This Afternoon In Drama

This Year's Holiday Wrapping Theme

For my birthday Brent took me to a cabin in Northern California that was in the middle of this pastoral valley, and I got really into the idea that if we could just move there- or someplace like there- then the two of us could stop being neurotic, unnecessarily psychologically tortured people.  And this was even after we went to get dinner late one night from the gas station diner in town, only to discover that on Sundays it turned into some kind of thumping Spanish techno with a DJ who remained parked in his plastic chair, the only dancer on his floor a chubby four-year-old who gave a nonstop series of facial expressions loaded with twenty times the intensity of anything J. Lo has ever mustered.  Even then, it seemed like a very peaceful and rejuvenating life option.

So when we got home, I decided that this year's holiday wrapping theme would be "Away In A Cabin," and I mistakenly believed that paper-wise this would be an easy theme to carry out because it's not like the one I wanted to do last year, "Underwater Yuletide," which finally got put aside when I couldn't track down any wrap with fish wearing Santa hats.  I figured that cabins are a very typical wintery thing and took confidence from the fact that there are lots of holiday greeting cards with Thomas Kindadian cabins glowing amidst blue snow, wreaths hanging upon the gold-warmed windows, and I naively assumed that I would be able to find a number of cabin-oriented papers, especially in this day and age of the Internet.  But no, it is very, very quiet out there on this particular wrapping front.  I almost gave up on the theme, except I happened to go on Ebay that day and search for "miniature fireplace lot," thinking that if I could just find a bunch of tiny, plastic chimneys to put atop the gifts, as if the packages were cabins themselves, then I would find a way to make this all work even though this season, almost every wrapping store is featuring graphic owl prints lifted straight from an Ikea bed sheet.  And lo, a holiday miracle: a woman was unloading fourteen of said items, and she was the only one in the online auction world doing so at that specific juncture in time.  So I bought the fireplace lot, and I'm sure she turned to her husband that evening and said, "Whoa, someone actually bought the fireplace lot," and then I proceeded to solve the problem of cabin gift wrap.

I realized I would have to get it custom made.  So I found a company online that will print whatever you want on rolls of paper, whether that be your face or your children's faces or your local hair salon's logo or even your penis, if that is something that excites you, and then I went and found images of winter cabins via an image Google search.  Keeping in mind the delicate Christmas, Hanukah, and areligious balance I go for every year, I located pictures that naturally had a blue tint, a red tint, and then a more neutral white and charcoal palette.  The rolls arrived, and I was happy with them.  On the way home from breakfast the next morning, I manipulated Brent into accompanying me to Michael's Arts & Crafts store, abuzz with silk poinsettia enthusiasts, and I picked up two kinds of iridescent glitters to mimic snow (and sprinkle atop snow drift cotton balls), sticky translucent jewels to indicate ice, and gold and silver paint pens with which I intended to write the recipients' names.  Getting ahold of these pens was an unexpected challenge because Michael's insists on locking up their paint pens from (?) neighborhood hooligans, and so we had to wait for a significant period at the glass case while a seasonally employed teenager with epically bad breath tried every single key on his huge ring until he finally located the right one...and then broke it off in the keyhole.  Don't worry.  It all panned out within an hour.

So anyway here it is, holiday theme 2011, which came about, in the words of Phil Collins, "against all odds."  An overview of the gifts from a few angles:

Closeups of the chimneys, cotton ball snow tufts, and snow-themed ribbons:

And closeups of some of the papers (the blue one didn't photograph well, so it's not here):

And that does it for me.  Happy holidays everyone, and may your new year be visited by frequent dots of mental peace.

In The Meantime

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8/20/11: Update on the movie (Laggies): it's actually getting made.  Lynn Shelton is attached to direct, and if you haven't seen Humpday, you should definitely track it down.  Also, her new movie, Your Sister's Sister, is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and it's genius.  Geeeeeeenius.  

Link to Variety announcement for Laggies.

**

5/1/11: Right now I'm writing a new book and a movie, so this blog will be on hiatus until the fall, but not a half-assed hiatus like the one I said I was going on a few months ago.  It's really a hiatus.  Unless Britney Spears gets photographed carrying one of my books again, and then I will probably have to announce that.

In the meantime, I'm also starting to do more pop culture writing for the Internet, so I'm just going to use this post as a regularly updated log of things I'm doing elsewhere if you need something to masturbate to:

I'm writing a column "Boyfriend Of The Week" for Crushable (link takes you to all weeks).

Boyfriends include: 4/20: Rob Mariano, 4/27: Raylan Givens, 5/4: Jason Hoppy; 5/11: Nick Offerman; 5/18: Simon Cowell; 5/25: James Spader; 6/2: J.P. from The Bachelorette; 6/8: Khal Drogo from Game Of Thrones; 6/15: Detective Stephen Holder from The Killing; 6/22: Blake Shelton; 6/29: Judge Belvin Perry Jr. of the Casey Anthony trial; 7/13: Jason Segel's TV characters

I'm doing recaps of Bravo's The Real Housewives for Nymag.com/Vulture. (link takes you to all weeks)

4/18/11 Ugo.Com  "100 Hot Girls To Follow On Twitter"

4/30/11 Shalom Life interview.  Top 20 Jews In The Arts- Andrea Seigel

5/30/11 "Writing From The Tub" interview.  

6/20/11 "By the time you get to the murder it's going to seem like a cough: An interview with Andrea Seigel" at HTMLGIANT

The Worst Before And After Photo I've Ever Received

My Canadian uncle sent me this picture the other day because his wife, my dad's sister, recently died of cancer.  And my dad, as you know if you read this blog, died of cancer two Octobers ago.  So it was kind of a "can you believe they're both gone?" gesture.

 

When I look at any picture of my dad, all I see is my dad, and then my thoughts immediately go off into how strange it is that he isn't calling me five times a day anymore and how surreal it is to see an image of him and have some part of me fail to understand he's not still alive.  So I didn't pay any attention to where the picture was taken, but when I showed it to Brent, he immediately said, "Weird, your dad's standing at his cemetery."

I said, "Wait, what?" because I couldn't believe I'd missed that he's standing in the cemetery where his crypt is, but that might be at least partially because the picture was taken before the hideous murals went up.  (If you want to read about two of them, you can here and here.)  Sometime after 2000, the year of this photo, some power at the cemetery decided what that crypt structure really needed was a depiction of Yentl getting married in heaven, but on the day that my dad visited above, everything was still white.

My dad and his sister would have been there visiting their mom's grave, which is in the lawn burial part of the park.  From where they're standing in this picture, that grave would be behind and to the left of the camera person.  So what ends up being strange about this photo is that my dad is randomly standing directly in front of his future crypt, which is directly over his right shoulder.  His body is now in the spot where I put the highlighted blue dot (you'll probably have to click on the picture to enlarge and be able to see it):

He hadn't bought the crypt at the time, so the juxtaposition is an uncanny one, for a number of reasons.  One, there are multiple wings to the crypt structure, so the exact positioning is notable.  Two, he wasn't visiting the crypt part of the grounds, so it's odd that that's where he and his sister decided to stop and pose.  Three, there's the weirdness of a photo existing of my dad in a cemetery because he hated going to them (he's trying to put on a good face about it here- neither of us knows how to smile all that great for a camera).  And four, someone really wanted to take a picture right there and then?  Wait until you go have lunch at Dinah's across the street, you know?

I'm not the type to think that there's some profound, time-bending message in the picture, like that my dad or the universe just "knew" that the drawer over his shoulder was going to be his crypt and so that's why he stood where he stood.  But the picture totally stunned me for a good few hours, I think because it's an image of my dad, alive, juxtaposed against where he lies, dead.  It's just an in-your-face artifact of change.  The murals are now up.  My dad is now in a box, in the wall.  Before him, I had never had someone integral to me die, and so the only idea I had of how I'd feel about it came from movies and how fictional people appeared to miss other fictional people.  I think movies can do a pretty good job of capturing a more general feel of sadness, especially if the right sad song is playing underneath a scene, but they can't really get at what it's like to be an adult and to be unable to wrap your head around someone really important being here, and then not here.  When you were a kid and your parents had your sick dog put to sleep while you were napping, you were at the mercy of the same lack of comprehension, except you were a kid, and so that was just the expected and natural limit of your imagination.  When you were a kid you didn't project into the future, where you'd be turning your mind in unsatisfying loops around the concept of not seeing someone ever again, except trapped in old photos.

Weird picture.

Falling In Love Again

This year's Pop Show felt like the end of an era for me.  I've been going for 8 years now, ever since I accidentally caught a taped replay on Burbank public access television while not doing work at my Disney Channel desk (why I left that job-- which allowed me to watch hours and hours of TV and gave me optical insurance-- after earning a TENS OF THOUSANDS advance on my first book is a decision I sometimes unconsciously grapple with in my dreams).

The kids I'd originally gotten so excited about had graduated, and then the kids I got excited about after that initial run now had little siblings in the show, and those siblings were graduating, suddenly leaving the threat of a future vacuum.  As I flipped through the program before the show, I wondered, "Who am I supposed to care about next year??"  A similar thing happened on One Life to Live a few years back when the show decided that they wanted to get younger and hipper and started introducing a bunch of random younger characters that I couldn't give less of a shit about.  All I wanted to see was Vicky Lord Buchanan's multiple personalities re-emerge for the twenty-thousandth time, and not just because I'm a creature of habit, but because when Vicky's life falls apart, it really means something to everyone in that town.  Same with Pop Show.  You need your stars and you need your connections because without them, the stage starts to feel populated with all those kids who you don't remember ever having seen in your life when you flip through your old yearbooks.  You assume that they were actually there because you have documented proof, but it would be all the same if some computer program slid their pictures in to force a created memory.

So before I get to to the shining lights I desperately searched for during this year's show, I need to first take a second to pay all due respect to Tyler Mann, who I thought was a senior last year and emotionally detached from prematurely.  (I was really, really sure he was a senior last year, so hopefully he didn't get held back.  If that's the case, Tyler, what does a Poli Sci grade matter when you have all you'll ever need inside you!)  He was so obviously the center of this year's show, even with song choices that were slightly less rousing than in 2010, that I got the feeling Pop Show is going one of two ways next year.  Either:

1.  Tyler's graduation is going to produce the same effect as if OLTL killed off Vicky Lord Buchanan, and the Pop Show town is going to devolve into a bunch of disconnected moments that fail to interweave in any satisfying way.  I mean, for me.  I'm sure for the parents and the teenagers who actually know these people it's satisfying because they have a lot of rich backstory from life, they know who's dating who, etc.  Or,

2.  There's a kid who's been shying away from being the star he or she really is because I'm sure there's been some kind of general feeling around the vocal association of, "Who can compete with Mann?  Who wants to go up against that?"  And now that kid can step out into the light and become the new heart of the show until that siren named College calls.

(Below is Tyler from last year's show because a lot of the individual numbers from this year aren't up yet.)

Let me also briefly say that it's a testament to these kids that even in a shaky year, they present more intriguing characters in the course of a single performance than anyone on Glee has managed over the course of a couple seasons.

Onto the show:

I'm not going to bullshit.  The first act was pretty touch-and-go, as it is wont to be, but this year in particular it lacked the breakout moment that I always look for, when an underclassman in one of the lower groups (Leatrice Innocent, anyone??) displays charisma that tidal waves through the sea of identical costumes.

We did have some of the more comfortably familiar Pop Show novelties: the incredibly literal joke costume (the kid who came out dressed like a gorilla during Neon Trees' "Animal"); the incredibly high slit on a dress that makes me hyper-conscious of all the dads in the audience (Shannon Ary's dress during "Sway"); the incredible amount of illusion netting (the Decibelles genie costumes, which were intended to look backless, except they just sort of emphasized the tethered backiness of some of the backs, if you know what I mean); the incredibly dramatic romantic duet where one partner eye-fucks the wings of the stage while the other looks longingly at him ("One Less Bell"), and, of course, the incredible math teacher, Mr. Peebles, who always comes out and raps and always charmingly remains at least two counts ahead of the beat.

I got a kick out of the Soundwaves "British Punk Medley," sung with what can only be described as anti-punk technique, but the place where the show turned itself around was during the pop cabaret of Lady Gaga's "Pokerface," as sung by Emily Barnett and Cooper Baldwin.  While an intensely great singer who has a voice as good as Gaga, Emily's graduating this year, so I just couldn't get too attached.  But Cooper, playing Sir Elton John with crystal glasses, white flares, and a blouse that looked like it came from Spiegel's was nothing short of the shining discovery that the entire first act had been leading to.  It wasn't just a matter of him being able to sing beautifully, but more crucially that he brought a radiant presence to the stage that had me wanting to know more about his personality off of it.  Starlee came with this year and she leaned over to whisper, "Is he a senior?"  We still had three performances to go until intermission when I could do a proper check of senior statements, but I didn't think so.  And I hoped not.  Because here was a kid we could potentially hang our spangled fedoras upon for 2012.

(So excited this is on YouTube already for you, although I feel like this was taken from Saturday and not Friday night's show).

During intermission, as I was purchasing a new John Burroughs Vocal and Music Association hoodie because my old one lost its drawstring, Starlee wanted to know, "So what do you think about the siblings?" meaning the younger sister of Caitlin Ary, who is probably my all-time favorite Pop Show girl, and the younger sister of Keaton Savage, who competes with Tyler Mann for all-time favorite Pop Show redhead.  And the truth is, I can acknowledge that I was just never able to give those younger generations a fair shot because their older siblings had occupied such huge chunks of the Pop Show part of my heart.  So while both girls are obviously talented, and while Trevyn Savage gives off something that tells me she belongs on an ABC sitcom about family, stat, you just can't get over your first loves.

Second act: "Pokerface" had gotten us newly excited about the promise of the numbers to come, and happily it was all uphill from where we'd been.  If you and I are ever at a social event and you need to hear about the other performances in detail, I'll be glad to sit and discuss how amazing it was that Dance Ensemble kicked off with "Tardy For The Party" and how some of the strongest voices in the show (including Tyler Mann and Cooper Baldwin, naturally) helped my eyes stay straight in my head during what I think was a religious inspirational number.  But for now I just want to narrow in on the two moments that really made the show for me this year.

The first came during the "Men @ Work" medley, which kicked off with the all-guy group pulling the moves I've come to look for from them.  It's like seeing old friends: there's the kid in the group who likes to dress up like a girl obsessed with the other dudes; there's the choreography where the guys look like they're making out with themselves; there's the homoerotic banter (this time, phenomenally, while shaking Shake Weights® en masse).  But then the group went into what I call "The Serious Time" of the group performances, where the members take to the risers to sing what's usually a pretty boring song at a pretty boring pace in order to demonstrate harmonizing ability.  When I saw in the program that the "Serious Time" song was going to be Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," I was not at all excited because that song has obviously been done to death during American Idol auditions and all the times I played Jeff Buckley's first CD while on vacation with my family the summer it came out.  But then a soloist (whose name I don't know and who I can't track down because he doesn't appear to be a senior) was the first to take to the mic.  And when he sang his line, it sounded like there was a tear hanging in the back of his throat.  If not a tear, then a true ache.  And it was so moving that I went still from taking notes in my program and could have almost cried- for the sadness of losing my dad, I think.

(Again, pretty sure the YouTube clip that's available is from Saturday night, because his voice doesn't crack here.  "Hallelujah" starts at 6:29).

The second moment came during the final number.  Powerhouse.  Literally, the most powerful house of singers and dancers the school's got.  Their theme is always extravagant, but this year when the lights went up and the stage had been transformed into a wintry, cold, empty planet with fake snow blowing from the rafters, I was like, "Damn guys, this is a new level."  After some Googling, I think I'm talking about the planet Hoth (?), which maybe someone can confirm for me because I've never seen Star Wars.  But I could easily put it together from costuming, as some of the girls were wearing C-3PO-ish gold bodysuits with demarcated breasts while others were in Princess Leia white jumpsuits (others still were in sparkly minidresses with fur Uggs, and Starlee believes they were intended to be Ewoks).  Some of the guys were in Luke Skywalker (?) outfits with capes, and some were in what looked like chaps that had been made from pelts of Chewbacca.

I was already slayed by the time the group sang a mash-up of Nine Inch Nails "Head Like A Hole" and Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation," which was like my 9th grade self having sex with my 6th grade self except better.  But then the cannons on the edges of the stage suddenly began to shoot a dense smoke, and a large cloud formed in the middle.  The performers ran into it.  I started saying to Starlee, "Oh shittttt, oh shitttt" which is what I say when something has just gotten so exciting that an almost painful tension is building within.  Five seconds passed.  We couldn't see anything.  Maybe ten seconds passed.  I began to suspect a group-wide costume change, and I began to hold my breath.  We waited a little more.  And then the members of Powerhouse burst forth from the cloud, having completely abandoned their Star Wars getups, and now they were in sequined, rainbow-colored outfits and forcefully singing Katy Perry's "Firework" like the physical embodiments of the sun coming out on a planet that had never seen any.  They were catharsis made tangible.  And right then I was almost unbearably excited for next year's show.

(This is the only video I could find of this year's Powerhouse so far and it cuts off, but at least you get to see the smoke change around 13:00 if not the number afterward.)

 

And here are my notes in the show's program:

Spanking The Hand-Crafted Sock Monkey

So Etsy's blog asked me to contribute a short thing on how I felt about Sweethearts candies for Valentine's Day, and I wrote up a few paragraphs about how they used to gross me out once unboxed.  You can read it here.  I had Brent read it, and he was like, "Maybe leave out the part where you talk about how you're not that disturbed by waiters spitting in your food because it's just so gross, Andrea."  And I was like, "Thanks for your opinion, but I'm going to ignore it like you ignore me when you play Mass Effect until 4 in the morning."

Then the Etsy post went up on Valentine's, and that day, a few comments started rolling in from community members that the piece was inappropriate for the site and that they thought it was kind of disgusting, but whatever.  They were also upset by another part of the post, not done by me, that had jokey alternate Sweethearts sayings, and there was this whole, frenzied misinterpretation of one of the hearts, when I think the author's intent was clearly not malicious.

But back to me!  Because me is my sweet spot!

I woke up the day after Valentine's to a tweet directed at me from a fragranced soap seller, saying that she hated my Etsy article and it was an embarrassment to the entire site.  She linked me to a message board on Etsy where a whole lot of crafters were going OFF not just on what a shitty piece I'd done, but also what a questionable person I must be.  A candlemaker publicly seconded the soapmaker on Twitter, saying I was tasteless.  And not to be a dick, but I just found all of this really funny because that post was such a softball.  And it had gotten people-- gentle soap-making, candle-producing, knit-enthusiastic people-- more upset with me that probably anything else that I've ever written, including my first book, which can be construed as pro-suicide.

So I retweeted the soap seller's hostile tweet at me because I was honestly kind of proud.  But then Rob Delaney happened to tell people to follow me a couple minutes later, and I started getting hundreds of followers, some of whom were then replying at the soap maker that she sucked.  And then I think she got overwhelmed because she amped it up with some more trash talking and finished off by telling me to "retweet that to your idiots."  So I was like, "Okay" and did.  I mean, I was pretty entertained by this point.

Meanwhile, I went and read through some of the comments that were coming in on the Etsy message board, and I was getting my mind blown.  If people just didn't like my piece or my writing style, that was totally fine.  Look, sometimes I'm not into your crystal wine ornaments either.  Diff'rent Strokes, ladies.  But what really astounded me was the serious offense some of the members took to the content, often reading bizarro messages in innocent details, so I thought I'd take this opportunity, this opportunity of me writing on my blog, to clarify some of that intent.

1.  The post is about "drizzling cum on childrens candy."

No one actually masturbated on my Sweethearts.  As far as I know.  Masturbatory was an adjective, suggesting that the candies were a one-way mental tug fest.  The words "drizzled" and "come-on" were there to replicate a feeling the hearts gave me, not to indicate that the hearts had literally been cummed on.  Hey, they may have been.  We had some weird dudes in my class.  And in that case, it's a good thing I never ate them, AMIRITE?

2.  "The visualization of the outcast 10 year old boy and the sexualizing of candy hearts and envelopes is also disturbing. I'm not sure how its ok to use this writing style while talking about children. That is disturbing."

Listen, young outcasts masturbate too.  Just because I wasn't into the kid who kept giving me hearts doesn't mean that he wasn't into himself...and I hope he was.  Let's not shame him for that.  Someone else commented that there's no way that a 5th grader could have been a stalker, but you've got to keep in mind that my generation had both Rollerblades AND cordless phones, so he definitely could.  Right underneath my window.  Regularly.

3. "Little kids never think like that! I never thought like that in grade school!"

I taught a fiction workshop at Loyola Marymount in which this girl read a story about a Loyola student doing Ecstasy for ten days on the beach until she was finally arrested for being a non-functional person roaming around Venice and was subsequently thrown in L.A.'s women's jail.  A bunch of her classmates started off discussion by saying, "10 days of Ecstasy is totally unrealistic!  And also, LMU students wouldn't do that amount of drugs on a beach."  And then the girl lifted her head from where she'd been staring at the floor and she said, "Uh, this happened to me last summer.  I just got out of the pysch ward."

4.  "Did you know what masturbation was called in 5th grade? I didn't. Did you ever picture a fellow 5th grader masturbating about you in his mind? I didn't."

I did.  And I so did.  And I hoped it was Brian Millat.  

5.  "When I think of my 10 year old-5th grader self, pictures of masturbation certainly DO NOT come to mind."

You know, we all choose to define the stories of our lives in different ways.  My personal narrative seems to have more childhood masturbation in it than yours, but it's not like it was ALL masturbation. If I were to spin you a yarn about my 5th grade life, it would definitely also be balanced out with super tragic bangs and a big time hard-on for tie dye pant sets with reflective mirrors glued to the shirts.

5. "The article was cruel and classist... I wondered if the kids that sent candy hearts could not afford better candy. Yes, poor children can be in Gifted and Talented programs."

Wait, what?  There was also another comment that I was being an asshole by suggesting that kids who weren't in gifted programs were just dropping acid like craaazy.  My implication was that we were so fixated on doing well in school that we didn't really have the time to trip out.  But the bigger implication is that it's a fucking joke.

(P.S.  I'm from Irvine.  We're all rich!)

6.  "Author mentions kids she "would not borrow a pencil from..." To me, that sounds snobbish."

Thank you.  I love that I have standards.

 

So by the end of the day following Valentine's, the soapmaker asked me for a truce on Twitter, although I don't think the two of us had ever really been in a fight.  I had just shared her opinion on a wider level.  Regardless, I was like, "We have no problem" 1. because I think it's completely fine if she wants to hate that blog post and 2.  because she wrote at me that she bought my latest book and that I was pretty.  Everything was cool.  But I just never had any idea that my brief thoughts on Sweethearts would be so upsetting to so many craftspeople.  Because while some of the sellers were anxious that their shops would be affiliated with my kind of thing, I can assure them that when I go on Etsy looking for French Bulldog merchandise (shout-out to to seller MCOpen: I love my greeting cards, particularly the leprechaun French Bulldog!!), I have never once gone into shops through the blog, and I'm positive the same goes for buyers determined to bring home luxury scented soaps.

I Intended To Do The Hustle

I'm technically a Jew, if you're late to this party.  So I had no idea little girls do a full-out veil for their communions until I received this kids' catalog yesterday and flipped through it, looking for sundresses that I could still fit into.  This is some next level bridal dress-up:

These pictures made me realize that I never played bride as a kid.  I occasionally played wife, which was the game where I yelled at my friend's brother Lloyd about how he wasn't holding up his end of the housekeeping in our Little Tikes studio cottage.  The romance in that situation wasn't about the dream of finding another person to share my life with.  It was about daily drudgery.  Like, I couldn't believe that I had so many dishes to do and Lloyd had only brought home two plastic eggs from the market and now we were obviously going to starve and die, and that was exciting.  My fondness for that game developed into my understanding that a real relationship is about nonstop arguing, a fantasy I couldn't shake until about three years ago.

But I just never dressed up as a bride as far as I can remember.  Every single one of my dress-up outfits was about pretending to be a slut, a real free-spirited lady about town.  I'd be like, "Hey, yeah, hold your horses Tyler [imaginary discothèque partner], let me just throw on this sequin bikini top and these Body Glove shorts with some heels and let's go tear this town a brand new asshole!"  And then I'd pretend-meet another love interest [non-existent] on the dance floor [my twin bed, brass frame] and we'd go home together, making out in front of Tyler's face.  From religiously watching an 80's Saturday night dance show whenever my parents left me with a babysitter, my fantasy of adult life had begun to shape around the belief that I was just killing time until I could go perform erotic routines on L.A. club dance floors, flash a ton of side boob, and fool around with a revolving stable of male dancers, but only ones who had spectacular city light views from their all-glass bedrooms.  That was what I was really looking forward to about getting old.

I mean, take a look at what I chose to wear on my Bat Mitzvah place cards.  I was twelve by this point, so dress-up was something that had become appropriate only on Halloween or in celebration of Jewish womanhood, but I remember wishing that this top showed a little more cleave and wishing that I could make that tail into a miniskirt for school.  (I also remember being really happy that I owned a matching scrunchie).  (P.S. I wrote that rhyme on the right.  You could already see I was going to be a huge fucking writer.)

So it's still upsetting to me that when I did finally hit club-going age, I discovered that there was really nowhere I wanted to be less than a club and that I had little to no desire to visit the "Tylers'" houses - and more than that, really no patience for strangers and really no sense of adventure.  I earnestly tried to get into the life for a second somewhere around 2002, frequenting Club A.D., described in this way on "ClubZone":

"A giant, medieval castle/cathedral-style dance den with three bars, a smoking patio and waterfall...Sexy Ladies, NBA Stars, music and Film stars, and the Top DJ's every week. The dress code is strickly enforced for guys, no jerseys, jeans or athletic gear. Ladies just look sexy."

And it's hard for me to accept that I don't remember seeing a waterfall because I genuinely love a water feature.  But I appreciated the invitation to "just look sexy," and yes, absolutely, I did put on some of the outfits I'd been mentally pulling together since I was seven.  I brought out the tropical green halter dress and I left the bra at home.  I took my see-through white tank for a spin with velour pants that had a barely vagina-level rise.  On some nights I even heated up my old crimping iron, just to get back in that magical headspace when all the world was waiting for me to come seduce it with a high kick. 

It's disappointing when you realize that a fantasy you had of a future existence has no correlation to your true leanings.  To who you are.  I felt exactly this way when I pictured myself as a social butterfly at college and then realized my first night there that all I wanted to do was take advantage of the high-speed Internet (we'd had dial-up in my childhood house) and nap.  I used to love to pretend to do the dishes and now I let them pile up until Brent's forced into doing something about it.  But before I get too melancholy that the whole dream slipped away, I'm able to remind myself that I never feel better, clothing-wise, than when I'm in a little sundress that allows for a significant amount of side boob.  In fact, that's exactly what I was looking for as I flipped through the catalog, a dress just slightly too small for an adult.

What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

Last year Brent had vertigo on New Years, so after we drove up to Lake Arrowhead, we basically rang in 2010 by eating Domino's Pizza while prone on the fireside couch of our rented cabin.

This year I had vertigo the week leading up to New Years, but mine was far more important and dramatic- or this is what I keep telling Brent since I didn't have that much sympathy for him last year- and so on New Year's Eve afternoon we decided to go to urgent care.  While conducting various neurological tests, the doctor found a weird response in my feet, which she shrugged off at the time, sending me home with some nasal steroids.  [The conversation on the ride home: "Like my nose needs to be bigger, RIGHT?"]  

Brent and I picked up some pizza, because that's how we do, and we were just settling in to wait for the Snooki Ball to drop when the phone rang after 11 p.m.  It was the urgent care doctor and she'd spoken to a neurologist and now they both agreed that I needed to go to an ER immediately because I possibly had a bleed in my brain.

But I'd been waiting for the Snooki Ball all week- it was the only televised part of New Year's that I was interested in seeing.  So I just didn't want to leave the house.  I don't usually want to leave the house anyway, but I especially didn't want to with Snooki about to ride down from the sky, our national orange angel in a glittering ball.  But then Brent got all fucking serious and he was like, "If something ever happened to you, I couldn't live with it, blah blah blah" and next thing I knew we were off to the hospital and fighting with various police and security officers who didn't want to pull aside Rose Parade barricades unless I was having a baby.

I admit that I was presenting a pretttttty bad attitude to Brent about being in the ER because I thought the urgent care doctor was overreacting, a feeling which was exacerbated by the triage nurse, who fed my eye rolling by saying, "You're way too with-it to have a brain bleed," and then I was nodding, making myself even dizzier, saying, "Yeah.  I am WAY too with-it."  But still, Brent was insisting on waiting to see a doctor, so we parked it in the molded chairs.

The TV was being dominated by a heavy set black woman who kept doing the "Oh, Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy me" stuff, fanning herself, except she was reacting to how cold it was that night instead of the Memphis heat.  She was particular about watching Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest, but it was hard to concentrate on the TV anyway because it was mounted to the ceiling, which was a bad angle for my vertigo, and also there was a little kid wrapped in a blanket next to me who was top-volume wailing from ear infection pain.  For a second, he took a break from the wailing to say, tears wobbling in his eyes, "This is the very saddest night of my entire life," and I laughed at him.  Which I felt bad about afterward.  He had no idea why that was funny, and so he just stared at me like I was a ghost rattling my invisible chains in his face.

So what happened at the stroke of midnight?  Well, another kid violently puked into a bag EXACTLY as Ryan Seacrest hit zero and Jenny McCarthy kissed the new executive she's dating! 

I'm not one of those people who believes that god opens a window or there's a greater purpose to every challenge.  But I do feel blessed that I let Brent convince me to stay in the ER an hour past when I was demanding to leave because if I'd walked out, I would have missed the threesome from a Bret Easton Ellis novel that came in as the first hospital drunks of the new year.

A young prep I can only describe as a ginger (once you're into casual bow tie wear, you demand something more descriptive than "redhead") staggered in through the automatic doors, bearing the weight of his unconscious, taller friend, the friend's button-down shirt and sport tie bedraggled.  The ginger dumped his friend in the triage chair and then a girl came running in the doors after them.  From the moment I saw her face, I was riveted.  She had the most natural petulance in her features, her just slightly upturned nose speaking to me of childhood grosgrain ribbons and maybe a brief flirtation with ice skating lessons and real diamonds at an early age, and her thick, sandy blond hair was tossed over one side of her head.  I became extremely nostalgic at that hair, remembering gazing at it on the cover of one of my Teen magazine prom issues in the very early nineties.  She was wearing a light rabbit fur coat with a mini-mini skirt, tights and high heels.

She was dramatically annoyed from the moment of entrance, but what really sucked me in was that she immediately began huffing and repeatedly looking over at us in the waiting area to see how we all felt about her friend being such a gigantic New Year's buzzkill.  

Meanwhile, the ginger was attempting to get the wallet out of his friend's trousers so the ER team could identify him and check him in, but the drunk friend needed to be propped up in order to stay in a sitting position.  So the ginger went into a sort of wrestle stance with his friend, pinning him to the chair with all of his body weight, except it was then I realized that the ginger kid was extremely drunk too.  He began fervently speaking in his friend's ear and grinding while fishing around his friend's pants, and I asked Brent, "Is this sexual?  It looks sexual."  Both were wearing Top-siders.  The girl in the fur was still audibly huffing.  The wallet finally was retrieved, and I heard a nurse announce a 1991 birthday.  I thought, "These people are 9 years-old?" because whenever I hear of birthdays in the 90's, I think that means you're in fourth grade.

The butch triage nurse with a very round shaved head- who I fell in love with because she was just so "take charge" and that got Brent all bruised because he was like, "What?  You don't think I'm take charge?  I'm taking charge of you right now"- asked the ginger, "Is your friend usually this color?" because the friend had gone very Twilight.  And the ginger gave her a sour look as if she'd just wiped her ass with his bow tie, a look that said, "Do your eyes not work?  Obviously he normally has a sporty tan and a healthy rose to his cheeks.  We boat."  Ignoring his eye lasers, the nurse asked the ginger to step back so she could lift his friend onto the gurney, and the ginger interpreted this as some kind of additional insult, maybe to his own sportiness, and he wouldn't let go.  An argument ensued until finally the butch nurse just simply out-butched the ginger with firm, controlled force.  The friend was rolled into the ER.

The ginger stood there in front of the rows of the rest of us, like an actor on stage, and he began to fume visibly.  He stared at the doors his friend had just passed through without blinking, freckled nostrils flaring.  Wrecked bow-tie quivering, even.  His hands curled into fists.  From off to the side, the girl in the fur coat called, with the most perfect swath of bitchiness in her voice, "Oliver!"  The ginger didn't turn to look at her, but I was thinking, who else in this room could possibly be "Oliver"?  That's definitely Oliver.  Again, she called, "Oliver!"  The ginger didn't turn.  "Oliver!"  She imbued each syllable with annoyance, entitlement, impatience, secret shame, basically the four cornerstones of WASP emotionalism.  After saying Oliver's name at least 7 times (the waiting area was completely quiet at this point), she exhaled a huff to end all huffs, seemingly for us onlookers, and stormed over to grab the ginger by the shoulder.  He was Oliver.

But Oliver wouldn't look at her.  It didn't seem like he was blaming her for anything, just that a low-level hatred simmered below their friendship when they were sober, but when they were drunk, it really blossomed.  First he angrily ripped off his loosened bow tie.  Then, never giving the girl the satisfaction of eye contact, of awareness that she was alive and in his world, he retreated to a chair where he called his dad on his cell phone and began to sob to him, swearing that they hadn't taken any Ecstasy.  The girl, conscious that the public had seen her get embarrassingly rebuffed by Oliver, flung us an insecure yet still annoyed look- like she was annoyed with us too, for existing (chills!)- smoothed her hair, and then marched off to the side of the room to examine the contents of her purse violently.

Before we knew it, Oliver was suddenly undressing.  His own drunkenness and indignation were literally steaming him up, and he was taking off his fine knit sweater and he was taking off the shirt underneath it and he was getting topless.  Then he decided to put his undershirt back on, but he seemed disgusted with the rest of his clothes, so he got up, exited the glass automatic doors, and angrily threw them on the ground like he'd just found out something vulgar about them, like they came from J.C. Penneys.  

"You're loving this," Brent said to me, since I'd transformed from depressed and inert to a child with Christmas morning in her eyes.  Anyone who knows me a little knows that I'm fascinated by the prep lifestyle, by certain slopes of nose, by nicknames that are actual names but don't have that much to do with your actual given name.  But Oliver and the girl were unreal, just straight out of a fiction that I couldn't ever turn in because it would be considered cartoonish.  The irritation crackling between them and the rest of the world, along with each other, was electric.

The butch-nurse walked over and ordered Oliver to go pick up his clothes that he'd flung outside.  He rose, swaying, glowering, revealing what he used to look like when his nana made him do a chore, and he stomped back outside to get his stuff.  

Then I don't know where Oliver and the girl went after that.  But without them, I wanted to go too.  They had been my glittering ball.  And when it dropped, there didn't seem to be any purpose to hanging around anymore.  The wait-time in the ER had increased, since the drunk guy had needed to cut in front of everyone.  And there would be more drunks with similar urgency- but none, I was sure, like the ones we'd just gotten (this isn't the east coast).  I stood up from my chair, took Brent by the hand, and walked with him outside saying, "Oh Lordy Lordy Lordy" because it was truly cold.  We came home, got under the faux-fur duvet, went to sleep, and I woke up the next morning, still alive in 2011.

Worth Two In The Hanukah Bush

Well, it's time to reveal this year's wrapping theme (following 2005's Blue Winter, 2006's Fall Into The Holidays, 2007's Black Christmas......(/Hanukah), 2008's A Very Polo Holiday, and 2009's Not Totally Classy):

And it is Birds Of A Feather.

I came up with this theme while thinking about how, especially as you get older, it becomes more and more important to recognize the people you're on a level with- i.e. to find the people that you "flock together" with- since an understanding of the spirit is so rare and helps to drown out so much of the other bullshit you encounter whenever you attend a party.  But I also came up with this theme while searching Amazon for "gift wrap" because I had about $10 leftover from an unused gift card, and one of the greatest lasting gifts my dad ever gave to me was his ongoing membership to Amazon Prime.  I found the blue peacock wrapping paper first, and I have really strong feelings about teal and electric blue, so I was like, "Okay, this is it."  All of the papers are variations on that theme, from the more graphic depictions of the peacock feather on brown and green paper to the more wispy interpretation on the pink to the more Louis XIV vibe on the gold.

At my local Michaels store there is this cashier who keeps the most psychotic eye contact with you while simultaneously smiling and not watching the register, and when she was ringing up all these feathers, she asked (again, holding 100% eye contact, no blinking), "What are you going to make with these???"  And the way she asked that question, it was as if she was dying to know.  Or maybe dying to kill me.  Either one.  I could only really get this intensity across to you if I had a picture of her expression, and I'm too concerned to put my phone in her face.  But anyway, I was like, "Oh, they're just for wrapping gifts this year," and before I even had that last consonant of "year" out, she was beaming, "THAT IS A GREAT IDEA!  THAT IS SO GREAT!" and I nodded, maybe a little scared, because yeah, I have some decent wrapping visions, but only I'm supposed to get so excited about this shit.

These two presents might be the gifts I'm most proud of wrapping ever because they were pretty impossible.  I'd tell you what's in them, but 3 and 7 year-olds are getting more and more technologically savvy these days, and I'm not totally sure what their blog reading habits are.  I can say that these gifts are not paddles for sorority/fraternity hazing.

So there you go, another year under the fanny pack.  I hope everyone has a remarkable 2011, especially if 2010 bummed you out, and, uh, I hope your greatest dreams fly free (trying to stay on theme here).

Oh My God, And The Ottoman Too!

It's fitting that just as I put up a picture of Ralph Lauren waving goodbye, a major fucking Ralph Lauren coup would drag me back to the blog for a stop-in.  Basically what happened last week was that I wrote a very, very long, involved post about my thoughts on the Ralph Lauren women's Spring 2011 collection, and when I went to hit save, my blogging service deleted the whole thing.  I became very emotionally exhausted in that moment not only because that post had communicated some spot-on commentary about WASPs, yuletide swags on banisters, boating off Connecticut, the American fantasy of the open frontier, and romance, but also because lately I've been experiencing a general fatigue with social media, this blog included, and I've become somewhat consumed with my own fantasy of taking off for a historical colonial in Savannah, Georgia (though I've never been there, it looks GREAT on House Hunters) and disappearing from the Internet and returning to writing things for which I might get paid, so I could restore the chimney in my hypothetical colonial to its original splendor.

In short, I've got my fucking Twitter, I've got my fucking Facebook, I've now got my fucking VYou, and I've been feeling like the blog, going on over 7  years now, is just another distraction.  So I'd written the original Ralph Lauren post about his daring vision for the spring, and then I had ended it with a note about how I'm stopping the blogging in its regular incarnation, and will only be popping in from time to time when I have something truly spectacular I want to document (e.g. my holiday wrapping theme).  But all of that got deleted and I was too tired to try to recreate it, so I stuck up the picture of cowboy Ralph and intended to move on with my life.

BUT Ralph had a cosmic surprise in store for me, not that I believe in cosmic surprises, but the fact is that the chair I was always destined to have finally made its way into my home this week.  If you're a regular reader of the blog, you know I've had a longtime hard-on for Ralph's furniture, and while I don't think you're supposed to fill up your home with one brand the same way you're not supposed to wear a designer head to toe, I would.  And I would love it.  And when you came over, I'd make you love it too.  

For the past few years, there has been one chair in particular that I've wanted in my life more than I've wanted, like, a job or a sense of well-being, and that is the Ralph Lauren Writer's Chair.  I'm not going to lie because obviously the name really clenched a hand around my gut and twisted my intestines, giving me ideas, ideas along the lines of, "Whoa, I could write in that."  But it was more than just the name because I also have a big, big thing for tufting, and the first time I saw this chair I just said to myself, "That is the most brawny, beautiful, and bold tufted armchair I have ever seen."  (I was already writing things in my head- look at that alliteration!)  I talked about this chair to friends and family.  I looked at this chair regularly on the Internet.  I thought about it when I lay in bed at night on my Ralph Lauren herringbone sheets I got from Ross.  But the chair alone started at around 6.5k, and I couldn't imagine that I'd ever have that kind of cash to throw down on a single item of furniture.  And I never even dreamed of owning the ottoman (which started at 3.2k).

But hark!  A little hopeful fire must have stayed lit in my heart because every morning since becoming acquainted with that chair's existence, one of the first things I'd do was search "Ralph Lauren" on Craigslist furniture.  Over the years a couple of Writer's Chairs appeared, both hovering somewhere in the 1k-2k range, which was good, but still not totally realistic for my book contract to book contract lifestyle.  Then, on November 10, 2010, I performed my usual search and an ad with BOTH CHAIR AND OTTOMAN appeared in my list and I held my breath when I saw the price sought for these items together was...$350.  My scalp tingled.  My intestines clenched again.  My head nearly popped off.  I immediately wrote to Geoff and Brent, Geoff because he knows that I've wandered in a mental desert for this chair, and Brent because we live together and so I've got to respect his wishes too, although if he hadn't understood how amazing this chair is, then I don't know what would have happened to our relationship.  Next I wrote to the seller and said, "Can we come see it."

The following day, as Brent and I were standing outside the building where this chair was located, I was becoming extremely nervous because the whole thing seemed too good to be true and I just couldn't grasp that I was about to own this chair that I had pined longer for than any guy in my life.  Brent and I, both being kind of paranoid people, began to arrive at the conclusion that we were about to be led up into an apartment and shot for $350 cash.  That's just who we are.   But the way this story ends is that we were NOT shot.  We were shown the chair and the minute we saw it, we were both done, just done.  I'm sure Madonna felt the same way when she saw Mercy in the orphanage.  And ever since we got it home, I can't stop staring at it and just feeling this immense pride, which I know sounds kind of ridiculous when all I did was purchase a chair, but I truly believe it is the chair that I was meant to have and that it speaks to the power of patience and tenacity.

So anyways, it felt important to me to share that for now.  In the middle of writing this entry Brent came in and said I'm the Brett Favre of blogging, but I'm not saying that I'm going away for good; it's just that appearances are just going to be more rare.  Like maybe I'll be back when we locate a used version of the elegantly molded electric fireplace we've been eyeing.

Bye For Now