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Monday, June 22, 2009 - 23:35:44
Robyn Getting Married
My friend Robyn is one of the nicest, sweetest, kindest, most badass women I know. She is blunt and sassy and she is not interested in any B.S. you (or her students) might be trying to sell. She is also engaged. I got my wedding invitation in the mail this weekend, and unlike on the Save the Date card, she even spelled my name right this time. We're very close, really.
I have only one regret about Robyn getting married, and it is that we won't shop for her bachelorette present together. After we graduated from college, about half a dozen of our friends got married in quick succession. Robyn and I were roommates at the time, and we were invited to the same parties and showers, so we usually pooled our resources at our friendly neighborhood sex shops. She and I didn't embarrass easily and between the two of us, we never missed an opportunity for a good double entendre. To hear us talk, we were our generation's versions of Mae West. So, when we got invited to a bachelorette party, there was a certain degree of pressure. We had reputations to protect.
That summer, we made enough shopping trips that we became familiar with the inventory, and we evaluated each gift on a case by case basis. Was the bride more of a Condom Sense lady or a Curry's woman? Were we getting them something the couple was likely to use or wildly impractical? How much was too much, and what was so tame as to damage our aforementioned reputations?
There were also unspoken rules about how to behave while shopping. We never pointed or giggled or made any face that even hinted we might be surprised or scandalized by the things we saw. Because for reasons I can't quite explain, I don't like to appear shocked. Maybe because I grew up in a small town, I'm afraid of looking unsophisticated or inexperienced in the ways of the world. Or maybe I just don't want to give people the satisfaction of provoking me in that way. But whatever it is, and whatever Robyn's motives were, we played it cool.
For one shower, a friend of Robyn's from church asked to tag along. We reluctantly agreed, then cringed as she repeatedly pointed, giggled, and called out to us, then held up merchandise with a mix of glee, embarrassment, and just a pinch of fear. She seemed like a lovely girl, but there was probably something a little Mean Girls about the look I gave Robyn. The one that said, "This simply will not do."
Along the way, at least one cashier mistook us for a couple. She recommended a book for us to try for when you didn't know how to communicate your desires to your partner, which I found hilarious because if there's someone I could say anything to, it's Robyn. And she's never been one to hold back her feelings either, which is one of my favorite things about her.
She's one of my favorite ladies even though we don't see each other very often since she moved to Cleveland. It's mostly an email here or a voicemail there about movies we think the other might like. Sometimes those messages start of with, "I don't know of anyone else who might like this but you..." One of those was a movie so dark and disturbing I almost threw up, but she was right that it was amazing. She is truly a kindred spirit, and while I'm having trouble finding the right dress for the occasion (somthing that says, "I love you. Thank you for not getting married in Cleveland in the winter. Now, where's the bar?"), I'm thrilled for her and her fiancee, Steve. Congrats, guys!
Sunday, June 21, 2009 - 12:20:56
Te amo, papa!
My father likes to brag that he has 1,000 nicknames for me, and I think his estimate is not far off. They range from "Sweetart" like the candy to "Carla." They make me crazy, but I have no power to stop him. I have tried to break him of the habit of identifying himself when he calls me. Between caller ID and his distinctive voice, I know who it is by the time he says, "Ashley?" his usual greeting to me. Trying to short-circuit the inevitable, I would say, "Hi, Dad" or "Hola, Papa!" But he always insists on identifying himself. "This is your faaaa-ther" he says dragging the vowel out and using a vaguely Boston accent to make the pronouncement. Somehow I feel the New England based wood working shows he watches on PBS every Satruday are to blame, and breify get annoyed with both my father and Norm Abrams. He's done this every time he calls for years now. It's our little patter. Just like every time I come home he will joke about how it's good to have me back under his roof and the influence of his guiding hand. He's got a million of 'em.Since I went to college, I've proved quite resistant to the wisdom he's tried to give me. I stay up too late, I had male roommates, and most notably, I wear very high heels. I have a collection of shoes with heels that range from 2.5 to 4 inches. "You're scaring all the men away!" he tells me when I put on shoes that make me 6 feet tall. "Men should be braver" I usually tell him.
Dad laughs whenever I give him a particularly sassy answer. Every once in a while he describes my personality as "salty," but I can tell he approves. I'm pretty sure I haven't turned out the way he expected his daughter to be. When I was little, my grandmother kept me well stocked in sweet, hand-embroidered dresses, and among those 1,000 nicknames are both "little girl" and "baby girl." But he's always teased my brother and I, giving us a hard time, and as a result we learned to give as good as we got. It's partially his fault that I turned out as salty as I did, and I don't think he'd have it any other way.
This year, I've sent my appreciation for all those years under his roof in the form of a clock radio and in his honor I'll spend the entire day in a nice sensible pair of ballet flats.
Thursday, June 11, 2009 - 19:18:10
By "Roughing It," Do You Mean Sleeping on Scratchy Sheets?
Before I moved to central Arkansas, I worked for a program called Upward Bound in the southwest corner of the state. We helped prepare high school students to be the first in their family to go to college. It's a fairly rural area, and even though I grew up there I only knew the path from my house in DeQueen to Texarkana, where I went to go shoe shopping or watch movies or eat at fancy restaurants like Applebee's. When my boss told me she wanted me to do a recruiting presentation at the school in Saratoga, my first question was, "Where exactly is Saratoga?"
I asked everyone in my office, and they all said the same thing: "Okay, so you know how you're leaving Mineral Springs and you're headed towards Tollette..." One of them also added as an aside that some people refer to Tollette as "toilet," which I could have guessed since they have similar pronunciations and also because I was once a third grader myself.
None of them noticed my blank stare at their explanation, though, so I finally stopped my coworker, Tina, and said, "Why would I be driving toward Tollette? Am I lost in this scenario?" I finally learned that Tollette is near the community of Schaal (pronounced "shawl") and halfway between Mineral Springs (a city with a population of about 1,500) and Saratoga, which is more or less a suburb of that thriving metropolis.
I'm a city girl. Even when I'm not living in a big city, that's where I want to be, and I try not to drift too far from the beaten path. Nature's nice and all, but I don't want to live in it or even visit, really.
At work, we have a Page-A-Day calendar in the bathroom. Last year it was 365 days of great books, but this year it's one of those survival handbooks. I always thought those were meant to be a joke. Like, their tips for how to avoid being bitten by a shark would be limited to things people learned from watching all the Jaws movies back to back, and the number one tip would involve Roy Scheider somehow. But they're actual tips for surviving really dangerous situations.
Thursday, June 04, 2009 - 23:41:00
Turn Around, Bright Eyes! (Don't Do Drugs!)
Two people I know this week have referred to a YouTube video called Total Eclipse of the Heart: Literal Video Version. It's basically the original video but the old lyrics have been replaced with new ones that just literally describe the weird ass stuff on the screen because have you seen that video? With the school boys with the glowy eyes? It's messed up. You can watch it here.My friend Regina sent it to me in an email, and I didn't know what it was. When I heard the opening notes, I screamed and closed the window immediately. I was an Orientation Leader for the University of Arkansas one summer, and we had to do a skit...but, not really a skit because we didn't talk, so a pantomime, I guess, to that song. It was an anti-drug bit, and I'll never know why we chose that music. It was decided before my time, and all my fellow OLs and I could do was commit to it. The bit went something like this:
All but two of us stand with our backs to the audience. We are wearing black sweatshirts with the names of various drugs on the back in white letters like you'd see on a sports jersey. For my money, the best one was the one that just said X, and it should be noted that when it got cold in our office, we would put them on. So, I'd frequently be typing in a sweatshirt that said HEROIN.
As the music plays, a girl whose name I can't remember would wander out and then my buddy Jason would join her, frolicking onstage. They'd skip around and cavort, but then the people in the drug shirts would seductively wave to her. She'd begin glancing our way becoming more and more interested in us.
Breaking away, she starts hanging out with ACID, MARIJUANA and the rest. Then, the drugs all hold hands, encircling her and running playfully around her. But lest we forget, there's a dark side to drug use, the drugs keep Jason away. When she tries to escape from the circle to join him, she discovers (gasp!) she is trapped.
Here, to be honest, my memory falters a bit (mostly due to how I've been suppressing it.) This or something thematically similar happens next: The girl begins to get scared. She loves Jason and misses him. They have drifted to opposite ends of the stage to represent how drugs have separated them. Finally, she's had enough and breaks free. Across the stage, the couple see each other and then (as the song builds in the background--Briiiiiiight Eyyyyyes!) they run to each other and embrace!
There you have it, an anti-drug message brought to you in the form of interpretive dance. We did that number for every session of orientation, and I think it averaged out to two shows a week. In rehearsals, we melodramatically lip synced to the song because, really, how can you not? Eyes squeezed shut, clutching our chests with one hand, we would just go for it. By the end of summer, I'd head that song more times than I'd care to count, and I sort of overdosed on it. Maybe there's a finite number of times you can hear that song, and I used them all up? Whatever the reason, I cannot hear that song without out the totality of that whole summer hitting me at once. It's too much.
After I'd calmed down from hearing the song for the first time in years, I finally remembered I could control the volume on my computer, and I watched the whole YouTube video on mute. It's a different experience, but the subtitles still work pretty well to carry the joke. And that way I can get through the whole thing without screaming and with minimal flashbacks.
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