Clatter clatter brrrr

My office is freezing.

The previous tenant used to complain about it all the time but it went in one of my ears and out the other… At the time I had a cozy, well insulated little space in the basement. Now she’s in a different space and I’ve inherited her icebox.

Sometimes my hand cramps up on the mouse because it’s so cold. (That and my addiction to “Collapse”…) I make a lot more mistakes typing when my fingers get stiff.

There’s a scientific reason as to why I’m sitting here at my desk today with my favorite squash colored scarf wound around my head and neck like I’m a bedouin groom– apparently the two of my walls are outside walls. I think, if given the time (a half hour?) and a sharp no.2 pencil I could probably bust through (good to know if I need a quick escape route?).

In the meantime I’m looking for things that put off heat. Maybe I’ll put the hard drive on my lap. Or better yet go home and bring in the pup. Or just go home.

Send hot water bottles??

My Sister Meredith Baxter Birney the Bulimic

There’s a great Lifetime Television for Women Movie (that’s a sentence worth carving in stone…) starring Meredith Baxter Birney as a bulimic suburban housewife. My sister and I love it. The best scene is after a party when the kitchen is full of food and she goes into this trance eating everything in sight smearing the goods all over her face in this rapturous manner. It’s a hoot.

Yesterday Trish and I reminisced about our own version of that scene… we think it was in the Spring of ‘94 when I was newly engaged and Trish was expecting her second daughter (though we didn’t know she was a she yet). We had this now-funny urgency to go to Chicago– sure that once Trish had two children we’d never be able to slip away. (Though, come to think of it– we HAVEN’T since then. Huh.)

We planned our little adventure around the season finale of Melrose Place. (This was the second season of the little show that 90210 spun off… and it was still campy and deliciously fun. By season 4 we had written it off.) We shopped Chicago but carefully arranged to have plenty of time before the show started that evening. Trish was voraciously hungry at that point in creating Keegan so deciding just what to have for dinner wasn’t as cut and dry as it might have been. We decided to create a smorgasboard of our Chicago favorites ending up with a menu that included Hooter’s wings, Diorgano’s deep dish ‘za, Ceasar salad, Hard Rock Cafe Chocolate Cake and Portello’s Lemon cake. I think there was also cheesecake and some other things thrown in? We plotted out a wee little city map from the hotel and hailed a cab that then took us from place to place where Trish would call ahead and I’d run in to fetch our take-out. Back at the hotel we spread our feast out on one of the beds, got into our jammies and watched our show.

The clincher came at the end of the program when we sat completely stuffed and happily licked the chocolate off our fingers watching the local news… and the live-feed report from a “Melrose Place Party” open to the public with a complete array of appetizers and desserts taking place in THE BAR OF OUR HOTEL.

Sigh.
Whatever.

Here’s to you Miss Zuckerman

Each and every week day I tape Beverly Hills 90210. I used to watch the show in college with my friend Jennifer Jones. We recognized it for what it was– bad television as only Aaron Spelling can produce, but still we were raptly attentive on the nights that Brandon, Kelly, Steve, and Dylan (this was after Brenda had jetted off to London because Shannen Doherty grew a head the size of two zipcodes) came into our dormrooms.

I saw Jennifer the other day– she was in town for the college reunion that had completely slipped my mind. I went to the five year reunion and found it so disappointing that I’ve skipped the subsequent ones. I didn’t fit in with the officially popular crowd (popular being subjective… I wouldn’t give up my MST2000-TacoBell-running-Chapel-skipping darlings for a thousand student government types…) anymore than poor Andrea Zuckerman did– and like her, I was enveloped in the student publications labs. Our college reunion seems only to attract the old popular crowd and not the fringes. My fringe shuns yearly reunions for more frequent gatherings. (If we HAD had a 10 year gathering not one of us would have pulled a Tori Spelling or Brian Austin Green by not showing. Holy Peach Pit– even Miss Doherty showed up… though Jennie Garth DID look a little frightened.)

90210 is still a bad show… Brenda is too overdramatic and Dylan is (especially in these early seasons) such a terrible, terrible James Dean impression. Brandon’s too earnest, Jim & Cindy are too lenient, Donna’s too ditsy, Kelly hasn’t found her place, and Big Issues are too soon Solved Neatly. (I love the episodes where Brandon takes on a “Little Brother” and dates/befriends the neighborhoods sole black family– and yet, in the next eps they’re never, ever mentioned.) Last night Emily Valentine went “all fatal attraction” (Brenda’s words) on Brandon. Good times… Good times.

So. What are your bad television habits?
To inspire you I give you the following snippet of dialogue from Season 1 at the Spring Dance where Dylan and Brenda have sex and Kelly thinks only of her “Spring Dance Princess” status and not Steve’s birthday.
“Brandon, do you think I’m a geek for coming to this dance all alone?,” –Andrea Zuckerman
“Not at all. We never get to slow dance in the newsroom,”– Brandon Walsh. (This, apparently before the writers decided to give Brandon the quirk of never dancing at parties…)

Wanderlust

I feel all out of sorts lately like I want to jump out of my skin and go someplace new– but I don’t suppose that it would be a very pretty sight what with me running about skinless like a chicken breast. Still…

Usually by this time of the year I’ve taken several trips out East to film and/or fraternize… But this has been the Year of Obstacles and it has me hungry for a good road trip somewhere. Anywhere.

I took a trip to New York City while I was in college. Me and my pals from the newspaper staff– Bryan and Scott. We were supposed to go to a journalism conference and we did attend a session or two out of my guilt that we should. But the deciding factor was when we sat in on a session with a Girl Editor from the south babbling about how she motivates her staff with beer. Scott and Bryan started passing notes across my lap that noted that she was hot and that it would be great to have a hot editor like that and that I never buy them beer. We spent the rest of the weekend as far away from Girl Editor and the Conference as I could manage and instead found ourselves exploring our own ideas of the City That Never Sleeps. I think they ended up buying me a beer but maybe it was the other way around. I do remember that we ended up in a wee little local bar with an Irish bartender. And while I nursed a Heinekein and Bryan sipped his rum and coke and Scott swilled his draft the table next to us broke out in an actual bar fight. A bottle was smashed and a chair raised and the three of us watched it with a vague interest. Maybe it wasn’t a real road trip since we had taken the train?

The first road trip I ever took was with my best friends Michelle and Liz and Mark to see Robby at his parent’s cottage up north. We were 16 and drunk with the freedom of my little gray Ford Escort and the open road in front of us. It was hardly an adult adventure– we were to check in as soon as we arrived and there was the knowledge that all of our mothers knew how long it should take us to get from here to there– but we ignored that provision. Once at the cottage we took a day trip over to Lake Michigan in Lady’s jeep. That Peter Cetera song “Glory of Love” was popular that summer and we changed the words to it and sang it at the top of our lungs. When we were more mellow we sang “Forever Young” from Alphaville.

Work seems to get in the way now. Work and life and other crap.
Blah.

Mama said there’d be days like this

Ever have one of those days where you wake up after hardly sleeping from worrying about the day and then you are scattered from hardly sleeping and have to fly around your house from room to room gathering up things that you will need and then dig for clean clothes because you have to go to work and you are running even later because your husband called to say good morning (a very nice thing to do) and there’s a staff meeting first thing and then you have a zillion things to do and you realize– after you finally catch your breath for a millisecond that you have, in your tote, the cordless phone from home?

Yeah. Me, too.

5 Things I wish I had RIGHT now…

1. Cup of good, hot, properly brewed tea.

2. A large box of Moonstruck Chocolate (I’m still dreaming about them).

3. A comfy piece of furniture. (My desk chair… sucks. I’m sure there are those of you out there flinching at the word “sucks” but that’s what it does. Literally. The life right out of me. I hate it.)

4. A really good book. I just finished Tracy Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue… it’s made me quietly hollow. That’s what a really good book does when I’ve first finished it. I get all hollowed out wishing for more. And I really like her writing. I recommend her other books, Falling Angels and The Girl With the Pearl Earring. They are also lovely. (For those of you with a list of Things To Do For Terri you can go to my Amazon.com/uk wish list and order her newest book The Lady and The Unicorn for me… It doesn’t come out here in the US until January.)

5. My red and white coverlet. We bought it last year at the Atlanta History Center (a really good Museum, by the way).

Now we’ll all be pasty white…

The puppy and I had a picnic outside yesterday to soak up the last of the Indian Summer. My suspicions that this was the last real warmth for a while was confirmed this morning when I had to push the same little dog outside for his morning constitutional.

Personally, I’m not unhappy with this chain of events– I like autumn when it is crisp. Last night, helping Robby’s folks carry the contents of the cottage from their cars to their house here (another sure harbinger of the season), I remarked, “(sniff) It smells like death outside.” Robby looked towards the nearest neighbor’s house and back at me as though I might have done her in (we’ve all considered it, trust me) and I had to explain that it was the decaying leaves that I was referring to. Sheesh.

I plan on walking through as many leaf piles as I can in the next few weeks. There’s no crunch like that crunch (except for Capt. Crunch but that hurts the roof of my mouth…)

Happy Fall!

The most exciting thing I can think to type…

I had a peanut butter & jelly sandwich on toast today for lunch.
And it was delicious.

Happy Birthday Keegy!

My littlest neice is 9 years old today.

On the night she was born Robby and I– then a month away from being married– went over to sit with her sister Maddie while my sister and her husband went to the hospital. My sister is very good at having children… she’s down right efficient when it comes to labor– so it was only a matter of an hour or so when the neighbors came to relieve us and we could go to meet Miss Keegan.

Keegan, in gaelic, means “fiery little one” and she was. When her sister was an hour old she’d looked about solemnly at each of us. But Keegy screamed her head off at the lot of us and clearly seemed indignant that we were so intent on unwrapping her in turns to see her tiny little feet and hands. Robby remembers that she stopped crying when he held her… he felt, at the time, that she’d taken pity on him for being the next in line to enter the family?

The day after her birthday Robby and I went to the U of M/MSU game since Andy’s interest in the game had faded in light of this new daughter (or at least most of his interest. It WAS the MSU/UoM game…)– I didn’t want to leave my niece or my sister. But I did. I can’t even tell you who won the game that year. (Okay. I can’t most years…)

I’m moving to Our Town

Can I just say how much I love PBS?

I really, really do. Not all those little cheesey political commentary shows or “Nature!” but Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers and Masterpiece Theater… (And Frontier/1900s/WW2 House). Last night they showed last Spring’s Broadway production of Our Town. Bliss. Starring Mr. Paul Newman. The actress playing Emily Webb was perfectly luminiscent. I adored her. Her name is Maggie Lacey. Let me know if she pops up anywhere else?

If you haven’t seen Our Town live you should… but this is the next best thing to seeing it on stage. It’s a wonderful play by Thornton Wilder full of clever asides. There’s no scenery and very few props. I love Act 3. I love the way it’s done. (But I won’t tell you about it here because I did that with Robby and I don’t think he was as affected by it as he would of been if I hadn’t of spilled the beans.)

The beauty of Our Town is that you fill in everything in your mind so it’s very nearly like a book.

And support PBS.