Snow Day !

"I have Often Walked Down this Street Before, But the Snow was Never on my Feet Before"

We don't often get snow in north central Texas, (generally every other year or so we get a dusting) so we get pretty excited around here when we do. People around these parts still reminisce about the "great storm of '08" which happened in March, of all things. (Started snowing mid-morning; by 1 am they closed school. My normal 5 min commute home took 45 minutes.) This being an El Nino year, we've had 3 - or is it 4?- snow storms so far this year alone, and winter is not over yet. The one we had on Feb 11 broke all records for the greatest amount of snow to fall in a 24 hour period in this area, since records started being kept. The official record for this latest event is 12" for the DFW area, and Denton was no exception. School was cancelled for a record two days over this one; I can't remember that ever happening in my lifetime.
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Of course, no one in north central Texas has ice scrapers for cars, snow shovels or blowers, much less snow boots or heavy winter clothes, gloves or hats. They don't even sell that stuff in stores. Hubster and I have a half-broken snow shovel we brought back with us from Virginia, and all the clothes we wore when we lived there. Our children, however, refuse to wear coats so I stopped buying them several years back. Fortunately, they now, as teenagers, think they are 2 kule to actually go out and play in the stuff any more, and would rather sit around with their video game systems, anyways.

Seinfeld Withdrawal

Isn't this more fun than "Friends" ? For some reason, that show just never really did it for me. Maybe those characters are just a tad too GenX - while the Seinfeld characters are all Baby Boomers, as am I. I just couldn't relate to the "Friends" type of angst

I have many secret guilty pleasures which are sometimes embarrassing to admit ...one of them is an addiction to "Seinfeld." I don't know why this show is so funny, so applicable, so necessary to my life.....it just is. As a small child, my mother raised me to watch "I Love Lucy" reruns on a daily basis, (mom loved watching them while she cooked dinner) and I think, for a while, it shaped my life. I still treasure the "Hollywood" episodes of that series, with cameos from Harpo, John Wayne, William Holden, et al. Can still recite many lines of dialog verbatim, and perhaps modeled some of my own personal life and relationship expectations on episodes where Lucy and Ethel made bread, Lucy's commercial for "Vitameetavegemin", when she stole footprints from Grauman's Chinese Theater, or tried to sneak in to the show at Ricky's nightclub. Life got too busy for me to watch the show for a few years, and when I finally tuned back in, sadly, I found that my attitude toward "Lucy" had changed. In between, the women's movement came along, I went off to college, became a rad fem, grew up, got a job. Lucy's relationship with Ricky now felt demeaning, and Lucy's lack of personal empowerment was humiliating to endure. I just couldn't watch it anymore.
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Shortly thereafter, I met and fell in love with with the 80's-90's show "Seinfeld". I don't remember when it first happened - maybe when I lived in New York, maybe some other time. The setting of the show is not what has held my attention all these years, rather, it is the comedy shticks and the relationships between the characters. Just like "Lucy", there are classic old vaudeville moments : "Soup Nazi", "The Bottle Deposit", "The Second Spitter". Kramer's (Michael Richards) physical comedy and offbeat ideas ( the "bro", a manssiere) never ceases to make me laugh, and the fact that "short stocky bald man" George (Jason Alexander) has a series of beautiful girlfriends who bore him, and whom he is always trying to get rid of, along with his futile attempts to avoid working at any real job - are great running gags. (Hubster says he likes Marissa Tomei, just as George does.) It doesn't hurt that one of the greatest comedic actors of a generation, Jerry Stiller, is a semi-regular on this show as George's father, Frank Costanza. (I like his son, Ben, in some of the movies he has made, but not all. Love "Dodgeball", hate "Tropic Thunder". It's just not funny to me.) Frank's stint as a chef, in "The Fatigues" is one of the greatest episodes of the series. Wayne Knight, as the annoying neighbor "Newman," is also a national treasure and needs to be given a lot more work.(I also loved him in the Branaugh-Thompson mystery romance vehicle, "Dead Again.")
I've been watching "Seinfeld" for years. Since I moved back to Texas, over a decade ago, it has aired regularly each night at 6:30 on a local cable station that typically shows reruns. At first, I was the only family member addicted to the nightly adventures of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer - but soon, my entire family became pulled into the episodes. It became a daily ritual that I would cook dinner while watching the news, and we would eat dinner while watching "Seinfeld". What this says about my family, I fear to ask - perhaps my children are doomed to a life of juvenile delinquency due to the fact that we eat while watching tv, instead of discussing the day's travails with wise fatherly advice, like those smarmy kids in "Father Knows Best".

Does this remind you of anyone ? George and Estelle Costanza (Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris) make hubster so uncomfortable when they appear, he has to leave the room. It seems they remind him of someone he knows or, possibly, is related to. (The other great tv mom who does that to him is Holland Taylor, who plays Charlie and Alan Harper's mother from "Two and a Half Men". Her voice, her clothing, her manner - excruciatingly familiar. ) However, George's relationship with his parents is stilted, frozen, and painful. He never learns how to deal with them and each encounter is nails-on-the-blackboard annoying. (Charlie, on "2 and 1/2 Men" in contrast, manages to make fun of his mother at least, although she still gets the better of him most of the time.) Watching the Costanza family dynamic ( my fave is when Estelle is in the hospital, George is visiting, and watches her roommate get a sponge bath.) is a great lesson in how not to be......and catch phrases such as "master of your domain" have become a permanent part of my family lingo.

I think, perhaps not too secretly, that I identify too much with Elaine. (This was such a great role for Julia Luis-Dreyfus, showing the full range of her talent; she also had a funny small part as the evil yuppie neighbor in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation". I absolutely hate her new show, "The Adventures of Old Christine."A recent spate of tv shows, where divorced couples are chummy and hang out together after the divorce leaves me pondering : If they are such good buddies, then why did they get divorced in the first place? Who lives like that?) I used to look like Elaine, just a bit, and fancied myself to be the same sort of sassy, confident, career woman. I do have guy friends I used to date, but later became just friends with, like Jerry and Elaine. I would have loved to have had a career writing gibberish for The J.Peterman Catalog, (once bought a dress from them back in the '80's) and traveling with my boss to Thailand, England, Africa, and places in-between.
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A few years back, hubster and I found ourselves country and western dancing in a honky-tonk in a tiny little town in far west Texas. The local denizens there thought our dancing style was, to say the least, peculiar. Neither hubster nor I have hung out in bars, discotheques, or danced much (other than at weddings) since our college days, and it is probably safe to say our dancing "style" froze somewhere around 1983 when we were at parties listening to The Judy's, The Clash, Gary Neuman, the Thompson Twins, Madonna, the Eurythmics, and the Ramones. So I secretly worry that I , too, dance like an idiot these days - just like Elaine - and that people are laughing at me behind my back.
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With great anxiety I discovered one day last fall that suddenly and without warning, "Seinfeld" was taken off the air at my preferred 6:30 time slot. Sure, local stations were running back to back episodes at midnight...what's up with that ? What good does that do anyone who comes home from a long stressful day at work, needing a little laugh ? Sadly, I searched the dial, looking for something similar in tone to take it's place. There was no "Simpsons", no "Three Stooges," nothing. I was bereft. The days dragged on..... I still cooked dinner each night while watching the daily disasters on the evening news, but with nothing funny on tv, my attempts to get the various members of my family back to the dinner table were futile. We dragged on in this dispirited manner for months, me sitting alone at the kitchen table, kids wolfing their food down and going upstairs to play video games, hubster pacing around the house. In the words of Jackie Childs, we were "disgusting, salacious, outrageous !"
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You can imagine my pleasant surprise the other night when I turned on the tv, was scanning the guide, and suddenly, in it's old 6:30 time slot - was "Seinfeld". Could it be that other people also missed watching this show while eating dinner, and hounded the station to bring it back? As perverse as it sounds, this show about nothing brings my family together. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Weird Moment

In 1977-78 I was dating MC, an handsome older student at the local suburban high school I attended. The crush I had on him was severe and everything he liked, did, or touched seemed just magical to me. It is safe to say he was truly my "first love". At the time, I was 17 years old and taking a heavy academic load at school and did not have a part-time job. I remember wanting to buy him a Christmas or birthday gift (can't remember which) but had no money to do so; I asked my mother for some allowance or pocket money to shop for him. His favorite cologne at the time was Aramis, which seemed truly sophisticated to me in 1978 as it was only sold at Neiman-Marcus. Without remembering why or where I came up with the idea, I do remember I wanted to buy him something made by Aramis, and settled on the idea of a soap-on-a-rope, which was the least expensive item in the product line. My mother and I had a hideous, colossal yelling screaming fight about the issue, that went on for days, and she refused to give me the money to buy it - she said it was too expensive. A recent google search for this item turned up a pretty consistent price of $14.00 currently, and I extrapolate back to think it cost about the equivalent of that much, 30 years ago.
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Instead of giving me the money, my mother went to some discount drugstore and bought a cheap soap-on-a-rope for me to give him, instead. I think the one she bought was made by Pierre Cardin and looked strangely phallic in shape. It was truly embarrassing to look at (and odd that my mother, so Puritanical in her view of the world, didn't "see" it.).
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I vacillated for days, agonizing over the issue, b/c it boiled down to essentially no money = no gift or else the ugly creepy totally-not-the-right-one my mother had bought. Eventually I caved and gave MC the cheap hideous thing, figuring it was better than nothing. He was charming and polite and accepted it with grace. I felt agonizingly embarrassed.
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Skip ahead 30+ years....I had completely forgotten about the incident. (Maybe this was why I got a job shortly thereafter, and have worked continually ever since, so I have almost never put myself in a cashless, powerless position like that, again. ) Imagine my surprise this Christmas when my two sons opened their gifts from my mother this year....and they each got Aramis soap-on-a-ropes. My mother had no idea why this was the thing to buy them - in her aging forgetfulness, she had also forgotten the original incident. I know, b/c I queried her at length. She just knew they were special, but couldn't remember why.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

Snow is such a rarity in north Texas....and a White Christmas has never officially been documented since records started being kept in the late 1800's - until now. 2009 draws to a close with two, yes two ! Texas snowfalls in the month of December, one the very first week of the month, and the most recent one falling on Christmas Eve. It was such an unusual, exciting event, people felt they just had to get out and dance in it !
The snow started falling in the morning, but did not stick to anything for hours, because it had been sunny and in the 70's the day before. That's Texas weather for you. By mid-afternoon the ground temps had cooled enough that the snow, still falling (and not, I must add, our normal ice pellets which pass for snow around here, either, but real fluffy flakes of it) finally began to accumulate. Frantic last-minute Christmas shoppers attacked the mall in a frenzy. Traffic all over the DFW metroplex slowed to a snarl as highway overpasses began to slick over. (Sand trucks ? Snow plows? No one knows what those things are around here; we are the only people we know who even own a snow shovel- and we brought it with us from Va. They don't sell those things south of the Mason-Dixon line.) Fortunately hubster, who had just returned from visiting relatives during the Great East Coast Blizzard of '09, managed to fly in before the Texas snowstorm hit, and just narrowly avoiding being stranded on a plane or in an airport somewhere else and missing Christmas.
It was an unusual, welcome, beautiful Christmas present. Many churches started canceling their Christmas eve services, worried about folk driving in the weather as the sun went down and road conditions grew worse. Our little family carried on, easily making it to church but by the time the service was over, the drifts made it impossible to see where the road ended and the curbs began. We made it home safely, just in time for our family feast. My sons are getting to that age where they'd rather play video games than slide down the hill in the nearby park on giant pieces of cardboard ( what passes for sleds around these parts), and that saddens me, a little.

Я люблю все русское!

My family's ethnic identity is German on my father's side, and mostly English (little bit of French, little bit Cherokee) on my mother's side. Yet for some reason, even as a youngish child, I became fascinated and fixated with various aspects of Russian culture. I think it all started with the PBS production of "War and Peace", which I remember held me spellbound in the early 70's for the several months that it took to run its course. Anthony Hopkins just sizzled in his break-out role as Pierre, the bumbling idealistic aristocrat rebel-without-a-cause. (He was the first of several of these types I was drawn to.) My bff Monica and I soon were re-enacting various plot lines from this long soap opera with our little dollhouse villages and reciting bits of dialogue while avoiding strenuous activity in the hideous p e classes we shared, which we likened to working in the Gulag or Napoleon's March home from Moscow in the bitter winter snow. (One of hubster's fave anecdotes in the field of metallurgy concerns the buttons on the French army's uniforms....) The tv mini series of "War and Peace" inspired me to read Tolstoy's novel at age 12, and I found that it was not (as it is often jokingly referred to) a particularly Herculean task. No longer than Twilight, Gone With the Wind, an Anne Rice or Steven King novel or any other dense tome that people love to bury themselves in, the only tricky thing is keeping track of the 30+ main characters with long Russian 3 or 4 part names. I simply give them nicknames, and skim through the long passages substituting the nicknames for the 3 or 4 part-ers when I read. I enjoyed War and Peace so much that I frequently re-read it, along with other Tolstoy works , and soon became immersed in other Russian authors such as Chekhov, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gorky and Solzhenitsyn.
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I also loved the movie "Dr Zhivago" as a child, and was inspired to read Pasternak's novel from which the movie drew its inspiration. If you ever undertake this task yourself, you will quickly realize that the plot of the film comprises only about half of the novel, and that the author's chief allegory of the literary work (each woman Zhivago gets involved with represents a different stage of the Revolution) is completely lost, as the final third of the novel (and final lover of Zhivago) is entirely omitted in the film. The love story between Zhivago and Lara is blown out of proportion and the author's point is completely obliterated in the sappiness of their movie romance. That happens, sometimes, when a novel is turned in to a film.
I wasn't one of those little girls who grew up taking ballet lessons ( lord knows why, my mother dragged me to art lessons and sewing lessons and many other kinds of lessons) but I wanted to be. I never got to experience the thrill of partaking in a student performance of "The Nutcracker" ballet until a little friend of my younger son was coerced into playing all the boy roles, because his sister was one of those little girls who studied ballet, and as each year passed, she rose through the ranks of her particular academe, starting out playing flowers or snowflakes and eventually working her way up to major roles in our small town production. So it became a kind of holiday tradition to show support and go watch my son's friend sullenly be one of the boys at the party, or Clara's brother, a dancing Chinaman, etc, as he danced alongside his sister, willingly or not. Who knows? Perhaps some of the great male ballerinas got their start in similar fashion. I couldn't help but think of this as I recently watched the San Francisco Ballet's "Nutcracker" production on tv one night. What a fresh new vision (costumes, set, staging) for this (sometimes stale, yet beloved) holiday classic. I haven't been this entranced since seeing Baryshnikov perform it....truly magical. The music never ceases to enchant; I love even Disney's version from "Fantasia". (It must be noted, I am a true curmudgeon, and many Disney films.......dare I say it ? Grate on my nerves. Too many singing __________! (fill in the blank: mice, butterflies, candlesticks, sea creatures, frogs, whatever.) Yet I can watch "Fantasia" endlessly and never grow irritable. The music is that wonderful.

Those of you who know me have heard the many bizarre stories about my mother-in-law, especially in the realm (that's another blog entry!) of gift giving. Yet a few years back, she gave me a truly wonderful present for Christmas, why I have no idea, and I have treasured it above all others. It seems she had recently visited St Petersberg, which I really want to do, esp after reading my book club's selection The Madonnas of Leningrad awhile back, a beautiful little book and not long or difficult to read. It is the story of the Siege of Leningrad, and how the citizens, esp the employees of the Hermitage, survive. As they are slowly starving to death, they play a game of remembering ALL the artwork - which has been hidden away for safety, and all they have to look at are bare walls - and where it hung, what it looked like, the artist, its provenance. Along the way, reality and fantasy begin to blur....... If you love art history or WWII, you will love this book! Anyways, my m-in-law had been to St P, and for some quixotic reason, bought me a beautiful enameled jewelry box painted with a scene from "The Firebird" on it. It charmed me immediately, and ( almost) made me forget all the tense moments we have had, previously.