The Difference Between Boys and Girls

Posted on April 9, 2012 by

#5 got a cell phone for Christmas.

He’s too young for it, we know.

We were maxed out on our family plan when it came time to get one for #4, who was literally the last kid in the sixth grade without one. We had to open a whole new account to accommodate her, and at that point it was easy to add him on.

For the record, we’re talking about basic phones here. Not smart phones. An awful lot of kids in the middle school here got iPhone 4′s for Christmas. Our kids referred to them as spoiled, which made me proud.

Though it is quite possible they were just saying what they knew I wanted to hear in hopes that I would buy them smart phones next time around.

I figured #5′s phone would last three months, tops. Turns out it was #4 who broke her phone first.

Ten days after Christmas; water damage.

She didn’t do it, she swears.

Kids text. They don’t talk on the phone. I wish someone offered a plan that was unlimited texts and like, twenty minutes a month. I would totally come out ahead on that. Which, I suppose, is why no one offers that plan.

Most of the texts I get from the girls are either asking for something that will cost me money or complaining about something that will cost me money. They are nearly always misspelled, and not in a fashion that saves them any extra effort.

-Wat is 4dinnner

-Cant we haaav bk instead of stew

-do i haaavd to do choares please say no

-HELP ME. SHE WONT STOP SNORRING.

-I haaaaate her shez such a b-word!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

-Cn u leev $$$ for me pleeeez?

-I just want to give you a heads up about tour. I’m going to need two new dresses. And probably shoes as well. (#2 always spells everything correctly)

Though I have to say, during the brief span of time before she broke her phone, #4 did send me a picture of Casey wearing the Gene Simmons wig.

#5, however, is different. He never texts me with complaints about his sisters, requests for money, or to say he didn’t like dinner.

This is the kind of thing I get from #5:

OH NO MY ARM!!!! EVERYTHING'S BETTER WITH PERRY

A picture of him being attacked by the vacuum cleaner on a Saturday when we left them with an extensive chore list.

“Everything’s better with Perry” was his signature line. A reference to Phineas and Ferb, the greatest TV show of all time.

So when my friend Walter brought me a gift to give to #5, I texted him.

Me: My friend Walter brought me a gift for you.

#5: sweat! tell him i said thanks

I’m pretty sure he meant “sweet”. He didn’t ask what the gift was until I got home. As if it never occurred to him to pester me via text.

The pestering came later, and it was really directed more at his sisters as he proclaimed with great joy, and even greater volume, the two magical words that named the gift, over and over, all day long:

BACON WALLET!!!!!

It is his most cherished possession. Thanks, Walter- it’s sweat!

Posted in Bad Parenting, The Heathens | Tagged , , , , , , | 18 Comments

One and Done Sunday #14

Posted on April 1, 2012 by

Hey. It’s One & Done Sunday. I’m actually on a one & done Sunday schedule again. Cool.

I took this picture months ago at work (at the old job). They were putting in these defibrillator stations and, apparently, it is done in stages.

This would be the Lysol stage. That’s the bathroom right behind it, so I guess it’s not wildly inappropriate.

I’ve tagged some links from posts that I’ve enjoyed and even though they weren’t all put out this week, here they are.

First off, if you’ve ever been around midtown New York, I’m willing to bet my overtime paycheck that you have seen the Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar ads. They’re plastered up everywhere. There are more Dan Smith ads than there are trash cans. Or mail boxes. Or Famous Ray’s. Even more than Starbuck’s.

There’s an electrician in our business to whom someone made the comment that he looks like Dan Smith.

Which he doesn’t.

But then he made this. Randy Zaibek Will Teach You. . . and I howled. Every time I go back to it, it’s funnier.

A post on gratitude, and why one man runs. Run to Be Fit.

For writers, Kristen Lamb’s Seven Deadly Sins of Prologues.

Christine at QuasiAgitato’s post on, as I like to call it, what the hell happened? Plan Z. For those of us who were planning on being far too famous to have kids.

You probably have said something like this to a child at some point, and this guy made art about it. Deny Designs.

An old post, but SUPER frickin’ cool! A hand-knit skeleton.

Happy Sunday.

Posted in Ha, One and Done Sunday | Tagged , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Coming Back to Life

Posted on March 29, 2012 by

A couple things always surprise me about going through production to open a show. I don’t know why I’m surprised; I should totally be used to it by now, but I’m not.

Maybe I’m like the goldfish. They say goldfish have no memory, so every trip around the bowl is a new experience. Swim swim swim. . . Hey, look! A plastic cave! Swim swim swim. . . Hey, look! A plastic cave!

Or like the addict: This time, it’ll be different.

One of the things that surprises me is how each time I do production, it’s harder. This is because each time I do it, I’m older (I hit 40 this month, post to come!). My brain thinks that with age comes experience and so each production period should be easier than the last. My body, however, says, Sweetheart, you ain’t twenty-eight anymore.

When the sleep deprivation is hitting me and I struggle lifting coils of cable, it strikes me how viciously difficult it must be for women that have their kids later in life.

The other thing that surprises me is how long it takes me to come back to life when production is over. In my head, the day after opening night I have my house clean and I’m making home-cooked meals after I run five miles and go to yoga. My body, however, is fully invested in making endless pots of tea, reading magazines, and eating Girl Scout cookies.

Which is bliss.

All the flowering things are blooming in my neighborhood. It’s really beautiful. The last time I was here during daylight, it was winter. To me, it’s as if they just popped up in full bloom overnight.

And around my house, I struggle to understand anything that’s happening:

#4, wearing one shoe: I lost my shoe.

Me: I see. That’s problematic.

#4, to #5: Can you come help me find my shoe?

#5: You lost your shoe?

#4, shaking her foot: Duh.

#5: What’s wrong with you?

#4: Just come help me look.

They walk out of the kitchen. About thirty seconds later #5 walks back in.

#5: Sometimes she makes no sense.

Me: Oh?

#5: Yeah. She just told me to come look for her shoe and we went to her door but then she wouldn’t let me in her room.

Me: Hmm.

#5: That’s like sending a cow to an orphanage.

Me:

One of my favorite bloggers came to my opening night show last week and wrote about it. Check her out: GoJulesGo at GoGuiltyPleasures- How I Almost Walked The Red Carpet Last Week.

Posted in #4, #5, Bad Parenting, staying sane during production | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

I think we made it

Posted on March 22, 2012 by

In the [truly] immortal words of the lead character in my show, it is finished.

We open tonight.

Finally.

At some point during the party that follows the show, reviews will start to post online. People with iPhones (which is everyone except me) will read them and word will spread. What did they say? Did they like it? Do we have to look for work next month, or can I buy a new laptop?

And after tonight, irrespective of critics and ticket sales, I start to get my life back.

Right now it looks like this:

That’s our room. All my mess.

Underneath that pile is my writing desk.

My life also looks like this:

*sigh*. Well, at least I know they ate.

I took the kids to school for the first time in months this morning.  I overslept. I was cranky and snappy. There wasn’t enough food for lunches for everyone (not that I had time to make them all anyway). But damn, it was good to see them. I tripped over their shoes and ignored the clothes on the living room floor and gave them money, and sat with the pull of truth inside of what a terrible job I’ve done on the parenting side of things during this production period.

I’m glad we’re at the end of this.

Lots of people have jumped in to help us get through the past couple months, including my mom, my sister, and some of the best babysitters in the world. CC is amazing, the way he’s kept everything running while going into production on his own show. The kids have also stepped up and taken on more responsibility. All while I get to work with some of my favorite people, doing a pretty kick-ass thing. I’m a very, very lucky woman.

Hey, when did we get a rat?

To all the incredibly talented people – and I do not say that lightly – that I am fortunate enough to work with, I say: Thank you. Break legs. And, hopefully unnecessarily preemptively, Ben Brantley is a twat.

Merde!

Posted in Bad Parenting, Puppies, Stagehandery, staying sane during production | Tagged , , , , , , , | 24 Comments

Pi Day Pie

Posted on March 14, 2012 by

I can’t believe it’s Pi Day again already! In honor of this, my favorite geek holiday, I’m reposting my Pi Day Pie blog that I ran last year.

Happy Pi Day.

 

Sunday Night:

#3 just came running in to remind me that we need a pie for tomorrow. A few weeks ago she gave me a sheet from her math class. It was about Pi Day (March 14) celebrations, and they were asking for, among other things, some pies.

Last year I saw a picture of the most badass Pi Day pie ever made.  I just searched Google images and can’t find it, which can only mean that I must know the person who made it and saw the picture on Facebook. It was homemade, crust and all, with the symbol Pi cut out of pie crust and placed on top in the center, and then the numbers cut out of pie crust, placed all around the edges of the pie. This was the first I’d ever heard of celebrating Pi Day. I was an instant believer.

I am a geek at heart and that pie thrilled me. This memory is what welled up in me when #3 handed me her math sheet, and it was what took over and compelled me to yes, volunteer a pie. I was going to make her a homemade pie, crust and all, and decorate it with as many decimal places of Pi that I could fit around the circumference.

Then I went to Berlin and we had some crises at home and I forgot all about it until she just now came to me, and I am jetlagged and cranky and the last thing I want to do is leave the house and make a goddamn pie happen.

This is what happens when I try to be a better parent.

But.

I said I would.

I am now off to the store to see how I can remedy this with a half-assed solution without totally crushing my geek spirit, or completely letting down #3 and her math class.

I asked CC for input. (Foodies, you can stop reading here). He suggested frozen pie crusts and canned filling. Hot damn!

*********

Back from the store. I assemble the pie parts and then proceed to use an additional pie crust and cut out numbers freestyle with a blade. I am way too into this. The kids keep coming by and looking, and they comment on how cool it is and how unlike me it is. It takes a long time. I do not read #5 and #4 stories tonight like I usually do on Sundays. I do not even tuck them into bed. I am Baking a Pie. Leave me alone.

I signed up to give a pie to try and be a better parent.  I end up being a worse parent with a nifty pie.

Nifty, except it had an accident in the baking process. The color is uneven. And it ripped, and now it looks like it’s bleeding.

Doesn’t it rock?

I had hoped that some superior mom would be envious of my pie and erroneously attribute me mad parenting skills. That was before my Pi pie turned into sweet vampire protection.

Posted in #3, Bad Parenting, Ha, The Heathens, Yum | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

Punctuation Saves Lives

Posted on March 6, 2012 by

Image: dailywritingtips.com

I remembered this image when I was searching for a title to start writing today’s post. I was going to call it:

Jesus Christ. What Happened?

and then I realized I could also call it:

Jesus Christ (what happened).

And then I giggled uncontrollably because I’m doing production on a show that has Jesus in it and it’s the reason I’ve been posting so sparsely and sporadically since December. I would like to say that everyone here at work in the theater turned around and asked me what I was laughing at but the truth is they’re all so used to me being on auto-giggle by now that no one paid any attention and even if they had, they wouldn’t laugh anyway.

We’re at that point.

One of my favorite places in New York is the Westerly Market. It’s a small natural foods grocery store that I love mostly because it has tasty snacks and my favorite chocolate. They have healthy things too, including a juice bar.

We had a strangely-timed lunch break today because we’re shooting B-roll (video to be used for publicity) so I went to Westerly and hit the juice bar. I got a shot of wheatgrass while I was waiting for my drink.

I dig wheatgrass. Sue me. And yes it does, in fact, taste like grass. I’m pretty sure when I was an infant I spent a significant portion of my crawling months eating grass. It’s just that good to me.

The drink I got today is called a Maca Firecracker.  It’s coconut, cinnamon, agave, cayenne, and maca. It’s divine. Heavy on the cayenne, easy on the agave, as per my request.

It was perfect.

I paid at the juice bar ($12.50. No, I’m not making that up) and then grabbed my tasty snacks and went to the front counter to pay for them. You have to do that separately because making drinks that involve pressing wheatgrass and hacking open coconuts is quite time-consuming, and they can’t mess around with ringing up your tasty snacks back there at the juice bar.

At the front counter, I pay for my tasty snacks and then watch, like it’s in slow motion: My sleeve catching my Maca Firecracker and knocking it off the counter. The cup flipping upside down. Me screaming “nooooo!” in a very Wookieish voice. Half of my nectar of the gods rushing out of the broken lid.

Here’s the thing about a Maca Firecracker. When it’s spilled on the floor, it looks like vomit. I’ve never had so much personal space anywhere in New York City. I’m considering carrying around rubber vomit with me just to get everyone out of my hula hoop.

Oh, so back to the Jesus Christ (what happened) thing. I’m in production, blah blah blah. The hours are long, yadda yadda yadda. Also, there a lot of screens. It looks like this:

By the end of the first week of tech rehearsals I had the worst case of screen-related eye strain I’ve ever had (even worse than the case I got when I stayed up all night and wrote this post over the summer). When we finally reached the day off I had to lay around with my eyes shut. I didn’t even make it to yoga.

I had to read analogue books for a whole week (I read Sara Zarr’s How To Save A Life and Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman)’s Black Heels To Tractor Wheels)

Even now, ten days later, I can feel my retinas singeing. It’s still bad enough that I’m not even going to attempt to fix the alignment of these pictures.

Speaking of wheatgrass (and we were, earlier, I swear), there’s a guy I work with who is friends with a guy who started a wheatgrass company out of his apartment back in the day . The mice kept getting into and eating the wheatgrass. And the more they got into it, the harder they were to exterminate.

I feel like the wheatgrass people could make a motto out of that somehow.

I guess none of that really had anything to do with punctuation.

Posted in Books, Solely for my own amusement, Stagehandery, staying sane during production, Yum | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 23 Comments

Oh Yes I’m Hot

Posted on February 22, 2012 by

The town I grew up in got cable when I was eight years old. It consisted of three channels: WTBS-Atlanta, WGN-Chicago, and USA. Plus you got a free month’s trial of HBO and I remember straining to listen through the family room door while my father watched Bo Derek in Ten, which was deemed inappropriate for my sister and I.

I still haven’t seen that movie. But I remember a bunch of the dialogue.

MTV hit the air in 1981 but we didn’t get that in my town. On Friday nights, if we could stay up late, we could catch some videos on USA’s Night Flight  or WTBS’s Night Tracks.

We had the same three channels up until my parents got divorced and I moved to the “city” with my mom and my sister.

And then, holy crap: there was MTV.

Between the summer we moved and the summer my grandma died from cancer, she came to visit us at our new apartment. That was my eighth grade year, highlights of which included seven Jennifers in my class (none of whom would speak to me), my locker number (666), getting mono, and wearing out the grooves on Duran Duran’s Rio and Motley Crue’s Shout at the Devil. My sister and I introduced Grandma to MTV, and her favorite video, inexplicably, was Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher. 

This was the first thing to ever indicate to me that old people could be cool. It’s one of the reasons I’m staring down the barrel of 40 with anticipation rather than trepidation.

CC has a theory that you can’t be depressed while listening to Van Halen (and by “Van Halen” I mean everything up to and including MCMLXXXIV and not anything after that). I’ve tested this theory numerous times over the years and it appears to be true. Also, I have found that you cannot drive the speed limit while listening to Van Halen, and it is compulsory to scream sing along.

Grandma loved Hot For Teacher’s itty-bitty Van Halens, the ridiculous four-man choreography performed by a band containing only one member who could actually dance, and even the stripping teachers, but most of all she loved Waldo. Waldo in all his nervous, nerdy glory.

I love Waldo too. I feel like Waldo inside probably more often than not.

Grandma just howled every time Hot For Teacher came on- which at the time was approximately every 22 minutes.

I guess I have an extra reason to not be depressed while listening to Van Halen.

Every time I’m driving by myself, listening to Van Halen, blowing my voice out and shaving twenty minutes off my commute, I think of my grandma.

Posted in Music, Solely for my own amusement, staying sane during production | Tagged , , , , , , | 17 Comments