My employer is bleeding money with no end in sight and so we are embarking on the downsizing track. Today I had to lay off two employees with whom I have worked for many years. I have known about this for a few days and the anxiety has eaten a hole in my brain. I feel wretched about it and I wonder what I could have done to save them. Of course, ultimately, it was out of my hands. The decisions came from the top and I was the apologetic messenger. But the anticipation of having these conversations has made me physically ill and in some ways was far worse than the actual conversations which I just wrapped up a few hours ago. What surprised me about it was that the co-worker I thought would melt into an inconsolable puddle of tears took it very well and even apologized to me because I had to go through the trauma of delivering the pink slip. The other co-worker, who has always presented as Zen-like carriage sort of exploded on me in anger and bitterness, which totally took me by surprise. The thing is, all the stuff she vented about is valid and I don't disagree with her. Being a grown-up so totally sucks sometimes.

true love

The kid and I went to the mall yesterday. She wanted to peruse bikinis and I wanted to find the ladies room because my bladder was about to blow--too much coffee and bottled water for my own good. I went off to the second floor of Macy's while she wandered in the junior department. When I finally located the ladies room--tucked behind the bridal registry and the Waterford crystal display, I hit the door with urgency. What hit back was an odor that about knocked the wind out of me. It was intense. Someone had obliviously been ill. I heard water running and low voices coming from the wheelchair accessible stall. Two women occupied the stall and as I entered the one next to it to pee, I heard the sound of paper towels being pulled over and over from the dispenser on the wall between the two stalls and the sound of a woman softly weeping. The other woman was shushing her, saying "It's alright now, don't you worry. I've got you..."

It was one of the most intimate and heart-wrenching moments I've ever witnessed, and even though I couldn't see the women in the stall, I imagined it was an elderly woman being attended to by her daughter.

I did my business quickly and exited my stall, praying that no one (like a gaggle of rowdy teenagers) would enter the ladies room and react to the awful stench that had permeated the room. As I washed my hands, I lingered, considering whether or not to call to the women and offer my help (I worked in health care for several years a lifetime ago) but I thought better of it. Some intimacy is just too intense to acknowledge.

The Devil wears a purple poncho.

God, I miss Howard Cosell.

we played a little hookie last week and went to the Outback Pro-Am in Tampa. The greens were a little sunburned but because we went on Thursday, the crowd was sparse and the weather was Chamber of Commerce perfect. The access to the celebrities was startling to me, being as paranoid as I am about psycho stalkers in public places when there are celebs about.

There was one young woman who seemed to be following Stone Phillips around and I became fixated on her because she looked so odd and out of place. She wore a flowy sundress and high heels for god sake, and she had a clutch purse that she held tightly under her arm. She was alone (which I thought was weird) and she walked from one hole to the next and stood silently watching. She just seemed strange to me and I kept telling the GITB to keep an eye on her in case she made a sudden lunge for Stone (who, by the way, is skeletal and has NO ASS whatever but his swing is tres elegant). I kept thinking about the character in The Natural who seduced Robert Redford's character then pulled a tiny little Derringer out of her lady-like little purse and shot his ass for no apparent reason.

I was amazed by the fact that one could literally come into physical contact with the players.

Case in point: George Lopez broke a stumble on my right boob. He had hit a ball so wild that it left the fairway, crossed a cart path and landed on the opposite fairway. Lopez had to trot across the path, through the onlookers and NBC camera crew, and up a little rise to hit the ball back onto the correct fairway. It was a good hit: he made it up on the green and was closest to the pin. But as he jogged back down the rise, he stumbled a bit and I was leaning against a pine tree minding my own business as he stumbled right into my chest. The GITB was impressed that a boob-graze also served to prevent a spill for George. Hey, you know, whatever I can do to help. Oh, and George is way better looking in person than he is on TV.

Some of the big-name players did have a deputy sheriff walking with them from hole-to-hole, but others didn't. I was struck by the fact that some of the celebs were very patient with their fans. I observed some wonderful moments of kindness and sincerity. Lopez was very patient with every kid who asked him to sign a hat, a ball, or a shirt. There were busloads of inner-city kids who had obviously never been on a golf course before at the tournament that day, so they were everywhere and they didn't realize that when one is teeing off is not the time to shout "Yo! That's Ronde Barber!!!!!" But the celebs were accessible, relaxed and, as I said, super-nice. George stopped over and over to chat with the kids, Ronde too. Vince Gill smiled shyly and nodded his head as middle-age women stopped him as he walked the green to tell him how much they enjoyed seeing him in concert a few years back. As much as I think the celebrity-crazed culture we have is fucked, these guys were decent.

not so sustainable

I have been trying to get with the green thing, honest, I have. I'm a recycling fool to the point that I even fish water bottles out of the kitchen garbage that the GITB has tossed in because that's the only option when the recycle bin in the garage is filled, of course. I have replaced all the light bulbs with the new-fangled bulbs that look like curly fries, and there is nary a spray can in my house. But. I cannot do the reusable canvas grocery bag. I see the good, earnest people of the world in line at Publix hauling their canvas bags filled with groceries and I admire them but I can't bring myself to do it. First, I shop infrequently, so when I do actually shop, it's almost two carts full. So how many cute little canvas bags would I actually need? Like 25? Probably. And I don't want to have one more thing hanging around my house. Especially something that can get stinky because some groceries invariably leak, pee, sweat or in some other way perspire. And then what? I have some smelly, non-hygienic bags stacking up somewhere in my house. I'm trying to go the other way--I have been downsizing like crazy and less really is more. The direct relationship between my anxiety level and the amount of clutter in my house is completely clear to me in my old age. I don't need most of the stuff I own and it's going. Every bag of suff I drop off at Goodwill makes me feel lighter. The compromise with the grocery bags is that I am that pain in the ass customer who slows the line by asking for paper. But I recycle it.

giving up actually works

Living in Inferno can be challenging if one entertains fantasies about daffodils and bluebonnets and manicured English gardens. Such dainty flowers incinerate almost instantly here in the sun and humidity. Pretty much the same thing with grass unless you are okay with pissing away thousands of gallons of precious water every month via an automatic sprinkler system--and for what? So we threw in the towel a few years ago and decided to go with xeriscaping. Our yard now resembles a tropical jungle but that's where we live. My neighbors' carefully cultivated spongy emerald St. Augustine lawns and perversely symmetrical hedges are kind of an odd, anal-retentive contrast. I like my out of control native jungle. And letting it do what it wants yields beauty such as this great bloom. So it's all good.

is it "oy vey" or "oi vey?"

my director wants me to perfect an accent that's "a blend of Russian-Yiddish-Brooklynese." Yeah. I can do that. Especially now that I am working with a dialect coach (a grumpy old man who in fact may actually predate dirt). This is hard work but I have to admit it's a blast.

the lover

My girlfriend, Ellen, is one of those salt-of-the-earth, no-fuss kind of gals who lets most stuff roll off her back, puts up with a lot of other people's shit and when they take her for granted the most, she is still totally there for them, every step of the way. Ellen has not had the most ideal of relationships with her mom and I suspect that her mom, a steel magnolia, would have preferred that Ellen had chosen to lead the sort of life she no doubt had in mind for her--you know--marry a dentist or lawyer (with deep Southern roots going back to the Federalist days) she met while an undergrad at Tulane, have a great house in Charleston or Chapel Hill, and a summer home in Maggie Valley and raise her strapping golden-haired sons to be quarterbacks and/or dental/law students in between Junior League meetings and hosting teas for the Episcopal churchwomen. That would have been just right. But, no, El dropped out of college to marry Roberto, a dude from the Dominican Republic, and they moved to Florida where they reared their two hell-raising, swaggering Dominican boys who did stuff like steal cars and set up a meth lab in the garage. They are good boys now, of course.

After much hyperventilation and drama, mama finally accepted El's life was what it was and they got on with it. It was a fine truce for a while, until Beulah took sick. She suffers from some sort of dementia with a special name that is the last name of the physician who managed to differentiate it from some other dementias but tragically, sort of sounds like what is actually wrong with her. I think it's Looper's dementia. Or something like that. The point is that Beulah now spends all of her time--and I mean every waking fucking minute--fully immersed in a gauzy make-believe world that occupies her as if she is watching a never-ending movie starring Fred and Ginger.

Ellen calls it dementia but it doesn't sound all that demented to me. I think it sounds like being on some pretty damn good drugs. Beulah lives in a fantasy world that comes complete with a 24-7 soundtrack of nothing but Italian opera music. And it seems that Ellen is one of the stars of the opera. Yes. Beulah is having a fantasy/delusion that my dear Ellen is having a wild illicit affair with a sweaty, smarmy Italian tenor. El finds that the most disturbing factor in all of this is that her mom really rags her ass when she visits her in the nursing home about how awful she is being to Roberto via her unfaithful and whorish behavior with The Tenor. Beulah is just appalled. So is Ellen.

"Can you believe it?????" she asked me the other day. "After all these years of treating Roberto like shit, NOW she decides he's the poor wounded party because I am allegedly screwing a hallucinogenic opera star!"

I asked her if Beulah listened to such music when she was coherent. Ellen said she didn't think so. But she's not sure. She doesn't remember.

enough

Unreality show

I don't know about y'all, but I do not do reality TV. I don't feel the need to go into the reasons why, but I will comment that I think the whole "reality" exploitation thing is our modern-day version of the coliseum with blood-thirsty sub-humans (the audience) getting their soulless, debase and depraved needs met through observing the anquish and tortured sufferings of others.

So I am not up on American Idol or Dancing with the Stars nor do I care to be but because I work in media, I am often forced to walk through a newsroom past the office of one of my friends, who covers media. He watches a lot of TV at work and the cool thing about hanging with him is getting to see advance DVDs of HBO and Showtime series way before they hit the air. Which was manna from heaven during my Sopranos and Deadwood addictions. Okay, yes, depraved, but at least it was not touted as "real." Which leads me to today's before and after artwork here to the left, which I stumbled across in my friend, the media critic's lair. So, OMG, you guys, WTF happened to Priscilla????? Is it me, or does it look like her face was melted off her skull in a horrible fire and her mouth was reconstructed with tissue trimmed from her labia? Holy plastic surgery gone waaaaaaay wrong, Batman! I realize the woman is in her 60s now, but I think she would have aged beautifully if she had just left herself the hell alone.

I think those dudes who hung out with Elvis all those years--the TCB dudes--the Memphis Mafia--whatever they called themselves--need to track down whoever did this to her face and at the very least force-feed him/her about a dozen peanut butter and banana sammiches. Jeebus Chrysler.

the sweet spot

The GITB has decided he has been off regular exercise long enough so he's going back to his kick-boxing class twice a week. Tonight he got all suited up and wandered into the bedroom where I was trying to edit a report while lying flat on my back with my laptop on my tummy. Not very effective, btw.

"Hey, honey, kick me in the balls, " he says..."I'm wearing my new cup."

I refused and he insisted and so I finally leaned over the side of the bed and socked him in the balls. It was very satisfying. A few minutes later the kid wandered in with the dog and said that the Tae Kwan Do teacher had left a message on the machine earlier that class is canceled tonight due to illness. The GITB was bummed.

who's a stupid whore?

um, yeah. That would be you.

V-Day

Yet another life lesson in how it's so not all about me. Not even remotely.

A few days before I was set to perform in the Vagina Monologues here in sunny Tampa Bay, Jane Fonda went on the Today Show to chat about this being the 10th anniversary of the VM and her role in the big-ass V-Day event in New Orleans next month. And then Jane said "cunt" on live, national television. And Meredith Viera looked exquisitely uncomfortable and blinked really hard a time or two. Then in the segment immediately following Jane's c-bomb, Meredith bowed and scraped and apologized for Jane's "inadvertent slip." What. Bullshit. Jane didn't slip. She said "cunt" and she meant to say "cunt." Cunt, cunt, cunt. That was it for me. If I had a shred of hesitancy left, Meredith's groveling apology eradicated it. Here's the thing: Meredith apologized for potentially offending anyone. No apology for the fact that this pejorative has been used as a weapon against women and girls for way too long.

Enywho...so the morning of the event John calls me to say that one of the cast members has fallen ill and could I read an additional monologue for him that night.

I asked which one it was, and he said “It’s the one that is based on the wide-spread and organized rape of young girls in Bosnia during the war over there.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he stopped.

There was a pause and he said, “Do you think your daughter would do it?”

“I don’t know, I’ll ask her,” I said.

I gave the script to Schmoopie and she took it into her room, sat on her bed and read. She came out a few minutes later and said she would do it.

That night, when she rose and walked to center stage, I held my breath.

“My vagina was my village,” she read, her voice soft and sweet and soaked in the
innocence that she is at this stage of her life.

She continued. “My vagina was green, water soft pink fields, cow mooing, sun resting, sweet boyfriend touching lightly with soft piece of blonde straw.”

The auditorium was silent as she read. I heard a few gasps as the monologue grew darker and painted scenes of brutal soldiers and the rifles they used as tools for sexual assault, the horror of rape, the death of childhood and home and possibility, the violation of the vagina and all it signifies.

It was stunning.

There is still a lot to say about vaginas. I think that my daughter has a lot to say. And she and her vagina really haven’t even started getting to know one another yet. But they will.

({})

poor rick

so Rick Springfield was on Oprah today and he still looks just like this. Hot, hot, hottie McHotmeister. But the dozens of 50-somethings wiggling around and clapping and screaming as he crooned "Jessie's Girl?" They all looked like Hillary Clinton. Looking out into the audience and seeing his pants-suited peers must be really jarring for Rick. Let's hope for his sake and sanity he is prone to '80s flashbacks.

Happy V-Day

I heard Woody Allen being interviewd recently and his response to the interviewer's question about what lessons or truths he's learned in his long life made me laugh. (Woody is 73 now. Can you believe it?)

Woody didn't hesitate before he responded, "Nothing really." I could totally relate.

The older I get the more I know I don't know shit. As a kid I just assumed that the grown-ups knew everything there was to know and I also assumed that once I too reached adulthood, I would somehow magically be instilled with this all-knowing-ness. So when I became a young adult I was shocked, shocked by the adults (especially the older adults) with whom I crossed paths who were complete fucking idiots. And by that I do not mean mentally challenged due to some sort of genetic mishap. No, I am referring to the idiots who choose freely to be ignorant assholes.

But that is a whole 'nother rant. This rant is about love. WTF is love? Who knows.

I know that most of the times in my life that I have been "in love" I have been in the end:

A: actually, just wanting to have sex with the person;

B: hugely disappointed at best and;

C: completely devastated at worst.

But unlike Woody, I haven't learned zip. I have had some moments of clarity. They may make no sense to you, but I don't give a shit. They're my truths. So here goes:

*Guys sometimes say "Baby,I love you..." during sex because at that exact moment, they sort of do. I mean, can you blame them for blurting those words out when their tiny little brains are being flooded by an electrifyingly euphoric tidal wave of hormonal surging? What they are really (usually) saying is: "Holy shit, it's good to be alive and THIS FEELS FUCKING GREAT!!!!"

*Lust is a wonderful thing. But it is not sustainable as a constant if you share the same bathroom for a few years. But if you truly had it at first, it comes back in flashes here and there, usually when the house is kid-free thanks to sleep-overs or grandparents and you have engaged in a nice dinner and/or a prolonged happy hour. It can return and manifest in a really hot romp of sweating and hair-pulling and loud vocalizing and happy endings that make your home a happy, shiny place for at least a week afterwards. And that's good to know.

*Some people (okay, not just men) oh, fuck it--it's the men--only want to be with you when you don't give a shit about them. This is particularly maddening when it's a case where you are hot for him but he has a thing for someone else who treats him like utter dogshit. So you're all: "Hey!!! Hello??? Come over here!!! I'm the one who loves you and appreciates you!!! I'm the one who really does want to give you everything you want!!!" But do they listen? No. And then when you have seen the light and walked away, they decide you may not be a bad bet after all. But at this point you're turned off and disgusted and don't give a shit anymore.

*Some of us say "I love you" without having the slightest fucking idea what that means. And how can we? It doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.

*If you find someone who loves you, wants to be with you and sticks by you no matter what (excluding acts of animal cruelty, child abuse, and certain felonies), you're good. If there's mutual respect and friendship the rest can be worked out.

*I know that I do not have one singular soul mate. I have many. And that's not a slam on the GITB who is awesome. It's about the reality of life and the odds and laws of fate and all that stuff. I know that there are a few people out there in the universe who I will never meet who are perfectly suited for me and with whom I could have shared a long, happy lifetime. Others are great guys I've met and adored but we just didn't get the timing right. A few drift in and out of my life even now. There's the guy I dated off and on in high school and college who got married impulsively at 21 then found himself single when we were in our early-30s. I loved him. But he tracked me down a few weeks after I had hooked up with the GITB. There's another old friend of mine with whom I have lunch once a year. We connect on every level and I think he's adorable. There's nothing going on, but given the right circumstances and timing for both of us, no doubt in my mind it would be a wonderful relationship. And there's nothing wrong with knowing that. Nothing is ever black and white. It's trying to force things and people into perfect compartments that causes the pain.

*I have experienced all sorts of love: puppy love; unrequited love; young, first love; intense, ill-advised psycho love; rebound love that was less real than other love but absolutely necessary; lust-driven love; and, finally, thankfully, contented, mature,I'll-take-care-of-you-after-you've-had-surgery-and-need-help-getting-on-and-off-the-toilet-love. And it's the best.

I will use the "C" word on V-Day

although I have asked my mom not to attend.

the amaryllis has bloomed

yay.

I wish I knew how to quit you.

fire cracker

when I was a teenager I had quite a lucrative babysitting racket going on. I unwittingly stumbled onto a goldmine: the field of specialization babysitting-- handling boys --which earned me hazard pay. Most of the families I sat for had packs of grubby feral boys who were (for some odd reason) like wet sauerkraut in my hands. This was not because I allowed them to smoke/drink/use foul language (although I suppose I did from time-to-time) but anyway, I never sat for sweet little girls who wanted me to play dress up with them and brush their hair and have tea parties and read Amelia Bedelia aloud to them.

No, I sat for boys who wanted to catch lizards and put them in the freezer and then play with them while they were semi-frozen and mostly in shock, or worse, they wanted to stuff the occasional firecracker into the mouth of the pop-sickled lizard, and, well, you know. They wanted to pee in the yard and ride their bikes off the diving board or roof into the pool and try to start their mom's car that was parked in the garage and look at their dad's Playboys and take bites right from the loaf of Velveeta and, well, I allowed that boys will be boys and so I let them now and then and so it went. The word spread among the moms in the neighborhood desperate for a night out that ell was cool sitting for boys and the boys liked me fine and I was booked all the time and made great money babysitting the cast of Lord of the Flies and it was good.

One of my favorite families to sit for was the Martins. They had two little tow-headed boys who were sweet as pie and the parents had a great collection of borderline-naughty paperbacks stashed on the top shelf in the TV room that I liked to peruse after I put Greg and Brad to bed. My favorite was The Sensuous Woman followed closely by The Happy Hooker.

The boys' mom was a statuesque redhead who worked at a nearby children's hospital and their dad was a fun-loving bad-boy type who I realized after I became an adult was what my dad calls "a ne'er-do-well." He had one job after another--none for very long, one venture after another that didn't quite pan out, wild hairs, crack-pot ideas and nothing that ever really took off or stuck. The boys were lucky that their mom was a grown-up and stable because their dad was Peter Pan. At one point he worked in the area making appearances as Ronald McDonald.

One night I went over to babysit and there was a pool table in the living room where a nice traditional set of living room furniture had been the week before. A month later he wallpapered the new "pool room" with tin foil and painted huge planetarium-ish spheres on the walls in hues of bright cobalt blues and deep bottle greens. Lovely, really, but kind of odd. The mom and dad split and got back together a few times. I could see that she was in love with him, but I could also see that she was embarrassed by his failure to step up to the plate and be a grown-up. They were not similar in any way. He married up when he married her and I think she was never not aware of that reality.

Eventually they split for good and he kind of faded away. I ran into him at a party when I was home one summer during college and we had a few drinks together and he seemed sad and depressed, kind of a sad, big kid.

The youngest of the two boys is a professional chef now and he lives out west. His mom and my mom are still friends and last week my mom mentioned that Brad is going to be on a new TV show on NBC called "Moment of Truth." It is one of those heinous, soulless game shows that gets people to vomit up all their pain and humiliation on camera for the chance to win a lot of money but they have to do it while attached to a lie detector machine. If they lie they lose all the money they have won. I am sickened that Brad is going to be on this show next week. It breaks my heart. His mom told my mom that one of the lines of questions the show's producers asked Brad was about his dad and they actually flew his dad to LA to surprise him on stage with a forced reunion. I say forced because under the circumstances -- on national TV --isn't it? They have been estranged since the boys were little. I guess it has a happy ending. At least for the segment that will air. Who knows what will happen afterwards. I hope it's good. I hope.

we hired the lesbian to tile the bathroom

Because the other two tile guys who came by to give us an estimate leered at me AND my kid. Ew. I told the GITB that if I have to be subjected to an ass crack in order to get the bathroom re-done, I much prefer Cathy, the strapping young lesbian, (who I KNOW will do a fabulous job because she's a girl) who, by the by, does not wear her work pants slung below her beer gut. She wears a belt, thank you very much.