October 9, 2011 · 0:00

… comes around

A friend of mine told me that this weekend was her 20th high school reunion.  Immediately, I was transported back to mine, back to one of the best nights of my life, back to when someone who had bullied me showed everyone else his true colors.

My hometown was a wealthy suburb, a place where rich, well-schooled, successful folks go to raise their families.  A town filled to the brim with liberals who mostly commute to New York City, just a short train ride away.  A town of folks that raise their kids to be liberals too.

My classmates and I were at the tail end of the Baby Boomers, old enough to protest the Vietnam war but not old enough to serve.  Old enough to remember and mourn the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr., to have seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.  We participated in protests, celebrated the Women’s Movement, went braless through high school, and believed that all you need is love.

My family landed in town when my father bought a run-down Victorian house, sight unseen, in 1963. Kids in the neighborhood thought it was haunted; we moved in on Halloween.  My two brothers, two sisters and I started school the following Monday.

Within a week, I had ruined my life.

You see, in 2nd grade, every Friday at my new school, we had Show and Tell.  I bet you did too.  But I bet you didn’t, well, show and tell quite like I did that very first week.

You remember Show and Tell, I’m sure.  Everyone gathers together on the floor and everybody raises their hand to perform; three or four kids are chosen every week.  They sing songs, tell jokes, juggle.  That first week I anxiously raised my hand, but the teacher didn’t call on me.  I performed anyway.  There in the middle of the circle, I wet my pants.

I do not recommend “showing” in this manner if your goal is to one day be voted “Most Popular.”

I don’t remember what happened for the rest of the afternoon.  I don’t know if I went home early, if my classmates got wet and ran screaming from me.  I have buried that memory.  I do know that it started four years of hell.

Tommy was the lead bully.  He dubbed me “Weenie Girl” and teased and tormented me through 6th grade.  He was truly cruel, and tried to keep others from being my friend.  I hated him.  I saw him less as we got older, but he was still a classmate when we both graduated in 1974.

But by the time of my 20th reunion, I had more or less gotten over my shame over the incident.  And I did it with a very public therapy session.  One night, when I had had way too much to drink at a bar, I climbed onto a table and told everyone in the bar my hilariously funny/sad story – how I ruined my own childhood during Show and Tell.   I had always feared that someone would find out and ridicule me.  Instead, there I stood, making the room love me, as I showed them the humor and the pain.

It had taken me years, but I had to admit it was funny.  I mean after all, I didn’t do it during naptime.  I didn’t do it during storytime.  I didn’t pee while learning long division.  I wet my pants during Show and Tell!  Why hasn’t anyone put that scene into a sit com?

So on the night of my 20th reunion, when I saw lead bully Tommy heading towards me to say hello, I had forgiven him.  Completely.  And although I thought of all the things I could say to the nasty bully, I smiled politely, chatted amiably to him and his wife, and moved on with my life.  It was a proud moment.

But the night got better.  Much, much better.

You see, Tommy was the MC of the evening.  It was his job to introduce particularly successful classmates, tell who was living in exotic places, and what surprising career choices had been made by a few.  He showed pictures of us when we all still had hair, when we were thin, when we were young.

And Tommy did a good job speaking to that extremely liberal crowd of editors and publishers, doctors, public interest lawyers.  People who still wanted to save the world.  Good people, people with heart and soul.  Liberals.

And then it happened.  Towards the end of the evening, Tommy stood up on the dias and started to wind things down.  And he said to my extremely PC friends and classmates:

“My wife told me not to tell jokes tonight.  But I’m just going to tell the one.”

“Why is a man like a linoleum floor?”

Tommy paused for effect.

“Lay him right the first time;

walk all over him from then on.”

The room went silent, as one by one, each head turned towards the dias and each person either thought or said aloud:

“What an asshole.”

And after realizing that everybody agreed on that one point, I cracked up.

“Hell, I’ve known he was an asshole since 2nd Grade!” I said.

I’m pretty sure that when I am taking in my last breath, I will still be smiling about that night, knowing that in this life what goes around really does come around; sometimes it just takes a while.

The scene of the crime

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October 6, 2011 · 0:00

Flower Power

Every time some high-profile person dies I get like this.  Annoyed.

Not generally at the person who died or the fact that they did.  That’s not usually their fault.  And let’s face it, sometimes their, uh, absence isn’t such a bad thing for the world.  Of course it depends.

No, what annoys me are all the damn flowers.  Folks started doing it last night, probably as soon as word went out that Steve Jobs had died.

I was irritated because I knew that outside each and every Apple Store, outside headquarters and outside any house where an Apple-product fan lives, there would be flowers.  And each and every damn bouquet would still be in its plastic sleeve.

Now I think Steve Jobs was a great guy, truly.  And Macs are absolutely the way to go.  If I could afford one, well, that’s what I’d be working on right now.

But the fact that folks go to all the trouble to get flowers, take them to memorials, take them to places of quiet contemplation and remembrance and LITTER, well, it makes me nuts.

When I see someone doing that I want to toot my car horn and shout “Litterbug, beep, beep” like we did as kids.  I want to get that crying Indian from the 70s to ride after them (on a diapered horse, of course) and make them pick up their trash.  I want there to be a 2011 advertising campaign to stop people from throwing plastic down on the ground and leaving it there, even if they mean well.  Even if there is something pretty still inside.

I can still remember that when Princess Diana died, there were so many £5 bouquets of flowers wrapped in plastic outside of Kensington Palace that they declared a public emergency and brought in bulldozers and backhoes to remove the mess.  They asked people to stop bringing flowers.

To my mind, a plastic-enclosed bunch of flowers is just not a very good way to say good-bye.  Well, maybe to the chairman of the Hefty Trash Bag company, but not to Princess Di and not to Steve Jobs, and not to anybody else I can think of unless there’s someone out there who routinely wraps him or herself in plastic.  And I’m pretty sure you won’t be getting a lot of hands up in the crowd from folks who admit to doing that.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t like flowers.  I just don’t like flowers left in unseemly piles of plastic crap.  It is environmentally, politically and humanitarianly incorrect.  It’s bad for Mother Nature.  And it is damn ugly.

Lovely Flowers for Princess Diana

So, I would like to tell you, my enormous fan base, years from now when I die tragically here at my computer from Blog-itis, and when my die-hard devotees simply must, MUST memorialize me with flowers, 

TAKE THEM OUT OF THE GOD DAMN WRAPPER

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October 4, 2011 · 0:00

Buttons

I’ve always thought that my car had too many buttons.  But now I’m not so sure.

At last count, there were 223 buttons of different sizes and shapes.  They control the stereo, the lights, the wipers.  They open the windows, heat the seats, and reset things I cannot identify.  In fact there are a lot of them that I’m just not sure about; so I try not to press them.  I fear disastrous results.

I didn’t used to worry about what would happen if I pushed something unfamiliar.  I thought, well, I can just press it again if I don’t like what happens.  But that was before owning my dearly departed Mini Cooper.  It had one button that was strategically located right next to the window control, and it terrified me.   My husband, John, said:

“Don’t press that button.”

Why not?

When you pressed it, the rollover control for the car went off.  I don’t know why a car would have that button.  The only explanation I ever found was that the Mini Cooper was very much like my dog, Cooper, who loves nothing more than a belly rub.  And so I figured that sometimes, my Mini Cooper just needed a belly rub, too.   And that button made it all possible.

But this morning I realized that my car is short a button.

Today, I drove to work a different way.  It was 8:45, and I was 15 minutes from work, when I got to the end of one road, and needed to turn left onto the next four-lane road.  I’m sure you realize that I am a terrific driver, a really nice, considerate, non-assholic driver.  So of course I was in the left lane, with my car responsibly flashing its left turn signal.  There was a silver Honda next to me in the right lane.  Obviously, being in the right lane, he was turning right.  He was not proudly displaying his turn signal, I might add.  At least not so I could see it.

When the light changed, I pulled forward, and I crossed the two westbound lanes and the left, eastbound one to take my rightful place in the right lane.  But my friend in the silver Honda did not turn right – he turned left – from the right lane!  And I immediately remembered that, well, he could do that at that spot on that road.  He was allowed to.

I cut him off.  And I nearly smushed his Honda flat enough to be used as one of those silver plates that cover big holes in the road.  Oops.

I felt bad, and not just because of the language with which he described my driving.  I am still blushing.  But I really do try not to be an asshole, at least when I drive.  And when I do act like an asshole, well, I want to mean it.  You know, like when someone drives really slowly in front of me, or really fast behind me or smokes in the car ahead of me with his arm hanging out the window so I have to smell it.

But after I cut off the man in the Honda, I tried to let him know I was sorry, that I had made a mistake, that I was glad he was not now in an ambulance, headed towards the trauma unit.  But there really wasn’t any way to do that.

That’s where my new button comes in.  I want to be able to hit a button and have a light flash that says,

“Sorry, my fault.”

I’m pretty sure though, that my new friend in the silver Honda wants a different phrase to come out when he smacks his new button.

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October 1, 2011 · 0:00

Excuse me?

Whenever I go to a bridal shower, I always give two gifts:  one real gift of something nice or useful (and boringly chosen from the registry), and one joke gift.  When my friend Judy got married in 1985, she got cold cream and foam curlers.  That gift was such a hit that it became my standard joke gift until about two years ago.

That was when I realized that all men mumble so much that I needed a way to warn women what they were getting into in a relatively lighthearted way.  Q-tips.

You know as well as I do that all men say vitally important, life changing things to you while walking 5 feet ahead and facing in a completely different direction.  Lip reading isn’t an option.  Have you ever known one who doesn’t?

And then they then get, well, testy when you say,

“Oh, sorry, honey.  I couldn’t hear you.  What did you say?”

So these days, I make sure to give the bride a box of Q-tips.   And I tell them that once they are married, they will need to keep their ears very clean or their marriage will not last.

I’m only partly joking.

There is just something about guys that they think that they only need to say something once, and the entire world hears, comprehends and hangs on their every word.  Whether it is, in fact, comprehensible or not.

My husband, my son, my brothers, they’re all like that.  Male friends, too.  Well, they’re probably former friends after that comment, but they still mumble.  My co-workers may mumble like that too, but they hide their annoyance better.

There is just something about asking a guy to repeat something, to say it again, that makes them, ummmm, crabby.  And just because, well, perhaps you were in another state when they said that thing you didn’t hear, well, it is entirely your fault that you just didn’t hear it.

Hence Q-tips for the bride-to-be.  I think it is important for people to understand just what they’re getting into.  And just opening a silly gift like that stops the stupid-ass bridal shower games and starts a conversation that lets the bride-to-be understand what she needs to be a good wife:  bionic hearing.  Surprisingly, no bride has yet run screaming from the room.

Actually, I wonder how many divorces do revolve around this irritation.  I’m sure that in divorce court, this issue comes up all the time.  And I’d bet it plays out differently depending on whether the judge is female or male.

When the husband stands before the judge and says:

“Your honor, she drove me crazy.  She was always asking me to repeat myself.  She said I mumbled.”

A female judge would respond:

“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith.  I couldn’t understand what you said.  Would you repeat that please?”

A male judge, alternatively, would respond:

“Divorce granted.  Take it all, Smith.  You’ve given her enough over the years.  Leave her a box of Q-tips so she can clean out her ears so she can hear the next poor sod.”

So I figure it’s actually a kindness for me to warn brides-to-be of what’s ahead of them.  Don’t you?

But come to think of it, I haven’t been invited to too many bridal showers lately.  Maybe they’d prefer cotton balls.

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September 23, 2011 · 0:00

Intelligent Design

Americans have decided that it’s OK to vote for a dummy.  Nope, I didn’t come to that conclusion from watching last night’s 467th GOP debate.  No I didn’t look at how many people have contributed to the likes of Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum.  I didn’t even Google George W. Bush.

Nope.  I read a new poll that came out yesterday. It said that even though a majority of Americans believe in evolution (57%) and even more believe in global warming (69%), Americans are nevertheless willing to vote for a candidate for president who doesn’t.

Huh?

Now I’m a big fan of history, and I would love to time travel.  I’m especially fond of the Victorian Age, but I wouldn’t want to have lived back then.  Still, I love Dickens, that decorative architecture, and I would really like to have more opportunities to wear those terrific dresses.

But, going backwards to the scientific beliefs of the mid- to late 1800s seems, well, backwards.

Now I work in science, and last I checked, the whole idea of science was to go forward.  Yup, it’s true.  That’s how we get all the new stuff, like medicines, technology and pollution controls.  That’s how we move forward.  Science and technology go hand in hand, or actually hand in latex glove, cause we don’t want contaminants in either, you know.

Now science doesn’t always go forward.  You know that doctors have started using leeches again?  Yup!  Apparently leeches are now used in microsurgery where they clean coagulated blood away from the opening.  And, a few years ago, I learned that scientists have figured out that our GI tract is just too clean, and that’s why we have so many bowel problems in the West.  The solution?  Scientists have developed a treatment where the patient drinks worm larvae, which helps their gut work the way it is supposed to.  Think of it as meaty yogurt.

Eating?  Oops, sorry.  My bad.

But most of the time science goes forward and takes the rest of the world to new and better places.

So what does it mean if Americans will vote for someone who ignores thousands of years of accumulated learning?  Elects someone who doesn’t understand, at a minimum, that science is good?

It means that there will be no investment in the future.  No cure for cancer or even the common cold. No vacations on Mars.

More importantly, it means cell phones reception will never get any better.

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