sweetness

Happy Fourth, ya'll

dear jack: you need better writers...

I love Jack.

I would probably love to have wild, crazy monkey sex with Jack were I not otherwise occupied.

I love how uninhibited and goofy Jack is, that he has no problem parading around in his tightie whities, beer gut hanging in the breeze for all to see. I love that he seems to know how to have fun and obviously does not take himself seriously. There is way too much of that tired BS going on...Angelina and Brad, are you listening? Back to Jack--the dude is funny and he deserves some decent writing.

Envy was not much of a movie, made worse by the presence of Ben Stiller who I think is a tiny little tight-ass no-talent jerk. And the writing was lame.

Sadly, ditto, my friends, with Nacho Libre. It has so much potential but falls flat in a lot of instances. The wrestling scenes aside, there is not much fun here. The laughs are too few and far between and stuff that could have been hilarious was stale or just went nowhere. Jack is a truly funny guy, yes, but with a script as weak as this, even Jack started to seem like he was flailing around in a desperate attempt to be as entertaining as possible. I did dig his accent and his skinny feral sidekick. And I hope Jack gets a really good, funny script next time. He deserves it.

Nacho Libre is nacho best bet if you expect the same level of humor Shallow Hal delivered or even School of Rock. Bummer. But loved the tights.

could we be any cuter? maybe, but likely, no.

I just had to include a shot of the mandatory phone basket which Kip the Nazi instituted after she who shall not be named (not I) knocked someone's brand new Blackberry into the pool in a fit of uncoordinated dorkish lunging for the frozen Cosmo bucket. Ah, well, so it goes when you mix alcohol and UV rays and girls and a pool. I also wanted to include this photo since the lovely Barb was the official photographer of the other PP photo posted here a few days ago and was therefore not in the photo. BTW--don't you just love Carolina's "Holy shit-Macauley Culkin" face? Yeah, neither do we but we put up with it because we love her anyway. The things we do for love.

click this...

Schmoopie had a slumber party to attend last night so after we dumped her off we gleefully bolted to adult-land: imbibed at an adult beverage establishment, grabbed a slice of pizza (white pizza with spinach and cherry tomatoes for me--yum), strolled around and watched an outdoor metal concert for a bit and then wandered off to the big movie-plex downtown where we saw "Click."

All I can say about Adam Sandler is he was at his peak (for me) back when he was doing Opera Man on SNL and did the Monica-Hannukah song. I was less than entranced last night. Adam is a nice guy and all that but I would have loved to see Denis Leary in the role...with nudity...anyhoo--the chick playing his long-suffering wife looks no more like a chick who has had two kids and would be married to a loser, Twinkie-swilling, workaholic/yes-man than I look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Kate Beckinsale and Adam? Puulease. I guess since Adam's production company produced this movie he got to have the typical middle-aged white guy fantasy of being a so-so-looking average Joe with a beer gut and a bad attitude who ignores his kids and refuses to give his wife a massage before sex but is still somehow able to be married to a Victoria's Secret model-type. Sad, sad, sad. And the other thing I don't get is this: why does Holllywood keep hiring British/Australian chicks to play American chicks? WTF with that? Like we don't have enough Amercian actresses who could have done the role? Now I know why the Brits hated Renee Zellweger doing Bridget Jones. Talent aside, it's the principal and it just doesn't wash with me.

So, final wrap-up: I give it a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10 mostly because of the absurd casting and the unforgivable,unoriginal and cynical lameness of the "It's a Wonderful Life"/"Back to the Future" rip-off. But I LOVED Christopher Walken's performance as usual and will see him in anything. And mel will like Click because they don't say "fuck" one time. I counted. Zero "fucks." Honest.

Next review: Nacho Libre. Oh. My. God.

floaters

by the by, here's a shot of the platter we gave to Laura as a memento of our many, many "pool parties." Though my image is covered up by Amy's paw, my ensemble features decorative watermelons, an homage to my watermelon shooters. I make the best in all the land...and we have had the black-outs to prove it, honey.
And I can also spit watermelon seeds like a mo-fo. No dirty comments, ladies. Okay, maybe one or two.

there she goes...(sniff, sniff)

My girl gang is down another member and though we had a hell of a good time the other day at our all-girl wrestling match/pool party/poker game and we were all talking sassy smack as usual, we each had big ole lumps in our throats because Laura is leaving us tomorrow to move back to her home state of Alabammy. Not a move taken lightly--even in these times--by a white woman married to a black man--and they are headed to a very rural area where they will both teach.

We know she wants to be close to her family and she has been through a lot the last two years, but breaking up the band, so to speak, is a tough thing to do and we are all grieving the loss of our girl and with her, the inherent shift in chemistry that has made our girl gang so perfect for so many years. That chemistry has been achieved over these many moons by the combination of the perfect amalgam of wacked-out personalities (we are among our group: writers, teachers, artists, musicians, horticulturists, moms, grandmothers, sisters, wives, lovers) that blend together beautifully (even when we want to kill each other), years together, dragging each other through the tough spots and cheering each other on in good times. That combined with lots of wine, frozen fruity drinks and tons of junk food and we have had the perfect group friendship.

But it's been tough lately. In the last year we lost our beloved Karen and then last month, Lisa and her husband, Joe, abruptly decided they needed to move back up to Pittsburgh to be closer to family to await the birth of their baby girl following the very traumatic loss of their first. We all totally understand but we wish we could be there for her in the coming months, too.

So Laura is off on her next big adventure and we wish her fair winds and following seas.

It's funny, as we all gathered to have our last group photo taken (Laura is the lovely blonde, far right, third row. I am the chick in the first row with the biggest hooters of all time! Yes, I had my push-up bathing suit on), one of the many balloons we had tied around the deck broke loose and soared upward like a rocket.

We all looked up and watched it take off and bob along on a breeze like Forrest Gump's feather and at the moment the picture was snapped, one of the girls hollered: "There she goes! How's that for metaphor, bitches?"

Indeed.

06/15/06 rescue me, baby

I am in love with Denis Leary. It took a while--he had to grow on me. I thought he was a major asshole back in the "I'm an Asshole" day, but I really dug him in "The Suicide Kings" (1997) and now I find him irresistible as a philandering, boozing, lying, cheating, conniving yet haunted firefighter on his FX show Rescue Me. It's the only television show I watch. Period. And the more dysfunctional his character becomes the more I drool. One man demolition crew, careening out of control, leaving a trail of total wreckage and broken relationships in his wake? Oh, yeah, baby, so sexy. How sad is that?

But no matter, Denis has moved to the top of my list. What list, you ask? Come on, I know you have one. The "Honey, I love you, but if I ever have a shot at __________, I have to leave you" list. And Honey nods as he stares at the TV and pops another Bud because, really, who are we kidding here? Like it'll ever happen.

Anyhoo, here's the list I have shared with the GITB and he has approved it (this is the list of men I am officially allowed to have a fling with): (yeah, I know) drumroll please:

• Denis (we already covered him).
• Ray Liotta (I have no explanation. I just want to rip his clothes off).
• Bruce Springsteen (have loved him since 1975. I should have been the mother of his children).
• Andy Garcia
• Jeremy Sisto (Brenda's psychotic brother on Six Feet Under)
• That guy who played Furio on the Sopranos

PS--addendum: I forgot (I know, how COULD I?): Benecio Del Toro. YUM.

06/13/06 we lived

The wind blew like hell (65 mph) and the rain kept hammering down but we got through it. The biggest terror was wondering if the dog's bladder could avoid exploding because Miss Daisy (the dainty flower) refuses to do her business in the howling wind and tropical-force rain.

She will eat lizards and June bugs but she won't pee in bad weather. It's not even bad weather--any weather--the slightest hint of a misty light rain and she clamps down on the sphincter.

She went like almost 20 hours without doing number 1 or number 2. I got very nervous when the barometric pressure dropped enough to make my ears pop and since the whole family was in the bed watching HBO--including the dog, you can understand my concern. But she never goes in the house. Ever.

Anyway, once things cleared this morning she finally let loose in the back yard and it looks like a rhino pooped out there. So now the big discussion at lunch today was who is on poop patrol. Not I said the Little Red Hen. I already chased all our garbage cans down the street and fished them out of our neighbor's pool. My work here is done.

06/12/06 and away we go

Re: the commencement of hurricane season 2006:

We have beer and cigarettes.

Bring it on.

elliot got old. So did we, btw

Randy and I went to see Poseidon (yes, I lost the coin toss AGAIN) last week.
Three words: we were disappointed.

First of all--whilst I was in the little girl's room Randy bought some sort of "combo" thing that amounted to a huge feedbag-size bucket-o-popcorn best suited to feed some starving herd of livestock and two bladder buster sodas that cost him $13. WTF? I was so horrified by the cost I couldn't bring myself to eat the popcorn. It was the principle. (Plus Randy has a wart on his hand that he insists on treating with Compound W and I keep telling him to go to the dermatologist and have the damn thing cut off because it's not gotten any smaller since November and I refuse to eat popcorn that has been brushed by the wart from hell even though I love my boy toy).

Okay--and I know I don't have to issue the usual and customary spoiler alert here because who the hell is really going to go see this movie? You will wait 'til it comes on HBO and you will only watch it then when the prospect of watching Titanic/Regarding Henry/The Chronicles of Riddick or The Color Purple one more frigging time makes you want to lock yourself in the bathroom and shave your head instead--there is no one singing "There's Got to be a Morning After..." in this movie!

I suppose I got past the snubbing of Maureen McGovern because Randy kept leaning over and singing it in my ear, but still. Then we got into a whispered debate about who among the group of scrappy survivors was really the Shelley Winters character and I was very adamant that none of them could possibly be since there were no spunky, cute, older fat chicks in the film and our whispered debate got intense and louder when one of the gorgeous young studs announced that he had been on the swim team in school as he sexily dove into the water to save someone and Randy squealed "it's her, it's her!" and then the gay couple in front of us glared at us and one of them shushed us. Bitches.

The biggest problem was Richard Dreyfus and his resemblance to the Cryptkeeper in Randy's opinion. I am partial to the perky Richard from the Goodbye Girl days but I have no illusion that he has not aged and that's okay--getting old is cool. Randy was horrified. He kept whispering "Oh my god--he looks sooooo OLD!" and it was more of a big deal because Richard is playing a gay man and very unconvincingly, may I add. He was way more gay in Goodbye Girl playing a straight actor forced to play gay onstage. Anyway, Randy could not forgive his lack of swishiness in this movie or his calling a studly Latino waiter "gorgeous" then 5 minutes later shaking him off his leg as the two hung from an elevator shaft. Even though flirting with a guy then sending him plunging to his death because Kurt Russell cannot handle pulling both of you to safety is pretty typical gay man behavior, actually, according to Randy. At least he hollered "I'm so sorry" (but not in a gay way) down the shaft.

But anyway. I would have liked the whole thing a lot better (make that at all, really) if (A)Maureen had been allowed to sing and (B) the gang of survivors had not looked like the cast of a GAP ad (except for Kurt and Dick) and (C) if Kurt had shown off his Snake Pliskin tattoo (you know, the coiled snake that disappeared into his pants). Although the scene where Kurt drowns is kind of sexy because he goes into these full body spasms that kind of look like--well, you know. Rather than be crude and spell it out, let's just say we now we have an idea of what Goldie has been seeing in the boudoir all these years if you get my drift.

The movies just aint what they used to be. Sigh.

Reasons why leaving the family for 10 days may not be a great idea:

• Your brother may decide to divulge all of your adolescent secrets to your 12-year old who is staying with him and his family for a week of summer fun and extended family bonding while you're away. This litany of disclosure will likely include the times you dyed your hair purple; wore safety pins as earrings; got caught with your boyfriend hanging out of your bedroom window at 3 a.m.; vomited in the choir loft during communion following a Saturday night of drinking hurricanes in celebration of your 18th birthday.
• Your best gay boyfriend will become so bored he will launch his own blog which uses your full name and muses on all the things he loves about you, many of which you would rather not be divulged in public.
• You will receive 177 e-mails while you are gone, none of which are spam. Your eyes will bleed when you check your account remotely. You will be unable to deal with them and repeatedly hit the delete key in a fit of helpless anxiety once you arrive home. People will be really irritated with you for not responding to their e-mails. You will lie unconvincingly that your PC crashed while you were out of town.
• You will meet all kinds of wonderful people while you are out of town on your own, sans spouse and child. Every one of these wonderful people will want your e-mail address. They will begin to e-mail you immediately, further adding to your crawling anxiety over your inability to keep up with your e-mail correspondence. You will begin to hate these people.
• The GITB will rearrange all the furniture in the house in your absence. It is now not feng shui. It is fucked shui. And you keep tripping over and running into things THAT SHOULD NOT BE WHERE THEY ARE.
• After ten hours of drinking endless cans of Starbucks' double-shot espressos, smoking cigarettes like a sailor on shore leave, singing along with Springsteen at the top of your lungs and tailgating truckers doing 85 mph with all the windows open and your hair flying, you will discover that you really, really, really love solo road trips, so much so that you begin to fantasize about the next one exactly one hour after you return home. You will muse that this is probably not a good thing.

oh, snap, BBQ sauce on the wall...

Grace is visiting in preparation for her two-year move to Paris. I am in denial that she is leaving, that for TWO YEARS I can not impulsively jump on a plane and three hours later be standing in Times Square screaming at her on my cell phone to hurry up and meet me already. Which I actually do every few months.

Last night after the normal people went to bed, we put on a huge vat of ribs--she pre-cooks them in cheap beer then bathes them in BBQ sauce for a day or so--and went out to sit on the deck and look at the stars. I got her to try my Janis Joplin cocktail: Southern Comfort, Diet Coke, some cherries and cherry juice. Very southern girly-girl. We were thorougly polluted after two hours and many refills and decided it was time to get the ribs off the stove and into the BBQ sauce. Two plotzed women slinging ribs at 2:00 a.m. is not really advisable. There was a lot of giggling and whispered shushing of one another and bent-over laughing jags that went on until we forgot what it was that was so damn funny. The kitchen looked like the scene of a heinous crime when the family came out for breakfast. Damn, I am going to miss her.

I bought a lava lamp the other day. I have been meaning to do this since 1977 and, well, I finally got around to it.

When I got it home I was pissed to find that it was missing the lightbulb but since it was on clearance and I got it at such a steal of a price, I got over being pissed quickly and went back out to the store to get a bulb for it. All this and I had a mountain of laundry that needed folding on the dining room table, excerpts and essays from 11 books to read for school by next week, a houseguest and no plans for dinner. The GITB knows better than to give me shit about this because he does a lot of work with Hospice and therefore gets the whole carpe diem thing but he cannot understand why I had to have a lava lamp. He keeps referring to it as a "piece of shit," and then I foolishly ask him to cool it with the excessive profanity and so of course, he proceeds to say "fuck" about 50 times every time I enter the room the rest of the evening and tried to tell me I shouldn't watch the Sopranos because it is loaded with language I may find offensive.

Is it me, or is it ridiculous to yell "mother fucker!" at the contestants on Jeopardy! when they blow a really easy question? I use profanity, yes, but artistically and in the right company and under only the perfect circumstances for maxiumum effect. Did I ever mention that the GITB is a mental health professional? And a huge horse's ass sometimes? Maybe I did.

why too much of a good thing (watermelon shooters) really isn't always a good thing...

...the vodka-soaked delusion that one looks hot. I mean, really, really hot. So much so that a fish would just LOVE to smooch us. Oy.

run, forest, run!

once again, I have proven to be an idiot savant of pop culture.

Remember I was ragging on "Charlene" and her god-awful 1970s shit-ass song "I've never been to me?" And how when Miss Otis really wants to torture me, he calls me up and blasts the song?

Well, looks like CNN audience members agree. Well, sort of. But their ranking of the wretched song as number 4 of the top 5 worst is a rip-off. It deserves to be the #1 most shitty song of all time. And I should know. Because I called this one two months ago. Scary.

Do you think if I try to collect a consulting fee from CNN it would fly? Just wondering. Bastards.

more ladylike behavior

we had a big old ho-down last night in honor of Caroline's 30th (butter-creamed chin on the right) and Kimmie's 48th (on the left, with the strawberry filling on her forehead and up her nose). It was a surprise party and we started out with about 22 guests but per usual, all our men crapped out (went into the house "to watch basketball" translation: "I have had waaaay too much to drink and I need to go sit and stare," etc.) so we girls were the last ones standing. At which point the gloves came off: profuse and liberal use of profanity, consumption of tobacco products, alcohol abuse, cake fight. It was the best. Hard to believe we are all (now) over the age of 30 and some of the wild women I hang with are well past 60. But no matter, we like to cut loose, and as they say, you have to go with your strengths, you know--do what you do well.

The evening was cool and breezy and clouds were dashing around overhead so we stayed outside and sat around under the Chinese lanterns and tiki torches and listened to Caroline sing as her brother, Jay, the only remaining brave male, strummed his guitar.

Caroline's husband had stoked up the fire pit before he beat feet for the house, muttering something about how "the gin finally kicked in," so we reclined in Adirondack chairs we'd dragged into a ragged circle around the flames. And sipped frozen margaritas and looked at the stars. Heaven.

I asked Jay to play a Dylan song and he smiled sweetly at me and without missing a beat (or a chord) slid right into the lyrics of my fav Dylan tune:

"They sat together in the park, as the evening sky grew dark, She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones. 'Twas then he felt alone and wished that he'd gone straight. And watched out for a simple twist of fate..."

How'd he know? Sigh.

I gave a friend of mine the link to my Blog several weeks ago and when I asked him yesterday if he had checked it out, he referred to it as "disturbing" and made a half-hearted protestation about "the language." And the "disturbing" is not in a good way. After pondering his reaction, I think I am assuredly on the right track. Did I mention that he is a Republican? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

now I hate Staples as much as I hate Radio Shack

I broke my keyboard last night. Don't ask. So I called the long-suffering IT guy at work this morning (as I work, mostly, from home) and told him that my spacebar is DOA and asked him if I could grab another keyboard off the pile in the corner of his office and he said no, because those all have messed up spacebars too and that's why they are piling up there, beginning to resemble a modernist artistic pile of a statement about technology or some such thing, so just run over to the office supply store and grab a new one and keep the receipt.

Fifteen minutes later I am in the keyboard/mice aisle at Staples pondering the mysteries of keyboards and I see a skinny kid in a red polo shirt sidewinding his way up the aisle toward me. I didn't even need to spy him out of the corner of my eye because I could smell him coming. He was drenched in Drakker Noir, a fragrance my 1980s boyfriend wore and because I have a visceral reaction to it and can smell it a mile away, I was more than aware of the approach of Staples Boy long before he pulled up in front of me, totally blocking my view of the keyboards slash mice.

"Finding everything okay?' He asked in a sing-songy, don't actually really give a shit sort of way as he hitched up his pants that sagged right back down around his 22-inch hips.

"Well, yeah, Jeremy," I said, after squinting at his nametag.

"I want one of these Logitech keyboards in black. That whole stack there is all white. Do you guys have black?"

"Nope."

"How come?"

"Nobody wants black. It isn't a popular color. But if you want a black keyboard, we have these," he said, sweeping his hand, and I looked at the dozen or so black keyboard models they had that were all minimum twice the price of the white one I had in my hand.

"Didn't you just say nobody wants black? And why would I want to pay double for a black keyboard when this is all I need?" I asked, waving whitey.

"Well, these have all these other media features and some are wireless. Don't you want a wireless?" He asked earnestly.

"No." I said.

"How come?"

"Because I'm not allowed--my IT guy said not to get a wireless. And besides, I don't understand why this only comes in white -- what is the deal? It's the only one you have under $20 and it only comes in white and it's the only white keyboard you stock?"

"Well, you could paint it." Jeremy said.

"You're kidding, right?"

"No--I painted mine green and blue but it was a bitch cutting out the mold to put over it so I could paint it without fucking up the keys, took me forever but you, know, I was grounded so I had a lot of time on my hands..."

When I went to the counter to pay for my under-$20 white keyboard, the kid at the register asked me if I have a "Staples Savngs" card. I told him no.

He said "You should sign up for one. You'll save a lot of money."

I said "No thanks."

He then placed an application form on the counter and tried to hand me a pen.

I said "Listen, I don't want any more of my personal information out in the world than is absolutely necessary, so no thanks."

"This is just for us--we don't sell your personal information like Blockbluster does..." he said.

"No."

He glared at me with naked hatred and slapped my change into my hand like I had just told him his mother is a whore.

I hate the intrusion into my private life that is what should be a simple transaction. This is why I refuse to step foot in Radio Shack--I do not want to tell anyone my zip code or fucking phone number. I shouldn't have to. And giving the phone number to the county detox unit is just no fun anymore. And now Bath and Body Works is doing it! I just want to buy whatever it is I want to buy without disclosing personal information and I am happy to bypass "a 20% discount on this purchase!!!!" to do so. Can't I just buy in peace and anonymity? Is that too much to ask? I guess it is.

We got up early Sunday morning to take our sweet girl to school as her class is off to Sea Camp down in the Keys for a bit of marine science and all sorts of adolescent horseplay. We were forbidden from signing up as chaperones this time. She won't be home until Wed. night. So the house is very quiet and I got more work done today than I have in weeks and the GITB and and I actually have had a few meaningful conversations and went out for dinner at 8:00 p.m.!!! and had cocktails and ADULT conversation. It all feels so weird. I am not ready for her to leave for college. I realize that this won't happen for five years. But it's already started in a way. And I'm not ready. But she is.

I'm sorry, I am just so enamored of this portrait of moi that eb created for my birthday, I just had to post it. Without her preauthorization. She could probably sue my ass. But she is on vacation right now, so not likely that legal action is on her agenda at the moment. Anyway.

Remember this young man? I found him delightfuly intriquing back in December when my girlfriend, Grace, (yes, Miss Minnesota, ANOTHER ONE!) and I literally stumbled across him as he was sprawled across a sidewalk writing love-sick poetry in colored chalk.

Seems the St. Petersburg Times finds him intriquing as well.

Four months after I noticed him and blogged about his sidewalk prose.

Hmm. Am I being plumbed? Sure seems that way, doesn't it? Especially since the one poem I fell in love with and posted on my blog (with his consent) is the same one the Times used in its story about said young man in yesterday's edition. If one were paranoid, one really could begin to suspect plumbing...Hmm...good thing I'm not. Paranoid.

On another note, because of the nature of one of my jobs, I have an e-mail address that's published. As a result, I recieve anywhere from 25-100 spams per day pitching everything from software to real estate to precious metal investing, vacation packages and the requisite penis enlargers. Some of the faux people who send these e-mails to me are:

Aidan Scott
Efren Harvey
Jakob Adams
Ingrid Galindo
Kristen Solis
Kristopher Franks
Anibal Trotter
Damion Rosado
Efren Barnett
Wilma Wood
Jack Long
Bryan Phillips
Katrina Phelps
Francisco Barber

I am fascinated by these names. Who the hell comes up with them? My fav is Wilma Wood. Sounds like a porn star. Or a drag queen. She and Jack Long would probably really hit it off.