact, Mr./Miss Poster, it is a "shithole" in some places. Have you actually been through different parts of Michigan and not just Bloomfield Hills? Nnnnah.

I shall return to the work I came out here to do, my solo play. I'm stalling on beginning. Like stalling on most everything else I'm doing...perhaps like, going back to work? Hmmmm.....
Hmmmm...
MM

WHY DON’T I MOVE BACK TO MICHIGAN

2009-08-13T14:44:00.001-07:00

Family Blog

8/12/09

And may I say that 2 weeks is 2 weeks too long for a family visit. Goodness, I feel like I've been here forever already. Although I do enjoy myself spending time at old haunts and eating at old haunts. There is something homey and comfortable about this southeastern part of Detroit where I'm from. You get used to it, fits like an old glove. I visited with cousins last night. Don't ask me to trace the family tree especially on Dad's side. It gets rather confusing with first and second cousins, nieces, nephews and who's the daughter/sibling/son/in-law/uncle/aunt of which of Dad's sisters and brothers, all since long gone, except for him, a mere, thank god for us, three years since he's passed on and up and away. Although he visits me in dreams all the time poor guy. Back to the evening.

I visited with cousins last night, okay, I'll try to explain: my father's sister's daughter's daughters, my second cousins because their mother is my first cousin and my father's niece. There. Try to figure that one out before your head hurts. Mine does, all the time when I try. One of these days I'll make the family tree thing and just refer to it. So we have dinner at this waterfront restaurant and of course it rains late in the day when we're about to meet, so we can't sit on the deck and watch the boats come in or out, but we have a nice indoor table near the windows where we can see the apartment building on the other side and related car ports. So many American cars to sight-see, my gosh. Geesh, everybody, I just want to yell: "In case you didn't know it, it's okay to buy a Toyota now. They are made in America and Ford makes Volvo and Chrysler makes Mercedes…" oh, forget it. Buy your GM, Ford, whatever, every three years with your bonus money. Full of digressions, I am.

Anyway, my cousins are 4 or 5 years older than I, wonderful people, always enjoyed seeing them. I went to school with their younger brother and sister, but never bonded with the sister, somehow I bonded with the older gals. Probably because they are single and middle-aged like me, never married, don't have any children and like myself, make no apologies for it and we are all living wonderful fulfilling lives, yes, we are, thank you. BUT MY POINT! Is that I always get asked if I'm going to move back to Michigan. As if moving to California or anywhere else is just a little excursion into the big world and soon I'll get older, come to my senses and move back near family and darling old Michigan, St. Clair Shores, Detroit, the big cheese or however that song goes. I just don't get it. No, I'm not moving back. At this point if I were to move anywhere it would be a mountaintop where I could sit all day and do nothing but watch goats.

And what do they think I would do for a living out here in the second highest unemployment rated, cultural wasteland? Go back to being a secretary? I think not. A teacher? Absolutely not. No working for the man anymore. I'm the only man I'll work for and that's stretching it since I sleep in until noon. They seem to think I should move back in with my mother and take care of her. What are they talking about? My mother takes care of me. Ahem. Not only that but why would I uproot my life to stay with an 87 year old woman who may or may not kick off anytime soon and then do what? Live in my childhood home until I die? God forbid, oh the thought. That's surely an old maid's death and not one I would go into that dark night willingly to do.

There are lots of things good about the place I can say but none that I'd like to give up my future for and die here. It was a nice place to grow up although I could have done without the pedophile uncle and a few others, but not much else really. And my family and all this is just a little too late. I hate to break the news to them but where were they when I needed family fifteen years ago going through my illness, my subsequent depression and alcoholism and my life transition to an artist? I was here. I was in Michigan, near everyone and no one came calling then. So, hey, now you're calling because, why, at any minute I could be famous? No, you're calling precisely for the reason I left. Because it's much more interesting being around someone, family or not, not doing what you're doing, not living the way you live but living in a different place, having different, varied experiences and enjoying their life. Not that my wonderful cousins/nephews/uncles/whoever aren't enjoying their lives or aren't sincere with their regard, interest and attempts to bond, I feel that they are and I am too. But next time you want to give me the lowdown of what a great place Michigan is and I'm sure it is and how I should move back, just think that you would never enjoy the time spent with me listening to my wonderful adventures in LaLaZasuPittsLand: the counseling classes, the writing classes, the yoga, the sights, tales and scenery and the angel reading counseling. And yes, who knows, maybe one day soon I'll return to visit again…this time with an entourage.

WHO STOLE MY PARENTS?

2009-08-07T19:17:00.001-07:00

Mortality is and all its contrivances have come upon me. No, I'm not dying…well, according to science I am a little every day and yes, that's what I am talking about but not today in the literal sense. Not yet, anyway. Whenever I visit Detroit or, rather, where I grew up, St. Clair Shores, I am confronted with mortality smack in the face. I don't visit very often anymore, once a year at most, but when I do, all I have to do to be reminded of the passing of time is look at my childhood home. What has always been to me a quaint, cozy, cottage where I thought I would never want to leave is now an old, archaic, bourgeois, unkempt, untidy, in dire need of renovation and paint, eyesore; an eyesore that I desperately want to revive to some level of maintenance and care if only just to clean it out.

What happened you say? What happened was I moved 2000 miles away and my parents got old. That's not being mean, it's true. Several years ago, after I had been living in L.A. for a few years, I came home one summer day to greet my parents at the front door who were ever excited to see me and I, them, and lo and behold, I gasped. Where formerly there had been two robust senior citizens, now were two elderly, white-haired, shrinking in their clothes, folks who I almost didn't recognize. Who did the Hollywood make-up? You can take it off now and bring me my parents, the real ones. The ones who used to vocally disdain the idea of being "seniors" (except for the discounts); the parents who used to be so self-sufficient, self-reliant and sympathized with the "real" elderly people by exclaiming, "Poor old soul." And now…

I don't know why it surprised me so much. My father was 47 already when I was born, almost 49 when my sister was born. My mother was 41 and I was her first born. So my parents were already well into middle age when their children came along. Yet, they were very active people and continued to be or so I thought. That day I came home was only the beginning of the realization that mortality hits everyone sooner or later, hopefully later, when you've had a chance to boost your 401k and make amends. It was also the realization for me that this wasn't the house I remembered anymore from my youth. That was a good thing. We all need to move on and god knows I sure did. I cease to call this "home" anymore. Where I live is my "home" now. Finally. But gradually, in the years before my father passed away and in the three years since he passed, I can see this house had grown old with them.

The problem became that my parents stopped doing what was necessary to keep the house in shape and didn't have the financial means to, other than keeping their bills paid. After my father's funeral, I helped my mother clean out some of his belongings and other things in the house and out of the house. I took the garage first. Opening the garage door, gingerly because the handles had broken off, I stood aghast looking at a garbage heap of empty boxes piled high in the middle of the floor of the garage. The floor of which I couldn't see because so much dirt, dust, leaves and other debris had covered it. At what point could my parents not see this? At what point did they decide that it was just easier to toss boxes in the garage rather than throw them out? My mother's logic was that they were saving the boxes for me in case they needed to send me something. This, of course, didn't make sense, because I hardly ever asked them to send me anything and when I did it wouldn't require anything but a small box which could be easily picked up at their local post office. Needless to say, I cleaned out the garage and a bunch of other nooks and crannies in the house of useless items waiting for a large black plastic garbage bag to hold them.

Now three years later, I hold my breath whenever I have to visit and walk in my mother's house. The distress I feel at having to stay in this once comfortable, embracing household, is palpable. This latest visit, I almost left to get a hazard suit. I awoke one morning to see a large cobweb strung from the family blind to the ceiling and from the window ledge. I looked up to see a bunch of cobwebs all over the ceiling not to mention in practically every nook and cranny in the house. I wouldn't stay in a hotel that looked like this. I would expect maybe the Bates Motel or maybe the Munster Hotel, even the Addams Family chain of Spookaday Inns but not, no, not, my parent's house.

I got busy. It took me several hours but when I finished the bugs and spiders took coat and hats in each little furry leg and grimaced and muttered their way out the door. Sorry, gang. I'm home. I understand my mother is 87 and she shouldn't have to clean her own house at this point but trying to talk her into (1) selling the house and living with me in Californy and/or (2) having a housekeeper come in twice a month at the least, is like trying to explain to her what Wi-Fi is and how it works, which is difficult for me on a good day when I'm sober. I kid, but only just barely. I don't know if I changed her thinking but I did make the house livable for at least another two weeks in which time I shall hop on a plane to my own house where the only reason I might find a cobweb is because I've been gone for two weeks.

My point is two things: that in my mid-life I am becoming acutely aware of what I have to be prepared for and look forward to in my old age and that it is long overdue I realized and also that I become as finely aware of my mother's own mortality. Since her genetic line includes amazing longevity with great health even though not one of her brothers or sisters followed an exercise regimen, diet regimen or other longevity-forming programs like vitamitavegmins, it hasn't seeped into my consciousness that her time is limited. Who knows, maybe mine is just as limited as far as that goes.

I remember after my father died many people "suggested" that now I would move back in with my mother to take care of her., of course. That's right, uproot myself from my life, one I have worked to hard to establish, including being unemployed at this time, in order to take care of my mother in her house in Michigan. Of course, the single daughter should sacrifice her life for the parent. The daughter that is married and has children has a much more valid life than a single woman could have. Not much has changed since the 50's has it ladies? Both women and men think this way, this is not limited to any one gender or the third gender and you know who you are. As you know, I didn't move back in with my mother. On the contrary, I've been trying to get her out more often to stay with me which is proving successful so who knows? In the near future, she will be living with me. I can't imagine having to put my mother in assisted living center or some such awful thing. I know I wouldn't want to be anywhere like that. The irony of all this: my sister divorced, again, and moved in her stuff "temporarily" to my mother's house, even though she's used my parents house as storage for quite some time now. So glad I didn't move back in or even remotely think about it. Sibling relationships are a whole 'nother blog and it would be much longer, another time.

One thing is sure: that I have been in the role of caretaker for awhile now and more so in the future I know. I cook for Mom all the time now and make sure she has more vegetables and fruits in her diet and less of that fast food which she denies she eats everyday but she does. Like the MacDonald's pancakes. She loves the MacDonald's pancakes and it's a social meeting spot as well. And the coffee, she loves the coffee there.

She's a pack rat though. She has every event dress from my youth, still, even though I've told her over and over to sell them, give them away, whatever. Give them to motorbike midgets I don't care. Every piece of every pot and pan and paper, paper, paper, mostly from her profession which she hasn't given up as yet even though she retired over twenty years ago, she keeps stored, stowed, tucked in somewhere, someplace, some cabinet, some bookcase, some magazine rack, etc. So this awareness also dawned on me as I cleaned for several hours and filled two huge boxes full of useless, outdated records, yes, records, those, even a 78 rpm, books, nursing books, magazines and CDs and cassettes among other things, that when my mother dies I'll have to clean out the house of all this stuff and the picture won't be pretty. And that's when I'll have to move back to Michigan because it will take at least a year to clean this all out. Sigh.

So here it is: A new stage of life, new transitions, and an opportunity here to reinvent myself. And make sure I have proper housekeeping as an ongoing routine. Otherwise, I might end up as breakfast for some lovely arachnid seeking revenge for my recent housecleaning binge.

From Unemployed to Sabbatical

2009-06-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

Whew! Back after a harrowing 8 weeks, feels like 12 weeks, studying hard, taking a final exam and writing a term paper. In between, I was also trying to write songs and do a hundred other creative things that I am either in the middle of trying to finish or trying to start. Life should be so dang tough. It certainly is a time for reflection and catching up and just really focusing on my own self and healing. I am adamant about not working any job for the sake of a job. I will make my income happily and joyfully doing what I love, whatever that may be, whatever comes my way. I can’t believe I’m stating this intention now. How many times over the years have I tried to make that my goal? So why now?

I guess it’s about being unemployed. Don’t worry, I’m still lovin’ it. It’s a little hard to get your bearings some days, to find a focus. That sort of threw me. I’m used to trying to get everything in on a weekend: errands, fun, recreation, relaxation, cleaning, maintenance and all that. Now I can do laundry Monday thru Friday during the day, anytime. I can clean a little bit every day or once a week, or once a month all at once. Aw, who am I fooling? It’s not that I want or need a job, it’s that I just want to know that the future is still out there holding possibilities for me. I want to feel a purpose to getting up in the morning. I do, it’s just that my real purpose has never really took off for me in any validating way.

I have seen a lot of great television series that I didn’t get a chance to on cable. I’ve seen:
“Deadwood,” which was amazing and fantastic. I would love to have had a chance to write an episode for that.
I’ve been watching “In Treatment” which is very interesting and has amazing writing and acting as well.

And here’s the list of books I’ve read so far this year, ones I can remember:
(asterisks indicate favorites and this is not in any kind of order)
Intimacy by Osho*
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith*
Notes from Underground by Dostoyefsky
Persuasion**, Sense and Sensibility**, and Emma, all by Jane Austen
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros*
The Senator’s Wife by Sue Miller**
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Monster by John Gregory Dunne
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion*
The White Album by Joan Didion*
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
Conversations With Woody Allen by Eric Lax*
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Paula by Isabel Allende*
Chosen by A Horse by Susan Richards*
Women in Science by Vivian Gornick
Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill*
Method or Madness by Robert Lewis*
Passion For Acting by Alan Miller**
A Dream of Passion by Lee Strasberg*
The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzberg
Man In Search of a Soul by Carl Jung*
Synchronicity by Carl Jung**
For Love of the World by Deborah Lubar**
At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard**
The Story of A Soul by St. Terese of Lisieux

Looking at it in writing seems like I’ve spent a lot of time reading but really it doesn’t take me that long to get through a book I love. And I’ve developed this little problem called insomnia which helps with the reading.

I’m bound and determined to get through all the Jane Austen novels by the end of the summer. I’m really enjoying them. It’s so wonderful to finally give myself the time to read all these wonderful literary works.

I believe this time off has turned into what one would call a sabbatical. And Lord knows I needed one of those. So let’s say we take this sabbatical for the rest of the year which gives me time to finish my creative project, write, read, make music, and study for my counseling certificate which is really rocking my world right now. Let’s say, I just give myself permission to do a job on my time, in my way, with purpose and enthusiasm and the joy that comes from the freedom of the unexpected opportunity to be right here, right now in this present moment moving towards wholeness. Let’s say, I do that. Good, because that’s exactly what I’m going to do now and in the future.

And for tonight, there’s always reruns of Sex And The City…and 3 books…

Where's Sue?

2009-04-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

It’s not often I’ve had to push the panic button with my 86 year old mother. (She would probably smack me for giving her age.) But not too long ago, I got a little scare. It was time to pull out my Worst Case Scenario book but I remembered, I didn’t have one. So I had to go to Plan B which was…??? See, I’ve never had to act on an emergency scenario so I didn’t quite know what to do. I digress.

It all started when I decided to call my mother at 7:00 p.m. one evening. There’s a three hour time difference so the call would have come in at 10:00 p.m. at her house. Now my mother is home in the evenings. She’s not social except during the day and it’s rare anyone would take her out in the evening because she would either feign fatigue or illness or say she had to get back to the house which she keeps at 86 degrees no matter what the weather is outside. I think the heat in the house goes up every year with her age. And she’s up at that time of the evening, in fact, she’s mostly up all night. She's usually watching some Dateline program, 20/20, CNN, local news, etc. The woman never leaves the five mile radius surrounding the house but has to continually watch the news. Then call me up and tell me what’s happening in my neighborhood. Is it any wonder I never watch the news? Mom has it covered. If there's an earthquake, I call her and say, what just happened? She knows.

So I call and there’s no answer. The machine kicks on but I wait because sometimes she picks up when the machine answers. She’s not a fragile 86 by any means but the news keeps her enraptured until the third ring at times. But this time the machine is running and no one is picking up. Strange. So I call her cell phone which she was told to keep with her at all times in case she falls and can’t get up. No answer. My mother is pretty good with a cell phone but only if it’s ringing or she’s dialing. After four years we finally got her to figure out her voicemail and how to retrieve messages. Her mailbox was full for two years with messages from people who assumed if they dialed her cell phone they’d be able to leave a message. She insisted she didn’t know how to retrieve her voicemail and resisted learning until I told her 20/20 left a message one day and she missed it. Pretty soon, she was working voicemail.

So I dial the house again a few minutes later, no answer. Dial cell phone, no answer. Hmmm. Did she tell me she was going out and if so, with whom? Her brother was dying and I thought maybe she’s at the hospital. So I try my cousin’s cell phone. I try Mom's cell phone again. Now, in addition to the voicemail, we had to train her to check to see if her ringer was even working. Sometimes it was in “off” mode, not even vibration mode. That was harrowing. But once again, I used the example, hey, what if Dateline called and you weren’t available because your ringer was turned off. That does it every time.

Then I try my sister and leave a message. Maybe Mom is with her or told her information. But I’m not panicking yet. I wait about twenty minutes then try again, both cell and home. No answer. Now I’m into emergency mode. I try to figure out the last names of my mother’s neighbors. My mother is blessed with two middle age single women on either side of her living alone in their homes. I figure out one woman’s name and give her a call. I leave a message, please see if there’s a light on in the house or my mother’s car is there. Give me a call. I’m 2000 miles away and feel very helpless right now. I may have fallen myself.

Then I call, finally, the local police department. I talk to a very nice woman and explain to her that I’m 2000 miles away, my elderly mother lives alone and I can’t get ahold of her. She’s usually home every evening and she’s not picking up the phone. I can’t seem to find anyone either who can check on her or tell me if she’s gone out. So the nice lady says she’ll send a squad car over to see what’s up. I tell them there’s a key in the garage, but I don’t know the code to the remote door opener. The nice lady tells me she’ll call me with details when the squad car gets there.

My sister calls and I tell her I’ve called the police. My sister who is usually only 25 miles away is taking a vacation in Florida and is also about 2000 miles away herself oddly enough. She tells me the remote door code. I say too late, they’ve probably already broken the glass in the garage window to get in and then tells me where the key is in the garage. She doesn’t know where Mom went to this evening either.

The nice lady from the police dispatch calls and tells me the police are in the house. The dog is barking in the background. I forgot about the dog. Poor Rebel is probably scared half out of its wits and it’s a nervous skinny retriever mix to begin with, skittish, I think is the operating description of this dog. The nice lady says the 200 pound or so police officer got in the house through an open window (What!!? The house has finally warped from the heat no doubt.), but they’re in the house and it’s dark and she’s not at home. Then the nice lady asks me if my mother is at the City Hall meeting and I say, oh my god, yes, she could be there. Was that tonight? Yes it was and she asks, does your mother have white hair and is she short? Yes, she does. Well, she’s speaking on TV right now at the meeting. The meeting is running long which is unusual because there’s a high turnout. Well, no doubt, because my mother showed up.

Oh brother. Okay, yes, that’s her. Grabbing the news spotlight whenever and wherever she can. Sigh. And her next door neighbor, the one I called, is there with her. So while my mother is over at the meeting, she making news in her local city because an APB has been put out for her by some 200 pound police officer who got a little more exercise than he bargained for on duty this evening. But he got to meet a nice dog. A nice, skittish dog.

One of the officers goes over to the meeting and tells my mother that her daughters are worried and have been looking for her. She checks her cell phone which she turned off (!!) because she was in the meeting. Another cell phone lesson for Mom: don’t turn off the phone, just turn the ringer off. Sigh.

So she’s a mix of humiliation and pride that her daughters actually cared enough to call the police to see if she was okay and humbled enough to realize that being the center of news attention isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. All this within the five mile radius that surrounds her house. “I’ll never do that again,” Mom says. "I have to remember to tell you where I'm going." Yes, thank you.

But, now, I know what to do in this worst case scenario. Next time, I told her to get pix and phone numbers of the police officers if they’re single. I think this is really the reason for a worst case scenario. And I'm on the phone to Dateline as we speak. Elderly parents out too late with turned off cell phones...

MM

DAY 84, 84, 86, 99, 105….OF UNEMPLOYMENT

2009-03-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, I’m still on my own here. Awaking everyday to find a closet full of clothes that I didn’t realize I only wear if I’m going to work. Geesh, the money I could’ve saved because, really, if I don’t get a job soon, all this stuff is either not going to fit me anymore or be out of style and I’ll have to give it away anyway. Sad. So what do I wear you ask? What do the unemployed wear when they’re not going to work? You may not be asking that at all. You may be asking yourself, why am I reading this blog? I could be reading the New York Times bloggers where they have Dick Cavett congratulating himself or Maureen Dowd, who is suddenly turning on Obama, instead of reading about this gal’s sorry-ass life. But I’m not really writing for you am I? So go piss up a rope and get off my blog. But if you are one of the interesting, fabulous, wonderful people who read my blog, I shall continue. In fact, what do I do all day? I have decided to take a little inventory of exactly what I have been doing since the big lay off occurred.

Let’s stick to a schedule shall we?
8:36 a.m. Roll over and look at the clock and think to self, gee, I should get up now and go for that walk and meditate and start my day. Roll over and go back to sleep. Must have slept throught my 8:00 alarm.

9:45 a.m. Roll over, look and the clock and think to self, oh my god, I feel asleep for an hour. I should get up.

9:46 a.m. Sleeping.

10:30 a.m. Look at clock, decide I need to pee, pee, come back to bed and think, just five more minutes then I’ll get up.

11:46 a.m. Roll over, look at clock and think, what happened to the five minutes? Get up finally. Very carefully, because I’m usually sore from my workout the day before.

12:00 p.m. Showered, hair is air-drying because I can do that, dressed in my yoga exercise pants, a long or short sleeve tee shirt depending on the weather, and a cardigan sweater and slippers. This is my unemployment uniform of the day.

12:05-12:25 p.m. My meditation. This is preceded by a reading of some spiritual item as "food for thought" during the meditation. The meditation usually goes like this: the spiritual thought, then thoughts about money, food, angst, people, people, more money, hey, I’m not supposed to think these thoughts, back to spiritual thought, then money, people, what’s on TV tonite, the glass of wine awaiting me later, writing, laundry, money, hey, I’m not supposed to be thinking this stuff, peeking at the clock, only 10 minutes, damn, oh not supposed to swear, back to spiritual thought….you get the idea. To say I’m a work-in-progress is a vast understatement.

12:30 p.m. Turning on the computer, making coffee, making breakfast, well, lunch really.

1:30 p.m. Computer finally comes up. (!)

3:30 p.m. Done reading email, looking for jobs (?), reading newspapers online. Think to self, geez, it’s 3:30! Where did the day go? And I am a dago. I should start writing, practicing guitar, go for a walk, do laundry, clean the house.

3:31 p.m. I go back to surfing online.
4:00 p.m. Waiting for response from emails, oh yeah, people have lives and so I better check later.

4:01 p.m. Still waiting.

4:02 p.m. Turn on TV for news and to see who’s on Ellen. She’s dancing, no one interesting, change channel to Bravo and that infernal Housewives of NYC reality show that I watch now.

5:00 p.m. Oh they have another episode at 5! I watch.

6:00 p.m. I’m getting hungry. But I go for a walk.

7:00 p.m. Check shoes for dog poop, enter house.

7:30 p.m. Clean and shiny again after shower, making dinner.

8:00 p.m. Eating dinner which consists of a piece of celery, an egg and a slice of cheese in front of TV watching some episode on any station at 8:00.

11:00 p.m. Turn off TV, think to self; gee, I should really go to bed. Pick up a book and read until…

2:00 a.m. Go to bed. Write post-it note of list of To-Do’s for tomorrow including laundry, guitar practice, novel writing, screenplay writing, yoga, walking, job search, playwriting, agent submissions and cleaning house. Realize I won’t do any of that so cross it out and stick a reminder up that Housewives of NYC is on at 4 and 5 p.m. on Bravo. Whatever I’m doing I need to stop and watch then.

Dream all night about weird shit and wake up and write it down to talk about with my therapist.

End of day.
End of blog.
By the way, this blog was on my list of things to do yesterday. Actually, more like two weeks ago but I am getting to it. And I pat myself on the back for that.

Someone said it’s St. Patrick’s Day and I never understood exactly what I was supposed to care about on this day. Drinking? Um, no, I’m in recovery. Shall I eat a baked potato? I don’t know. Shall I plant a kiss on the Guinness salesman? I will, if I can find one. Maybe I should just get on a plane to Ireland. That sounds more like it.

Day 65 of Unemployment

2009-02-15T15:47:00.000-08:00

I am finally catching up with the talk shows, she says rolling her eyes. I’ve never been a fan of talk shows. I don’t get it really. What does everybody have to talk about ? Just alot of actors promoting their TV shows or movies and they make this innocuous conversation about what they like to eat for breakfast. Who cares?! Please make this more exciting! When's the last time you had sex? Who with? What time of day? Do you smoke afterwards or fall asleep or eat? Or at the very least, dish! Dish about the set, who was a jerk and who didn't the make up people like? We don't want to hear it was a labor of love. Boring. We don't want to know you can do Al Pacino impersonations. What we want to know is, do you do these impersonations during sex. See? I should have my own talk show.

I turn on the TV in the afternoons while I’m writing sometimes, just gives me something to do when I take a pause and makes some noise in the background. I like it quiet when I write but sometimes it’s just too quiet all the time when you’re home all day long. Then you’re listening just to your thoughts and that’s scary. I turn on Oprah or Opree as my Dad liked to say. One day this week she had this young male architect on (I guess that’s who he was, I turned it on in the middle of program) who had redone a house for a woman and her husband (? Was this guy her husband, I don’t know, they just looked so mismatched.) who had a severely damaged, water-logged home due to Hurricane Katrina. The story took us through the house as it looked after the storm and then now as the architect had redone it with all these major renovations turning it into an almost storybook home. I felt kinda jealous, like, hey, someone do that for me. And hard as I tried not to cry, even Opree was crying, I did. It really was amazing.

I watch Ellen from time to time. She’s funny but I can do without that dancing stuff. It’s just silly. I love that she dresses in comfortable jeans and sweaters and sneakers. The game stuff she does with the guests or the audience is kinda interesting and the gals who went to the Superbowl were funny.

Dr. Phil sucks. I just hate all that pop psychology stuff anyway. I mean, really people, you don’t know you have a problem? Sorry, but life is hard, and you have to work at it which means really paying for therapy that can help you over the long term. Unless you’re a sociopath in which case not even Dr. Phil can help you but at least you’ll get some time on TV.

I watched Bonnie Hunt on her show this week. She had Chandra Wilson on in some too large dress that looked like a bath robe. Can’t these hosts say something gently to their guests about wardrobe? I realize not, probably, but all the same, do you own a mirror? The best thing was the pix of Chandra’s family, adorable. I love Bonnie and I’d love to love her show but didn’t she have a sitcom for awhile there about a talk show with her as the host? And isn’t she a damn good actress and sometime director and why is she doing this? Ugh, come on Hollywood, don’t you have anything for these women? Please replace Sally Fields on that awful Bro and Sis drama with Bonnie Hunt. Somebody, hello?

So next week, I’m going to try to watch The View since I’ve seen it maybe once and it was before all the brouhaha with O’Donnell. In fact, when I saw it, they had on the original members and I tuned in once and thought, how insulting to women everywhere. Why does everything feminine have to call itself out? Like female comedy night? I refused to do those shows because I’m not just a female comedian. I’m a stand up comedian who happens to be female. I don’t write comedy just geared towards women or the feminine perspective and a few subjects. In fact, I’ve never been married or had children so that would leave out quite a few subjects. And while I understand the need for a hook in this business if I see advertised one more week at a comedy club with the Comedy Moms headlining or the Mommy Comic or whatever, I’m going to singlehandedly force a protest march on the club. I mean are audiences really yammering that bad for subject matter pertaining to kids and moms and husbands and marriage? Aren’t your lives a little fuller than that?

What else? I’m reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem—finally—by Didion. I picked it up in high school in my library years ago and didn’t get it. Now I get it in spades. The essay on Self-Respect alone is the reason you should read this tome. I’m so happy to have discovered her work at this late stage. Sometimes you’re ready when you’re ready and that’s all.

I’m reading a book on reading books, Shakespeare Wrote For Money. Nick Hornsby wrote this column about books he’d read and then compiled them, the columns that is, in one little tome. It’s interesting. I got through one column last night about his discovery of Young Adult literature. I thought to myself, what took you so long? I have read YA novels for years now. Some of them rival the best fiction out there in less vocabulary but no less literate story-telling and less pages. They’re spellbinding. What reading this reminded me of was that I have to take a break from all this heavy reading I’m doing to take in a few or more than a few of those novels soon.

I made an historic decision this past week. I am going to become a full time UCLA student. I am going to get certified in counseling, something I wanted to do for years actually going way back to my NYU days in SEHNAP, a school which doesn’t exist anymore, and my music psychotherapy days. I just can’t stomach going to back to find a perm job in the legal business. I need flexibility and time to write and create. I’m too old to not do what I want with my life anymore. And I’m enjoying immensely the writing class I’m already taking there and how it has set me on the path to other things that I could be doing as well. In some ways, this unemployment has been a really good thing for me, for once. As David Byrne says on his new CD, “Life is long when you give it away.” And that has been true for me. I’m not giving it away anymore. It’s mine and I’m living it for me. And me only.

And I must say what a wonderful Valentine’s Day I had going out with a wonderful friend last night to see a solo show and then aperitifs. That is what Valentine’s Day is all about, doing what you want to do and sharing it with people you care about. It’s not about sex, and dinner, and lingerie and roses and chocolate and balloons. Oh those stupid balloons. If you need to give someone an “I love you” on a balloon, you need help. You’re only announcing how badly you want it for yourself, not for them. I am so happy not to have had to deal with any of that obligatory Valentine’s Day stuff. It’s like New Year’s Eve. Everyone’s afraid to not have something to do but it’s all overpriced and overrated anyway. Yes, you could say I’m bitter, but I’m really not, I’m happy and relieved that I don’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore and that I finally get to do what I want to do without any guilt. So the next wonderful man that comes along will match my strength, my groundedness and, thank you, Joan, my self-respect. That’s all it is. AMEN!

Day 60 of Unemployment

2009-02-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

Already two months, no work. Well, I’m working, I’m just not being paid for it…yet. I get all this time to write, hooray. I don’t have anyone who wants the work…boo. Here’s another little glitch. Every time I fill out one of those EDD forms to get paid, they schedule a phone call. What the…???!!! Just send the damn checks! It’s been two months and I’ve only gotten two checks totaling $810.00. Thank God, I don’t need to pay my rent or anything. Thank God I’m independently wealthy. Unbelievable. Why bother even applying for unemployment if they’re always trying to catch you in something? I don’t know why they scheduled a call this time. Maybe they just want to chat. Maybe they found out I’m going to pole dancing school for middle aged women who have been laid off and instead of taking crap during the day from men, they learn how to take it at night scantily clad. Oh wait, that’s my personal life. But at least I’ll make some money. I don’t know. I only know THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF I GOT A CHECK!! A FEW CHECKS!!

Excuse me. So what do I do all day? First of all, can I say how much I love my place? It is wonderful. I don’t feel boxed in like I did in the old place and I can sit here and write all day. I have done more writing in the last two months that I have in ten years. I’m finishing my spec script and starting on another one, working on a pilot and writing songs for my solo play that got derailed last year. I can do things in the evening without feeling exhausted from being at work all day. I can make a 6 p.m. yoga class once a week, twice a week if I want. I can enjoy the sunshine during the day taking my walks during writing breaks. I am playing the piano again, changed my guitar strings, playing guitar everyday and sleeping in later and staying up later which is more of my normal schedule. My house is really clean too. It always was clean but now I can get to it in short rather than long order. All this and more, I just can’t afford to eat. Or use the phone or turn on the lights. But those things are overrated if you ask me.

And, I bake cookies, cakes, baby-sit dogs, help the elderly cross the street, direct traffic and planted a garden. I volunteer for the local nonprofits and make sure I’m on time for afternoon prayer with all the other sisters if I’m not lost in thought dreaming on Mt. Salzburg. Then I take in foster children and we go out during the day and sing songs with me on guitar and the children marching and dancing behind me singing along. Sometimes we climb trees and I make them clothes, because I’ve learned how to sew now, and I make them from the curtains that used to hang in my bedroom. It’s adorable. Then when it thunders they all run in my room at night and we sing some more. Ah, isn’t being unemployed fun??? I renamed myself Maria Von Trapp and I’m going to take the children out and enter festivals as a singing group. Where’s my Captain though? We’re missing the captain.

Goodness, I must go now and prepare for our farewell song to all the guests I’ve invited to my apartment to dance to Austrian waltzes this Saturday night. We’re going to sing and the children are going to use the steps leading up to my front door for the show. Later on, we’ll sing about a mountain flower that doesn’t grow in California and that no one cares about here because you can’t smoke it. Sigh.

Yeah, okay, I need to get back to work soon. Stay tuned next week when I move in with my sister and her husband after I’ve been kicked out of my motel for nonpayment and out of my teaching job for sleeping with all the men in the county. I get to wear chiffon dresses, talk like a Southern gentile peach, and get taken away in a straitjacket. That should be fun.

Captain, where are you?

Thoughts: Rev Road, Bruce, and Oscar

2009-02-01T18:52:00.000-08:00

I just watched Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band play Halftime at the SuperBowl. I have been a fan for years now ever since Rachel O’Leary introduced me to The River double album back in college. Along with Billy Joel and Elton John, I don’t think there is a performer alive that matches this guy’s absolute talent and genius for live rock ‘n roll. It is just music that makes you feel alive and after dancing the whole set, I am now a bucket of sweat. Might have been the two cups of coffee I had before that, but I don’t think so. There isn’t anything more joyous than dancing to any music that guy makes. I must go see him in concert again somewhere. And he’s 59!!! for cryin’ out loud. All you lightweight contemporary, hip-hop, alternative, whatever bands out there, learn something. There’s nothing like that blue collar rock ‘n roll. But I give myself away as an unrepentant middle-class, Detroit girl. Los Angeles lacks the rock ‘n roll edge. I mean, really, Sheryl Crow? God bless her but it doesn’t translate.

Last night I saw a phenomenal film. In every aspect, this film was amazing, from direction, acting and writing to cinematography. Revolutionary Road just rocked my world. Okay, I get a little emphatic but isn’t that what the art of cinema is supposed to do? What a tragic, beautiful story of lost hopes and interrupted dreams and mistaken ideals of love and life. Kate Winslet is a genius. That’s all there is to it. I’ve always enjoyed her work but after seeing both The Reader and this, I have to admit that this gal has a long wonderful career ahead of her if she doesn’t go the Annette Bening route of giving everything up for “a family.” Really, you can do it all, just try. A gift is meant to be used not given up for your husband who’s 20 years older than you. What’s up with that? I digress. Back to the flick. Sam Mendes did a terrific job and Haythe wrote a fine adaptation. Not a false move in the piece and Shannon is so good as the voice of truth. I could pick apart this flick in oh so many ways but I’ll spare you just to say that every flick that Mendes does he gets better and better and every film has more heart. American Beauty was a fine debut but it lacked heart and emotion and I still haven’t forgiven the Academy for giving it Best Pix over The Green Mile. Road to Perdition was terrific storytelling and heartbreaking. And this one, Rev Road, is just as fine and wonderful and I may have to forgive Mendes for his Oscar for direction over Frank Darabount. I still am rooting for you Frank.

So now, the Academy Awards: Leo DiCaprio was robbed of a nomination for Rev Road, that’s all I’m going to say. I haven’t seen Ben Button because I can’t stand Fincher films, no heart or soul, all technical, pretentious filmmaking crap. But, I still need to see it yet, I know. That said, I still don’t think I would have given Pitt a nomination. He almost never knocks me out with anything he does. What I think he should have been nominated for: Burn After Reading, in a supporting role. He was hysterical in that and terrific. I honestly think he’s a better character actor than leading actor and I wish he would get that. He would rock. I don’t know what the Academy has against Leo but I wish they’d get over it already. Titanic, Ti-schmanic.

Kate Winslet should have been nommed for Rev Road in leading actress, not The Reader. She actually has a character arc in Rev Road and in Reader she is really a supporting role and doesn’t really learn anything. Reader is a terrific film too. The only beef I have in this category is Jolie who like her counterpart, Pitt, never knocks me out in anything she does. I’m too busy looking at her lips. In fact, I think she was nommed for this role because of her thick, raging red lipstick she wears in Changeling. I don’t get it, here’s a woman whose son was kidnapped and she finds the time to put gobs of makeup on her eyes and lips every day when she goes to work as a lowly telephone operator manager whatever and to see the police and to the grocery store. She’s supposed to be this unassuming, single mom in 1930-something Los Angeles and she’s made up like a movie star/hooker every day to go to work? When I’m depressed and stressed, the last thing I’m thinking of is hey, I better look pretty today. Or, for that matter, when a member of my family has been kidnapped!! And the other telephone operators look like regular women with almost no make-up? Can you say, hey, I’m the star and I need to stand out and be made up? That was the only element of that film, which was otherwise disturbing, yet well-made, that I didn’t believe and thought both Jolie and Eastwood should have known better. So maybe Spike Lee does have a point, eh, Clint?

Rourke is the whole movie of The Wrestler, love Tomei in anything, but the film itself is not that great of a story. Good for Rourke and the hearing aid, great “Method actor prop.” Hey, Darren, pay attention, we’re not all looking at your fancy film-school camera shots. It’s called, the story! So get over yourself already.

Slumdog is it. I don’t care what anyone says, I really enjoyed this film and it’s one of three films I saw this year that I could see again and walked out of the theater feeling really good. The other two were Rachel Getting Married and Frozen River. They didn’t give the slum kids money, they did, whatever. Really, these are movie-making Hollywood liberals even if they are from England. Do you really think they’re not going to pay these kids and take care of them? C’mon, get a clue. Anyway, India needs to get a clue. If that’s how millions of their people live, I’m horrified, and a few filmmakers aren’t going to really change anything are they? Aren’t you putting the blame in the wrong place?

I gotta say I’m making great creative use of my time off here and am in no hurry to start back at the job grind. Talk to me in a couple weeks though when my bills are due.

Finally, I’m hittin’ Thunder Road because I’m Workin’ On A Dream to resurrect my Glory Days when I was Born To Run….

I tell ya, next relationship I have, the big test: he’s gotta love Bruce otherwise….Niagra Falls.

How Many CEO's Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb?

2009-01-16T00:35:00.000-08:00

Well. What a waste of a day. I hate wasting days, hours, minutes, words. To me, that kind of a day is insufferable. And I have them rarely. It started when I couldn’t go to sleep last night even though I had to get up early for an interview for a job. A job that I don’t want, didn’t want and would never want but I go because, hey, it might be THEE job right? And the economy’s bad and I’m out of work and these people were offered up by my former employers, blah blah blah. In short, all the wrong reasons to get out of bed at all as far as I’m concerned. No wrong side of the bed crap here. I get out on the right side all the time. In fact, I should probably try the other side just for fun to see if my luck changes in any way at all. Then after the interview I have to go see a recruiter agency to update my files. Sigh. I get up too late to do my morning Ohm’s and run out the door as my new car is bucking, why, I don’t know. Maybe because, oh yeah, it’s a Ford product, it’s an American car, and 13 months is about par for the lifetime of an American car. Yeah, yeah, come and get me, I’m from Detroit, so I know, so just shut up about it. So when I take it back to the dealership because I’m still under my 30 second warranty, they say, well, we test drove it and it didn’t do anything for us. Okay, okay. Gimme it back. I’m the hysterical woman who just doesn’t know how to accelerate after 30 years of driving. In fact, on second thought, give me back my ’98 Ford Escort. Might as well.

Hey, I’m just warming up here. Stay with me. I get to this interview in Brentwood of all places that I never am and find the visitor parking spot in the building next door where cars are shoved in spaces like sardines one on top of the other. After I get over my initial panic attack at another car parked behind me, I head for the offices of the place I’m interviewing. The woman who I talked to over the phone about the job greets me and she’s nice enough. In fact, she’s very pleasant and I find myself able to actually converse without any trace of animosity, irritation, annoyance, frustration or smoke coming out my ears at having to be there and repeat for the umpteenth time in my life what I’ve been doing for the last ten years or twenty years or whatever or where I’m from la dee dah, blah blah blah.

As she explains the job which is basically babysitting a grown man, which all these jobs ever are, how he wants his paper in the morning, me to be at my desk at 8 a.m. sharp, to remember every little item of his home, office, family and friends such as who was the plumber they got last year, what kind of light bulbs do they use on their chandeliers, you know, all really important stuff like that that makes me want to get up on the wrong side of the bed in the mornings, as she explains the job (can you say long run on sentence because I’m emotionally overwrought), I’m thinking how can I make a run for it. How can I actually beat it out of there before I have to meet this overgrown baby who’s known nothing but a silver spoon up his ass for as long as he’s been living and wouldn’t know how to wipe his own ass if it weren’t for some woman next to him telling him what to do.

But wait, there’s more. Stay with me. This gal I’m talking to then tells me that this CEO wants to hire someone who’s going to be there forever. Because when he retires, his son will take over for him and by the way, I’m working for the son as well. So I see, I should profess to want to be here for THE REST OF MY LIFE???!!!! WHAT??!! Right. Let me just rethink those plans to own my own company, be President of the United States, a vacation, that novel I want to write, oh and anything else exciting I wanted to do with my life because I am in this position forever.

Then she proceeds to tell me that he likes things just so every day and he doesn’t use a computer and will need me to tell him when he has a hair appt., keep his calendar, and so on and so on. Okay, two minutes into this job, I’d be teaching this guy how to use Microsoft Outlook calendar and email and how to listen to his own voicemails with the edict not to bother me unless he’s on fire, underpants, France and all, because I’ll be on the Internet and reading his paper. You gotta be kidding me.

Oh and the woman that’s in the position now is moving back to the East Coast and she might be going in two weeks or six weeks but he doesn’t like all the “not-knowing.” I see, he doesn’t like that she’s a human being with all the ups and downs, inconsistencies, unpredictabilities and the like of the human condition and her silly little life is interrupting his plans for haircuts and light bulb information. Riight. Sounds like a great job to me. All for the discounted price of 50 or 60k. Not even enough to save a decent amount of money for my silly little retirement but then again I’m supposed to calcify there in my chair and not retire at all.

But wait, there’s more. Between thinking of hightailing it out of there and how I could demonstrate a Section 8, this gal tells me that if I don’t have any questions, I can meet the man himself. Oh boy, I’ll bet this is going to be good. I do have a question: um, how big of a jerk is he really? Here’s another question: if I took a poll of all the people in the office, how many would say they’d like him as their dad? Oh, wait another question: what does his ex-wife say about him?

So I walk across the carpeted path with secs in cubes on one side and glass-walled offices on the other to this man’s office. I guess in their offices they like to know what you’re thinking, saying, and doing at all times which is what's up with all the glass walls or no walls. I notice how quiet it is in the area. You could hear a pin drop on the carpeting is how quiet it is. I walk in the office and see a short, gray haired, nice-looking guy who is probably not more than a decade older than I am, maybe 12 years at the most and shorter than me. Napolean, heal thyself. He motions for me to sit down in a chair at one end of his office and he then proceeds to sit in a chair all the way across the other side of his office. I mean, we were not close. I thought that maybe I would have to get out my megaphone to talk. Maybe he thought I had cooties. Maybe I do and don’t know it. That’s probably why I don’t get direct-hired a lot. That and my cranky attitude towards CEO’s who don’t know how to work computers and need me to remember plumbers and light bulbs. Okay, I digress.

So I sit down and he proceeds to grill me on every aspect of my resume wanting me to fill in the blanks of every year that I have on there from the time I graduated college. Oh and what college did I go to? “Never heard of it.” I don’t give a shit whether you heard of it or not, that’s where I went to school and so did my aunts and if it was good enough for them, it was for me. What did I do between 1994 and 1996? Slept. What do you think? I married Rip Van Winkle and slept.

Now the gal had prepped me for this next line of questioning by telling me that he likes to get to know his personnel and if it bothers me to answer anything, to just tell him. Okay. He asks me what my father does? I said my father died two years ago. His response was not, hey, I’m sorry to hear that, but (with a wave of his hand), "What did he do?" Okay. Excuse me, my father was everything to me and if you’re going to diss my family then you can take this job and shove it up your lily-white, silver-spooned fanny (said with a heavy ghetto accent and a jive shake of the head, remember, I am from Detroit).

Then he wants to know do I have brothers and sisters? A sister. “Oh is she married? (huh?) What does she do?” She teaches. What does your mother do? She’s a nurse anesthetist. “Oh she’s a nurse.” No, she’s a nurse anesthetist and then he laughs and says, “So you are teachers and your mother is a nurse.” Yeah, so??? Give me back my resume you piece of shit. Ugh. All this for the price of a job. Like I’m what? A piece of meat you can poke around and see if it’s FDA approved? I wouldn’t work for you if this was the last job on earth and believe me it will be the last job, coocheez. Keep up the line of questioning. Oh yeah, and here’s a question for ya: What’s my name? And how do you pronounce it? That’s my test.

No, no, I’m not going through this again. It is criminal what I have had to contend with just to get a lousy, stinkin’ secretarial position. Like your bestowing a crown of jewels on me. It’s not. It’s a paycheck I felt like saying so I can bust out of this place and do what I want to do. But you know, it’s time I just busted out and did what I want to do anyway. The thought of giving another piece of my precious soul to some stupid man who can’t figure out how to tie his shoes, makes me want to commit hari kari…on him.

I’m not married, I don’t have children and people ask me why. I’ll tell you why, because I have had to take care of men all day long for the last 15 years and I am tired of raising my hand to go to the bathroom. Ladies, I hate to break the news to you but the glass ceiling is still there, there is no liberation in case you hadn’t noticed. We’re not any further along really then we were 40 years ago. Shame on you that continue to let yourselves be afraid of people like him. You have a choice, you always do. So do I. And my choice these days is going to be to perfect that game of chess I’ve been wanting to for years now. That and trying to sleep on the other side of the bed. And Opree's on at 3:00. Let’s change it up!!

Question: How many CEO’s does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: One secretary.

HAPPY UNEMPLOYED NEW YEAR!!

2009-01-11T15:09:00.000-08:00

First blog of the new year! So much for that counting down the 12 days of Christmas thing blog. Yeah, that didn’t happen. But so much otherwise has! Let me tell you what hasn’t first, so you don’t get too excited. I didn’t get married, I didn’t buy a house, I haven’t gotten a leading role in a Clint Eastwood film (although my Detroit connections might help now that he filmed “Gran Torino” in Detroit, good fer him!), nor did I book any TV shows, commercials or other writing jobs. Well then you say what did happen that was good if none of that did. Well, are you sitting down? I got laid off from work. YIPPEEEE!! No, really. I have been sitting around (well, barring errands, walking, running and yoga everyday and classes) and studying my creative work, writing, making strides on my solo play and others, reading, reading, reading and going to see a lot of wonderful films. Oh and spending way too much money for someone who doesn’t have any good day job prospects in front of her. WAY too much money. I don’t mean designer clothes stuff but books, CDs and the lone top, blouse, t-shirt, too good to pass up deals at Christmas stuff.

This is not new for me losing a job. It’s just that I’m so used to it that now at my age, I see it as an opportunity to improve my lot rather than a nail in a coffin. The work will always be there in one form or another. At some point, the offers will come in again and I actually have an interview on Thursday this week, and I will have my pick of where I want to be. It’s just that this time, I really felt as if I was getting very complacent in my day job. In fact, I just wanted to write and not be bothered with anything other than keeping my bills paid and food and shelter available. I had goals I was working towards like this solo play and classes I was taking at UCLA in writing and feeling good about that. But as soon as I was let go, which I knew was inevitable from day one oddly enough, I felt like this lid had come off this very large pot (not my belly which is getting smaller and tauter every day thank you). All of a sudden, it hit me. I could do theater. I could audition for stuff again. I could take acting classes…DURING THE DAY! I could do lots of things now…DURING THE DAY. Including my writing. The fact that I wasn’t getting paid for any of this really didn’t strike me as a problem. It still doesn’t. As if to encourage me, I got a call from some guy at some theater company to come in and read and sing for a part in his upcoming January production. I still don’t know how this guy even got my pix or number. Sing!?? Ugh. But what the hell, I did it. And I was great! It was such a fun audition and they were so nice. I played not one but three songs and even brought my guitar which ended up being a conversation piece. I think I would have had the part if I wasn’t going away for a week back to Detroit at the end of December. Nevertheless, when I got back I learned a new monologue my new acting coach had given me and applied it to an Equity audition on Monday. If I had been working, I never would have considered auditioning. Wrong, so wrong! I did really well, so well, I got a callback. These are encouraging signs to me.

Most importantly, I feel like I have to get back to my original goals and that I can tackle them again with courage, faith and no small amount of confidence and no trace of anger or bitterness. I feel renewed. This is what I needed in these past two years of desert that I’ve been traversing and trying to cross. It really doesn’t matter where you are in your life, the opportunity for renewal is always present. It may take some time to cross the desert but the journey is worth it. No matter what happens with any of these projects, I know that I’ve set my goals again and have the ability, talent and will to see them through. The best thing: I don’t care anymore what anyone says, what anyone thinks or who the critics are, I’m living my life the way I want to and I fought for and that is what’s great about this new year, another chance to do just that.

Read some great books in the week I was home (yes, I read three books in one week):

Don’t Look Now, selected stories by Daphne du Maurier. Chilling is all I can say. Very Twilight Zone-ish but that’s almost insulting, these stories are so much better. I remember seeing the film of the book’s title years ago and shall revisit it again. The story is much better though.

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida. I picked this book up in a little bookstore I frequent in Studio City and what intrigued me was it took place in Finland/Lapland and involved a setting in an ice hotel, no lie. I read this in one day, it was so good. I’m all for stories about main characters searching for their fathers, since my father was such a peach and I still miss him every day. This story didn’t disappoint. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story where the mother was such a brutal character and even then it’s hard to judge.

The Shack, by William P. Young. Okay, I know this one is like saying hey read Conversations With God, Part 16, but it is much different. It’s told in the vein of a memoir and could be true or not true but it’s heartbreaking and hopeful and enlightening and wise and beautiful and horrific all at the same time. I read it in one sitting on the plane coming home to LA. Aw, I call this place home now, finally. Anyway, I was amazed at how the insights in the book correspond to my spiritual studies now in contemplative living. Why, it’s just like Fr. Keating says it is, go figure. Those mystical monks are really onto something. I also was drawn in by the horrific incident that starts the main character on his spiritual journey since I still find unrest in the unanswered evil in the world. Go ahead, pick it up, you don’t have to tell anyone or blog about it.

I so thoroughly enjoyed visiting with my nephews and family this holiday season. My mother came to stay with me out here for six weeks and through the holidays and we went back together for the last week of the year. It was a restful time and reflective time and I had so much good food that I went and gave away hundreds of dollars to those who really need it this time since our country is in such turmoil and upheaval and I feel still very lucky for what I have. I shall leave off with my explanation of this lovely picture at top of my sister and I taken on New Year’s Eve or actually just after the new year began. It’s inspiration comes from my older nephew Adam, 15 now, whew, who advises that when you take a picture you should “look away.” So we did. I took it a little farther than intended and added the flare of the nostrils part, but I do believe but I’m working on it. Try it next time someone points a camera at you. It’s adds a little something or other.

Twelve Lords A-Leaping

2008-12-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

Blog of Lists

I have decided that I will write a blog every day during the month of December. I have not blogged since JULY!!! What is up with that? I have stopped and started 18 different blogs and not finished a one. And an historic election came and went and me, political baby, didn’t even blog about that!! What is up, sister. Maybe it’s my UCLA class that’s keeping me busy writing and that it is I can tell ya but I’ve only been taking it since mid-October so that’s still no excuse. In any event, this will be my first blog for December and then until Christmas and then after Christmas and then until New Year’s Eve and then after that and then….well.

Everyone does their end-of-the-year favorite things/lists/bedtime stories/positions, et al., ad nauseum so I think I’ll give my two cents.

Terrific films I’ve seen this year so far:

Tell No One
I’ve Loved You So Long
Rachel Getting Married
Frozen River

Yes, it’s a short list but so far means that I haven’t yet seen any films coming out in this month yet and I can’t wait for Valkyrie (not). These films really stayed with me after I left the theater. They are terrific stories about character, redemption and human resilience and survival. They tell a story. Hooray for these original stories and terrific writing and acting. And hooray for independent film. Finally, hooray for the French. Those people can really make the flicks. Who’d’ve thought considering the whole Jerry Lewis thing. The first two films are French with subtitles.

Terrific books I’ve read this year:

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.

Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Out Stealing Horses by Per Patterson

Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert

I did quite a lot of reading this year. I was bound and determined to read more classics that I have not gotten around to in the last twenty years. I was also bound and determined to buy one book at a time and read it, then buy another one instead of buying five books and reading two. Oddly enough, the first four novels were about main characters in solitude or leading solitary lives or travels. Another common theme was grief and learning to assimilate heartbreak, loss and change. These were not to be read at a quick pace. No page turning for plot here. Yet, I couldn’t put them down. They’re themes and stories that resonated and stayed with me long after I put the book down.

Terrific music I’ve listened to and bought this year:
Another Country, Tift Merritt
Raising Sand, Alison Krause and Robert Plant
Children Running Through, Patty Griffin
Live, Karla Bonoff

I have to admit this is a very limited category for me. I tend toward the female singer/songwriters. But, hey, if it’s good, it’s good. These are the crème de la crème, terrific female songwriters who thru the years have written and sung quality stuff.

Terrific Theater I saw this year:
Tosca

The first time I’ve been to the opera in 20 years. Now I see what all the fuss is about. And to think I used to learn whole operas in voice training. I loved the music but couldn’t put two and two together about how to appreciate it. It’s amazing and this particular opera was astounding and heartbreaking.

I was working on my solo show this year and that prevented from seeing a lot of theater. Never again. In 2009, I shall be doing show after show.

Mediocre books I read this year:
Skylight Confessions, Alice Hoffman
Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

I love Alice Hoffman but the greatest last book I read by her was Blue Diary which was terrific. This one just had one too many angels, wings, symbolic stuff coming off every page. I get it, we get it, angels, wings, symbolism, suicide by leaping off a building, whatever, and now back to our story. I always wanted to read Ann Patchett fiction after I read Truth & Beauty which was Ann Patchett non-fiction and pretty good, I finally bought this novel. The ending was a little too happy and contrived and I saw it coming which is odd for me since everything gets by me and I wouldn't know contrived from contrite. Well, now I do.

Mediocre films I saw this year:

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull thing. I’m sorry, aliens? This is what we waited 15 years for? Another alien story? The ONLY thing great about this flick besides anything Harrison Ford was KAREN ALLEN. Yay, for the filmmakers. It’s about time. No more female du jour. They are so boring.

Sex and the City. Did I say this flick? And I’m a huge fan. I enjoyed this film immensely but it’s all a bit too much with the clothes and outings and Park Avenue digs and all that. Are these babes really making all that much money? I make a good dollar doing what I do but I shop for sales and still look great. Well, I think so anyway. In my jeans. In my pajamas. In the end, I’m a sucker for happy endings and that was one good thing about this flick. That and all the husbands, boyfriends who were so underused as to be insulting.

That’s it so far. Until tomorrow….

ALICE’S BOOKSTORE (and Patty’s and Anne’s and Maria’s)

2008-07-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

I truly believe that all my life is about waiting until I can have time to read. I wait all day, all week, all month, all year. I wait for breaks, lunch times, bus times, train times, little pockets to steal on a weekend afternoon and even when exhausted, just before I close my eyes, in bed. I even buy furniture so that it is conducive to an afternoon of curling up in the nooks and crannies of fabric to immerse myself in story.

So it is when I go on a vacation or have to travel anywhere that the first and foremost item to pack is always a book. I can finish a book on an airplane in one sitting. So depending on how long the trip is, it will certainly entail buying another book during the course of the time spent anywhere. In fact, the search for an appropriate bookstore is always a part of my itinerary of any travel plan.

That being said, I do go through dry periods, periods where I can’t pick up a book and need to clean the palette so to speak. I also don’t want to live my life from the jacket of a book cover. I need to enjoy life in all its fullness as well. Sometimes for all the books that are out there, there just isn’t anything I’m drawn to, to read. Often the reason I pick up a book is because I read a good review or that the name or author comes up in different things I’ve overheard or read in other places. If I start hearing a name or title over and over again at random, then my intuitive side kicks in and says, hey, maybe you should pick up that book.

I’m not very well read even though I do read. There’s many classics I’ve yet to pick up. I always thought I should have been an English Lit major in college. I was a minor instead. I should have studied writing. I should have done a lot of things. In any event, I notice that my bookshelves are filled with memoirs, biographies and certain fiction. I really enjoy science fiction but I don’t read enough of it. Same with mysteries. I don’t read enough of those even though I enjoy a good whodunit.

When I was growing up, I spent lots of time at my local library and it was a pretty good one I might add. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, Rona Jaffe, Philip Roth, Sidney Sheldon, and my personal favorites, Woody Allen and Bennett Cerf. I read much of the 70’s fiction at the time. And I especially enjoyed the annual Best Plays series. It was sort of the Readers Digest of condensed plays. In my little Detroit town, that was about all I could get. I followed all the shows in New York and on Broadway. I knew who was acting in what parts. I used to write plays all the time growing up in school. I don’t know why I didn’t figure out I should have been a playwright or gone into theater in some way.

I didn’t really get into memoir until much later when I lived in New York. New York opened my eyes to a wide variety of culture. There was The Strand bookstore, very big and used and new and you could get lost in there for a whole day. This was back when they had Mom-and-Pop-owned bookstores and you would find your favorites in different neighborhoods and who would carry what. You would find those paperback books from different press houses, not the big guns, that had those generic looking covers with white borders and great titles or something that caught your eye about what the story would be about. It was like buying the independent films of books or something like that.

I then realized that I started to unconsciously read and be drawn to female writers. And oddly enough, female writers with “A” names, like Alice and Anne, and Madeleine. Okay, that’s not an “A” name but it rhymes…sort of. I bought Anne Tyler, Alice McDermott, Alice Hoffman, later on Anne LaMott, Alice Munro, Anne Sexton. Not unlike my musical tastes which also run toward female singer/songwriters with the same names, like Patty Larkin, Patty Griffin, Patty Smythe, Nancy Griffith (again, not a Patty but it rhymes…sort of).

So there are a number of things I’m trying to say here. One, that I’m obviously OCD but also that I don’t just read everything because I like to read. It takes me awhile now to buy a book just because I might go into a bookstore. I can’t buy more than two either. I used to come out with four or five at a time. Then I looked at my bookshelf one day and realized I was buying a wish list but not actually books I was going to read. Some of them are still sitting there with my good intentions still intact. There was a period a few years back where after I finished going through receipts for my tax return, I realized most of what I owed on my credit card were book purchases and most of those I hadn’t read. Now I frequent libraries more and I keep only those books that I feel I will read again and some of them I have read again and over and over and I get more out of them the second or third reading. Anyway, it’s the same rule that happens when you buy three CDs or more. Only two of them will be any good, the rest you won’t like. It’s a law, I swear. Always happens to me. I think that’s because you buy something you’re either not ready to hear yet and think because everyone has it you should too or it’s good intentions and wishful thinking because you want to really like jazz and want to expand your repetoire but hey, I gotta hear some Patty Griffin. And so you play it once while you’re reading the Sunday paper, never really listening to it and then it goes into the CD file never to be heard again. Until you move, then as you pack, you say, what’s this? I bought this?

Another thing is that I’m a firm believer in quality over quantity which means that just like going to see a movie, I want to read a book because I want to have that life changing experience where I have to get through it and can’t put it down. I don’t go see many films at all for that reason. I can’t come out of the cinema with an “okay” feeling. I have to be totally moved and enlightened or still laughing my ass off in flashbacks. That doesn’t happen often. I had a friend who constantly went to the movies and read books. And she was MARRIED!! She thought because I enjoyed to read too and was an actor and writer that I also loved going to the movies. Yes, I do but not every weekend. I do not read a book a week anymore. I live my life. Life is where the stories are which is why waiting to read or see something wonderful just enhances life and enriches it. That’s what I would love to be able to create if I could. In fact, I stopped hanging around her because it was boring. Geesh, let’s go jump out of plane lady. Get your head out of the book!

So it is with great pleasure that I offer up a book I’m in the middle of reading that is just that, enriching and life-enhancing. And her name is Anne! No lie. I swear I don’t look for these things. Anne Enright wrote "The Gathering" which recently won the Mann Booker prize, or vice versa, last year. I picked it up at a Borders in Chicago where I was traveling and bought furniture this past weekend. On my way to the O’Hare airport, we stopped in the Borders and I bought two! books only, the third being for my host (on a coupon). I had finished the one I brought with me and started in with Anne’s book. And from page one, I couldn’t put it down. I can’t really explain it either because the premise is so simple and it’s not a page turner in terms of plot and I sort of already figured out what the surprise was half way through but getting there was a joy to read. Her prose is marvelous. (And mine, well, trying to describe this book…sigh.)

Now this always happens to me too these coincidences if I’m reading or renting films. By the way, you can only watch two films at a time as well because the third will be a stinker. Okay, so anyway, I just finished reading an Alice Hoffman book about a boy and his sister and the sister is the survivor who loves and tries to save her brother and then I bought Anne’s "The Gathering" and within the first chapter, I discover that the story is told in the voice of the sister who’s trying to save her brother who has also died and committed suicide!!! Is that weird or what?

[As an aside: when I used to rent at the video store, I’d pick out the best double features and there was always some coincidence to them like the time I rented “The Mirror Has Two Faces” and “Michael” and both of the pictures ended with the main characters dancing down the street…in New York no less. And a great double feature I might add.]

One time, I was going to Chicago, same weekend, I go for my birthday a lot, and I happened to pick up "The Secret Life of Bees" for the plane ride there and I was traveling on my birthday. I started to read it on the plane and couldn’t put it down. About halfway through the book, the narrator, a female of about 13 I think if I remember, talks about her birthday being today, July 4. Okay, what’s going on?

Now another strange thing happened to me one day as I was looking through my bookshelves. That was the time I noticed I had a lot of Anne’s and Alice’s as favorite authors. What started me on the path of story and reading, was an aunt who was a schoolteacher who I didn’t get to know for very long, only 11 years of my life. When my sister and I were younger, my dad’s older sister, my Aunt Alice and her husband, Uncle Lawrence, used to visit us and bring a box of books, all new and inscribed by our Aunt. “To Maria, Love, Aunt Alice and Uncle Lawrence” in her perfect teacher script. I thought she had given me gold. I loved all the books, A.A. Milne and fairy tales and all kinds of other novels. All hardcover too. My Aunt Alice was a very well loved teacher who taught elementary, sixth grade. I remember her students at the end of the year which was her retirement year, gave her an autograph book signed by all of them telling her how much they enjoyed having her. I was always very proud of that. I remember she would write me letters on pink tissue-like stationary in her beautiful handwriting. She talked about taking communion and school and they were long letters and very beautifully written. I wish I could have appreciated that more then but I was so young. She died at 67 from a long illness which she fought hard to recover from. I remember my parents telling me that she had only two-thirds of her stomach left because of the ravage of that disease. But she left such an imprint on me and a legacy that to this day I now understand. And I looked at my bookshelf that day and said out loud, gee, that’s funny I have all these authors named Alice and Anne. Why is that? And some voice from somewhere said to me, because of her, because you’re a writer.

I see, said the blind woman. And that’s why I read. I read to enrich, enjoy, entertain and enlighten myself. But, mostly, I read because I write. I am a writer.

Thanks, Auntie Al. xo

I Really Am Too Old For This Sh*t!

2008-07-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

I am going to be 46 in two days. (Yes, it’s the Fourth of July: insert your patriotic, holiday joke here. And yes, I am quite the firecracker and proud of that.) Yeah, yeah, it’s just a number; I’m still young; I don’t look 46 at all; I’m healthy, strong, beautiful. All of that, yes, I know. And of course, I’m going on my 6th 39th year, a record somewhere.

As a woman, I’m not supposed to tell my age. As a woman in the entertainment industry, I’m really not supposed to let anyone know my age. But I always tell people anyway. In part, because I like to see the look on their faces because I don’t look anywhere near 40 much less 46 and because I have to say it out loud once in awhile to remind myself. I don’t feel like 46 although I don’t know what 46 feels like. If it feels like this then I’m doing okay. I can still dance, yoga, run, walk, hike and all that stuff. One of the young office employees here said to me last week, “I have to tell you, you are in great shape.” I nearly fell over. Really? I am at least 10 pounds heavier than I’d like to be and have been doing my daily regimen in hopes of keeping myself toned and my stamina high. My daily dose of yoga, walking and a two mile run is also to keep me mentally and emotionally fit. I can’t tell you what going without yoga for two days does to my peace of mind or whatever little of it I’ve cultivated over the years. Nevertheless, I was very pleased she commented on my fitness. It also forced me to maybe admit even though I’m not my perfect petite size 2 anymore, I’m still quite fetching and I’m doing something right. In fact, I don’t know what size I am anymore. I have to factor in water retention days when I try on jeans which I seem to buy every other week. I know of no other clothing item that is so ridiculously uneven in size depending what designer you’re trying on or whatever other cheap brand happens to be out there. Sometimes I’m a size 6 and sometimes an 8. Sometimes the size 6’s get smaller in the wash. Add to that, that I would live in jeans if I could and wear them to bed and at the same time, being in a 6 or an 8 makes me feel fat, I could just throw up my hands to the whole deal and surrender to the fact that deep within middle age I may not ever enjoy wearing a pair of jeans again. Please say it isn’t so.

But this is what I really enjoy because now I can say it and know I’ve earned it. I say all the time, “I’m too old for that shit.” It’s great! It’s so great to be too old to give a crap about keeping up with everything and everyone. I don’t even care anymore. I stopped caring when I turned 40 I think. I looked around one day and realized that some things that were goals in my life I either wasn’t going to achieve ever or that I didn’t care about it anymore. And it was quite the relief. It’s not that I’m not up for adventure or that I don’t have goals still I’d like to achieve but I just don’t want to work so hard anymore. I felt like all I ever did was strive strive strive to get somewhere in my life. Most of time it’s felt like I was running in place or banging my head against a wall. At this point in my life, I don’t have anything to prove anymore. I already know all the talents I have and all the good things about myself and all the ways I’ve succeeded and failed in my life. The only thing left is just to be happy. Enjoy the journey I guess and take it one day at a time. So that’s what that means. The platitudes kick in at this time with a ferociousness.

I read a book review of a computer technician who has a bestseller, a work of fiction, his first ever novel being published and he’s 49. Then they listed all the major authors who really didn’t publish until they were in their late 40’s. So I see there’s time for me to do what I need to do creatively and maybe this is the best time for it. All I know is the kings are gonna come to me now because by golly I’m not spending one more dime and one more precious minute of my life chasing after them. Forget it. I’m too old for that shit. See? Comes in handy!

I always hoped I’d age gracefully. I never wanted to be one of those people who botoxed, surgeried or starved myself. I wanted to be one of those people who at 50 or 60 could look back on their lives and see how far they’ve come and felt confidence with themselves and in their lives and looked forward to an adventurous old age filled with companionship, family and travel. I always thought I’d feel okay about turning 40 or 45 or whatever. Today I find that I’m not so much yearning for my youth because it wasn’t that great. It was mostly troubled and anxious and filled with grief, loneliness and lots of unanswered questions. No, it’s not the old days I yearn for, but I yearn for the chance to live it over and embrace all the uncertainty and feel that boldness of risk again. I wish I could take the opportunities I’d missed years ago and try them again with the knowledge I have now. The knowledge that I’m smart and good and beautiful and good enough. The confidence and respect for oneself that comes with age, comes with living through personal tragedy and despair and having to pick yourself up many times and try again often times in the face of great humiliation and discouragement.

I think the greatest thing I can say about myself now is that despite everything, I have grown in self-love which is most important. I have compassion and forgiveness for myself that I couldn’t find years ago. Because without these things, you can’t really move forward. I’ve also earned the right to confidence and self-respect because I have worked hard and still do to try to have enough self-awareness about myself and my actions and thoughts to change what doesn’t work, what has brought me trouble and what I’ve attracted both personal and material. If I am responsible, then let me live the rest of my life in responsibility for what I still can become and let me honor the years lived and the years to come. So what is the point of lying or not giving account of my years any more to anyone? I’m too old for that shit.

So if you call on my birthday and I don’t answer right away, give me some time because I’m probably trying to pull on my size 6 jeans.

Will The Real Strawberry Thief Please Stand Up?!

2008-06-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

Hell hath no fury than an Italian scorned of her food. Here’s the story: I went in the main kitchen where I work to take a short break to cut up, wash and fix in a small bowl some strawberries I bought at the farmers’ market at lunchtime. Just a little snack to keep me from spending money on some candy or other sweet bread to pass the time on a long afternoon of hard work trying to win my 815th game of solitaire out of 1,246 games so far this day. (Isn’t that a record for something somewhere? I’ll have to look into that, of course, here at work.) So I put a cover over the paper dish and set it next to a fork and my newly cleaned tupperware bowl and leave the kitchen to use the ladies’ room. I leave the items there on the kitchen counter because who wants to drag tupperware and strawberries in the bathroom with them, however briefly? The association would ruin any pleasure I would derive from future storage or present sating. And hey, I’m coming back, it’s obvious the items are there for pick up by the person who left them there so why not just leave and come back?

Why not my lily white strawberry fanny, indeed! I return not two minutes later to find my covered paper bowl of strawberries GONE!! Whoosh! Outta there! The tupperware and the fork are still there but no paper bowl of fruit. And I am livid. I run out to see if I can find the culprit still walking back to his desk with the bowl. I search in the front lobby, I make the rounds of the floor, I search every open door and closed door (although I will not go into the mens’ room)--nothing and no one! No one slurping down juicy sweet strawberries from a paper bowl anywhere. I am still livid. I resurrect my plight to everyone within radius and everyone not within radius. I call The Times, I call O.J.’s attorney, the FBI, the CIA and the KGB (do they still exist?) and report missing produce. Have they found Bin Laden? Maybe he and his cohorts have been in a kitchen of an office building seventeen stories up in Los Angeles. I send out an email to the Staff of the office stating that I have a missing bowl of berries somewhere and the culprit better ‘fess up or die. Well, something to that effect although in a law firm threatening death to anyone is not a good thing. I get many replies of compassion, sympathy and a couple marriage proposals but no leads. I am still fit to be tied. A couple people offer by way of possible explanation the fact that since extra food from meetings and office lunches go into the kitchen for public consumption that maybe someone thought it was okay to take them for that reason. Uh, yeah, nice try but no cigar. See, food brought in is usually on large trays that look as if they were made up for a large quantity of people not small single paper bowls of strawberries for one. Thanks for trying to make me feel better but I’ll still pulverize the person when I find them and you are now basically an idiot in my book.

People who work in offices have nothing better to do than eat. The work is so boring, tedious and repetitious that the diversion of any type of mutton, whether stewed, french fried or candied, brings them out of the fabricated woodwork to stuff their faces. And stuff they do, leaving not one crumb for Cindy Lou Who or that mouse. Nada, niente, nyetaskavaya! And these are people who turn a good dime working in legal offices. These people pay well, no lie! I, myself, can afford more magazine subscriptions because of it and I’m the better off for it because spending my extra cash for more articles on how to live well, how to be happy and how to meet the man of my dreams is certainly money well spent to…that better life of bigger fruit bowls. So, my question is, why do these people act like food is such a finite, endangered article? Are they all so much in debt that they sacrifice groceries in their budget for cable? Do they have cable? Do they live in cardboard boxes under freeway overpasses and come to work, the rest of us none the wiser as to their fragrance? Really what is it and the draw for free food all the time? Mind you, this is food that has been breathed on, spit on, picked over and been sitting out for over two hours already. Where is the appetite for that?

I guess it’s the same idea as buffets. If you go to Las Vegas or any Midwestern po-dunk town in the country, you’ll find at least one eating establishment that caters to the fascination Americans have with “ALL YOU CAN EAT.” What does that mean exactly? All you can eat. Are you supposed to sit down and eat until you drop? Are you supposed to store up for a few days and eat dish after dish right there? Are you part squirrel, part chipmunk, part bear and hibernate for a few months and therefore need to eat as much as you can? Are you running an eight day marathon and need to shovel it in all at once? I don’t get the concept of “all you can eat” at all. All I can eat is a little bit of this, a little bit of that and a slice of this with a side salad. I really can’t do much more than that especially if a glass of wine and dessert are involved. And especially if I don’t want to roll home, if I want to fit into my car and get behind the wheel instead of on top of it. I don’t want to spend four hours at the restaurant so I can shovel one helping of everything in and then wait an hour and shovel another helping. I got places to see, things to do, I can’t be spending my time in all you can eat restaurants for several hours just to get my $12.95 or $30.95 or $100.34 dollars worth! And how do I know no other customers haven't sneezed, coughed or fingered the food before I put it on my plate? I can’t even believe with all the ebola-ecoli-e-i-e-i-oh going around that we even HAVE buffets anymore. Shouldn’t they be outlawed or something? Why are we spending so much time on gay marriage issues when basic food issues still exist in this country? I don’t get it. (I’m for the marriages by the way, so there, all you ridiculous people who oppose it.)

Anyway, after putting the workplace, well, at least the lower levels of the office in a tizzy, someone came up to me and asked me if I checked the fridge, which I already did. Apparently, the person who swiped the berries put them in the fridge in the back of a pull out tray where I would have never even looked. So they were obviously saving it for later. Hmmph! I threw it out. I mean who knows if they touched it, breathed on it or just plain salivated all over them? So I made myself another dish. Next time I’m leaving a bowl of strawberries unattended in this kitchen I’m going to spit in it just for fun. Although I know two things for sure even though I don’t know who took the berries: I’ll bet it was a man and probably an attorney! And he probably frequents buffets. Don’t worry I’m on the lookout and standing in line at an Old Country Buffet as we speak. I’ll get ‘em.

The Glasswing Butterfly

2008-06-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

“A butterfly with transparent wings is rare and beautiful. As delicate as finely blown glass, the presence of this rare tropical gem is used by rain forest ecologists as an indication of high habitat quality and its demise alerts them of ecological change. Rivaling the refined beauty of a stained glass window, the translucent wings of the Glasswing butterfly shimmer in the sunlight like polished panes of turquoise, orange, green, and red.

"All things beautiful do not have to be full of color to be noticed; in life, that which is unnoticed, has the most power.”

April 29, 2008

I received one of those pass-around-forward-upside-down emails complete with full color pictures of the glass wing butterfly. I don’t know what it is about butterflies but I get full of hope, joy and inspiration when I see one or a dozen. I don’t see that many at all anymore. Life in the big city I guess. The new place where I moved has a nice landscape so that I see hummingbirds every once in awhile. I love hummingbirds too. They remind me there’s beauty in the world and it’s such a gift to see it in motion.

In Indian Medicine cards, the Hummingbird signifies joy while the Butterfly signifies transformation. Both cards can be read upright and reversed, meaning, depending how the card ends up in the totem card spread, it carries a different message. A reversed Butterfly card means you are resisting your transformation into a new life or from your cocoon to a new “birth.” The Hummingbird reversed card means that you have been seeing life through joyless eyes. That deep within “your sadness is your joy upside down.” Now that is something to reflect on. Your joy can also be your sadness or in your sadness is your joy. Or pain can be good or suffering is almost hedonistic. Okay, I think that’s getting a little masochistic and not the real meaning. But I think I was onto something. All I know is when I weep, I weep. And sometimes it feels like the tears will never stop. Then there is a little light somewhere that somehow seeps through and in the middle of it all there’s the eye of the hurricane where all is peaceful and calm and you feel everything will be all right.

That’s sort of what I feel like now. I feel like I’m in the eye of the storm. I’ve made so many transformations in my life that I definitely feel as if I’m resisting this one. But this is the big one. This is the big hurricane. I can’t tell if it’s male or female. I’ll call it iahklu'. Hurricane iahklu'. Which means…I don’t know but I finished this book last night that turned on a bit of that light and in the middle of the main character’s understanding of his dilemma, there was that word and with it, a sense of peace about what was to come.

The main character had a problem where he would dream during sleep and then wake up to find reality changed the way he had dreamed it while sleeping. Only it was an involuntary change. So he was afraid to go to sleep. Then he met a man, a psychiatrist, who tried to use the main character's gift for his own purposes. So the main character has to find a way to control his dreams as well as stop the doctor from trying to make use of his dreams for the doctor's egomaniacal pursuits.

Oddly enough, this is sort of my life right now at the moment. You could insert for the doctor character any number of people I’ve met through the years in my life who have tried to take advantage of my gifts for their own use and my good nature. Because as sarcastic, aloof and callow as I may seem, underneath I’ve got a very big beautiful Italian heart. I may let you in but you’d better be careful how you use my heart and my good nature because once, twice, thrice burned I will cut you off. For good.

So in the end, the man realizes that these benevolent Aliens he dreamed that now inhabit the earth gave him the advice and wisdom and the “word” above that he is the ultimate creator of his reality. His dreams are but another world, another illusion he created and he can choose to look at his reality in a different light. He can choose to look through his pain to find the joy. It took him a little while to figure it out but when he did he lived the flip side. He transformed, he released himself from the cocoon. And on the other side of the dream, he found a new reality. That’s what he learned to dream.

It made so much sense to me. I feel like that’s what I’m looking for right now. The flip side of the dream, the release from the cocoon. Much of it is releasing people and things that don’t serve me anymore. I need to dream a better reality, find the flip side.

So iahklu'! everyone! Whatever it means. Look within. Find the joy. Transform. Change your reality. Dream a better dream. Then sup a little nectar and fly.

“All things beautiful do not have to be full of color to be noticed…”

“…in life, that which is unnoticed, has the most power.”

The Sixties are OVER, People!! Snap Out Of It!

2008-05-12T19:17:00.001-07:00

I don’t know if it’s a California thing or what, or a musician thing or a hippie wannabee thing but let’s get this straight okay? The Sixties are over, gone, kaput. In fact, as much as I hate to admit it, it’s going on almost 50 years ago since the 60’s. I am so sick of all you people in your 50’s and even 60’s!! talking about it and identifying yourselves with it. In no other era, not even the Depression, do I hear people talk about a time with such proclivity. Okay, I get it, free love, drugs, rock ‘n roll, pookah beads, whatever. Fine, it was your youth, you had a good time, but really, do you need to constantly identify yourself with that era in every conversation, in every breath, in every action you take NOW?

I came of age in the 70’s. Do you hear me talkin’ about the 70’s? No. And there’s quite a lot I could identify myself with, such as: The Partridge Family. They were one of the pinnacle bands of the 70’s. The Beatles had nothing on these guys. I mean, there wasn’t one David Cassidy in the bunch. Or Donny Osmond, or HR Puffenstuff…I could go on. Then there was Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. I spent my life and a goodly amount of dinero buying concert tickets and records of those guys. Yes, I said records, the vinyl, the large round discs you had to play on a record player, a turntable, not for scratching, with a diamond head needle that had nothing to do with Hawaii. Do I listen to these guys now? Not really. I still enjoy listening to them and infrequently I’ll buy a CD if something new comes out that I think I might enjoy but do I dedicate shrines to them? Do I stop traffic if I see a mural in a shop window or some other silly thing, like a dish or a halter top or a key chain? Do I assume everyone I’m with will have the same enthusiasm I will for these people? No! I consider them part of the landscape of my youth and I have fond memories of seeing them through binoculars through much of my adolescence and raising my fist in the air four balconies up while caulking my nosebleed with a Kleenex but nevertheless they are just that, fond memories. I don’t need to drag them around with me and pull out wallet size photos to show everyone. I haven’t bought an Elton John album since Blue Moves and if you can remember that two record album then (a) you were a true Elton John fan and (b) you’ll know why you stopped buying his albums after that. That and the fact that he turned out to be gay. Not that I’m against it, and not that we didn’t all know anyway, with the crazy costumes and all, but dang if he didn’t rock out with the best of the heterosexual rock and roll men out there. And he was kinda cute on some of those album covers. Although my heart did really go out for Bernie Taupin but I was rather mercurial in my youth anyway. One week Bernie, next week Redford, week after that…Paul Michael Glaser…I was a pop culture crush slut in my day.

Hell, the 70’s were about those concept albums and lyrics and liner notes. Record albums were a work of art. Shelling out almost $12 for a two disc set was an investment. That’s what I remember of the 70’s. I remember my older cousin working for Sony at one point or was it Magnavox, anyway, he brought out a compact disc and had us listen to it over my Uncle’s house one day. He said, these are the wave of the future. No more records. And I covered my ears!! I refused to believe him! No more records??!!! No way. Where was the artistry in a CD cover, where do you put the lyrics? How can I lift up the needle to skip around to a song I like? Stuff like that. But, hey, now all I have are CDs. You don’t see me running around with a bunch of vinyl records, pullin’ one out and accosting everyone with it so as to relive the 70’s every day, do you? NO! Because it was 30 YEARS AGO!!

So please stop with the Beatles, Woodstock, beads, “I’m just an old hippie” crap. And cut your hair for godssakes! You’re 55, what, 60, maybe already? I hate to break the news to ya, but you don’t look like a hippie. You look like a homeless guy or a guy stuck in the 60’s who needs a bath. Stop replaying old Zappa tapes and throwing your fist in the air. We get it already you had a good time, you got high, zonked, laid, whatever. It’s called your youth, your adolescence, maybe your 20’s but it’s back then, not NOW!! Get over it because we’re bored with you. We don’t get it, we weren’t there and any attempts to relive it with us will make us roll our eyes is exasperation, disgust and annoyance. And anyway, aren’t most of those people dead, from drug overdoses? This is what you called fun?!! This is what you look back on with fond remembrance? Take a bath! And hey, half of the Beatles are dead and one of them just got taken by a blond half his age who looked like his first wife, rest her soul. Maybe if he hadn’t been living in the past and found someone his own age with gray or brunette hair, he would have fared better. So see, get up, dust yourself off and realize the good times are now, today, in the 21st century.

Now let me just take this plastic comb with a handle out of my backpocket and give my feather-cut a comb through. My hair stylist keeps telling me to get a different style but no way, I want to look like my high school graduation picture. I was really cute then. I wonder if you can get CDs of The Partridge Family?