Monday Monday -- I Like It Like That

My dark and woeful mood has lifted somewhat. I think it is the weekend that does me in. Seems to me that I've spent a lot of Saturdays over the past year or so sitting on the sofa and watching movies during the day. Maybe other people do that all the time, but me--no, except on these Saturdays when I can't think what else to do with myself.

Sunday is my Food Network Day. That's an allowable excursion into TV Land, mainly because I don't do it sitting on the sofa. Rather, I'm standing in the kitchen, cooking up my own Food Network show. Yesterday I did some conglomeration of bacon and pork and onions and greens. It was what I had in the refrigerator.

Please do not tell God that I had all that pork, because we're right smack in the middle of the Days of Awe. If God gets mad at me, he will not write me in the Book of Life for 5769 and consequently I WILL DIE.

So not only is the American Stock Market continuing to tank, but the rest of the world's as well. If I am not going to die this year, then I WILL NEED AN INCOME. Anybody out these hiring a good, marginally shop worn writer????

And what about them Cubs. Or was it the White Sox? Twitter is all a-tweet with the boys watching the game. Or maybe they're watching football. I'm not quite sure, because I haven't paid attention to boy-talk about sports, like ever. Even in high school, when I had to seem to listen, I'd really just perfected a round-eyed, rosebud mouth, "Oh really? Fascinating. Huh. That far." God knows what they were saying, because my ears were elsewhere, and you know something, no one ever called me on it. This is not a special talent that I had; it's one that most girls learned quite early. Think of it as the precurser to the "ahu hu hua ha hu hu eeeeeeeeeeee" in When Harry Met Sally. You know, the line that provoked the response, "I'll have what she's having."

My Date With Fabian, byJane

Once upon a time in a land far away lived a young girl who in today's world would be called a geek, but then was just known as a creep. She was tall, very tall, seemingly taller than everyone else in her ninth grade class. This was not actually a fact, given the truth of pubescent growth spurts which were just now hitting a few boys in her class. But it's the way she felt and that, after all, is what counts the most when you're fourteen.

She was, our young heroine, a girl who lived a lot in her imagination. One consequence of this--and of the fact that she was known as a creep--was that she had never been on a date. No boy had held her hand or kissed her cheek, and as far as anything else went--well, this was a land far away when such things were unheard of until you were seventeen or eighteen at least. This did not, however, mean that she had not lusted in her heart, as far as her heart knew how to lust. In fact, she had seen the movie Gidget eight times. This was not, you must remember, a time of video tapes or CD-ROMS. To see the movie Gidget eight times, our heroine had to go to eight different showings on eight different days. But such was her love for James Darren, the Moondoggie of this Gidget that she eagerly spent hours alone in a darkened movie theatre imagining that it was she and not Sandra Dee that Moondoggie was kissing. There may have been some part of this where she actually wanted to be Sandra Dee, that is, petite and blonde and Protestant, but that is what happens when you give a young girl an imagination that knows no bounds.

Now it happened that in the summer before her freshman year of high school, she spent some time in Atlantic City, staying with her mother in a rooming house owned by the mother of her father's brother's daughter's husband (this detail is only of interest to those who would like to know that said husband eventually ran NBC, but then, he was just a lowly lawyer whose mother ran what was called a cochalein. This is Yiddish for a rooming house where the ice box (yes, ice box) was shared by a number of different women, each of whom had their section of a particular shelf.

Our heroine, who we shall call for expediencies sake, J., never knew why this was one of the few she things she remembered from that summer. Another was that her mother shoe polished her white Keds, which you all must know was, is and will always be a fate worse than death. And the last thing J remembered from that time was--Fabian.
He was appearing at a concert in Atlantic City and somehow J. was going. She can't remember who with, although she thinks there might have been a fix up there by her mother and another woman at the cochalein. She has vague memories of some faceless young man who was, it seemed, the reason why J's mother applied the white shoe polish to J's Keds. But more than that is lost to time, gone with the wind, as it were. What J. remembers about the concert is screaming. She clearly sees herself standing in a mass of other young girls and screaming. She doesn't know if she screamed at the sight of Fabian or at the sound of his voice, but she opened her mouth wide and screamed. It was a primal response. After the evening was over, she was returned to the cochalein a somewhat changed girl, not the least of which was her raspy throat, and life as she knew it would never be the same.

(To Be Continued....)

Witnessing for the Lord

I am such a sucker for these people. Because I'm nice and my mother raised me right and when someone comes to my door, I may not let them in, but I at least give them the courtesy of listening to their spiel. But they're not satisfied with my courtesy; they want nothing less than my soul. When they find out that it's a Jewish soul, oh my my my, do their evangelizing hearts beat faster. They whip out their Bibles and start quoting Isaiah to me and take me point by point through this verse and that to prove that the Prophesy is true, and I could be saved if only I'd listen. And read the literature which they left me the last time (which I threw out, but not without some guilt that I was tossing someone's Word of God). I stand in my doorway and nod and smile and give the same mindless comments I'd trucked out in high school when a date would start talking about his car.

The irony of that does not escape me, that I'm still putting on a happy face so a male should not know how pitifully boring I found him. But it is my choice; I could cut them off at the pass (which is what my mother would have done, without a second thought). I don't because they care so much. I find that kind of intense good will a rare quality in today's world; therefore, in the spirit of tikkun olam (to heal the world), I listen.

Lost in the Sixties

YouTube - Del Shannon - Runaway (1965)

I hear this song and I'm in the back seat of a car, at the tail end of a double date. We're on our way to the Greater Pittsburgh Airport, just to walk around, hang out, see whatever there was to see. I don't remember who my date was. No one important, then or later. It's winter, cold, and was it really raining or is it that song puts rain into my mind? I don't know. Memory is a funny thing, isn't it. The boy I'm wondering about has dumped me, that I know. Alan. My first short blond. My first kiss. My first makeout. My first breakup.

CUT -- This is just not working. I'm trying to get myself back in the moment to write an amazingly evocative trip back in time and it simply isn't happening. Sorta like the orgasm that just won't roll over...or the sneeze that dies before it's out.

Part of it, I know, is the the bevy of prancing girls circling Del Shannon. Are they doing The Pony? Or just making like a carousel. And if so, to what end? And isn't their hair bouncy? As if they're refugees from a Breck commercial.

That's what we looked like in the Sixties. Exactly. Friends today see the photos of me back then and gush, "You were so good-looking. The boys must have just loved you." Well, no, they didn't. The boys loved the blondes; we brunettes were always consigned to the second banana role. Think Betty and Veronica. Or Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner.

Besides, I was too "ethnic". Read, Jewish. Not WASP. The Other.

And also, too smart. Smart was not in then. Smart came about five years later.

I always was ahead of my time...