Pamela Ribon's Blog: the latest from pamie.com, page 12

OED! OMG!!

It is surprising you didn't get a phone call at around 11:30pm my time last night, as I wanted to call every single person in the world after I read the following email:

From: Brandon Gordon

Subject: You're in the OED!

Your cultural legacy is secure.

Go look up the word "muffin top" in the Oxford English Dictionary (no, seriously, it's there - they just added it) and a line from one of your books is selected as one of the "contextual" examples.

I'm guessing an editor really liked your Gilmore Girls recaps.

BG

You guys. I'm in the dictionary. I'M IN THE DICTIONARY. I am using all the restraint I have not to type every curse word I've ever learned and then make a flakreggin few up because I cannot believe I AM IN THE DICTIONARY.

2. slang. A roll of flesh which hangs visibly over a person's (esp. a woman's) tight-fitting waistband.

2003 D. Campbell Wildwood 185 Edith eased her muffin-top backside into the chair opposite the desk.

2006 P. Ribon Why Moms are Weird 29 'Oh, my God!' I shout from inside the dressing room. I stare at my muffin-top in horror.

2010 Daily Star (Nexis) 29 Sept. 33, I hated my muffin top and was desperate to slim down.

All my nerd life, I never thought -- I never even dared to dream! -- that one day you could look up a word in the dictionary and find my name next to a source! That I could be in someone's bibliography! I am NERDGASMING. (To be added to OED, April 2012.)

I'd heard about the addition of "muffin top" last week when it was discussed on NPR and The Daily Show, and at one point I thought, "Yeah, I am guilty of using that word in a book a few years ago..." but this?! I'm in the reference section!

Pamlea "Camel" Riboy has made it into the dictionary. And not unlike when I finally got to be Oprah-adjacent I was wearing a mouthguard and a helmet, when you go to find me in the dictionary you must first think of "muffin top".

You could try to reach this level of dorktastic (TBA: OED, September 2011), but it takes years of practice. Decades. I am getting that OED page printed, framed, and hung over my desk, people.

But before you start thinking I'm going to get a huge(r) nerd(ier) head over this, know that I just opened a package from my mom to find that she sent me: "Crazy Cat Lady -- A Magnetic Sculpture Kit." Thanks, Mom.

Hey, look me up,

Pamie

Mother on the Orient Express | Part Five (The Train)

We only had one night on the Orient Express. You could go longer. You could start in Rome and have two nights on the train (and if I could do this again, and had much more money, this would be it.) You can go Venice to Prague to London (but, you know, done that.), or you could just go ahead and travel cruise to Myanmar. But we were going from Venice to Paris, per the suggestion of the travel agent.

Our journey had us boarding the train in Venice during the late morning, arriving in Paris early the next morning. If you go from Paris to Venice, however, your afternoon tea will coincide with the Swiss Alps outside your window. So, you know. Decisions, decisions.

There are rules about attire on the train. The answer to any question is "You're never too dressed for the Orient Express." But you could technically attempt to be too dressed, which is why there are also rules about how much onboard luggage you can have. I'd managed to stuff four outfits (boarding outfit, dinner attire, sleeping clothes, Paris arrival clothes), my laptop, and half my life (Kindle, iPhone, Mino, camera, journal, backup paperback, a few surprises for Mom, eight million chargers, curling iron, makeup) into two bags. Then we had our giant suitcases that contained our things for the other nine days of the trip.

I got up extra early that morning, anxious. Mom was already up because she never really sleeps unless she's completely at ease. What time is it where you are right now? Trust me; Mom's up.

We decided to wait to pack and get ready for the train until we'd had breakfast, enjoying our last chances to use the word Prego, the only Italian we'd learned during our time in Venice. We wandered through the castle a little, taking a few pictures. We leisurely went back to the room to pack, take our showers in the enormous bathroom, do our hair just so, apply makeup. Tra-la-la, easy-breezy, plenty of time before the water taxi picks us up at 9:30. It was only 8:15!

When we'd come in the night before from late-night gelato and flirty waiters, the front desk reminded us of our morning reservation. I remember looking at a piece of paper on the desk and confirming a 9:30 pick up.

But listen, I don't understand military time. I mean, I get it, but my brain refuses to acknowledge it. Like the metric system. It's just numbers that I have to translate into real numbers. I don't have that kind of time -- just tell me what you mean when you're trying to tell me the time. We are not in the military, so please use the same clock everybody else is using, and stop making me count forward or backward from twelve.

Military time messes me up so much that I'm wiling to take the blame here, even though I think we had a piece of paper in the room given to us by the OE travel agent who picked us up at the airport that said something differently from what the front desk had said, but I'm not one hundred percent sure. I just know that everything was in military time, and having a full hour to get ready made me think that something must be wrong. Which is why I obsessively re-checked the boarding schedule as Mom went into the bathroom and I ended up screaming at a closed bathroom door: "MOM! THE TAXI IS HERE IN TEN MINUTES! WE WERE WRONG! TEN MINUTES! WE HAVE TO GO WE HAVE TO GO WE HAVE TO GO!"

I was going through the kind of panic-shock worse than any "I think we might miss our flight" I'd ever experienced. I couldn't imagine what was going to happen if we missed the train. Our train. THE train. It's not like you just grab the one an hour later. This thing only happens a few times a month. And even then, only certain months. This is no normal train.

We threw on our clothes, lying to each other that we looked decent enough to board the classy express. If you'd eavesdropped from outside our door you would have heard such memorable screeches as: "We will do makeup as soon as we step foot on the train! Promise me!" and "Where are shoes I actually want?" and "This hair! This hair! THIS HAIR!"

I couldn't find the electricity converter I'd borrowed from Jason, the one thing the asked me to keep track of, the one thing I borrowed and needed everywhere we had been and were going. I called the front desk, trying to sound like I wasn't panicking when I said, "I'm sure someone didn't mean to steal it, but can you look around?"

They were a little offended.

Time was running out. The water taxi was coming. We couldn't swim to the train station. We had to leave the room. I was forced into making the tough decision. I picked up my things, abandoning this piece of technology I so desperately needed to keep my laptop/camera/curling iron working.

And there it was, hiding under my suitcase.

"Go, go, go!"

European elevators, if you haven't been inside of one, apparently have some kind of law that keeps them restricted to a space precisely two feet by one foot wide. We realized it was going to take two trips to get all of our luggage down to the lobby.

This is when I shouted, "Mom! You go! If the taxi won't wait for me, you go without me!" And you guys, I mean it. I would have just let her go. Let her have the train all to herself and met her somehow in Paris.

… I might've had to have found that Italian waiter in order to deal with the grief, but who could blame me?

But when I got down to the lobby, Mom was standing there with a sheepish grin. We were an hour early for the taxi.

Military Time, I blame you.

We went back upstairs (two trips). Unpacked. Repacked. Did our hair, put on makeup. I tried to fit all of my Orient Express clothes into my carry-on, but my shoes were giving me problems.

"I have extra room," Mom said.

"Oh good, because I can't figure out where to put these boots. I think I'm going to wear the boots and put the other pairs of shoes in the carry-on."

"Well, I have room for all those shoes." Yes, judgy reader, I brought more than one pair of shoes to a less-than-twenty-four-hour-long event. NEVER TOO DRESSED!

Fifty-five minutes later we strolled into the lobby to find quite a number of people waiting for the water taxi, all dressed for the Orient Express. One tall, thin blonde woman had only a delightful little handbag, miraculously containing all of the things she would need before we reached Paris the next morning. How was everybody else so damn classy? Where was she keeping her toothbrush and her backup paperback?

As we boarded the water taxi, I asked Mom where the suitcase was that held my shoes. "Oh, I gave it to them for the steerage section," she said.

"What? What, you gave to them for going under the train?"

"Well, yes. Why, did you want that on the train?"

"IT'S ALL MY SHOES."

I was wearing a pair of knee-high brown boots. These would not match the dress I'd brought for dinner, nor would my current outfit -- a brown tweed skirt in a horse print -- be appropriate for the dining car. I began my second panic attack of the morning. This one had hyperventilation involved.

We all crammed into the seating area, coupled off, tantalizingly close to the front of the boat, where we could see a tower of all our luggage. I watched the driver toss my laptop suitcase into the pile, as if it held nothing more than pillows and shatter-worthy hateables.

Gasp. Wheeze. Gasp. Sigh. I was going to be barefoot on the Orient Express with a broken laptop.

Mom patted my hand. "It'll be okay," she said. "You'll get your shoes."

"I don't know, Mom," I said, unable to pull back from full drama. "I just don't know."

Other people quietly stared at me as I freaked out. "That poor mother," they must've thought. "Having to deal with that shoe girl on such a nice day."

We pulled up to the train station, and then some Italian shit hit the fan. The boat-driver didn't want to pull the taxi all the way up to the dock and was tossing our luggage. Our travel guide was yelling at him that he needed to dock properly and let us off, because we had to be checked in for the train. I watched the driver mime how easily it is to jump from the boat to the dock and walk around the stack of luggage as the travel agent yelled in a million syllables a second that he was being unreasonable and that we weren't suitcases and some of us were wearing fancy shoes (NOT ME). He starts gesturing for us to get the heck off of his taxi, prego, and we all start our way off the boat.

Flip! There goes another suitcase, hitting the wooden dock, right at the water's edge.

Flip! There goes my suitcase that doesn't have my laptop, but it could. It just so easily could.

Flip! There goes the fancy lady's impressively compact carry-all. And there it goes right into the water.

Oh, so much yelling! Oh, so much Italian! The tall woman's traveling partner deftly swept the carry-on out of the canal before it sank, and they were whisked away to file some kind of report.

At this point I grabbed every suitcase that had anything to do with my mother or me. Porters dressed in Orient Express outfits tried to explain to me that they could take my suitcases but no, I was not going to let them out of my grip. I dropped to the ground, unzipped my mom's suitcase, in there in the middle of all the chaos, grabbed every shoe I could see.

By the way, the woman whose entire outfit was now ruined was very c'est la vie. "It will dry, or it will not," she said, as if her dinner plans were nothing more than heading out to Whataburger. I was out of my mind on her behalf, carrying my shoes in my hands like a lost cobbler girl. Mom was nowhere to be seen, as it had just dawned on her that she'd be riding a non-stop train for many, many, many hours in a row, and that meant her ability to have a cigarette whenever she wanted was about to be over.

Things calmed down as we stood in line to check in. From this point on, everything fancy is kicked up a billion notches. You're standing on a special carpet, you have special boarding passes. "Your items will be in your car when you board." There was even a film crew in front of us, adding to the excitement. We got our luggage tags and boarding passes, showed them which items went on the train and which ones went under it, until we had nothing left to do but wait.

And then there it was. The Orient Express. Big and blue and shiny, stretching out for so long you cannot see where it ends. It is stunning. I took lots of pictures as Mom continued smoking like the prison guards were calling her back in from break.

It's not just the bathrobe and slippers, the champagne waiting for you in your room when you arrive. The Orient Express is amazing wherever you look. It's in the fantastic woodwork, the amazing restoration of the original Art Deco design. It's in the delicate orchid in your window. The bar of soap. The shaving mirror. Venice outside your window. Someone shouting "All aboard!"

And it was happening, it was really happening. All these years, all these plans, all this running and saving and hoping and wishing, the train was leaving the station and WE WERE ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS!

A Tour Through the Venice Simplon Orient Express

I handed Mom a new copy of Murder on the Orient Express, but it the smallest of the surprises I'd had planned for her birthday trip. I'd reserved us a cabin suite, meaning she had her own cabin, her own room, her own sink, and our rooms connected into one large room (click that link to see a 3D rendition of the cabin). I offer you this advice: if you go on this trip with someone who's not someone you have sex with, splurge for the joined rooms.

And then I got to take this photo, which I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Next time: One amazing day and one unforgettable night aboard the Orient Express.

It's Not That Scary: Shooting a Gun

I'm not sure how Jason got it into his head that I needed to shoot a gun. I know that he's not the only person in my life who assumed I would enjoy such a thing. Chris Huff, a weapons expert, has wanted to take me to a shooting range for years. It's only his wise wife, Allison, who has insisted that would be a bad idea. "First of all, she'll be holding that gun sideways in five minutes, acting like she's tearing up the joint."

But the reality is: I have absolutely no desire. Because the super real reality is: guns are terrifying.

Mom never let us have guns in the house growing up. Even water pistols were outlawed. I don't think we could even finger-shoot each other without the threat of being grounded. We Karate-Kidded the hell out of each other, but plastic gun violence was outlawed. I do believe she even confiscated the "Bang!" gun that came with my magic set. Mom was serious about this.

Like all deep fears my mom has (crossing the street, the police, going outside with a wet head), they are now deeply embedded in me. A potential roommate situation fell apart in college when the girl I was to room with insisted on having a gun in her room. Her father insisted, actually. And my mother insisted the opposite. We never lived together.

I did end up rooming with a Texan here in LA with Ray, and while I should've assumed, it never even occurred to me for a second to think about the fact that he was (of course) storing guns in our apartment. Multiple. Which he pulled out one day when he couldn't believe I was scared of guns. He came down the hall holding this thing and my broken panic reflex had me hide behind the corner, shouting at him to put that thing away. "Aw, Pamie," he said, sounding terribly disappointed in me. "I even brought out the little one for you, because it's so cute."

So when Jason promised this past Christmas that when we went to his grandparents house, he'd teach me how to shoot a gun, I kept telling him that it was more the thought that counted, and he didn't have to go through all that trouble. What I was banking on was the business of holidays, how you make a lot of plans you really never get a chance to follow through on. His dad said something like, "I'll be sure to bring up my rifle and the shotgun the next time I go over there," and I'd make jokes like, "That sounds terrifying, and I really hope I don't have to touch those guns!", and "Ho, ho! I hope you know I will cry!" But they weren't really jokes. They were confessions.

They were serious confessions. I cried when Ray pulled out the baby gun, and I cried when a security guard at a hotel I worked in back in Austin pulled a gun on me as a "joke," and I had never actually touched a gun.

And then suddenly we're at Jason's grandparents' house in the middle of Nowhere, Louisiana, standing in front of what I suppose he'd call his "Paw Paw's Shed," and it's a windy, cold day and I'm suddenly closer to a firearm than I'd ever been in my life.

Jason was being careful as he explained how the rifle works, holding it upright, showing where the safety is, how you hold it, how you point it, what you do and do not do. Then he shot the rifle. Two, three, five times. Opened this thing, clicked that. He was being so careful that he wasn't looking behind him, where I was standing, silently trembling all over, weeping uncontrollably.

A standing panic attack. That's what I was having. He was holding this weapon and my brain was flashing images of people being shot, of blood coming out of mouths, mouths I don't even know. I saw me touch the gun and then Jason accidentally get shot in the face. I flashed back to a recurring nightmare I'd had as a child -- a marine was my boyfriend, and he got shot in the neck in front of me, but I felt the bullet enter my own throat instead. I saw deer getting shot, birds getting shot, bunnies shot between the eyes. The opening scene of Watership Down, a blood-wave of deadness, the gun going off in my hands, accidentally pointed right at myself. It could happen, right?

At this point Jason noticed me. "Oh," he said, this sound like he'd walked upon a woman having a seizure, like he knew he had to do something, but he wasn't sure the best way to approach. He suddenly understood, "I'm kind of afraid of this," didn't mean, "I'm nervous to try something new" or "Guns are kind of scary." I meant: I cannot function around this machine.

He told me that I absolutely didn't have to touch the gun or shoot it, that everything was okay. That I would just stay behind him and he'd shoot at the tree a few times where he'd tacked a makeshift target. At first I had to get used to the sound of the bullets firing.

And then Anna Beth called.

"Hi, Jason's Firing Range," I answered. "I'm terrified!"

"Pa'am! What is happening?"

"Jason's shooting a gun and I'm crying!" I shouted, beginning to cry again. "I'm so scared!"

"I'm scared for you, too! Now I'm gonna cry!"

And we stood there, crying over Jason shooting a gun, and I realized how silly this was. Anna Beth and I laugh-cried while she gave me instructions on what I was going to do next to help her throw a party. Only Anna Beth can offer up sympathy while ordering you to make glittery-pom-pom toothpicks for her donut holes.

While Anna Beth instructed away, I watched Jason practice shooting at a few plastic water bottles. These he had on the ground, far away.

After I hung up I asked him, "Can I do it that way?"

"What way?"

"At the ground? Instead of at the tree?"

"Of course. Why, does that feel safer?"

"Yeah, I can see where the bullet's going. If I shoot toward the tree it could hit that shed or go off into the forest and kill a bunny."

"Is that what's scary?"

"Among other things."

"I promise, there's nothing in that field, nothing around for a long, long way. But yes, shoot at the ground."

I hit the bottle on my second shot. And I hit it over and over. Because right before I pulled the trigger I reminded myself to pretend it wasn't a gun, but a video game, and I was just trying to hit a target with this thing in my hand.

So I got braver, and tried the tree. I aimed at the target and shot.

"Whoa!" I heard Jason say behind me, quietly, impressed.

My first few shots were all grouped at the center, and I was starting to feel a little more relaxed.

And then I heard a sound, somewhere behind me or next to me, some kind of rustling, and I felt my mother shouting, "STOP SHOOTING!"

I turned to see Jason's grandfather was rolling up in his golf cart. Now, he was in absolutely no danger, far away from me, telling Jason how impressed he was with my shooting, but I just want to say this is exactly what I was afraid of. The first time I shoot a gun, I accidentally kill Jason's grandfather. Or the president. And my mom would've been right.

I shot the rifle a few more times, changed to the shotgun, WHICH I DO NOT LIKE. My ears would ring after I pulled the trigger and I'd be like Will Ferrell in The Other Guys, rolling around, holding my head, screaming, "I NEED AN MRI!"

Jason took my plate down from the tree and took it home with us. He proudly showed it to any friend who was even slightly interested. And yes, I do believe Chris Huff is still kinda jealous he wasn't the one to show me how to hold that rifle. (Please note how awesome I was doing at shooting until I almost shot Jason's grandfather.)

So, shooting a gun. It's not that scary. But first: IT TOTALLY IS.

My apartment is filled with packed boxes and stacks of my belongings. If I stayed in this apartment for only two more weeks, it'd be the longest I've ever lived anywhere. Therefore I'm moving tomorrow morning. Forgive me if I'm mistaken on the following memory, as I was kind of upset when I moved into this apartment...

I was crying in my car, upset about having to get a new trashcan, about the injustice of having to buy something I used to already have, combined with the crippling fear of having to buy something without Anna Beth there to tell me which trashcan was the right one to buy. And I feel it was Sara Hess, because she was the one who gave me the speech in Target, saying I must buy things without fear of retribution from Anna Beth... but what I'm about to quote is terribly sentimental for her, which is why I think it was Laura, or Dana, or Cat. But anyway, she said, "Just remember that while you are very sad moving into this apartment, and that you are moving into this apartment for a very sad reason, remember that the only way you'll be moving out of it is for a happy reason. You will leave this place happy."

And forgive me Sara, or Dana, or Laura or Cat, because I can't remember which of your kind faces said those loving words. But I thought you'd like to know, for the record, that you were right.

Mother on the Orient Express | Part Four (Venice)

Before I continue, I need to take a moment to compliment every single person who works for the brand that is Orient Express. Their attention to detail is phenomenal, but my travel agent Heather was so spectacular that I wrote letters of praise to anyone who would listen.

So when I'm about to complain about the hotels where we were booked, know that I do not blame her.

Here's why it's already not her fault: Mom wouldn't stay in the hotels they first recommended. I sent Mom some links while we were on the phone.

"Oh, no!" she said at the first hotel in Paris. "That's too fancy. I won't even step foot in there! No. I don't the right clothes to stay in that hotel. Where would I drink tea?"

When it came time to find the Venice location, I had to find something not too fancy, but also not "too wet." Travel agent Heather was like, "What about an old castle?" And that's how we ended up at the Ca' Segredo.

It was pretty dark in there, and while it was pretty, it felt like The Phantom was about to murder you while you were on your way to get some eggs.

Mom didn't care because the room had a smoking section:

This was "the balcony." And I'm not really going to complain about Ca'Segredo because the staff were very friendly and helpful. When I couldn't get the Internet to work, our bellman came back to the room. After having to go through the usual "I'm not a dumb girl; I know how computers work" bullshit I find happens way more than should be acceptable when asking a stranger for help with anything technological, it was determined that the only way to get my laptop to connect to the Internet was to delete the cache, close all tabs permanently and reboot.

"It is because you use The Apple," the bellman said. "You know who also has this problem when he stays here? Alan Alda. You are just like Alan Alda."

And all was forgiven.

We got in late, but not too late that we couldn't eat dinner. The bellman called the concierge and booked us a reservation at a restaurant around the corner.

Mom and I walked through the darkened streets of Venice and had a lovely meal (Italian!) at a restaurant with a very flirty waiter, who looked just like Liev Schreiber, who kept complimenting all my choices. (I'm not bragging; this is important for later.) "I think that waiter likes you," Mom said to me. "I think that waiter likes getting tips," I said back.

After dinner we wandered the streets as far as we were brave enough to go. It's very easy to get turned around when all the narrow alleys look the same, yet spit you out in very different places. We didn't have a map and we'd been awake for almost two days, so we decided we'd get up early and explore when the sun was up.

Mom says, "I bought a leather coat for the trip. It's red. I wasn't going to buy it, but the girls talked me into it."

"You bought a red leather coat?"

"It's very nice."

It was also very helpful in making sure I never lost my mom in public.

Venice looks like this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

And lots of other pictures I will point you to on my Flickr page.

We started early in the morning wandering to St. Marks, with the intention of going up into the cathedral. Well, this was my intention. I didn't realize until we got there that there were a couple of things Mom hadn't really told me:

1. She doesn't like standing in lines.

2. She doesn't like walking, especially to places.

3. She doesn't like stairs.

I will give her that cobblestones are difficult, particularly when your feet hurt 98% of your life, which is what has happened with my mom's feet. I know I should have more sympathy for her feet, because I know they hurt her. But I also know that I inherited her feet, and I cram those assholes into high heels and quad skates most days and I've run a marathon on them, so I know that while feet hurt, you can get past it if you want to.

Or maybe she can't. I don't know. I just know that our Venice was observed at a leisurely pace.

We left St. Marks to walk a little while, which is when I learned "a little while" actually had a number attached to it, an actual amount of time. I figured out that for every 45 minutes of walking, we were going to do another 45 minutes to an hour of sitting. This wouldn't have been as difficult if I knew the landscape of where we were headed, but often the 45-minute internal alarm would go off in Mom's feet when we were nowhere near our destination.

It meant we quickly had to adopt a way more European method of doing things. Every hour or so we'd find a cafe, sit, and people watch.

After finding a bit of a dead end in an extremely sunny section of Venice, it was clear to me that we weren't going to do too much more exploring. Mom had hit a wall after five hours, and it was looking like she wanted a nap. We headed back to St. Marks, where we were going to need to rest again. It had gotten much more crowded with the lunch rush, and there was a band playing outside one of the restaurants. I saw my mom looking longingly at the tables in front of the band, where there was a fee just to sit down. But I knew her feet hurt. I knew she wanted to sit and smoke and have her tea.

NOTE: "HER" tea. Not the tea that anybody in Europe gives you. These places, known for their teas, my mother shakes her head at them. "Yicky," she says, making up a word that could approach her level of disgust for their teas, when she has her Lipton in a Ziploc from a Big Y in Connecticut, the only tea worth drinking seventeen cups a day.

I had to turn down tea bags in Venice, in Paris, on the Orient Express. Teas that were like, twelve euros a bag, I had to turn down to buy a twelve euro pot of hot water.

So there, in St. Marks, I proceeded to buy my mother the most expensive cup of tea in her life.

It was worth it. So worth it. Because this is when acqua alta rushed in.

It hits so quickly. In the morning people were putting these platforms up around the cathedral, which I assumed were going to be for vendors. It turns out it's for people to stand on in order to keep from getting wet when water floods the square.

By the time we were done with our fifty-dollar tea and coffee, the tide was so high there were only two options: stand in the long lines along the platforms or take your shoes off and walk through the water.

I was wearing boots and tights, and I didn't feel like taking off half my clothes to walk through notoriously filthy water.

My mother, however... my mother, who wouldn't let me sit on cold concrete while I waited for the school bus for fear of developing hemorrhoids, my mother who doesn't like the "taste" of water, who still won't let me go outside with "a wet head" for fear of pneumonia --

My mother -- who thought Venice sounded "too wet" -- took her shoes off and trotted through all tra-la-la.

I waited in line on the platforms while Mom walked along with the people in strollers and wheelchairs (AKA: those who could not use the platforms). "This feels so good on my feet," she said. "Take your time. I'm happy."

We got lost for a little while, trying to get back to the hotel. In our defense, every street looks exactly the same, with the same shops and the same stained glass and the same trinkets. Mom was getting wearier, which meant she was slowing down even more. We stopped at a few more cafes and restaurants. I am very smitten with Venice and want to go back to see more of it. We had train reservations in the morning, so we only had that one day in Venice, one that was quickly coming to an end as Mom definitely needed a nap.

I'll just have to find a way to get back there again.

So while Mom napped I headed down to the hotel's restaurant on the canal and ordered a glass of wine to go along with my Rob Sheffield book. I watched the pretty people at the table near me have what was either a business dinner or some kind of "Look, we're all ridiculously attractive. We should do it in public." gathering. I wrote in my notebook before taking a few pictures of the boats on the canal and tried to focus on my book, but everything in front of me was so beautiful. I truly felt like my eyes were getting full, an experience that would only increase the next day on the train.

A female gondolier went past, looking wonderfully defiant. And at that moment I wanted to see the parts of Venice that weren't covered in Murino glass and carnival masks, that weren't for foreign eyes, but for the people who lived there. Maybe next time.

When they brought me my glass of wine? They also brought a bowl of potato chips. As if it were possible for me to love Venice any more, it is a city who already understands my wine-and-fries happy hour. I have converted many a friend to Happy Hour Wine-and-Fries. All begin with skepticism. All end with, "Why don't we do this all the time? YOU ARE A GENIUS."

"Excuse me," a woman said to me as I was happily sitting with my book, wine and crispy potatoes. "You look like a picture. I noticed you have your camera. Can I take your picture?"

It was one of the fancy ladies from Table Pretty. She took my camera and took a picture. "I hope it looks like the picture I saw from my table."

I told her I think I look like a dork, not the old world serious writer I was somehow fancying myself a few minutes earlier. She didn't know what that meant. "Studious," I tried. She nodded, as "nerd" reaches through no matter what language.

Night time. It's raining. Storming, in fact, but we want dinner and we don't want it in the sad, old castle. We decide to wander down the same street and find a restaurant a little further away. We are looking at the menu of the place across the street from where we ate the night before when we hear:

"Pa-mellla! Pa-melllla! Pa-mella, are you not going to eat here tonight? Oh, Pa-melllla, did we not have something? I am so sad, Pa-mella."

"You don't have anywhere to sit!" I said to him. "It's so crowded here!"

"I give you seat. You wait. Stay under this, it is raining."

And then they made us a table, in a safe, dry spot, moving people around and causing a bit of a commotion.

Mom's giving me all these nudge-nudge/wink-winks, like I'm going to go home with the waiter. "If only I weren't here to ruin your opportunities," she beams. My mother, the wingman. "We should at least get his picture," Mom says. So we do.

Please note my nervous expression and that one hand ready to do something if he tries to reach for any of my body parts. Mom was less anxious:

We tell him how he looks like Liev Schreiber. He doesn't know who that is. I get out my iPhone and head to the Internet to find a picture. "I look like Charlie Sheen," he says. "I know that. Charlie Sheen with less money."

It's a livelier night from the night before, and customers are talking across tables to each other in many different languages. The couple next to us speaks French, and I use my very basic skills to answer a few of their questions. Their patient smiles let me know I am butchering their language, but we get to an understanding that they are in Venice for their thirtieth anniversary. Their children paid for their trip. My mom tells her that this was my treat to her, for her birthday. And then we're all silent, having run out of mutual words.

The waiter comes back and I show him some Liev Schreiber pics from a Google search. He realizes just how much he looks like Liev Schreiber. He takes my phone and says, "I need to show my boss. I want a raise!" My phone gets passed from table to table, as each person notes that yes, he does look quite a bit like Liev Schreiber.

Dessert comes to the table and I can hear the people behind us talking about how fantastic our food looks. They are speaking in English, which is why I can notice it, like how you can recognize a song you love within three notes. I hear them debate ordering everything we have on our table, and as I excuse myself to the restroom, one of them is asking my mother what we're eating, and just as I'm on the edge of hearing distance, someone says something about Los Angeles. I assume it's my mom, and we will now have a family of six to take care of when we get back to the States.

When I walk back to the table, one of the English speakers is standing by my chair. She looks at me and shouts, "Then you must know Robin Shorr!"

This is funny for several reasons, but mostly because my instinct upon hearing Robin's name is to launch into my impression of her (which you can see on that clip I just linked above).

"Of course I know Robin, ohmygod!" I shout. And the table of six erupts into shouts and laughter. "She DOES know her!" they say, clapping.

And I'm sorry, Robin, it's so unfair to you because I'm thousands of miles away doing my Robin Shorr impression like I'm still at the writers room table of Samantha Who? But these people have known Robin since she was a baby, I guess, and they watched her grow up, and now we're all in the same rain-soaked restaurant in Venice, bonding over ABC sitcoms and the people who write them.

Their group had just come back from Paris, so they began writing things down that we had to see, while one of them asked if she could set me up with her son (You guys, go to this restaurant in Venice! It's better than speed dating!), and the waiter came back around to return my phone. On the screen was a picture of a shirtless Liev Schrieber holding a baby. "Oh, is this how you look, too?" I asked (because there was a lot of wine at this point, people). He smiled. "Yes, but that is because you are the baby."

And then I blushed a lot.

The restaurant closed down around us and despite my mothers myriad forceful attempts to I think have me hook up with a random waiter in Venice who looked like Liev Schreiber, we headed back to our cold, dark castle, stopping only for some gelato, which was a perfect way to end the night.

We only had twenty-four hours in Venice, but I can't imagine them going any better. We drifted off to sleep knowing that when we woke up... we were boarding the Orient Express.

"I'm sure you'll get it. I mean, look at you."

What I said last year to the nervous guy sitting next to me in a FOX waiting area who was there to audition for Glee. He turned out to be Chord Overstreet. I now feel okay with all the objectifying I was mentally doing to him and his guitar case.

Because I was right.

Mother on the Orient Express | Part Three

Yesterday would have been my parents' 37th wedding anniversary. It made me remember how there was supposed to be a third person on this trip with my mom.

Dad.

Specifically, his ashes. Soon after his death I suggested to Mom that perhaps Dad would like some of his remains scattered around "Mozart's house." As if there's just the one. But that's how I pictured it at the time. "I think he would have wanted to see that," I said to Mom.

"He would," she said. "But we should also make sure to sprinkle some of your dad in Vegas, just to be sure. He'd probably want to be there."

"This probably breaks a number of international laws, Mom."

"Oh, I'm sure it does. I don't know how we'll do it."

"Do we put him in a make-up bag?"

"(long sigh)."

"We could put him in a tampon box. That would be funny. He'd be so mad!"

"Why do you want him to haunt you?"

So when I started planning the Orient Express trip, I found a way that we could head into Vienna as well as Venice and Paris. Except it was going to be more trains and longer rides and more money and...

And then Mom said, "I don't know that I can handle going in that box and getting some of your dad."

In the end, we left Dad at home.

Mom and I arrived in Frankfurt at something like ten in the morning, which was something like the middle of the night for Mom and somewhere around midnight back in Los Angeles. So I was feeling funky, but THE SYSTEM made it so that I wasn't tired at all and rather itching to start seeing stuff and having fun.

The only problem was: we still had a six-hour layover in Frankfurt. I'd already looked into taking a train into the city and spending the day there, but that was before the three-hour delay back in Newark, when we would have had over nine hours in Frankfurt. Six just wasn't enough for me to feel confident in taking Mom "out in the world" with our luggage in tow. I wasn't one hundred percent sure we'd come back in time for our connecting flight to Venice.

This all worked out very well for Mom, though, because the first thing we learned about the Frankfurt airport was that you could smoke in it. Smoking made the time fly by for her, because she has an amazing ability to make friends with strangers. I'm usually left standing somewhere with suitcases and a book, and right when I'm about to call security and say, "Please, I have lost my mother again," she will wander up, all smiles.

"They were from Amsterdam!" she'd say. "No, wait. Holland. Iceland? I don't remember. She smoked menthols."

Mom makes so many friends with strangers I would say that she must be the one starting the talking, except that I have inherited this trait, so I know that these things just happen to her.

A couple of years ago, I was on a flight back to Los Angeles that connected in Phoenix or something, during a time when a number of flights had been cancelled and many people were stranded in airports for a day or two. I ended up sitting next to a woman who had been one of those stranded, and she had explained to me that she'd run out of money for food and drinks, that she had been sleeping on her luggage and was exhausted.

She was also frantically applying makeup, looking into a mirror, fluffing her hair. She told me that she was on her way to see her fiance for the first time in a long time, that he'd already moved out to California to get them a house and get everything ready, and now she was flying out there -- her first time in California -- to start a brand new life with this man who was going to marry her.

"I'm so nervous," she said, halfway through her eyeliner application. "I've lost some weight since he saw me, and I hope he likes it."

I tell her she looks great. She tells me about her lapband surgery, pointing to places she doesn't like on her body because she can't afford the skin removal surgery yet. I buy her a Diet Coke. She tells me her mom didn't survive her own lapband surgery, but she decided to do it anyway.

This was my first moment of pause, but I ignored it, forgetting all I'd learned from The Gift of Fear.

The flight goes on, and so does she: about how excited she is that her whole life is about to change. She tells me that before we started talking I looked like I was working on something. I don't remember what I was writing at the time, but it got us talking about books. She asks my name so that she can buy one. This has happened before, and it's hard to sell books, you guys, so I tell her my name. We talk about books and California and how excited she's going to be when her life starts anew. She asked me a lot about Los Angeles, about what it's like to live there.

It's not that long of a flight, and soon we were touching down in Burbank. "It's so nice to land in California and already say I know someone."

I know. And yes, I ignored that weird little pang, too.

She asks for a card. I give her one.

I KNOW! I'm sorry. I'm nice! It's because of my mom! Blame her!

Anyway, we end up talking about how I'd been writing on television shows. She then says, "I was on Maury Povich once."

And with that the plane landed, she tucked my card into her purse and she said, "I'm so glad I've made a friend. I already met someone who lives in Los Angeles! I'm not alone."

We were headed towards baggage claim at the same time, so I ducked into the restroom to put a little travel distance between us. When I reached baggage claim I heard, "There she is! That's my new friend! Come meet my fiance!"

Let me tell you something: the fiance was not happy to meet me. He gave me one of the biggest, "Stay away from this situation" glares I've ever received in my life. Not that I collect those, or anything. But still.

So, I go home, I tell the story, a couple of people are like, "I feel like this story isn't over." But I was sure it was.

It wasn't.

So one night I'm hosting a party in my house that's half my derby team, and half visiting people from around the country to see my derby team compete the next night. One of these people, specifically, is opinion-haver AB Chao.

There are a lot of people in my apartment, and some of them have decided to make crafts involving glitter on my coffee table which is NOT REALLY OKAY and some people are on the porch being quiet, good Canadians and some people are watching derby footage and some people are drinking by the food and some people are leaving and some people are late and in the middle of all of this my phone is ringing.

I answer it and I can't really hear, but I can make out what I think is, "I MET YOU ON THE PLANE!?"

And then I'm saying, "Okay! Uh, yeah! It's really hard to hear you right now, can you call some other time?"

And I hear her say, "...VERY IMPORTANT... CALL BACK! NEED YOU" and then I hang up and decide to pretend I didn't hear those words at all.

She left three voicemails.

In the morning I decide to take a listen.

I AM STILL KIND OF CONFLICTED ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, BECAUSE OF A COMBINATION OF MY MOM AND AB CHAO SO PLEASE KNOW THAT WHEN YOU THINK I'M A MONSTER 'AT LEAST I'M UPSET ABOUT IT, FOLKS'."

The voicemail is, in fact, the lady from the plane. And in it she is saying that she is at a hospital in a place called Sylmar, which is MANY MANY MILES from my apartment (excuse number one), and that she really needs me to call me at that hospital because I am the only person she knows. She leaves the room number and the phone number and says she really needs me to call because it's important.

"Uh, you aren't not calling her. The end." That's AB Chao, scolding me as I sit on my couch. "This is what you get for talking to strangers on planes and giving them your number like that's okay. That is not okay. What good could come out of you calling that hospital? You do not belong in someone else's drama. You trying to get on the Jerry Springer show, too?"

"It was 'Maury.'"

"I will kill you right now. You don't even know this woman's name. You can't do anything about her."

"But what if--"

"She said she had family back home, you know she came from somewhere, because you were on that plane with her. She can call them. You aren't kin, you can't just go to a hospital and help someone. You don't have access to her. Also, YOU DON'T KNOW HER NAME. You don't know if her fiance's there fixing to kill anybody who tries to go near her. You don't know WHERE SYLMAR IS. You are staying right here and you are going to clean all that glitter out of your coffee table and then you are going to think about how dumb it is to talk to strangers on planes."

She never called again, and to this day -- and forever -- I'm still kind of unsettled about what I did...and didn't...do. This is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to my mom, but she would call the hospital back, and the next time I came home to visit, she'd be like, "Oh, the woman living in the basement? That's Vicki. She just needs a place to stay for a little while. I'm not sure how long, or what her last name is, but she smokes menthols."

Perhaps Mom would've made fewer stranger-friends in Germany (and I'm sure there's a word in German for specifically that), if she'd performed just once for any of them her German people impression, which she did for me at an alarming volume.

"They sound like they're going, 'SHIT! SHIT! CACA SHITZER SHIT! SHIT!" And then she laughed and laughed and laughed.

I have written here in my notes that I took during this trip this part that still cracks me up:

When she comes back from over thirty minutes in the bathroom I ask her why it takes her so damn long to do anything.

She looks at me and deadpans, "I'm old."

We finally get on a plane to Venice. During this time we end up talking about Murder on the Orient Express. I finish reading it on my Kindle as we're about to touch down. Have you read it? Do you know the story? I didn't, so I won't spoil it for you. I will say that seeing Liz Lemon reading the large-type face version in a recent 30 ROCK didn't do anything to help the comments that my life and her fictional one are oddly parallel.

So I finish the book and I am underwhelmed. But I don't know how to approach this with my mom. I mean, we're on this huge trip because of this book, because my mom read it at a certain impressionable age and got it in her head that she wanted to ride this train. This is the life goal, right here.

"Did you like it?" she asked.

"Well, I... don't really read mysteries all that often."

"Your father hated it. He hated it SO MUCH. He threw it in the trash, if I remember correctly. And when I took him to see the movie, he didn't realize it was the movie of the book he hated until we were halfway through. He was so mad! He was yelling, 'I read this! This is awful! This book was so stupid!'"

The only person who could be more innapropriately louder in public than my mom (with her recently developed shoutwhisper) was my father. His audience voice was legendary. I can still hear the following moments in my head:

During the opening scene of Titanic: "IS THAT GUY SUPPOSED TO BE CAME-ERR-ON? THE DIRECTOR? CAMEROON? WAIT. THAT'S BILL PAXTON."

During the final moments of Schindler's List: "AFTER THIS IS OVER, DO YOU WANT TO GO GET SOME PIE?"

During the final moments of a play I'd directed, for which I was getting a grade and my teacher was in the audience: "WELL, THIS ONE ISN'T VERY GOOD."

I could only imagine if we had brought Dad along on this trip, his ghost would be yelling, "WAIT! THIS IS THE TRAIN OF THE BOOK AND THE MOVIE I HATED! GET ME OFF THIS THING! THE ENDING IS BULLSHIT! AND THERE'S NO CASINO ON THIS TRAIN!"

We arrived in Venice at night. I was nervous, because everything my mom had seen about Venice made her say, "Ich. It looks very wet."

But let me tell you a surefire way to impress your mom. Have the Orient Express meet you at the airport in Venice. Because you are immediately treated like a big, damn deal.

And then they escort you onto your own private boat. Mom did that thing when she gets impressed, when she feels like she's getting treated extra-special. She kind of rocks back and forth, her shoulders alternate rising as her head ducks and she smiles. "Fancy," she said, almost blushing.

The boat raced through the water, in the black of night, right toward the lights of the city. It was beautiful. I didn't take any pictures or shoot any video because it's the kind of experience you can't replicate. There's no way to capture it. You're zipping through vast open water and then you hit the town and you slow down to a quiet crawl. Then you're navigating the canals, and you look up to see on either side of you are people's homes. You can see into their windows -- the couples making dinner, the people grabbing books off the top shelf of their bookcase, the dog that watches you pass.

All you can think, and all you can say out loud, is just the dumbest thing: "It looks like we're in a movie."

Next time I'll tell you about getting stuck in St Marks during high tide, how I got compared to Alan Alda, and one of my absolute favorite moments from the trip that came from my mother's ability to befriend strangers.

"Red Hot Mary Brown"

She was quite a lady, my grand-aunt Mame. I suppose her nickname says it all. The last time I saw her she said, "I've met you before, yes?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry. I'm sure I know you and love you. But I've been diagnosed with CRS. 'Can't Remember Shit.'"

She will be missed.

Ms. Mary A. Meserole

'Red Hot Mary Brown'

WATERTOWN — Mary Ann (Duska) Meserole, also known as "Red Hot Mary Brown," 89, of Echo Lake Road, died March 1, 2011, at Saint Mary's Hospital surrounded by her loving family. She was the widow of Gilbert Meserole Sr.

Mary was born Aug. 15, 1921, in Stratford, a daughter of the late Paul and Helen (Amrick) Duska, and lived in Watertown most of her life. She was educated in Stratford schools. Prior to her retirement in 1984, she worked as Rosie the Riveter at the former Chance-Vought in Bridgeport. Mary also worked at the former Jamsky's Package Store in Oakville for many years.

She loved to crochet, sing and dance, play bingo, and loved spending time at Sunset Beach in Branford. She was an avid bowler at the former Turnpike Lanes in Watertown, and was a member of the Falls Avenue Senior Center. Mary was a communicant of St. John the Evangelist Church.

Memorial contributions may be made to Alzheimer's Association CT Chapter, 2075 Silas Deane Hwy, Suite 100 Rocky Hill 06067; or Vitas Innovative Hospice Care, 1579 Straits Tpke., Unit C, Middlebury.

rest of the article here

Mother on the Orient Express | Part Two

Did I mention that seconds after Mom showed me her dead cell phone, I found her boarding pass on the floor of the restaurant?

This is when I confiscated all of her travel documents, and would not let her have them in her possession... until we ended up in a fight while being forced to go through customs in Canada.

"Canada!" you say. "But I thought you guys were going to Europe!"

Yes, dear reader. Thank you for paying attention. I will tell you all about Canada, but not until later, because right now in this story Mom and I are still trying to get out of Newark.

It wasn't easy.

I can't remember too many plane trips I've taken with my mom. I remember flying to Vegas together for my 21st birthday, which had us meeting up in Phoenix (and almost missing each other due to Mom's misunderstanding of time zones). And I know I took flights with her when I was very little and we were moving, but those stories mostly involve how difficult it was for her to fly by herself with two small children and a cat carrier. I do remember my little sister losing her shit and running as fast as she could in the direction of away from the airplane, while my mom held onto a suitcase and a cat and yelled, "Wait! Somebody stop that little girl!"

(I, however, was an angel.)

I fly rather often, so I've gotten into my flying groove, and I forget that it's different when you travel with someone who doesn't fly all that often. Where I've got a system (some might call it THE SYSTEM) that probably makes me rather annoying to partner with if you aren't a normal part of THE SYSTEM, someone who flies every once in a great while has no system. And for someone with a system that can be... well, completely frustrating.

I remember Tara tweet-complaining once that she can't understand nor forgive nor be at peace with the fact that some people get on a plane and then just sit there, staring straight ahead. For hours. Who does that?! What is that?! Are you that opposed to reading? Are you meditating? What does that kind of person do for fun -- sit in gridlocked traffic? It's shifty, is what it is. Get a magazine. There's one right in front of you in the little pocket. Jesus. Just be normal while we're all on the plane, can you?

I fly with about sixteen different forms of recreation (THE SYSTEM works), which means that if you're flying with me and you run out of paperbacks, I have backup media I would be more than willing to offer to share. (Including to you, Seat Starer).

Our flight was a redeye to Frankfurt, so what I'd also packed with me was some glorious Benadryl. THE SYSTEM says that I must take the Benadryl as soon as the flight is safely in the air and beverage service is beginning. There are several (very good) reasons for this, the first being that you never know if the flight will be delayed or cancelled, and Benadryl works rather quickly on me. I don't want to be slobbery and passed out in 12D when they are asking everybody to get off the plane and be smart enough to figure out how to get on another one or stand in a very long line on the other end of the terminal while they pretend they have a plan for getting you to your final destination.

We were in bulkhead seats, which are not the best seats when it comes to THE SYSTEM. I'm short, so legroom isn't my first priority, and bulkhead seats always have tray tables that are worse than high chair trays. I hate having to navigate around my own breasts to see my laptop, or have my elbows poking my neighbors' ears if I'd like to try to eat using utensils.

But the biggest problem with bulkhead seating is that you often have to put all of your belongings in the overhead, and the seat pocket in front of you is barely functional. This means all of THE SYSTEM is now out of reach, and if I have a middle seat (which I did, because I'm a good daughter and offered my mother the window), then I'm going to be bothering someone so that I can get into the overhead. Which is even more unacceptable (to me) when you're on a redeye, because I want the guy sitting on the aisle to sleep for a couple of reasons. I'd want to be left alone if I were asleep, but also if he's asleep he isn't fidgeting, all poking at me from the arm rest, wiggling around making me have to babysit my tiny plastic water cup from its scary perch at the corner of my useless mini tray table. (Side complaint of middle seat bulkhead -- if I want to use my tray table, I've got to wake aisle seat up and ask if he'll lift his arm. I really think we should all be as quiet as possible on planes. This is so we don't disturb the babies, who will cry when they figure out that what we're doing is kind of dangerous.)

So. Middle seat. All of my belongings up above me and out of my reach. I've got a Kindle and a paperback (because you can't read a Kindle during take-offs and landings), and Mom's next to me with her paperback... when the flight gets delayed due to storms over the Atlantic.

We are told we will sit on the plane until we wait out the storm.

What we couldn't have known right then is how long we'd be waiting.

We sat there for two and a half hours.

And at some point during those one hundred and fifty minutes, I became my mother's mother. I'd hold her things while she searched through her purse for her glasses and her book. I ordered her tea from the flight attendant. I asked her if she needed another "blankie."

She was the first to notice it. "This used to be the other way around, little girl," she said. "Now you're the one shushing me on the plane."

"I'm only shushing you because you're SO LOUD."

She is sixty years old. That's the reason we're even on this flight, because the woman is sixty years old. I would think by now she would know that when she's wearing headphones and has the pre-flight entertainment volume cranked to full blast, she doesn't need to yell over that noise to talk to me.

And yet, there she was, laughing at a trailer before turning to me to bellow, "I LOVE THAT GUY."

That guy is Brendan Fraser. And she does love him.

So this is the part of the pre-flight flight where I go ahead and have an anxiety-fueled freak-out about getting my Benadryl out of the overhead compartment, because I might as well have it just in case we take off at any moment, and I know that aisle seat guy is looking pretty sleepy as it's getting warmer and warmer inside the airplane as we sit there not flying. And also, taking a pill that will make me calm down is probably a good idea. (THE SYSTEM is also for the benefit of other people.)

We finally do take off and I do take my pill and I think maybe things will be okay, and the lights start getting turned off and it quiets down on the bumpy plane.

This is when Mom tried to watch IRON MAN 2.

I say "try" because she had a hard time with the movie-watching machine that came up from the bottom of her seat (Another bulkhead problem). There were buttons to push, and she couldn't always understand which button was for sound and which button was for starting the movie over again from the beginning. I mean, that's what I'm guessing was happening. I'm not sure if those buttons were right next to each other. It seems like bad design, if they were. I just know that every twenty minutes, I'd be almost dozed off from my Benadryl/sleep mask/red wine combo when I'd hear:

"I CAN'T FIND THE VOLUME ON THIS THING. I CAN'T HEAR IRON MAN. SHOOT! SHOOT. I JUST --- I HIT THE WRONG -- I JUST--- DID I? ...YES. I JUST STARTED IT OVER AGAIN. I ... DAMN BUTTON."

I'd wake up, try to help her fast forward, suggest she read a book, anything to feel like I got her settled, because I didn't want to fall asleep while Mom was wide awake. I was deep into THE SYSTEM by this point, and deep, drug-fueled redeye flight sleep was imminent.

"Mom. Maybe you can read your book?"

"MY GLASSES ARE BROKEN. I FORGOT THAT THEY NEED TO HAVE THESE--"

"Mom. Shh."

"I'M NOT YELLING. My glasses are broken. I need these nose things fixed, so I can't read without my glasses."

"Well, what are you going to do? Do you want to sleep?"

"I'm not tired. I think it's all that tea."

"Probably."

"It's too bad we're just now leaving, after we put in so many hours already sitting here."

"Mm."

And then I dozed off. When I woke up a few minutes or maybe an hour later, I took my sleep mask off to check on Mom.

There she was, sitting there, staring straight ahead.

And I realized: she had no choice.

I gave her a Benadryl. And forced her to be a part of my system.

Mother on the Orient Express | Part One

While I was eating dinner tonight "Sentimental Journey" played over the restaurant's speakers. I'm well aware that I probably heard it more because I was sensitive to hearing it, but I still think it was a gentle reminder that I needed to get my ass in gear and write up these stories.

I love these stories, what happened on our Orient Express trip. Ten days with my mother for her sixtieth anniversary? Obviously, some things I'll forever treasure. So I want to make sure I get this down before the alleged "Myth of Pam" takes over and mutates the past into stories I'd much rather remember. Before I have an excuse that it's just too late to write them down.

I'm sure it's taken longer to write these entries than you were expecting. Me too. Originally it was because I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this experience. I don't like to think it was an excuse I was making when I pondered over whether or not there was a larger story in here, like a book or a screenplay. I still think there is one. But maybe I have to get this story out in little spurts, pamie.com style, while I figure out what to do with the lessons I learned in taking my mother on the European vacation that was her life-long dream. Not everybody gets to do this. I still can't believe we got to do this.

My mom asks periodically if I'll write these stories up. Mostly I think because she wants me to release my pictures from Flickr so she can send links to friends. But the truth is, I've come to look at these stories a little differently than I thought I would. See, once I got home and people asked how the trip went, my answer was almost always the same:

"It was fun. It was good. Well, mostly. We haven't spoken in three weeks."

I'm pretty sure I know where it fell apart (Paris), and just how much blame I have in its falling apart (a lot). And I will say that the happy-ending of this is that I think enough time has passed that my mom only thinks of this trip as a fond memory, of a life-long dream come true. But that's because my mom is good at selective memories. I do not know how to do that.

Much of the problems I had on the trip have to do with the difference in how I perceive myself to be compared to the actual person that I am. I like to think of myself as a patient person. Open-minded. One who rolls with the punches and doesn't get hung up on the trivial.

After spending ten days with my mother, I can tell you, unequivocally, that I am not that person.

What I am, it seems... and I am not bragging about this in any way... is my father.

Okay, but before I take all the blame on why I turned into my dad on this trip, you need to know the following things about my mom:

1. She once missed her flight sitting at the gate, reading a book.

2. She once missed her flight sitting at the gate, asleep.

3. Despite having FIVE YEARS WARNING that this trip was happening, she did not learn one word of a foreign language, nor did she get herself prepped to walk a few miles a day.

4. This second part of that last fact? I didn't learn about it until we got to Europe.

5. If there is an opposite of a "foodie," it is my mother. If you ask me to use words I already know to label that condition, I might offer up "stubborn" or "toddler-esque." My frustration with this comes from the fact that when I was little she MADE ME try new foods. "If you don't like it, you don't have to eat it," she'd always say. But I had to try it. If I could have told little me that my mom would one day make vomit sounds at the word "guacamole," I might have saved myself a few miserable nights of being trapped behind a plate of green beans.

6. Mom has never been outside the US.

6a. Mom would point out here that she has been to Canada and Mexico.

6ai. "Canada" was an amusement park just outside of Michigan, on a tiny island you took a ferry to that was technically Canadian land, but I don't think there were actual Canadians on Boblo Island.

6aii. "Mexico" was a three-hour catastrophe where my father thought it would be fun to see Mexico, got all of one mile beyond the Tijuana border and said, "Well... all these signs are in Spanish! How am I supposed to know where I'm going?" He immediately turned the car around and we spent the next three hours crawling through traffic to cross back into California.

6b. So I say they don't count.

7. Mom doesn't know how to text. I don't think her phone actually receives texts.

8. Remember the time we lost my mom while she was up in the air on a plane because she had sent me her arrival information in what turned out to be a blank email? I do.

9. My mother considers two places when she thinks about the word "vacation": Palm Springs and Las Vegas. If my mom could play video poker in a swimming pool, she would truly do nothing else her entire life. She'd look like Tandoori Lady and be so freaking happy about it.

10. I think I've made my point.

I had mom meet me at the Newark airport, giving her a departure time that was a good two hours before it actually was. I flew from LAX to Newark and waited in a restaurant named Oyster, frantically gobbling up the last Internet access I was to have for a while.

That phone Mom's holding in that above picture I took when she sat down. It's her phone. You may remember phones like that from the '90s. The other interesting fact about the phone is that seconds before that picture was taken, the phone died and she had no way of charging it. Which means there was no way to contact my mom if we were to somehow become separated during our trip.

Which means from that moment, sitting at a table at Oyster before we'd even taken off toward Europe, before we'd even made it to the gate, we had to become literally inseparable.

But, I mean, it's ten days with your mom. Who'd ever need a little alone time in the middle of that?

Putting Me Out There

In case you were coming here looking for a collection of my Valentines Day Poems: The best place to go is here.

As you read this, Glark is hard at work, tirelessly attempting to wrangle the beast that is pamie.com into something that can reload with dignity. After looking through thirteen years of file dumping, he has declared me the Hoarder of the Internet. He has a small point. Anyway, I'm very excited about unleashing a pretty, sparkly version of this site in the near future.

This means there should be more updates! Hooray! Huzzah! I have a list of things I want to write about on pamie.com, and I'm currently chained to my laptop as it is, working on the new novel due in a few short months, so I have a feeling I'll be occasionally popping over here for procrastination/inspiration.

I finished that screenplay, for those of you who have been losing sleep wondering. Soon it'll be "going out," which means my agents will have talked with producers who are interested in reading it and the script will get distributed in the hopes that some of those producers will take the script to their studios and a studio will want to buy the script in the idea that someone's going to make a movie out of it.

This is the part of writing for Hollywood we don't really talk about all that often, I guess because it isn't sexy. But in the past few months I've written several different proposals for various projects, all of which are "out there," all of which are out of my hands while I wait to see what people who have money decide what they want to do about them. There's also a pilot script that I wrote for a half-hour comedy that was written for a studio who requested it, although they've yet to find a network who wants to buy it. You do lots of these projects -- sometimes they're gigs, sometimes they're for no money at all -- waiting to see if anything works its way all the way up from the "Perhaps" to the "Yes."

The good news is I'm chained to the laptop right now because of two very exciting Yes projects. Number one is the new novel, YOU TAKE IT FROM HERE:

"When I die, I need you to be with my husband, become his wife, help him finish raising my daughter. I want you to take my place."

When your best friend assumes you will willingly give up your life and start another, just because she's "technically" "dying" – how much does your love of someone mean you are entitled to carry out her final wish? YOU TAKE IT FROM HERE is a story about pushing a friendship to its limits, exploring what we do for each other when our lives (one ending, one just beginning to start over) are on the line. Who's really in charge of our future? (Answer: the bossy one.) (GALLERY BOOKS, PUB DATE TBA)

My second "Yes" only recently got the greenlight, but it's equally exciting. ABC FAMILY has bought the rights to WHY MOMS ARE WEIRD! Yes, we're going to try to make my life as a sitcom. My mom's not very happy about this one, but my sister is! "LET ME NO WHN U NEED ME 4 CASTING," she texted.

We've only just started, but it's already created one of my favorite "Only-in-Hollywood" moments. During our last meeting I was telling stories about being home for Christmas this past year, and how I was trapped in my mom's house during the blizzard (which she caused, by the way, by wishing for it inside my Christmas card. "Merry Christmas! I hope you get snowed in and can't leave!"). Thanks, Mom.

Anyway, after a few of these stories, one of the producers stops laughing long enough to say to me, "I have to say, as much as we love the sister in the book, I really love your current sister more!"

(My "current sister" agrees.)

I've been getting some really nice email from you guys lately about pamie.com, or my books, or just reminiscing about old school TWOP days. (If I haven't written you back yet, I'm sorry. I'm going through my backlog, I promise). I always appreciate hearing from you guys because there are some days when you're sending stuff "out there" that most people will never get a chance to read or see when it can get a little frustrating. In case you're one of the three people who have never written a book, I'll just let you know right now that doing so is kind of a slog. You write and write and write and then: yeah, there's still so much writing to do. And unlike a script, making one change can sometimes mean you're making a hundred changes, all over the place, in little places and big, and it feels like you're playing a life-sized game of Jenga.

So I will try to use this place to tell you as much as I can/should/probably shouldn't about the behind-the-scenes stuff going on over here, finally write up a few stories from last year (like Mom on a certain train), and I have a couple of pressing Tales from the Accidental Asshole (that's me) to share.

Okay, I gotta go back to work. Happy Valentine's Day, pamie.com. Here is my heart. I try to write it all out for you.