Nancy Davis Kho's Blog, page 56

Lazy Days of Summer

On our refrigerator hangs a list, with entries made in three different people’s handwriting and four different kinds of ink. It’s our traditional Summer Wish List, on which we write down all the things we’d like to do in the vibrant, rockin’ Bay Area over the summer, when the kids are out of school and we finally have some time to get out and enjoy a region that draws tourists from all over the world.

See how not one entry on the 2013 list is crossed out? Pretty impressive, huh?

That’s because as of August 9, we have managed to achieve bupkus from the Wish List. And given the schedule for the next eighteen days until school starts, the window of opportunity to hit even one of these events has already closed. We’re book ending the summer with visits East to see various family, so for all intents and purposes, summer is done.

The Summer of 2013 will go down as one of the lowest-activity on record. Not that I’m complaining.

Our big family achievement this summer was to blitz through Season 1 of Friday Night Lights in ten days. It is nigh on impossible to find a show that a Boomer, a Gen Xer, a teen, and a tween can enjoy in equal measure, but FNL hit the sweet spot. For a week and a half, between one family vacation and the day the oldest kid left for camp, we all hit the big blue couch at 7:30 pm to see how many episodes we could get through, always saying we’d watch just one and then cramming in three instead, early morning meetings be damned.

I swear to you, I could turn this entire blog into an ode to Tammi and Coach Taylor and their solid, middle aged, sexy marriage, but I will spare you that.

Just know that as a mom, those hours of family television watching felt blissful to me, and not only because of Tim Riggins. As our oldest daughter starts her second year of high school, I am keenly aware that, exactly three summers from now, we’ll be buying things for her dorm room and figuring out how she’ll get home for Christmas break. This family time that I’ve taken for granted for so long suddenly has an expiration date sooner than that on some of the cans of turkey chili in my Emergency Kit. We are fast approaching a time beyond which getting all four of us together will require coordination, driving, the taking of vacation days from jobs. So to be able to just move from the dinner table to the couch, and have everyone want to be there at the same time, feels hedonistic to me.

The other big activity this summer? Reading in bed. Our house is configured so that the living room, dining room, kitchen, and master bedroom are all on the same floor. I know that in other houses, where the bedrooms are on a separate floor from the public rooms, people probably don’t spend the hours between five pm until bedtime already in bed. They probably read on couches or sit in the kitchen.

The thing is, my bed is super comfortable, and warm, and looks out onto treetops where squirrels do crazy acrobatics, and there’s a giant stack of books next to it. (I’ve gotten all up in Goodreads this summer, find me there if you haven’t already. I want to see what else I should be reading.) And my bed is right on the main floor, steps from the front door and next to the kitchen.

So if I’m not upright doing something like cooking or working or walking the dog, I am Always. In. Bed. So is my husband, but it’s not like that because he’s either reading Velo News or playing Scrabble on the iPad. I swear, we are just like the Swoosie Kurtz character in the David Byrne movie “True Stories,” the lady who lives in her bed (though we don’t have a TV in our room, or a robot to feed us.)

The kids always look for us there first when they come home from ballet or a friend’s house, only later checking the family room or yard. Close friends have been known to come in through the front door, straight down the hallway, and climb into bed with us for a chat. It may sound weird, but what sounds weirder to me is sitting on a couch in the living room to read when you could be doing it under the covers,  the dog snoring contentedly nearby.

We didn’t go the Santa Cruz boardwalk, we didn’t take the dog to romp in the Pacific Ocean at Half Moon Bay, we didn’t go watch the catamarans sailing in the Bay as part of the America’s Cup. We didn’t cheer any Bay Area teams. We went to a couple movies. We sat in bed and read. We lumped on the couch in a big Kho-pile and watched Friday Night Lights, and we’re already counting down the days until everyone is home again so we can watch Season 2 together. We made sloths seem hyperactive.

It’s only early August but to me it feels like summer’s over.

And I wouldn’t change a thing.

Once I started thinking about True Stories I couldn’t stop, so today’s video had to come from the movie. Plus, because obviously our summer was wild.

Ok, sorry to ask again but I promise it’s the last time…if you can spare a vote for me at the Circle of Mom’s “Top 25 NorCal Mom Bloggers” I sure would appreciate it. You can vote every day, in case you were looking for something fun to do with your summer weekend. Just press the magic pink button, below.


 

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Gifts From Ceil

When we moved into our house ten years ago, the first neighbors we met were the older Greek couple across the street from us named Jim and Ceil. In their eighties, they’d lived in the neighborhood for 45 years already at that point, in a big brick house that had a long staircase up to the front door, lined with white wrought-iron. Ceil would stand and wave to us from atop that balcony—she adored my then-little girls—like a tiny Shakespearean Juliet, in pastel suits and a bouffant.

When they were small, I’d send the girls across the street to visit Ceil in their Halloween costumes, or just to say hi. They’d come back with a box of See’s Candy every time. “Ceil gave it to us!” they’d say, astonished anew at their good luck and digging through for the caramels. I felt guilty about it. I didn’t want her to think she had to bribe them for their visits. So one day I said, “Ceil, you are so kind, but you know, I’m trying to keep an eye on how much sugar the girls eat. Please don’t feel you have to give them candy.”

Ceil was listening. The next time the girls came home from a visit, they were carrying a box of See’s Sugar Free Candy.

Jim and Ceil adored each other. He’d been stationed in Alaska during WWII, and a fellow soldier told him about the cute Greek girl next door in West Virginia who would only date fellow Greeks. Jim sent a letter, Ceil wrote back, and thus began a pen-pal relationship that culminated in marriage. Or as Ceil once said to me, leaning close with conspiratorial confidence, “After awhile I sent him a picture of me in a bikini. What else was he gonna do but propose?”

They raised three children, travelled all over the world, mourned the untimely loss of their son. Even as a casual observer watching from across the street, I could see that Jim and Ceil cherished each other with all the action, affection, and devotion that verb implies. So when Jim passed on in 2006, Ceil was devastated. From then on, every conversation we had included a mention of how much Ceil missed him. Not that she needed to say it. Her eyes made it so clear.

But the Greek coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia was nothing if not tough. She soldiered on, or should I say General’d on because she was always the one calling the shots. The phone would ring and one of my kids would answer. “MOM!” they’d say. “Ceil needs a ride to church.”

Especially after Jim died, the big Greek Cathedral that is a four minute drive from our house became the center of Ceil’s world. She worked there in the office as a secretary, and it was clear that Ceil felt that her direct and daily intervention was one of the few things keeping the Cathedral from going down the tubes. If she had car trouble or one of her devoted daughters couldn’t give her a lift to work, or the church supper, or the big Greek Festival, well, she’d just call me.

“Nancy. I need to get to church for…” and there would be a long explanation of why as I pulled on my shoes and mouthed “goodbye” to my kids. There was no saying “No” to Ceil. By the time I’d grabbed my car keys she’d already be waiting on the balcony, perfectly coiffed and accessorized and watching for me. Sometimes she wore her furs. Even as she passed her ninetieth birthday, she was more glamorous and self-assured than anyone I know.

Last month, at ninety two, Ceil passed away at home, in hospice care. I knew she’d been failing, watched as she got smaller and smaller in her own skin over a series of months, as she stopped driving, stopped returning my wave as the live-in caregiver her family hired helped her up the long front steps. I didn’t cry when I heard she was gone. If anything, I felt a moment of relief for Ceil: she was finally with Jim again.

On the day of the memorial service at the Greek Cathedral, I went to pay my respects during visiting hours and wrote a note to her family in the book. I said my goodbyes to my friend, then went outside to wait for my family to pick me up.

And that was when I cried, shuddering tears, because I realized it was the last time I’d go to the Cathedral on Ceil’s behalf.  I finally understood the magnitude and generosity of what she’d been giving me, the whole time she was sending over those boxes of chocolates for the girls:

The simple gift of making me feeling useful.

Here’s another Greek, Georgios Panayiotou (you may know him as George Michael,) singing with Mary J. Blige.  I love this song, and it’s a fitting tribute to Jim and Ceil.

                   
CommentsIn the tradition of the Other Mothers, I think you could count ... by EllenWhat a beautiful tribute! I love the last line: “The simple ... by Janine Kovacwhat a beautiful tribute to a beautiful lady… Ceil would ... by KirNancy, I love your heart and how you use your words. Gulp! by AnnA big (little) presence. I always felt like a giant awkward ... by Nancy Davis KhoPlus 2 more...Related StoriesLittle Bit of Fit KitAn Open Letter to Grandma’s HarpThis Is Actually Good, Because… 

Little Bit of Fit Kit

The statistics don’t lie: female bloggers have a disproportionately high influence on purchase decisions. A 2011 study showed that while only 12% of adult women were motivated to make purchases due to celebrity endorsements, 20% were motivated to do so when a blogger they knew promoted or endorsed a product.

That’s why the Exhibit Hall at BlogHer, the social media conference for women that drew 5,000 attendees to Chicago’s McCormick Place last weekend, is like Halloween for grown women. Consumer sponsors arrive en masse, set up cute little booths, and start throwing dosh at lady bloggers, hoping to entice them to write positive product reviews on their sites. Bloggers wander up and down the aisles saying, “Sure, I’ll take a sample of the chocolates inspired by the Hunger Games book series,” and “Where do I put my business card to win the free La-Z-Boy?” and “Ok, you can give me a blowout and do my nails and makeup with your products while I sip some of the wine they’re giving out three rows over.”

You see people limping away towards the hotel shuttle, shoulders laden with bandoliers that overflow with Trojan lube, nailpolish, Kozy Shack coupons. That’s not even counting the haul from private parties which are more like shopping events only without money changing hands, or the afternoon “Swag Drops” during which the hotel busboys drop more stuff from sponsors onto your bed while you’re gone. (Or in the case of my roommate Liz of PeaceLoveandGuacamole, while she is not gone but rather napping, causing both her and the startled bellboy to experience heart failure.) It’s overwhelming.

Now, you know I don’t write product reviews unless that product is a concert or a music themed book. But when I got an eyeful of the Bra Fit Kit from Jockey Underwear in my official BlogHer attendee bag, I decided to make an exception.

See, Jockey has a new DIY bra line. You send away for a Fit Kit that contains cups in every size from mosquito bite to Dolly Parton, and a tape measure, all stored in a nice little mesh bag perfect for washing the bra that you will no doubt order. The idea is that in the privacy of your own home, you can find the right cup size for your “volume,” measure your ribcage, and voila – no need to go to a department store. Great idea. I wish them well.

But you know me, I worry a lot about recycling, upcycling, just cycling in general. Yes, that was me having an earnest talk to the lady in the Keurig booth on Saturday morning about how critical it is that her company come up with compostable K-cups or risk overrunning the landfills with their admittedly convenient but environmentally reprehensible product. Pretty sure they’re making it a priority now that a lady blogger has asked them to.

So what do you do with all those Jockey Fit Kit cups when the fitting is done?

I had some ideas.

Nut dish. For a cocktail party, you could set out a Size 3 and Size 4 at opposite ends of the room, or just have everyone gather around a Size 8 in the middle.

Jewelry holder. I take my rings and watch off at night, put them right back on in the morning. Here’s a Size 5 on my bedside table making that routine easier.

Rain Water Collector for Emergency Kit. After the Big One hits, we’ll be slaking our thirst out of a Size 10.

Egg white separator. Size 1. Your meringues will never have more lift!

Dog water dish. That’s a Size 9 for my fifty-five pound dog. You could probably go as low as a Size 2 for a lap dog. As you can see in the video below, Achilles was, like most males facing a Size 9 cup, both enthralled and unsure what to with it.

Business card holder. Size 2. Because what says lady blogger more than outsize audience influence and a business card proffered in a bra cup?

 Ok, readers, let your creativity run rampant. I expect comments.

Enjoy “Lovely Cup” from Grouplove in the meantime. This is from their 2011 album Never Trust a Happy Song but they have a new one dropping in September, be sure to check it out!

***I’m still in the running over at Circle of Moms for the Top 25 NorCal Moms list…vote early, vote often so I can get some of the earthy crunchy street cred I so sorely lack!



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An Open Letter to Grandma’s Harp

Dear Harpy:

There you sit, in the corner of my dining room, a one hundred year old beauty in a state of Miss Haversham disrepair. Your sinuous curves, outlined to great advantage with thin scrolls of gold paint, contrast sharply with the strings that pop out in odd directions, like the black wires of Linus’ hair on Peanuts. You exude such a magnetic charm that children and adults alike are drawn to pluck your strings, to run their hands along your dusty angles, and finally to ask the question that you hypnotize them into uttering:

“Who here plays the harp?”

And I have to answer, every single time, “No one.”

Happy now? Thanks! We all get it! I never learned to play you!

I’ll admit that upon learning from my father that his mother had left me her precious 1923 Irish harp, I was touched. It was unexpected. She carted this harp around to old folk’s homes to give concerts, when she herself was an old folk. “She knew how much you like music,” my dad said. “She wanted you to have it.”

Music as in going to concerts and dancing in mosh pits and downloading songs until the credit card is smoking, yes, I like that type of music. Music as in playing it myself? Not since that fateful ninth grade day when I broke my arm in a game of tag football and finally had my excuse to quit early morning piano lessons with  Mrs. Hargrave. Or as my brother refers to the event, “That day you stopped playing piano, one month exactly after Mom and Dad bought you a brand new one.  What a good daughter you are!”

Do you see, Irish Harp, why I feel tormented by instruments? You’re like the best looking ex-boyfriend in the world. I want people to see you in all your beauty, and in the same moment I want them to know that it was me who decided we weren’t right for one another.

Listen, I made a couple calls about having you fixed, and taking lessons. I almost blacked out with boredom just listening to directions on how to restring you. I’d rather learn how to put a fork in my ear.

I have a cousin on Grandma’s side who was a musician as a young man, though his instruments largely comprised synthesizer and drum tracks on a home-built Commodore computer. His band was called Pulsar; when they cleared out Grandma’s house after her death, cousin Jimmy found a copy of Pulsar’s one cassette tape and we were left to wonder whether Grandma had been bootlegging his stuff all along.

Jimmy’s daughter has grown up to be a talented and fabulous jazz musician. Maybe you should go live with her? She slaps that cello and thumps the bass something fearful. I’d like to see her get her hands on you, make you appreciate the benign neglect you enjoyed here in my home.

But I’d miss you if you left. In a way, your disappointed aura makes me feel closer to my family.

With reserved affection,

Nancy

Here’s my cousin’s daughter, Kate Davis, on guitar this time. Watch this and you’ll understand: the ENTIRE family’s musical genes pooled in this lovely, talented girl. Check out more at www.KateDavisMusic.com.

Analogue Muse – Lamps & Amps featuring Kate Davis from Analogue Muse on Vimeo. 

 

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MotherWriters

With the big annual ladyblogger lovefest that is BlogHer starting  this weekend, I’ve been thinking about how writers are portrayed on the Big Screen. Seems to me that writers in movies are often—almost always—men, with just the right amount of bearded scruff and tortured psyche. They often smoke, sit in coffee houses or garret apartments, and dress all hot-shabby. (See Johnny Depp, Bradley Cooper, and Ewan McGregor.) About the only woman writer I can think of in the movies lately is Virginia Woolf played by Nicole Kidman, and that movie somehow became about Nicole’s fake nose, or the Diane Keaton character in Something’s Gotta Give, and the minute you saw the all-white interiors of her house in the Nancy Meyers movie, you knew it was all just a fantasy anyway.

Which is weird, because when I think of working writers I know, a lot of them look exactly like the thousands of women descending on Chicago for BlogHer: moms who write. In fact, motherhood may be the possible best training ground for writing, and here’s why:

The monotony is deadly, but unavoidable. Yes, there are moments when your child makes you a beautiful painting or discovers that he is good at soccer or cleans up the kitchen without being asked – those are the starburst moments of motherhood. Similarly, writers are sometimes blessed with a turn of phrase that perfectly captures what they are trying to say, or imagery that lends a psychic punch to the point being made, or a fantastic kernel of an idea for the main characters’ motivation.

But most of the time? Drudgery. Loading dishes in the dishwasher day after day after day is the same as typing 500 words of crap that will later have to be edited down to six good ones. It’s monotonous, but unavoidable. Who better than a mom to know how to power through the Resistance?

The rejection is constant, but necessary. Ok, not for you mothers of boys between the ages of four and seven – we all know those are the most loving creatures in the world. But once you have tweens and teens, it is simply part of your job description to be rejected as they pull away and form their own beings, growing up and independent.

It’s perfect training for when you take the leap to submit your work to editors who may reject it with the inscrutable “not a fit” or a silence more ominous than a teen behind a closed bedroom door. The rejections hurt, but if you’re not getting them, then you’re really not doing your job. You can repeat that mantra to yourself for both parenting and writing, if you like.

Your back will kill you. Carrying a 20 pound toddler on your hip while cooking dinner can give your spine a curve worse than Deenie’s. Guess what else will? Sitting at your keyboard for 6-9-12 hours per day. If you’re lucky, your toddler spine pain and your writer spine pain will cancel each other out.

You need to be comfortable with a Long Term Vision. A book that takes five years to write, from initial idea to publication–if you’re lucky? That’s nothing compared to the eighteen (ok, twenty-five. Ok, forty) years that it takes to nurture your baby to adulthood. Keeping your eyes on the prize is part of both job descriptions.

The money is awful, but the rewards are priceless. My niece spent a summer as a counselor at a sleepaway camp once and calculated that if she’d been paid by the hour, she would have been earning something like $0.11 every sixty minutes. I don’t dare do the math on either mothering or writing, since I don’t want find out that I was out-earned by a twenty-two year old.

And yet I happily re-up both contracts every single morning when I wake up. Motherhood, and writing, both have a knack of making you redefine success in a way that just can’t be captured on a balance sheet.

Hey! Angry Pearl Jam is back. I miss the ukeleles, but this brand new single from their upcoming album “Lightning Bolt” is pretty tight, like ’80s punk rock. And who among us MotherWriters hasn’t stage whispered the title of this song before?

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Midlife Mixtape Concert Review: Peter Case

The Band: Peter Case, Saturday July 20 2013. Case was a mainstay of the New Wave scene in the late ‘70s with his band The Nerves and then The Plimsouls of “A Million Miles Away” fame. Since the Plimsouls disbanded (just in time for Million Miles to be featured in Valley Girl)  Case has kept on keeping on, releasing folk/rock/blues albums, earning Grammy nominations, teaching songwriting craft, blogging, writing a couple of books – you know, one of those lazy, do-nothing guys.

The Venue: Elise’s backyard. Who is Elise? I still don’t really know. I’d signed up to see the house concert via the website of local promoter KC Turner, an exuberant young man who lives to bring Great Music to The People, both in regular concert and house concert form. Unlike the Rosecrest Supper Club house concerts I’ve written about before, where the hosts invite their own friends to the show, KC’s house concerts are open to anyone, in residential venues around the city. This one, held in the foggy part of SF, did not disappoint.

We left our shoes in the front hall, traversed an apartment hung with gorgeous artwork and textiles that felt like the inside of someone’s jewelry box, and arrived in the twee backyard where concertgoers were arrayed on colorful picnic blankets. Tibetan prayer flags fluttered overhead, ladybugs buzzed around everywhere, a chicken coop formed Stage Left, and a French bulldog named Rosenkrantz hopped from blanket to blanket, nobly accepting all the petting a French bulldog inspires.

The Company: Everyone needs a friend like my buddy Lisa, who I met at LitCamp. When you call Lisa to see if she wants to catch a show with you, no matter how last minute, LitCamp Lisa always says, “YES! Do you want me to drive?”

The Crowd: Forty over forty, plus a handful of youngsters, splayed around the blankets drinking wine and eating snacks. (I offered a brownie to the guy sharing our blanket and he said, “Medicinal?”  When I assured him they were not, he said, “I’ve learned to ask in the Bay Area.” Word.)

Unfortunately, there was also one drunk guy, which is standard for any concert but a lot harder to ignore at a small house concert. This one showed his reverence for Peter Case by providing a hand-clapping drum line, singing along loudly, and then just repeating “Peter Case! Peter Case! Yeah, Peter Case!” in case any of the rest of us forgot who we’d come to see. That distraction ended when he stood up, fell over, and was gently escorted out the door by KC.

The Opening Band: The Plastic Arts. The Plastic Arts is one guy: Kyle Terrizzi, a Bay Area singer songwriter who writes songs that are exquisite little stories. His voice has an appealing versatility that lets him go from vulnerable to strong in the same phrase. To me he sounded like a wiser, less drunk Ed Sheeran. I bought Kyle’s latest album (and first full length release) Academy Clonez, and when I got home the teenager ripped it to her laptop right away, and the husband listened to it twice yesterday, and basically it’s our new favorite.

Age Humiliation Factor: Low.


An afternoon house concert on a summer Saturday? I had the morning free for errands and was still home in time for our family marathon of Friday Night Lights. If all concerts were held by great artists in backyards during the afternoon, it’s all middle aged people would do.

Cool Factor: High

When we first walked through Elise’s beautiful apartment and out into the backyard, LitCamp Lisa was uncharacteristically quiet. I finally said, “Are you ok?” feeling a little worried.

“I’m just taking it all in,” she said, a huge smile spreading across her face. “This is amazing. I’ve never been to a show in a place like this.” As the chickens in the coop pecked around, and ladybugs from the lush green garden flew around our heads, and a grey cat stopped to say hello once Rosenkrantz moved off our laps, I had to think, yeah, this is not your everyday concert occurrence.

Worth Hiring the Sitter? A million times yes.

Peter Case looks the part of the blues musicians who, he told us, inspired him in his formative years. You get the sense that the Plimsouls stint was a tiny blip in what has been a rich, varied, and rewarding music career, and that it’s probably kind of annoying that it’s what people think of when they think of Peter Case. (Though less annoying that someone yelling “Peter Case! Yeah!” from six feet away.) His hour plus set was infused with rock, folk, and some serious blues, switching between acoustic and electric guitar and ranging all over the musical map.

Case was generous with his music, his stories, and his time – there’s really nothing like a house concert when you can chat with the musicians and pay them directly for their merch to make the distance between performer and audience feel small. It was while waiting on line for Elise’s bathroom, for instance, that I started talking with Case and learned that during concerts, Case has had bottles and vegetables thrown at him, but never an egg. Though Elise’s chickens got a little riled up when he did Bumble Bee Blues.

Do you live in the Bay Area and have a hankering to see a house concert? Subscribe to KC’s email newsletter – he’s got Chuck Prophet and Griffin House coming up in the next little while. Not in the Bay Area? You could host a backyard concert like this. It’s not complicated: a singer/songwriter, some friends, some blankets. Drunk hecklers discouraged. French bulldog optional.

You will not be disappointed.

Peter Case is heading home to Buffalo for a gig in September, then back to the West Coast – check out tour dates here. What’s your house concert dream bill? Let me know your thoughts in the comments field – I could talk music with you all day long.

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This Is Actually Good, Because…

A few weeks ago I was in my local indie bookstore and a self-help book with a lemon yellow cover caught my eye.

It was called You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, by Jen Sincero. “Sheesh,” I thought, “what manner of Pollyanna baloney is this?”

Then I flipped through to a random page and found my new life philosophy.

Because on that page, Sincero recommended that when something bad happens to you, you should immediately reframe it by finishing the sentence, “This is actually good because…” The simple act of doing that forces you out of a negative mindset and forces you to focus on positives, however small. So when you are stuck at the end of a long line at the DMV, instead of thinking, “There goes my day, plus I think that coughing guy is giving me tuberculosis and/or lice,” you say, “This is actually good, because it gives me a reason to see if the Centers for Disease Control has a mobile app.” See? As someone who usually sees bad things as, well, bad, I knew this simple phrase could pack enormous power.

So I’ve been practicing “This is actually good because” as my new mantra. And the fact that I woke up two days ago with an allergic reaction to eye makeup that makes it look like a) I’ve been punched in both eyes and b) I am wearing an eyeshadow color called “Magenta Flame”  is actually good, because:

I normally try to control my hair-trigger crying reflex so as not to upset the family, but since it looks like I’ve been on a two day jag anyway, I am free to let fly. Commercials, onions, feelings of inadequacy, the movie Fruitvale Station—I’m sobbing like crazy and saying “Stupid allergies!” to anyone who wonders why.
Sometimes I’m tempted to stay up late in bed and read. With my swollen lids, I can barely see the page so good night Irene!
I hadn’t had my blood pressure checked lately, nor had I climbed onto the scale at the doctor’s office that always adds eleven pounds to my home scale weight. Now I’m all caught up on both counts.
The doctor has recommended putting absolutely no products near my eyes at all, so I’m saving valuable time not washing my face or wearing makeup. Corollary: no more pesky compliments to interrupt my day!
It’s not blepharitis, which is the search result you get for “red eyelids, bloodshot eyes” on Google. That stuff is gross.
I really like my sunglasses, and I’m spending a lot of time with them right now.
Whether it’s the the expensive primer, the two-month old eye shadow trio, or the fancy mascara that caused the reaction, I’ll never know because it’s all going into the trash. So much more storage room in my makeup bag!
The money that I’d normally spend on replacing said eye makeup is free to be reapportioned. That’s what I call a financial windfall for the concert t-shirt collection.
I was debating whether to bring the white/grey/blue clothes to BlogHer next week, or the orange/red/pink stuff. Problem solved! If I go for the latter, my eyelids will look perfectly coordinated.

Yes I am too going to do it. Nancy Davis Eyes, clap clap. I’m staying away from that Pro Blush, though.

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Tour de Meh

This July, for the first time in about fifteen years, I have not woken up at the butt crack of dawn to drink my coffee and glance through the newspaper while watching (slightly delayed) live coverage of the Tour de France with my husband and kids. We did not pick fantasy teams and place actual money bets; we are not poring over the thick “TDF Official Guide” issues of Velo News and Cycle Sports; we are not re-watching epic crashes and post-race analysis from Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen after dinner each night.

In short, what has been a family tradition since the girls were old enough to say, “That’s a time twial helmet” as they watch a cyclist reach the end of his endurance during the month-long circuit of France, is now gone, discarded, marked only by this blog post. July is, once again, like every other month of the year.

Screw you, Lance Armstrong, and all your doper friends too. You ruined the entire sport for us, and ended a tradition that bound our family together as a team.

Oh, I mean, it’s not like we didn’t suspect there was doping going on all along. Every year from the mid-90s forward, some hotshot rider was pulled from the course for failing a drug test, and in the off season you’d read about pro cyclists in their twenties dying of heart conditions that looked suspiciously like drug side effects. But those weren’t household names (I mean, not even in my household. I get that you probably don’t know your Schleck Brothers from your Spartacus.)

And then the bigger name dominoes began to fall: Tyler Hamilton, such a tiny little man that I felt like I could probably carry him around in my bike basket, but who was so tough that he rode the 2003 race with a broken collarbone and required dental surgery afterward for grinding his teeth down to nubs. Floyd Landis, who we watched win a stage in southern France on Bastille Day 2006. Ivan Basso. Danilo Di Luca. Vino, the Kazakh cyborg. The pattern was louder than Garmin’s ill-advised Argyle team uniform.

Still, I held on as a fan. I’m an optimist. They were catching the bad guys, right? The riders wouldn’t keep taking risks at the rate they were getting snatched up by drug testers, right?

Last October, on the day that George Hincapie released a statement that acknowledged his doping, that’s the day I gave up. George was Lance’s second in command and the only rider to stay beside him for his seven tour wins, and my mom and I shared a not-very-secret fondness for the quiet giant from North Carolina whose ears stuck out like handles on a toddler cup. He was always courteous to the press, married a podium girl and was raising little kids. A guy like that wouldn’t dope, would he?

He would, and he did, and I’m done. Why am I wasting any time on a sport where a person endowed with amazing natural talent and perseverance still needs to inject, intubate, transfuse to win? That’s not a sport. That’s a medical experiment.

We have a couple of friends here in Oakland who have never understood what the appeal was of cycling, who were openly derisive about what they said was “obviously” doping in the sport, who didn’t quite see the point of the shaved legs and the aerodynamic helmets and analyzing the outfits of the podium girls. I felt sorry for them. I married a guy who loves cycling—doing it and watching it–and he patiently explained it to me over the years. I grew to love its drama and beauty and strategy (yes, it truly is a team sport.)

A few weeks after the notorious Oprah interview with Lance Armstrong last fall, I methodically removed every piece of Armstrong memorabilia in the house. We have a lot: my sister in law worked for the cancer foundation, and my husband rode in fundraisers for cancer research under the LiveStrong umbrella. All that stuff is in the storage unit now. I can’t quite throw it in the trash, though I couldn’t tell you what’s stopping me. Pride that my husband worked so hard to ride well in those events, probably.

And—ok—maybe I still read the stage recaps in the news every day in July. But when Chris Froome won the Mont Ventoux climb yesterday on Stage 15 , my first reaction was: “He was probably doping.”  On the one hundredth anniversary of the Tour, the cynicism with which the cyclists treated the sport has leached out into the world and come back to bite them in their Chamois-Butt’rd butts.

Way to win, Cycling.

Maybe Those Darlins can’t help it, but you could have.

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Turn Down the Music and Read: Rock On: An Office Power Ballad

This month’s music book review is a reach back into my small, but highly valued, library of music books that crack me up. It occurred to me one day when I spotted the red, black, and white spine of this 2008 book that Midlife Mixtape readers might have missed this the first time around. And that’s a problem that I have the power to address. Plus: an excuse to reread it. Now that’s a win/win situation.

Rock On: An Office Power Ballad (Algonquin, 2008) by Dan Kennedy, tells a tale that, on its surface, may seem like a dream to middle aged music fans everywhere. An avid music fan/sometimes rocker/sometimes food service employee hits his thirties, finds himself as a copywriter in an ad agency with a part-time gig in adjusting his expectations ever lower when BAM: he gets the job of a lifetime, in the marketing department of a major record label. Finally! He’s working in the music biz in a grown up job!

Only, it’s in the early 2000s. You’ll remember that era as the one in which the entire music began to implode. So instead of giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the exciting life aboard the “S.S. Rock N Roll,” what we get is the universal story of the first decade of 21st century America: people madly scrambling to keep their jobs in a sector of the economy that is tanking, albeit a sector where Duran Duran may show up a conference room now and again.

Kennedy is sharp-eyed and hilarious, wavering between the music fan who wants to believe that rock and roll can save his life and the cynical worker bee who sees further than the upper level execs who have rested on their laurels since they discovered Rush back in the ‘70s and don’t understand how a little thing called the Internet is ever going to affect their business.

So while the scenes that made me laugh hardest are the ones grounded in his regular brushes with musicians and bands– the chapter called “The Salvation of Stooges,” about the night Kennedy saw Iggy Pop scare the life out of the industry suits lounging in their private balcony seats at Roseland, is worth the price of the book alone – Rock On is much more than a music book.

It’s for anyone who ever walked into their first meeting on their first day of work at a new job and instantly, unintentionally, made an enemy of a new coworker(in Kennedy’s case, by mistaking a chocolate chip muffin for a blueberry muffin. What a bastard.) It’s for anyone who has tried to decipher the tea leaves as managers send “goodbye, I’m leaving to pursue new opportunities” emails in ever-increasing frequency. And it’s for anyone who’s thought about whether smuggling out office supplies like Post Its and Dri-erase markers can ever make up for the fact that the corporate ship has hit an iceberg and is sinking fast.

Kennedy, who hosts the Moth’s storytelling podcast, is not just an appealing author, but a generous one. He’s offered a lucky Midlife Mixtape reader a copy of Rock On as well as his brand new debut novel, American Spirit, about which the Washington Independent Review of Books says “Dan Kennedy not only manages to craft bitter, effective comedy out of life’s darker corners—egregious substance abuse, financial collapse, depression and death but he makes it look easy.”

Want a chance to win both books?

Just leave a comment, below, and tell us about a time you were in a job and realized that it was all starting to go to hell around you. (If you don’t have a story like that, you are either fourteen years old or weren’t paying attention.) I’ll give you my example: Dot Com employer holiday party, 2000, in a fancy San Francisco hotel with stilt walkers and filet mignon stations and a live band and lots of champagne, and my pragmatic husband leaned over and whispered, “What does your company actually do, again? And do they make any money at it?” Fast forward eleven months to the massive layoff.

Leave your comment by Monday, July 15 at 5 pm PST and I’ll use Random.org to pick a winner. I asked Kennedy for his favorite Iggy Pop video to accompany this post, and he picked the Repo Man opening credits (no not the Jude Law movie version, cawsh, what are you THINKING?) which filled me with joy because I loved that movie so much. So if you’d prefer to leave a favorite quote from Repo Man as your entry I’m cool with that too.

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Video from Listen To Your Mother 2013

Well, it’s time. For those of you who, from the sound of my writing, thought I was a tall slender blonde with a British accent, maybe like Cat Deeley on So You Think You Can Dance, I’m afraid I have to burst your bubble today. Because this is the video of my performance at the Listen To Your Mother show in San Francisco last May. It’s just me, my big ol’ Rochester accent and frantically swinging earrings, preaching a message of gratitude to all those “Other Mothers” in your lives.

Many thanks to the national video sponsor  The Partnership at Drugfree.org. LTYM is proud to promote their message of preventing prescription drug misuse and abuse!  Join the growing number of parents pledging to end this epidemic – more info here. You can view more vids from the LTYM shows coast to coast here, so worth your time…

Keep in mind that about 23 hours earlier I was engaged in overage slam dancing at my college reunion in Philly, so I came by those bags under my eyes honestly. And thanks again to everyone who came out to the show in person!

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