Mumbling Madly

A special thanks to my longtime friend, KB. Not only does he make this blog possible, but he continues to be a true connector amongst old friends and new. Here we are drinking “Christmas” out of mugs and looking smashing at Ben’s table.

After eating a large meal of black beans and corn tortillas on 23rd in Portland, Kris, Josh, and I returned to the ‘Couv to a familiar haunt: Ben’s House. This was the location of many a high school drama party; Ben had a pool–a rare find in the Northwest. Granted these were fairly innocent pool parties…I wish I could say we at least skinny dipped, but there was none of that…Mostly we went there to burn off our teenage angst and energy. College would later corrupt us, but ten years ago we were content to somersaulting off the diving board, cans of Shasta, and games of chicken. Sadly, the pool was covered, and in its place is a fabulous green lawn. Ben lives in LA now, but the remains of my high school friends try to regroup every Christmas. We were a powerful posse, we drama, Knowledge-Bowl playing, new-waver, Doc Martin wearing (before they were cool), suitably grungy, theater kids:

Ben’s hair hasn’t changed….but brewing his own beer is a new thing! However, I opted for his homemade, spiced, wine-like concoction he entitled “Christmas” (in a cup).

Josh really enjoyed Ben’s homemade beer. It’s hard to read, but his mug inquires: What’s Brewin?

Ben’s longtime lady-friend, Missy, holding their little dog. Later on, Missy and Ben invited us to jaunt on over to LA for a visit–maybe even attend their legendary, annual, St. Patrick’s Day part-ay! We were very intrigued.

Parked outside of Kris’ apartment was a car with the following enscribed on the window:
“Dance as if no one is watching you, Love as if you’ve never been hurt before, Sing as though no one can hear you, Live as if heaven is on earth.”
First of all, I’m impressed that someone would have the desire to put this entire paragraph on their window. (And you all know how I feel about bumper stickers). Don’t people typically put large brand names on their back window? Like OAKLEY or something equally stupid. Or my favorite are the kids who paste their name in Old English on the back: “Jose” or “Josalito” or even better yet “Blessed Mother” accompanied by Lady Guatalupe. Maybe that’s just a Ft. Collins thing….
Second of all, I would have really dug this quote when I was an angst ridden, poetic, teenager. I wrote this kind of stuff on my walls and really BELIEVED in it, man, I mean…YEAH, “love as if you’ve never been hurt before.” That stuff spoke to me back than. Now it just seems painfully corny.
Kris was kind enough to take a picture right before the owner of the car returned. And than Kris said, “Hey, we took a picture of your car.” And we laughed.

Ah, the gift bag…
I don’t remember gift bags as a kid. Seems like we could wrap any lopsided gift and make it work. You might use an entire roll of wrapping paper, but that wierdly shaped gift was getting wrapped no matter what. Now we have gift bags: You stuff one with tissue and plop the strange oddity right inside. And you can reuse gift bags! Many times over….how many times have we torn the tag off, recreased the edges, and put new tissue paper into a gift bag and WHAALA! We can regift the gift bag. Sadly, this cuts down on our ripping into presents tradition…it’s really anti-climatic opening up a gift bag–especially if someone is shoddy with the tissue paper. Gone are the days of ripping the paper down the middle to reveal whatever treat is inside, or meticulously peeling off the paper and saving it for another use. Now we merely peer inside and there’s our gift…you don’t even need to work for it!
Now, I find that I use gift bags with casual aquaintances and co-workers. But family members get actual wrapped gifts. I really enjoy wrapping presents. I’m certainly not as talanted as some, but I can do a mean fold down the middle…

This is the latest I’ve ever gone home for Christmas. Typically I would be home by now, savoring the family Christmas festivities leading up to the Big Day. In my home there is a certain ambiance my parents provide that I cannot duplicate here no matter what. Of course, this is largely in part, because they provide the tree, the siblings, the lending of their wheels, the classical music tinkling in the background, the gourmet coffee, the high class wine, and the pasta. Nay, you wouldn’t think it would take all that…but all of the above is tradition. Granted things are a little bit altered…instead of it just being the five of us, we now have Josh added to the family….and Mariah, and Justin…(although Josh is the only one who is allowed to sleep over–an advantage to getting married).
Friends I only see once a year swing by, or I seek them out…we reminice, we gossip, we pet my parent’s overweight cats. This year we’ll truck on over to Josh’s eldest sister’s house on Christmas Day for brunch. She has two small girls and a baby on the way. They’re cool kids who are at the height of S-A-N-T-A.
Here in F.C. I have a small, scraggly, little fir tree with a candy cane hanging from it. I meant to decorate it more thoroughly over the weekend but my heart just wasn’t into it. I did make sugar cookies, with chocolate icing and sprinkles. I’ve been plying our milkman with baked goods and he has rewarded us with eggnog.
Our lives have slowed down. I only have two little classes to teach this week, and that’s about it. The major shows are over…thank God. The parents who dislike me are forever gone…a part of history. There are wrapped presents waiting to be put away in a suitcase. There are a smattering of Holiday parties to attend. We still don’t know where Josh will be working in a month, or two….or where we’ll be living.
Hobbes has developed a taste for ham…something she never used to eat. Over the past week she’s boycotted her Ocean Fresh Friskies…the dry pebbles no longer do it for her. We were worried she had lost her appetite, until we saw her scarf down a piece of ham left over from Josh’s graduation party. We bought her new food, which she crunched down…hopefully she’s well. The last thing we need is a hungry cat on her own when we leave for the holidays.
This year we leave on the 24th, something Josh has done before but I’ve always avoided. After many years of separation during the holidays, the two of us have refused to spend the holidays apart for any length of time. The downside is that we’re hanging out in F.C. feeling very little Christmas spirit.

This is their response to: “Strike a ballet pose.”

Notice the white board in the background says: “I live in the state of Colorado.”

Mom’s lipstick at its best.

The latest scandel I’ve incurred is that of a over-zealous mother who realized two weeks ago that the Holiday Recital coincides with the annual family ski trip. She asked Chanel, the head of the recital, if we could move the show date. When that didn’t work, she agreed to bring her kid to the dress rehearsal to take pictures and that was it. I removed the kid from the choreography because, and let me spell this out: Her. Kid. Is. Not. Going. To. Be. There. Why bother, if the child is NOT going to be performing in the show? I stop seeing this kid, she doesn’t show up to rehearsals…she misses the end choreography and the group finale. Suddenly she shows up, less than a week before the show, and Mom says, “Yeah, we think we’re going to do it…she’s in the holiday show. It’s just so important for her, and now that her father’s chemotherapy is over, we have the time again” Oh my God. I took this kid out of the show…this isn’t going to work, chemo or no chemo.
Chanel calls the Mom on the phone for damage control and the Mom FREAKS out: She wants all her money back, rants and rails against me, rants and rails against the show, the school, me (again) and finally, begrugedly re-agrees to the previous terms: The Kid Will Show Up At Dress Rehearsal For Pictures. No surprise re-insertion of the kid into the choreography, no disadvantage to the poor kids that have showed up and put in their time, and no pulling the chemo card…(for crying out loud, it’s all very tragic, but that’s no excuse). Appearantly, I will never see this child again because the mother has banned her from my class forever…which is fine, we’re not talking a prodigal child here….but, to know that I am currently being boycotted stings a little bit.
It’s so typical, no matter how many parents come up and say they really like me, I do a great job with the kids, etc. it’s always the pissers that get to me. It’s always the parents who have temper tantrums that hurt my feelings and make me feel like crap. I suppose out of the 57 children that I taught this last semester, 2 is not so bad. That’s eight classes, which averages to about 7.12 kids per class, and only 2 had a freak out with me…wait, the kids didn’t have a freak out, the MOTHER’S of these kids freaked out. So what does that say?

My teenagers nearly killed me tonight. I say that as if they are “my” children, all fifteen of them, gaggling and giggling and struggling to perform on stage. We all worked so hard, put in an extra sunday rehearsal, struggled to memorize those lines, and boom, we showed up at the theater. This show broke new ground for me. Let me tell you, there are very little plays out there for teenagers, let alone fifteen teenagers. The only plays I could find were terrible early 90’s crap with an after-school special feeling…while plays like “Alki”, “The Hood,” and “Juvy” may have their place in the world of playwrites writing for young adults, I felt no love or inspiration for their tired, dry, cheesy scripts. So I found a short absurdist piece and had the kids perform it three different times with three different casts of five. The first cast played it straight, the second cast played it as a gender-bending musical, and the third cast performed the entire play in the audience. It was highly ambitious and, at times, too challenging for this group of young amateurs.
Dress rehearsal is notoriously bad…in fact if dress actually runs good than that’s a terrible omen. Dress rehearsal is the time for the blank, “deer-in-the-headlights, DEAR GOD, what are my lines?” moment that permates the stage. Each one of them had that moment, the moment of all moments where every line they memorized flies out of their head and they stare blankly into space hoping it will come to them, (cue the sound of crickets chirping away during the silence). Dress rehearsal is when the fly of every kid seems to have been left accidentally open, every dress strap has fallen down onto every shoulder, and yes…my young man in drag almost lost his wig. (Wanna quick laugh? Cast a man as a woman and let him rock it in a dress). Dress rehearsal is when I can’t sit still, I’m whispering furiously to the light and sound guy in the booth, using a galactic looking headset–which is bad news when I have to yell out to the kids onstage and subsequently yell into the ear of the lighting designer as well.
A kiddie swimming pool was placed onstage for the second act…the pool is a death trap. (OK, I’m being dramatic.) Basically the pool is terribly slick, no traction on the underside, and I watched in horror as the young lady onstage performed a flying grande jete into the pool and the whole thing slid across the floor causing her to eat shit on the ground. Luckily she was not harmed, but for the rest of the rehearsal she suffered from chronic “poolphobia” where she could barely approach the thing without the fear of it sliding out from underneath her. We solved the problem by cutting out the entire base of the pool with scissors.
During the trecherous dress rehearsal, their staging was all wrong. They forgot to smile. They had mini-teenage-panic attacks. But through it all, the cast stuck together and pulled off a remarkable show. It goes down in the history books for me…I really wasn’t sure if it was going to work out. One of our newer kids brought down the house with his slurring character of The Drunk. Another tap danced and shuffled her way through fast costume changes and plastic candy cane props. The guy dressed up as a girl was a huge hit. It worked! And they gave me flowers…and a big ass chocolate bar. Which is always nice…