Mumbling Madly

I shutter to even write this, but I am about to embark on teaching (shh) PRINCESS CAMP. This goes against a lot of my feminist values, it really does. I understand, however, that this is all part of gender identity, girls exploring the feminine role, etc. An excellent article in the NYT Magazine nails it on the head: this whole ‘princess’ phenomenon is both age/gender appropriate and a big marketing ploy by Disney. Therefore, you can expect me to don a crown tomorrow and encourage the six other little girls to get in their best princess finery. But while we color pictures of our princess selves and travel through the magical obstacle course I will also be reading tough girl books: Princess Smarty-Pants Rules, Cinder-Edna, and Pirate Girl. Sure, sure, we’ll throw in some classics–maybe I’ll have the girls retell them to me and each other. You can’t avoid Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and all the plastic Disney princesses.

It should be noted that while I talk tough I was/am a shameless girly-girl myself. I would have been ALL over the Disney Princess marketing that’s happening these days. Dress-up, ballerinas, dolls, Barbies, you name it, I was INTO it. I remember watching the Little Mermaid and feeling sad that I was just a little too old to get away with buying an Ariel doll–and this is from a gal who played with Barbies until she was 12. I understand that much of this is, again, part of girls identifying themselves. One of my favorite lines in the above article is by Peggy Orenstein is, “According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable. They believe that they have a choice: they can grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. Some psychologists say that until permanency sets in kids embrace whatever stereotypes our culture presents, whether it’s piling on the most spangles or attacking one another with light sabers.”

Sure, there are parents who roll there eyes when I ASSURE them that there will be an element of Girl Power in my Princess Camp. That we aren’t going to spend two hours falling all over each other and swooning–that we can rescue ourselves! Still, I’m totally nervous. Do we color our crowns today or tomorrow? Do I ask them to give me a princess name or do I come up with my own? I had to come face to face with the inherent sexism of Princess Camp when I had a Mom call about her son possibly taking the camp. As much as I desperately want to try and encourage parents to enroll their little boys in dance classes (COME ON, a creative movement class will NOT turn you son gay), I knew it would be really tough to bring a boy into the camp. I warned Mom: “It’s gonna be REALLY girly.” Wisely, she backed off. Because, well, I’m going to rise up to the challenge: It’s gonna be really pink and obnoxious and that’s just fine…

Stay tuned…

A quick set of pics from a hot day a few weeks ago…

First off Josh is going camping for four days and I need some playdates…what is everyone doing this weekend? (Mind if I tag along?)

A few great finds, one of them being the WalkScore. How does your neighborhood rate in walk compatibility? Do you live in a place where grocery stores, restaurants, and entertainment are just a few paces away from your front door? Or do you live in a neighborhood where you are required to get into a car and drive every time you want a gallon of milk? My neighborhood ranked 63 which translated as: Some Walkable Locations: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a car. (Sam and Erin you live in the highest scored neighborhood I’ve checked; interestingly, my parents live in the lowest).
I also recently stumbled upon this really great local reading promo: The Seattle Public Library’s Adult Summer Reading Program! That’s right, you can get a $5 gift card at Starbucks for the first three books you read! I’ve been reading a lot lately and with the Rainier Beach Library a few blocks away I stop by constantly for kid’s books for Storybook Acting and adult books for myself. Here is a quick review of some great children’s reading:
1) I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean; A cocky squid brags to all the other fish about his immense size and is then eaten by a (much larger) whale. Only the oldest of my students got the moral: There is always someone bigger then you.

2) Dog Breath; A family’s pet dog, Hali Tosis, stinks! Luckily her bad breath helps capture a pair of robbers. Not much of a moral, but the kids enjoy acting out a stinky
dog.

3) The Story Of Ferdinand; You can’t deny the lovability of a bull who would rather sniff flowers then fight. To be honest: this is the book you pass to the fruity student who may have some bumps sniffing flowers along the way.

4) I Stink!; One of my new students brought this book in to share with the rest of the class. It is truly a work of art. In great detail it describes the day in the life of a rowdy garbage truck. This book describes the garbage he ‘eats’ in detail, from dog poo to dirty diapers. This isn’t a typical Storybook Acting book, but a great read-aloud.

5) Ugly Fish; I know, I know, again with the fish books. This has been the best Storybook Acting book EVER. An ugly fish rudely eats all the new fish in his tank. Eventually another big, ugly, fish shows up and eats him. The moral is not lost on any of these students: What goes around comes around! (And kids just love pretending to eat each other).

For adults, I’ve read the following:

1) Papa Married a Mormon is written by John D. Fitzgerald, author of the Great Brain series I read as a kid. His account of his parents meeting in Utah (mom a Mormon, dad a Catholic) in the late 1800’s is facinating. If you remember the Great Brain from childhood you’ll enjoy this book for adults.

2) The Road by Cormac McCarthy; Dear God, just SHOOT me, this book was so depressing. It takes place entirely in a post-apocalyptic world. Oprah swoons about how amazing the relationship between the father and his young son is; how they JUST KEEP GOING no matter what the obstacle. Crazy, half-alive, bandits eating babies because there’s no food left? Doesn’t matter, the love of a father and son will beat all odds…even though we don’t know WHY the earth is nothing but a burnt out shell and the bleakness never leaves this book…

3) At Home in Mitford by Jan Karon; The sweetest, slowest moving book ever. I read a few pages every night. It’s all about a tiny town in one of the Carolinas where there is no crime, no graffitti, no nothing…just a bunch of small town folk having random small town problems: Someone is breaking into the church and stealing the priest’s chicken sandwiches! Who should the widower, Doc Hoppy, marry? Will Barnabus, the dog, ever chill out other then when the priest shouts out random quotes from the bible? I have to admit, sometimes when I’m reading this book while listening to the sirens go by at night, I kinda wish I lived in Mitford.

4) Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie is extremely naughty. This is a graphic novel at its most sexually graphic. I had stumbled on a review of this book in the Stranger: Three women from fairytales (Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, and Wendy from Peter Pan) are all grown up and have many a dirty story to tell. I checked this book out for the artwork…and the fifth. It’s pretty spectacular–but be prepared to be pretty damn shocked.

We have been blessed by a series of surprise visitors: ants. The LITTLE kind, thank God, the tiny kind that look like crawling specks. They were initially congregating around Hobbes’ food bowl and in the kitchen, ok, I understand that…but now they’re crawling around the shower–clearly no food in the shower. They infested a house plant (why?!) and started ganging up in the spare bedroom. Last week I doused them with vineger…which they hated and fled screaming. But as soon as the vinegar dried up they quickly regrouped. We tried ant traps–the kind where they eat poison and then go home and spread it around like an std. They are so little they couldn’t even get up the lip of the trap and into where the yummy poison was.

We sucked it up and bought the awesomely effective RAID. However, it makes me feel sick to my stomach–even though the manufacturers were kind enough to give it a sweet smell. The RAID works…sort of. After a few days it goes away and they show up again. We also discovered that the ants are coming through the floor boards…this sucks. It means they are hanging out in the huge crawl space under our house and breaking and entering through the cracks. So, we’ve sprayed their entrances and opened up windows to ventilate the poison. Josh bought a bug bomb with the intent of sticking it under the house. However, it would mean both man and cat would have to evacuate for four hours. We might put Hobbes upstairs with food and litter box and bomb under the house while we’re away at work. Or we could just wait it out…continuing to kill them with RAID, vacuuming them up alive, and cursing every time we see a group of them. Advice?

We did it…after 7 long years of nagging credit card debt hanging over our heads we finally kicked it to the curb. I say we, despite, for many years I was financially separate from my husband and in denial about my beloved’s tango with the cc. I realized that when you marry into debt, you must stop looking the other way and do your darnedest to contribute and erraticate the problem. I took over the finances two years ago and after painstaking, vacation-forgoing, Quicken-using, detail managed to click the button on finality while paying bills online today. Fin. See you COMMERCE! Quit sending me those stupid checks, DISCOVER! Stop calling my house, WELLS FARGO! (That’s the problem, once they find out you’ve paid off they start sniffing around).

I was always really poor at math (I still am), but I fell deeply in love with Quicken. Its simple categorical way of tracking, its graphs, its charts (so that’s how much I spend on coffee every month!) Sure, it takes time, and I don’t ever really look at the budget, but once it showed me six months ago that we had only a $100 to last us a week (hey, that was surprisingly hard!) Quicken informs me exactly how much gas I spend in one month, how much our trip to Port Townsend cost, and if we have enough money to, oh, you know, buy a new sweater. Despite the debt, we have fantastic credit and despite my misgivings, we purchased a house (talk about debt). We also have a hefty student loan payment still hovering on a cloud above us too, but Josh’s degree has certainly been paying for itself. When that sucker gets paid off (in 15 years) we’ll be pulling out all the stops and dancing on rooftops…just you wait.

Many of you know about Legends In Their Own Minds which opened and closed last Friday and Saturday. It was totally awesome and we packed the house both nights. With little promotion we managed to rally enough friends, family, and word-of-mouth to cram people into the Jewel Box theater. We had to turn folks away! My story about Captain Dart was shaky the first night and solid the following. I had a blast and my love for theater was officially re-birthed. (C’mon, it’s hard to feel bad when 60 people are cheering). My favorite part was reconnecting with the guys from my old comedy troupe days:

We’re all a little older, but we used to sell out houses in the late 90’s!  We’ll do it again, you just wait! Quick pics of the cast party on my flickr page.

To continue on with my previous post about Green being the new catch word of environmental marketing, I have to take a moment to regard the new trend in buying local. Sure, we all went organic, we all read with great concern how pesticides and chemicals are stunting our collective growths, and we cheered when Wal-mart started carrying organic food. We reached deep into our pockets and paid up for organic milk because we had heard wicked stories about puss dripping utters. After Oprah’s Green special we went out and purchased cloth bags so that when asked “Paper or Plastic?” we answered, “Neither.”
The organic label has been a political playground as the FDA entertains lowering the standards of what can be labeled ‘organic.’ This tampering has caused a large backlash among the purists: Back off corporate America! Certain ingredients are not organic, (like food coloring, baking soda, etc.), no matter how lenient you want to be. Bumper stickers scream out at me on my commute home: “You Were Born Organic And Free,” “Eat Non-Organic At Your Own Risk, and my favorite, “Healthy Crops, Healthy Craps.”
Perhaps this strong reaction against changing the organic standards created the Buy Local movement. This is the whole idea that, sure, you can buy organic but how many miles did your organic strawberries travel to get to you? Were they frozen on the way? Did you buy them at a huge corporate-y store? From NPR to the internet, the new bestest thing is to NOT buy organic produce from Safeway but buy local. If you’re gonna spend the big bucks (and believe me, you do) spend it on your local farmer.
Now…the actual going to a farmer’s market. I have found that in my two years of regular market attendance that they can go either way, boiling down to either the fun, community-building, feel good experience, or the crowded, stifling, self-indulgent slog. I’ve gone in the rain, in the sweltering heat, after battling rush hour traffic and a full day of work behind me. A good day at the market is one where I feel very connected to everyone there. The farmers stop and talk with me, they throw in an extra tomato for my salsa, they share cooking and gardening advice. A bad day is when I have to wait in line for ten minutes to buy a flat of strawberries; the people in front of me keep eating berries off the random flats, irritating the farmer–who is very busy–and myself. I have to keep track of which flats they kept their fingers out of so I can choose the one with the most berries to take home. A crowded market means chaos, rifling through picked over peaches, over-hearing the most pompous, hifalutin, conversations about how great Metropolitan Market is, the local playground at Madison Park, and comparisons to our local cheese with the kind you can buy in the south of France (jerks, I want to go to France).

The opposite perspective is to look at the impact local farms have on communities: do they employ illegal immigrant labor? Are they using pesticides? Are they using heavy, gas guzzling machinery to do the work instead of employing real people? Sure, there are those costs to weigh in too. However, all politics and marketing aside, there is something very smug and satisfying about swinging your little cloth bag under your arm filled with produce while holding a large bouquet of fresh flowers: You just know you did the right thing.

I can’t express to you all how absolutely lovely the movie “Once” is. I saw it on a whim and just loved it. Don’t let the term ‘the new musical’ scare you (it did for Josh), this is nothing like “Showboat.”  Imagine your favorite album layered over scenes, monologues, and scenery shots. The result is a goose pimpling, smile resulting, unusual film experience. There is easy-to-follow narrative, so don’t be alarmed, in fact it’s a bittersweet love story. Bare bones, renegade shooting in public without consent of the city, shot for a mere $150,000 budget, we need more of these sort of movies in the states. Songs from the movie are on their myspace page.

Widely received, “Once” received a whopping 97% on Rotten Tomatoes , critical acclaim at Cannes, and is sneaking up on the states to be a sleeper hit. (OK, stuck-up indie rag The Stranger didn’t like this movie, so please, read their terrible review with a grain of salt. It’s almost like the reviewer felt like he had to be all hardcore and go against the grain, because, you know, The Stranger is so cutting edge with its hideous pack of angst-ridden staff). This Irish love story is magnificent, my only regret is that I will never be able to experience it again for the first time.
So, my dear readers, just GO…GO SEE THIS MOVIE.

We just returned from a two day trip to Port Townsend. Always delightful, always beautiful, our trip was super fun. We couldn’t seem to get the food thing right, however, and with the exception of one coffee shop we found error in all our dining excursions. From finding a big hair in my salad (I picked it off and gamely ate what I could) to the horrendous, obviously frozen, fish and chips Josh ate, we couldn’t seem to eat well. I also chomped on a huge clump of nasty tasting baking soda in my vegan bran muffin (I guess that was technically my fault, what with ordering so practical).
We chose to go historical this time around at stayed at the Palace Hotel, which was once a brothel:

Pro’s: Old fashion, cute, comfortable king size bed, all the rooms were named after former prostitutes (Miss. Rose was the name of our suite), no clocks or phones in the room, and Josh sprung for the huge soaker bathtub.

Con’s: Big fat cookie crumbs on the bed spread when we first walked in, loud music emanated from a nearby club–sure it was honky tonk but after several hours it began to wear on me, three long flights of stairs and no elevator, a near fire was started when the lampshade fell off its holder and made contact with the hot light bulb (me: “What’s that burning smell? josh: “I have no idea.” me: “Wait, a minute, is the lampshade smoking?).

The close proximity to so many cute shops and cafes was super fun. I had these grand fantasies of visiting all these historical buildings but balked when I looked at the price vs what-you-actually-get ratio. The historical museum didn’t look all that promising, from what we could see it looked like someone’s senior project: photos tacked up on cardboard sort of displays. The museum store was a lot of fun:

I also had high hopes for the historic Rothschild House. I had envisioned a huge house, like a mansion on the bluff, that we could roam around and imagine what life was like 100 years ago. Instead we cruised up to a house not unlike our own, ramshackled, turn of the century craftsman. We walked into a tiny corridor with roped off rooms and a lady pounced on us. She was obviously a volunteer for the historical society and we all had an awkward moment standing in the corridor. Josh and I didn’t realize how ‘one on one’ the tour might be, there were no other people around, and the lady totally stared at us. In hindsight, I realize we were probably suppose to make small talk with the her, where we were from, what sort of tour we wanted. This sort of banter is what good tourists do. I awkwardly asked if we could look at the garden outside and beat a hasty retreat, Josh trailing after me.

Port Townsend continues to be an adorable hub of galleries, shops, and art is everywhere! The local artist coop was super cute, lot’s of cute, quirky art:

Josh noticed how hippy Port Townsend felt, what with its anti-patriotism in the windows, abundance of farmer’s markets, and a coffee shop literally on every block (locally owned I might add). I would much rather vacation in this environment then in the yuppy touristy places that even Seattle isn’t immune to, (not-local veggies at Pike Place anyone?) I also loved that art was everywhere–not just in the galleries. When trying to find a place to eat we stumbled on this large chalk poem on a picnic table:

This sweet VW bear also made me smile:

Check out my flickr page for more Port Townsend pics.

Josh bought me an ice cream maker for my birthday. I’ve wanted one forever, especially since I kept seeing these recipes for amazing ice cream in various publications. I also wanted to experiment with controlling the amount of fat, preservatives, corn syrup, etc. that goes into my desserts. Ice cream seems like the next step in my low fat ‘cooking’ quest.

In our enthusiasm Josh went out and bought a bunch of imported strawberries at the local Safeway (despite my brief protest that we should wait for farmer’s market quality berries) and we dove in with the hardest strawberry ice cream recipe in the book. We started off with a custard base which involves bringing cream to a simmer and then gently adding a cup of it to a batch of egg yolks. It’s a balance between warming up the yolks and not scalding the milk. Then you have to strain the custard and wait an agonizing three hours for the custard to cool. Our first batch of ice cream took six yolks–we weren’t dicking around. Josh also felt like we need to go all out with the whole milk and the heavy whipping cream as the base. The first round of ice cream was crazy rich with the strange aftertaste of Safeway quality strawberries. The second round I took into my own hands.

I wanted chocolate ice cream…but KNOCK OUT quality. The kind that makes you ooh and aah over the spoon. I wanted fancy restaurant style ice cream…you know the $7.00 dessert you choose over the $4.00 cheesecake. I bought a block of fancy semi-sweet chocolate, I minimized the custard base to one egg and one yolk, and I low-balled the sugar. Basically, I put a ton of chocolate, cocoa powder, a smattering of sugar and vanilla, espresso powder (to make the chocolate ‘bloom’), the eggs, non-fat milk, and heavy cream into the ice cream maker and VIOLA! A concoction was made! My first thought when I tasted my homemade ice cream was: I’ve created a monster. It was that good. I actually had to cut the chocolate with a dash of whip cream and almonds to mellow it out. This was a slightly lower fat version–I had to use up the full fat dairy products in the fridge–and it still tasted dynamite. My goal is to make a product with virtually no fat…which means I might have to cross over to frozen yogurt land. I know, I know, what do I think this is, the early 90’s? Well, all the TCBY’S closed, ok! Josh’s father calls them To Crummy to Be Yummy but my family used to love those frozen yogurt joints. It was a big deal to go to TCBY and pick out your own flavor with toppings–and my DAD actually ate frozen yogurt and he NEVER ate dessert. I realize when you mess with fat content you mess with texture, but it’s worth it to me to construct my own dessert and know my latest food obsession won’t show up on my hips. Stay tuned for more tales of the ice cream maker…