This Afternoon In Drama

How My Bitch Stays So Sexy

(yoga.)

What's Pink And Orange and Pinkish-Orange All Over?

Despite being a huge narcissist, I'm often seized by the fantasy of not-existing.  The feeling of the disappearance, as imagined, is like being a Listerine strip on god's tongue.  I just fade and fade and fade until I've become a film so thin that I'm inseparable from what I dissolve onto.  Less a fly on the wall, I'm more a consciousness spread across that wall.  Fly gut residue.  But peaceful, you know.

Surely my longstanding attraction to the ombre effect has a lot to do with this fantasy.  Colors bleeding into one another until no one can figure out the point at which one ended and the next began.  Every once and awhile it makes a comeback in popular fashion and I find myself wanting everything, everywhere, as opposed to the times when every catalog shows leggings and ankle booties-- you will never see me in ankle booties-- and this spring happens to be one of those seasons, but ombre's pull on me has been constant and permanent and trendless.

So one night a few weeks ago, when I was feeling especially disappeary, I decided to make my hair ombre.  I started orange at the roots, segued into a reddish brown, and then finished with magenta.  The effect is clearer in natural sunlight than it is below:

Then almost immediately afterward started fixating once again on this Ralph Lauren comforter I'd been eying for months, except it was stupidly expensive at Bloomingdales, so I'd written it off:

And somewhat stupidly on my part, I began to wonder, what is it about this comforter that has me so entranced ?  Until I realized that if I flipped it vertically from how Ralph shows it in his packaging photo, it was the bedding equivalent of my hair.  I had to have it.  And I found one cheaper than four hundred dollars because it had some mysterious defect that I couldn't find (bedding, c'est moi?), and my fantasy began to get more specific.  Instead of this colorless disappearing I had been picturing before in my mind, my fade now went from a mandarin to magenta, the warmest, fuzziest version of becoming obsolete.

I saw myself lying in the bed, hair above me like a flame, self on and under matching fabric, one great swath of tropical sunset.  Saw myself being hard to see if one were walking into the room at that time of day.

And then I saw this (clearly, Ralph Lauren is similarly fixated), which is the only one I can find, and though it isn't my size:

I think I have to have it.  To go to bed in.  For bottoms I own a pair of hot pink bloomers with orange ribbon, which will have to do until I master the art of dip-dyeing.

Fading in terms of the blog has to do with getting ready to move and commencing work on the screen adaptation of a book, which I guess I'm not supposed to talk about because the company that holds the rights to the book isn't announcing the project yet.  But if you're quick with your one-eyed romantic leads, you can put it together...well, probably not.

Poor Aesthetic Decisions Made By Famous Blondes

I don't think it takes all that much to fuck with a baby's mind.  Fears are instantaneous and insurmountable; baby brains aren't all that known for their powers of perspective.  When I was somewhere around three or four, I saw my mom eating a bowl of Quaker oatmeal, went to sleep, and dreamt a creature made of instant cereal was scaling the side of my house.  It broke in through the second story window of my bedroom, and, taking a spoon to its side, scraped off a piece of itself, which it then force fed me.  That night I experienced a level of horror I hadn't known to exist.  And this fear persisted, eclipsing my sense of well-being even during the daytime.  I thought about that oatmeal monster constantly.  I discovered my mentally induced gag reflex.  I watched my mom's bowl of cereal with a profoundly untoddlerish sense of dread, waiting for its contents to congeal, organize into a sentient being, and make me its bitch.  I learned what it was to have a reoccurring nightmare.  And that this oatmeal monster persists in my adult memory as one of the guiding images of the first house I ever lived in says volumes to me about its tremendous sway over my psyche.  In fact, I was only able to start eating Quaker in 2007, it having apparently taken me a quarter century to process this trauma.

All I'm saying is the dumbest shit can really scare a kid.  So that Christina Aguilera decided it would be a fantastic idea to bring home the ELEVEN FOOT moon from her most recent concert tour and hover it in near proximity to her kid's crib initially struck me as a questionable parenting instinct.

And then I took a good look at that moon's face.  Imagine you're little Max Aguilera Bratman.  You've got a hazy field of vision and so far, your universe is a blur beyond the rosy nipples and soft globes of your mothers bountiful, enhanced breasts.   Before you know it, as weeks go by, your sight begins to lock into focus:

Hey, there's my friends, Mr. Lamby and Mr. Teddy on the easy chairs...hey, there's the pillowy shapes of the trees and the cloud and the hills on my mural...hey, there's my dad's droopy nice-Jewish-boy punim!  And then:

Holy shit, ma, there's a slice of evil fucking incarnate that looks as if it's decaying from the inside and trying to cover the stench of death and gangrene with hot tranny mess rouge!

The kid would be less scarred had she accessorized his room with the assless leather chaps from the Dirrrrrrty tour.  Poor aesthetic decision.  Less potentially psychologically damaging is Scarlett Johansson's new tattoo, which I keep waiting to learn is really a fake-out stunt for Ashton Kutcher's new meta-meta-Punk'd show, except he already had The Hills' Audrina tattoo her arm with Chinese characters advocating frying rice in pork fat, and the lameness of Scar-Jo's ink is both more subtle and more astonishing than I think the Kutch is capable of dreaming up.  (If the tattoo was a joke, then I replace this poor aesthetic decision made by a famous blonde with Carrie Underwood's Bride of Jessica McClintock styling during last night's "Idol Gives Back.")  I always say that choosing a tattoo is not about selecting a design that you think you'll always love, but instead about choosing one that accurately depicts the moment in which you got the work done, so that it's a mark in time and not a mark of identity.  And if Scarlett had gotten this ink done on the last day of Camp Wichi-Wachi when she was eleven so that she would never forget what great friends she had in Tikki-Takki cabin and the summer she learned to make lanyard keychains that twist, I would get it.  Compleeeeeetely.  But if Scarlett is currently at a place in her life where a kindergarten sun rises over the kind of ocean that usually accompanies a menage of Wyland dolphins (I was once there too), then she has no business putting out an album of Tom Waits covers.

 

About a month ago, my mom and I were in side-by-side dressing rooms at Loehmanns, and she wanted me to tell her if a certain pair of pin-striped jeans were making her ass look fat.  In a state of partial undress, I opened the door to see if the stripes were distorting that ass, forgetting the latest tattoo on my ribcage, now visible.  When my mom saw the ribcage, she sucked in her breath as a quiver took to her voice and asked, "What...is...that?" in the same voice used by one Abigail Breslin in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs when the aliens first started attacking her home.  "No, your ass doesn't look fat," I said, wanting to move past the issue, but my mom retreated to her dressing room where I heard sighing, more vocal quivering, and some crocodile tears for the next fifteen minutes.  I said, "It's not on you.  Get over it," when really I should have said, "It's not a technicolor circle of afternoon delight on my forearm; be grateful for that."

And my last poor aesthetic decision made by a famous blonde for the day:

This one needs no exploration.  The Bee Movie press tour haircut and its lingering aftermath are tragic.

Seagull

Maybe if I'd slept with more song-smiths, I would have fulfilled the longtime, narcissist desire to have my own song on the radio.  My own anthem in the vein of The Kaiser Chief's "Ruby," where the chorus would instead be a very urgent, "Andrea!Andrea!Andreaaaaa!"  (When the song first hit the air, I emailed my friend, Hannah, who'd just gotten a new niece named Ruby.  And I said, oh, Ruby's so lucky-- it's strong and clear and passionate name placement.)  Childhood friend, Rhonda, once danced to "Help me, Rhonda!" for me in her bedroom, and though I wasn't yet saying "fuck" at the time, my feelings were somewhere along the lines of, "Fuck, I wish I could choreograph to myself!"  In college my boyfriend Ryan actually did write a song for me and he did use my name, but while the gesture was touching, the droopy folk chorus: "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Andreaaaaaaaaaaaaaa/ This is the song that I wrooooooooooooooote/ you" wasn't getting either of us anywhere near the Top 40.  I used to have a tape of the song somewhere, but it got lost in the shuffle of the past decade, and now there's no longer even that record.

I'm well aware Andrea isn't great for rhyming, and it's also a reasonable effort to tuck into a verse.  Too many syllables, too many vowels, too many neurotic- Jewish-editor-of-the-Beverly- Hills-High-student-paper associations, even.  So maybe I'd given up on the dream a little until I was running at the gym three weeks ago, listening to satellite radio on my headphones, and the DJ announced he was about to play a song called "Seagull."  My ears perked.  And the wheels between them quickly spun.  My brother had been "Seigel" all throughout his years playing football, into his years at the fraternity, no sign of stopping as he navigated adult friendships; why not me?  Every form, every file, every prescription, every attendance sheet, every visit to the gynecologist my entire life, last name first, so why not flip the importance of the identifications in my head?  Here was a song on the radio in which my (last) name was being crooned by a certain Joe Bonamassa, and could I not make something of this long awaited musical shout-out?

So I put in the effort.  I said to myself, "If this is my song, then it needs to speak so clearly to me that I can drag a personal truth out of every line."  While on the treadmill, losing myself in the music and the pounding rhythm of my Nike Frees, I began the process of interpretation:

Seagull, you fly 'cross the horizon/

Well, sure I do.  Not only did I fly to Baltimore this month, but I also metaphorically fly 'cross the horizon, if by horizon we can substitute that line of emotional equilibrium which I completely just cruise right over.

Into the misty morning sun/

I don't live all that far from the ocean.  It can be kind of misty sometimes- kind of- in the morning, even when there is sun.  Things were even mistier when I lived in Venice, and maybe this is one of those songs that romantically addresses me a confluence of past and present, an always "was" and an always "will be."

Nobody asked you where you are going/

Pretty true.  I don't have a boss, I no longer live with my parents, and I'm not accountable to a husband or kids.  You could go with either "fiercely independent" or "dedicated loner" and still be spot on, Joe-Joe.

Nobody knows where you're from.

In the literal sense, perhaps a stretch.  I think there's an interview somewhere on the internet explaining that I was born near Disneyland.  But how often have I been told by people that they can't figure out where I'm coming from?  So often!  Almost every single time I've ever been in a relationship or group situation, in fact.

Next verse:

There is a man asking a question/

Who is it?  My dad who regularly wants to know, "What's new?"  My student in my UCLA class who recently wanted to know, "What's the difference between regular 3rd person perspective and a tight 3rd?"  Ryan Seacrest on the TV wondering, "Who will go home?"  Or is it, in a very meta turn, Joe himself (see next line)?

Is it really the end of the world? /

A timely question, Joe, since with all the recent L.A.-area murder-suicides, accidental driveby deaths, and Santa Monica residents getting clobbered, lately I've been talking a lot about how yeah, I do sort of think things are coming to an apocalyptic head around here.  And then, of course, there's the problem of the economy.

Seagull, you must have known for a long time/
The shapes of things to come

If I'm an asshole for saying so, fine, but I was in the gifted program as a child.  And I've often said I'm really ninety-two inside and should probably be getting ready to die.  And just yesterday I was writing back and forth with Geoff about how I feel my adult consciousness locked in somewhere around twelve when I was studying for my Bat Mitzvah underneath my family's front fern, wanting desperately to commune with god, but discovering the power of bullshit, of rhetoric (my Torah portion) instead.  And since then, the shapes of things haven't shifted so much.  I saw them awhile ago.  I did.

Chorus:

No you fly through the sky/

We're back to the flying in the sky again?  Covered.  Done and done.

Never asking why/

I don't think Joe means to say that I'm easygoing, which I'm not, or that I go through life without questioning what's going on around me or why I make certain choices.  What I think he's doing here is singing obliquely about my hardcore existentialist leanings, which make it nearly impossible for me to attach a fixed meaning to any symbol, system, behavior, way of life.  So I don't necessarily ask, "Why?" in terms of questions like, "Why are we here on earth?" or "Why do most marriages fail?"  I'm strictly a case-by-case basis, and for me, meaning takes root in the process of interpretation and doesn't exist otherwise; thus, questioning an earlier origin point is just playing a fruitless game.

And you fly all around/

I do run a lot of errands.

Until somebody shoots you down.

Possibly a reference to the murder/suicide-robot I will eventually build.

Refrain:

Gonna fly away tomorrow, fly away/

While not actually going on a plane tomorrow-tomorrow, I have been applying to professorial jobs in other states, so I'm taking this as an instance of poetic license, "tomorrow" being a stand-in for a more generalized notion of futureness.

Leave it to my sorrow, hey yeah/

Here I have to stop and ask, "Leave what, Joe?"  I get on my writing students all the time about these vague "its" that don't clearly hook back up to a referent.

Gonna fly away/

As has been established, yes.

Leave it to my sorrow, hey yeah.

Seriously, dude leave what to your sorrow?  If this "it" isn't specified as any fixed crisis, then do you just mean "everything?"  Leave the flying, the horizon, the misty morning sun, the man asking questions, and the even more ominous man who's apparently going to shoot me from the clouds? (It just occurs me to me that I haven't heard much about hunters going for seagulls.  Not really common marks, right?)

Or do you, Joe, just mean that when I fly away, I am going to leave my sheer absence to your sorrow?  That all you will have left of me are the hazy memories, the whispers of who I am?  Because if so, that's very sweet!  How nice to be missed like that, especially on the radio.

The Saddest Easter Bonnet Ever

And inside her, the saddest egg hunt EVER is going on too.

In The Words Of Wilson Phillips, "Hold On"

will be back soon.

(This is the envelope in which the Bed & Breakfast delivered my room key and the most interesting written interpretation of my name I've seen in years.  By now I'm used to people finding "Siegel" a more intuitive spelling than "Seigel," which is mildly bewildering because "Sie" looks as if it rhymes with pie, and many of these people have heard my name spoken out loud.   A contract that came to my andreaseigel.com email address last week pulled the well-worn flip-flop, and the nice ladies of the Brandeis University National Women's Committee put the more German looking version of me on a bookplate inside one of the Learned Research Journals acquired by their libraries.

Somewhere in the stacks a young, dilligent student thinks this kind appreciation is going out to:

Andrea Siegel, clothing and fashion theorist (caption on the photo came with the photo- I wholeheartedly question the cut of the pants):

Andrea Siegel, Massachusetts real estate agent, who recently donated her hair to "Locks of Love"?

 

Andrea Siegel, Immunology & Molecular Pathogenesis grad student at Emory, who is obviously wayyyyy better at science than I am?

Or any of a number of my evil near-twins with the wonky i's.  I have very few regrets in my life, but one of them is that I never made the effort to collect all of my Starbucks cups, which have featured more creative manglings of my first name than belonged in the trash.  I know I mumble and I know I have a monotone that camoflauges my speech inside the pillowy hum of the air conditioner, but there are versions so fantastical, so dreamy I can't properly recall them, far better than the "Delawndra's" and "Handree's" that I can.

Anyway, my time at the Bed & Breakfast helped me to finally put together why I loathe Bed & Breakfasts-- because who wants to feel like a personal guest?

And now I need some time to pull things back together in L.A.

New Author Photo?

Kim took this when we went out to brunch at the Fairmont Hotel for her birthday this past weekend.  Christmas and I both had red meat.  Previously, I was accused by an Amazon.com forum poster of appearing naked on the back of my last book; in this photo even the dog's nipples are tastefully covered, no?

And this would be Christmas' publicity shot (my head cropped out, of course).  Look at the intensity in that gaze.  It says, "I pee on you, Darconville's Cat.  I pee on you!"

The Minimalistic Spring Cleaning Of Oh-Eight

My Dog Is Ahead Of Her Time

About a month and a third ahead.

Out on my deck I've created a little patch of lawn for her.  Once she's peed that patch to death, I go to Home Depot and buy some new sod, which is exactly what I was up to today.  Home Depot keeps their sod in the front of the nursery in a big pile, and it's very possible that somewhere around this pile was the warning that this sod had been artificially treated to be prettier, but often I stumble around stores, lost in my own head, so I didn't take notice.

And sure, as I hoisted the strips of sod and the nearby day laborers shouted, "Lady!  Lady!  Lady!" and I mused to myself, "I am no lady," I might have noticed that the grass looked especially green.  Not unlike the color of the plastic grass at the bottom of the Easter baskets my parents used to give me and my brother, despite our familial indifference toward the purported resurrection of Jesus (we practiced the same indifference toward the Yom Kippur fast).  But I just thought, "Spring?" 

Today was the first warm day L.A. has had in awhile, and the world did seem to be amping up its hues.  I saw a picture of Paris Hilton at the premiere of her new movie and she looked oranger than ever.  On the style section of People magazine's website, they were trying to convince readers that sky blue eyeshadow-- swept across the entire lid-- was making a comeback, trotting out Beyonce and Rihanna as proof.  When Christmas and I took our walk this morning, there were gardeners in front of every other house, depositing red and pink flowers in their frothy beds. 

So, "A trick of the light," I shrugged.   "The turning of the seasons."  From there my mind similarly turned to the coral sundresses hanging on the left side of my closet and the Daisy Dukes I cut from a pair of corduroys and the idea of cutting bangs, which, for whatever reason, is an idea that resurrects every year (like Jesus) but is usually followed by the realization that bangs will totally fuck me up during summer and the awareness that I will regret the decision all the way until the following spring.  (These mental safety mechanisms fail about once every four to five years.)  I never claimed that when I'm lost in my own head that well is particularly deep.

Upon returning home, I unfurled the new sod and was happy as Christmas danced happily upon it.   I went indoors to catch the tail end of One Life To Live as she christened the grass with her holy water, and five minutes later she ran into the house and climbed into my lap, flipping over so I could play drums on her stomach.  And that's when I saw that the pads of her paws were a green that veered into teal territory, and I said, "Ohhhhhhh shit, Christmas.  I've always hated people who dye their dogs and look what I've done to you!"  I tried buffing her paws with a towel, but the color wouldn't lift.  Water and puppy shampoo took the green somewhere closer to the seafoam of my childhood bedroom, but as you can see from the pictures, the effect is still pretty noticeable.  So, like bangs, we're simply going to wait the look out.  In the meantime Christmas just barks a close approximation of "Irish pride" whenever anyone gives her lip.

In The Red Of The Night, Part II

In the beginning I was convinced that Rachel had to be either drunk or on painkillers.  Whereas Kelly's smile was paper thin, Rachel's was so saturated with giddiness that I couldn't see past it.  It was a brick wall standing in front of her psyche.  If there was irony, if there was disillusion, if there was malice, if there was sadness, if there was anything other than a meadow of singing bluebirds under her skin, I couldn't even find a nook, a chink, a crack for a view.  She'd often mention that in her previous, pre-HSN life she'd been a middle school French teacher somewhere in the midwest, and out loud I said, "Of course!"  I saw her breezing into the room, snapping up the shades, spreading her arms to the glorious, snow-kissed morning and chirping to her corn-fed kids, "Bonjour, bonjour, bonjour!  Je t'aime mes étudiants!"  The persona: astonishingly happy. 

Still, it was a drunk kind of happy.  Wanting to give her the benefit of the doubt, I thought, "Hey, mayyyyybe punch-drunk."  After all, she was on-air at 3 a.m. and trying to sell the enormous, animal print caftan her producer had thrown on her tiny frame.  It was less a garment than yardage straight off the bolt.  And she was not only radiant in it, but also radiant on the subject of it.

By the time summer started I'd begun to wonder, "I'm two months into this with her-- hasn't she caught up on her sleep yet?"  She was as consistently loopy as ever, and I knew this because I was an extremely loyal viewer, if not customer.  If anyone could make me want a caftan (perhaps to sleep in the next time I got the flu?), it would be Rachel, and that I continued not to want a caftan told me that I really did not want a caftan.  I wanted Rachel never to leave the red eye time slot.

When my energy and joy were depleted, Rachel had surplus.  Late night home shopping customers are a notoriously depressing crowd.  It's the women who work the worst possible shifts and who are either just walking in the door, exhausted, or just getting up to a dark world outside.  It's the women who can't sleep.  It's the women who talk about how they shouldn't be shopping because they don't have the money, but they turned on the TV and couldn't resist.  It's the women who are lonely.  It's the women who are sick, obese, and handicapped.  It just is.

While hardcore pushing the Tignanello pebble leather convertible shoulder bag with wristlet as if it were that hideous, limited edition Vuitton Beyonce was carrying awhile back, Rachel decided to go to the phones.  More often than not, the phones are a psychological black hole.

"What made you want to pick up this bag?" Rachel asked, caressing the pebbled leather and smiling like HSN was paying her by the tooth.

"Well," a voice croaked over the speaker system (this is not out of the norm, as the voices usually croak; are sometimes so froggy that I think, "Oh my god!  It's a man calling in!" (But this is never the case.  The men call in during the coin, sword, and power washer shows).  "If I understand-- because I'm basically blind-- that bag drops to twenty-three inches?"  A glowing review of the design if I've ever heard one.

No matter what was said, no matter what ailment revealed, no matter what type of diabetes suffered by the caller, Rachel was unflappably ebullient.  Or-- possibly drunk.  In some way, on something.  On many nights she'd dissolve into uncontrollable giggles, claiming that her producer had just said something hysterical into her ear.  Her head would bobble as if it had become difficult to hold up.  Veins would pop out of her blushing forehead.  She greeted a caller, "Hello Lauren!  Did they warn you about me?" with the same cadence Nic Cage used in so much of Leaving Las Vegas.

Trying to sell a questionable Moonlight Markdown, she suggested that the piece might be something worn when "ladies go out together."  Then, gaze going fuzzy, she asked the camera, "Go clubbing?  Is that what they say now?"  And then, digging even deeper for her answer, she began to run through the kinds of dances one might engage in when she went out clubbing.  "Sock hop?  Charleston?  The Charleston?  The Twist!"  The mention of The Twist seemed to excite her very much.  But within seconds her smile, while still pure, was itself twisted with some confusion.  "The Swiss?" she asked.  "I don't know The Swiss."

The sun dipped for just a moment behind her eyes.  And then it came back up, brighter than before, and she was laughing, "Ohhhhhh!   The Swim!"  Supposedly, "the producer" in her ear again.

Selling a digital camera, she showed us pictures of her cats, which she had so religiously referred to as "my babies" throughout the show that I never considered I wasn't going to see fingers.  We looked at those cats for a good, long time.  Or, rather, we looked at the suggestion of cats because Rachel kept trying to angle the display so that the video camera could pick up her babies' faces, except they appeared to be very dark and perhaps captured without flash, so it was kind of like looking at the Tribbles.  (Her profile on the HSN website says, "Rachel is 'mommy' to three cats, aptly named Monet, Mia, and Paris.")

I couldn't relate to Rachel in the least, just like I can't relate to Bindi Irwin.  But whereas Bindi's unreal cheer just freaks my shit out, Rachel's was a lighthouse and I was a dinky ship, bobbing in my depression.  In fact, this depression probably should have driven me to become one of her callers (though mine didn't really have a concrete story behind it, as the other women's depressions seemed to), and I could have been one of those croaking voices heavy-breathing on the line, talking about how much I loved getting things in the mail-- which I do-- but there was nothing tangible I wanted.  The customers were buying into the illusion of the Absolute™ rings ("The very finest diamond simulant!" Rachel would beam), but I was content buying into the illusion that there was someone out there in the world who was really that regularly, effortlessly happy.