Archive for September, 2011

Happy Mothers Day To Me!

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Do you ever feel like a plastic bag

Drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?

I woke with one of those hormonal migraines.  Not a great start to the day.  My oldest son, who was staying with me, was born 28 years ago to the day, May 8th.  It had made a most wonderful Mother’s Day gift.  And now he just announced he’s in a severe depression.

Do you ever feel, feel so paper thin

Like a house of cards, one blow from caving in?

I spent the next several hours in a dark room, preparing to go to my youngest son’s fourth audition for a singing competition reality show.  My headache was getting worse by the hour and I’m secretly praying for the call from Barnaby letting me off the hook.  A call in which he will say, oops, he got the time wrong and it’s done.  He will be on this new show or he won’t be, and I can then rest comfortably.  But no, that doesn’t happen.   At around 4:00 p.m. I walk into my husband’s office at home and announce in a very quiet, suffering voice that I will be heading to the downtown venue.  I feel for him since he needs to wake up for work at 4:00 a.m. and tell him he can pass on this one.  He offers to drive me anyway.  What a relief, I accept the generous offer.  I’d have jumped at if I weren’t in such pain.

Miraculously, we make it to downtown Los Angeles in twenty minutes.  Crossing my fingers, it looks like things might work out well.    We turn onto the right street and suddenly what come into focus are long lines with thousands of human beings.  It looks like chaos, though I’m sure there is an order to it all.  Dread sets in.  I hate crowds.  I text Barnaby a frantic message.  There is a spooky line of regular people.  He will know what I mean.  I get a text back from Vice, the other member of his group.  He says to tell a security guard that I’m a family member of Wild Thingz.  I do, and it helps us get in much faster.  We are led into a huge arena and herded here and there like cattle until we find our upper level seats.  The rest of the place fills with all the “normal” people who waited for hours in line.  They start to chant, Simon! Simon!  And suddenly it sinks in what is about to play out.  I do not watch reality shows very often, if at all.  I have never watched the one this Simon was on before.  I don’t, however, live under a rock, so I have landed on the channel a few times, long enough to see him abuse random performers.  At this point, I’m terrified of what is about to happen to my kid.  I look to my husband with sheer panic.  “Is this one of those shows where the guy is REALLY mean?”  I want him to answer, no, honey.  He doesn’t.  He tells me the truth as I start to curl into a fetal position. (more…)

I’ve Got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates

Saturday, September 17th, 2011


I heard from Ruth, my erstwhile boyfriend’s mother (and my surrogate mother and neighbor), that she was expecting a young guest. Rumor had it the girl was my age. I got the feeling Ruth wanted me available, though she never framed it that way. But she knew how friendly I was and probably assumed I’d show the “British” girl around.

I was an out-of-work actress with no life whatsoever. The day she arrived, I threw on my new 70’s roller-boogie-disco skates and headed down to introduce myself. “Hi,” I said in my overly friendly, Welcome-to California, not-really laid-back at all kind of way. Hard to ignore my neon blue and yellow roller skates in place of proper shoes, the different colored bobby socks, clashing with all the other colors adorning me, namely the electric-blue-shimmer-spandex pants. Think Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu. Lisa, the girl from London, must have thought central casting had put out a call for a quintessential Hollywood actress type. Welcome to L.A. Let me show you around!!!!

And I did. We missed nothing. Went with my dad to Nate n’ Al’s for deli and wonderful old Jews coming onto her. Day trips to Malibu beach. She looked like me, or rather had very similar taste. We bonded over many like-minded things. Lisa had fantastic style, gorgeous with her naturally dark, curly, perfectly ringleted hair. I’ve paid fortunes for perms that failed to make me look like Lisa. The most beautiful blue eyes. A Jacqueline Bisset type. Lisa wore sleeveless shirts sporting some serious-looking, mysterious scars at her shoulder down to her elbow. And I was so impressed with how she rocked those scars, never covering them and comfortably exposing them. Made them sexy, like maybe I wanted some groovy scars like that. The story was she got them in a gnarly car accident. Pins, rods and all.

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Lake House

Monday, September 5th, 2011

I’m a looky-loo. I real estate dream shop online, a lot!!!! Late one night when my husband was safely sleeping,  I forwarded a photo of a house on a lake I had found and the subject said, “Lets buy this instead of doing an addition to our house.  It’s MUCH cheaper.”

So, instead of doing construction , we bought a house online in Quebec.  Doesn’t everyone in L.A. do that?  Come on.  You know you do.

Well, we did.

So, there we were that first week, enjoying our pristine lake when we got our first and possibly only visitor.  It was our neighbor, the retired judge who lives up the road on our quiet lake.

He was there to inform us about ecology and keeping the lake from getting that nasty blue algae that was killing a lot of the other lakes.  First we heard of that.  Perhaps we didn’t research enough.   Pollution was the culprit.  He told us about phosphates and to use phosphate- free soaps and detergents.  We were in.  He told us to let our grass grow wild right at the lake’s edge.  We were reluctantly in.  The former owners had loud parties and cut the grass long after they were told it wasn’t safe for our lake.  We would be the good citizens and stay on top of all that we could.  Have good lake etiquette.  And we did.  And we do. (more…)