Archive for December, 2009

What an incredible day it is on planet earth.  The last day of the year.  It is the end of what was and the beginning of what can be.  Whether the change is wonderful or tragic, we will find some peace in knowing that what is past, whether wonderful or tragic, can be somewhat locked up, filed away or stored in the vast recesses of MOZY.  I don’t see it that we want to dodge our past, but we want to have a sense of completion, and, perhaps, rest.   The hope for change gives us the ability to pause.  A change in gear requires a moment, however brief, in neutral.

That is what today is about:  neutrality.  We may undeck the halls or go out for Chinese food instead of cooking, stop and really play with the kids or take out the husband for a glass of bubbly, but we are forced to be mindful of the shift.  I like using the word mindful.  It makes me feel like a guru.

I’m not making this up.  You know that there are celebrations across the globe.  We can’t agree on abortion or whether George W. Bush engaged in war to impress his dad, but we all agree that when the ball or its non-NYC equivalents drop, things must explode and we must kiss our cute husbands, cute boyfriends, or cute strangers at the bar.  We all agree that we must risk DUI arrests for the sake of honoring this shift.  So I wish you all a Happy Shift and I hope you enjoy the beauty and comfort of ritual and change.

In honor of these wonderful hours of neutrality, gearlessness or free-balling, I will NOT blog about the following with regard to my 2009 experience.

• My position on Newsweek’s Most Influential Women in 2009 List, mainly because I don’t appear anywhere on it and rightfully so.

• The fact that I have lost 50 pounds, which I have, but it was the same pound that I gained and lost over and over again, 53 times, for a difference of 3 (going up).

• That my family is quite cool, for a group of human beings, because that’s unspecific and probably boring to you, but I will state that I do really enjoy hugging them all more than they can sometimes stand.

• How the vice principal (my former boss) at the local Catholic high school is a d-bag who applies cheesy workshop mantras (in lieu of sound logic and true wisdom) to his decision-making.  I won’t say this.

I will say that reflection on the past year’s events, both GOOD AND BAD, still makes me happy.  Perhaps I’m just thinking about the champagne and the potstickers with which I will observe neutral, but I certainly appreciate the adventure that is my life, even if I’m not as pretty as Tiger Wood’s wife.

Thank you all for hanging out with me.  I hope to have the honor of your browsing eyes in 2010!

The performing arts world is experiencing another revolution in the form of flash mobs, where a choreographed dance is performed in a public setting resulting in the improvised participation of the on-looking crowd.  My husband (who was a hunky high school show choir geek several years before the concept of Fox’s Glee was even a synaptic spark in the mind of creator Ryan Murphy) thinks, “This is sooo cool!” I agree.  This movement is not only bringing art to the masses, but it is allowing them to be a part of it without an audition.

In this video, you will see the spontaneous dance, set to a Glee medley, evolve into an all-crowd dance in a Rome shopping mall. (Eat your heart out Westfield; this mall is PRETTY.)   It is an interesting intersection of improvisation and contrived art that I would imagine makes for a unifying and uplifting experience. (Of course, in this case, I heard it was a marketing stunt for Glee’s upcoming season.  Oh, that clever Fox!  However, not all flash mobs are ads.)  Inviting the audience to join in a performance is an ingenious twist, second only to, maybe, the opportunity to run into the moderately choppy waters of Malibu Beach, alongside the buoyantly bouncing upper half of Pamela Anderson.

I wonder if flash mobs would work to fight terror.  And, I wonder if they are only cool to show choir geeks and Europeans.  The two are easy to confuse.  But if you’re not prepared, even your American football sons and horseback-riding daughters who dwell in mall food courts will become unwitting performers or, rather, YouTube sensations.  Should we all enroll in Jazz class and swap our Dansko’s for Capezio’s for our next shopping trip?

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Musical Magic Of ‘Glee’ (npr.org)
• Flash mob evolution – even Microsoft stores are trying them now! (nickburcher.com)

Carla Zilbersmith was my teacher.  She is an enviably talented actress, director, and writer who taught with wisdom, skill, and the unique ability to inspire you beyond your thought that you were kind of an aimless loser (not easy to do at a community college).

Now, she no longer performs (Did I mention her rich, cool jazz singing?), and she no longer teaches college, though she imparts infinite wisdom via her BLOG. READ IT. And her musical comedy on dying (yes), Leave Them Laughing.  WATCH THE TRAILER.

Dying? you ask.  YES.  DYING.  I almost forgot to tell you because even while in the throes of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, one of the most bullshit fatal illnesses (her words and I agree) in, perhaps, the history of the world, she is such a source of light, wisdom, and inspiration.  (I don’t mean that in a New Agey sense.)

As if all that weren’t enough, now Carla is taking fatal illness to the pin-up world.  Who, besides me when I find it on my husband’s workbench, doesn’t love a pin-up girl?  (Actually my husband doesn’t have a workbench or a pin-up girl, but still.)  In her ALWAYS LOOKING SEXY CALENDAR, she presents the racier side of ALS, wheelchairs and respirators included.  Why not greet each month with a full color photo of the hottest humans stricken with the disease?  Please BUY A CALENDAR and you will support ALS research and yet another brilliant endeavor of one of the most talented people that the earth will soon be robbed of.

Related articles by Zemanta

• A story for a quiet day (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Night (nybooks.com)
• Exhausted for a cause: Watch Seattle neurologist run the Ironman (seattlepi.com)
• New hope for people whose nerves degenerate (stemcell.taragana.net)

The lump of raw gingerbread (See Praying for a Christmas Miracle) was seen to its full potential by an angel who appeared on my doorstop with my phoned-in grocery requests in his hands.  This angel was neither a blond, infant cherub, nor John Travolta, nor a Victoria’s Secret model in feathered wings selling underwear.  We’ll just call him JAY MASUNAGA, since that’s his name, which means nothing unless you know him, but my point is that angels don’t often resemble the pictures that come up in the Google image search.  Sometimes they are 32 years old, 5’6”, slender, dressed in Armani, bearing an impish grin, and attached to a laptop for frequent Farmville updating. Jay is that along with many other adjectives that he doesn’t deserve to hear before his 40^th birthday.  The second point is that some of your Facebook friends are actually real friends who can follow through on something other than posting pictures of themselves picking organic vegetables.  Many, many thanks to Jay and others like him who haven’t lost the art, like perhaps I have, of helping out ‘just ‘cause,’ and not just to get into heaven.  Feeding the homeless will get you into heaven.  Helping me make a gingerbread house will not.  That is true altruism, ladies and gentlemen.  Tell me I’m wrong.

The second Christmas miracle occurred involving the unemployment SNAFU where my marking the wrong box on a question halted my $8000 in back checks being sent to me.  You saw that number right.  Want to see it again?  Here:  $8000. I said to my unstoppably optimistic husband, Please tell me something that will make me feel better about this. He tried a few lines out on me, but they all failed.  Poor husband.  Poor me.

Later, I went to check my previous post for, I don’t know, spelling errors, and noted the line that read:

George, having lost $8000, is ready to jump off the bridge because he doesn’t know that the movie is called It’s A Wonderful Life.

I know it’s tacky to quote one’s self, but if I don’t, no one will, AND it was exactly what I needed to hear.  See, in the movie you think, Oh come on, Jimmy Stewart!  It’s only money.  Mr. Potter is evil, your wife is lovely, your children are adorable and you are WAY too handsome a hero to die over this. I find it oddly coincidental that the amount is the exact same as the loss over which I am lamenting.  Perhaps a metaphysical 32-year-old, Farmville-obsessed angel was at work or it is just a weird coincidence, BUT it worked to help me step out of the situation and see that it’s not the end of the world, and that I’m no worse off than a Jimmy Stewart character, which is why we watch movies in the first place.  There’s no other good reason to like Jennifer Anniston.

So I’m feeling okay on the blessings front, having experienced two Christmas miracles (or three if you count my old dollhouse that my parents saved, which we gave to our children, which they loved, and which cost us only about $50 in glue and fake landscaping.  It is pictured here since it, unlike our home, has a gloriously elegant formal dining room).  I am thankful for all this, and for having had a wonderful Christmas.  And, of course, for Diet Pepsi.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sometimes It’s a Wonderful Life (time.com)
• Shelf Life: It’s A Wonderful Life (cinematical.com)
• A wonderful day, if you let it be (timesunion.com)
• Santa Claus was successfully tracked by Norad (webfrog.co.za)

The lump of dough you see pictured on the right is what is supposed to be, by now, our gingerbread house.  We are several days behind, and I’m running out of options to cross off of my To Do list.  Will this fragrant blob of spices and fat become the gumdrop bedecked gingerbread house that God and my children intended?  Perhaps I should let it sit on the counter as an aromatic alternative to a Glade Plug-In or mulled cider.  Perhaps I will just throw it away and pretend that my baking adventure with my children never happened.  (Molasses, the star ingredient in gingerbread, is, for the record, slow as molasses and fully deserving of every bit of the negative attention it gets from that idiom.)

Perhaps there will be a Christmas miracle in the form of: an extra day called December 23, 2009 showing up on my doorstep; my mop, in an effort to outdo the Swiffer, ceasing to stalk me at bus stops, and, instead, washing my floor while I’m asleep; or my friend who said, possibly in a weak Facebook chatting moment, he can come and help do the gingerbread house tomorrow after his trip to Berkeley.  If he doesn’t get too stoned, I think it may happen.

This is one of those “no room at the inn” moments or George, having lost $8000, is ready to jump off the bridge because he doesn’t know that the movie is called It’s A Wonderful Life moments. Fortunately, the innkeeper offers a cozy stable, and the guardian angel only has to serve a weak, but lovable plotline in order to successfully talk Jimmy Stewart’s character off of the ledge.  Perhaps, I, too, will experience a miracle and succeed in this saga of Man vs. His To Do List.

Perhaps the miracle will simply be that it’s over.  No matter what becomes of this ball of ginger potential, the world will spin, Christmas 2009 will happen, and I will delight in the hugs of loved ones and the bubbles of a nice, cheap champagne.

Happy Christmas to you and yours.  I wish you every Christmas miracle, possible or impossible.

And here’s a wonderful YouTube treat about Christmas miracles for the family, Rankin/Bass’ animated ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas.  This was one of my favorite Christmas specials, from a time when you had to actually wait for them to be broadcast.  Enjoy.  We will be watching this, piled on the couch, eating popcorn and gingerbread dough.

Play the show already.  Click.  Here.