standBy Bert

That Whole New Year's Thing

2011-12-31T10:20:00.004-05:00

Ok, look. I’ve never been a fan of this holiday. It seems to be about a few things I have a hard time getting on board with: the pressure to go out and do something socially even if you don’t feel like it, the awkwardness, once out, of standing around, while everyone is freaking COUNTING DOWN, no less, wondering if anyone will notice you have no one to kiss, staying up until midnight (I’m not 19 anymore), saying this year sucked, and hoping next year will be better. Not to mention getting shit-faced, which I don’t do anymore. (Add to this, when I lived in New York, never being able to get a cab when you were beyond ready to go home from wherever you were, which was usually at the farthest distance from where you lived, say the World Trade Center, where I spent one bizarre New Year’s Eve, to the Upper West Side.)

For sure, New Year’s Eve has gotten better for me over the years as my life has gotten better – in Chicago there always seemed to be something going on and a ride to and from, and then I met Ben, so now I always have someone to kiss at midnight. You know, someone I want to kiss.

But this year New Year’s has me reflecting, no doubt because for me this isn’t an easy year to throw out with the bathwater. My father died in September, which sucked, and still sucks. So a part of me feels very much like, Yep, I’m super glad this year is over. Woot! But it’s also impossible to overlook the awesome things that happened for me this year: I finished a novel, which more or less happened altogether unexpectedly, and I sold that novel, which you can imagine was also a wonderful surprise. And there were various other wonderful times: three weeks with Ben at an artist’s residency in gorgeous, green, temperature-normal Vermont, where I wrote and made new friends. I taught a real-life class at UT, which I sometimes had to drag my butt to, and which was the last thing I wanted to show up for a week after my dad died, but which turned out to be kind of perfect, an exceptionally engaged, talented, and delightful bunch of undergrads. Ben and I took a trip to Marfa for my birthday. We gained a beautiful new nephew. We saw freaking West Side Story ON THE STAGE.

Most years, you don’t happen lose someone you love so very much. Some years, as I have been through in the past, it seems like every member of my family was coming down with cancer (and/or some other life-threatening condition): there have been years, periods of years, actually, where I have been known to tell people it wasn’t a good time to be related to me. My mother died of cancer in 1998, a few years later, my father was diagnosed with both prostate cancer and Parkinson’s in a relatively short span of time, and my stepfather, after having recovered from throat cancer, had a very serious stroke in 2003. (And sadly, this is the short list of illnesses that befell my relatives in this period.) But in 2001, I got my first book deal, and in 2003, I started dating a super sweet guy named Ben.

I know I’m not breaking any new ground here with my declaration that any year – that life –usually isn’t just bad or good. I’m pretty much just telling you about my shades of the gray for 2011, and I have reason to anticipate that though I am actually really excited about 2012, that it will come with many mixed emotions as well. We’re moving. You know what moving is like, right? It’s never good, and our last move was probably the most traumatic I’ve had (now that I’ve said this, I suppose by comparison, this next one will have to be less so, right?). Leaving Chicago felt as bad as, worse, than any bad breakup I’ve ever had. Ben and I are planning to move to New York, which, a few of you know, was a place I barely looked back on when I left fifteen years ago. I’m excited this time, but I also have reasonable reservations (it’s expensive, it’s crowded, it’s expensive). I’ve got several (exciting) trips on my calendar already, and/but the new book comes out right around the time we should begin packing to move, and/but, and this is where the bittersweet part comes in, there’s a character in my novel based on my dad in his decline with Parkinson’s, which I will undoubtedly be reading parts of again and again for audiences of two or twenty, and so, well, you see what I’m saying. It’s gray.

I endeavor, always, to be in the moment, but I am invariably a huge failure at this. Nevertheless, this idea of being in the moment calls for neither regretting the past nor wishing to shut the door on it, and it also calls for putting aside my expectations of what will come. On the pessimist-optimist continuum, I probably fall well on the optimist side. (Note: there was a full decade or two when I was very far on the pessimist side, albeit with fearful, fleeting glances at the optimist view.) My life is incredibly rich, and fulfilling, and it seems to me that overall, it has really only gotten better (often VERY slowly) over the last twenty years, and I have had, for some time, the strong feeling that this will continue to be the case. That shift in perspective, right there, is probably the miracle for me, regardless of what the next turn of events will be.

So. The New Year’s thing. That’s pretty much it. 2012 will suck when it sucks and it will be great when it’s great and sometimes those things will occur simultaneously. At midnight tonight, after a great meal with good (foodie) friends, I will most likely already be asleep. After that, yeah, I don’t really know.

All The Pretty Status Updates

2010-07-22T09:44:00.007-04:00

So it was actually pretty great being offline, but we weren't in the fields long enough to assess whether we could withstand the world without facebook long-term. We were there just long enough for me to still think continuously in status updates, so here they are, in no particular order:

Back roads are the way to go.

Sirius radio: eh.

I pitched the tent. All by myself.

At campground: Ben leaves the bananas on the table overnight.
Betsy: What about wild animals?
Ben: They don't want bananas.
Betsy: Monkeys do.
In the morning, all that was left of the bananas was the peels.

Vogue magazine is acceptable campground reading.

A six-person tent is the exact right size for two tall people and an 80lb dog. I pitched the tent.

Strange sucking noise outide car.
Ben: Did Percy just make that noise, or did you?
Betsy: I didn't make that noise.
Ben (laughing hard): You're saying Percy made that noise?
Betsy: Yes. Why would I make that noise?
This seemed very funny at the time but I am seeing now that something is being lost in the translation.

Campground showers have not become more cleanly in the time since I last camped.

When you have laryngitis on a long car trip, the urge to comment on every billboard becomes stronger than ever. Suddenly, you will need your every thought about every weird ad or town name to be known. However, I can remember none of these now.

Auto breakdowns: I am a trooper.
Airline mishaps: I am not a trooper.

Outside our bedroom door at my dad's house lives a frog who croaks loudly until about midnight. Ben opens the door and goes "Shhhh!"

We Have Blog

2010-07-16T19:24:00.001-04:00

Oh hi. I figured out how to get back in. Maybe I'll start posting again.

The Awesome and Great Reading Show

2010-01-04T12:19:00.004-05:00

The Awesome and Great Reading Show!

Hey everyone - I was away from the bert for a while due to technical difficulties but I'm back! And if I have any Austin readers who aren't facebook fans, please come to the show - this month we've got Tod Goldberg, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Amelia Gray and Kacy Crowley!

Writers write stories based on songs! Songwriters write songs based on stories!
It's backwards and bizarro awesome and great fun!

This May Be My Andy Rooney Moment

2009-04-16T08:55:00.006-04:00

So picture me with white hair and a cranky look on my face while you read this:

What's the deal with Twitter? Or let me rephrase: Will someone please, for the love of god, explain to me what there is to like about this website, because I am truly, madly, deeply uninspired. Every day this is all I hear about, it's on the news, it's all over facebook, but try as I might, I don't get it. And I've been on there for months.

Granted, myspace and facebook each took me a while to warm to. But not this long.

I have experimented with following only close friends. I have experimented with following news organizations and celebrities. I, who am a known fan of exclamation points, find PTwitty's use exclamation points alarming. I, who has an unhealthy interest in celebrities, am unmoved by the opportunity to know Ashton Kutcher or Spencer Pratt's every thought.

What am I missing?

A lot of times I don't understand the shorthand. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like there's no rhyme or reason to the shorthand, like, everyone seems to have their own and you either get it or you don't. I have to say this too, and this may be just me, but it feels a wee bit like the cool kids party I'm not invited to. I'll give you that John Mayer has sort of a charming sense of humor, but what kind of relationship do we have where he gets to do all the talking? John Mayer and Demi Moore aren't going to answer my tweets. With all due respect, I can't even get Punky Brewster to answer my tweets, and she seems like a very sweet person.

If Lydia Davis and Deb Olin Unferth jump on board, maybe I'll be back. I think those gals make something out of that Twitter thing you kids are playing with these days. Meantime I'll grab my cane and stick with facebook until the next party comes along.

Naked City

2009-01-29T10:06:00.003-05:00

Woke up at 3 am last night and came into the living room and found this program and had to stay up to watch the whole thing... I'm sure some of you have seen this or heard of it, but I had only the vaguest memory of hearing about it - anyway - by the look of it I figured it was very early 60s New York, black and white, and this episode featured Diahnn Carroll as a teacher for the blind or sight-impaired who takes a small group of her students on a city bus and then one of them runs off the bus, loses his glasses, and is lost in the city for the rest of the day. I didn't really know what to expect - it kind of looked like a cross between Dragnet and The Twilight Zone - but the location footage of NY was actually incredible; in this episode they went everywhere from the lower east side to Bethesda Fountain to the Brooklyn Bridge and into Brooklyn and gave you such a sharp sense of the landscape at that time. (Which was slightly before mine, I didn't arrive there until 67.) You could see Jewish delis, bakeries, bars, vegetable markets - and huge piles of rubble and dirt down along the east river - it's hard to think of any parcel of land in NY that's not built on at this point, but it reminded me so much of my childhood when things were a little rougher and darker than they are now. And to boot - this episode, anyway, was incredibly thoughtful - it wasn't so much a cop show as it was a really (really circa 1961) introspective drama - the teacher doubts her methods because she believes they can become independent until this kid gets lost - and then in the end he finds his way home because she had taught him he could. Another interesting detail that was only just dealt with under the surface was the issue of race - her boss is talking to her about it at one point and he's extremely empathetic but in so many words tells her that if this kid isn't found, she's going to be 'held more accountable' - and says something like 'you know what I mean?' Anyway, I can't be getting up at 4 am every night but I really want to see more of this show.

Plus Diahnn Carroll is wearing a really smart suit and looks totally fabulous through the whole ordeal. I tried to find a photo but no luck.

Shortest Conversation Ever In Which Both Parties Knew What the Other Was Talking About

2008-12-30T09:48:00.003-05:00

Me: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.

Alright, admittedly there was a slight bit of context. We were driving up Division Street past where Leo's Lunchroom used to be, and we'd driven past it about a week earlier, when I commented that I wondered if it was now part of Bob San.

Nevertheless, it made us laugh for about five minutes straight, and we decided to communicate like this from herein.

51 Birch Street

2008-11-29T10:53:00.003-05:00

So, this mindblowing documentary is about a fifty-year marriage, and if you haven’t seen it, queue it up now, see it, and then come back and read this, cause I’m gonna spoil this too.

It’s a subject I have become really fascinated by ever since I got married – go figure – although you might think I’d have thought about it more deeply before, given that my folks were divorced, and I waited so long to get married. I mean, that wasn’t by accident. I knew I wanted to try to get it right if I was going to do it. But it wasn’t like I was mired in contemplation about my parents’ marriage, or either of their subsequent ones to any great extent. Probably just to the usual extent. Anyway. This guy starts out just by trying to document his parents and his family and then his mom dies, while he’s still making the film, and the father remarries very quickly (there should be an investigative documentary on this subject alone, I say) and slowly, more gets revealed about their history, and as he comes to think his father may have cheated with his new wife many years before, he discovers his mom’s extensive diaries, and it turns out she had been unfaithful, but that really, that was just one small thing, that she had profound feelings of unhappiness in her marriage, in her life, and all this stuff, and but, then in the end, it turns out that the father and his new wife are actually really in love, for the first time, and somehow all this ends up bringing the father and the son closer together, in letting all these secrets out.

For me, it just brings up, again, the central questions of – why do we do this marriage thing – when the odds are as low as they say they are – and how do we do this marriage thing, and what makes a marriage a good marriage or not a good marriage – are these questions all entirely individual? Or are there any universal truths? Are there cultural truths about it? You’d think I might write some fiction about this – and maybe I will – but I’m still figuring out what the questions are. Would love to hear what all y’all think about it, married, divorced, remarried, divorced parents, whatever. Maybe you can help me figure it out.

Bye, The Wire

2008-11-29T10:10:00.002-05:00

Ben and I watched the last episode of The Wire last night. Oh, man. That was some good shit. Spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen the whole series yet. Really amazing how they wove in all the storylines, and wrapped them up without it being all neat. And so perfect that in the end, they sort of show a sequence where it’s pretty clear that everything will more or less go on as always, in the form of different people and places maybe, but more or less the same. The whole last season, all I really wanted was that Bubbles would get clean, stay clean, and come up out of the basement, so needless to say I’m happy. And as much as I hoped Du’Quan would have a chance, I thought it was perfect that he sort of – took Bubbles place, if you will. I was totally bummed about Omar, and the worst part of that was that I actually saw that one episode out of order, before we’d started watching this season on DVD, at a friend’s house. I don’t know how any of you read this, but I actually thought the end for McNulty was kind of perfect, like, maybe if he weren’t a cop he and Beadie could have a chance. Anyway, goodbye, The Wire, it was great.

Omar.

Bubbles before.

Bubbles after.

More Awesomeness

2008-11-26T09:49:00.003-05:00

So stoked that I figured out how to post this over here. This is my buddy Kacy Crowley (you need her record Cave) singing with the African Children's Choir the other night. We were there, and these kids were amazing, sparkling little lights. Try not to cry. I doubt it's possible.

Kacy with African Children's choir

November 4, 2008

2008-11-25T12:56:00.002-05:00

I was not in Chicago for this, but Ben was in Grant Park that night, lucky! Anyway, you've seen a lot of the footage from the park that night, but he took this in the street, after everyone was leaving the park. Still cheering. Pretty rad. But actually, I'm still cheering now.

No Wonder Cardigans Are So Hard to Come By Lately

2008-11-25T12:17:00.004-05:00

Okay, I am LOVING Mad Men for like sixteen different reasons, not the least of which is the wardrobe. Many of you know my obsession with vintage cardies, the truly special ones of which were increasingly hard to come by even before this show came on. I'll try not to cry too much, because the show is totally worth it. But if you see me repeating the same ones for a while, we can all blame Mad Men. Anyway, I have always loved the clothes of this era, although watching this show makes me really, really glad to be a woman in 2008 who can have the best of the clothes, without the foundation garments or the sexual harassment or the inequality.

NOTE: I have just finished watching Season One on DVD so if you lucky people have cable and you've seen Season Two, DO NOT TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS or I will come out in my nightie and shoot you with a BB gun.

Greatest. Thing. Ever.

2008-11-05T07:58:00.001-05:00

The words I saw on my tv screen last night: President Elect Barack Obama.

'Nuff Said

2008-11-04T10:09:00.001-05:00

(for Obama)

Another Crane Story on Selected Shorts!

2008-11-02T18:49:00.002-05:00

I just found out my story "Ad" is airing on Selected Shorts this week, so check your local NPR listings. I haven't heard this yet (we were supposed to fly to NY for the live show last year, but got snowed in), but it's kind of one big long run-on sentence and I've only read it out loud once myself, so I am really looking forward to hearing what Jill Eikenberry did with it.

VOTE FOR OBAMA! HE'S AWESOME! AND GREAT!

2008-11-02T11:41:00.008-05:00

For the love of all that is good and holy, I implore you, Bert readers, to vote for Obama this Tuesday. As much as I remain optimistic, the race is still too close for my comfort, and what is it all about if it isn't about my comfort, really, and so if there is even one Bert reader who is on the fence in any way (which I can't imagine, seeing as how awesome and great Obama is and since I'm guessing I'm preaching to the choir here, but you never know), I beg of you to consider how dangerous it would be to have McCain and Palin running this country (and god forbid, just Palin). As Tina Fey said of her, she's as smart as me, and that's not good enough. And frankly, I think Tina Fey was being extremely generous in describing her this way, because I'm pretty sure Tina Fey is way smarter. I'm pretty sure I'm way smarter, and I've had some insecurities with my own smartness level over the years, which ought to tell you something.

Also - I've been making calls for MoveOn this weekend, and I urge anyone else who has any little bit of time between now and Tuesday, to volunteer for Obama in any way that suits you. It's actually exciting and energizing, as well as eye-opening. We're almost there - but we aren't there yet.

Listen Up, People of the Internets

2008-10-30T12:49:00.007-04:00

Dear Bloggers Everywhere,

Okay, it has recently come to my attention that some of y’all are like, putting your whole sordid lives out into the blogosphere, and I really, I just, I um, I I I, it needs to stop. Just, just please, make it stop. It’s really not okay. Back in the day, us crazy kids who’ve been around since before the internets, we bought these little books, these little empty notebooks, sometimes they were very pretty on the outside, covered with lovely fabric, and on the inside, these notebooks, sometimes they had lines, I need lines, I can barely read my handwriting without lines, but some of you prefer a blank page, that’s fine too, some of them come with blank pages, maybe you have nice penmanship, maybe you like to draw, or paste in pictures or mementos or what have you, all fine, anyway, we bought these books, back in these pre-internet times we called diaries, nowadays they are sometimes called journals so as not to seem so fourteen-year-old girlish, although I would encourage those of you who prefer the term journal to refrain from using the term ‘journaling’, because as I have said before there is far too much turning of nouns into verbs these days, anyway, some of these blank books, these diaries, they even had locks! (flimsy, they were at best, agreed, but the point, if unclear, is that one was not to open something that had a lock on it, if you were not the keeper of the key) In fact, these books still exist, in greater numbers and greater varieties than ever before. Here are some pretty pictures, you can get most of these and many more just from Paper Source.

Here's one with a lock and a mermaid - what's not to love?

Who doesn't love an uglydoll? I know I do!

This one comes with it's own pencil!

Moleskine - very popular. I always carry one with me.

Simple With Cloud

Love Who You Are - a great suggestion - maybe you could start by using this book!

In these books we called diaries we wrote our private thoughts. Private. In these books we were free to ramble about how mad our moms made us, how that cute boy did not notice us, how drunk we got at the frat party, and whatever else. In my own, it would be repeated decades of: this boy this boy this boy this boy mom this boy this boy this boy this boy I’m depressed this boy this boy this boy what is wrong with me. Trust me when I tell you that that is all you need to know about that, that is all I will ever share with you about that, and if you want to know more about that you will have to pry those diaries out of my crypt.

I am both a writer and a blogger. It’s super great and fun to have a blog on which to throw out some random stuff that interests me, and I encourage anyone to do the same. There are plenty of blogs I follow on a regular basis, from personal ones to ones on various subjects that interest me. But for me, as much as some of my stuff, fiction and here, begins in autobiography, I choose to write fiction for any number of reasons ranging from I’m just better at it to I just like it better to what’s true and what isn’t is my own damn bidness. It’s not even that I wouldn’t consider writing a memoir someday, if I was moved to. I haven’t been, thus far. But maybe what I’m talking about here is a matter of boundaries. I feel very clear, for myself, about what I would and wouldn’t write about in my blog. Which brings me to another point I think is kind of interesting. It has been said about the writing on this blog, and of my writing in general, is that it’s honest. I really hope that’s true, and I take it as a great compliment. But to me, there’s a big difference between honesty and too much information.

Do I have to read what you write? Hell, no, and I generally don’t. But for your own good, and for the love of god, if you must write every last grisly detail online, take advantage of the privacy options, and keep your blogs private, or choose a program that allows you to be selective about your readers, say your two best friends, or whoever it is that you might actually talk to face to face about these private things. You understand that employers look at this stuff, right? Maybe you were born rich and don’t care about employers. Surely, then you understand that random creepy people look at this stuff, right?

I am now done with my rant/plea for the day. Thank you for your time.

Yours truly,

Elizabeth Crane

Austin Events

2008-10-28T18:04:00.003-04:00

Hey Y'all!

Come to some readings and stuff in Austin!

This Sunday, November 2, 8:00 pm at the Texas Book Festival:

Austin Bat Cave
1807 W. 11th St
Panel: The Worst Years of Your Life: Writing About Adolescence
with Owen Edgerton, ZZ Packer, Andrew Sean Greer, Robert Boswell, Amber Dermont, Mark Jude Poirier

Five Things Reading Series
Friday, November 14th, 7:00 pm
Do512
2208 S. Lamar
(more info to come)

Follett's Intellectual Property
Tuesday, November 18th, 5:30 pm
2402 Guadalupe St.

These People Cannot Catch a Break

2008-10-11T10:06:00.004-04:00

Oh man. Ben, Lisa (visiting from Los Angeles) and I watched Pelle the Conqueror last night - arguably, an excellent, excellent movie. But never have I had so much gratitude (fine, any) for not being a Swede trying to hack it in Denmark at the turn of the century, holy toledo. Jeebus. This movie is brutal, people, utterly relentless. You can't believe this many bad things could happen in one movie. Relentless. But you know, worth seeing. Just be sure to have your Kleenex handy, and maybe take an intermission halfway through to regroup or something.

Why We Don't Have Cable

2008-10-07T11:57:00.002-04:00

I do not speak one word of Spanish. Okay, well, crap. That’s a lie. Truly, I do not speak Spanish. I speak a few words of Spanish. I wanted a punchier first sentence. I usually write fiction. Cut me some slack. Here’s a list of Spanish words I know, off the top of my head:

1. maricon (sp?)
2. conio
3. mira

(this is the point in my list where you might be figuring out that I grew up in a neighborhood with a significant Spanish-speaking population) (and also where I might point out that I am fluent in swear words in several languages)

4. ola
5. abuela
6. supermercado

So I think it goes without saying at this point that for me to watch as much Telemundo as I do is curious at best. But I haven’t had cable in years, and the truth is, Telemundo can be a hell of a lot more entertaining than some shows in languages I do speak.

Occasionally I watch the telenovelas. Sometimes I watch the talk shows. On one, there is a very animated middle-aged lady with big curled blonde hair and a push-up bra. Actually, I’m pretty sure that being a guest on this show requires a push-up bra and if you do not come prepared, it’s like going to a fancy restaurant and getting a dinner jacket – they’ll provide one for you. Guests on this show include a lot of musical acts with, in addition to push-up bras, short skirts, and very bad choreography (which may be a function of the fact that the set seems to be the size of my bathroom). Sometimes if there’s some event going on they cut away to stars on red carpet. Not speaking the language, I like to try to figure out if they’re pop stars or soap stars and frankly sometimes it’s hard to tell. Sometimes I also watch the talk shows in the vein of Jerry Springer or Maury Povich where the people have very long titles underneath with only one or two words I can catch, like “papa,” enough to surmise that someone is trying to find out which of two “papas” someone’s baby belongs to.

Plus it’s just fun to say, “Sabado Gigante!”

Mostly, though, I love to watch American movies in Spanish. It works fairly well if it’s an action movie. There’s very little dialogue, none that you couldn’t figure out fairly easily, anyway, and lots of dramatic action and expression. I watched the entirety of Anaconda on Telemundo, a movie I would never have watched in English in spite of the presence of Owen Wilson. (Although he gets eaten by the snake fairly early on. Oh, sorry, did I give too much away? People getting eaten by the anaconda?) And let me say I am no friend to snakes, they skeeve me out, and I certainly don’t like big giant ass ones.

But as films to watch in a language you don’t speak go, this is a perfect example. You have a cast of characters on a rickety boat in a swamp somewhere. Jennifer Lopez is the sexy one, Kahri Wuhrer is the other sexy one who’ll probably get killed, which we know because she used to be on MTV. Ice Cube is the black one, Eric Stolz is the weird one. Some of them don’t get along. Jon Voight seems to be the egotistic leader, which you can tell by the determined look on his face. One is as skeevey as the snake itself. They fight. It’s probably about how to kill the snake, or a money issue. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that the skeevey one eventually gets eaten by the snake.

What’s fun about watching movies in Spanish is that it forces you to actually pay attention. I’m inclined to be reading a book while watching TV, which you can’t do if you’re watching in languages you don’t understand. Granted, the very title of Anaconda in and of itself is probably as much attention as need be paid. Big snake, got it. Talky dramas, for obvious reasons, don’t work as well, although it can be interesting to watch a better movie in Spanish, to see if people really are good actors. I saw a bit of that vampire movie where Nicolas Cage eats a cockroach, in Spanish, and, you know, in any language this is not enjoyable, and makes me rethink Nicolas Cage, who I’ve liked in English.

Anyway, just to refer back to the title, imagine all the things I’d watch that I don’t need to watch if we had more channels. We had cable for three weeks when we first got to Austin and it was AWESOME – do you know there’s a whole show about throwing all the junk out of someone’s house? Think about it! There are enough people out there who have a house full of junk to warrant an entire TV show, not just a special two-part episode of Oprah. And who can resist reruns of 90210, or all-day marathons of The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency or What Not to Wear, even when I want to yell at Clinton and Stacy not to just leave the tattoey hipster be! On cable I want to watch everything and nothing. The only shows I truly cannot watch are the ones that show surgeries, real or fake, and The Hills. Thoroughly unwatchable. I do not have any idea who’s watching this show. I tried. But the conversation is like, Are you going to the party? I guess. Is Lo going to the party? I don’t know. Okay, well, I guess I’ll go. But what if there’s drama? I don’t know. And then cut to the party and the drama is about as dramatic as the pre-party discussion about the drama. Even writing this is putting me to sleep.

My New Thing: Little Houses

2008-09-13T09:59:00.011-04:00

Austin has a cool mix of houses, a lot of old little bungalowy houses, with some modern ones mixed in. Most of them aren't huge, and it seems that very often the new construction is considerate of the general scale of the surrounding area. The one we're in has one bathroom, one bigger bedroom, living room, sun room - but I'm realizing that any much more room than this and I wouldn't spend time in whatever extra rooms I happen to have. Our place in Chicago is bigger than this house, I'd say, especially including the storage we have in the attic - no complaints, mind you, I love that place - but sometimes when Ben's in the office and I'm in the bedroom - I don't want to have to yell, or, you know, get up and walk to the other end of the house to say the three words I feel he needs to know at any given moment. Here, everything's in easy reach. It's cozy, without feeling claustrophobic. The sun room makes a nice office for both of us to work in at the same time and Ben even has room to do a little painting.

Not that I have ever had any interest in moving into a McMansion - I'm staunchly anti-McMansion aesthetically and otherwise - but these smaller homes here have such character and modesty and charm. All I want one day, when we own a home, is a designated craft area that isn't in a part of the house I can only use when it's a perfect 70 degree day. (My sewing machine is in the attic, and winter/dead summer sewing - not enjoyable.) And I've never really had a proper crafts table with all my stuff in easy reach for - spontaneous crafting!

I think this one is especially cute, even though it doesn't have the traditional front porch.

This one is brand-new, and seems like it's trying to fit in, but is just a little too big, I think.

Pink Flamingos

2008-09-12T16:42:00.003-04:00

A classic, or so I'm told. Ben thought it was hilarious. I don't have a very strong stomach, so I couldn't watch the whole thing. But lucky me, I got to see how it ended...

Critters We've Seen In Austin So Far

2008-09-12T16:22:00.007-04:00

A whole family of deer we saw as we were leaving a party. Two full-grown, five little ones.

A turtle in a parking lot. Ben picked him up and put him on the grass. This guy was about soup bowl-sized, but I saw one about twice as big the other day when I didn't have my camera.

A peacock. Or - peahen, I guess. We actually saw her boyfriend as well, but he was gone by the time we got the camera out.

Ben has seen an armadillo, but I have not.

9/11/08: UT Austin Campus

2008-09-12T16:15:00.002-04:00

I thought this was a nice thing to see yesterday. Today it was gone.

Boasting Not Necessary Here

2008-09-09T18:01:00.002-04:00

I saw an ad for some fancy face cream or something that promised "Five percent of every penny we earn will go to charity!"

All well and good. But the phrasing, not so much. I would suggest maybe just going with the five percent and leaving off the every penny. Otherwise, all I can think about is the other ninety five percent of every penny that's going in your pockets, fancy face cream company.

Notes from Austin: The Weather

2008-09-09T17:54:00.003-04:00

Greetings from Austin!

Finally, internet service! As such, I will try to provide more frequent reportage, Austin-related and non.

Austin-weather related:

One: instead of saying 20 % 'chance of rain' down here, the weather folks say
20 % 'rain chance.' Which is a little bit poetic, I think.

Two: I also heard this on the weather the other day. 'It's about 86 degrees right now, but it'll warm up later.' This was said with absolutely no irony whatsoever.

More soon!

Dream Chicago

2008-08-30T08:33:00.004-04:00

Total bummer, I have to miss this, but if you're in Chicago, you don't!

Steppenwolf is putting on a show of Chicago-centric stories in Millenium Park at the Pritzker, September 8, at 8:00 pm for free! Martha Lavey will be performing my story, Jesse Jackson, He Lives in Chicago, and she's a superstar, and did such an amazing job with my story Football for Selected Shorts.

Here's a linky.

There's a very cool green beetle on my window who just flew in to insist you go see it!

Last-minute crafts

2008-08-14T11:05:00.004-04:00

'Cause, you know, I didn't have enough to do what with getting ready for Texas and all - but actually I saw these little rag bracelets on whipup.net and they take about three minutes to make and I have absurd amounts of scraps around.

Talk Show

2008-08-13T18:29:00.003-04:00

When I was in college my friend Karen and I used to amuse ourselves by pretending we were on a talk show, usually David Susskind. I was usually Jordan Brooks, famous person.

That has nothing to do with this, really. Just something fun to check out.

You Kill Me

2008-08-10T18:34:00.004-04:00

Ben and I watched this the other night and I had low expectations mostly because as much as I think Ben Kingsley is a great actor, he tends to be in movies I don't like or want to see (one notable exception: House of Sand and Fog). Please don't hate on me for not loving Sexy Beast, 'cuz I know there's going to be a comment that says Did you see Sexy Beast? and the answer is yes I did see Sexy Beast and I didn't love it.

Anyway, this movie You Kill Me was a lovely surprise, as you might expect from a romantic comedy about an alcoholic hit man. But it was really funny and Kingsley was great and there you have it. I'll try not to judge a Ben Kingsley movie anymore before I see it.

Dark Movies and Lunch

2008-08-10T18:33:00.009-04:00

So we went to see The Dark Knight the other night and I actually liked it just fine even though the four of us who went agreed that maybe the last half hour had a little more going on than was necessary in terms of hostage-holding and storylines and such, not to mention that the last half hour was maybe a half hour extra of Dark Knight than was really needed given it was getting near ten o clock and you know where I like to be at that hour. Anyhoo, I wasn't dying to see it except for wanting to see Heath Ledger, who totally lives up to the hype, I say, and I couldn't help feeling a little sad about not seeing what he'd have done with the rest of his career after this and Brokeback Mountain. But that's not why I'm here. I'm here because as a rule, I'm just not into movies that are dark. Dark themes, fine. Dark-ness, not so much. I like to be able to see what's in the picture. Also, me, I like a movie with a woman in it. That's a bit tangential, this movie has a woman in it, but as another rule, some of these big movies are very dude-heavy. I like a movie with a woman in it. Also, as a meal, I don't care much for dinner. I prefer lunch. I had two fantastic dinners at Lula in the last few days, but I'd just assume have had them earlier in the day. That's all I'm saying.

A rule

2008-08-10T18:33:00.004-04:00

If you live in a city, or are in a city, you are not allowed to wear a shirt that bears the name of that city.

So, if you go visit a city, and you buy a t-shirt that bears the name of that city, you are only allowed to wear that shirt after you return to your own city.

Exception, sort of: You are allowed to wear t-shirts that bear the name of sports teams from your own city. I mean, I wouldn't. But you can.

Jeff Koons

2008-08-10T09:37:00.005-04:00

Whoa. I can't do this painting justice here because it is billboard sized. And this is the tame one in the series. So you'll just have to go see it yourself.

Ben and I went to the Jeff Koons show at the MCA yesterday. Intense.

Make It Stop!

2008-08-10T09:22:00.005-04:00

Do you ever just get the feeling like the world thinks there's only one thing going on, because it's so omnipresent that it just seems like an endless loop that will only stop when the next thing the world thinks is the only thing going on comes around? Because lately when I turn on the TV or the internets, this is all I see: Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus Miley Cyrus Miley Cyrus Miley Cyrus. Miley Miley Miley Cyrus Cyrus Cyrus. Miley Miley Miley Miley Hannah Montana Miley Cyrus Miley Cyrus Miley Cyrus. Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley Miley MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley Jonas Brothers. MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyJonas Brothers.
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMileyMiley
MileyMileyMileyMileyMiley Cyrus. Jonas Brothers. Miley Cyrus.

Ben Brandt at Lula

2008-08-08T10:09:00.004-04:00

Two great things in one:

Ben Brandt + Cafe Lula

2537 N. Kedzie
Closed Tuesday

The show will be up through November 4!

The paintings are for sale!

The food is yummy!

Join Me Tuesday Night for a Farewell Quickie

2008-08-08T09:53:00.001-04:00

Quickies! The reading series! Started by one of my awesome students! Get your mind out of the gutter, what did you think I meant?

August 12
Innertown Pub
1935 W Thomas
Chicago, IL
7:30pm

Ta Da!

2008-08-02T17:11:00.002-04:00

This is the rug I made. I made a rug. There is a dog on it. That is our dog. I did not make him.

Harvey Milk

2008-07-24T11:29:00.003-04:00

Wow. Ben and I watched The Times of Harvey Milk last night - I highly recommend it. For anyone who doesn't know the story of Harvey Milk, it's a pretty amazing one. He was a the first openly gay city supervisor in San Francisco, assassinated along with the mayor, George Moscone, by a former supervisor, Dan White. One of the worst parts of the story is that White only served about five years, and got off easy because of the famously ridiculous "Twinkie" defense, stating that he had snapped because of too much sugar and junk food. (White committed suicide less than two years after his release.) In any case, it's a moving and thought-provoking story - this was thirty years ago, but it made me think about what's changed and what hasn't since then, and I feel like we still have a long way to go. He was quite an inspiring character, and it would have been nice to see what he could have done had he lived, since he was instrumental in getting a proposition vetoed to allow gay teachers to keep their jobs, among other things.

P.S. Looking for the photo, I discovered that there's a Milk biopic coming out later this year starring Sean Penn. I might have cast Adrien Brody... but either way I'll be eager to see it.

Two Two Two Anthologies

2008-07-14T11:01:00.003-04:00

Hey there good people of the internets! Right now I have stories in two, countem two anthologies that just came out:

Who Can Save Us Now? A superhero anthology, which features a brand-new (illustrated!) story called Nate Pinckney-Alderson, Superhero

and

Dzanc Books Best of the Web, which features my story Promise from You Must Be This Happy to Enter.

What Would Courtney Do?

2008-07-07T09:59:00.013-04:00

I have one record by Hole I may have listened to three times. That’s it.

But I’m obsessed with Courtney Love. I dream of Courtney Love.

I read articles about Courtney Love, I read interviews with Courtney Love, I study photos of Courtney Love.

(I don't know what it means, no.)

Probably, her music would also be a good place to look, but it’s not her music I’m interested in. I want to be Courtney’s friend.

It’s thoroughly transparent, my Courtney obsession, if you know me. Even if you’ve barely heard of me, to know nothing more than that I once loved the Carpenters is to know enough about why I am so fascinated by Courtney Love, why I love even just the sound of her name, but if you still don’t get it, I can spell it out, that’s fine.

(Oh, yes.)

I’m no Courtney Love.

Courtney Love says what she wants and does what she wants and does not seem to care what anyone thinks. I want me some of that.

In my dreams, Courtney is my best friend. She does not think I am uncool. I’m not just talking about daydreams. I have dreamt of her while sleeping. More than once.

I first became interested in Courtney Love by way of a certain hipster I was dating some years back.

(Just say no.)

Certain Hipster didn’t profess to being a fan of hers, in fact, I recall him mentioning he didn’t really even like music much at all, which is actually more mind-boggling to me than if he’d said he listened exclusively to yodeling or zither music or polka or something and which probably should have clued me in to our romantic incompatibility because What? No one doesn’t like music, that’s like saying you don’t like breathing, that’s like, I must have misheard you, you must have said something that rhymes with music, but wait, nothing rhymes with music, it’s like orange, so you must have said it and if you did say it there is something seriously wrong with you because that is not a preference so much as it can only be a disorder that probably warrants medication or perhaps an operation of some kind because the only explanation for someone not liking music would be if they didn’t have ears, maybe, although from what I’m told even hearing-impaired people like music, so it would be more like if you were just missing a critical element of, um, humanity, and as far as I can imagine must lead an utterly joyless, blank existence in which pierced eyebrows and tattoos and ironic t-shirts step in and somehow try to fill the musicless void of your world, either that or now that I think of it perhaps means that if it is not some sort of medical condition that he was an alien. Nobody doesn’t listen to music. Maybe he was just blaspheming, or maybe he was testing me, like I was supposed to say, Ha ha, that’s funny, no music, if so for sure I failed; it was back in the day when I was still more inclined toward polite nodding than openly declaring opinions, which personal era, as you can see, has passed. Sorry – this was a while ago now but apparently I’m still working it out. Anyway, I do remember him mentioning that he knew people who knew Courtney (in retrospect this information alone should have told me I wasn’t cool enough for him; at that time I wasn’t even hanging around people who’d ever heard of Courtney) and after we broke up (he loved me, but not loved me loved me) I got it into my head that if I could understand Courtney Love, then married to about the hippest hipster ever of all time, I could understand what had gone wrong in our relationship and perhaps be a little more Courtney next time.

Look, I’m trying to be honest here, you wanna mock me, that’s fine, but I’m giving you the truth. It’s what Courtney would want.

If Courtney Love has a feeling or an opinion or an impulse to flash a boob, she puts it out there, right, wrong, whatever.

Courtney Love code requires putting any and all thoughts, pretty much whatever comes into her head, however fleeting, out into the world for all of us to consider, with absolutely no regard for consequence and even less for what anyone thinks about it. Courtney Love thinks cheese is satanic. I am not making that up. Could I make up something better? No, I could not. It’s not that I haven’t occasionally said things before I thought them through. I once used the word “awesome” no less than three times at an academic luncheon. Unlike Courtney, I am a person whose day will be ruined by such a thing. I am a person who keeps her boobs safely harnessed inside her shirt. I am a person who writes rough drafts of letters. That may not even be a bad thing, necessarily, but it is very unCourtney-like. I imagine Courtney to be the kind of person who, if she writes letters at all, writes them on whatever happens to be closest, even if it is not a paper product, even if it’s a lampshade, and gives it to her assistant to figure out how to mail, or if she does actually have some sort of expensive stationery product, like nice letterpress notecards with CL running though a little ribbon on the top, would spill coffee on them and probably not even say “Shit” and give it to her assistant to mail out without thought of an apology. Probably with thought of, “This person is fucking lucky to be getting my coffee-stained note!” I began life as the kind of kid who, fearful of any possible controversy, answered questions like, “What kind of cookies do you like?” with “What kind of cookies do you like?” and then when you told me what kind of cookies you liked I would say that I liked those cookies too. Even if you said your favorite cookie was banana oatmeal honey walnut chocolate chip I would say banana oatmeal honey walnut chocolate chip was my favorite too, although I will tell you now without hesitation, after many years of therapy, that although these ingredients are all quite delightful individually, this is way too many ingredients for the good of one cookie and if you know one thing about me besides my Carpenter love you know that I do not mix nuts and sweets. I imagine little Courtney Love answering the question any number of ways involving the word “fuck,” possibilities including but not limited to, “What the fuck kind of cookies do you think I like?” or, “I don’t fucking eat cookies, bitch.”

Not to get too far off subject, but my interest in Elizabeth Wurtzel is similar, if not as epic.

(Note: also flashing boob.)

Wurtzel is probably the literary equivalent of Courtney Love, and I might feel bad about saying what I’m about to say if the entirety of her book Bitch weren’t so, well, bitchy, if it didn’t practically beg me to. In fact, Elizabeth W. has the hubris to describe Courtney’s entire existence as “calamitous” on page seven, and if I had the inner resources to comb the entire four hundred plus pages again for other Courtney references, I would, but I don’t. The fact that I withstood the reading of this book in its entirety even once, is a feat that should merit some sort of acknowledgment. Nevertheless. Although I don’t covet her approval in the same way, or – at all, I have read all of her books with a similar desire to understand – well, something about myself ultimately, via her unlike me-ness, and it’s a safe bet that I’ll read whatever she spits out next. What continues to fascinate me about her is how incredibly bright she is, how observant she can be both about herself and the world, and yet how thoroughly she is just not getting over herself enough to see the traffic accident that is so apparent from this side of the road. To be honest, I am sure that a great deal of what interests me about her is that I do see myself in there, if a few degrees less Cosmo cover goes to Harvard. I have always been a person who believes herself to have a good deal of self-awareness and yet sometimes not quite enough to keep me from making the same mistakes about fourteen times or however many more than once I need to in order not to do it again. But that Elizabeth seems inclined to make her mistakes about forty-eight times, and then to write about them with this compelling combination of charisma, ego, talent, brains and apparent lack of concern about what anyone will think of it. She’s just slightly less in-your-face than Courtney about it, undoubtedly only because she’s not a rock star, and I suspect, is the needy moat to Courtney’s fortress of pain. (It makes sense to me.) When I read Prozac Nation, my overwhelming thought was, Well, she may very well need Prozac but I think she also has a drug problem. When I read Bitch I realized how right I was about the drug problem. Never has there been a book that’s a better argument for an intervention than that one. I imagine relatives and friends and random people in her famously long acknowledgments sitting in a huge circle wordlessly holding up copes of her naked self on the cover of that book as E. walks in, forced to admit it’s time to book a suite at Hazelden. Naturally, when I read More, Now, Again, her book about her recovery from Ritalin addiction, I was hardly surprised, but this time I can’t quite guess what the next book will be. She has one book I haven’t read, called Radical Sanity, filed under “self-help”, I kid you not. There are undoubtedly limitless ways to go on the joke front here, but I’ll just say that I fear for any woman who chooses a book by Elizabeth Wurtzel as a guide to life over virtually anything else in the self-help section. A woman would do better to entrust herself to Chicken Soup for People Who Love Lindsay Lohan’s Soul or whatever random Soup title is on the table this week. Cripes. Do you realize what it takes to get me to use a word like cripes? I don’t say cripes. A peek inside this book reveals some tips from Elizabeth, including “eat dessert,” “be strong,” “have opinions,” “say your prayers,” “embrace fanaticism,” “enjoy your mistakes,” and “be gorgeous.” Cripes again. This is alarmingly close to my own life, but I wouldn’t offer most of it up as advice. I love my life now, but I’m much more inclined to say, “For the love of god, don’t do what I did.”
I’ve always wished Wurtzel would just use her superpowers to write fiction, because I really do think she’s quite talented and could translate that into a real knockout if she wanted to, plus it might actually be a positive step in her personal evolution to write about something besides herself. Ok fine, I’m no one to talk. I am to be sure, my own favorite subject. All I know is that I have known people like her, it is extremely easy for me to imagine being friends with her in that kind of too-close-for-anyone’s-good friendship where the person drives you absolutely crazy because they have everything going for them and yet just cannot get it together, and that in my mind, Elizabeth W. and I get together and I shake her shoulders (because as we know shoulder-shaking is always a surefire method for straightening people’s lives out), and say “Come on, lady! Cut it out!” But the truth is, the few times I’ve (metaphorically) shaken shoulders, it has come to naught, and I’m not really much of a shoulder-shaker anyway. I’m much more of a people-pleaser who would probably meet Elizabeth Wurtzel and tell her only what I really like about her work and ask her where she got her jeans and then try to have coffee with her.

It occurs to me only at this late date that my desire for a more Courtney mindset had everything to do with my unfortunate decision to drive across country with a man I barely knew, a man who was against electricity, a man who despised all things money including anyone who had any, a screenwriter who didn’t believe in scripts, a man whose waistband was hitched inexplicably high for someone under the age of sixty-four.

(In real life, not as bad as this from the waist up, but still...)

This was a guy you would never describe as “cool” unless perhaps you too were against electricity, which seems like a small group to me. Was he extremely bright? Yes. Was he sort of cute? I guess. Did I find him moderately amusing? Once in a rare while, he didn’t make me want to cry. But I think the more important questions are: Was I deeply in debt and looking to get out of town any way I could? Yes. Was he as creatively messed up as anyone I’d ever dated? Fo ‘shizzle. Did warning bells go off on or about the time of our first date? Warning gongs, more like. Warning steamships knocked me over as they cruised up the streets of the Upper West Side, sailors yelling off the side, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU OR ANYONE WITH THE LAST BIT OF MENTAL HEALTH IN THEM TRAVEL IN CLOSE QUARTERS WITH THIS MAN. I used to describe myself, often, as a person who made terrible decisions with her eyes wide open, particularly when it came to men. I was never part of the I Can Change Him school. I always know that’s out of my hands. For me it was more like, the But He’s So Cute school or the No One Else Is Banging Down My Door school or, most often, the Well, This Might Be An Interesting Ride school. There was nothing that wasn’t obviously filled with potential for disaster from my first date with… well, why don’t we call him “Mickey Rourke”… ew, no, let’s call him “What’s That Guy’s Name Who Played Buddy Holly?”… scratch that, too long, still not cute enough… what about “Robert Downey, Jr.”… no, that might actually have been fun… gee, maybe I’m in touch with my inner Courtney after all… how about let’s just call him “Bring On The Crazy #468”.

I doubt that the question of what Courtney would do is ever a conscious one, if it is, I invite anyone to admit it. Bizarro indeed would be the life modeled on Courney’s. One is probably enough. So this wasn’t at the forefront of my mind when I got the call from Bring On The Crazy inviting me to go. At the forefront of my mind was, I have no job, I have no money, my rent is late as usual, New York is making me want to beat myself over the head with a mace, and since I no longer drink, my options for distracting myself from all this seem limited. Cut to the telephone ringing and a conversation not unlike this:

BOTC #468: Hey, I just bought a car for forty bucks, do you want to come meet me in LA tomorrow and drive to Florida with me to meet my mom with whom I have a lifetime of unresolved issues?
Me: Why yes, I’d like that very much.
BOTC #468: Wait, this is probably a terrible idea. Forget I said it. I really need to concentrate on the “screenplay” I’m writing. (BOTC #468 makes air quotes even though he’s on the phone.)
Me: Yeah, you’re right. Just the same, I can’t really think of a better way of not dealing with my life right now.
BOTC #468: Alright then. I guess it would help to have someone share the driving. You can drive a stick, right?
Me: No.
BOTC #468: Oh well, that’s okay. I can teach you.
Me: (silent, thinking about the time my dad, who I do get along with, tried to teach me how to drive a stick, and I almost rolled backward down a hill while simultaneously being yelled at by a cop as though I ought to know how to propel the car in a forward motion)
BOTC #468: One of us can just take the bus home if it doesn’t go well.
Me: Okay, then, I’ll see you tomorrow!

Alright, the conversation was a little longer and considerably more fraught with mind-games. BOTC #468 was all but certified in coming up with the exact right thing to make me feel, well, whatever he felt like making me feel, one of which was never “happy.” Nevertheless, I was on a cheap flight to LA faster than you could say, “You may just have made the worst mistake of your life,” and I didn’t take it as a good sign that BOTC #468 was late picking me up when I got there.

Pummeling home the masochistic aspects of the trip (which I suppose implies there were some non-masochistic aspects of the trip, which there weren’t), it wasn’t as though I was even getting any sex out of it. BOTC #468 believed sex was something not to be entered into lightly, like say a trip across country after four dates in a vehicle that cost forty dollars. But as long as we’d made the decision, it wasn’t anything a little unlicensed psychoanalysis couldn’t make worse. Highlights of the trip included arguments about: why having babies was selfish, misguided and wrong, why marriage and monogamy were prehistoric, unnecessary conventions, why my wearing makeup was a mask and showering regularly was a cultural custom the purpose of which eluded him, why he planned to move to Costa Rica to live an alternative filmmaking lifestyle without running water, why I still, in my thirties, had unresolved issues with my mother, why he still, nearing forty, had unresolved issues with his mother, why mothers everywhere were more or less the root cause of everything that ever went wrong anywhere ever (but mostly in the United States, see sub-why, why the U.S. is second only to mothers as the leading cause of anything ever going wrong anywhere), why every single thought in our heads is unoriginal because it’s in some way sold to us by the man, and that advertisers are probably developing new ways to program our heads even as we sleep. And I’d like to say? This is a short list. Sightseeing on this trip was limited to an overnight in Joshua Tree, one hot spring at a quirky youth hostel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, two hours in the French Quarter of New Orleans (by myself, while he went off to a café to “write”), and souvenirs included whatever I could get at a gas station. I took about three photos during the entire two weeks, knowing this wasn’t a trip I cared to commemorate. Summing up: was this better than staying home? Actually it was, in that worse-before-it-gets-better sort of way. In the absolute most circuitous way possible, via this supremely calamitous road trip, I had come to understand that I had to get out of New York once and for all, which decision, if also made with no backup plan whatsoever, ended up being on my top five list of best decisions ever made, top two or three if you count decisions I made with little or no real consideration. Within months, I was living in Chicago, er, well, in the hipster’s building… but I’ve digressed enough. It all worked out.

I maintained, for some time, that this relationship ended because I wasn’t Courtney enough. BOTC had openly told me about any number of ex-girlfriends who sounded thoroughly out of their minds. What I was at the time was depressed. I correctly predicted that like many of my previous BOTCs, as soon as we broke up (because there was never any question that this would end, and not well – in spite of my poor decision making in this area, I never had it in me to stick with these people for too long) this one would soon be committed to someone else. What I didn’t anticipate was that he would marry rich and bear children. I’m running under the assumption that they have electricity, and frankly, I wonder how he can sleep at night with like, appliances and running water. No matter. I’m happily married now, and we are not ashamed to admit that we likes us some stuff.

Getting back to Courtney, yes, I know she has some issues. Don’t we all? She’s a bright chick, if you haven’t noticed. Plus I saw her on Rosie O’Donnell a long time ago talking about her eBay obsession with Little Kiddles which means we have at least one thing in common for sure even though I only have one and she’s probably missing one if any.

I had all of these:

This is what we had before Hello Kitty was born.

She had a helicopter!

Kiddle Kologne

Wouldn’t it be so much fun to hang out with Courtney and order pizza and smell all her pristinely plasticy-floral scented Little Kiddles and tell each other your life stories all in one day and ask her what she thinks about someone not listening to any kind of music and when she goes off for like forty minutes about how not listening to music is so thoroughly fucking nonsensical it makes listening to Mister Mister and Quarterflash

Take! These broken wings!

I'm gonna harden my heart... I'm gonna swallow these te-ars...

cool just by comparison which is freaky like she’s reading your mind’s record collection and you find a small opening to say “Right?” and feel totally validated when she describes the person your hipster said he knew as a “bitch-ass ho” and that she totally kicked that girl’s bony ass once and if you wanted she’d totally be into going out and kicking his ass right now, which you pass on because he’s actually become a friend and you’re not especially into ass-kicking even though you feel like it sometimes when people don’t use their turn signal. Also you try to think of any celebrities Courtney would care about that you even almost slept with which you can’t because there are none and so you skip the part about making out with a Baldwin because you know she wouldn’t care which one it was anyway, and totally become super codependent on each other instantly and ask her if she was always like how she is now and she says defensively Like what and you say Cool and unafraid to say whatever you think and show your boobs randomly and stuff and she actually admits to a bit of false bravado and even tells you a tiny bit of her private fears and insecurities which blows your mind both because she has any and because she’s bestowed this information to only you, and you become her new entourage maybe even and go shopping and gossip, ‘cuz you know she’s got some good gossip, and find out how big some movie star’s penises are or are not because she’ll for sure tell you and make something up if she has to and do each other’s hair and let her put red lipstick on you all messy-like and rock out a little bit and let her teach you how to scream-sing and maybe even fight because you let it slip that you used to love the Carpenters and she gets all pissy when you remind her she said any music was better than no music and she says well not the fucking Carpenters or because you lied and said you tried heroin once but didn’t really like it which Courtney and anyone else who’s ever done heroin once knows is a lie because they agree that there’s nothing not to like and she calls you on the lie and you get your feelings hurt because you both know that you’ll never be as cool as her especially when she asks you if you want to try the heroin now and you almost make up another lie before you realize it’s pointless at which time you make up and eat giant raw cookie dough slices with Courtney? Or better – just each have your own whole thing of cookie dough and eat it like it was an ice cream cone? And then get super sick to your stomach and have to sleep over? And stay in her totally fluffy guest room and call up your friends and tell them you’re at Courtney Love’s house and Courtney thinks you’re at least one whole percent of cool and that hipster made the biggest mistake of his life cause the guy you finally married is awesome and Courtney Love is your new best friend?

I so want Courtney Love to like me. There’s a small part of me that actually thinks Courtney Love would like me. Let’s see: What do you think Courtney would do if someone wrote an essay about wanting to be her best friend? Well, she’d probably a) have no idea about it, she gets written about way too much to keep track, or, being Courtney, to care. So I’m guessing that if she’s in the mood, she’d probably just b) show her boobs to someone.

Like I said, I’m no Courtney Love.

I Have Learned Two New Tricks

2008-06-25T13:33:00.003-04:00

Today I learned, all by myself, how to use both our scanner and photoshop. I'm not saying I'm an expert in either of these areas, just enough for you to reap the benefits very soon with all kinds of goodness from photo albums gone by.

This is going to be fun.

I Dreamt of Danny WIth the Bright Red Hair

2008-06-12T11:19:00.016-04:00

Watching reruns of the first season of The Partridge Family recently, I remembered why I loved that music so. In spite of almost completely thorough lyrical corniness, they had, um, you know – melodies. Kick-ass – no, outtasite melodies. Okay, one or two of the slower songs, er, don’t work as well. Somewhere along the line a couple of my records disappeared, so currently I only have two, but I’ve been listening to them and thank god for eBay because I will get the others. If anybody thinks they don’t rock, they do. I defy you to listen to a song like “I Can Feel Your Heartbeat” even one time and not be singing along by the end and not have it rock you for the rest of the day. Yes, it has a bit of a seventies-porn wocka-wocka groove, but here it’s a total plus. I can’t even give them grief on account of only two of them singing on their songs. There was a clearly readable note at the end of every show saying that some of the vocals were “enhanced” and my recollection is that it was openly talked about. (Not on the show, of course, but in the press – which here means publications like “Tiger Beat” – they may have been the Milli Vanilli of the seventies, but at least they didn’t pretend otherwise.) Yes, I was always a little troubled about the fade-out. At the end of most shows, the Partridges would perform “live” at one place or another, but most of their songs fade out on the record, and since they were unapologetically lip-synching, this would always result in the group sort of appearing to sing over the applause and then fading out (whereas at a real live show, a song would actually, you know, end). So I always wondered – how does the audience know to anticipate the exact point at which the song is about to fade out? Or – does the group just really start to sing more and more softly until the audience percieves the beginning of the fade-out begins to clap? I dunno, it just sort of always put me in the mind of, what if one time there was no clapping, and they were forced to audibly fade out? Wouldn’t they be super embarrassed? I shouldn’t have had to think about these things.

(Played 'til it scratched)

In general, there’s a lot to recommend about this show. It was one of the first shows featuring a single mom; granted there’s not a lot of discussion about her dead husband, but it was a comedy. And it was actually pretty funny. Unlike most sitcom families up to this time, they weren’t all happy-sunshiney. They were all kind of gently sarcastic with each other, which was the beginning of a more realistic tv-family model. There’s actually one episode where Keith’s “coach” (I don’t recall Keith being on any teams) overhears Keith and Danny insulting each other and takes Keith aside and tells him he needs to be more of a role model for his younger siblings, since they’ve lost their dad, and so Keith stops insulting Danny and starts taking the kids to classical concerts and art galleries (there’s actually one really great, still-relevant art joke in this scene) and sightseeing and then the kids start to get totally annoyed by it and at the end they’re in the kitchen talking about how annoyed they are by it and Keith overhears them and is hurt, but then after they apoligize he realizes he was taking himself too seriously and of course in the end they go back to being sarcastic and insulting. When I was a kid, I didn’t give a lot of conscious thought to why this show was so different, but looking at it now, almost everything about it was different than other sitcoms. One major difference was that it was all shot on film, so they had lots of exterior and location shots, resulting in a significantly better quality than other shows then or now; much more real, with you know, actual shadows n’ stuff. I’m sure now that they only stuck with the laugh track just to appease some higher-up muckety-muck somewhere. I have to say I was a bit disconcerted to discover, in the course of my research, not that the Partridge house itself was more or less only an exterior, but that it was on the Warner Brothers lot, and was later painted blue used as the house for the family from “Life Goes On.” (How I missed this, having watched LGO fairly regularly – oh for crying out loud, I’m already talking about my love for the Partridge Family, I’m gonna be embarrassed about “Life Goes On?” – shames me more than admitting I watched either of these shows.) Furthermore, the Partridges actually lived next door to Major Nelson and down the street from Darrin and Samantha Stevens, and at various times these and other TV houses could be clearly seen on The Partridge Family and yet curiously it was never addressed that both a genie and a witch lived on their block. Not to mention an astronaut. Plus, I just think the least the “Life Goes On” family could have done was to mention once or twice that the Partridge Family used to live in their house. I don’t think that would have undermined their credibility at all.

I’ve also been experiencing a bit of deja-vu in that the feelings I had for a certain Partridge are coming back to me with the added bonus of understanding what it was I once felt.

I loved Danny Partridge.

(C'mon. He's cute.)

That’s right. Danny Partridge (b. Dante Bonaduce). The funny, freckled, redheaded one. The very not-Keith one. Actually I loved Danny Bonaduce as I interpreted him through the character of Danny Partridge. I loved him so much that when I was in Japan for a month at the beginning of fifth grade, I watched reruns of The Partridge Family in Japanese. Only the songs remained in English, and despite my lack of fluency in Japanese, or okay, anything past “konichiwa”, forced to watch more closely, I was only made that much more aware that our love transcended not just words but entire languages. I read Tiger Beat and Flip and I’m pretty sure I subscribed to The Partridge Family Magazine and anything else that might have Partridge-related information so I was not confused. I knew Danny B. was his own person and he was the one I wanted.

I imagined our relationship. In spite of having no acting experience whatsoever, I would meet him by being cast on the Partridge Family as the new smart-alecky next-door neighbor girl who doesn’t get along with him at first but then shyly kisses him on the cheek and runs away at which time he turns beet-red and then punches her in the arm, pretending he doesn’t have a girlfriend because his troublemaking friend Punky Lazaar tells him it’s not cool to like girls but then they still meet in her treehouse for long soulful talks and then I don’t know what happens after that but probably Keith and Laurie find out and tease him really bad because that’s what always happens. Actually, I’m pretty sure some of this storyline is mentally cribbed from one of the Gloria Hickey episodes (she was Danny’s “girlfriend”), or maybe the one in which Jodie Foster appeared or maybe both; it’s fuzzy. There was one where this girl Danny’s age has a crush on Keith and Danny has a crush on her but then Keith breaks her heart and in the end she realizes Danny is more age-appropriate (and um, cuter). Anyway, after I get cast as a guest star in this one episode, I move to Hollywood because I am so dazzling in the part that I become a series regular, and Danny and I become best friends and hang out in my trailer and slam the Brady Bunch which we agree is so not as funny and real as The Partridge Family in spite of the them-not-all-singing thing and plus how totally lame it is of them to totally steal their idea of being a musical act and what a suck-ass song “Sunshine Day” is, not to mention how seriously retarded their choreography is and how lame their orange polyester outfits are (surmising that they if couldn’t afford Partridge-quality velvet and didn’t have the talent anyway, they might as well go bright?), and plus how the Partridges would never like, dance, and he openly calls me his girlfriend even though all we do is kiss with our mouths closed (well, he tries to stick his tongue in my mouth and his hands up my minidress but I’m not up for that just yet because I’m only eleven and he’s thirteen and super horny) and gives me presents all the time like a white rope bracelet and puka shells and for our four-week anniversary, purple suede hot pants with a matching fringed vest. Tiger Beat calls to interview me about our relationship which I describe as groovy and of course they want to know my favorites:

Color: Purple
Food: Macaroni and cheese
Drink: Grape soda
Candy: Lik-m-aid
Song: Anything by the Partridge Family, duh!

Here’s what it comes down to. I felt he understood me. Already. No, for real. Before my fictional TV-star discovery. Through the TV, Danny’s understanding of me was palpable. Being understood was, dating back sometime B.D. (before Danny), something I perpetually felt I wasn’t, and something I desperately craved until about ten years ago (at which time, amazingly, I moved into being at least slightly more interested in understanding others). I felt certain that Danny would understand me if we met, and I felt it was entirely possible that we would meet. (If I am to be 100% honest, I would subsequently have this feeling for quite a number of famous people over the years. A few I can think of: Tony deFranco – don’t even think of saying “Who?” [okay fine, maybe you’re twenty-five or whatever - TdF was the extremely foxy frontman-boy of The deFranco Family, who apparently were really related and all sang for real, on their one hit “Heartbeat, It’s a Love Beat”] the Fonz, Billy Joel, Eric Roberts [I’m not lying – I saw him on Broadway in Burn This, having missed John Malkovich in the same part or his name might be here instead and realizing only now that it was probably Lanford Wilson who really understood me], Robert Downey, Jr., Steve Martin, James Taylor and of course, Owen Wilson. I did finally meet Henry Winkler [aka Arthur Fonzarelli] decades later, who was so nice, and quite married.)

(For those of you who have no idea about TdFF)

It was no surprise to me that Danny would have his issues over the years. This only served to prove to me that he really had understood me all along. One of the things I’m coming to understand now, which was in my childhood only something I felt as a psychic connection, is exactly why I felt this way about Danny. It wasn’t just that he was the funny one. It wasn’t that I thought he was so cute, although I did, think that. It was more that he was the obvious misfit in the family, and I swear, I could feel his pain. He was the one who got picked on, he was by far the least typically telegenic of the bunch, he was the one who was always trying. Yes, this was his character, but I am not confused. This was something that was utterly visible to me as being entirely distinct from his character. A lot of his storylines seemed like they were written with both of us in mind. I want to interject here that I sense you’re not believing me right now, but I want to tell you I am 100% serious. Judge me if you will, but I’ve worked through my Danny-loving issues and if you have something to say about it, I’m prepared to fight. It’s what Danny would want.

An episode guide to prove my point:

Episode 4: See Here, Private Partridge
Okay, and so, in this episode from the first season, ten-year-old Danny is drafted by mistake. At first he imagines himself a war hero, then believes he gets rejected for being too short, saying the experience has made him wise beyond his years. I knew I was wise beyond my years at age ten as well.

Episode 9: Did You Hear the one About Danny Partridge?
Here Danny becomes a comedian but doesn’t know the audience is laughing at him/not with him, and suffers embarrassment.

Episode 11: This Is My Song
In which Danny hears Keith writing a song while he’s asleep and then when he wakes up he writes the same song thinking he wrote it and his pride is hurt when he finds out the truth.

(Obvious.)

Episode 13: Star Quality
Wherein Danny decides to “go out as a single” (I guess this was in the days before people left groups to go “solo”, because this “going out as a single” concept comes up more than once in the series) after a columnist says he has personal magnetism and star quality but then it turns out she was mistaking Danny for Chris (with all due respect to Chris number one or two, um, this was a stretch obviously for the sake of a joke, because everyone knows that Chris and Tracy were kind of just the filler of the family – allowing for the fact that at no time in the entire four years did Danny, Chrisses #1 or 2, or Tracy actually play or sing, but Danny at least had you know, lines, and he really did have personal magnetism, just ask Vincent Gallo (scroll down for more on that). Well, guess what, I wanted to go out as a single myself, and I actually could sing, but see

Episode 1: What? And Get Out of Show Business?
in which the entire family suffers from stage fright for why it didn’t happen to me.

Episode 24: A Partridge by Any Other Name
So and also Danny’s birth certificate gets lost and he thinks he’s adopted and goes around looking super sad and looking for his birth parents and calling his mom Mrs. Partridge. I had a brief period where I thought I might be adopted too. Sure, my mom had mentioned the agonizing pain of her only childbirth more than a few times, and sure, I looked exactly like her and sure, there was that whole birth certificate thing, but I have felt like a misfit from day one, and in my ten-year-old mind, that was evidence enough.

(Deep.)

Episode 30: Anatomy of a Tonsil
This is the one where Danny is supposed to get his tonsils out but Punky Lazaar (the Eddie Haskell of the 70s) tells him horror stories about surgery which freaks him out plus he also watches an episode of Marcus Welby and decides he will die from the operation and then when he doesn’t die he’s still afraid to sing. One more time: me = afraid to sing.

Episode 43: I Am Curious Partridge (a very risque choice for a g-rated sitcom, I might say, as this references a popular sexy book/movie of the era)
In which Danny writes slanderous pieces about Keith and Shirley for the school paper. I started writing slanderously about everyone I knew starting in third grade but had the good fortune that no one read it. (I took Danny’s experience as a cautionary tale, and ended up becoming a fiction writer.)

Episode 71: The Partridge Connection:
In this episode, Danny and Punky Lazaar get caught stealing. I stole a bracelet from a hotel drugstore in Ohio where my mother was performing, and didn’t have the good sense to consider that my mom might ask me where I got it, and had to go back, just like Danny, and repent.

Episode 84: A Day of Honesty
Not to forget the one where Danny gets brought home by the police for lying about sneaking into the movies and the day of honesty where he points out that everyone is somewhat dishonest so they all agree to tell the truth for an entire day until he learns at the end that a white lie is sometimes okay if it means not hurting Laurie’s feelings about a guy rejecting her.

And then there were all the episodes involving Danny’s love life, including:

Episode 46: Promise Her Anything But Give Her a Punch
Episode 55: You’re Only Young Twice
Episode 67: The Eleven Year Itch
Episode 91: Danny Converts

I’m not sure anything was illuminated in any of these so much as it was a place to live vicariously though Jodie Foster (who gives him a punch in the eye in episode 67 – clearly a recurring theme), or Gloria Hickey, his recurring steady, or that Jewish girl where he goes to her bat mitzvah pretending to be Jewish. (I would later have a long history of dating Jewish boys, and when they called me Craneberg in college, I would say “Ha ha ha!” but not go to any great lengths to deny it. I thought my decidedly Aryan looks would speak for itself in the end, but I had people ask me seriously if I was going home for Pesach.) In my school around this time, kids were playing Spin-the-Bottle after school (not me of course, since I was at this time waiting for Danny), and at no time would anyone be satisfied with a punch in the arm. I did of course relate to the tales of unrequited love. I’d had one or two real-life crushes by this time (proving that I had at least some grounding in reality), on boys who probably had little or no information about my existence. And there was one entire episode (#53: Each Dawn I Diet) about Danny being shall we say chubby, which I was, and could definitely relate to. I filled out my Danskin shorts a little too well. In episode 55, Danny acts out at school because he identifies more with older siblings Keith and Laurie. I watched Laugh-in at age six. Eventually they use reverse psychology on him, letting him stay up late to watch talk shows (I watched Johnny Carson beginning when I was around ten) and double date with Keith and his girlfriend at Muldoon’s point (the makeout spot) and in the end he decides he’s tired and not so much into making out and really only wants to play with Gloria Hickey. Which really was what I wanted, although I’m guessing Danny B. would just assume make out. (Let me also add that this is not even a comprehensive list of the Danny episodes. He was heavily relied on throughout the run of the show.)

So let’s review the character description: wise, embarrassed, prideful, going out as a single, possibly adopted, afraid, slanderous, thieving, lying, shall we say chubby, mature for his age. Check, check, check, check – if there were a universe in which this were someone’s personal ad, let’s just say I’d answer it and leave it at that.
I kept my secret love from everyone. I knew he wasn’t the one I was supposed to have a crush on. In a moment of weakness mentioned it to my dad without thinking to pinky swear him to secrecy, and when it came out in conversation extremely casually over dinner or something, I felt a shame I’m not sure I’ve felt since, and was teased by my stepbrothers, although I’m sure now that they would have teased me even if it had been Keith. That’s just part of the brother job description. I made the mistake of mentioning the subject of this essay (then in it’s incubation) over dinner one night and one friend’s reaction was so violent, so horrified, I fought the ancient temptation to pretend I really meant to say Keith, but instead found the courage to defend my Danny. I told him I had been in the closet about this for thirty-five years and I wasn’t about to go back in now.

Then something occurred to me. Although I have felt so alone in a million ways in my lifetime, I made the somewhat late discovery that everyone feels this way, at least at one time or another, and also, we now have the internet to search for kindred spirits on nine magillion topics, at least eight magillion of which I probably don’t want to think about. (I’ve posted on my blog about subjects like Girls Gone Wild and Winnie Cooper being in Stuff magazine, and have received a surprising number of hits on those pages even though the content was I’m sure not what those readers were looking for. I’ve also received numerous hits on my pages about hating to wash their hair – people actually typed this phrase into Google – and as many on Landon and Shavonda – and I still don’t know who they even are – so I’m just saying I’m aware now that people have interests in things I’ve never even heard of.)

So, I proceeded to Google, in various forms:

“Danny Partridge fans” - over 100,000 hits (quit after searching 20 or so Keith-or-entire-family-related pages)
“Danny Bonaduce fans” – same
“I Love Danny Partridge” – 0 results
“I Love Danny Bonaduce” – 0 results

The sole result of this unscientific search being a snippet from an interview with Vincent Gallo, he of Buffalo ’66, a great movie, as well as The Brown Bunny, a notorious movie in which if you sit through three hours of scenes of empty highways with no dialogue, you get to see Chloe Sevigny give Vincent Gallo a supposedly real blow job. If that’s something you in fact want to see. Now, if you know anything about Vincent Gallo, he seems like an interesting guy, interesting being a euphemism for complicated and weird and sexy in a creepy unclean kind of way, not to mention a staunch Republican, so I’m not sure what it says about me that Vincent Gallo was the only person I could find on the web who openly admitted to being a Danny Partridge fan. My husband expresses vague concern that the logical conclusion is that I am also soulmates with Vincent Gallo. I don’t know. All I know is, apparently I really am alone, but with Vincent Gallo.

Excerpted here, from “The Book, LA, Winter 2001,” for your edification:

The Book: Is it true you are a fan of Danny Bonaduce?
Gallo: I became an actor, because of Danny Bonaduce on the "Partridge Family". He's tremendous, so funny and brilliant, and we seemed around the same age, I felt I should be on a show with him. We could have done a good spin-off, "the Danny Bonaduce, Vinnie Gallo show", da-da-da-da- da di da da (sings theme show music)
The Book: Would you still like to work with him?
Gallo: I never lose my heart for anyone. Ever. I would do anything with Danny any day of the week.

You go, Gallo. I suppose if I am to be thoroughly honest, he does impress me as the kind of guy I would have felt understood by if I’d known who he was twenty years ago, and who we can probably all feel grateful that I never met. I was doing a little acting at that time and a lot of drinking and I might have thought it was a good idea to give him a blow job in a movie for the sake of art. And not even my art. If I really gave someone a blowjob for my art, at least no one would have to see it.
What’s weird is that I am now married to someone I am sure I understand, and who I am sure loves me like mad. I’m pretty sure he understands me too – but perhaps more interestingly, I’m inclined to mention that my ongoing prayers in more recent years “to understand than to be understood” have actually been answered, and it’s a relief. Trying to be understood is exhausting.

My best friend Nina claims she liked Danny too, which makes me question the Google search. When I mentioned that he bore a slight resemblance to someone I knew, I didn’t have to finish the sentence before she knew which ex I was talking about. An ex who any number of his exes and current wife would agree on as being empirically cute. Could it be that no one is willing to admit their Danny love, even now? Until very recently and for many years, Danny had a wife, and she’s actually pretty hot. And what about all those five hundred women he’s claimed to have slept with? Could they all have been on drugs? Don’t answer that.

It’s been a couple of decades since I’ve read a celebrity memoir, and having temporarily put down Francine du Plessix Gray’s elegant memoir of her parents, “Them,” reading Danny’s book, “Random Acts of Badness” left me feeling a bit like I’d been on a two-day drug binge myself. I’m obviously not going to recommend it unless you’re the only other person out there besides Vincent Gallo and me who has an interest in Danny Bonaduce. But know in advance that he’s no dummy, in spite of his odd use of exclamation points (one or two every couple of pages, including, “Pow!” “Hey!” “Groovy!” “Gasp!” “I just didn’t know!” “It’s not like my hair should be wet!” and “Thinking of one’s mother at a time like this is just wrong!” I feel compelled to mention that there are probably an equal number of question marks, but I think one will make my point well enough: “Do you see the dwarf?”), plus as many of you know, I’m hardly one to judge when it comes to creative punctuation. He also seems overly fond of the phrase “Don’t get me wrong,” nevertheless, there’s an interesting story here. He’s opinionated and totally self-deprecating, extremely willing to poke fun at himself all the way through. (I’m sure he knew someone else would do it if he didn’t. He claims to have lost count of how many times he made Letterman’s top ten list.) I’d also like to go on a minor tangent here about the fact that his given name is actually Dante, because one of my real-life crushes of my junior-high school days, post-Partridge, was on a family friend also of Italo-American descent and also named Dante who was a few years older than I and the second-cutest thing I’d ever seen, first if you count people I’d actually met. He actually got married pretty young, crushing my hopes for our future, while I was still in high school, but fortunately this particular Dante had two redheaded cousins around the same age named Adonisio and Vittorio (real names), who were extremely funny and paid attention to me when no one at my own school was looking (and they were in college! I was only sixteen!); I’m trying to point out that I’m sure that Danny had everything to do with the origins of my love for Italian guys, which would recur again for a period right after the Nice Jewish Boy years. Anyway, Danny seems to know that he wasn’t considered the cute Partidge and claims that even Brian Forster (Chris #2) had more female admirers than he did, which seems preposterous to me. He seems to have appropriate remorse for the way he’s treated his loved ones during druggier times. (He also admits to being a liar, so take that for what it’s worth.) He doesn’t blame show business for his problems, which I appreciate, because I’d personally hope to god my kid didn’t want to be a child actor, although contrary to popular opinion, I don’t believe it’s show business that causes addiction. For every Danny, there’s also a Jodie Foster, for every Dana Plato, a Ron Howard. Okay well maybe there are also a few who are not drug-addicted or dead but just living happily in obscurity. He has a great overall attitude, considers himself the luckiest guy in world to have been on the PF and to have an ongoing career in radio, and does not overestimate his talents.

That said, I still kind of want to shake him. He doesn’t seem to think drinking heavily is a problem even though he’s entirely willing to admit he’s a big drug addict. And I admire him for essentially saying that that drug addict is very much alive in him (this was written four years ago, before his recent return to rehab, so I guess he was right) and that he didn’t know what would happen in the future. But mostly what endeared me to him, in the second half of the book, was his admiration for his wife. The end of the book is very bittersweet, made me really sad. He's describing a conversation where some people get sort of personal about who they really are and he doesn't know what to say because in some ways he doesn’t really know. The best answer he can come up with is, “I’m Gretchen’s husband.” This woman has obviously tolerated more than a wife should ever have to, clearly helped him in a million ways, and I pray to god she goes to Al-Anon. Of course, I don’t think there’s a single soul out there, including Danny, who can be summed up in one three-word sentence, especially one that defines you by your relationship to another person. But you know what? I thought it was really sweet, and you know, even if I didn’t know myself as well as I think I do, I’m happy to say that “I’m Ben’s wife” is way up on my top ten list of who I really am.

(Never saw this in my life, unbelievably)

Thief of My Old Life (2005)

2008-06-05T10:31:00.005-04:00

So lately I’ve been doing “research” for my new project in the form of watching a lot of old TV shows and movies I was once a big fan of. Some of them fall deeply into the cheese category, others more on the fence; the ones on the non-dairy side of the cheese fence are not of interest at the moment. I am looking to explore the emotional and possibly artistic value of cheese.

Yesterday the good people of Netflix sent Thief of Hearts, a movie from the late 80s starring Steven Bauer and Barbara Williams, with a guest appearance by Norm from Cheers. If you’d happened to ask me the day before if I could recommend a sexy late-eighties movie (I would concede this was a seemingly unlikely request if I didn’t have the internet to tell me that people have an extremely wide range of what I consider to be unlikely interests), I would have enthusiastically encouraged you to put this on your queue. Having watched it again mid-2005, I must amend my possibly enthusiastic recommendation with something along the lines of “I guess I can’t.” Nevertheless I will attempt to tell you what you need to know about this movie, both so you never have to see it and in the interest of regaining some small bit of self-respect along the way.

This film had, at one time, at least a semi-profound impact on me in that it brought to life something I had always wondered about: What would happen if a sexy art thief stole my diaries, read them, and decided to make all of my sexual fantasies come to life? Okay, well, what I’ve wondered is actually closer to what would happen if anyone at all read my diaries. In fact, nothing about this movie bears any resemblance to my own life except that I keep diaries. (Well, yes, I did have quite a few items in my closet with shoulderpads.) I have at no time been a wealthy but horrifically untalented even for the eighties interior designer living with my dull husband in a San Francisco townhouse with sweeping ocean views. Nor have I ever written much in my diaries or anywhere else about sex of any kind, real or imaginary, beyond “I had sex with him” or more frequently “I’d like to have sex with him.” Maybe “I had hot sex with him.” But boy I was sure worried that someone might read pages and pages expounding on why that year’s He didn’t call, or the meaning of the one call that that particular He did actually make, or the meaning of the one message that particular He actually left, or what the meaning of a look/hand gesture/hairstyle had to do with me and our nonexistent relationship, ad infinitum.

But I digress. It has been of great import to me that my diaries not be read, and given the fact that I don’t even like to read them myself, it should seem unlikely that anyone else would ever want to. Even in the future when historians open up my musty six hundred volumes, very little of literary import will be found in conjunction with my oeuvre. (I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I will ever be able to refer to my own work, unseriously, as an oeuvre without italics. Although frankly, I defy you to use a word like oeuvre in any context without italics.) In fact, they could do a great deal to diminish whatever tiny file I might have in literary history altogether. So maybe I should be worried on that front. I tend not to worry about things that might or might not happen several hundred years after my death though, maybe that’s just me.
Part of the appeal of the movie at this time was that I thought Steven Bauer was the bomb, and there’s some semi-explicit sex that at the time I thought was hot.
Watching it again was a huge disappointment.

The soundtrack alone will be a clue for anyone staying past the title credits. I’m not sure I have words to describe that late-eighties movie song; it’s sort of Giorgio Moroder synthesizey meets Eye of the Tigerish that says “sex, but with danger”, for what that’s worth.

Steven Bauer’s Members Only-style jacket, with the collar turned up, is another corner you’re either going to turn or you aren’t, although for me Barbara Williams’ wardrobe of double-wrap belts brought back fond memories.

David Caruso with a freaky fade haircut may be the point at which 80% of you will be forced to turn away.

By the time Williams um, bold, redesign of Steven Bauer’s loft apartment makes its appearance, few of you will have hung in, as well you shouldn’t.

Part of what I see now is that Steven Bauer is not so much a sexy art thief as he is a stalker, which has never really done much for me. He keeps her diaries, he stares at her portrait (one of the stolen paintings), he “bumps into her” at the market, twice, and poses as a mysterious rich businessman who needs his apartment remodeled. And when Williams finally realizes the ruse and says something indignant, like “How dare you” (after she’s had mind-blowing sex with him that she hasn’t been having with her husband, because he wears glasses and a bow tie) and Bauer angrily says something like “You invented me, lady! I love you!” there’s nothing to do but cringe and reexamine your entire life.

Which brings me to the part where I reexamine my entire life.

I really really loved this movie once. And a lot of movies I once loved I still love. But this time around, Thief of Hearts was painful. There was fast-forwarding, or whatever you call it now that it’s on DVD.

The question now is not so much what would happen if a sexy art thief read my diaries, but what happens when twenty years go by and something you once thought was so super-sexy makes you question who the hell you are? Further evidence that the brain I was operating with in 1988 is no longer in service is another film I enjoyed from that very same year: Two Moon Junction.

Oh, don’t even try to tell me you haven’t seen it if you were a girl child born before 1970, but just in case you were living in a video-free zone at that time, basically, this movie is in many ways interchangeable with Thief of Hearts, including excessive use of shoulderpads, although I think it leans more overtly toward the porn side. Or, just this side of porn. Very stylized porn, in this case about April de Longpre, a repressed southern rich girl (we know she’s rich because of the “de” in front of her vaguely French-sounding name) about to marry a rich boy in order to maintain status quo, and a sexy, sensitive and insightful carny (we know these things because he loves his dog and wears glasses and no underwear) instead of a frustrated writer’s wife and a sexy art thief. There’s a slightly more complex plot that includes Burl Ives (no lie), Herve Villechaise (well, it is about carnies), and lesbian undertones involving Kristy McNichol of all people (who, as America’s onetime sweetheart/tomboy Buddy from Family, should not have been allowed to show her breasts, which is like Tootie from the Facts of Life showing her breasts, it just should not happen, I don’t care how much these people want to stretch, in fact, K McN was actually kind of adorable in this part as a gum-chewing sexpot, but went one step too far in allowing the director to give her a scene in which she cheerfully applies rouge to her nipples).

I was trying to explain about the lesbian bits to Ben and mentioned, without enough explanation, I realize now, that Kristy and the heroine traded tops in one scene – what to me was clearly a gratuitous but obligatory hot lesbian scene (not that the entire movie isn’t gratuitous, of course) – to which Ben said, deeply confused, “They… trade… tops?” (Since I can assume now that you may be as confused as he was, Kristy convinces April (aka a platinum blonde pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn), that it would be fun and sexy – for the carnie of course – to trade blouses with each other, and in a whispery voice-over says, “Don’t worry about me. Tomorrow I’m takin’ a bus out of here. I don’t know where I’m goin’, but I can’t wait to get there.”) There are also a couple of references to AIDS, which seem to have been thrown in for no other reason than that it was 1988, I imagine just in case anyone was worried that the filmmakers were endorsing unprotected sex with carnies. TMJ has a similar soundtrack to TOH plus a few more slow-playing saxophones to south it up some, and in case we aren’t sure it’s the south, all the rich people dress only in white because, I’m pretty sure, the costume designer once saw a play by Tennessee Williams. The only significant difference between the two films is that in the end, April does get married to the rich guy, but decides to have it both ways and keep the sexy carnie on the side, proving that money is important, but not without hot carnie sex. If this means anything to anyone reading, it’s written and directed by Zalman King, and I don’t know what he’s up to these days but in the late eighties and early nineties he was um, the king, of this sort of entertainment, this sort of art-meets-everything-but-a-cum-shot. I could practically hear him behind the camera saying, “More fog… no, no, you have to really thrust, like this… yes, and you, what’s your name with the gum, I want your lesbian desire for her to burst off the screen… what?… I don’t care if you flew out of an empty nest… yes, fantastic, from behind, just like that, yes!” Even the housekeepers at a seedy motel are backlit to ensure our ability to see that they have no panties on underneath their uniforms. There’s once scene where Perry, the Fabiolike carny, yells at April outside of a motel that she’s only scared because she’s just discovered her libido, and I couldn’t help but suspect that Zalman, in addition to wearing the writer/director hat, was also an unlicensed shrink, like so many of my exes. It may have been the only believable bit of dialogue in the film. One essential difference for me personally between TOH and TMJ was that TOH spoke to this particular fear of having my diaries read and threw in Steven Bauer, and TMJ was about pure fantasy, not that I recall ever harboring any fantasies about sexy underpantsless carnival workers, which may explain why I wasn’t quite as horrified watching it again as I was watching TOH. But if memory serves me right, as I mentioned, it was sort of a known secret, if you will, that TMJ was the sexy chick flick of it’s day – everyone I knew had seen it, and it was generally thought of as, well, hot.

Of course, I realize I’ve changed in many ways, everyone changes for better or worse, and also of course personally I like to think I’ve changed for better, but at the same time, I guess what perplexes me here is that it’s not as though I don’t have a good corner of my entertainment life these days devoted strictly to cheese. I check in on Jezebel. I watched Beverly Hills, 90210, I watched Dawson’s Creek, the O.C. and when the time comes, I will watch the next show about beautiful teenagers. (Note: Perhaps I misspoke here, when I originally wrote this. For what may be mystifying reasons, I haven’t been able to fully immerse myself in Gossip Girl.) I watch a lot of reality shows, everything from the relatively classy Amazing Race to the supremely low rent Cheaters, although I don’t see as many cheesy movies as I once did, actually not any I don’t think, if you don’t count the occasional Constantine, which I can assure you was not by my choice, and I watch very few sitcoms anymore. I just think they should be, you know, funny. But so anyway then why is the cheese I loved in the eighties so unwatchable now? It might make sense if I had morphed into an exclusively NPR-listening sort of person, but that’s just not the case. So I’m having trouble figuring out if it’s just this one movie that was bad, or if it was my taste that was bad. And if it was my taste… who the hell was I then? Surely I must have had some awareness that these were not art films (sorry, Zalman). I certainly knew this walking into Roller Boogie. There was one more movie I also really liked around this time, maybe a little earlier, it had Darryl Hannah as a moody misunderstood teenager (misunderstood because she was so beautiful, I’m pretty sure) who dreams of leaving town and Aidan Quinn as a moody rebel with a motorcycle and I’m pretty sure the last scene in the film is them riding past the factories out of town to a similarly Moroderish song. I don’t remember it all that well except for that I saw it in New York one afternoon when I should have been out looking for a job, and that I so wished an Aidan Quinn would come and ride me out of the town he and Darryl were probably coming to, preferably to a town with factories. What I’m trying to get at is that I feel different, happier and smarter, a little anyway, and interested in better books and music and movies for the most part, but I also feel like there’s a certain core of me, perhaps in everyone, that doesn’t change, and at the same time, seeing this again boggles my mind. It’d be easy for me to write it off as pure escapism, but my cell memory knows it was more. Because it feels like whoever that person was that was lusting after a stalking art thief was someone else entirely. Actually now that I think about it, I do sometimes feel like I’ve lived several lives, like there are these eras I went through, like I’m looking back on it now having retained a certain amount of memory but also as though it was someone else’s life entirely. I should start naming these eras. This one could be called Thief of My Old Brain.

Ben says if a movie has shoulderpads in it it’s just not going to hold up. And I would add, especially if that movie is trying to be sexy.

In conclusion: cheese from the eighties very often spoils, and I am not the person I once was.

Printer's Row Book Fair!

2008-06-05T10:12:00.003-04:00

Hey, come see me on some panels on Sunday, June 8 (near Dearborn & Polk):

11:00 AM
Heartland Stage, with ELIZABETH BERG, author of “The Day I Ate
Whatever I Wanted,” in conversation with Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

4:00 PM Other Voices finale reading with BILLY LOMBARDO and AUDREY
NIFFENEGGER, hosted by Gina Frangello

For more info and a map, go to printersrowbookfair.org.

Ben's Website!

2008-06-01T20:03:00.004-04:00

Lookit! My hunny has a website now. Check out the arts!

How To Be Lloyd Dobler

2008-05-24T09:36:00.003-04:00

Note: I have a bunch of non-fiction pieces I wrote a while ago that have been languishing on my computer in nowhereville, so I'm going to post them here over the next few weeks before they become utterly obsolete. This is the first.

Lloyd Dobler is real.

Unfortunately, Vince Vaughn from Swingers is real, too. Vince Vaughn from Swingers is half the reason a lot of us can’t find our Lloyd Doblers. One time, in a restaurant, a guy came up to me and said, “I think you should go out with me because you’re cool and I’m cool and we’d be cool together.” Putting aside my awareness that this might be the single most uncool statement ever made, the only reason I finally agreed to a date with him at all was because it was clear he wasn’t going to let me enjoy my dinner with the girls until I agreed about our mutual coolness. This was a mistake. If a guy ever comes up to you and tells you he’s a dentist and an actor, and that he’s cool and you’re cool and you’d be cool together, turn right around and walk briskly in the opposite direction. The Vince Vaughn from Swingers of the world might very well be able to pull this off, but I am sure it’s only because he isn’t also a dentist. If Vince Vaughn from Swingers had been in Say Anything, I’m sure he would have tried to messed with Lloyd Dobler’s head just like he messed with Jon Favreau from Swingers’ head (“You have to wait a week before you call”) just like the Vince Vaughn from Swingers of the real world are out there messing with the heads of a lot of other perfectly nice guys inclined to call whenever the spirit of calling moves them and not at some predetermined calling time. But it took four whole dudes at the Gas n’ Sip to try to convince Lloyd Dobler that he had to “go out, find another girl who looks like Diane, you gotta nail her, and then you gotta dump her, man,” and since they failed, I doubt Vince Vaughn from Swingers could do it either. That’s the difference between Lloyd Dobler and Jon Favreau from Swingers. Lloyd Dobler knows who he is and he knows what he wants.

I know Lloyd Dobler is real because he lives in my house. He also lives in Sue’s house, and Megan’s house and Anne’s house and also in Caren’s house and a lot of my other friend’s houses, which leads me to believe he has residences all over the country as well.

I didn’t always believe this.

I wanted to, but I didn’t really, not until he moved into my house. In my house he goes by the name of Ben Brandt, but I am not fooled. He is my own personal Lloyd Dobler.

My Lloyd Dobler never gave me a blue letter, never held a boombox playing In Your Eyes outside my window and knows better than to try to teach me to drive a stick. My Lloyd Dobler is tall, though, and he doesn’t sell anything bought or processed and doesn’t process anything sold or bought. I can’t say for sure if he’s ever bought anything processed or sold, but I know he doesn’t do it for a living. Also, unlike Say Anything Lloyd Dobler, he knows what he wants to do for a living, and I am not it. But he has a spectacular talent for making me feel as though, like movie Lloyd, being with me is what he’s good at.

Okay, let me sidebar for a while here. If you’re a guy, like a lot of guys, I am sure you have strong opinions about how Lloyd Dobler has ruined your life. I just read an article that argued that Lloyd Dobler was a stalker on account of the boombox moment. Mmmm, I don’t think so. One boombox does not a stalker make, and if that’s stalking, sign me up. This is at best, a weak example of a guy trying to excuse his unDoblerness. Deep down, I am sure most guys know that Lloyd Dobler is every girl’s dream, and that they are not that, and many of them are probably right. This is not just any romantic comedy. This is a romantic comedy with the model for what a guy should be. And let me say that with all due respect to John Cusack (whose name I hesitate to use here, because I want to be clear about differentiating between Lloyd Dobler, who I know a lot about, and John Cusack, who I know nothing about except for he’s from Chicago, which is definitely in his favor, but which in and of itself tells me very little about John Cusack’s character, and of course does not account for the fact that plenty of non-Lloyd Doblers are from Chicago, most of whom drink MGD and call it MGD and hang out at places like the Cubby Bear and put shorts and flip-flops on on the first sixty-degree day in March and can quote most of Caddyshack at will), Mr. Cusack, who is plenty cute, is certainly not the cutest guy who ever lived. Lloyd Dobler, however, just might be, and although they do bear a striking physical similarity, if this hasn’t occurred to you already, it is his Lloyd Doblerness that makes him supremely cute. Let me also add that although I know nothing about John Cusack, I would imagine he must find himself in a dating conundrum of epic proportions due to having played Lloyd Dobler, because it seems that almost no girl on the face of the earth has not loved Lloyd Dobler, and so imagine if you’re the guy who played Lloyd Dobler, knowing that you are really John Cusack but that women want you to be and believe you to be Lloyd Dobler, it would seem to me that he, like every other famous actor, would be left with only one option romantically, which would be to date other celebrities who “understand” him, although I can’t think of even one movie in which there was a female equivalent of Lloyd Dobler (which is not to say that there isn’t a long list of excellent female characters, just not any that are equivlent to Lloyd Dobler and frankly if there were, it might not be such a good thing, because a woman who was uniquely good at loving a man might be considered a step back, feminism-wise, although frankly, as I write this, it certainly seems noble enough to me, and perhaps I will write that story myself). Although I suspect that even other celebrity women have their feelings about Lloyd Dobler, leaving him in the truly unique situation of having to weed out a lot of women who don’t want John Cusack for John Cusack the person and not the Lloyd Dobler. That said, he has the best possible chance anyone could have for becoming Lloyd Doblerish if he so chose, if he doesn’t already happen to be the best guy ever, for obvious reasons. I’m not saying I feel sorry for him, and maybe he has that other thing I never understood, where people don’t care if other people like them for the right reasons, like men who attract women because they’re “powerful?” What’s that all about? If Donald Trump singlehandedly erased AIDS, poverty and terrorism worldwide, yeah, I might rethink him as a human being, but I still wouldn’t want to have sex with him. I’m just saying that if let’s say John Cusack would kick the glass away from your path but he wouldn’t call you by Wednesday for a Saturday night date, it’s not like he couldn’t decide to call by Wednesday. That’s the whole point. Anyone can. It’s just not that hard to be like Lloyd Dobler. I’d almost argue it’s easier to be a nice guy than it is to put the effort into being a poser or a full-on Vince Vaughn from Swingers. (I feel the need to mention right now that I have been referring to him as Vince Vaughn from Swingers not just because I don’t know his character’s name, but because unlike Lloyd Dobler, his character was so fully the anti-Dobler that I don’t want to know his name.) If they had cast, let’s say, Brad Pitt or Jude Law as Lloyd Dobler, I doubt I’d have any awareness of the name Lloyd Dobler at all, much less the concept of Lloyd Dobler. It would be theoretical, and I might have little hope at all that anything resembling a nice guy I wanted to have sex with existed. By now you have surely realized that I will use the name Lloyd Dobler as many times as possible because listen to it, it’s positively musical.

What I’m saying is that anyone can be Lloyd Dobler. (Okay, I’m ruling out serial killers and child molesters, obviously.) It’s a choice. You know how Lloyd says to his sister near the beginning, “Get in a good mood! How hard is it to just decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood?” It’s as simple as this. Be Lloyd Dobler! How hard would it be to just decide to be Lloyd Dobler and be Lloyd Dobler? It turns out, bad boys are overrated. No, for real. My friends and I, with a collective ridiculous number of frequent flier miles on Angst Boy Air, enough to circle the globe ninety bajillion times, have unilaterally turned the corner on this. Well, okay, let me say those of us who are over twenty-seven, and speaking for myself only, it took me a little bit more research, like about another decade than everyone else, but I’ve always been slow. Like Lloyd’s best friend Corey (played by the brilliant Lili Taylor), we have all been with our share of Joes, although our songs may not be as memorable. Joes do lie when they cry. They do like gi-hirls with names like Ashley. They may not hang out at the Gas n’ Sip, but do not be fooled. If they do not kick the glass out of your path, if they do not look at you like you are Diane Court in the flesh, move right along, friends, nothing to see there.

Lloyd Doblers are layered. I could quote pages of the dialogue in Say Anything, which is, I daresay, genius, but really, that would require way too many pages. Half of what’s amazing about this movie isn’t even in the dialogue, it’s in Lloyd Dobler’s eyes. Think about the iconic scene where Lloyd is holding up the boombox. Visually, it’s a striking one, even from a distance. But take a good long look at his face. There are a million things going on on Lloyd’s face in this scene. Heartbreak. Longing. Fear. Regret. Determination. This scene alone, even a still shot from this scene, I propose, warrants an honorary Oscar for John Cusack somewhere down the road when the Oscar-giving people come to their senses. Lloyd Dobler knows he isn’t in Diane Court’s league, but he also knows that very few people are at their age. He knows he’s nineteen and that everyone doesn’t have their life mapped out at nineteen and that he’s not a college kind of guy but that he’s looking for a “dare-to-be-great situation” and in the meantime he’s just gonna hang with Diane.

I realize a lot of people will argue the exact opposite of what I’m about to say now, but hear me out. Romantic movies, comedies more than dramas, often, I agree, have probably sent a Cinderella-ish message to the women of our culture that sets perhaps unreasonably high expectations in terms of what we want in a man (although as with the power thing, I’m not going to start on women who want rich men or giant penises, because I have no idea what that’s about beyond what it seems to be about, which I can’t really process), which is basically – everything. Looks, charm, brains, humor, success, kindness. Yes, we don’t necessarily choose men who meet more than one of these criteria at a time. Some of us are easily distracted by someone with only one of the above, if it’s outstanding enough, and we’ll overlook a penchant for excessive pot-smoking if let’s say the guy in question plays bass for our favorite indie rock band. Or we’ll pretend we’re okay with the relationship being “undefined” if the guy sends especially funny emails every other day even though he doesn’t make plans more than one night a month, usually at four-thirty on a Saturday afternoon for the same night – to just “hang out.” Poor choices aside, more than anything, we want to be romanced, to be swept off our feet, as they say, and a lot of us find ourselves single longer than we planned to be because it hasn’t happened yet, because life isn’t like a movie. There is an argument to be made that moderately nice and successful are enough. But many of us hold out and as we hold out, our grandmothers and other people tell us we’re too picky.

Which is so wrong on a million levels. I have always thought that a lot of us aren’t nearly picky enough. I have seen more than a few good friends of mine date men who stop just short of hitting them, and frankly, the verbal abuse dealt out by these people is no less brutal. I myself have dated one in particular who was given to unkind words, but even at my lowest point I had very little tolerance for this. Me, when the “c” word comes up, I tend to hang up the phone. I have, however, enjoyed any number of boyfriends who were emotionally unavailable. For years this seemed to be the only way I could classify my “type.” I’ve always said that if I were somehow able to gather everyone I’ve ever dated into one room, after getting over the initial shock of the vast number of mistakes I’ve made, I would defy anyone to say that I had a physical type, or what it was that any of these dudes had in common. I hoped against hope that at some point these men would avail themselves emotionally, but no. They had a unique inclination to avail themselves emotionally to someone else, however, disconcertingly often the very next girl who came along. So I waited. I waited while relatives undoubtedly wondered if I was gay (and if so, why didn’t I have a girlfriend?), seriously messed up, or neuter, I waited through a lot of loneliness, I waited through life moments wonderful and terrible, I waited through dry spells heretofore unimagined, and the wait was worth it, but I will say forever, I will never know now how long I would have continued to wait, when the loneliness would have been too much, enough for me to settle in some way, but I know I had at least a few more years of waiting in me.

Okay, I’m coming around to the rest of my point. This is what I’ve learned from Lloyd Dobler, which is a concept I formerly opposed rather vehemently. Need is good. It was once a source of extremely misguided pride on my part that I could take care of myself and that I needed no one, thank you very much, which is pretty funny I’m sure if you even just ask Nina for one, about what I like to call “The Codependent Years,” which ran approximately from eighth grade, when I scheduled all my classes to match hers because I was terrified of being in a class without her, ending sometime in the early nineties. I once briefly dated a guy who told me that if a girl said to him the words “I need” or “I want” it didn’t matter what followed, that it was the biggest possible turn on. This stuck in my craw for a long time, but I always had a hard time differentiating between “need” and “needy,” which drives me insane. It turns out they are not the same. Needy is not what I’m talking about. Lloyd Dobler made me understand the difference. There’s a scene in the kickboxing studio where Diane Court comes back to Lloyd after she’s broken up with him and finds out her dad has been embezzling money from old people. Appropriately wary, he says to her, “Are you here because you need someone or because you need me? Nevermind, I don’t care.” Thankfully, she says she needs him, which is a crucial distinction. In real life, if you only need someone? You can always find someone. Someone is a lot of people. Eight million dating websites indicate as much. Here is what I have learned. We all need someone, but it’s much better to need the right someone. We do not live in a vacuum. People who do not need people, not to go totally Streisand on you, are few and far between and tend to make bombs out of sagebrush and write manifestoes on their plans for the destruction of humankind. Everyone needs help. We all have friends, we all ask them for favors, we all pay someone to do things we don’t know how to do or couldn’t possibly do without making costly mistakes, like filling out tax forms. Relationships, it turns out are no different. I didn’t realize this until after I got married, of course, actually I didn’t realize it until I watched Say Anything again for the twenty-fourth time the other day. I do not need my husband to brush my teeth for me, although he did it once, and although there’s some chance in the hopefully distant future where one or the other of us might need to help the other do so. As for the difference between need and needy, I also do not need my husband to stand next to me for the duration of a dinner party, I do not need him to tell me he’s stopping at Stanley’s for a bag of apples on the way home and I do not need him to tell me the exact longitude and latitude of his location at any given moment. I do not need him to wash my dishes or do my laundry (although I suspect he might need me for those things) or even take out the trash and mop the floors (although I am grateful that he does) and I do not need him to read my mind (although he’s uncannily good at it anyway) and I do not need him to be anything he isn’t already, because, well, because he’s my Lloyd Dobler. I need him because he’s Ben Brandt. I need him because he fills my life with love and joy and giggles and art and goofy songs and I need him because he’s that thing that being Betsy Crane just isn’t quite enough without.
Wait for Lloyd Dobler. Lloyd Dobler would beat Vince Vaughn from Swingers in a fight in like, one round and that’s even if you put an eyepatch on him and gave Vince Vaughn from Swingers the weapon of your choice and maybe a superpower.

As an alternative, The Pickle Man from Crossing Delancey is close. He may not have hit it quite as big as Lloyd, but he’s from the same school. They’re out there.

Roger, Joyce and Ken

2008-05-23T10:20:00.006-04:00

Once upon a time in 1976 there were three friends with nothing to do. One afternoon they were drinking some Boone's Farm Apple Wine listening to Tony Orlando and Dawn and as the apple wine flowed, it began to seem like a very groovy idea indeed to make a record of their own. Roger, Joyce and Ken began as a trio, 'Like Peter, Paul and Mary!' Joyce said. 'But with a disco beat!' was Roger's idea. 'I was thinking more like Mark Spitz...' Ken said, dismayed at Roger's insistence that Mark Spitz was not a singer.

Things went downhill from there.

Joyce, initially in a long-term relationship with Ken, was easily seduced by Roger's many facets (versus Ken's mere two), and though the group did endeavor to record as a unit, their discord on the direction of the band coupled with Joyce's reluctance to choose between the men, quickly led them to pursue solo careers.

No one knows where the trio is today, although it has long been rumored that Joyce served as the inspiration for the character of Ana Gasteyer's beloved music teacher Bobbie Mohan-Culp.

Pictures From My Tour

2008-05-15T09:32:00.004-04:00

Los Angeles (Russell)

Los Angeles (Ariet)

San Francisco

San Francisco

Ashland, Oregon

Think I was missing someone?

Business Attire

2008-05-15T09:31:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I don't have that.

Re: The Tasteful Public Nudity of Your Child

2008-04-28T18:06:00.002-04:00

Dear Billy Ray,

Okay, um, I was going to address this letter to both you and your daughter, but then I woke up and remembered she's fifteen and the onus is on you.

So, er, did the name Annie Liebovitz not mean anything to you when you signed up for the Vanity Fair dealy? If not, did you not happen to mention to anyone that Miley was signed up for this dealy? If not, did it not occur to you to maybe Google Annie Liebovitz? If not, let me tell you about getting your picture taken by Annie Liebovitz. Many times, shirts come off. I realize this is a bit late.

Moving on. Actually, I personally think it's a nice portrait. Actually, I think it may be the most honest, least contrived, lovely and artful, if, yes, provocative, photo of her I've seen. Actually, I think what you should really be worried about are those photos she posted on the web herself, pulling up her shirt. That's provocative, minus the art. And that's what fifteen year olds do these days, when their parents aren't looking.

So, um, I'd maybe concern yourself with monitoring the internet use and not so much with the Annie Liebovitz.

Yours truly,
E. Crane

Road Report: Day 1

2008-04-19T10:54:00.006-04:00

Greetings from Seattle!

Left sunny and warm Chicago yesterday and arrived here to, well, snow. Snow and hail. But I made the best of it, checked into my hotel and then poked around a little bit.

Yesterdays highlights:

1. Running into sweet Nancy Pearl on my flight.

2. Exit row aisle seat. Leg room!

3. Not going up in the Space Needle. It's a few blocks from the hotel, but I kinda freaked in the Eiffel Tower. Decided not to freak in the Space Needle.

4. Dude who tried to get me to sponsor starving children. He looked kind of like a 20-year-old Donal Logue, and tried so hard, but I couldn't commit on the spot. He was way funny, though. Dude kept calling me dude. I talked to him for a while. He almost hugged me but I told him my husband was 6'4" and he said, Dude could kick my ass, right?

5. Took the bus to another neighborhood and poked around some vintage and antique stores, didn't see anything I couldn't live without.

6. Walked all the way home. Didn't really mean to, I was planning to get on the bus at some point, and then as I got closer, I started thinking it wasn't that far, but then as I got farther, I realized I wasn't there yet, and that I still had a ways to go, and that I was pretty tired but now I was nowhere near the bus line I'd taken and didn't really know how else to get back besides walk or take a cab. You know how, in your own city, you think, Ok, I'd obviously never walk from Hyde Park to Wicker Park, but in a strange city, you don't realize how far something is so you think it's okay to walk but then you suddenly become aware that you've been walking for kind of a while? And that you may very well have walked the equivalent distance from Hyde Park to Wicker Park? And that you're really hungry? And there's nowhere to get a sandwich, which is what you really want? Or else there is somewhere to get a sandwich, but they're out of the only kind you want? So you just start looking for any place of any kind where you can take something out? Which results in:

7. Two major donuts. One was chocolate cakey glazey, the other was chocolate raspberry glazey. This raspberry donut was for sure the most delicious donut ever. This basically ended up being dinner.

8. Cable TV zone out. Rock of Love!

9. Check in with Ben. Sounds like his thesis show went well (total bummer that I had to miss it) and he went out and partied down until 1 am!

What Up, West Coast?

2008-04-14T10:19:00.002-04:00

Come to some readings!

Sat., April 19, 2pm
Olympia Timberland Library
313 8th Ave. SE Olympia, WA
*With Abraham Rodriguez and Nina Revoyr.

Sat., April 19, 7:30pm
Elliott Bay Book Co.
101 S. Main St. Seattle, WA
*With Abraham Rodriguez and Nina Revoyr.

Sun., April 20, 7:30pm
Powell's Books (Burnside)
1005 W. Burnside Portland, OR
*With Abraham Rodriguez and Nina Revoyr.

Tues., April 22, 7pm
Black Oak Books
1491 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA
*With Abraham Rodriguez and Nina Revoyr.

Wed., April 23, 7pm
City Lights
261 Columbus Ave.
San Francisco, CA
*With Abraham Rodriguez and Nina Revoyr.

Thurs., April 24, 7pm
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
W. Hollywood, CA
*Akashic Books hosts a pre-LA Times Festival of Books party. With Abraham Rodriguez, Nina Revoyr, and Mike Farrell

Sugar and Mint

2008-04-03T09:02:00.002-04:00

After my wonderful book party in New York, at Nina's house, there were a lot of leftovers and Nina sent me home with most of the sweets. Besides about a jillion cookies, I took a lovely box of sugared candies that are shaped like little daisies, brightly colored daisies, so cute are these daisies that I really don't want to eat them, at least until I take a picture. Except I did eat one or two, and it turns out they are delicious sugary mints.

Conversation with Ben regarding these candies as he's about to choose one:

Me: No! Don't eat that!
Ben: Why not?
Me: They're too cute. I want to look at them.
Ben: Take a picture.
Me: Okay I will but not right now.
Ben takes one anyway.
Me: Ennnh!
Ben: Mmm. What are these made of?
Me: Sugar.
Ben: Sugar and what?
Me: Mint.
Ben: Yeah, but sugar and mint and what?
Me: Just mint.
Ben: But what's the binder?
Me: Mint.
Ben: No but what are they made of?
Me: Mint.
Ben: But what holds them together?
Me: Sugar.
Ben: But what holds the sugar together?
Me: Mint.

Dead Man's Cell Phone

2008-04-03T08:55:00.004-04:00

I just saw it at Steppenwolf in Chicago. Jessica Thebus directed it, she of the fantastic adaptation of When The Messenger is Hot, and it's amazing. You should go see it. I don't want to say much more except it's really funny, but also really moving and thoughtful and surreal. It's everything good.

If you live in New York, you can also see it there.

What Up, East Coast?

2008-03-23T09:52:00.001-04:00

Come on out and see me read from YOU MUST BE THIS HAPPY TO ENTER!

Fri., March 28, 7:30pm
Back Pages Books
289 Moody St., Suite 101
Waltham, MA
*With Paul Fattaruso.

Sat., March 29, 7pm
Bluestockings
172 Allen St.
New York, NY
*With Paul Fattaruso.

Sun., March 30, 2pm
Word Books
126 Franklin St.
Brooklyn, NY
*With Paul Fattaruso.

Mon., March 31, 7pm
Olsson's Dupont Circle
1307 19th St. NW
Washington, DC
*With Paul Fattaruso.

The Funniest, Most Disturbing Talk Show I've Ever Seen

2008-03-21T09:44:00.004-04:00

I hope to god this show becomes a huge hit.

See it.

2008-03-17T09:00:00.002-04:00

The Best Review I Ever Got

2008-03-07T09:14:00.005-05:00

everydayyeah

Reading This Saturday!

2008-03-03T09:11:00.003-05:00

With Spencer Dew and Kate Duva

Sat., March 8, 7pm
The Book Cellar
4736 N. Lincoln
Chicago, IL

My Ben Likes to Party All The Time

2008-02-15T11:24:00.002-05:00

So the other morning Ben was singing "Party All the Time" in the falsetto you've all had the pleasure of witnessing now.
Me: Do you know who sings that?
Ben: Paula Abdul?
Me: (giggling) No.
Ben: Bob? (Bob here = actor friend who plays 'Wilson' on the popular Fox television series "House.")
Me: (giggling more) No.
Ben: Okay I have no idea.
Me: Eddie Murphy.
Ben: No way!
Betsy: For real.
Ben: Well then I was pretty close with my last guess.

That's How He Do

2008-02-02T18:09:00.001-05:00

Behold the magic of iMovie (and the magical musical stylings of my hunny):

See what you've been missing at the Brandt house?

My Mom is on YouTube

2008-01-29T11:10:00.000-05:00

So weird and random that this turned up on YouTube. Check it out. Maybe y'all can post some nice comments on there.

Patry Francis Day

2008-01-29T08:48:00.000-05:00

First go here:Litpark

And then go here: Patry Francis.com

That's it for me today.

Two Sad But Good Movies That Will Stick in Your Head

2008-01-28T08:48:00.000-05:00

Half Nelson:

Even the picture is sad, right? I never saw this Ryan Gosling dude in anything before but he was fantastic. That kind of acting where you can just see inside someone's head, without them being all flashy about it.

Speaking of which, I'm pretty sure Gosling went to acting school with this guy from The Lives of Others (except for them being 20 years apart in age and Ulrich Muhe being from Germany):

One of the saddest movies ever, but also incredibly beautiful and thought-provoking.

I Have Solved A Computer Problem Entirely On My Own

2008-01-27T09:28:00.000-05:00

This is not to say that I have solved all my computer problems. Just one. Being that blogger was not letting me post anything at all. All by myself. Figgered it out. Now I've just got to work on the photo thing and we're really back in business.

Please praise me.

Apparently I Have A Book In Stores Now

2008-01-20T09:05:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm having trouble uploading photos and adding links right now for reasons involving postdata and I have no idea what that means so the nice little cover of my book I wanted to post here will have to wait. But wait! I spoke too soon!

Anyhoo, the point is, you can buy the book now, YOU MUST BE THIS HAPPY TO ENTER, it's on Powells and Amazon and in most stores, from what folks tell me, even though the official release date is February 8.

And if you're feeling all Frenchy, there's a bonus story in the French edition, also just out, which is called BANANA LOVE (another story in the collection), and you can order that from Amazon.fr.

Chicagoans, please come to the release reading/celebration:

Thurs., February 7, 7pm
Quimby's
1854 W. North Ave.
Chicago, IL

Special home-style treats for book-buyers!

Merry Christmas to Me!

2007-12-30T11:04:00.001-05:00

Okay! So, except for Ben bonking his noggin in a freak snowboarding accident (or, not freak - he was actually standing on a sled) and us going to the emergency room, we had a pretty great week at my dad's house in Iowa. Here are some highlights taken with MY NEW CAMERA that Ben got me for Xmas plus a little post-concussion video that I also took with MY NEW CAMERA. (Note: Ben is recovering nicely and the ER, at least in Mt. Pleasant, is not anything like it is on NBC. Meaning, you fall off a sled and you walk in and there's no one there and they say come on in and then they fix you and it doesn't appear that any doctors are drunk or having sex with any other doctors. Also: while viewing, please ignore my fingers/horrible hangnails in front of the camera, I wasn't concentrating, but I don't claim to be Scorsese either.)

Snowman #1

Snowman #2

Tree with cardinals (there was a bright red one in the center just seconds before I took this photo, for reals)

My bro Reed, in fake smile

My dad in fake smile

Crane-Zangers in Santa hats.

Dog tired.

It's The Little Things

2007-12-19T18:39:00.000-05:00

I got my first pair of snowboots in about twenty years.
This is life-changing.
I'm sorry if you've been waiting for something better than this.

Monsters of Rock

2007-11-25T09:29:00.000-05:00

There's a new obsession in the Brandt house.

Feelin' it.

All Nancy Wilson.

Headbanging.

Because you know, what with school, teaching, writing, art, and Facebook - we really didn't have enough to occupy our time.

A Transcript of Yesterday's Support Group Meeting For Obsessive Dogs

2007-11-13T09:15:00.000-05:00

Sunday at the dog park, Percy's best gal pal Piper swallowed one of his rubber balls whole. She's done this before. Thus, the transcript.

Percy: Why would they leave such a tasty pillow out if they didn't want me to eat it?
Piper: This is my feeling about the balls. Am I the only one who loves that rubbery feeling in my mouth?
Izzy: LOVE that feeling! LOVE IT!
Charlotte: Oh man, me too.
Santino: Nothing like it.
Percy: Have you guys even tried pillows? Slippers? LEATHER? Leather is the best!
Counselor: I think we're getting a little off-track here. Let's redirect. Last week we talked about treats, and we agreed that you all get plenty of treats.
Percy: A treat is completely different than a pillow. Not the same. Both have their place, don't get me wrong.
Piper: Does a treat have a squeak? I don't think so.
Percy: This is what I'm saying.

My Fambly

2007-11-09T10:07:00.000-05:00

Okay, so Percy has been entering a new phase of life in which several changes have taken place, for the better or worse depending on how you look at it. After nearly a year with us, he seems, in his doggy way, to have become more certain that this is is permanent home, and that we are his permanent people, and although his personality is still not altogether typically doggy run to the door lick you all over the face, he is showing signs that he kinda digs us. One of the more obvious ways is that he just sits closer to us than he ever used to, whether it's on the sofa or on the bed, he'll just sidle up and lay his head on your lap or under your hand, as opposed to sitting down in his own little spot at the foot of the bed, or on the other end of the couch.

The more problematic behavior, of late, is that after TV/reading hour is over, Percy has become more and more reluctant to go to his own bed on the floor, and has repeatedly either whined to get back into bed with us, where, during sleeping hours, there is no room for Percy and our four legs. The repeated whining, however, is more or less intolerable, and so often one or the other of us will concede some space to Percy and contort our legs however we can so that we can go back to sleep. I suggested a king-sized bed, which Ben is not into. Then I had a genius idea. Ben could build a platform dog bed that will go at the foot of our bed, so that Percy would have the feeling that he's in our bed but really he isn't. I tested out this idea with a makeshift version where I put Percy's dog bed on top of the trunk already at the foot of the bed, which isn't really big enough (or stable enough, long-term), but amazingly, he went for it, and slept there for several nights before Ben brought home the new dog bed.

And I was thinking, hm, where am I going to move the antique trunk to when the dog bed comes home. My idea was that Ben would slap some two-by fours together with a piece of plywood.

I should have known my husband would never do such a thing.

What can I even say? My husband is the winner. The winner of the husbands. And my dog is about the luckiest dog ever. Paris Hilton's dogs wish they had beds like this.

Chocolate Louds

2007-11-06T12:07:00.000-05:00

Ben went to Trader Joe's yesterday. Opening the bag looking for my chocolate cat cookies I saw what I thought was labeled "Chocolate Louds." I said, "Mmmm, chocolate louds...". Ben said, "Clouds. Chocolate clouds." I looked closely. Indeed, there was something resembling a cursive letter C in front of the all-cap serif font of LOUDS. I said, "Well, that's just bad design." Plus, while clouds of chocolate sound perfectly lovely, don't chocolate louds sound so much more exciting?

Bubblerama at the Midwest Film Festival

2007-11-02T13:35:00.000-04:00

Hey, come see Bubblerama if you missed it! It's free! And it's opening for this movie!
Click below to RSVP!

George Saunders is Inside My Head And I Can Only Hope He Remains Blissfully Unaware of This Fact

2007-11-02T11:17:00.000-04:00

From now on, in my classes, I think I’m just going to tell my students, ‘Please go get The Braindead Megaphone and read “Mr. Vonnegut in Sumatra” and “The Perfect Gerbil” (along with “The School” by Donald Barthelme), because these two pieces articulate, in a far more entertaining and intelligent manner than I ever could, exactly what I think about writing, and reading, and if you have any further questions, I’m sorry about that, because there isn’t anything at all that I can add to advance or illuminate the discussion, and your time would be just as well spent sitting here in silent contemplation for the next ten weeks.’

During the school year, I have little time to spend reading the ever-growing, nay, perilously Tower-of-Pisa-like pile of books on my nightstand, much as I am loving what little of it I have poked into lately (Roy Kesey – freaking fantastic! Deb Olin Unferth – totally want to be her in my next life! Tao Lin – whoa.) One could suggest that I cut back on my television viewing, to which I would say to one, ‘ For one thing, One, I have to have some entertainment while I’m in bed weaving our new living room rug (yes, One, you heard me right) also, most evenings, past the hour of say, eight, my brain begins to fuzz over and cannot properly absorb reading as well as it can earlier in the evening, and frankly, before you judge me, One, you should really check out Pushing Daisies, because it’s about the cutest show ever, I don’t care if anyone thinks it’s too precious, it is precious, but not in a Care Bears kind of way, just in a super fairy-tale bittersweet comic love story kind of way, with super cute 1950’s style clothes, and Anna Friel, if you’re a google-yourself kind of gal, and I hope you are, I would love for you to star in the movie version of my story of your choosing. Actually, I would write a story just for you to star in. (Although Pushing Daisies people, if I had any complaints, there’s maybe just a smidge more cleavage taking place on this show than seems necessary to move the plot. But maybe that’s just me.)

Getting back to Saunders, the piece about Vonnegut is so freaky to me, because the trajectory of my life as a writer bears some very similar, albeit completely different experiences. Unlike Saunders, I was introduced to Vonnegut in sixth grade – we also read a bunch of Pinter, and the following year, Salinger, and my pre-teen imagination ran completely wild. I had decided when I was eight that I was going to be a writer, and I had always loved reading, but it had never been more clear to me that this was what I wanted to do. Forget that I didn’t have much of an idea at the time about what any of it meant – it was odd and hilarious and gorgeous and it made me write stories about made up creatures that lived under the dining room table and babies born in empty rooms who aspired to be on Johnny Carson, but then I was assigned to read some people like Hemingway and some other perfectly fine writers like Austen and Fitzgerald (and with regard to Hemingway, heavy emphasis here on ‘assigned’, because I’m quite sure this assignment was in no way completed) and for reasons that escape me now, I completely forgot that the Vonneguts of the world existed and started thinking about themes and climaxes and denouements and trying to describe things, like I dunno, wildlife? bullfighting? women in petticoats named Eliza Jane? which weren’t things I was especially interested in, in our 11th floor apartment at 588 West End Avenue, I was interested in Wacky Packs,

and the Partridge Family,

and why my friend from fifth grade was showing up at school with belt marks on her back, and why my friend from sixth grade who used to be into old movies like me came back after the summer to seventh grade suddenly into sex and the marijuana.

Hm, this is so not where I thought I was going with this. Where was I going with this. Nowhere as usual, likely. The point, I think, is that it appears that Mr. Saunders had his own circuitous route to writing the way he writes, and I very much appreciate my unaloneness in that, and am reminded why I try to encourage my fellow writers and writing students to read all kinds of different stuff, not because they should be writing like Vonnegut or whoever floats their boat, and especially not to write in nice tidy upward sloping stories before coming back down at some mathematically predetermined end, but so that they go, ‘So, you’re saying that if Vonnegut writes like Vonnegut, maybe I can write like, er, me?’

To which I say yes, yes you can, and you don’t even have to wait until you’re thirty-five before you let anyone read it.

Crazy Something, Anyway

2007-10-29T09:37:00.000-04:00

Ben and I watched this documentary last night about this couple in NY, Burt and Linda Pugach. The story in a nutshell is this: they met when she was about 22, they broke up because he was married, he was obsessed with her, threw acid in her face, partially blinding and disfiguring her, he went to jail for fourteen years and then they got married and they’ve been together for thirty years but apparently ten or so years back he pulled a similar stunt with another mistress.

So, um, I’m clear on the ‘crazy’, but not so much on the love.

Still, it’s interesting to think about. The question of love aside, they have chosen each other. Me, lye in the face would be a deal-breaker. Equally as fascinating is that almost all of Linda’s friends seemed to support her choice to go back to him. One of them said something like, ‘She was thirty-five.’

Anyway, all I’m clear on is that Burt and Linda Pugach have something, but if that’s love in any universe, I’m frightened for all of us.

The Bachelor of My Dreams

2007-10-23T18:15:00.000-04:00

Voice over: Next, the most shocking rose ceremony ever…

Cut to clip of befuddled Bachelor.

Insert commercial.

Cut to: Twenty-five young women in cheap evening gowns.

Host: You have twenty-five lovely ladies here but only sixteen roses. Are you ready?

Bachelor: This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do.
Host steps away. Tense music plays.
Bachelor (looking down): Alisha, will you please accept this rose?
Alisha walks over.
Alisha: Um, I don’t know how to say this… I just don’t see this going anywhere.
Bachelor looks blank, but moves on.
Bachelor: Oh, of course, I totally understand.
Alisha walks away.
Bachelor: Jenni, will you please accept this rose?
Jenni walks over.
Jenni: I’m sorry, I can’t. I see us more as friends.
Bachelor looks blank again. Bachelor: Sure, sure. Candis, will you please accept this rose?
Candis walks over.
Candis: I’m not really feeling this.
Candis walks away.
Bachelor: Oh, okay then. Arnelle, will you please accept this rose?
Arnelle walks over.
Arnelle: No.
Arnelle walks away.
Bachelor shakes his head in amazement.
Bachelor: Southern Arnelle will you please accept this rose?
Southern Arnelle walks over.
Southern Arnelle: No.
Southern Arnelle walks away. Host walks over.
Host: Well, this is a first in Bachelor history - you’re batting a thousand here slugger, but not in a good way. You want to keep going?
Bachelor: Yes, yes, I guess I should be surprised this hasn’t happened before.
Host: Alright, well then let’s move on.
Bachelor: Bettini, will you please accept this rose?
Bettini walks over. She shakes her head no and keeps walking.
Bachelor: Petunia, will you please accept this rose?
Petunia walks over. She gives him the hand and walks past.
Bachelor: Shamickney, will you please accept this rose?
Shamickney has already left.
Bachelor: Shamickney?
The other girls shake their heads.
Bachelor: Shmemumnum, will you please accept this rose?
Shmemumnum: Joker.
Shmemumnum walks away.
Bachelor: Shlmrmma, will you please accept this rose?
Shlmrmma: Sorry, man.
Shlmrmma walks away.
Bachelor: Blehblahblys, will you please accept this rose?
Blehblahblys: Not likely.
Blehblahblys walks away.
Host walks back over. Host: Do you even want to continue?
Bachelor (not convincing): No, I do, I do, it’s cool. Brlph, will you please accept this rose?
Brlph walks over and says No, whispers something in the bachelor’s ear, he brightens briefly.
Bachelor: Thanks, Brlph. Shondpoo, will you please accept this rose?
Shondpoo walks over.
Shondpoo (conflicted): Okay.
Bachelor hugs Shondpoo before she walks away.
Bachelor: Crmpgth, will you please accept this rose?
Crmpgth: No.
Crmpgth walks away.
Bachelor: Okay look, is there anyone else who actually wants a rose?
Plpnquich: I do.
Bachelor: Plpnquich will you please accept this rose?
Plpnquich: To be clear, I don’t really want to date you, I just like roses.
Bachelor: Here, I have some extras.
Bachelor picks up most of the rest of the roses.
Bachelor: Look, are any of you interested in dating me?
All remaining ladies shake their heads no.
Host walks over.
Alright, so at this point, any number of possible endings would satisfy me:
a) A truly awkward, terrible relationship week after week in the same format as the existing show.
b) This:
Bachelor: Shondpoo, I didn’t have time to go pick out rings from the fancy store they’re advertising this season, since there were supposed to be ten more episodes before the last bachelorette was left, but: Will you marry me?
And then here, again, I would be delighted with either of these possibilities:
a) Shondpoo: Oh my god, yes, yes! Yes, I’ll marry you!
b) Bachelor: (Pulling out a ring from his pocket) Shondpoo, will you wear this ring to signify that we are continuing to date and see what happens?
Shondpoo: Oh my god, yes, yes!
c) Shondpoo: Let’s just forget it.

Cut to: The Bachelor, in a limousine, sobbing uncontrollably.
Bachelor: God, I don’t understand! I felt intimate connections with at least twelve of those women! What’s wrong with me? I’m so embarrassed!
Bachelor grabs bottle of booze from minibar.
Bachelor: Whatever! I’m the bomb, if they can’t see that it’s their problem. Just friends. As if. Pssh.
Bachelor starts crying again, waves his hand in front of his face and hides his head, doesn’t want to be seen anymore.

Podcast

2007-10-23T09:30:00.000-04:00

Chicago Center for Literature and Photography has a podcast up that I did with them yesterday. Check it.

Our Dog is Famous

2007-10-21T10:47:00.001-04:00

Did a reading at Quimby's last night with Ken Foster, who is an important link in the chain that led Percy to find us, and you can read all about it in his new book.

No, Percy didn't make the cover. That's Ken's dog. I don't know what went into that decision. But in any case, check it out - Ben and I get special mention as well!

Bunches of Readings

2007-10-14T11:38:00.000-04:00

Hi Kids!
I've got readings all over the place in the next two weeks.

Friday, October 19, 7:00 at The Book Cellar: Come hear "Witty Women Writers" Stacey Ballis, Wendy McClure, Claire Zulkey, Jen Lancaster and me. 4736 N. Lincoln.

Saturday, October 20, 7:00 at Quimby's, 1854 W. North Ave: Ken Foster, Megan Stielstra, me, and maybe some dogs. Maybe my own dog Mr. P.

Thursday October 25, 7:30 The Fixx Coffee Bar, 3053 N Sheffield, with Roy Kesey (all the way from China!) and Jonathan Messinger.

And if you happen to have a limo, you could also go to the screening of Bubblerama at the River East AMC that same night at 6:30, details at www.bubblerama.com. It's only a half hour, so it could happen.

Green. Very green.

2007-10-13T12:31:00.000-04:00

I do what little I can to go green, more and more, although unlike my husband I'm not ready to make the move from tissues to handkerchiefs. I use a lot of tissues, at times, and one hanky, well, it's just not gonna work for me.

Recently I've been using Trader Joe's pocket packs of tissues, and I didn't realize before I bought them that they were 100% recycled.

I don't know what to make of this.

My mind goes, well, it goes to a bad place. It takes the word green into a whole new dimension.

Let's not even speak about recycled toilet paper.

Poor

2007-10-05T09:09:00.000-04:00

Dear My Students,
I know, my penmanship is terrible. I will work on that, although you should know it was the only subject in elementary school in which I got a 'poor' and it may not improve significantly now that I am long out of third grade. In the meantime, please be aware of the following: if you see a note next to a sentence that looks like it says "No!" in fact, what it most likely says is "Ha!"
I would never write something so brazenly shaming on your work.
Your Professor,
E. Crane

I Go To Premieres and Shit

2007-09-25T09:37:00.001-04:00

Here is a still from Bubblerama, MY (first) MOVIE:

The premiere at the MCA last night was super glam and my friend Liz told me I looked so Hollywood which made me very happy since it was exactly what I was going for. I figure, you know, when in Rome... no one needed to know my Hollywood outfit was a top from Forever 21 and a very last minute belt that was actually a necklace and a pin, which looked very cute until I attempted, um, moving, at which time it kept falling off.

But enough about my outfit.

The movie is awesome. It's based on this crazy story I wrote, called Stealer. There are some amazing (and surreal) images in the film but I don't want to give too much away since I think it will be more widely available for your viewing pleasure soon (stay tuned). There were twizzlers in the theater and the party was fancy and fun and they served yummy small food like tiny burgers, tiny milk and cookies, and tiny soup with tiny grilled cheese. And there were gift bags! With bubbles and cookies and champagne - we donated ours to a very, very excited homeless lady on the street. (This could be a whole separate post...) Check out the website again, on the link above - there's some cool stuff there, including an interview with the adorable and sweet actors (watch closely for a clip from the film in there featuring ME) who were so so so great and perfect, and you can also send an email message to a friend from 'the doll' (although the voice is computer-generated and not the helium-goodness in the film).

Yep, this is how we roll. I'm just glad this is only how we roll sometimes, because if we rolled like this every day I would roll through life dazed and spaced out from all the excitement, which keeps me awake at night. I would be willing to roll like this slightly more often though, if it keeps paying the rent.

The Lost Baldwin

2007-09-22T08:47:00.000-04:00

This morning we met a French bulldog at the park.

He tried to bite Percy's ears.

His name is Daniel Baldwin.

What, you want more?

Kid Nation

2007-09-21T09:13:00.001-04:00

Okay, I care about kids. I don't have any but I am pro-taking care of them.

And I think Kid Nation is my new favorite show. I almost cried like six times.

The clip here on Gawker, might or might not prove my point. But in fact, these two kids were really great, even though the shaggy haired little boy decided to go home, and I love that moment where the older girl comes to take care of Jimmy.

And that little girl ended up being really glad she stayed - she toughed it out and felt really proud of herself. There was also another girl, a fifteen year old named Sophia, who rocked it - totally stepped up.

Is the show contrived, is it sort of Survivor for little kids except no one gets booted off and they have food and roofs over their heads? Yes. Are these kids really great? I think they are. Check it.

Ben Moments

2007-09-21T09:03:00.000-04:00

The other night Ben walked out of the bedroom in a very odd, squiggly fashion - I thought maybe he had tripped. I said, What was that?

He said, That was my straightening out the rug dance, and then he performed it again.

This morning, Ben said, This book is awesome! I thought he was still reading The Devil in White City. He said, No, The Theory of Mouldings!

Love Lift Us Up To A Higher Place

2007-09-17T09:38:00.000-04:00

Not sure if I've mentioned our singing habits around here, but they include making up words to existing songs, making up entire songs around things like frozen foods ("Mini Beef Tacos"* is a classic) and other less romantic things. Also, Ben tends to sing falsetto pretty much always.

Yesterday he was singing the theme to Officer and a Gentelman in the aforementioned falsetto, thusly:

"Love lift us up where we belong
to a higher place
to the Asian race."

There were more lyrics after this that also rhymed with ace, and some of them were pretty funny, I'm pretty sure outer space was in there too, but I forgot the rest because I was still back on Asian race. Because - it seems like it almost means something... but it really doesn't.

*Mini beef tac-ohhhs
mini beef ta-cohs.
Repeat

Year of the Dog is Not a Comedy

2007-09-17T09:25:00.000-04:00

I have never been able to hack it when bad things happen to animals in the movies.

When I was ten and saw Gone With the Wind for the first time, the only time I cried during the movie is when a horse drops dead from exhaustion.

So, in spite of knowing the basic storyline of Year of the Dog in advance of seeing the movie, I completely lost it when the bad thing happens near the beginning. I don't mean I got verklempt. I mean that kind of sloppy wheezy sobbing.

We have a dog now, as you know.

And he was curled up at our feet as we were watching this sad, not a comedy movie, and I just, okay he's a puppy still he's not a year and a half old really, but this dog in the movie was a puppy and bad things happen but I would seriously just die if any bad thing happened to our dog so I don't really even know why we're talking about it.

It's a good movie, by the way. And there are one or two funny things in it. But it's just not a comedy.

If I Could Get My Cash Back, I Would, But I'd Settle Instead For My Time

2007-09-02T09:42:00.000-04:00

Ben and I watched this movie Cashback last night, which initially had a little promise, slowly became weird, and then became downright disturbing.

And let me say this about that: I am not easily disturbed. Not by movies, anyway. What disturbed me about this film was not what it was but what it pretended to be.

Briefly, this movie is supposed to be an arty/quirky indie film, a romantic - comedy? - of sorts that focuses on the an art student who had a bad breakup with his girlfriend. Early on it seems sort of gloomy, and as they're developing the breakup story there is some insanely heavy-handed orchestra music that seems like it got lost on it's way to the climax of an Oscar-nominated biopic. At this point, Ben and I are just in the "What the hell?" stage of watching. There was another sequence - I don't know what the film-techie word for it is, but it's that thing where one object (in this case, the art-kid) is moving in slow-motion and everything else is moving fast - and it's just - I'm sorry, but it was cool the first time I saw it but I just kept thinking - I LOVE movies that are creative and artful (I'm in the LOVED IT camp on The Science of Sleep) but I've seen this more than once before and at this point - you know - a great story doesn't require a lot of special effects, and all this so-called artiness was doing was just calling attention to the unoriginality of all of it.

It begins to take a turn for the more comedic when the sensitive art-student guy (who of course has a horny best friend) goes to work on the night shift at a supermarket, where we're introduced to a quirky cast of characters such as you might see on The Office - no, wait, such as you have already seen on The Office. And then the art student guy suddenly becomes taken with one of his co-workers, as indicated in the locker-room scene where he tries to help her get a bit of food off her face, which has only been done in about sixty other romantic comedies and/or sitcoms. Oh and there was one more bit that was dowright creepy - art kid finally wins supermarket girl with his debut gallery show - that's all portraits of her. Okay, in real-life, we call that stalking. My husband - my husband - has maybe drawn four or five pictures of me in as many years. This movie takes place over the course of a few weeks.

But mostly (can you believe I'm not even up to the mostly yet?), this movie got under my skin because of this: art guy talks a lot about how beauty has always meant a lot to him - beauty here being indicated by lots of lingering, slow-motion shots of perfect breasts and asses, and when I say lots, I mean - so many that it becomes offensive on multiple levels. One being that the point could have been made with, say, one or two pairs of breasts, but another being that the 'beauty' being discussed is pretty much a porn-magazine conception of beauty - round, pert boobies, flat bellies, round high, asses. I have the sense that the slow-motion was intended to make this 'artistic', but I'm not having it.

Tying this back to Showgirls, as much as I've heard that film was trying to be arty, it fails so spectacularly on that front, that the humor value is well worth it, and, more importantly, I am completely fine with a movie titled 'Showgirls' having a whole bunch of bare breasts in it. Cashback, not so much. Arty filmmaker, whoever you are, I'm sorry to harsh your mellow, I often save my negative reviews for my private life, but you lost me at beauty. Give me Russ Meyer any day.

Blue, Black, Whatever

2007-08-30T08:09:00.001-04:00

Apparently I cannot tell black from blue.

Yesterday I bought a pair of pants that I believed to be navy blue. When I modeled them for Ben he informed me that they were black. I stood next to our black dog to show him that the two colors were not the same.

He laughed very hard and told me I had a problem and that I might be colorblind. I went around the room naming colors to prove that I am not colorblind. I got them all right.

He retrieved several more black items to hold next to my blue pants to prove to me that I had this problem. I continued to maintain that they were all different. Finally I could not refute the truth when one last black item was held next to the pants.

Although the issue comes back into some debate because after I decided to return the pants and retrieved the tag from the trash, the color, in tin-iny print, was listed as 'New Black.' Which to me either means that navy blue is the new black or I do indeed have a problem.

My New Old Career

2007-08-27T11:11:00.000-04:00

Last week I made an appearance as “Elizabeth Crane” in a film called “Bubblerama,” based on a short story I wrote called “Stealer.”

I was cast without an audition. They asked me if I thought I could play the part. I said I thought I might be able to bring something to the role. Layers.

This was not my acting debut, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first thing I’ve done that will ever be seen (unless you were watching As the World Turns back in 1986 and were inclined to use the pause button). I had lines. I sat in a trailer. I had makeup. (One more reason I love me some Ben: he said “They gave you a smoky eye.” I said “How do you even know what that means?” He said, “I’ve seen America’s Next Top Model.”)

I am very much planning my wardrobe for Sundance right now.

If you would like to come see the magic, you can!

Click it or ticket: BUBBLERAMA

Every Now and Again My Faith in Humanity is Restored

2007-08-22T11:12:00.000-04:00

Wonder Dog by Tony Fitzpatrick

I believe in artists supporting artists and when I find that other artists share this belief, I am happy.

That's all I have to say except look closely at this collage and read the poem. I think it might be the loveliest thing I've read in a while.

Business Time

2007-08-14T10:49:00.001-04:00

Messenger - The Play: See It

2007-08-13T10:29:00.000-04:00

Hey Kids!
Okay, I should have posted a reminder about this a while back, but the theatrical adaptation of When The Messenger is Hot is up at Steppenwolf's Garage theater right now, and there are still four performances left and you should go see it. Call this number for tickets: 312-335-1650. It's only fifteen bucks - a bargain! And it's amazing. I can say this because all I did was show up. Okay, well I wrote the book. But they play was adapted by Laura Eason, who dreamed up something I couldn't have, and if it weren't for the genius vision of the director, Jessica Thebus, it would never have gotten to Laura or onto the stage, especially not in just exactly the captivating way that it is. I can't say enough about how great the cast is. I will save for another time what a surreal experience it is to see your work, and elements of your life, more or less, acted out in front of you, but in these capable hands, it's mostly relief that those parts of my life are over and that I am crazy lucky to have a theater like Steppenwolf include my work in any way.

Here is a crazy good review from the Tribune.

And here are some photos:

Behold the beaded sweatery goodness!

Look, mom comes back from the depot!

A sweet moment I won't spoil.

Different Places!*

2007-08-05T10:12:00.000-04:00

Okay, please don’t ask me the obvious question – which would be along the lines of – Um, and, why did you watch this movie?

Even though I’ll answer anyway: Because Ben hadn’t seen it?

It can be argued that the humor value, intentional or -un, holds up, anyway. I would argue that the cost of renting this movie, especially on Netflix, is worth it for the swimming pool sex scene alone, between Elizabeth Berkeley and Kyle “I’m just trying to hang on for dear life here” McLachlan. If it doesn’t make you laugh uncontrollably, I’ll send you your 2.99.

*Showgirl Nomi Malone's angry answer to the seemingly innocuous question, "Where are you from?"

All Buffalo Meat All The Time

2007-08-02T18:41:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a week at this lovely place, Ft. Robinson, Nebraska. Here is a picture of the lodge we stayed in:

I noticed, in the weeks leading up to our family vacation, that when people ask you where you're going on vacation and you say 'Nebraska', the response is generally a puzzled look. In fact, Ft. Robinson, former military compound and the site of the demise of Crazy Horse, is quite a beautiful place, with well-preserved historic buildings, gorgeous western-like scenery (buttes and what have you) lots of stuff to do like swimming, horseback riding, hiking, tennis, kayaking, even a little Corky St. Clair-style summer theater (note for the next Broadway Revue: I'm not sure the song "I'm Just A Girl Who Cain't Say No" has held up so well). So it was the perfect place for my entire family, from 10 to 80, to convene.

Here is a picture of me on a horse, followed by my two nephews:

Here is a picture of the main ingredient in most meals at Ft. Robinson, Nebraska:

If buffalo meat isn't your thing, you might want to consider bringing along some food because non-meat oriented meals are hard to come by. They did have a 'salad bar', but there was a lot of mayonnaise involved in most of the 'salads'. Also, if you anticipate even a remote need for femininine hygiene products (perhaps this is in keeping with the 1900-military theme where there would have been few women around?) or Diet Coke, plan ahead. This is a strictly Pepsi-lovin' town. If you want a wooden gun that shoots rubber bands, then you're in luck.

Here is a picture of a kid from the rodeo:

Note: This kid was not the smallest one in the rodeo by a longshot. There was a little girl who could not have been two, who participated in an event called 'ride the hide', in which you jump stomach first onto a cowhide that's tied to the back of a horse, and get dragged. This little girl jumped onto the hide like she'd done it a hundred times, but watching her bounce up and down while being dragged behind a horse was more than a little disturbing.

Here is the sort of picture I like to take:

Here is the sort of picture Ben likes to take:

Finally and sadly, I do not have a photo of what was perhaps the most spectacular moment of the trip, so you'll just have to picture it: Ben diving, nay, flying, head first, Jackass-style, into a large hedge to retrieve a Frisbee. But let me just say this: if I had videotape, I would for sure win the big money on AFV.

No again.

2007-07-24T17:12:00.000-04:00

Please Never Say This Unless You Are Quoting Someone Who Is An Idiot:

"Game on!"

Why.

2007-07-21T18:06:00.000-04:00

Okay, please someone to explain why I need to be on more than one network such as myspace, friendster, linkedin and what have you. I'm confused. And I have only so much time to spend online looking for messages in six places.

The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem

2007-07-17T10:06:00.000-04:00

Summer television sucks. I’m catching up on some reading, for sure, but sometimes, in the evening, I’m just tired and I need a little mindless entertainment. But I feel like what’s going on right now brings ‘mindless’, as the guy on Mad TV says, to a “ho, nubba lubba!” (translation for those of you who haven’t seen it – “a whole ‘nother level”).

So what I am known to do is watch several shows at once. I do not have picture in picture. And yet, my feeling is, watching shows like this, I am more than capturing the essence of all of them in this limited viewing style.

Last night, I watched Wife Swap and Posh Comes to America at seven, followed by Extreme Makeover and Age of Love at eight.

By nine, I was suicidal, but too tired to do anything about it. At this point, I actually picked up and finished a book, bleary as I was.

Read it. Eighty brilliant pages about Vietnam was far less torturous than the combined programming I had on earlier.

Okay, so but let me talk about these shows a bit. I was drawn into the Posh show by the commercials and by my utter wonder at the apparent obsession they have in Britain with Posh and Becks. Basically, she comes to America a few weeks ahead of her husband and kids to settle in, buy a house and find a manicurist. It was hard to tell what of this show was meant to be cheeky and what wasn’t. She had a certain charm, I’ll admit (she does a fine impression of a blowup doll), but the name Posh seemed to fit. She lounges by the pool in heels. Her two best friends are her hairstylist and her makeup artist. But the whole show was so contrived that it was hard to tell if there was any real glimpse of her at all. All I could really latch onto about the whole show was the utterly foreign lifestyle. Hideously garish twelve million dollar houses, paparazzi, and especially, a group of post-middle-aged and multiply reconstructed/hair-extended Beverly Hills ladies who invite her over with a welcome lunch. It was during this segment that I learned of Posh’s affection for the term ‘major’, as in (imagine Posh accent) “These ladies had ‘may-juh’ lipstick on!” (in fact, it was really their lips that were major, if you ask me). I really don’t know what to make of any of this. I don’t know what my life would be like if I had that kind of money. It just seems really hard to imagine that it would be anything like that.

So I flipped between that and Wife Swap. Okay, I actually like Wife Swap. One of the things I love about it, as with many reality shows, is imagining what it would be like if I were on that show, and in this case, trying to figure out what would be the sort of opposite of our life, who they’d swap us with. Which would maybe be: very rich and indulgent, very rigid and religious? We’re not super neat or sloppy, we’re certainly arty, but we’re not very extreme anything, which helps for the drama on the show. And yet, all of the families they choose seem so extreme that it’s not often I can root for one over the other because they’re usually both so stuck in their weirdnesses that I don’t like either of them. Last night they had a family whose son was super into motocross even though he had hideous burns on his back from an accident and they more or less ignored their daughter, matched up with a ‘pagan’ family who ‘worshipped’ their mother, the goddess. Ben and I are, it’s safe to say, the opposite of both of these families. Maybe we would need two whole families to swap with.

Okay, and then there’s Extreme Makeover, which is almost pointless to watch until the ‘reveal’ which comes in the last five minutes, and Age of Love, arguably the most shameful of all of last night’s programming, a dating show in which a 30 year old man chooses between a group of women, half in their twenties and half in their forties. I have my own reasons for tuning in to this show, and am obviously rooting for one of the forties (not that this guy is so great or so bad), but it should come as no surprise that there’s no real depth to the exploration of this issue, if there is one, it’s as if they’re pitted against each other, so that only the vaguest commonalities come through – your twenties can very frequently suck, and your forties can be a time when you really know who you are. All of the women, younger and older, are basically attractive, and they made a point to pick especially ‘hot’ older women, but. But. It’s edited to be a sort of younger vs. older, typically catfighty kind of thing whereas in real life, I have women friends of all ages, and certainly there are differences to the extent that I’m not the same person I was when I was twenty-five, thank god, but the kind of people I hang around with tend to assume that we’re all individuals on our own individual timelines. I know, I know. I know this kind of show would never be deep. And yet I retain the hope that I can glean some little glimpse of something real.

Don’t ask me to give up TV. There’s 30 Rock and The Office and what else, I’m sure there’s something. But I need to cut back even more. (Yes, I said, ‘even more’. I watch less than I once did, believe it or not.) I don't really want to quit. I just want to be a social viewer.

I Am So High Tech + DON'T FORGET ABOUT BEN'S SHOW TONIGHT

2007-07-14T08:34:00.000-04:00

Two major developments in my life this week:
I now have an iPod. An iPod I actually loaded with my own stuff. What I'm saying to you is that I figured this out.
I have also, thanks to a friend, (yo what up CB!), discovered a new website to obsess over called Pandora. Probably I'm the last one to know about it, but in case you're behind me, it's a music site where you create your own radio station and it's awesome. You plug in stuff you like and they give you more stuff you might like and they get it right way more often than not.
My station is called Awesome and Great Radio.

But way more important:

BEN'S SHOW!

Falling Down Is Not My New Thing, Even Though I Do It Sometimes

2007-07-12T13:02:00.000-04:00

Okay look. I have a weird thing about making things happen when I write them. A sort of superstition, if you will, even though I'm not superstitious, which I decided a while back was actually a choice I could make, as I continued doing things like stepping over cracks, walking around ladders, avoiding black cats, knocking on wood and throwing salt over my shoulder, one day I thought, wait, I actually don't believe this will prevent and/or remedy any ill effects caused by running into these things, and so far so good, as I no longer worry about spilled salt in particular, which I do a lot because I like salt, a lot.
So it occurs to me that I could also decide not to have this other selfmade superstition about making bad things happen by writing about them, like family members getting sick or what have you.
The point today is, recalling the previous post about falling down being my new thing, is that it doesn't have to be my new thing, and so, just because I fell down a third of our front stairs yesterday for no good reason and now have a hideous bruise on my thigh which might be a really lovely shade of violet for let's say an evening gown but which on my thigh is well past unsightly not to mention sore, does not mean I have to continue falling down just because I said it was my new thing and therefore that concept is out in the world.
Because it's not enjoyable, really. And quite frankly, that thing about seeing your life flash before your eyes? Let me tell you what I saw, in one instant: I saw myself, at the bottom of the stairs, bent into unnatural positions, possibly never bending back into the original one.
And by the way? I don't even know how it happened. I didn't trip, I didn't stumble, I wasn't hurrying, I was standing up and then I was falling down for no apparent reason.
So falling down and or superstitions, known or selfmade, are officially my old thing. My new things include standing up and logic.