Living on the Edge (of my Seat)

I practically fell off my chair. Well, okay, I actually fell off my chair.

It happened at work, in the back office, where I was hiding from customers and eating lunch. It wasn't because anybody made me laugh, or that the fax coming in from my attorneys was even mildly amusing. I just misjudged where the chair would be after I stood for a moment -- no doubt right where it had been before -- and when my butt hit the front edge the chair literally flew out from under me, crashing into the wall as I crashed to the floor. Even my ass has lost a bit of footing, it seems.

I wonder sometimes if it's obvious, if folks on the outside looking in can tell I am on shaky ground. I wonder if I appear as off kilter as the forty-something year old woman in Starbucks, the one who is clearly operating without a full set of marbles. She has emerged again after a bit of a hiatus, and she is in rare form. She has something to say to everyone. In my case, she expressed concern about my well being and asked me if I'd like to be set up with someone. What a frightening thought.

The other day, just as I was about to pack up and leave to escape her incessant babble, men of all shapes and sizes began to stream in to Starbucks and she quickly lost interest in me. She works the room from her seat, catching the guys completely off guard as they approach the counter to place their order, talking to each one as if they've known each other for years. They all get sucked in at first, taking a few seconds to realize they do not know this woman who acts so familiar. To everyone except her, their body language betrays a desperate search for an exit strategy as they try to remain polite. Even those of us who know her routine, who have relinquished some of our social graces to guard against her badgering, have a hard time extracting ourselves from her invasions.

I may not be as "outgoing" as she is, but am I as out of control? Is there a crazy look in my eye that I fail to notice in the mirror, one that is painfully obvious to everyone but me? I examined my face more closely this morning as I brushed my teeth, searching for signs. The crows' feet have expanded a bit (you know what they say about crows; big feet, big, um, talons); the dark circles continue to spread, conquering more square footage around my sockets by the minute. Hardened specks of yesterday's mascara cling fast to the inner corners, the youthful glow is long gone. Aging, maybe. Crazy? I don't think so.

Come to think of it, even though I am definitely on shaky ground these days, I might actually be quite sane. My daughter told me this morning that she thinks she gets her resourcefulness from me. I practically fell off my chair.

The Right to Bare Arms (and Legs, and Breasts)

The Facebook generation is coming of age, the teens who don't blush when their parents bring out the naked baby bathtub pictures because they're too busy posting their own soft kiddie porn on line.

Back in the day, and by that I mean when my two older children graduated from high school earlier in the current millennium (which, if you do the math, is not that long ago), yearbook photos were subject to at least one strict guideline: head shots only. Implicit, I suppose, in that guideline, was a requirement that the student be appropriately clothed, at least from the neck up. Seemed reasonable at the time; still does.

Enter a babe-a-licious high school senior somewhere in the surprisingly not so wild wilds of Colorado, an aspiring model who thought it appropriate to submit a vampy shot of herself clad in a glorified bra and panties as her high school yearbook picture. Granted, it was hard for the geeks on the yearbook staff to say no to those smoky bedroom eyes, but, ultimately (possibly with a little help from the administration), they vetoed the shot.

So unfair! The poor child; even her mommy's unconditional support ("everyone has a right to self expression") can't help her. No worries, though. The Class of 2012's Most Likely To is smarter than your average bare ass. While morning show anchors shake their heads in empathy with her plight, she is pouting her way onto computer screens everywhere, maybe even to the cover of People Magazine once Kate Middleton turns thirty-one. Or gets fat.

Let's face it; Matt Lauer has never been the sharpest tool in the shed, but at least he once had youthful good looks on his side. "A slippery slope," he commented with a muted "tsk tsk," offering his support when the porn princess (oops, typo, I meant prom princess) suggested that next the staff would ban pictures of girls wearing something sleeveless. Oh, Matt. Wasn't that a great opportunity to point out the other slippery slope, the one littered with yearbooks full of nudity, maybe even a few masturbation shots for honor students?

Naturally, the issue is moot, since the circulation for this one yearbook picture has no doubt broken all sorts of records, and the little nymphet will be way too busy autographing wallet size copies of her rejected photo to pursue her constitutional rights all the way to the top. Even so, the school might be well advised to draft some guidelines to stave off further slides down the slope. And as for the little nymphet, she might as well enjoy the launching of her brief career before her fifteen minutes are up.

Please Take My Kodachrome Away

The Mary Tyler Moore Show notwithstanding, the seventies were just an ugly decade. Men wore really short shorts, white people wore afros, and the clothes were either "hippie" without the causes that made them cute in the sixties or just plain tacky.

Even three decades of penitence and rehabilitation in the post-seventies world of shabby chic cannot erase the hideous memories. And, thanks to modern technology, the yellowed photographs we took with our Kodak Instamatics can now be scanned and disseminated to the world at large, exposing us as the freaks we used to be. For those of us who had the decency long ago to shred all those photos, the sudden appearance of mountains of evidence of unspeakably bad taste is devastating. All those years spent reinventing ourselves, all the apparel bonfires devoted to making the world a prettier place, for naught. Sigh.

Today, my old friend Mimi, dubbed "group historian" by one of the other six in our newly reconvened childhood group, posted seventies-era photographs of all of us on Facebook. And to think I used to be quite fond of her. A pathologically sentimental idiot, apparently, she has saved everything -- pictures, letters (I tremble to think), autograph albums. (Note: an autograph album is the little zip up faux leather thing we all got at the end of the school year so that we could measure our popularity by the number of pages signed by "friends" we barely knew; sort of a precursor to Facebook.)

I suppose Mimi's passion for documenting the past might be useful in my quest to prove myself innocent of the charge that I was the one who first referred to one friend as "Boom Boom." (So far, Mimi has found no evidence of anybody calling anybody "Boom Boom," but the investigation is still pending, and frankly I would like to see my name cleared.) Otherwise, there doesn't appear to be any up side to sharing these pictures with the public. What happened in the seventies should stay in the seventies.

"Who can turn the world on with her smile?" Maybe Mary could, but I wouldn't put my money on any of the freaks in the picture. Possibly now, but not back in the day; not in those outfits.

Group Hug

There were six of us. In the grand scheme of things, the years we spent together don't add up to much, but childhood friends are not easily forgotten.

By high school, we had broken ranks. Zoning glitches separated us physically, dispersing us into various schools where we each faced intimidating crowds of unfamiliar faces. Even for the three of us who ended up in the same place, the lure of new friends loosened our clingy grip on the old. We pursued different interests, different people, different paths. Though we always retained some tenuous connection, we were no longer, and never again to be, a group of six.

Never, that is, until there was Facebook. Some of us have been in touch for a while, and have already caught each other up on the past thirty something years. Love, loss, success, disappointment; we all offer different versions of the same story. Eileen, Ellie, Jill (the real Jill), Mimi, Robin, and I, the six uncertain girls who used to walk to Hebrew School together twice a week, walk the mile together to junior high every day (uphill both ways, naturally), reconvened last night. The most elusive one, Robin, had finally been located (in Australia of all places) and we trickled into the on line chat just as we used to trickle into the lobby of Jill's apartment building each morning for our trek to school.

We floated notions of a reunion. A trip to Australia in January seemed appealing to some of us stuck here in the northern hemisphere. I suggested we meet to celebrate Mimi's birthday, which happens to be tomorrow, but that probably won't work. Someone else suggested we meet on the bench lined bike path on Ocean Parkway, the street on which we grew up. Is it possible that we've become the old ladies who sit on the benches watching the kids play? Frightening. We traded recollections of long forgotten pranks, scores that were never settled. Our good natured prattle was filled with implicit forgiveness, and a longing to reconnect with the ones who knew us when. Robin rattled off all of our birthdays. I can't remember my own phone number, but, those birthdays are permanently embedded in my brain.

Life has tossed us all over the globe, but, unlike many Facebook connections, the ones that seem cool for a moment but actually remind you why you lost touch in the first place, this one has warmed my heart. Whether it's winter in Australia or summer on a bench in Brooklyn, a reunion with my first group of friends would be like coming home.

To Be Perfectly Ernest

My son has decided to catch up on great American literature, and I have vowed to join him. Which is why his dog-eared copy of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms has been sitting patiently on my nightstand for two weeks, awaiting attention.

By last night, I had run out of excuses. I had filled in every square in the New York Times Magazine Sunday crossword, had correctly organized the numbers in the weekly sudokus, and had attained a score in a round of spider solitaire that will be virtually impossible for me to beat. I don't read other folks' blogs because if there's something out there better than my own (hypothetically, of course) I don't want to see it, and, anyway, I'm way too self absorbed to be interested in whatever anyone else has to say. It seemed only logical, then, to read a book. A good book.

Which is what I did. Or tried to do. After about seven pages of stark yet elegant prose describing wartime Italian countryside, I drifted off to sleep. And, truth be told, when insomnia interrupted me only an hour later, I opted for my paper back sudoku collection over Hemingway. Numbers can be so much less threatening than letters.

As I sit now with my son at Starbucks, he is well into For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I am still stuck on page eleven of Farewell. Not even the simplicity of Hemingway's diction can tempt me away from my more comforting habits. Yes, I have put down the number puzzles for the time being, reserving them for those long hours in the dark when I most need the reassurance of accomplishment, the sense of worth that goes along with filling in the final square. But my return to the world of letters and words is, as it often is these days, as writer rather than reader. It is life in a world of my own creation, life on my own terms.

I wonder what Hemingway liked to read, or if he liked to read at all. It's difficult to imagine him sitting in a Paris cafe, wasting time with his head buried in a book authored by someone else. Why read another guy's interpretation of things when you are perfectly capable of making your own observations and drawing your own conclusions? Why miss all there is to see when sitting in a Paris cafe?

I know what you're thinking. I am certainly no Hemingway, and my Starbucks in suburban Illinois is certainly no cafe on the left bank. I've fought some battles, but have never been away at war. I have tried to run, but I have never lived the life of a true expat (self-imposed exile in the neighborhood does not count). I can get mired in bullshit, but I shy away from bull fights. Come to think of it, I have seen relatively little (even though I think, sometimes, I have seen it all), and should, by all rights, have relatively little to say.

But when has that ever stopped me? Or anyone, for that matter. And so I will continue to read less than I should, do sudoku puzzles until my fingers ache, and blog about whatever springs to mind. It's how my world takes shape.

The Circus of Life

It looks like the birthday wedding dress shopping extravaganza is all systems go, so let the preparations begin. First item on my list: order a "Facelift Bungee."

Yes, for only $19.95 (plus shipping and handling), I can stretch my skin taut over my cheekbones without worrying about botox induced paralysis or irrevocably botched surgery. The bungee -- a hair clip attached to a chin strap you can tighten to your heart's content -- is virtually risk free. My only concern would be pulling so hard that my boobs flip up over my shoulders, but that's probably not much of a risk when their normal resting place is somewhere around my knees.

What will they think of next? All I know is I don't want to look like the forty-nine year old who was trying on princess ball gowns the other day on Say Yes to the Dress, with leathery tan skin sewn so tightly over her cheekbones her eyes were practically on the back of her head. Little girls playing dress up can be cute. Old cougars playing little girls playing dress up -- not so much.

I'm counting on the facelift bungee to give me a more natural youthful look, and I'm hoping the product line is expanded in time for my shopping expedition to include an ass trapeze and a tummy tight rope. A three ring circus right in my own body, my aging assets defying gravity and most other laws of nature. But, damn it, I'm going to look good in that mermaid gown.

No need to send in the clowns. They're already here.

It's Only Fitting

Unless hell freezes over, I don't plan to be remarried -- or even thinking about it -- by my next birthday. But I can't help myself; I am obsessed with the idea of shopping for a wedding dress, just to see what the real deal feels like. And with nothing inherently special about turning fifty-three -- it's a prime number, not even divisible by seventeen, according to my very bright friend Cherry -- I need to create my own fun.

I am already dropping hints, paving the way for a gathering of my posse in New York City where I will try on every style of wedding dress ever made at the television gown capital of the world, Kleinfeld's. I don't necessarily require that my appointment be captured on film -- although it would certainly be icing on my birthday cake to star in a Say Yes to the Dress episode -- but I do expect a private audience with the extremely gay gown guru, Randy. Naturally, my greatest fantasy would be to turn him straight, but I will settle for an excited swish of his narrow hips and a big juicy hug.

The other day, I kind of got caught up in a Big Bliss marathon of Say Yes. I was riveted by the spectacle of morbidly obese women -- and I mean morbidly obese, with tattoos on their arms wider than my ample ass -- floating through the stock room of fluffy, feathery gowns, seeking the magical dress every girl dreams about. (Well, almost every girl; my daydreams of satin and tulle and lace and jeweled tiaras only began recently.)

Anyway, the pattern was pretty much always the same (and I am not just referring to the preponderance of African American fiances in this particular demographic). Hope at the beginning, despair after the first few dresses made them look more like giant pagodas than princesses, and, finally, tearful joy when some figure hugging gown seemed to perform nothing short of a miracle. And then, there's the final fitting, where the seamstress, a genius who I am certain has an advanced degree in engineering, always manages to take some of the delicate fabric and build a sturdy fortress somehow capable of containing boobs the size of small planets. The show has it all: drama, suspense, fantasy, and even a touch of science fiction.

If I am to compete with any of this, my posse of matrons of honor (who will not be forced to wear lavender chiffon on the off chance any of this leads to a wedding), will need to begin preparations for the big day now. We need a back story: a groom to capture the imagination of a broad audience (I'm thinking a twenty-five year old is probably the way to go), a tortured relationship with my mother (that'll write itself), a long lost sibling who needs a spleen transplant and I'm the only match (should be easy to find a neighbor in the trailer park willing to hook herself up to a few tubes in a hospital bed just to make a few bucks), and a whopper of a budget (to match my whopper princess dreams).

Space in my entourage will be limited, so if you have any interest, start working on that resume. Anyone unwilling to tell me I look absolutely stunning in everything need not apply.