ver since I can remember I have always wanted to wear glasses. I grew up before contact lenses or LASIK surgery became available, and to me anybody who wore glasses was immediately unique. How many times did I sit at the school lunchroom table and alternatively try on everyone else’s glasses with insightful comments on the pros and cons of each choice? I think that I was fascinated because, unlike a wardrobe of clothes, generally my classmates only had one pair of glasses which became a fundamental part of their appearance and persona. Certainly, there was not the endless variety of frames that are available today - back then for girls the basic choice was whether to go cat’s eye or not - but nonetheless, the frame selection seemed to make a certain statement about the wearer. What a quick and easy way to announce - I’m quirky, I’m eccentric, I’m traditional, I’m studious etc, with one easy facial accessory. While more flexible, creating a similar statement with clothes called for a more concentrated and sustained effort, requiring an ensemble of shoes, skirt, shirt and tights, which constantly needed upgrading and refining.
So it was with some delight that I discovered that I was unable to read the aisle markers in the grocery store. Once I realized this, I also discovered that I was probably a hazardous driver since it was difficult to find exits and read other important signage. But at the same time, I knew that I could still read close up, much to the chagrin of younger friends who had succumbed to bifocals. Experimenting with one eye closed and then the other, I made the curious discovery that I was now equipped with one far-sighted and near sighted eye, and that I was basically relying on monocular vision with either my left or right eye, depending on whether I was lost in the grocery store or phone book, respectively. A trip to the optometrist confirmed the obvious, and I left my appointment with a prescription for lenses to correct my astigmatism, farsightedness and nearsightedness. So after close to 50 years I had achieved my goal to wear glasses.
While pleased to have the opportunity to announce my personality with my glasses choice, I also realized that I now had the more challenging task of defining the announcement. With the vast selection in glasses frames, the choices were virtually limitless. In my mind the look I was going for was retro, with dark frames on top, and no frame on the bottom. Think Vince Lombardi, Malcolm X, or perhaps your grade school nurse or science teacher. I think that the statement I wanted to make was that I was not into fashion - although my wardrobe alone would make this painfully obvious - but that I also was not willing to follow the crowd and buy either traditional tortoise shell frames or wire rim frames. I wanted to create a look of funky anti-fashion timelessness.
But clearly, such an important decision should not be made in isolation. An occasional disastrous clothing purchase can be rectified by quietly storing the offending item at the back of the closet, but with glasses you must live with your mistake - it essentially stares back at you in the mirror every morning. So I headed off to Pearle Vision in the company of my husband and Andrea, a very fashion conscious work colleague. Immediately the challenge became even more formidable. First, Malcolm X type glasses apparently did not exist, and the prices for frames were truly astonishing. One pair consisted of a small piece of plastic for the bridge of the nose - coming in various bright colors - and skinny plastic arms. The most substantial component of these $200 frames appeared to be the lenses, but of course the lenses were just props and were there just for show - real lenses were at least another $100. So your $200 purchase essentially bought you three small pieces of plastic, which in materials probably would cost no more than $5. The profit margins on glasses must be extraordinary. No wonder it seems that both designers and non designers license glasses, from Ralph Lauren to Sophia Loren. And no wonder people generally only buy one set of frames - with the exception of the glitterati, such as Elton John.
It was clear that Nick and Andrea had not warmed up to my description of a funky retro look and were lobbying hard for a pair of tortoise shell glasses, whose only distinction was a small hint of blue amongst the brown hues. This did not meet my specifications at all. I think that this is probably the only time that I have consciously succumbed to peer pressure, and I left the store with the glasses on order. When they arrived, they vastly improved my vision, but that seemed to be beside the point. I had disappointed myself, and found that I did not really absolutely need to wear glasses, as this monocular vision thing seemed to be adequate. I never wore the glasses and eventually they got lost in the shuffle.
About two years later I went on another glasses expedition with my brother Tim. He had said that he knew of a great glasses shop in Chicago and that he had successfully helped others refine their image through their frames. One great thing about Tim is that he is not afraid to spend money. He absolutely nixed the notion that you need to limit yourself to one pair of frames. If you consider the amount of clothing that you buy every year, and the fact that much doesn’t really fit, can only be worn in certain seasons, or is just a mistake, the purchase of more than one set of frames does not seem out of line. He was absolutely correct, and I felt liberated. Additionally, at this point, I did want to have reading glasses, so now I was in the market for three pairs of glasses - one reading, one distance and one for variety.
The first stop was the Visual Effects shop in the Clyborn Corridor. Again, my funky retro glasses did not seem to exist, and the prices were exorbitant, but I dug in. The first thing that I noticed is that when you buy glasses you spend a huge amount of time looking at yourself dead on in the mirror. Virtually all my clothes are purchased from a catalog, and I just don’t spend that much time in front of the mirror in careful scrutiny. Therefore, it is somewhat ironic that I was looking for glasses to make a statement that I would essentially rarely see. And I began to notice details for the first time. Hmm, I could use a little Botox between the eyes to address the “chapter 11” wrinkle, my mouth seems to be exceptionally small (I subsequently measured it at 2 inches) and my ear lobes could be trimmed down. Despite these distractions, I managed to leave the store with two pairs of glasses, one that approached (but did not meet) my ideal in that they did indeed remind me of my grade school nurse Mrs. Easton. The next store was a high priced boutique on Michigan Avenue, but the dam had been burst and I was ready to lay down some serious money. I immediately glommed on to a pair of brightish blue frames, which strayed from my original strategy of anti-fashion timelessness, but I was on a roll.
Now of course I had my glasses, unfettered by peer pressure, glasses that were mine alone, but I frankly I did not feel confident enough to wear them. I occasionally used the reading glasses when I could remember where I put them, and used the others only for driving or watching movies. While glasses for driving would ostensibly make me a safer driver, it probably had the opposite effect, as I constantly sneaked peaks at myself in the rear view mirror, wondering if I had made the correct choice.
While I wore these glasses on and off for several years, I still clung to my original plan. There were ample examples of just the glasses that I was looking for in news reels and period movies. The movie “Quiz Show” relives the scandal of the 64,000 Question game show that occurred in the early sixties. In one scene, the camera pans the studio audience, and I swear about every third woman was wearing my ideal glasses. I can imagine the propmaster given the task of outfitting the audience. Again, this is before contact lenses, so I imagine somebody somewhere had calculated the percentage of Americans who wore glasses and the styles available. In a more recent movie, “Catch Me if You Can,” Tom Hanks plays a 60s FBI agent who is tracking down a teenage check kiter. Again, the perfect glasses. When the movie skips a few years, the costumer needed to make Tom Hanks look a bit older, so when Tom reappears he has traded in the perfect frames for a pair of wire rims. I have noticed that this is a standard movie tactic, i.e. to portray the passage of time, glasses frames are changed or a beard is grown or shaved off.
I also further investigated my theory that glasses more accurately reflected a personality than clothing by complimenting people on their glasses. This generally had an extremely positive effect; random strangers were also immensely pleased at the recognition, more so than if you said, “Nice hat,” or “Nice shoes.” If I truly liked the glasses I would always ask where they bought them, which further bolstered the initial compliment. I was visiting relatives in Northeast Vermont, which is home to an impressive collection of creative people, including craftspeople, artists, performers, all of whom seem delight in the offbeat. We were attending a performance of the Bread and Puppet Circus, which was presented in a field with a variety of different acts going on. At one point, I was sitting next to a young women with incredibly long armpit hair, a pungent lived-in odor and a great pair of glasses. As we watched the performers waft through the adjacent woods wearing oversized masks, I nudged the woman and said, “I really like your glasses, where did you get them?” She looked at me with an appreciative smile and said, “Yes, aren’t these great, last year I found them in the field.”
This past spring I participated in a bird banding project, which consisted of getting up really early in the morning, setting up nets in the woods, and then waiting for birds to get tangled in the nets. We would then fan out, check each net, laboriously extract the bird from the net, and then return to the central station where the bird would be weighed, measured, banded and then set free. I was stationed at one net with my feet deep in the spring muck and trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to remove a small blue winged warbler, who was flapping and squawking and generally making life difficult. My neighbor at the net was an older man, who was struggling with a northern waterthrush. When I looked up to ask him for help, I noticed he was wearing the perfect glasses. I said, “Boy these birds are a nightmare. But by the way, were did you get your glasses?” He replied, “Yes, I can’t seem to get this net off the wing. You won’t believe it, but I have had these glasses for over 35 years. I got them when I was in college in 1965!”
I was astonished. Here was a man who was so comfortable with his image that he had not seen the need to change his glasses, through the hippy days of the 60s, the disco craze of the 70s, the me decade of the 90s, and whatever it was we were living through now. And I think that through all these decades, these glasses would never have been thought of as fashionable - looking nerdy in the 60s and retro for the next three decades. Perfect. This man was my role model. I asked him, “I don’t suppose you know where you got them?” This seemed to be the stupidest of questions, since it seemed improbable that any store would carry the same glasses for almost 40 years. He said, “Well all I know is that they are called Shuron.”
When the birdbanding was over - at 7:30 AM - I rushed home and typed in “Shuron” to Google, and sure enough the company still existed and still sold the same model for the relative bargain of $100. I was in orbit. I quickly ordered a pair and excitedly thought that quest for perfect glasses was finally coming to fruition. They arrived and with great anticipation I put them. And though I was filled with pent up desire and dreams of making the perfect statement, there was no way around it - they looked AWFUL. Far from funky, they were just plain unattractive and distracting and just all wrong. My carefully crafted self image, one that I had held on to for over 10 years just went up in smoke. It was a painful moment.
Once I had assimilated my disappointment Plan B was relatively simple. I no longer looked to glasses as a vehicle for self definition, but just wanted something serviceable. I also realized that I had developed a nasty habit of losing glasses, so that of the 4 pairs I had originally purchased, none remained and once again I trudged off to the glasses store with a heavy heart. I picked out nothing special, but nonetheless $170 of nothing special, and wandered around the store while the clerk was writing the receipt up. Off in the corner I spied a dusty old pair that had a certain timeless dignity about them. “How much are these?” I asked. “Oh you don’t want them,” the clerk answered, “they are reading glasses.” I realized that I could take the standard reading lenses out of them and put in my prescription lenses, so I pressed ahead, “How much are they?” To my astonishment and delight the clerk said, “Those are eight bucks.” And while the style was maybe not perfect, the statement that I was saying, at least to myself, was at least I did not get suckered into buying another overpriced pair of frames. Perfect.
Are their parts of your personality that are - - - - - - -
Or maybe your self image could use a bit of retooling?
But if a complete makeover is - - - - - - - you,
I have a solution for a sure fire switcheroo
- - - - - - - yourself and buy new glasses to make people aware
That you can hip, chic or square depending on the pair.
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Ephemeral, Fugacious and Evanescent
remember one dinner table conversation years ago when all of us kids were challenged to present and defend our favorite word. My father’s favorite word was “magnolia,” which I thought was a sissy word for a family patriarch, and wondered why he did not choose something more high-minded like peace, justice or equity. His defense was that magnolia was a beautiful word, and he repeated it with great drama with a deep rolling voice. My brother Tim weighed in with the word “bump,” for no particular reason that I can remember, but his presentation was so convincing that the next family dog was named Bump. My word of the moment was “twig,” like my father, chosen for the sound of the word. There was something pleasing about the soft “tw” sound, followed by the hard “g” at the end. Twig also symbolized the very satisfying concept of great growth from very modest beginnings. I think that I lobbied very hard to name the dog Twig but Tim’s Bump got the nod. Tim was the youngest child and had to live with the burden that my parents had run out of family names by the time he came along, and thus selected his name based on a random recommendation from my father’s tennis partner. Therefore, I think that my mother wanted to throw Tim a bone and, as a kindred spirit, let him pick a dog’s name at random.
As much as I still like the word twig, if we played the game today, I would change my vote to the beautiful word “ephemeral.” Ephemeral is directly derived from the Greek word, ephemeros, literally meaning “lasting only one day,” - describing something that is perfect for the moment which then predictably vanishes. The word is often used in science or biology - for example ephemeral ponds exist only briefly after a rainstorm or snow melt; the placenta is known as an ephemeral organ, useless and discarded (or potentially recycled) immediately after birth. But part of the word's beauty is that ephemeral can be adapted to any object or concept. A sandcastle or sidewalk drawing is ephemeral art, emotions are notoriously ephemeral, and depending on how cosmic your perspective is, ephemeral can describe an entire life, or a childhood, or a day’s experience. If you wanted to flex your SAT-honed vocab, you might choose the Latin derived words “evanescent” or even “fugacious” to express the same concept, but it is so much better to luxuriate in the sound of the word ephemeral. Unfortunately these words are a bit pretentious for everyday use, so go with the more pedestrian “fleeting” for conversational purposes.
I was pondering these thoughts as I strolled through the grocery store, and suddenly realized that I had stumbled on a new category of ephemeralness – the ephemeral advertisement, those ads that are only apparent for a moment and then disappear. The grocery cart contained an ad at the top part of the basket where you would put a small child; it immediately vanished when I put my purse there. There was another ad pasted along the bottom part of the cart – bam! that ad instantly vanished, covered up by my leafy green vegetables. As I loaded my groceries on the check-out counter, I noticed that the divider separating my groceries from the next customer also had an ad on it – instantly obscured by the bag of potatoes. At home, when I opened the refrigerator door, I noticed that the milk jug had an ad for Nestle’s chocolate chips plastered on its side, which was quickly obscured as I piled other things into the fridge. These ads are different than the sly product placement ads in movies or TV shows; those ads actually show the product in use – my ephemeral ads only appear for a moment and thus cannot convey any specific message other than an iconic logo, or something to create product awareness, perhaps to soften me up for a more elaborate ad with a specific message.
These ads are also a bit different than the ads that are embedded in the ice at a hockey game, or plastered along the boards, or the sponsorship of specific segments of an athletic event, such as the “Toyota Half Time Show” or “Tostito’s” Fiesta bowl. While these also lack a specific message other than product awareness, they are not ephemeral – whether I notice it or not, I am staring at the Toyota logo for the entire half time show. Even though my friend Maria works so hard in the marketing department of Allstate, I cannot say that messageless ads have ever had any impact on my purchases, but Allstate probably has astonishing research that proves otherwise. Today, Nick had bought chocolate chips out of the blue, suggesting that the milk jug ad had done its job.
Now that I have my concept down pat, I spot ephemeral ads everywhere. As I stood in line at airport security, I noticed ads in the bottom of the plastic bins, instantly obscured by my jacket and shoes. I also realized that the ads could be ephemeral based on my movement. As I walked out of the grocery store I passed through some sort of waist-high detectors that had been covered with a cardboard sleeve advertising something. This was a complete failure, since only a small child would be eye to eye with the message. If we assume that any smooth surface can be adorned with an ad, then perhaps I could have an alternate career selling ad space to dry cleaners, who have vast unadorned counter space that is briefly visible before you plop down your clothes. I have very ample (but cluttered) counter space in our home that would be perfect for ephemeral ads. Ads could include such desperate pleas as, “don’t leave your dishes in the sink” or “please fold your laundry.” As a matter of fact my mother did this once, writing all over the washing machine with a magic marker announcing that she had officially quit as the family’s laundress.
I also don’t see why bankrupt state governments don’t take advantage of the millions of highway miles and start selling ephemeral ad space. Clearly motorists are already distracted by unsightly billboards, so what would be so wrong about embedding ads in the pavement to keep their eyes on the road? My fast food vendor of choice is Arby’s, so why not slap that logo right on the exit ramp to guide me on my way? The true meaning of ephemeral – perfect for the moment and then gone.
This fall I went to Traverse City to visit my friend Sallie in her new home, newly completed after a year of meticulous planning. As I walked in I was enraptured by the thousands of carefully weighed decisions that came together into the perfectly conceived and executed home that exuded Salliness. But then I had to go to the bathroom. In the brief moment between when I flipped up the toiled seat and parked my ass on the porcelain throne I noticed an ad on the underside of the toilet seat extolling the virtues of some super flush bowl. Sallie said, “I don’t know what to do about that, I can’t figure out how to get it off.” I envisioned the creative marketing minds at the toilet company who realized that they were in control of another smooth surface that could multi-task as advertising space. Perhaps they sent their crack research team into the pooh-barn to measure the ad exposure time to come up with an “ephemeral factor” that would justify the charge for the ad. Of course the exposure time can be measured in milliseconds for women, but should be longer for men, who presumably have nothing better to do than stare at the toilet lid. I sent my husband in and told him to count chimpanzees while he peed, and he came up with about 30, which in the world of ephemeral ads is like a lifetime – in fact might not even qualify for this status.
The quest for advertising space will probably never be satisfied
If there is but one smooth surface that remains - - - - - - -.
Ephemeral ads - - - - - - - on my grocery store jaunt
With carts and the check-out dividers telling me what I should want
That add on the underside of the toilet lid was the most unexpected spot,
Glimpsed only briefly before - - - - - - - around to squat.
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Santa Claus, the Hang Nail Fairy and Mr. Potato Head
suppose childhood can be characterized as a process of sorting out misconceptions from reality – the misconceptions can either by foisted upon you inadvertently by adults, or intentionally by perpetuating cultural icons or mores (think Santa, Easter bunny or tooth fairy here), or self imposed. Emerging maturity then is represented by a series of AHA! moments when the status quo is challenged and a distinct personal reality emerges.
One of my favorite childhood misconceptions was my literal interpretation of daylight savings time. As an 8 year old, I was a bit perplexed on how to save daylight, but wanting to contribute to the project, I would go outside with a jar, put daylight in it and then screw the top on tightly and store it in my closet. I don’t recall when I realized that Santa Claus was a phony, but I do remember, with some regret, cruelly educating a wide-eyed child. I was skiing with my next door neighbor Nell in Utah, around 1964, and we happened to be thrown together in ski class with the family of Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense. His family was presented as the elite, and I remember being among those watching McNamara in hushed awe as he whizzed down the ski slopes in baggy ski pants. Somehow I became jealous of his children who had a famous father and an apparently gilded life, so one day in the cafeteria line, I told the youngest child, probably around 6 years old, “You know there is no such thing as Santa Claus!” and then was filled with immediate remorse as her eyes filled with tears. The next two days were spent in terror as I feared that McNamara was going to confront me for spoiling his child’s vacation, but it turns out that he had other things on his mind.
As parents ourselves, we perpetuated the Santa Claus scenario with our children, but one year I drew the line at the Easter Bunny, since I did not want to bring any more candy or kiddy crap into the house. My plan was simple, I just didn’t mention Easter at all to the kids, and it was only several weeks later that my son said, “Hey what happened to the Easter bunny this year?” Another time I tried to create a mythical creature – the “Hang Nail Fairy.” I was playing on a woman’s softball team, where everyone showed up with their young children. When our team took the field, any left over players were basically assigned the chore of babysitting maybe ten or twelve kids at once. Since our team was only marginally talented, it could take a good while to get three outs and have all the mothers return to the sidelines to tend to their children. I was the designated babysitter for one inning of barely controlled chaos. One nameless little girl somehow got her hand caught in the chain link fence as she screamed for her mother in right field. As I tried to unwrap her tense grip, I saw that she had a nasty looking bloody hang nail. When the universal antidote of a cup of apple juice didn’t quiet her sobs, I tried a more mercenary approach. I explained to her that having a hang nail was actually a good thing, because when she got home, her mother could cut it off and put it under her pillow, and in the night the hang nail fairy would come and leave some money, and probably a lot, since blood was involved.
Her sobbing quieted a little bit, but then she looked at me and said, “Hey, how come I have never heard of the hang nail fairy before?”
Thinking quickly I said, “Do you live in Winnetka? I live in Lake Forest, and the hang nail fairy always comes to our suburb, but maybe Winnetka is just not on his route.” The combination of the possibility of a pay off, plus a subtle disturb point that Winnetka was somehow inferior to Lake Forest gave her enough to think about and she sat quietly on the bench. I tried to make myself scarce as her mother finally trotted in from right field.
Barbies, GI Joes and handguns were accepted cultural icons that were part of my childhood and that I totally rejected as a parent. Barbie for obvious reasons, and also because I was irked that Barbies were considerably more expensive than the male equivalent – GI Joes. My mother had blithely bought my younger brothers GI Joes and then very realistic looking handguns, a left over from the popular 1960s TV series Bonanza and Gunsmoke, where a holster was an everyday accessory. I tried to convince my mother that these were unacceptable toys, but my mother pointed out that a weapon was a weapon, and if it wasn’t a gun it would be a spear, a stick, a club, and that fighting (and presumably killing) had always been a part young boys childhood. Yes but… The GI Joes I tried to position as “dolls,” i.e. you don’t want your sons playing with dolls, but she repurposed the Joes as “action figures.” Yes but … Basically, my mother was going with the flow on this one, and while she was happy enough that I did not want to play with Barbies, it might be seen as a bit weird and sissyish if the boys didn’t have some guns to play with.
My most recent AHA! moment about childhood misconceptions came just the other day as I took a critical look at Mr. Potato Head for the first time, and thought, “what was everyone thinking, how has this creature become a cultural icon for the past three generations?” It is quite frankly repulsive, a plastic globoid figure that bears only a faint resemblance to a potato, where the head and torso are rolled into one, with arms extending from just below the ears and the feet seem to sprout from the chin, or maybe it’s the butt, but regardless there do not appear to be any legs. Presumably the body parts had to be a certain size to avoid being considered a choking hazard, but the resulting oversized pieces make the eyes totally bugged out, the nose a bumptious red and the lips suffering from a collagen OD.
Mr. PH started innocuously enough in the early 1950s as a collection of facial features that you used with a real potato - BYOP. However, in the era of post war frugality, mothers did not want to waste a real potato on a toy, and there was also the risk that a moldering potato could be left beneath a bed or couch. The plastic potato emerged in the 1960s and the product really took off – God knows why, since now the toy was far removed from sweet simplicity of the real life potato, and children could easily experiment with ripping the eyes from their creature, or making a pathetically deformed humanoid figure that could be ridiculed. In the 1980’s the potato came equipped with a compartment in its head/butt where you could store the loose parts. While certainly a convenience for parents, I would think that this would be a major source of confusion – you can put your eyes in your butt? This seems to confirm one of Nick’s childhood misconceptions in which he thought that that the butt was essentially a storage place for pooh until you had to go to the bathroom.
Mr. Potato Head came to life in the 1998 movie Toy Story, where the creators gave him a sarcastic personality voiced by the equally sarcastic Don Rickles. At one point of particular peevishness, Mr. Potato Head whips off his lips and basically kisses his ass. In the DVD extras, the creators stated that Mr. PH’s crabbiness could be easily explained by the frustration of having your facial features removed or rearranged at will.
Hasbro is the manufacturer of Mr. Potato Head under its PlaySkool banner. PlaySkool toys are designed to be educational, which is in sharp contrast to the misspelling of School, far more egregious than when Dan Quayle misspelled “potatoe.” According to its website, Mr. Potato Head offers multiple different educational opportunities (seemingly limited to boys based on the use of the pronoun “he”):
• Basic body concepts: “Being able to identify body parts can … allow your child to tell you what hurts when he is not feeling well.”
• Imagination: “Would Mr. Potato Head still be able to kiss Mrs. Potato Head if he had an ear where this mouth used to be?”
• Problem solving: “Today he might just be deciding where Mr. Potato Head’s nose should go, but someday he might be dreaming up new energy sources or designing a new airplane!”
• Fine Motor Skill: “As your child picks up Mr. Potato Head’s goofy glasses and pushes them onto his eyes (or his ears, or nose or mouth or feet), he’s developing and refining his finger movements.”
• Hand-eye Coordination: “In order to properly line up each plastic piece and push it into Mr. Potato Head’s plastic frame, your child needs his hands and eyes to work together. Good hand-eye coordination is a critical foundation skill that necessary for success in all kinds of activities, from doing simple puzzles to throwing and catching balls.”
• Control of Muscle Strength: “As your child picks up Mr. Potato Head’s big bulbous nose and pushes it into his spud bud’s ear, he’s figuring out how much force he needs to get the nose to go in and make it stay there. Good control of muscle strength may help children know how much force to use to … pat their pet.”
PlaySkool would like us to believe that Mr. Potato Head is a key gateway toy for future rocket scientists, athletes or other critical thinkers, but basically, what we are dealing with here is an pretty simple toy that somehow got established as a bizarre cultural icon. Then retrospectively PlaySkool had to retrofit Mr. PH as educational to meet the new cultural expectation that toys are self-improvement tools. In my view, these efforts are nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig. I also hope that the “muscle strength” lessons of Mr. Potato Head are not extrapolated to pets as children try to rip the nose off the family cat or dog.
Perhaps I should not be so hard on Mr. Potato Head. He does have some advantages. Hasbro never had to grapple with such thorny issues as culturally sensitive toys, i.e how black to make a Barbie. Mr. PH transcended cultures and what’s more he was already dark-skinned. In the 1970s the American Cancer Society was looking for a celebrity spokes person for the Great American Smokeout, where smokers were encouraged to give up smoking for at least one day. Mr. Potato Head effortlessly went cold turkey when his traditional pipe was simply deleted from the kit. The Cancer Society could not have found a more reliable spokespud. Imagine if they had relied on Tiger Woods, for example, and had to deal with the fallout of reports of Tiger secretly smoking all over the country.
Over the generations, think of the inexplicable cultural icons we have acquired,
Perhaps its time for some of these - - - - - - cows to be retired.
The Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy or Mr. Potato Head all grotesque and wide eyed.
Or Maybe even Santa Claus with his - - - - - - of elves working at his side.
Every year we take these icons, rev up the engines and give the kids quite a show,
But cultural icons will persist if we are too - - - - - - to challenge the status quo.
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The 17 Year Itch
or the past 17 years Joe had rarely looked at himself in the mirror. For a while he had stopped on the way to work every morning to get a shave, but he eventually abandoned this indulgence and just grew a beard. He took a deep breath and looked straight into the mirror and at Janet’s request, started to shave.
Just 15 minutes ago he had been sitting at breakfast reading the arts section while Janet sat across from him engrossed in the sports section. When they were first married, he had tried to break the silence with insightful comments on the Cubs, politics, fashion, whatever, but he got nothing but a stony silence. By their second anniversary he just gave up. He tried to pretend that the utter stillness was something to be expected in an old married couple who were so attuned to each other that conversation was no long necessary. The sound of the grandfather clock in the front hall used to drive him to distraction – a symbol of his failure as husband to provoke the slightest interest from his wife. Now it never even occurred to him to attempt at conversation and he loved the steady ticking of the clock.
He suddenly heard the crinkle of the paper as Janet folded it and set it aside. He looked up and there she was staring at him – such a strange sensation that he felt his forehead flush. “Joe,” she said softly, “remember when I first met you and you didn’t have your beard?” He could scarcely believe the tenderness in her voice.
“Janet, I can’t believe that you bring this up – do you know what day it is today?” She squirmed in her chair and shrugged, but something had to be on her mind. “Janet, it is almost 17 years ago to the day that we met at Ravinia – can you guess how I know?” She nodded and pushed the paper and pointed. Joe looked at the headline.
“Yes, I can’t believe it. I saw a cicada yesterday and now here’s the headline that the cicadas will be here in droves any day now.” She bit her lip and nodded. Joe thought he saw a glimpse of tears and was joyous at the first sign of tenderness after their whirlwind courtship and wedding.
“That was some night at Ravinia,” said Joe. We could hardly hear Joe Cocker over the noise of the cicadas and as we were sitting under the tree we could feel them trying to emerge under our blanket. I couldn’t believe it, you seemed to know everything about cicadas – you said that all the thrumming we were hearing was the sound of pure sexual energy as the cicadas had only 2 weeks every 17 years to find a mate. You were very excited, and I’m afraid that you took advantage of me, my dear,” said Joe as he tentatively placed his hand atop hers.
Janet recoiled. “I would like you to shave your beard off,” she said.
Joe leapt to his feet and headed to the bathroom and rummaged around to find one of Janet’s razors. He had always known that he was not a good looking man. He was a victim of an unfortunate genetic synergy between his father’s sallow skin and hooked nose and his mother’s tendency to a double chin and sagging cheek bones. People had startled at his appearance and he had occasionally heard titters on the bus, but he had grown used to it. In fact, his mother had told him many times that it was not the worst thing in the world to be ugly, after all, she had survived just fine. That was why he was so pleased when someone as pretty as Janet had thrown herself relentlessly at him. He had readily accepted her marriage proposal.
His mother had been skeptical, “Joe what’s up with this girl? Why would such a knock out settle for someone like you? Now don’t get me wrong, I love you dearly, but let’s be realistic. Don’t you think that someone plainer, I mean someone who shares your same scale of physical beauty might make a better life partner? I just don’t want your heart to be broken. Your father and I have been very happy all these years, because we each know that we are not attractive to other people.”
His mother’s attempts to manage his amorous expectations seemed irrelevant at that point. Janet was constantly calling him and showing up unannounced at work. One time she insisted that they take a long walk in the woods where they eventually joined the cicadas in their sexual frenzy. When he returned to work several hours later, he received knowing looks from his colleagues, one of whom leaned over his cubicle and plucked out all the leaves that were stuck in the back of his hair.
“Well for two weeks that summer, I really had it going,” he thought as he took the first swipe with the razor, revealing tender skin that that seemed to shudder at the exposure to fresh air. “If she wants me to shave, that is what I will do.” He hummed in grateful anticipation as the sink filled with his thick black hair.
“How are you coming, honey?” called Janet.
“Honey,” thought Joe, “this can’t be true, she has not even called me by my name for ages.” He trembled in excitement and nicked his chin. A tiny trickle of blood ran down his neck, but he left it where it was.
“Who knows, this could be a turn on for Janet,” he thought. He looked at himself, clean shaven at last and was horrified. The magnitude of his nose was horrifying. His eyes seemed to pop out, creating a definite prehistoric look. He heard a slight tap and a whirring noise next to the bathroom window. As he looked over he came face to face with a cicada and stared into its oversized eye.
“Honey, how are you doing” cooed Janet, “I’m in the bedroom, wearing the nightgown you gave me on our wedding night. I can’t wait much longer. I think that we should both call in sick today. I will make it worth your while.”
The trapped bug frenzied some more and Joe grabbed it by his wings and looked at himself and the cicada and himself side by side in the mirror. “Oh my god,” thought Joe, “I look like a cicada, even the blood trickle is the same pattern as the veins on its wing. I look like a fucking cicada, and my wife is in love with cicadas.”
The morning was just warm enough and the thrumming of the cicadas began. Janet joined them. “Well, it certainly has been a fallow 17 years,” thought Joe, “so I will really have to make the next 2 weeks count.” He rushed into the bedroom.
He thought that the sun, moon and stars must have been perfectly - - - - - - -,
So that his beautiful wife viewed his ugliness with an eye that was blind.
But he didn’t realize that he was - - - - - - - with a cicada in human guise
Who was only attracted to his prehistoric look and bugged out eyes.
Her frigidity and disdain were the - - - - - - - causes of his frustration and tears,
He didn’t realize that she was sexually active for only 2 weeks every 17 years.
Click here for answers
Thank You Very Much
y the time that I had gotten to the attic, I was far past dwelling on every single memento removed from my parents’ emptying house. A steady parade of dumpsters had hauled away umpteen boxes, and I had bequeathed the local library and rummage with untold books, cookware, and just plain gradoux (a most apt word of my mother’s). But when boxes of old correspondence veiled in decades of dust and mung (my mother’s synonym for gradoux) started to emerge from the attic, my husband Nick stood guard in front of the dumpster as the arbiter of what should be saved or tossed.
He discovered several boxes that appeared to have been moved from attic to attic over the past 200 years. One box included a numbered photograph of a very homely President Lincoln, another a whole sheaf of correspondence from some long ago ancestor named Charles Forseth, whose letters from the early 1800s detailed the appalling but routine deaths of children from such old fashioned diseases as the croup, quinsy or the dwindles. But the biggest find was the box filled with every single letter that my father had ever written his parents – and he was a faithful correspondent throughout WWII and his married life. And then with a gasp I saw that this box also contained every single thank you note that I had ever written my grandmother.
Granny Brown’s identity was solidly based on her role as a family matriarch to her five children and 23 grandchildren and many other nieces and nephews. She was a consistent gift giver, for Christmas and birthdays for sure, and then I routinely got a Valentine’s day gift. Giving gifts must have been a near full time job, and I remember a special room in her home that she used for flower arranging in the summer, but then was converted to a wrapping room around Christmas time. For the 25 years that our lives overlapped, she used the same exact diagonally striped red and white wrapping paper with green velvetoid ribbon. And then my parents would give gifts to all of their nieces and nephews and vice versa. Since we did not routinely see these folks, Christmas could consist of a bizarre collection of somewhat anonymous gifts.
Moments after Christmas, my mother’s pestering would begin,
“How are you coming on those thank you notes? It would be more manageable if you wrote at least one per day. Here I have gotten some special stationary for you, and I have a list here of all the gifts that you received. If you put a thank you note on the counter, I will make sure to get in the mail today. Okay?”
The thank you note harangue could suck the life out of a holiday, so for several years I wrote a note the very minute I opened the gift on Christmas morning. Some were particularly challenging. Aunt Lootie used to give all 5 of us the same gift and sometimes no one could figure what it was. One year we all got a different type of plastic vegetable that had a secret compartment – mine was a cabbage. We were collectively stumped, but then several months later I realized that these were intended to be clever hiding places for jewelry or other valuables that you could put in your fridge to fake out a burglar. On occasion I would try to write a generic pre-emptive note before I even opened the present:
“Dear Aunt Lootie, Many thanks for the intriguing item. I am sure that I will use it frequently. I have never seen anything like it. I hope that you are enjoying a happy Christmas with all your family. We sure are. Hope to see you soon. Love, Bobbie.
As I stood in my parent’s driveway with the musty box, I realized that the thank you notes that seemed an odious chore were meticulously saved and appreciated by my grandmother. She must have received several a day and her attic probably contained boxes and boxes of thank you notes. I pictured her saying, “Wow that David certainly writes a lovely note. I’m so glad to hear from Bobbie, but it sure sounds like she is writing this under duress.” How would I measure up?
The first one I opened must have been from my college days since it was written in the fine brown ink that I favored. I also used some sort of very fine tip pen – I think that it was called a Montblanc pen - which included the ritual of sucking up the ink from a bottle of ink, leading to spillages and smudges. The note began:
“Dear Granny, I am sorry that I have not written to you in such a long time, but I have been very busy at school. But I wanted to thank you for the Indian bird mirror and the collapsible purse…”
The rest of the note was basically illegible, but I was impressed at its length, so hopefully quantity balanced tardiness. Then I spotted a bit of misfiling by my grandmother; the box contained a thank you note from my cousin David, the epitome of thoughtfulness. I thought that for sure he would blow my feeble efforts out of the water.
David from college: “Dear Granny, I am sorry that I have not written sooner, but I have been busy at school. I want to thank you for the ten shiny dimes you sent me for Valentine’s day. I am sure that I will put them to good use.”
And then I spotted a thank you note from my cousin Ralph.
Ralph from college: “Dear Granny, I can’t believe that Christmas was already a month ago, so sorry that I am so late in getting back to you. But I just wanted to thank you for the Christmas check, and to also let you know that you are the best grandmother in this whole wide, ever-expanding universal infinity.”
Okay, so Ralph gets points for creative hyperbole, but absolutely every thank you note I read, all of mine and all of my siblings, uniformly apologized for tardiness. All in all, I think that I more than held my own. My notes would quickly dispense with the actual thank you and provide updates on my life – what courses I was taking at college, plans for a summer job. Probably just what my grandmother was eager to learn, particularly since she had probably long since forgotten the collapsible purse.
Now I find that I have turned into my mother as I cajole my kids into writing thank you notes, although to my credit I generally hold off until January 1st. I even got them small embossed note cards so that they would not be overwhelmed by the expanse of a large blank page. But I nix the email thank you or the phone call and firmly insist on the traditional hand written thank you note sent through the US Postal Service. I also realized that no other form of communication requires penmanship, which is fast becoming a lost art. I know that I could recognize the handwriting of all my grandparents – Granny Brown’s hurried scrawl, Granny Farwell’s more upright loopy writing, and Grampy’s which looked oddly feminine. All had distinctive styles that meshed with their personalities. I spent many hours as a child creating the perfect handwriting, experimenting with slanting it backwards and then forwards, and then finally deciding that the spidery forward slanted looped style and ink (the color of my last name) was going to be my personal style. All of that is now gone - I don’t think that my kids could recognize my handwriting, and sometimes I forget what I think that it should look like. And I don’t think that my kids think that their handwriting is a distinctive personal trait. But all of that can by rectified in the thank you note.
However, it is hard to explain the importance of a thank you note if you never receive one. I realized that unlike my grandmother, as an adult I have rarely received a thank you note. Gift giving in general has dwindled on both sides of my family, so I have received very few thank notes from siblings, nieces and nephews. And then I am more vindictive than my grandmother - if I don't get a thank you note, then there is one less gift to give the following year. Certainly my paltry collection would only require a binder clip and not a box. But then out of the blue I received a thank you note from a cousin, not for a gift, but for a small favor, and in fact I would not have elevated it to a favored status. I am sure she had shown her verbal appreciation at the time, but there it was in the mail, with deliberation and perspective and in her own handwriting. I was almost moved to tears at this simple act of gratitude.
Recently my husband and I joyously celebrated 25th years of wedded bliss and I realized that many of our wedding gifts (which I had dutifully written a thank you note for) had become part an integral part of our everyday lives – the white bowl with the blue flowers where I had mixed hundreds of batches of cookies, the large casserole dish that housed the jumbo turkey tetrazzini every Christmas eve, and the card table that saw any number of failed craft projects. This got me thinking again about the lost art of the thank you note. So I sat down and rethanked my parent’s friends for my most memorable wedding gifts, but this time with the perspective of 25 years. This was a huge success; I received very emotional thank you notes for my re-thank you notes. As my husband and I often say to each other, “it doesn’t take much and it’s so easy.” My faith in the thank you note has been reborn, and even if my dear grandmother couldn’t read my illegible notes, I am newly proud of what I had casually dismissed as a dreary chore for a dutiful granddaughter. My new commitment is to write at least one thank you note a week. It’s so easy.
Note: This fanagram contains two sets of anagrams, one with five letters marked with dashes (- - - - -) and one with six letters marked with asterisks (* * * * * *)
Christmas is now clearly over, and it’s the - - - - - of the New Year,
So I know my thank you note * * * * * * are both near, dear and clear,
My mother harangues my with her increasing “I mean it” - - - - -,
And I find paper and pen midst sighs, moans and groans.
“Dear Granny, the item you gave me is perfect and so well * * * * * *
And my tardiness in response does not mean that my thanks are diluted.
I have * * * * * * constantly so I think of you almost every day,
And if I really knew what this thing was, I’d have much more to say.”
But now, as a recipient, I realize that the - - - - - that were such a chore to send,
Can pack an appreciative wallop when you’re on the receiving end.
Click here for answers
Drawers
recent fanagram considered the cultural significance of visible bra apparati, so it should not be a total surprise that my mind wandered south and started to ruminate on underdrawers, and specifically consider the social messages sent by either conventional underwear, the thong or a visible crack. This was prompted by my daughter, home from college, who bent over to retrieve the lettuce from the bottom shelf of the fridge, revealing 0.5 inches of visible crack emerging from her snug fitting jeans. I thought that she would be grateful that I would be saving her from social embarrassment, but when I pointed this out, she nonchalantly said, “What is the big deal, it’s just a crack.”
Once again in unfamiliar territory. Certainly when I was growing up, the crack was certainly underwraps, as was any direct visibility of underpants. Hip huggers were the style in the 1960s and I remember cutting off the waistband of blue jeans and trimming the jeans to a lower daring “waist” line. We would take the waistband, soak it in warm water and drape it over a ceiling pipe in the basement. Then we would hang from the pipe, hoping to stretch the waistband so that we could sew it back on to the new low cut jeans. I had some pants where the zipper probably measured less than 3 inches. The outfit was then topped off with a wide and thick leather belt with a huge brass buckle. But no matter how diminutive the zipper, I would have never tolerated visible underwear extending above the pants. The only thing worse would be public pubic hair peeking out of a bathing suit. In the 1980s there was a short lived solution to this problem – the body suit, where the front and back of the shirt were snapped together under the crotch like a toddler’s onesie, eliminating any possibility of delamination when you bent over.
So based on my daughter’s comment, the visible crack (more scientifically known as the intergluteal cleft) was now considered no more significant than, say, an elbow. The visible crack probably achieved its greatest publicity in an early Saturday Night Live skit, where Lisa Loobner and her boyfriend Todd could barely contain themselves when Dan Ackroyd, as the plumber, bent over to reveal a good 2-3 inches of crack, in fact “plumber’s crack” became part of the vernacular. However, I suspect that concepts of gluteal quality – i.e. color, consistency and contour – determined the social acceptability of the visible crack. There is certainly a difference between a taut teenage body and a big ole’ flabby, mottled pale white and slightly hairy cleft.
What was the social message of a visible crack, was it really no big deal, or was it sending a flirty and naughty message? And if flirtation was part of the message, why was I receiving this message at breakfast on a weekday morning? It made me ponder whether I would rather see a crack or a protruding thong, and I think that I am voting for the crack. The crack is an error of omission – I could imagine my daughter testing out jeans in the dressing room, bending over in several ways and then craning her neck over her should to see if her cleft showed, but there was no way that she could anticipate every circumstance and a simulated bend and reach into the salad drawer was not part of the repertoire. Now you might test thongs in the same way, but the thong seems riskier since it is not snugged in under the gluteal fold (distinguished from the cleft by its shallower depth and the fact that it runs horizontally compared to the “where the sun don’t shine” vertical cleft.) Furthermore, there are times when the visible thong seems entirely intentional, i.e. a high rise thong combined with low rise jeans. You might don a thong for a date night when you want to send out a sexual message, but for routine activities, the visible thong straddles that fine line between sexy confidence and skanky trampiness. I once saw a mother changing her child’s diaper on the carpet at the airport gate, and as she bent over, out popped the thong. Was she trying to send the message that even though she was a mother she still “had it” and was going to flaunt it? Well if so, good for her. Here is my personal preference list from bad to better on the visual scale (all other things being equal): intentional thong, unintentional thong, granny pannies, inadvertent crack.
Internet commentary describes thongs as the solution to a visible panty line, apparently a situation so horrifying that it is known simply as VPL. So based on this logic, the thong becomes a risk benefit decision regarding the consequence of seeing the underwear outline vs. the thong itself. Taking a page for Law and Order, I would say, “that’s bootstrapping your honor,” i.e. creating a contrived nonsexual rationale for a basically sexual agenda, and of course there is the issue of visible thong line, VTL, or “vittle.” However, I will say that I have seen women in white pants who have made disastrous underwear choices. When I was working at the hospital, there was a certain nurse who had no clue that her patterned underwear were clearly visible through her tight polyester pants. One day, I noticed that she was wearing underwear that clearly said “Thursday” across the back, but since it was Friday, I wondered if she had forgotten to change up. Another day, she was wearing underwear that depicted the Chicago skyline, where the tall erect Sears tower was perfectly aligned with her cleft.
Now if you are truly concerned about VPL, I would think that the best solution would be to go commando. Marilyn Monroe did this with great success as she was sewn into a gold sequined gown she wore to serenade President Kennedy on his birthday. The commando option does beg the question why we are wearing underwear in the first place. I can imagine a variety of reasons: protection, reshaping the contour of the anatomy, modesty, basic mopping up action, habit and sexuality. Now protection is more of a male issue where there appears to be no clear winner in the boxers vs. tidy whiteys vs. the banana hammock debate. Reshaping the contour refers more to bras, which typically try to enhance and showcase a modest endowment. In contrast, reshaping the buttocks is the exact opposite – an attempt to discretely compress over-endowments using something along the lines of a girdle or stout “granny pannies.” Clearly the thong does not fit this role. Modesty applies to skirts where there is a possibility of a peek-a-boo. Commando-loving Marilyn apparently wore two pairs of underwear to keep the crowds at bay when she famously stood over the subway grate and coyly tried to control her billowing skirt. I can identify. In kindergarten I always had to wear a skirt, and I was grateful for my underwear since my classmate Eddie Friedlander always stood under the jungle gym to sneek a peek.
The mop up requires some absorbing action. Now the female anatomy has three outlets down there, two have sphincters, one does not, and thus its contents are more subject to the effects of gravity, if you catch my drift. In fact there is a whole industry around the panty liner, as a sort of belt and suspenders approach to the mop up. In my mind this is the clearest function of underwear and a role that cannot be achieved by the slender thong, even with a panty liner. Thong aficionados claim that they are comfortable once you get used to them, but that is an attribute only if there is some other function. That leaves habit and sexuality as the only rationales for thongs; neither of these roles is hostage to practicality or logic, and both of which are fueled by an entire industry devoted to decorating the derriere. Looks like my plan for a nation wide commando action is doomed to failure.
Thoughts on Drawers
Underwear has an important role that is sanitary
It - - - - - stuff that succumbs to forces that are gravitary
But the thong is only equipped with a tiny little - - - - -
That might not be up to the task in case of mishap.
And then the thong - - - - - the gluteal cleft both dark and deep,
Frankly, I would prefer panties that occasionally creep.
Click here for answers
The Bra Strap
remember the day distinctly, it was the mid sixties and I was standing in the girls locker room with my shirt unbuttoned just enough to reveal (to anyone who might want to notice) that I was wearing my first training bra. The gleeful shouts of my classmates echoed amongst the metallic clanking of the locker doors, and Kit Spaulding jostled me to get at her locker beneath mine. The training bra was little more than a glorified undershirt, whose only bralike feature was the clasp in the back. It was also unclear what I was in training for, since there was clearly nothing to “lift and separate” as advertised by Maidenform. Perhaps the advertising geniuses wanted to take a page out the cigarette industry and get pubescents hooked on their trainers early on and create a life long devotion to the Maidenform brand. Personally, the only thing that I was in training for was a slowly emerging pubescence that seemed to lag behind the other boy-crazy girls in my class, like Debbie Brown or Gail Chandler.
I remember looking down and noticing that the bra was adorned with a demur pink ribbon and feeling very conflicted. On the one hand, I certainly wanted to join my peer group and announce my anticipated puberty, but I wanted to do it quietly and discreetly without someone coming up from behind and snapping the strap and yelling, “snap, snap you are a turtle now!” I tried to figure out how I could somehow simultaneously whip off my school shirt and slip into my gym uniform, and then of course I would have to repeat the performance at the end of the day. I stood there quietly as the voices died down and my classmates skipped off to field hockey practice oblivious to my tense rite of passage. When no one was left in my locker row, I achieved my goal of anonymity, but then was disappointed that nobody had noticed.
I certainly did not realize that I was also entering into the confusing roles of the bra as function, fashion and sexuality. The word bra did not even come into existence until the early 1900s, when some one came up with the clever idea to support the breast from above (i.e. the “over the shoulder boulder holder”), rather than a corset that pushed up the breasts from below. Until the 1940s when the “life and separate” era began, breasts were generally not considered individually, but rather were referred to collectively as the bosom. The late 1940s also saw the introduction of the bikini, and the blurring of the distinction between outerwear and underwear began.
My concept at the time was that bra was most definitely underwear, but even so the rules were very confusing. The standard school outfit was a white cotton shirt, and the back of the bra was clearly visible beneath the shirt, particularly if you bent over or extended your arms. This was perfectly acceptable. Sometimes you could get a glimpse of the front of the bra – this was not optimal, but within the realm of acceptability. However, if you were wearing a sleeveless shirt and the bra strap wandered off your shoulder and was directly visible – well that was borderline trampy. Acquaintances might titter or feel sorry for you, but true friends would take you aside and would say with whispered urgency, “Your bra strap is showing!” The only thing that could be more embarrassing was pubic hair went public and peeked out of a bathing suit. Panicked reparations would then ensue, which sometimes involved pinning the strap to the shirt. But then of course you could not let the pin show or pucker the shirt. Therefore you had to carefully fix the strap to the shoulder seam. There were certain recalcitrant bra straps that always slipped down the shoulder, and it was just safer to just throw them away. (In fact I do the same thing for underwear that habitually wedges or socks that fall into my shoes.)
The other acknowledged function of the bra was to address the visible nipple. Lightweight bras could certainly be very comfortable, but might not be up to the task if the weather turned nippy. In the 1970s Farrah Fawcett rose to fame based on a poster showcasing her tousled hair and gleaming smile. But I think that the unspoken appeal was the novelty of one very visible nipple beneath a clinging red bathing suit. I am still startled to see the sturdy nipples of both of the Williams sisters as they hustle around the tennis court. I just want to reach into the TV set, tap them on the shoulder and save them from embarrassment in front of millions, “Girls, your nipples are showing.”
Then of course there were rules governing bikinis, which were only considered outerwear but only when worn near water. I remember the movie Lolita where the young minx was lounging in the back yard in a tease of a white bikini top. However, the sprinkler was on and so what looked like a bra became acceptable outerwear. While bathing suits can be worn with impunity either pool, sea or streamside, getting to and from the water requires a transitional outfit – the beach cover up, which is strictly limited to short errands such as pumping gas or returning a movie, particularly if the cover up is see through. For example, I have never seen anyone in a gossamer cover up in the public library or at a waitressed restaurant. We had a back yard swimming pool, and my mother would spend most of the summer in a bathing suit, which was far from a bikini, but more like a one piece romper. However, every time that she needed to go on an errand, she would dutifully change into a top and shorts (which were not that different from her romper), and then change back when she returned.
As confusing as this situation was, there was further upheaval a mere five years later when bras became the symbol of sexual repression and plumes of acrid smoke from burning rubber became the stuff of the nightly news. At this point I was in the college, and by the time the sexual revolution filtered down to my apolitical level, the only message that I got were that bras were now optional. Sounded good to me from a purely practical point of view – less clothes to buy and less laundry to wash. I did not have big breasts sloshing around that needed support and therefore bras seemed totally unnecessary. The visible nipple was still an issue, but that was solved by wearing thicker cotton shirts. Those Mexican wedding shirts were quite ideal - my favorite one was an otherwise light weight see-through cotton shirt but with two columns of embroidery positioned directly over the nipples.
After college I went to medical school and then onto motherhood, so I was completely distracted and unaware of the changing cultural mores. When I finally came up for air, I was appalled to notice teenagers walking around with visible bra straps – where were their friends to give them the heads up? But with careful scrutiny, I discovered that the bra strap taboo was over - in fact visible bra straps were everywhere, underneath camisoles, or criss cross straps beneath a tank top, where the visible straps could only have been intentional. But mentally I was still stuck in front of my grade school locker thinking, “Hey, your underwear is showing!” I interviewed a teenager who educated me on the different classifications of bras. Your underwear drawer now included bras with “cute” straps that were intentionally visible and color coordinated with the camisole or tee shirt. However, these were distinct from your everyday bras – ratty cotton bras with white elastic straps and potentially yellowed out armpits were still worn, but only when there was no possibility that they would be seen. It reminded me of the old adage to always wear clean underpants to bed in case your house burned down and you were forced to flee into the streets with nothing but your underwear on.
Then there was the emergence of the bra as fashionable and sexy lingerie – seems our culture was finally catching up to the French here. While past Sears’ catalogs featured disembodied photographs of sedate bras with a dash of frill, Victoria’s Secret created a buzz by featuring full frontal photos of models wearing nothing but elaborate come-hither underwear and high heels. Now when I get dressed, the shoes are the last thing that I put on, and the first thing that I take off when undressing, so the combination of ostensible underwear and heels made no sense. Furthermore, instead of being a second tier tawdry underwear model, the top Victoria’s Secret model was touted with the same breathless admiration and celebrity as a swimsuit model. There was an episode of Seinfeld that captured this dilemma of bra as outwear vs. underwear. Elaine had a big-breasted childhood friend named Ellen Mishki who irked her by always going braless. Elaine decided to give her a white bra for her birthday, which Ellen then preceded to wear as outwear beneath an unbuttoned blazer. As she nonchalantly walked down the street, Elaine was even more irked to realize that she got more stares and whistles than when she jiggled braless down the street.
Into this confusing mix came the sports bra, which by its very name suggested its ambivalence as under vs. outer wear. Ostensibly the sports bra was not designed to be sexy but engineered to tamp down the heavage of the cleavage, although Serena Williams seems to outheave even the best efforts of the Nike engineers. The convention seems to be that the sports bra can be worn as outerwear while jogging, extending its range beyond water limits of a swimsuit, but similarly, a sports bra is considered underwear in other venues. Recall the performance of Brandi Chastain, the US soccer player who scored the winning goal in the dramatic gold medal game against China in the 1999 world cup. She ran halfway across the field then took her shirt off and waved it over her head, revealing her black sports bra. Cultural anthropologists could probably create a thesis focusing on the demongraphics of those who regarded this performance as a strip tease versus a simple celebration. I was in the startled strip tease camp, while my daughter said, “Its no biggie, it’s just a sports bra, mom.” While it may have been a sports bra, the key fact seemed to be that she had taken off her shirt to reveal it, and that was stripping, regardless of what lay beneath.
Forty five years have past since my first steps into the world of bradom, and like many other fashion trends, I have chosen to be a bystander. To me the everyday bra is still resolutely underwear, and an exposed bra strap still makes me anxious. I’m an old dog averse to new tricks and I like of the comfort of the bra as nothing more than a functional piece of clothing. Its simpler that way.
Thoughts on Bras
1. Puberty is a complicated transition with many different - - - - -
But a simple training bra is one common way it starts.
2. A visible bra - - - - - used to make you want to cringe and die,
But what was underwear is now outerwear seen by every naked eye.
3. When a large breasted athlete has a problem with her cleavage
She wears a sports bra that - - - - - her breasts to diminish any heavage.
Click here for answers
Thrown Under the Bus
his spring, on an ill advised impulse, I signed up for a ladies’ ice hockey league, where random teams were formed based on the self ranking of the players. I originally had no interest, but then I was contacted directly and urged to participate. This was the first time I had ever been pursued athletically and I fell for the cheap compliments. In reality, the league was short on goalies, and they knew that I had access to pads and a helmet. At the first game, our “maroon team” was asked to sign a roster, which included recording your birthdate. When the sheet came to me, I was horrified to see that most of my team mates were born in the 1980s, and I was at least 20 years older than everyone else.
As we got on the ice, everyone was trying to size up both team mates and opponents, and it quickly became obvious that there were a couple of very experienced players on both sides, a few serviceable players, and a smattering of deer in the headlights. The ringers were wheeling, preening and making theatrical stops that sent sprays of ice chips aloft. As they passed me with their well muscled crossovers, I could hear the ice succumb beneath them with a deep seated knuckle-cracking crunch. I quickly realized our ringer was the short girl with the buzz cut and the tattoos. Since she played defense, she was my new BFF.
In my previous league at the Winter Club, shots rarely were airborne, and my basic and somewhat successful strategy was just try to take up space in the goal, not get hurt and not do anything stupid (aside from playing hockey in the first place). During the warm up, I was getting peppered with shots all over my body; one ricocheted off my helmet. Although I basically felt adequately padded in swaddling/waddling clothes, there were two vulnerable spots; my pubis bone (there is no built in padding in the pants since men always were cups) and my neck. I had gotten hit in the pubis bone once before at the Winter Club. While it stung at the time I forgot about it until I noticed an angry bruise in the shower later on. I initially thought that a big leech had taken up residence in my near nether regions. I motioned over to my faithful husband Nick and asked him to find me some protective equipment. I turned down his first offer of his Forbes magazine and sent him scurrying off to the locker room to find a ratty old “Jill” cup from my hockey equipment. When he rushed back to the ice, the game had started, so Nick gave the cup to the startled ref who delivered it to me in the nets, where I quickly shoved it down my pants. As for my neck, I just had to keep my chin down.
In one of our first games, we were totally outmatched, and while I know that it is poor form to complain about your team mates, the phrases, “fish in a barrel,” “sitting duck,” “hung out to dry,” “left twisting in the wind,” and “thrown under the bus” come to mind. When I saw that girl in the white pants gather up the puck at the other end of the ice, I know that I was in trouble. She steamed up the ice, while one by one my defenders evaporated like (you pick ‘em) 1. a popsicle on a hot day; 2. New Year’s resolutions by the following week or 3. cash in your wallet; 4. promises from children to keep their rooms neat; 5. socks in the dryer. And there I was, a 50+ AARP candidate with limited goalie experience, face to face with a large 20 something Canadian farm girl who had honed her power game by playing hockey on the backyard pond with her brothers. And all this happened within the first minute of the game.
While the margin of victory quickly mounted and neared the double digit mark, I am pleased to report that I did not do anything stupid, given what I am willing to do as a goalie. My skills, such as they are, are very limited by the fact that I make it a point not to fall down on the ice, for the simple reason that it is very difficult and time consuming to get up. And I did do one good thing, which is recorded in the fanagram below.
When I joined the - - - - - of women hockey players I got in over my head,
I found that I couldn’t stop or turn so I offered to be goalie instead.
With all the padding I wore I didn’t think that I would fear what I faced,
But with each onslaught, I went weak in the knees and my heart always - - - - -.
In one game, the slapshot from the point - - - - - toward me faster and faster,
I trembled and put up my glove to avoid the oncoming disaster.
But then I heard that wonderful thunk and a thud that all goalies love
If I had - - - - - to open my eyes, I would have seen the puck in my glove!
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Maryam and Me
had been working for a medical consulting company in San Diego on and off for 6 months, and the company seemed to be teetering on the verge of collapse with both staff and clients evaporating on a weekly basis. One day I called and got no answer whatsoever, so I assumed that the inevitable had happened. The next day I was surprised to hear that everyone had been evacuated because of the San Diego fires. It seemed that this company couldn’t catch a break. And then suddenly a ray of hope – I received an email announcing the arrival of a new stemwinder/rainmaker who was going to turn the place around.
Cynthia was one of the few remaining on-site staff, and when I called her to ask what was going on, she said, “Oh, you haven’t met Maryam yet, I’ll transfer this call. I think that you will like her.” But there was a tiny note of hesitation in her voice, a slight qualifying catch which very clearly sent the exact opposite message that 1. Cynthia didn’t like her; and 2. I probably wouldn’t get along with her either.
But I had barely time to process this hidden message when Maryam got on the phone. I was immediately taken aback by her fast talking and extremely LOUD voice, such that I had to hold the phone away from my ear. She also had a hair trigger braying laugh, and ended each sentence by saying BLAH, BLAH, BLAH in a thick New York accent. “Elizabeth, you’ll have to get your ass out here so that we can get to know each other, have some dinner together and BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!” At one enthusiastic moment, she uttered two triplets, “BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, YADDEE, YADDA, YADDA.”
It was also apparent that this woman was extremely insecure, because she would pepper all of her conversations with how many journals she had published in, how many people she had previously managed and how many languages she spoke, including Farsi. Three weeks later, I headed out to San Diego to meet Maryam in person. Just before I left, she called and brayed, “Elizabeth, it is pretty warm out here, so if you bring the wrong clothes, I just want you to know that I will lend you some of mine.” This was a multi-layered ick factor to be sure – not only the thought of borrowing a stranger’s clothes, but I was absolutely certain that my limited sense of style would not overlap in any way with Maryam’s.
As I walked into the office I thought about all the long distance telephone relationships I have had throughout my career, and the interesting “reveal” when two phone pals finally meet in person. I remember one physician from Montana that I had talked to extensively. We had many conversations about our shared interest in skiing, with Jim telling me he enjoyed hiking up into the mountains with skins on his skis. I had created an image of a strapping young mountain man in the full flower of physical prowess, so when I finally met him, I was stunned to see that he was an old man on the brink of retirement.
I knew that whatever image I tried to conjure up for Maryam would be exceeded by the face to face meeting. However, I was not prepared for the vision that greeted me with a big bear hug. It was hard to absorb the complete package all at once. First, there was make-up slathered on so thickly I could only assume that she was trying to conceal some disfiguring skin disease. The eyeliner and mascara were equally thick and bright red lipstick seemed to stray over the lips’ natural boundaries. Her shag hair was multiple hues of blond and gold with no attempt to conceal dark black roots. Now I realize that I am behind the times here, but my concept of dyed hair has always been that it is supposed to be utterly discrete – one of the original slogans of Clairol was “only your hairdresser knows for sure.” I guess that the pejorative concept of the bottled blond is gone, but in my mind Maryam was even pushing that concept.
The shirt had a plunging neck line revealing both the bra and its jiggling contents. She might have had make-up on her chest, but I didn’t want to stare. Both the diaphanous shirt and tight little skirt she wore were covered in some sort of fringe, and when she walked the fringe swayed in unison. When she laughed, which was constantly, her opened mouth revealed a piece of apple green chewing gum skittering across her glistening tongue.
After a series of meetings with clients who were also visibly startled to receive a hug, Maryam walked into my office, and said, “Elizabeth, I think that you are too uptight, I am going to take you SALSA dancing tonight – we’ll go out and get margaritas and SALSA dance. What is your husband’s number, I’m going to call to get his permission to take you out on a WILD NIGHT!” Experience has taught me that it is far simpler to be noncommittal than say no, so I just shrugged and said , “let’s see what we feel like.” Ultimately she suggested that we go out to dinner to get to know each other better. We ended up at some wretched Chinese restaurant sitting in a sun porch that intensified the setting sun on Maryam’s face. I felt my forehead getting moist, and as I glanced at Maryam’s, I spotted tiny drops of sweat trying to escape through the cracks and crevices of her thick make up. I felt like I was looking at a miniaturized version of the signature geologic event that has shaped this earth - the relentless force of water ravaging the landscape with ravines and mudslides.
Maryam first talked about how difficult it was to be a working woman in a male dominated field and how hard it was to get respect. I wanted to tell her that her problem could be solved if she stopped dressing like an aging Hooter’s waitress. When I didn’t respond to her bid for compliments she asked, “What do you like to do on the weekend?” I knew that whatever I said would seem so sedate and settled. But I also knew that she was desperate for me to ask her what she did, so I took that bait. “Well,” she said, “Since we are going to be working closely together I am going to tell you something that I don’t really want the other staff to know. I am a black belt in karate.” This certainly beat my list of birdwatching, knitting, playing sports and fiddling around with words. “Maryam,” I said “how do you actually do karate, do you enter tournaments or what?” “Well I do enter some tournaments,” said Maryam, and then leaning towards me and with a hushed conspiratorial tone she said, “I am actually an expert in num-chuks.” My only knowledge of num-chuks harkened back to the Mutant Ninja Turtles, cartoon characters that were very popular when Ned was 6 years old. Num-chuks were blocks of wood held together with chains that the turtles swung around their heads with lethal force. “Maryam,” I said, “don’t you get hurt with those things?” “Yes,” she said and smiled, “but I don’t mind.”
Maryam was gone after a blazing 11 week tenure, and all of us survivors relish telling seemingly endless anecdotes about this unusual woman. It turns out that she told everyone about her num-chuks, and also told everyone that it had to be an exclusive secret that she wasn’t going to tell anyone else.
Maryam had long lashes caked in mascara and thick lipstick the color of - - - - - - -,
And midst her plunging neckline swelled a pair of jiggling boobies.
Now anyone who - - - - - - - her face in such thick makeup must have identity issues,
But Maryam vowed she was a confident woman who had paid her dues.
She said that nobody would be better or - - - - - - - at schmoozing clients,
And on the surface of it she looked like the picture of assured self reliance.
But when she constantly listed the many journals that she had published in,
I realized that her ego was as easy to - - - - - - - as the skin of Queen Victoria’s kin.
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The Last One Picked
irls’ grade school sports in the pre Title 9 days of the late 1960s were a decidedly low key affair, and presumably were included in the curriculum on the basis of the “sound mind, sound body” principle. There was no such thing as traveling teams, no parental involvement and no aspirations for college scholarships, simply a bunch of kids playing field hockey in the fall, skating in the winter (just skating around for the pure exercise of it) and softball in the spring. However, beneath this benign surface there boiled all sorts of jockeying for identity and social stature.
I think that our class grouped itself into several cliques: the boy crazy girls, the horse crazy girls, the sporty girls, the brainy girls and everybody else. Of these only the sporty girls could be self defined. The boy crazy girls were defined by the fact that boys pursued them, the horse crazy girls were defined by the fact that they had a horse, and the brainy girls were defined by the honor roll that was read and posted each quarter. Perhaps this is why divvying up teams was such a high stakes affair.
These cliques were pretty much mutually exclusive. I don’t think that any of the boy crazy girls would be considered brainy, in part because academic achievement was not a big turn on for the boys. And the horse crazy girls, well they were just in their own world as they galloped across the field whinnying. Although I occasionally flirted with being brainy, my identity was pretty much based on sports,. Therefore it was a big honor when the sports teacher selected me, along with my friend Kit Spaulding, to be captain of the softball team one afternoon. There in a row in front of us stood all our classmates squinting in the afternoon sun, wearing baggy green cotton shorts, and cute white button down shirts with Peter Pan collars, this being in an era before t-shirts were ever considered appropriate outerwear for girls. Some of my classmates were hopefully punching their fists into their mitts, some staring directly at me, some looking down and rubbing their shoes into the dirt.
At this instant, I felt the weight of responsibility that had been thrust upon me. Kit and I quickly made our selections, moving through the athletic, marginally capable, and then the totally inept. With horror, I realized that when there were only two left it would be my turn to make my selection. I felt like I was taking out a dull needle and stitching the scarlet letters “LOP" onto a fragile adolescent psyche - “Last One Picked,” the eternal stigma of schoolyard shame.
And there it was. Ty Winterbotham and Gale Runnells stood before me. Ty was relatively new to our school, and her almost translucent skin and thin frizzy hair made her an unfortunate target of casual adolescent cruelty. But the odd thing about Ty was that she was totally oblivious to our scorn, thought that the “kick me” sign pasted to her skirt was a laugh riot, and tolerated other meannesses with amazing good humor. She was the type of person who would not realize that being sent to play right field without a mitt was a form of damage control, rather than an affirmation of her fielding abilities. Ty would not understand the horror of being the last one picked. I did not know Gale Runnells particularly well, other than I seem to recall her nickname was Punnells. She was tall, clunky, totally unathletic and always seemed to have an unhappy look on her face. I had no idea what to do. Kit stood quietly next to me. Although the last one picked would be on her team, her hands would be clean and blameless. On an impulse, and perhaps in atonement for past sins, I picked Ty, who gratefully skipped over to my team, while Punnells trudged over to Kit’s team.
I have no recollection of the sad little game we probably played, but as we were filing back to the locker room to take our showers, Punnells came up to me and said, “I didn’t appreciate that you didn’t pick me. I know that I am not good at softball, but my mother told me that there was an accident when I was born and my right arm is weak and that is why I cannot throw well.” I was stunned. In the tight gossipy world we lived in, I felt sure that I would have known that Punnells had a birth mishap. For example, it was common knowledge who was adopted, whose parents were getting divorced and I had even overheard at the grocery store about a mother’s affair with the golf pro. I felt that I had been put into an impossible situation and it was utterly unfair to spring a disability on me after the fact. Even the meanest person would not make a disabled person the last one picked.
I struggled with my guilt for years, until I ran into Punnells at some black tie event, where she had emerged as a stunning, slim, glamorous beauty, a real boy crazy girl at last. I began to think that Punnells was brilliant and had skillfully invented her “damaged at birth” story to inflict maximum revenge. Mission accomplished.
Last One Picked
The day - - - - - - up as captain, I thought it would be fun,
Until I realized it meant that I had to cruelly single out someone.
I would designate the last one picked, and certainly it couldn’t be - - - - - - ,
That I would stigmatize, humiliate and likely destroy someone’s precious pride.
- - - - - - , Ty and Gale stood before me, the last two left and I had to name a name,
I don’t know why, but I picked Ty and poor Gale was never quite the same.
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Line Management
or the past 50+ years I have celebrated Christmas in exactly the same way – family get togethers and toting casseroles from suburb to suburb, trying to make sure that everyone had the same quality and quantity of gifts and filling up stockings with crappy little shit. Two years ago as I was gathering stocking stuffers I noticed the exact untouched pile of deodorants, socks and ramen noodles on our son’s bureau from the previous year, so I just scooped them up and recycled them. As teenagers, all the kids really wanted was some money, but it was just too crass to hand over a check on Christmas morning, so for a couple of years I made up a Christmas Jeopardy game – Family pets for $10, please!! But even that was getting stale. It was time to get out of town and put Christmas behind us.
So with great foresight, researching and planning, we arrived at O’Hare airport as 6:30 AM on Saturday, December 23rd to start the first leg of our trip to Ecuador. It had never occurred to me that this was possibly the busiest travel day of the year, but as we entered the airport, we were greeted with an absolute seething mass of people. It was an overwhelming morass of gridlocked families, huge baggage carts trying to pick their way through braided lines of jostling people, all encompassed in an atmosphere of frustration, panic and weary resignation. Everyone realized that there was no way that you could get through the sequential bottlenecks of baggage and security to emerge free in the golden land beyond toward the beckoning gates.
And there we were the four of us, feeling absolutely doomed and helpless, witnessing the first domino tipping and slowly falling. If we missed our flight to Miami, we would likely be a day late to Quito, in which case our guided trip would have to leave without us, and we would probably only be able to catch up to them via an airlift to the Amazon basin. But one thing that I have always told my kids is to make sure you are in the right line and best line, and not to just stand meekly in amongst the other herded masses. So I told them to stay put in the doomed line while I reconnoitered. In some airports there is a secret check in counter around the corner that is ostensibly for checking oversized baggage, like a bass fiddle or bicycle (please don’t tell anyone else). One year when many flights were cancelled, I was able to triumphantly break through the clutter and successfully rebook to San Jose, saving a weekend trip to San Francisco. But no such luck here.
The clotted crush of people and merged lines may it hard to notice, but I spotted one line that had only four or five people in it. As I approached I saw that it was marked “For Airport Personnel” only. But I also noticed that one young woman in this line was clearly not personnel. She was wearing tight fitting jeans, some sort of abbreviated top displayed her taut midriff adorned with a belly button ring, and was saying, “Like when I get to Cabo, like I am really go to get tan.”
“Do you work for the airlines?” I asked her. “No, she said,” someone just told me to stand here.”
“Well guess what I said ,” I said, “That the same person told me to stand in this line next to you. Could you please save my place so that I can find the rest of my family?”
She was clearly unwilling to commit to saving my place, since we both knew were on the knife-edge of disaster, and she, understandably, did not want to be responsible for the downfall of our vacation. But I hurriedly corralled the rest of my family and established our undeniable and resolute presence in this line. Although I was still as tense as a tick, I now had a plan that had some chance of success, and I felt a moment of superiority as I surveyed the scene. It occurred to me that this barely controlled airport chaos represented the foundation of democracy. Democracy can only work when there is some respect for the law and for rules. As I looked around I realized that my fellow Americans were by and large willing to follow the rules and meekly stand in futile lines waiting their turns.
And then with horror, I realized that one of the American airlines service representatives was escorting people to cut in line ahead of us. He looked at us and said “I’m sorry, these folks will be late for their plane unless they check in.” At this moment, I realized that this guy was tugging at the very fabric of democracy – bribery. Clearly these desperate and clever families had slipped the airport guy a $20, $50 or $100 to skip ahead of the line. Yes perhaps I had stretched the rules a little bit by finding a better line, but bribery was clearly breaking the rules. There was now only one person ahead of us in the line, and I knew that we had to make it the finish line quickly before our little democracy collapsed into chaos - at any moment this line could be over run with people claiming that they would be late for their plane. And certainly the majority of us were well-heeled vacationers and not a desperate people trying to escape the icy grip of Communism, but a scene like the last plane out of Saigon came to mind.
And then we were through. Last step security. If could have hoisted this heft, I would have done a cartwheel though security in my stocking feet, but I settled for a grateful jig. We made it to our gate with 20 minutes to spare, and I became the Mom Who Saved Christmas.
The airport was jammed and without a - - - - - - - - plan I knew we’d be late
Unable to check our bags, get through security and get to the gate.
Unless there was some sort of miracle and the line magically diminished,
I knew that our Christmas vacations was totally - - - - - - - - .
I should have just - - - - - - - - my wallet to find money to give to the counter clerks,
Because now I now that bribery is the best way to grease the works.
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Family Car Ride
lthough the seven hour car ride to our vacation spot has remained largely unchanged over the past 40 years, the context has gone through several evolutions. As kids, the absolute keyed up anticipation of summer vacation made the trip endless; with 5 kids there was endless fidgeting in the car, siblings crossing imaginary lines and getting punched as promised and endless "when are we going to get there’s." These trips in the 60s were without benefit of CDs or even tapes. Only AM was available, and the best hope was that there was a Cubs game to listen to, although generally in a losing cause, with the reception slowly evaporating along with the Cubs hopes, as we inched our way further north. It wasn't until I had children of my own that I realized the torture of the drive, endlessly trying to entertain or disentangle twitchy children, accepting the futility of an enforced seat belt policy, and in general just enduring and wondering whether "family vacation" was really just an oxymoron like "butthead" or "military intelligence."
The teenage years were probably the golden years - a newly minted driver's license, minimal responsibilities, a car at your disposal, gas paid for, vacation paid for, it was freedom. You were a roll, screaming along the highway with the music cranked. I was a new driver driving with Butch Turner and Bill Campbell when I passed my first car on a two lane road. We were listening to a live concert of some sort on our 8 track, which coincidentally erupted in wild applause just as I completed this minor coming of age achievement. Bill said, "for her next number Bobbie will pass a truck and a semi." Perhaps now I have also entered another golden phase, although the lack of responsibilities of the teenage years are long gone. But the kids have gotten to the stage where they can read on their own in the car, and even help in the driving. As we prepare for our trip up north this year, I realize that I am now passing the baton again, the fifth generation to do so. Our son is now old enough to drive by himself and I see that he has got his iPod in order and is ready to roll.
Preparations for the trip would start a week before the target date as everyone began assembling items in the front hall. This was the great beauty of a car ride; you really didn't need to pack things, they could just be flung into the trunk. What an odd assortment - various boots and shoes, a new doubling cube for the backgammon board, paper bags with bottles of booze, a carton of cigarettes for my father, a Sears catalogue, and inflatable raft and other odds and ends. The entire car, probably a big boat of a station wagon with faux wood paneled siding, would be packed the night before we left. Since there was no particular concern about seatbelts, in fact there may not have been any, we were free to create little nooks for sleeping and reading, by stacking and moving the bags around. I am sure there were endless discussions about who "dibs'ed what seat. Then we were left to wait for morning and although we would have eagerly foregone the basic necessities of food and water to be on our way, we had to have breakfast, clean up breakfast and also clean up our rooms. My mother obviously saw an easy way to apply leverage.
My mother hated to stop for the sole purpose of going to the bathroom. As our family never shied away from a competition, my mother would announce a reward for the person who could go the longest without having to go to the bathroom. I don't think that there was actually a prize, but there was a powerful incentive to avoid penetrating questions such as "how badly do you really have to go", or "are you sure you can't make it," or "why didn't you go when we stopped for lunch?" While perhaps not healthy, this speeded up the trip immeasurably. I guess that I am proud to say that I usually won the contest and that this acquired skill has come in handy over the years. Occasionally, some one would bring a friend along, who would be forced into the contest. I can't imagine the consternation this poor child must have felt, who perhaps did not know the entire family well, and certainly not my parents. What could the rest of the vacation be like?
Car games were the staple of entertainment, and my mother was in charge, generally creating variations on standard games like "20 Questions" and "Bingo". We had quickly grown tired of the stale car bingo cards we had, which had such pedestrian items as "bird on a wire," or "tow truck." My mother quickly set about spicing up the game and created "Dingo Bingo. She improved the "Bingoes" we had to find, and improved the scoring. For example, "bird on a wire" and "tow truck" and "cow" were nixed and replaced by more interesting categories such as "religious lawn decoration," “man with a hairy back” or “bra on a clothesline.” Each had a point value based on the degree of difficulty.
Then she created a new category called "Dingoes." These were easy to find items, like "American flag" or "dog," but they were only scored if you could find them in combination with something else. For example, if you could spot a dog standing next to religious lawn decoration, you added the dingo score to the bingo score. There was also some sort of bonus if you could find two bingoes together. You could also apply for a special award if you saw something unusual. My brother recalls that he got extra points for spotting a man standing on his hands on a golf course, and a women in hair curlers juggling. These innovations added a major element of strategy to the game. For example, you wouldn't just want to score the first man with a hairy back you saw, but you may want to hold out for a simian man standing next to an American flag. Your strategy might be tempered by other conditions. Certainly it would be easier to find a man with a hairy back in the summer, and religious lawn decorations around Christmas. However, I recall one well known house - in Crivitz perhaps - (something memorable happened in Crivitz, but I am not sure if this is it), that kept its religious lawn decoration - some sort of Creche - up all year.
I have always believed that Dingo Bingo has immense commercial potential. At one point my mother wanted to sell the concept to McDonald's; the Dingo Bingos could be printed on their paper placemats, which then could be reused for the game, if not overly smeared with grease and catsup. Like many other of my mother's cottage industries, this one did not quite get off the ground, but it might be worth another try. Aspiring entrepreneurs can contact me by e-mail.
Every summer vacation we pile into the car for the seven hour car ride,
Where the scenery consists of endless farmland passing slowly by - - - - - - -.
The - - - - - - - journey is enlivened by my mother’s unique Dingo Bingo game,
Where entries such as nose picker or splattered road kill are her claim to fame.
But when the farmland - - - - - - - and is replaced by forest just north of Green Bay,
We all shout and cheer because now we know we have gone more than half way.
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Slipping Out of the Demographic
ge 50 has always been considered a significant milestone, spawning endless parties, toasts, silly hats and, dare I say it, trite doggerel. However, I have come to regard age 50 as merely another year, significant only because of our 10 digits and the resulting base 10 method of counting. Far more significant is age 54, the age when most advertisers regard you as nothing but worthless chaff as they hone in on the more desirable 18 to 54 age range. Here is where they concentrate their advertising dollars, thus driving entertainment options. I find myself slipping out of the desirable demographic. Increasingly TV shows are a total puzzlement and the ads indecipherable. (In a related development, the TV clicker has acquired the complexity of an airplane dashboard and somehow our marginal TV viewing keeps getting interrupted with shows about Hulk Hogan that have inexplicably been recorded.)
The situation reminds me of my splendid bowl of fresh raspberries, which nature has devised as nothing more than a way to disperse the seeds - attractive packaging hiding the real agenda. I adore raspberries and keenly await each summer as they come into season, putting them in yogurt or on toast. Although I would never buy cream expressly as a raspberry vehicle, on the few occasions that there is some cream left over a previous night’s party dessert, I will indulge with a bowl of raspberries and cream. In joyous anticipation I will note the small glistening globules of cream clinging to the septated raspberrylettes - a vision of pure beauty. And then like a bear or a bird, I will pass the seeds, the whole point of the exercise.
If only advertising were so painless. However, nature has not caught on to our efficient whisk-away plumbing system and continues to spew forth. Advertisers, however, are on to the game. Through countless focus groups, research and demographics they have concluded that I am fallow ground, and whatever seed they might present, however attractively packaged, will remain infertile, spawning no impulse purchases, no wild spending, no change in habits. So at age 54, no one bothers to serve me any fruit.
You might think that turning 50 was bad, but I’ll tell you what is worse,
When you get to 54, you’ll really want to put the time clock in - - - - - - - .
On the basis of focus groups, demographics and many other studies,
Advertisers - - - - - - - their budget for the young and not us fuddy-duddies,
No penalty is - - - - - - - , TV has become a wasteland, barely worth a look,
Rejected, neglected and disaffected, now I reach for a book.
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The Vindictive Snack Mom
greeted my first assignment as snack mom with undiluted pleasure. Like many of my contemporaries, I had delayed childbearing into the thirties, and had only two children. Now was the time for commitment to participate intimately in the life of my children and to bear witness to every school pageant, field trip and sports event. And if the new system required snack moms, then I was going to be one kick-ass snack mom, with creative and healthy snacks. The initial enthusiasm quickly soured by the second semester; instead of hand baked goodies, like everyone else I rushed to the store to get a box of just-in-time sugary Teddy grahams (who came up with that genius marketing idea) and a jug of sugary juice. I didn’t want to buck the system right away and become a pariah amongst the other attentive moms, but it did seem to me that children could bring their damn snack, thank you very much!
Snack mom is also very akin to the Halloween greeter, who must sit by the door for several hours and dispense candy to waves of unknown children. In one of the neighborhoods we lived in, our street consisted of houses that were fairly close together with short driveways, a very efficient street to trick or treat on. As the years went by, I realized that carpools were arriving on our street from adjacent suburbs, where I guess the trick or treating was less fertile. I would see a car pull up at the end of the street and disgorge six or seven kids with barely a token costume on. The car would wait while the kids made their way down our block, where they would then be picked up and moved to the next block.
Trick or treating was a two adult job, one to escort the kids, another to man the homefront. For several years in a row, Nick managed to be out of town for Halloween, so I had to juggle both responsibilities. I didn’t want our house to get egged, so I put a bowl of candy on our doorstep with a note asking children not to be greedy and take one candy each. When I came back after about an hour, all the candy AND the bowl was gone. The next year, I simply spread the candy out on the porch on top of some newspaper. One year I got home from work a little bit late, and Vashni, our babysitter from India, was fielding the first trick or treaters. She was entirely unfamiliar with the traditions of Halloween, so was quite perplexed when children came to the door asking for candy. She rushed around the house to find something to give the children and ended up putting a popsicle in each of their trick or treat bags!
I think that my mother shared the same frustrations, but she got very inventive about venting them. I remember that she would take a piece of raw liver in her hand, and ask all the older trick or treaters to shake hands with her. They would be left with sticky calf’s blood on their hands. I can’t imagine that this would be tolerated in this day and age, and would expect a summons from the police or children’s services. There was also a group of boys that mother particularly disliked, because they always took large handfuls of candy without any words of thanks. One year she got a whole bowl of tapioca and dotted some decoy candy on top of it. When the boys showed up, she offered them the bowl, and said, “We have too much candy this year, so just dig in as deep as you can!”
I thought that I would outgrow snack mom responsibilities as my children got into middle school, but then came the list of snack moms for all the soccer games. There were two snack moms for each game, one to provide the cut-up oranges at half time, the other to bring juice and a cookie at the end of the game. Some of the parents went whole-hog and arrived with a cooler on wheels lugging it across to field 13, or wherever we were. The kids would dig into the snacks, and then litter the ground with orange peels, water bottles, candy wrappers, etc. We then got an announcement asking the snack moms to stay after the game, since if there was too much garbage on the field, the team would be assessed a fine by the city. As the home team, this meant that we also had to pick up after the visiting team. I frankly snapped at this point and my revenge is recounted in the fanagram below:
I resented the concept of soccer snack mom, but the real coup de grace
Was watching greedy kids - - - - - - - open cookies, throwing garbage on the grass,
There were no thank yous - each one seemed a rapacious - - - - - - -,
I was so annoyed, I immediately began devious plans to retaliate.
My resolve was like - - - - - - - as I planned my counter attack,
Should I spike the juice, or perhaps give them a moldy snack?
When I found some lemons my plan began to crystallize,
I mixed them in with cut-up oranges for a - - - - - - - surprise!
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Childhood Sins
he first distinct memory of my childhood is unfortunate, mainly because I always wanted to be a good girl. It was in junior kindergarten and Emily Clow and I were tussling for a block. I prevailed and then hit her in the head with it and was banished into the corner for a time out. I was further humiliated because I was not allowed to participate in the May Pole dance and had to sit and watch with the senior kindergartners, who wondered why I was so isolated. I distinctly remember wearing a pair of green twill shorts that opened with a flap like sailor pants, and there were three white buttons on each side of the flap and white piping.
I can’t remember why we were fighting over the block, quite possibly I was provoked and Emily deserved what was coming, but I know that I was particularly irked because Kathy Washburne and I were told by our mothers that Emily had to be our friend since Emily’s mother was their friend. This seemed to be particularly unfair even though we both liked Emily and she is still a lifelong friend. Kathy and I took out revenge on our mothers by secretly drawing stick figures of Emily with green stuff coming out of her nose. I also silently vowed that I would never hand pick friends for my children. This is part of the novelty of the memory - that at the age of 5 I would have such a distinct image of myself as a mother, and further that this image had totally changed by senior kindergarten. In the next year’s 1958 yearbook our class was all asked what they were going to do when they grew up, and my response was a very tepid, “I guess I’ll be a mother,” as if sadly accepting the affluent suburban stereotype and reluctantly foregoing any consideration of alternative careers.
The next seven years went swimmingly well as far as being a good girl went. While I am sure that I inflicted the usual array of casual childhood cruelties, they were all unintentional and I have no memory of them. However, I hit a major derailment in 7th grade when a new student with the improbable name of Ty Winterbotham arrived. She was extremely frail and fragile looking with wispy and frizzy hair - an immediate outsider. Further she was saddled with an overbearing and buddinsky mother who made her life difficult. Ty had an open and engaging personality, which made our disregard even more cruel. I am glad to say that it was not me who plotted to put the “hit me” sign on her back, but my quite compliance was equally cruel. I still remember her unwittingly skipping down the hall with us dissolving in laughter as we saw the sign stuck to the hem of her skirt. When she discovered the sign, probably after someone smacked her in the head, she removed it with a huge smile, grossly misinterpreting this attention as acceptance.
Let’s see, it has now been over 40 years since I have been trying to make it up to Ty, and I still can’t seem to get it right. Ty and I have stayed in touch over the years, particularly since she also went to medical school a few years behind me. I was working as a pathologist and was on duty on the day of her wedding, which I had accepted. As the weekend pathologist, I was in charge of processing all specimens that were removed at surgery, which were divided into “bigs” and “littles.” “Littles” were anything that could be crammed into a cup, such as an appendix, a gallbladder, pieces of a prostate, etc, and “bigs” were everything else, which included a lung, a bowel, a hip, etc. There were some days where I thought I could create a whole person if I stitched all the specimens together. Anyway, on this particular day, I was awash in “bigs,” particularly a big pile of placentas that had to be processed. Even though I was completely gloved and gowned, I still needed some serious cleaning up before I could consider going out in public. I suppose if I had really rushed I could have made Ty’s wedding, but I just didn’t go, basically blew it off.
The next day, Ty called me. Here it was the first day of her wedded bliss, and the top thing on her “to-do” list was to call me and ask me if I was okay because she had missed me at her wedding. I was stunned, how could she possibly have noticed that I wasn’t there in the presumed throng of people? Years later, I suddenly thought that perhaps this wasn’t the large society wedding that I had envisioned, but an intimate affair, with me, a noticeable no show at the head table. Still guilty about the 7th grade incident, I was now in a very deep hole. I tried to explain about bigs, littles and placentas, but it was clear that Ty realized that her wedding was not a priority for me. That was perhaps 25 years ago, and I have still made little progress out of my hole. I clearly need to talk directly to her, but in addition to trying to be a good girl, I am also a non confrontational girl. Perhaps I will include her on the fanagram distribution list and she will read this as a belated apology.
Please gather around all kith and - - - - ,
I’m here to confess my childhood sins.
Kathy and I were mean to Emily I suppose,
When we drew her with mottled - - - - and runny nose.
I picture Susan as she - - - - the sign that says “Please hit me in the head”
We taped it to Ty’s back and laughed when people did what it said.
My heart still does - - - - as I think of those cruel times and bitter tears,
But please, hasn’t the statute of limitations has run out after 40 years?
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Living the Dream
was over 30 years old by the time I finished my college, medical school and residency training. One of the most joyful aspects of this feat of endurance was the realization that I would no longer be subjected to standardized tests. The guiding philosophy of the medical school I attended was not to train you to be a good doctor, but instead to train you to pass the medical boards on the first try. Therefore, all tests were in the style of the medical boards consisting of a dreary procession of multiple/multiple choice questions on isolated medical factoids.
And with all this testing came the periodic nightmares that have achieved the status of urban legend among college students, who just refer to “The Dream.” The dream consists of some sort of variation of anxiety over the final exam. A frequent version is the panicky realization that you have forgotten that you had signed up for a course and are totally unprepared for the final exam. My anxiety dreams tended to be more organizational. For example, I would dream that I had a pencil box full of No. 2 pencils, but none of them would have an eraser, or all the pencils would have jumbo erasers but be unsharpened. In other instances, I would be rushing around dark unnamed corridors desperately trying to find the right classroom, or there would be some sort of veil over my eyes so that I could not find my way through the corridors. Anxiety about public speaking was an odd variation of the dream, where my mouth would inexplicably accumulate some sort of debris. In the dream, I would attempt to discretely scoop all the material, and then struggle to find someplace to dispose of it, all the while the debris was accumulating again. With the formal end of my academic career, I thought that these dreams would vanish.
But my anxious dreaming mind quickly found a new outlet - getting to the airport on time. I would dream that I couldn’t find the correct suit case, or my clothes or the ticket would be missing, the car didn’t have any gas, the keys were gone. Perhaps these dreams were built more on actual experience, since each one of these events has occurred in isolation. But then one day last summer, all aspects of the dream came true in one epic trip to the airport to pick up Ned and Susie. I knew this airport pickup was going to be slightly more complicated than usual in this post 9/11 age, since neither of us had cell phones, but I felt confident that I could get to the airport, park and meet them in baggage claim.
At the appointed hour, I went to the garage to get into the car, and was aghast to see that both of our cars were gone. We had recently moved into the neighborhood and I did not feel comfortable in asking for this somewhat aggressive favor from our swanky neighbors. I then hopped on my bike and madly pedaled over to my father’s house, assuming there would be an idle car, particularly since he no longer drove. As I huffed and puffed into the driveway, I was stunned to see a totally empty driveway and house. I was seriously running late at this point, so I took a big gulp and decided to call my parents’ life long neighbor Mrs. Reed. Now I have come to know Mrs. Reed as a generous and loyal friend, but growing up, she was a figure of imposing authority, and somewhat persnickety in her tastes. I was afraid of her then and those feelings had lingered for over 40 years. I remember once saying to her, “Mrs. Reed can I ask you a favor?” and her response was, “Well you can always try.”
Mrs. Reed immediately responded to my plight and minutes later I was on my way in an immaculate Volvo. I wanted to return the car to her in the exact same condition, so I mentally noted which radio station was on, the position of the seat, and the gas gauge. My perilous situation seemed to have righted itself - until I reached the first toll booth and realized that the Reed’s car did not have an EZ pass and I did not have any change. Now normally I would just blast through the EZ pass, which I have done several times in my mother-in-law’s car, but I did not dare to do it in Mrs. Reed’s car lest she get a ticket in the coming months. I then resorted to a strategy that I had often used with the kids. I figured that no matter what I did, I would always be an embarrassment to them, so why not do something that truly deserving of their embarrassment? Therefore, whenever we were at a toll booth, I would stop, open the door and pick up the loose change abandoned by people whose errant toss had missed the toll booth. I would point out to the kids that some people were willing to just throw money out the window, but not this family. The kids would roll their eyes and slink down in the seat as I picked up dimes, nickels and the occasional quarter. Now this strategy came in handy. The toll at this booth was about a buck, so I had to park the car at the side of the road, and scrounge at several different toll booths until I got enough change.
I breathed a sigh of relief as now I was in sight of the airport, and only about 15 minutes late. As I drove toward the parking lot, I was horrified to see that for the first time ever, the parking lot was full, and all cars were being directed to remote parking, which required taking a tram back to the terminals. I had erupted in a nervous sweat at this point since I had no way of communicating with Ned and Susie, and decided to try my luck at the international parking, which was much closer than remote parking. However, mine was not an original thought, and I joined a competitive sea of cars jostling and milling around trying to nab the first open spot. I almost got side-swiped in the precious Volvo as someone aced me out, so I decided to try a more focused strategy my mother had once used. I drove to the spot where people were exiting from the terminal and spotted an overburdened and bleary eyed couple and offered to give them a ride to their car if I could have their spot. Success! I raced into the terminal, wild eyed, sweating, and disheveled, to find Ned and Susie peacefully waiting for me. I relaxed as well, and we turned around and headed back to international parking. However, as I stood on the sidewalk, I suddenly realized that in the rush of getting to the airport, I had neglected to notice the color, style or license plate number of the Reeds’s car nor could I remember what row I had parked it in …
If you have a huge gap between what you need and what you’ve got,
You might not care if your tossed coin misses the toll booth - - - - .
But for - - - - of people throwing money out the window is the epitome of waste
And typical of slothful Americans whose wanton excess is in such poor taste.
So if you want to participate in a most lucrative - - - - and found,
Just open the door next to the tollbooth to find coins strewn on the ground.
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When Jesus Walks
unday our carillon bell choir was scheduled to play during the prelude and the offertory. The prelude is a snap, since this is when the congregation is filing in, and the noise drowns out any mistakes that might be made. The offertory is another story. It is drop dead quiet and all eyes are fixated on the choir, standing in the front wearing these ridiculous royal blue robes. The robes are made out of some sort of dense unbreathable polyester concoction, so that you are essentially trapped in your own escalating body heat as all eyes are upon you. In addition, the mature age of our ladies choir guarantees that at any moment several members could erupt in a torrent of hormone-induced sweat, which cannot be discretely addressed since both hands are gripping the bells. At one particularly suffocating moment, I likened these robes to the memorable coat of gold paint in the James Bond movie, Goldfinger. The poor starlet died because they did not leave a space at the base of the spine for the skin to breathe.
For the offertory, the choir director had selected the piece, "When Jesus Walks." Apparently this is an established hymn, but the composer had turned this into a jazz piece, and for the entire 5 months we rehearsed this, I never did hear the tune. I only had 4 bells to play, the low E and F and the accompanying sharps and flats. The rhythm was very wacky, abruptly switching from 4/4, to 2/4 to 3/4 and then to something called 5/4. In general, I am most comfortable with a good stolid march, like Onward Christian Soldiers, so this was bewildering. Also you were supposed to hit the bells differently at different points in the piece, some rung normally, some muffled into the foam pad on the table, some struck with a mallet, some waved in the air, and this was more than my unmusical mind could process. And in the first two measures I was the only bell that played, where I was responsible for establishing the pace and rhythm, and in the last measure, I had a little solo run. So my focus was on the beginning and the end, and I figured that any success over the seven middle pages would be just gravy.
When I first started playing the bells, I diligently tried to play all my notes, which I carefully circled in different colors on the sheet music. But as time went on, I realized that I did not have to play all the notes, particularly since I was assigned to the low bells that do not carry the tune (however, in this piece I could have been playing the tune but just didn't realize it). I could judiciously delete a few notes here and there without telling anyone, and have a stress free experience. How does the saying go about the slippery slope of compromise? "God grant me the wisdom to play the notes I can play, and delete the ones I can't and the grant me the wisdom to know the difference."
However, I got it in my mind that I was going to nail this sucker, and after we played the prelude, I took the sheet music back to the pew while awaiting the offertory. Through various hymns, sermonettes for youth, announcements, joys and concerns, etc, I tapped out the beat on my knees, using my palms for the ploink and a closed fist for the doink. In the background I could hear the minister nattering on about how humans were as dumb as sheep that inadvertently walk off cliffs, or walk into a corner and can't back out. I was a bit irked to be compared to a dumb sheep, but I guess the take home message was that we are so lucky to have someone like JC be our shepherd.
Anyway as the sermon ended, I leapt up full of confidence. I should have stuck to the original plan. The first and last measures were flawless, but the middle was seriously lacking in gravy. Ploinks were doinks, and sharps were flats, and I felt about as clueless as a sheep stepping off a cliff. The conductor was desperately trying to shepherd us through this nightmare and to her credit everyone arrived at the end at the same time for the final chord. She managed a wan smile and quietly said, "good work ladies, that was a hard piece." In the aftermath between services, I was delighted to learn that everyone misplayed notes. One women said that when she was frantically trying to turn the page, she grabbed several pages by mistake. This is actually quite easy to do, since we are required to wear cotton white gloves similar to the ones that Mickey Mouse always wears, and consequently lose any tactile sense. However, this women turned so many pages at once that she ended up briefly playing an entirely different hymn, and then when she realized her mistake could not find her way back home!
Before the - - - - - of the hymn my nerves jangle and quiver,
But as the conductor raises the baton, its time to stand and deliver.
I only have four - - - - - to play but this piece has an odd jazzy beat,
I freeze up and miss so many of them that my defeat is complete.
I think I hear a smattering of snickers, moans and groans,
As the congregation winces at the sound of the dissonant - - - - -.
Am I the culprit, the mill - - - - - around this choir's neck?
Hey - the minister insists we're not perfect so I say "what the heck."
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Road Trip
have made the seven hour car ride straight north and back about 4 times per year. While sports radio is entertaining, once you get north of Green Bay, both Milwaukee and Chicago reception is sketchy, and you delve into the more rural menu of polkas, religious talk shows and recipes for tater tot casseroles. Therefore, I have gotten into the habit of prefacing each trip by a visit to the local library to pick up an audio book. There they have an extremely eclectic collection of such things Bill Clinton memoirs, ancient Agatha Christie mysteries, a few potboilers and some classics like Shakespeare and Dickens. For this trip, Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov caught my eye. I was familiar with both movie renditions, the first starring James Mason in the late 1950s as the pederast Humbert Humbert, and the more recent 1990s version starring the magnificent Jeremy Irons. Both were scandalous, as the story told in luxuriant detail the Englishman’s obsession with prepubescent “nymphets,” specifically his orphaned stepdaughter. I had found it odd that the second version was considered so salacious that it went straight to video and never hit the big screens. This was a testament to the power of suggestion, since there are no overt scenes of improper behavior in either version, and certainly one sees much worse on the nightly news, talk shows, and primetime network fare.
So somewhere north of Milwaukee, I popped in Casette one, and immediately realized that the reader was none other than Jeremy Irons, whose sonorous tones were simultaneously reptilian, lecherous and utterly compelling. The writing style, lost completely in the movies, was gorgeous, a tour de force of relentless alliterations that carried the story along while concealing the fact that I was basically listening to soft porn. Any less masterful style would have rendered this story into just another tawdry episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. That Bill Clinton could write of his amorous debacles so well. So I would heartily recommend Lolita for your next long distance journey, but would caution you to pay attention lest you carelessly swerve into oncoming traffic. I myself was happy to arrive home safely with only one speeding ticket (70 in a 55 MPH zone, but on a totally deserted stretch of highway where only total losers would adhere to the speed limit) and one warning (53 in a 45 MPH zone in a tiny town that presumably makes a tidy sum out of their contrived speed trap.)
And so the following is an attempt at the writing style of Nabokov’s Lolita. As I type this, I wonder if my little fanagram project has gone overboard and I have grown soft in the head.
Lolita
By Humbert Humbert
Ah my nymphet, with languid limbs and dewy - - - -,
Your bare necked tawny nape, and puerile hips,
Your feckless sibilant - - - - is the essence of pure bliss,
And beckons me forward to proffer a clandestine kiss.
I lie helpless and bewitched in your tremulous thrall
Into your voluptuous abyss, I - - - -, tumble and fall.
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Let Yourself Go, Part 1
ne day I was sitting in the kitchen as my mother arrived from the grocery store and starting unloading groceries, as she had probably done almost once every day for at least 30 years. But she hummed and there was a joyous zip to her step. She suddenly turned to me and said in a triumphant tone, “You won’t believe it. I saw Susie in the grocery store. I have not seen her in about 10 years, and she has LET HERSELF GO!” I had only heard of Susie by reputation as an elegant member of Lake Forest’s social elite, but my mother offered me no further details on this peculiar nugget of information, probably because she did not want to display the cattiness she was secretly enjoying.
Quite likely glamorous Susie was the life of a party, surrounded by a phalanx of sycophantic men only too eager to laugh at her jokes, pour her a drink, or swing her around the dance floor. Lake Forest was populated by a swell set, who might hire the band Cream to play at their daughter’s debut, rocking out on a dance floor placed at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. While this might have been Susie’s milieu, it was not something that my parents were part of, I think by mutual agreement. I never thought of my mother as a beautiful woman. Several times she confided in me that when she was younger, some people thought that she looked like Ingrid Bergman. However she always said this with a roll of her eyes and a shake of her head, implying that everyone was crazy to think that she could ever aspire to the cool elegance of this international movie star. While I could see the vague resemblance to Ingrid Bergman in pictures of her in her twenties, at this point she was deep into the throes of mothering 6 children, and clearly had no time for elegance.
My mother never had any interest in style, almost to the point of excess. She could spend the entire day in a one piece bathing suit that looked more like a children’s romper. She loved playing tennis in her bathing suit, and on the occasions that she was required to wear white, she seemed to delight in producing some rumpled old outfit, and completed the look by wearing black socks.
She abhorred shopping and had only a couple of outfits for the few formal parties that my parents did attend. One of her classic outfits was her pink “peek-a-boo” dress. This dress featured a really rather sedate rectangular cut out centered above her modest cleavage, but she loved pasting things into the cut out. I remember one evening she sailed off to a party with S&H green stamps decorating her chest. Collecting green stamps did not carry any social cachet in Lake Forest, and in fact was something that you would only do very discretely, but my mother chose to blatantly wear them on her chest. Another evening she pasted dark black dog hair in the cut out. I truly don’t think that this was premeditated and was not designed to send any particular message, she just wanted to cause a stir. I envision her looking into the mirror, thinking, “How should I enhance this dress tonight,” and glancing around the room, she spotted the lazy dog, grabbed some scissors and thought, “That’s just the ticket.” My father was so horrified at this performance that he banned the peek-a-boo dress to the back of the closet, never to be seen again.
Clearly from a starting point of Ingrid Bergman, my mother had “let herself go” in terms of elegance, but she did it such a conscious and refreshing style. Perhaps she knew that she could not compete with the upper echelon, but more likely she simply had no interest and considered this a losing long term strategy anyway. Certainly, my mother craved being the life of the party, but her strategy centered around playful humor and clever wit. In addition to her sartorial tweaks at elegant society, she was always ready to entertain with a poem or skit to commemorate birthdays and weddings. She amassed all these efforts into a bulging blue binder. Leafing through it I can see the passage of time, with poems written for the same person on his 40th, 50th and 60th birthday. I can envision party after party where she arrived with a guitar that she discreetly hid in the coat closet, waiting for the right time for her performance. Leaping up after dinner, she would begin her serenade, which frequently included a chorus that all the celebrants could raucously participate in.
Susie might have burned brightly, but as my mother so triumphantly realized, Susies’s tenure in the spot light inevitably succumbed to age and disrepair, while my mother could still command the stage and bring the house down well into her 70s. I remember one time when I was about ten I asked my mother what the word “sexy” meant. She replied, “It is a woman who is really fun and makes men laugh.” Even as a 10 year old, I thought that this definition was missing some key ingredient, but it was not one that mattered to my mother.
If you want to live - - - - - - - as a society queen,
And epitomize glamour and monopolize the party scene,
You can’t let yourself go, and will need to count each calorie,
And you must amass a wardrobe that looks like a stylish fashion - - - - - - -.
If you rely only on looks, you must treat aging like an - - - - - - - that must be treated,
But the ravages of age are a force that is not easily defeated.
Better have a plan B, because eventually wrinkles will line your face,
And you might be - - - - - - - forgotten as younger women clamor to take your place.
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Let Yourself Go, Part 2
y father began to contemplate retirement in the early 1980s, and thought computers might be a suitable focus for his newly acquired free time. When Nick spotted a computer seminar, we thought that this would be the perfect introduction. As the speaker tried to explain the difference between RAM and ROM, I could see that he was rapidly losing his older audience – eyes were glazing over. Then one older gentleman raised his hand and asked a simple question about spread sheets, “Who types in all the information into the computer?” The speaker was visibly nonplussed by this question, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Why you do of course.” I could see all of my father’s age group absolutely shut down, and the speaker totally lost his audience. My father’s working life came equipped with a secretary, and I don’t think he knew how to type. The only vague sense that he had of computers was that they were supposed to make his life easier. This clearly was not going to happen if he not only had to learn how to type, but also know what to type in if he wanted to use the computer to prepare a spreadsheet.
From that point on, my father just new technology go. Occasionally, he would ask, “What is this cyberspace?” Nick emerged from some family event exulting that he had finally explained cyberspace to my father, but multiple other family members chimed in that they had provided the same explanation. Basically, Dad really wasn’t that interested and just used cyberspace as a conversation device. He had decided that it wasn’t worth it to keep up with technology and that he was old enough to manage without it. After he retired, he developed two hobbies that probably had not changed since Ooga MaGook invented the wheel. He would spend hours in his wood shop with sandpaper, a screwdriver, hammer, rags and other simple tools. At his hobby farm, he could be found in the barn in his fancy cable knit sweater shoveling manure or lifting hay bales onto a cart. This strategy worked for about 20 years, but as technology evolved at a dizzying pace, he suddenly found himself totally out of touch with technologies that had now been woven into every day life – microwaves, cell phones and the internet.
One day I spent a great deal of time trying to explain to Dad the difference between a microwave and an oven. Of course, adding to the challenge was the fact that my father was a traditional husband who had never cooked anything, and probably didn't want to learn. I painstakingly explained that while you could put tinfoil in the oven, you could not put it in a microwave, and while you could put Saran wrap in the microwave you could not put it into the oven. The next day I arrived and was horrified to see that he was heating up a Styrofoam cup in the oven. Although I considered the difference between a microwave and oven pathetically obvious, I also realized that this type of distinction might be difficult to keep straight if I was starting from square one, as my father was. Another time he was at our house and spotted a bicycle cable that was tightly coiled and had a fancy looking lock holding the coil in place. “Is that a new kind of computer?” he asked. I initially thought I might be in the same realm as the psychiatrist who had written the book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” Then I realized that my father had no concept of what a computer might look like and had probably only heard how computers were getting smaller and turning into “lap tops.”
We have a basic strategy for whenever my father comes for dinner involving the good scotch, shrimp with cocktail sauce, no vegetables, and after dinner some sort of internet demonstration. He has been particularly interested in Google earth, where we were able to show him an aerial view of his own back yard, his child hood home and the boarding school he absolutely detested. Iron ore ships on the Great Lakes or antique cars are another abiding interest. But even as he was looking at the amazing technology of the internet, his basic question had not changed in 25 years. “Who types in all of this stuff?” he asked.
I tell this story not to poke fun at a lovely older man, but to wonder if I am unwittingly making similar decisions that will come back to haunt me. Without at least a toe hold on a virtually vertical learning curve, in several years I could be as befuddled as my father. Maybe I have already made this fateful error. I have never really needed a cell phone, as most of my work is done from home with minimal travel demands. Additionally, I felt that I was making a noble (if wrongheaded statement) about the folly of instant access. One time on a business trip I was supposed to be picked up at the airport by a car service. When there as no sign of a ride, I realized the folly of eschewing a cell phone. It was late at night and there were few stores open, so I had to wander around looking for change for the pay phone. Ten minutes later I was again wandering around looking for a pay phone. When I finally called the car service number, the phone rang in the pocket of the slovenly person sitting next to the phone eating a greasy hamburger. My ride had been sitting right next to me.
Now I get extremely anxious if we are driving in a car and Nick hands me his cell phone to make a call. While the first generation of cell phones resembled real phones, twenty years later and umpteen successive generations of blending cell phones with computers and hifis, this cell phone bears no relationship to what I would consider a phone, in fact it looks like a miniaturized airline cockpit. Nick would get exasperated as he once again tried to guide me through the steps, which involved double clicking, scrolling and negotiating a miniscule key board. In one instance, I hesitated and held one key down too long and the “phone” interpreted this as a signal to call the last number received and I ended up calling myself.
Clickers now dominant our lives. As a child I was amazed that my parents grew up without TV. Now my children are amazed that I grew up watching TV without a clicker. A profusion of household appliances now come with clickers, including a floor fan where one of the clicker selections is “breeze,” which translates to a random selection of fan speeds to simulate the real outdoors. We stayed in a ski condo once where the table in the living room had 6 clickers artfully arranged in a fan shape. I knew there was no way that I could decipher this array and actually was looking forward to a weekend of cards and board games. However, the teenager in our midst got both the DVD and TV up and running in no time. I have tenuous control over our own TV clicker, but often call on Nick for more problematic issues. One time the dog rolled over on the clicker and the TV went black; the situation was only resolved by a phone call to India. As part of Nick’s job, he often visits his clients in their home. One of his value added services is to coordinate clickers, if needed.
So what do I keep, and what do I let go? I will think about it this afternoon as I seek refuge in digging weeds with a shovel.
Technology advances every day as the earth - - - - - - -
With new innovations that the human mind creates.
Ancient Egyptians were probably puzzled by the - - - - - - - stone,
Now, millennia later, I am just as flummoxed by a cellular phone.
If keeping up with technologies is something you dread,
Watch out, soon your - - - - - - - will need a clicker to pop up your bread.
Click here for answers
Pathologic Memories
s an anatomic pathologist, I am frequently in a dilemma when asked what kind of work I do. For non-physicians the answer almost invariably requires further explanation. Sometimes I include the explanation all in one breath, “I’m a pathologist. We do autopsies and analyze anything that is removed at surgery, like an appendix or a lung.” Most people outside the medical world have some vague idea of what a pathologist does, but this idea generally conjures up grisly images. For many, pathology is equivalent to blood and guts, and a pathologist is some sort of social misfit working in some dank and poorly lit basement. “OOO – doesn’t that have something to do with embalming?” asked one visibly nervous secretary.
During my residency, I had collected various specimens from autopsies that showed the evils of smoking and drinking, including lungs and livers riddled with cancer or hearts showing the effects of hypertension or atherosclerosis. They were all stored in a large bucket of formaldehyde that I would take to schools for a very vivid demonstration of the consequences of poor life choices. At one school, a student raised her hand and earnestly asked, “Is someone making you do this job?” One day my friend Rudd peered into my trunk and said “what’s in that big bucket?” She was so intrigued that we immediately had an “organ recital” on her driveway, but her equanimity was unusual.
Pathologists also don’t get much respect among the physician community. The image is typically of the socially inept or English-as-a-second-language misfit who can’t hack it on the front lines of medicine. It is perhaps not surprising that pathology departments are often located in the basement of the hospital. There is a long standing joke stereotyping the different medical specialties, “Internists know everything and do nothing, surgeons know nothing and do everything, psychiatrists know nothing and do nothing and pathologists may know everything, but they are always a day late.”
While television and the movies have generally portrayed physicians as over-sexed and overworked surgeons, pathologists have been largely ignored, with a few notable exceptions. In a 1972 movie, the “Carey Treatment,” James Coburn plays the title role – a pathologist, of all things, who sets out to investigate the botched abortion and subsequent death of a colleague’s daughter and predictably becomes embroiled in the violent world of a drug cartel. Dr. Carey embodies all the traits usually reserved for surgeons. He is handsome, assumes that M.D. stands for “major deity” and surrounds himself with beautiful women. He even mouths off to a surgeon over the OR intercom, “Do you want the diagnosis now or do you want it right?”
The high point of the movie is when Dr. Carey, hospitalized for stab wounds, tussles with a would-be assassin. When Carey gets the upper hand, the drug-crazed killer offers him a deal and begins to pray. Dr. Carey then says the immortal words that have stereotyped surgeons for decades, “There is no God in this room, I make all the decisions.” The writers of this movie must have thought that it was necessary to explain why a lowly pathologist had acquired the persona of a surgeon. Early in the movie Carey confesses to one of his girlfriends that all he ever wanted to be when he grew up was a surgeon, but that “it didn’t work out.” While the movie does manage to make a pathologist look like something better than a feeble misfit, one also gets the impression that such a career should not be anyone’s first choice.
While casting Carey as a pathologist seemed like a curious choice, it began to make more sense when I realized that as a pathologist Carey can be both a physician and a detective, blending two of the basic staples of TV. The TV show Quincy picked up on this theme. Quincy was a crusading pathologist who risked his life to investigate crimes. When we first met, my future husband decided to watch a “Quincy” episode to learn about what I was doing all day. He was aghast to learn that pathologists routinely got shot at in the course of their work.
In 1982 I looked forward to the premier of “St. Elsewhere” which was billed as a real life look at residents in a decaying urban hospital. However, from the first episode, it became clear that the writers had pegged the pathology department as the source of black humor. Dr. Kathy Martin is a totally spacey pathologist and incidentally a nymphomaniac. She seduces her living conquests on the mortuary tables and later gets raped there. Another particularly grisly story line featured a pathologist selling body parts, specifically severed heads. “St Elsewhere” didn’t do pathologists any favors by portraying this specialty as a type of punitive purgatory for wayward internists. When Dr. Peter White is accused of Dr. Martin’s rape, all other medical privileges are stripped and he is sent (to the basement of course) to dabble harmlessly in pathology until the charges are investigated. While he cannot treat patients, apparently he can practice pathology without any particular training.
CSI:Crime Scene Investigation is a current family of TV shows that builds on the basic Quincy formula, with a lot of extra sex and technology thrown in. Instead of the aging Quincy, the detectives are either hunky men or women with exceptionally tight low cut shirts. In Quincy, the opening credits featured the grizzly pathologist in front of a line of policemen. Quincy says, “Welcome to the wonderful world of pathology.” As he rips the shroud off one corpse, all the policemen faint like a row of falling dominoes. CSI certainly includes plenty of blood and guts, but manages to glamorize the whole mess with exquisite slow motion simulations of bullets splintering skulls and shredded arteries spurting blood. The set is filled with all sorts of prop machines with blinking lights while the cast meticulously recreates crime scenes in artfully underlit sets of dark blue light.
Now I have worked in the city morgue, and I can tell you it was nothing like CSI. Every morning we would file into the over air-conditioned morgue that was so brightly lit you wanted to put on a jacket and sun glasses. Corpses gathered from the previous day were arrayed on stainless steel autopsy tables. You were supposed to eye all the bodies and then go stand next to the one that you wanted to work on. It was like picking out a blind date, only a whole lot creepier. There was occasionally a murder case, which was a lot more work than the “DIBs” patients (i.e. dead in bed). It was assumed that these poor souls had died of natural causes and thus warranted no more than a cursory autopsy. Occasionally the chief coroner would sweep into the room like a minor deity, particularly if there was some case that might require a press conference. Dr. Stein had become a faddish celebrity in Chicago when corpses of dozens of victims were unearthed under the basement of John Wayne Gacy, who held the top spot of serial killer for several years. Dr. Stein also was in the news during a prolonged heat wave in Chicago that killed many elderly people. I remember his complaint was not so much that the people had died, but that he was running out of storage room in the morgue.
Certainly forensic pathology has advanced in the past 25 years with fluids and fibers taking center stage, but even discounting the march of technology, it didn’t look like Dr. Stein contributed anything to the examination, and certainly the pathologists in the morgue were no crusading crime fighters like Quincy or the CSI cast. I remember one beautiful spring day we all felt like a road trip, and someone suggested that we visit a crime scene and try to find a bullet. Four of us hopped into someone’s convertible and arrived at what looked like a peaceful leafy neighborhood. We walked around to the back to inspect a porch where the crime had supposedly been committed. A bunch of neighborhood residents were hanging out on the porch, some were smoking dope. When we explained who we were, the residents visibly relaxed, and one said out loud to the group, “Don’t worry, its not vice, it’s just homicide.” We chatted with the folks for a while, made a token look for an embedded bullet, and then called it a day, headed back to the office, and wrote up a report saying that despite a diligent search, no bullet was found. No estimating angles, laser beams tracing a bullet’s path, and no discussion of whether or not the weapon was a Glock with a right twist.
So what do I care if the TV shows are unrealistic? With three different versions of CSI on the air, all in endless reruns on cable TV, I should embrace the newfound glamour and respect for pathologists. When someone asks what I do, I will now say with pride and conviction, “I am a pathologist, like CSI on TV. We solve crimes and make the world a safer place.”
As the autopsy starts, the pathologist reaches for her - - - - - - knife,
Slices open the body and searches for why this soul lost his life.
She inspects lungs and bowels that still glisten and quiver,
And samples each organ by cutting out a representative - - - - - -.
It turns out that human - - - - - - look just like what you buy at the store,
That’s why she has no longer eats organ meats for dinner any more.
Click here for answers
Shakespeare Wrote Doggerel
or about 2 years my mother and I worked together on a book of children’s poetry called Ned’s Journal, which described the “small and big life adventures of Ned,” a 10 year old boy. We were pleased to secure a publisher, Tatra Press, whose only previous publication was a guide to men’s clothing. While the book sold briskly in the 60045 zip code, sales fell dramatically off outside our home town– in fact there were virtually none – but that didn’t really matter. The principle goal was to get the book published.
My mother-in-law, who fashions herself as an arbiter of art and good taste, took a look at the book and said, “Why this is doggerel!” I bristled and gave Pat an unrecognized withering look. But then I realized that Ned’s Journal had that universal doggerelish beat of da-DAH, da-DAH, da-DAH/ dah, DA-da-da, DA-da-da dah. Then my pride of authorship kicked in and I thought yes, Pat is right, this is doggerel, but it was damn fine doggerel. The issue really was why doggerel was dismissed as an art form. I wondered how this poetic genre had gotten its poor reputation but had to go no farther than the on-line definitions of doggerel.
From Wikipedia
Doggerel describes verse considered of little literary value. The word is derogatory, from Middle English. Almost by definition examples of doggerel are not preserved, since if they have any redeeming value they are not considered doggerel. Doggerel might have any or all of the following failings:
• trite, cliche, or overly sentimental content
• forced or imprecise rhymes
• faulty meter
• misordering of words to force correct meter
From www.dictionary.com
dog•ger•el
n. Crudely or irregularly fashioned verse, often of a humorous or burlesque nature.
The derogatory tone of both these definitions is dispiriting, one can almost sense the contemptuous sniff from the anonymous Wikipedia author. If one judges literary value by what is taught in colleges, well, yes, doggerel may be wanting, but my contention is that doggerel is important to our lives and it should not be so cavalierly dismissed as an art. How many wedding albums include yellowed pieces of paper memorializing the awkward verse of a toast, how many birthdays and anniversaries are enlivened by friends and family standing up, willing to embarrass themselves by singing a poorly metered verse in a quavering and off-key voice? Such efforts are typically greeted with joyful groans and cheers in acknowledgement of the creative effort reflecting heartfelt good wishes. We all might like to write sonnets like Shakespeare, but realistically we settle for doggerel.
According to Wikipedia, overly sentimental content is a fatal flaw, but as I was sitting in church this past Sunday leafing through the hymnal, it occurred to me that many of these Presbyterian hymns could be classified as doggerel based on sappiness, to wit:
“Now the darkness gathers, stars begin to peep,
Birds and beasts and flowers soon will be asleep.
When the morning wakens, then may I arise,
Pure and fresh and sinless, in thy holy eyes.”
Don’t you agree that these verses to the hymn “Now the Day is Over” seem trite and oversentimental? And I am sure that I could find other hymns with off kilter meter to show that our treasured hymns fulfill multiple criteria for doggerel.
The online dictionary definition also states that doggerel can be defined by its “humorous and burlesque nature.” Here I see an opportunity to elevate doggerel to the rarified status of Shakespeare, since this towering linguistic icon suffuses all his plays and sonnets with incessant sexual puns and innuendos – the type of sophomoric puns that could be punctuated by a rimshot and an audience groan, progressing to burlesque, bawdy and then downright raunchy references. Shakespeare had the challenging task of appealing both to the masses and the English courts. Plays were wildly popular in Elizabethan England, and it is estimated 1 in 8 Londoners went to a play every week, ranging from the lowly laborers and apprentices, to country gentlemen, to aristocrats to Queen Elizabeth herself. Apparently bawdy and raunchy sexual wordplay was a real crowd pleaser across the entire spectrum of society.
The sexual puns that would be obvious to Shakespeare’s audience are now interpreted by modern readers as the epitome of English eloquence, simply because half of the time we probably don’t realize what Shakespeare is really talking about. By cross referencing “doggerel and Shakespeare” into Google, I stumbled across an interesting book called “Filthy Shakespeare,” which translates Shakespeare’s jargon into today’s vernacular. One of the first things you appreciate is the overwhelming number of idioms for “penis.” Basically you can assume that anything that is longer than it is wide is a phallic symbol. Also Shakespeare’s name itself is a sexual pun, since Will was a colloquialism for penis, vagina and sexual desire. And sorry to report this, but the word Shakespeare can roughly be translated to “masturbator.” So you can only imagine the kind of teasing the poor kid had to put up with.
Examples of Shakespeare’s idioms for male sexual organs include (but are certainly not limited to): beggar, carrot, dewlap, holy-thistle, instrument, kicky-wicky, little witness, needle, pizzle, potato-finger, pudding, three-inch fool and weapon. The corresponding female idioms are more numerous than males and include bird’s nest, bogs, dearest bodily part, low countries (including the Netherlands), medlar, rudder, salmon’s tail, snatch, tongue and velvet. Puns on sex itself include: boggler, change the cod’s head for the salmon’s tail, dance with one’s heels, dribbling dart of love, fill a bottle with a tun-dish, horsemanship, nose-painting, paddling palms and tickle one’s catastrophe. And I am just scratching the surface here.
Shakespeare certainly did not have to depend on clever idioms to get his point across. The following is an example of his signature word play, where the word “will,” repeated 13 times, can mean either Will (referring to a Christian name), or “will” referring to either a penis or vagina. In this sonnet, the Poet wonders if he can join the ranks of the Beloved’s lovers:
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
With thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in will, add to thy Will
One will of mine to make thy large Will more.
Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one Will.
Okay folks, here is the translation from one Paula Kiernan, author of Filthy Shakespeare:
“While other women can only wish for sex, your sexual desires are fulfilled by your Will, and you’d get my penis in the bargain, in fact you would get an excess of sex.
I can perform better than all of your lovers put together and I will keep tormenting you with my sexual advances.
Will you not, with that vagina of yours which is large and spacious from so much use by other men, let me hide myself in you?
Are other men better endowed, and I cannot measure up?
The sea is all water, but it still receives rain, and adds to it abundantly. It’s the same with you.
Even though you are already rich in the number of your lovers, I am asking that you accept me as a lover. I am already aroused and my penis has grown larger.
Please stop saying no to my reasonable advances. Think of all your lovers as being a single one, and treat me as the only one that you desire.”
Now that we know what Shakespeare was talking about, I certainly think that this sonnet meets the burlesque and humorous criteria defining doggerel. I thought it might be quite challenging to show that Shakespeare also meets the second important criteria for doggerel – that of faulty or awkward meter. However, we need look no farther than the fourth line from the bottom (So thou…). The sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, meaning that there are 5 pairs of words, with the accent on the second word in each pair. Each line should thus contain 10 syllables, but low and behold, this single line contains 11 syllables. Apparently Willy Shakes has played fast and loose with the rules of the sonnet game, force fitting the word “being” into one syllable!
I rest my case. Shakespeare wrote doggerel.
So the next time you raise a toast at a birthday, wedding or other event, and stand to read your little ditty, hold your head high - you are in the company of greatness.
Doggerel in honor of Shakespeare
For centuries mothers have had to - - - - - - their children to pick up their clothes,
I imagine a conversation between Ma Shakespeare and Will and here’s how it goes.
“Mother I doth protest mightily that into my quarters you have - - - - - -,
And methinks your accusations of irksome slovenliness are wrongly charged.
I shall be - - - - - - in whatever artful raiment I so chooseth and what’s more,
‘Tis much simpler to pluck my garments when they are strewn on the floor.
Click here for answers
My Saggin' Wagons
couple of years ago we decided to break the pattern of our holiday celebrations, unchanged for the past 25 years. Instead of traipsing from one suburb to the next to touch bases with as many family members as possible, we decided that the four of us would take off on a family vacation where the stress of Christmas and gift giving could be placed into the deep background. So off we went on a guided “multi-sport” adventure to Ecuador, featuring mountain biking, horse back riding and river rafting.
It was there at 8,000 feet in the Andes that I experienced the pleasures of the sag wagon, the vehicle that discretely follows behind you to transport the luggage while you are riding a bike, or to basically piece up the pieces in case you falter. As we headed off on our bikes on the first day, I knew immediately that I would need the sag wagon early and often. I am not a strong cyclist, and was further hobbled by the challenges of the high altitude and the uneven cobbled streets. Plus as I scanned the rest of the group, I noticed that some of the other members were unveiling full spandex outfits, a style that is not only useless for me, but also particularly unbecoming. We took off following along a ridge on a high slope. As a Midwesterner used to totally flat rides – in fact I don’t think that I have ever used more than 2 or 3 gears – I was immediately intimidated by the undulating course. Well at least I should be able to coast some of the time, I thought. However, going downhill was even more difficult than up, since you had to creep along to avoid the potholes. Using the brakes going downhill is not a good sign for an amateur cyclist who doesn’t like going up.
I immediately fell behind and soon I spotted my family and everyone else two curves ahead of me and getting smaller all the time. It heard a car sputtering behind me and as I stopped along side the rutted street I saw the blessed sag wagon. Now here was the quandary – what kind of help did I want? I certainly did not want to hold back the rest of the group who would have to periodically wait for me as I lumbered along, but on the other hand I did not want to make it so pathetically obvious that I was such a weenie. I hit upon an artful compromise. I asked the sag wagoneers if they wouldn’t mind stopping for a smoke or a drink at a café and then they could catch up with me, give me a ride to within a reasonable distance of the lead group, then they could have another drink or smoke, and then repeat. That way I could leap frog along the route, triumphantly arriving at the lunch spot within 10-15 minutes of the rest of the group.
The system seemed to work, though the sag staff was probably awash in drinks and dizzy from nicotine by the time I arrived. The luncheon spread was set out in a grassy meadow overlooking a picturesque valley. I realized that I also had a sag wagon team ahead of me, to arrange the lunch, pick out the picnic spot, make the hotel reservations, and probably prepare contingency plans if it was pouring rain. I guess we are all a collection of intertwined emotional, psychological and physical sag wagons for each other, and the definition of a vacation is when you can set your own sag wagon down and hitch yourself to another. And when you have sag wagons both fore and aft, well -- what you now have is a more expensive vacation.
The next big biking day was more promising. We drove to the top of a mountain and the idea was to coast down. How hard could that be, particularly since this time instead of a rutted cobblestone road, it was a semi smooth paved road. I felt quite confident that I could keep up with the spandex group – any idiot could coast. I had forgotten about the sag wagon, assuming that I would not need one, and then I smelled the unpleasant odor of diesel gas, and there it was right behind me. I bristled – clearly I didn’t need a hovering sag wagon in this situation. There are times where you obviously need to circle every available wagon, there are times when you want the sag wagon in sight, and others where you just need the concept of a sag wagon, and there are situations where others can mercifully call in a sag wagon for you. It was going to be hard to explain the subtleties of the length of the tether in my broken Spanish. I wanted to tell them to take a long break, in fact as long as they wanted and just make one run down the mountain at the end of the day to make sure that I wasn’t splattered on the pavement. Jose and Marcos settled in and I coasted down.
Pretty soon I was truly in the middle of nowhere totally wrapped up in a thick mist. Every now and then the clouds would part to reveal a stunning view of patchwork subsistence farms and the occasional cow. I moved steadily along and when the mists parted again I realized that once again I had fallen hopelessly behind. Perhaps I was more timid than I thought and was not willing to fly down the twisting and turning road, which had multiple blind turns where you could get absolutely flattened by an oncoming truck and thrown over the steep and rocky slope next to the miniscule shoulder. I tried to rationalize my slow pace by pretending that I was more appreciative of the scenery and the few birds, but the truth was that I was going as fast as I could. Pretty soon the small dots of my companions disappeared entirely and I was alone. There were several forks in the road and I just guessed the route, choosing the one that seemed to head down the most.
I began to feel nervous – I had no identification on me and no money – it was all in the sag wagon that I had so casually dismissed. I could envision the headline –“Unknown Amnesic Tourist Nursed Back to Health by Remote Ecuadorian Farmers.” Although I was close to pushing the panic button, I realized that the lack of sag wagon would make a better character-building story, of triumph over adversity and of dogged persistence - though perhaps not on the same scale of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes who fended for themselves by cannibalizing their fallen companions for several months. They finally realized that everyone had give up on them and no rescue was coming - they were entirely on their own. Then one of them heroically climbed out of the Andes wearing nothing by his soccer shoes and a thin parka.
I snapped out of my daydream as I again smelled the sweet scent of diesel. I knew that I could have made it if I wanted, but I didn’t want to keep everyone waiting. Besides, I was on vacation, and this vacation came with a sag wagon at my beck and call. I hopped in and coasted down the mountain.
Even the most confident CEO full of bravura and - - - - - - -
Can have a crisis of confidence or a nervous fluster.
His sag wagon may be discrete - - - - - - - or maids or even his wife
Who all try and pick up the pieces of his messy life.
Other days he lies on a couch and talks to a shrink
But most days he prefers something ------- like the gin that he drinks.
