my jaundiced eye

what the follywood?

MJE volunteered to let some film students shoot a short movie in her house for two days this weekend. If I knew then what I know now I might have been a bit more cautious. I’d been told there’d be 8-10 kids, turned out more like 15-20, all with endless needs and bottomless stomachs. They arrived at about 7:45am in a fleet of cars, a UHaul truck filled with gear and toting a bag of bagels. They set up a little food table outside, followed immediately by what would become standard operating procedure. Would I happen to have a toaster? Hot coffee? Sugar? Cream? Soy milk? Lox? Eggs benedict? I cooked enough lunch to feed the homeless population of San Francisco and even that wasn’t quite enough. One of the vegetarians requested a meat free tomato sauce for the spaghetti and followed that with a hope that I would accommodate the glutenophobics in the group. “Listen kiddo, tell those cretins that tomatoes don’t have gluten and not to eat the goddam pasta.” Capiche?

But there’s more! Would I happen to have sheers for the windows to filter the light? And tape. Batteries, a smallish statue in the style of Jane Austen, a lighter, extension cord, tweezers, pliers, a cordless drill (sorry, why do you need that?) magic markers, white board markers, zip lock bags, rubber bands, toothpicks, staplers, Xanax. Would I happen to have an old timey- looking file box, and files? And a dark and scary place to “hide” them? How about some firecrackers or maybe an air horn to scare off the birds who were making too much birdish noise. Could I also turn off the heat and AC, too noisy. How about unplugging the fridge, ditto. I watched aghast as five kids struggled to carry a massive dolly upstairs and damn near had to knock back a double nerve steadier on the spot. Fortunately I’d carried around my coffee cup all day to maintain my composure. Ever the perceptive smartass, Bandoleira-Saturnalia remarked “Whatever you’ve got in that cup I know for sure it’s not coffee.”

Between moments of hyperactivity there stretched eons when the kids slouched all over the house, feet up happily clacking away on their little devices. Or alternately tipping back in my tiny French dining chairs or hunching over the 18^thc table which they covered with spiral notebooks, wads of production notes, assorted writing implements and clunky bits of equipment. At one point I spied an open bottle of acetone and could have won the olympic100 meter dash with the my sprint to grab it.

They hired a third rate hack and flew him in from LA to play the main character. He neglected to tell them that he was hypoglycemic and needed to sit down and eat every 15 minutes (which adds up when he works for eight hours and not a minute longer) and couldn’t tolerate the cold. And he was deaf. In one scene he was to come in from the porch and it took the entire houseful of people screaming his name to get him to open the door and make his entrance.

He chewed so much scenery that I thought he was going to collapse after every take. The student actor they hired for the second character was clearly not ready for primetime either. Between the two of them there wasn’t a moment when there weren’t tears of every stripe: streaming tears, tears being choked back, desperately squeezed out tears, tears being wiped away. When they did manage to be dry eyed they delivered their dialogue at a decibel level to rival the sounds of the munition explosions wafting over from Parris Island where they probably heard it and wondered what all the weeping and wailing was about.

When Ethyl Merman belted out that there’s no business like show business I get it.

fuzzwords

MJE is bewildered as to why perfectly good words in the King’s English are abandoned and replaced with flaccid alternatives. It’s as though the entire American populace is trapped in a perpetual yoga class. I wonder whether the same phenomenon is occurring in other cultures and languages. If you find out please shoot me a soothingly worded note.

There are any number of egregious examples but these are some of my favorites, meaning the ones I hate the most.

“Be mindful.” Does that translate into paying attention, like the recording on the subway that tells you to “mind the gap.” The last time I heard that bit of verbal dryer lint it was uttered by a humanoid blessed with the mind of a gopher.

“Be present.” Does that mean not being absent? Well if you’re there you are obviously present, and if you’re not you are absent. The benefit of being absent is that you are out of earshot.

“Stay in the moment .” It’s only 60 seconds, do you really need a reminder? Plus, isn’t that a conundrum? If you are consciously making an effort to stay in the moment then by that very action you are in fact outside of the moment?

“Get in touch with your feelings.” Frankly, I have no idea what the hell that means.

“Start a conversation” That used to mean extending your hand and introducing yourself to someone and trying to find a topic which you and your new pal can discuss. Like, “Is it just me or does Mitch McConnell look exactly like a turtle?” which you could follow up with “and don’t you think that guy, Mike Pence the governor of Illinois, the one with the white hair has SS officer written all over him.” Now that’s what I call starting a conversation.

“Reach out.“ The lyrics to “Reach Out I’ll be there” by the Four Tops immediately come to mind. “Come on girl, reach out for me, and I’ll be there with a love that will pull you through.” I don’t guess that’s what he means when some television bobble head intones “we reached out” to the head of the terrorist group El Kabob regarding its recent beheading of a hapless American tourist stupid enough to be wandering around Syria but did not receive a reply.

“Unpack.” Often used in conjunction with the following as the first of a two part process of newsgathering.

“Drill down.” After you have “unpacked” it is then necessary to “drill down.” Get it?

I am deeply disappointed to hear even veteran newscasters use this term, trying to appear hip and appeal to the all-important 20-30 year old demographic.

Yo, geezer news nation! Those guys are not watching you, they get their news from John Stewart. Duh.

twelfth night, the lord of misrule and the art of the “get up”

Twelfth night, January 6, is traditionally when the guilt and anxiety-provoking season celebrating the birth of the lord of peace ends and the freewheeling, rowdy, drunken reign of the lord of misrule begins, culminating in the bacchanalia of mardi gras. But then, dontcha know the very next day, Ash Wednesday the old wet blanket’s back and we all have to feel really guilty about how much fun we’ve been having without him around and repent, hard time. And lent is even longer than the xmas season, or at least it used to be, until walmart decided it starts the day after the 4^th of July.

Once again we can thank those fab pagans for another christian custom. They celebrated 12^th night (or thereabouts) too except they called it Saturnalia, which is what I would have named my first child if I’d known then what I know now. And in various cultures through the ages it has been ruled by the aforementioned LOM, or in France “le prince des sots” (of which I am particularly fond) or the Abbot of Unreason in Scotland (boring). Whatever the moniker, come twelfth night she (okay, maybe he) reigned over the Feast of Fools (which is what I am calling the cassoulet I am making for dinner, for it is truly a fool’s errand, longer and more intense than a 12 step program but with a really good meal at the end). During the rule of the LOM, the proper nature of things are turned on their heads, or kicked in their asses, depending on your point of view. Peasants rule the kings, slaves their masters, etc. and during this period the LOM has the power to command anyone to do anything her fickle mind comes up with.

My fickle mind came up with a bash to celebrate the season and commanded all the guests to create a “get up” for the evening. A “get up” is familiar to anyone from New Orleans. It is not a costume, it is an improvised fanciful sartorial creation. However, most of my dinner guests hail from lands far far away from New Orleans and trying to explain what it meant was nigh on to impossible, like asking Helen Keller to sing an aria from La Traviata. So just as Annie Sullivan, Helen’s teacher, had to start somewhere, I began with goodwill. No not that kind. The goodwill store. So we made a journey over to the land where dreams are born.

There are not words to describe the vast sea of possibilities. Every one funnier than the one before. The other patrons, seeing us sobbing in hysterics underneath the mens’ pants rack probably just took us for employees having a little setback on our road to recovery. In the end we walked out with, among other things, one choir robe, three sets of “drapery sheers”, some furry stuff, a lab coat, a tiny necktie, a pair of men’s white slip-on shoes with a huge gold logo, a couple of appropriately gaudy polyester shirts and a pair of silky maroon double knit leisure pants.

And so the LOM has decreed: Let the “get up” games begin.

no nappies

Can you believe it, 2014 just up and came and went. MJE is trying to remember if anything of note happened over the past 12 months and all I can think of is that I am still above ground. I guess that’s better than the alternative, although there have been moments when I’m not so sure. Like when Decibelle lets loose that earsplitting howl, which unfortunately would probably still be audible in the hereafter. Talk about bum luck, totally dead but not totally deaf. The OB&C doesn’t have that particular problem, he’s deaf as a post already. I swear, I’ll say something like “Want a cup of coffee?” and he’ll say “Why in the hell would I want to waddle clay in a coffin?” And it is only downhill from here. Why just yesterday some friends and I frittered away what could have been a productive day on a long walk, and somehow got onto the subject of the appropriate time to have “The Talk” with one’s beloved. You know, the big one. The trickling sands of time, red sails in the sunset talk. When you look back on your long winding journey together, the successes, the disappointments, the tedium, and confront the reality of the waning years. The time to finally share with your life partner your most deeply held conviction.

“Just so you know, I am not changing any diapers.”

the tale of the truncated tree

MJE was ready to hang up her spurs in observance of the season but when opportunity knocks don’t be in the bathroom, hence the tale of the truncated tree.

A couple of days ago Bandoliera-Saturnalia and I embarked on our annual holiday tree troll. This year we ran into a bit of a headwind due to the rest of the merry makers not fully embracing the spirit of sharing and buying up every last fricking frazier fir for miles. We finally ended up at a hardware store in the next county where according to the proprietor they had “at least 25 trees” in the lot. What he didn’t say was that if you stacked all of them on top of one another they’d barely reach Jareem Abdul-Jabaar’s crotch. After a good bit of deliberation we chose the least pathetic specimen whose shortcoming, as it were, was the absence of its top 3’. A trapezoidal tree!!! Nobody else has one of those. SOLD!

We left it strapped to the roof of the car for a day or so to strategize but finally had just get on with it. But first, let the tree stand games begin! What sort of diabolical twisted creature created the xmas tree stand, or the xmas tree for that matter. Pagans. Obviously. Finally got it jammed into the stand, with about a 15 degree list to starboard which cleverly offset its shape, and dragged it into the living room. At that point Bandolita lit out like a singed cat rather than waste all day on this crap.

Just MJE and the tree, mano a mano.

The solution: a prosthetic peak. If Michael Jackson could have a nose tip created, anything is possible. So MJE whacked off most of the back branches (with bonus points for shaping the leftovers into a right angle so as to fit more snugly into the corner), bound them together with packing tape and wired the assorted shrubbery to the remains of the trunk. From a distance, at the right angle without glasses it was perfect. Sadly the ersatz pinnacle lacked the necessary oomph to hold up the tree’s shining star. It drooped like, uh, well you do the visual. Something more muscular was called for. A stout stick provided the proverbial lead in the pencil and a star was borne.

MJE is going to knock back some nog and I suggest you all do the same.

edging into the holidays

MJE, as the last post indicated, is no fan of the holidays. They make me nervous so I have to wade in slowly, like you do at the beach when there’s been a shark attack in the area. However, this year in a radical departure from the past, I decided to go beyond our traditional bowl-of-pinecones nod to the season and order some ready-made holiday cheer. I was smitten with a fabulous looking 3’ “faux birch” tree embedded with twinkling lights (promised to go for 320,000 hours, which is a lot longer than I’ll be going so that was a plus). It was to occupy a place of pride on the table in the middle of the entry hall, its lights radiating the the warmth and merriment of this special time. When it arrived, it was encased in a packing crate large enough to house Michelangelo’s David. Just getting through the titanic amount of packing tape required a hacksaw. The interior was crammed with yards of bubble wrap, massive volumes of packing peanuts, crushed paper, excelsior and molded Styrofoam, all to protect a couple of pieces of fiberglass. A particularly jaded friend told me that she suspects that the true purpose of all of this excess packing material is to insure that the purchaser doesn’t even consider trying to re-pack and return the contents. True dat. I finally extracted my little bundle of yuletide magic. Guess what, it turns out that in order for the goddamned thing to cast its twinkling wonderfulness, it has to be plugged into an electric socket, the closest of which is about 15’ from its glorious perch. So now I sit in the darkness trying to make out the shape of my unlit faux birch tree which I now literally want to tear limb from limb.

I was relaying my tale of woe to our oldest grand daughter Bandoliera-Saturnalia who instead of commiserating, replied dryly “Well that’s what you get for being festive.”

Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

the holidays are upon us

Yes, children of all ages, the holidays are upon us like a pair of cement overshoes. As you may have deduced, the MJE is not a fan. All the false bonhomie, forced familial bonding, guilt, anger, resentment, rage … sorry got carried away. The OB&C and I survived the first hurdle, thanksgiving, which we shared with four grandchildren, one boyfriend (the grand daughter’s, not the OB&C’s or mine) and our son and daughter-in-law. We used to “celebrate” it in a small house in the mountains but that situation became untenable when procreation exceeded the available square footage. This year we “celebrated” it in the low country of South Carolina. It has everything we need for a bearable holiday: it’s flat and not freezing. We can send Apricot and Seymour off on their bikes and be reasonably sure that we’d see them again, eventually. The youngest, two year old Decibelle, presents more of a challenge. She manages to rule the roost without benefit of either language skills or high tech weaponry. Armed only with the ability to stop an elephant in its tracks by virtue of a voice that can only be described as “auditory hell” she controls the whole shooting match. She has the lung capacity of Maria Callas, but sadly, lacks the range. She hits one piercing note that simultaneously shatters your eardrums and makes your crowns explode. And let me tell you, there is no negotiating with that one, she should be the next secretary of defense. She’d get Putin out of Crimea without a shot being fired. And ISIS? They’d be beheading themselves after ten minutes.

What a holly jolly thought that there are three weeks of anticipation, desperation and forced consumption ahead to celebrate a pagan holiday repackaged as Christmas. Gotta hand it to the Christians, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. If they hadn’t done it Amazon would have.

spain in the ass

MJE has returned from Espana. I know my legions of fans are relieved that I am back in one piece, as am I. I would have filed posts from abroad but the OB&C was so paralyzed with paranoia that Verizon was going to drain our meager savings, seize our house and leave us penniless that had I needed an ambulance he’d have let me bleed to death on the sidewalk rather than turn his roaming on.

If you want to hear about the glorious food, wine, scenery, etc. then damned well go to Spain yourself, you won’t get that from MJE. I try to convey the desperation that lurks just beneath the surface of every traveler in a foreign land and concentrate on the events of the trip that are indelibly seared into your pre-frontal cortex for their high crap factor. One of our more memorable days in that regard involved renting a car and driving through the mountains. We had a detailed map which the OB&C demanded we consult before we dared inch out of the lot. The map was apparently self-inflating and so huge that it literally filled the entire car. I had to muster my most skillful jiu jitsu moves just to beat it into the back seat. Good luck ever folding that thing again. As navigational backup we also rented a GPS dumb dumb but never quite figured out how to use it. All it would tell us was how to get to where the last renter wanted to go.

Our plan was to visit the white villages en route to our destination. We had heard how great Ronda (help me Ronda, help help me Ronda) was, perched above a very picturesque gorge, so we decided to stop there for lunch. Unaware of what lay ahead, we wandered blithely down one charming ankle-breaking cobblestoned street after another, finally ending up in some farmer’s pasture, at the bottom of the aforementioned gorge about 1000 vertical feet below the town. Herein lies the question, who is the bigger fool, he who leads or she who follows? Nevermind, I know the answer already. But not to worry, opined the OB&C, look! here lies a steep, muddy goat herder’s trail which will take us right back up to town! But as luck would have it, I had neglected to pack my crampons in anticipation of such a situation. As I stumbled through the underbrush clinging to whatever would keep me upright I hit a slick patch, down which I slalomed until I made a full frontal landing and became a dry cleaner’s wet dream. Needless to say, by the time I finally dragged myself onto the end of the very last of the charming cobblestoned streets in town I was fully prepared to throw the OB&C over the ever-so-quaint bridge into the abyss.

Oh, and in Seville, the OB&C mixed up east and north on the map. We walked halfway across Spain in the wrong direction in an effort to find one of the most famous landmarks of the city. But really, he or she who hasn’t made that mistake on occasion cast the first stone. FYI, I have one in my hand right now.

Finally, we rented an apartment in Madrid at the end of the trip. Despite having just 48 hours before boarding our flight home and survived very well without a washing machine, the OB&C decided that since one was provided we sure as shootin’ ought to use it. Let me tell you, a NASA engineer could not have figured this thing out. We finally mashed enough buttons and got it to start, but without water. The end result was a cube of clothes that looked like those cars that get smushed in a wrecking yard. Good news is that it fit perfectly in the overhead.

espana

The jaundiced eye is taking the show on the road to espana with the OB&C for a couple of weeks. He’s got some crackpot meeting of egghead academics to attend so I am tagging along to make sure he goes to as few of the mind-numbing sessions as possible. Those people are so engrossed in intellectual masturbation that they never leave the meeting hall and may just as well be in frickin Orlando. The last one we went to was in Orvieto and the OB&G was extremely conscientious and went to a bunch of the presentations, took copious notes, didn’t understand one goddam thing and wasted two perfectly good days in Tuscany. Lesson learned my friend. No mas. We deliberately choose to go to the meetings that are held in appealing places, for instance we skipped the one in Upsala (Sweden?) because we lived in Seattle for almost twenty years and I don’t want to be cold and wet ever again. Maybe Upsala isn’t cold and wet but why take a chance. Barcelona is sure as hell going to be a better clime than somewhere in the arctic circle. Gotta go feed the OB&C his anti-anxiety meds so he can make it onto the jetway, which is where he starts to get jet lag.

Hasta la vista!

these shoes are made of satin

My father died when I was eight and my brother was three. A boy’s loss of his father at age three is Freud’s sweet spot. The whole Oedipal thing supposedly kicks in and his life goes all to hell in a mental handbasket. That was a spot-on prognosis in this case. Anywho, we were fortunate enough to be raised by a wonderful nurse with only the occasional maternal intrusion to screw things up. My brother loved nothing more than clanking around the house in our mother’s high heels, you could hear him for miles. Her collection made Imelda Marcos look like a slacker. The specialty was outrageous styles purchased in bulk at the annual Krauss Department store shoe sale. One might even say that she loved her shoes to an unhealthy degree. One time when we were on what was euphemistically billed as a “family vacation” some of her shoes flew out of a suitcase strapped onto the roof of our car. Without a moment’s hesitation, she careened off the highway, slammed on the brakes and dispatched all of her offspring onto Interstate 10 to retrieve them. Apparently she was of the opinion that children come and go, but shoes are forever. So, back to the boy, time came for my brother to start kindergarten and he had to take some wacky test to be admitted. One of the questions they asked was, “What are shoes made of?” and he responded entirely appropriately “satin, of course.” Instead of fast tracking him to the Fashion Institute they declared him too immature for school. My mother was never more proud.