Fifty Shades of Red

After seeing several online postings and a segment of NBC's Today Show, I decided to see what all the buzz was about E.L. James' work of fiction, "Fifty Shades of Grey".  I almost didn't buy it because it ticked me off that the Kindle download was more expensive than the paperback edition.  After a few days of principled chest-beating, I caved and spitefully bought the less expensive paperback, especially when I saw that I could recoup nearly all my money by selling the carefully-read novel on Ebay.  The price differential wouldn't have bothered me so much if it were just one book, but this is a trilogy. And given what I'd heard about the book, I preferred the comparative anonymity of my Kindle if I were to be seen reading it in public.

Reading the book in public turned out to not be an issue.  I sat down to read about 7 p.m. a few evenings ago and read non-stop until I finished the 600+ page book around 8 a.m. the next morning.  Reading marathons don't strike very often in my household.  I'm quite embarrassed to say that the last time that happened was when I got hooked on the four-book "Twilight" series, and I came close to it on the "Hunger Games" trilogy, reading all three books in a week..

What kind of story sucks a reader in so completely that she abandons the siren song of blissful slumber?  Uhhhh, well, frankly....sex (she says as she looks at the ground and scrapes shoe distractedly).  It's not that the writing is great.  If the main character - who has been dubbed the "S&M Cinderella"-uttered the words, "Oh my" or "Wow" one more time, I was going to punch her.  The descriptions become repetitive.  How many different ways can you describe one of the most basic human behaviors?  Despite its shortcomings, the soft porn novel has hit the New York Times Bestseller List with a vengeance.  It has allowed millions of women to eagerly wait for the brown cardboard box to hit their porch.   And only the order fulfillment folks at Amazon know.

The story is so blush-worthy that the author herself was extremely self-conscious while giving a televised interview.  And why, in the post-feminist age of independent women, is a narrative that extols the seduction of an innocent college student by a twisted, young billionaire so enticing?  I'm afraid I don't have the language skills to explain that and have it still be printed here.

I can only say that if men want an advantage when it comes to picking up women, they have an extra weapon.  They need not restrict themselves to the gyms, the Whole Foods aisles or the bars in Fells Point.  All they need to do is head for the nearest bookstore, cafe or coffeehouse and find a woman with her head buried in one of these books... or wait for the upcoming movie.  You're halfway home.            

"Mad Men" - Food for Thought

Like many fans, I'm happy for the return of "Mad Men" to television.  Aside from my novel, "Ednor Scardens" which was set in that time period, there's a lot of nostalgia for the 1960's now.  An article in today's Baltimore Sun newspaper featured recipes for iconic dishes from that era to tie into the resumption of the show.  As I gazed at the pictures of Steak Diane from Harvey's restaurant, Hot Spinach Salad from the Chesapeake and Strawberry Pie from Haussner's, my mind drifted back to the memory of Paul, the street Arab who trudged the alleys behind my neighborhood.  We heard Paul long before we actually saw him through the back door, as he loudly sang the list of his offerings.  Soon the clopping hooves of his horse who faithfully pulled his wagon added a rhythmic percussion to his tune.

My mom quickly dispatched me with a list to halt his progress while she reached for the can that held her grocery money.  The wagon's metal scale, suspended from a chain, swung crazily as Paul deftly weighed her selections and I poked the row of live soft crabs, trying to make more bubbles come out of their mouths.

Her purchases were modest, as refrigerators were small back then, with freezers the size of shoe boxes.  Cartons of eggs competed for space with damp laundry stored in a plastic bag to keep it from molding before mom had a chance to iron late at night. 

Lots of things have changed in the way we prepare our foods now:  less fats and starches, more fruits and vegetables.  But some have stayed the same.  I still shake my chicken pieces in a paper bag with flour, salt and pepper before frying...on the few occasions that I prepare fried chicken.  I still have to have made-from-scatch mashed potatoes in order to eat liver and onions.  And I never, ever fix a steak on the grill without thinking of my father.

Why would a steak conjure up his memory?  At least twice during the summer months, we'd travel to Mr. Waskey's meat stall at Lexington market where Dad would gesture with his thumb and index finger to indicate how thick he wanted the sirloin slab before hurrying home to grill it.  One afternoon it began to rain soon after he had lovingly seasoned the meat.  Unwilling to change plans, he struggled to move the grill down the outside steps to the basement.  I watched as he stubbornly cooked the meat, ignoring the smoke that wafted steadily up the stairs.  The dog began to bark and mom coughed violently upstairs before she realized what he was doing.  We couldn't throw open the windows wide or else the rain would soak the wooden sills and floors.  He ate his steak sheepishly as we sat at the table, eyes watering from smoke.

Mom was a very good baker, but she wasn't a great cook.  Perhaps because of the lack of dependable refrigeration from the family "ice box" when she was growing up, she cooked a rump roast until it looked like a vampire exposed to sunlight.  She made cream chipped beef on toast that left no doubt in my mind where the WWII slang term "sh__ on a shingle" came from.   But her cakes and pies were remarkable.  To this day I cannot bear to buy a prepared pie crust.  It's like buying a box of cake mix and then saying you baked a cake.  If I'm going to go to the trouble of making something, it has to be from scratch.  I think, unconsciously, I do these ritualistic things to honor my parents in some small way.

I'll be watching the March 25th beginning of Season 5 of Mad Men, and I'll lift my flaky pie crust-filled fork in salute to my glory days.

The Changing Face of Beauty

MAC cosmetics launched a new line of makeup recently.  Nothing unusual in that, as companies constantly change and update their offerings to sustain sales.  It was the face they used to promote this new line that was the stunner:  90 year old Iris Apfel stared out of the page with her black bug-eyed glasses.  An odd choice?  You'd think so, as beauty and fashion campaigns normally focus on the teen and twenties demographic...ironic itself, because young faces need the least embellishment.  A smart choice?  Totally.

If you haven't noticed the print ads over the last few years, there has been an increasing shift toward the more mature face.  Helen Mirren, Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Ellen Degeneres and other older women have become flagship images for cosmetics and fashion designs.  Have the corporate mavens entered a kinder, more inclusive era and adjusted their mindset to be more accepting of age?  No, Virginia, there isn't really a Santa Claus.  It's all about following the money.

The baby boomer bulge has bulldozed its way through for decades, affecting nearly every aspect of society:  education, food, music, health care and culture.  As a group, we have benefited from better nutrition and exercise.  Wall Street hasn't gone all soft for us because we really are more beautiful.  They've just awakened to the fact that this generation has most of the wealth.  And even if we can't stop the clock of aging, we don't want to LOOK like our parents did at our age.

No one bats an eye when people of all ages walk or run through the neighborhood.  Fitness clubs are jammed with members of all ages.  If my mother had flown down the street in running shorts, a tee shirt and a baseball cap, we would have hauled her off for a long "rest".  There were no research studies (or if they were, they weren't widely publicized) to guide food and beverage choices.  My  mom baked pies and cakes relentlessly, laced her mashed potatoes generously with butter and seasoned her green beans with bacon fat.  Those things are now a very infrequent treat if eaten at all.  There was no sense of fashion residing in my grandmother's head once she entered her fifties.  She had her "good" coat that she kept for years, wore housecoats and gave up wearing bras (shudder).  I don't remember seeing makeup on her face unless she was attending a wedding or some other momentous occasion.     

Boomers have been enamored of plastic/cosmetic surgery in increasing numbers, but a shift is taking place.  The full-bore, hardcore facelift is being supplanted by "tweaking".  Looking good is making inroads on looking unnaturally young.  And let's face it, most of us would rather look like Diane or Meryl than Joan Rivers.

Weigh in...what's your strategy for aging well? 

Downsizing or Just Letting Go?

Each year as I go through the annual orgy of spring cleaning, I promise myself that next year it will be easier.  Then I make choices about what to put back on that shelf I just cleaned and what to get rid of.  Some years I'm afraid that the IRS is going to think that no one person could give that much stuff to Goodwill, and decide to audit my return.  So I stop giving when I reach the upper limits of what the average taxpayer in my income range donates.


I still give a lot to Goodwill, but my winnowing is different this year.  Cleaning is still necessary, but has begun to feel more like an irritating burden than a regular chore that I just do.  So now, I've determined that the less "stuff" I have, the easier it is to stay one step ahead of the Health Department.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not a candidate for the "Hoarders" television show.  But after a lifetime of slowly acquiring stemware, flatware, and other such items, their siren song has muted.  Or maybe my hearing just isn't what it used to be.

Thanks to online auctions such as Ebay, I can appeal to someone else's avaricious tendencies in exchange for money to pay off the credit cards that I racked up in order to buy the stuff in the first place.  And as the size of my family dwindles and they move to far-off locales, the dog doesn't really need to drink his water from a crystal goblet or lick his grain-free kibble from fine china plates.       

I don't have a Chicken McNugget shaped like George Washington to sell, but the clothing I saved for the time when I'd fit into a size 5 again are also on the block.  The Longaberger baskets that my group of Navy wives drooled over and held parties to afford have collected enough dust in my closet.  I've decided to get the family photographs, that hide with glued edges and inked descriptions in dozens of albums, scanned and give the digital copies to the kids.  But I fear that things like the black fiberboard funeral cards with their gilded lettering from the 1800's will disappear into a drawer and be lost forever.  Some things take longer to let go.

Stuff has lost is glittering attraction as time becomes more precious.  Even the multiple levels of my townhouse have begun to annoy me.  Smaller, spare and utilitarian spaces call to me.  I even fantasize about simply traveling - with no permanent abode to return to.  But this is beginning to sound like a metaphor for death, this journey to a small space.  So I'll pick up the dust cloth (microfiber now) for at least one more spring and keep listing my auctions until the superfluous items are gone, and I learn how to work all this stuff that is supposed to make life more streamlined.   

AN UPLIFTING CONFESSION

For various reasons, I’ve gone to an actual movie theater and seen more films this year than ever before.  That may be bucking the current home theater trend, but market conditions have converged to convince me that the higher ticket costs aren’t always an extravagance.

Specialized cable television packages are convenient, but not a great deal IMHO.  I was a Netflix customer for awhile, but my angle was to join once or twice a year for a couple of months and “catch up” on all the films I hadn’t seen.  But then the price nearly doubled, and the service was tiered so that the convenient PC streaming membership offered a more limited selection than the physical mail-in DVDs.   I find it well worth the savings to order a movie online and pick it up at the convenience store a mile away for about a dollar.  The theater is reserved for either films that are best enjoyed on the big screen format or those that I just didn’t want to wait to see.

So this year, I had more interest in watching the orgy of self-congratulation better known as “The Oscars”.  I haven’t seen the big winner, “The Artist”, yet.  Perhaps it will surprise me, but I don’t know how excited I can get about a movie with virtually no dialogue.  With that said, it follows that most of the stars and movies I’d seen went winless.  Except for “The Help”.

I touched briefly on this movie in an earlier blog (“Cry Me a River…or a Poopy Chocolate Pie”), and I really wanted to see both Octavia Spenser and Viola Davis take home a statuette.  Davis lost to perennially amazing Meryl Street, whose performances I can rarely fault.  Am I alone in feeling there ought to be a limit to the number of Oscars awarded to the same person in a lifetime? 

And then I heard Spenser state what she wanted to do if she won the Best Supporting Actress category:  to get her “girls” lifted.  She described it as having them stapled to her shoulders, so that when she turns 70, they’ll be in just the right place.  Her refreshing candor was especially striking in a setting where enhancements and augmentations are much more the norm than the exception.  Signs of aging are often the kiss of death in any business where the perception of beauty is synonymous with a youthful appearance.  Somehow, I don’t put Ms. Spencer in the Botox/Restylane/liposuction crowd.

When one of my books hits the New York Times Bestseller list, I’ll confess my own plans.  But in the meantime, go ahead, Octavia.  If it pleases you, if it improves your self-image, just do it!

My Life as a Car

I bought a car today.  Normally that would be an exciting time for most people, but for me, it felt like the end of an era.  It made me think about all the cars that have transported me throughout my life.

My parents' cars in the 50's are lost in the mists of time.  I only remember them as large and roomy until the day they moved up the ladder to owning TWO cars when dad bought a Hillman Minx.  Most people have never heard of that make or model, but he bought it because it was little and inexpensive.  It was the car I learned to drive on.  Black, tiny, and with a stick shift, it circled the Memorial Stadium parking lot in Baltimore until dad pulled out the orange cones and made me learn to parallel park.  Teeth-chattering jolts caused outcries from my parental unit as I learned the subtleties of the clutch pedal.  Not long after I got my driver's license, dad totaled it by rear-ending a vehicle driven by a friend's mom.

It was time to shop for a replacement.  At the time, I had no idea how iconic his next purchase would be.  All I knew was that when I saw him come home with a dark green 1965 Ford Mustang, I was awe-struck.  It was so out-of-character for him.  In retrospect, I think he was in the midst of some middle-age craziness.  He bought a corduroy cap and would ask me to accompany him around town.  Perhaps he just liked being seen in his trendy new vehicle with a seventeen-year-old blonde in the passenger seat.  I would do it to humor him....and to get him to say yes when I asked to drive that car.

The green Mustang was eventually replaced by a red Mustang, but by then I was driving my fiance's white Buick Skylark while he was attending Naval Flight Training.  Just before we were married, he bought a Jeep Commando that whirled over the white sands of Pensacola, Florida and took us to the Redwood Forest in California.  But as the size of our family grew, it outlived its purpose.  We bought a Volkswagen Dasher wagon with "leatherette" upholstery.  Soon we needed a second vehicle and added a red Toyota Starlet as a commuter vehicle.  It cost $5,000, tax and title included.

As the fights increased in the back seat of the Volkswagen from three kids in too-close proximity, in 1984 we bought our first minivan:  the space-age looking Toyota van.  It had a sunroof, a moonroof, three rows of seats, and a cooler.  It even made its own ice cubes.  Every kid in our neighborhood wanted a ride in that van.  I was the default driver for swim meets and anything else.  It survived being shipped to Puerto Rico for a tour of duty there.  By the time it was shipped back to the U.S., for a tour in Louisiana, it wasn't long before there was one less passenger.  The car was still around, but I was the one being traded in for newer model.

Piecemeal part time jobs provided the money to attend evening classes at Tulane.  One rainy afternoon on the way to class, it hydroplaned, jumping the muddy median, rolling onto its side and careening into oncoming traffic lanes, spewing No Nonsense pantyhose all over Interstate 10 (one of my jobs was as a part-time merchandiser).  Fortunately, I was okay, and complained to the police officer that I'd torn the sleeve of my new blouse as my arm scraped the roadway while the car was sliding.  My dad came to the rescue and gave me the money to buy a Honda Civic hatchback just before I landed a job with State Farm Insurance.

I worked as a auto claims representative for seven years until I was promoted into management.  One morning, my son woke me and said, "Come on, get up.  We're going car shopping."  I never intended to buy a car that morning, but was lured by the siren song of a 1998 Honda Accord EX with soft, plush leather, a sunroof, and a sound system from heaven.  As soon as I saw it, I was a goner.  I've loved that car, feeling like a princess every time I've gotten into it.  It owes me nothing after fourteen years of luxurious driving, but time has ravaged my car much as it has me.

My Silver Queen's surface has faded as the clearcoat wears and it leaks in a hard rain.  Cold weather and hard turns evoke groans from the CV joints and boots as well as the engine.  The valves have begun to leak and the yellow engine light has glared at me for nearly a year, demanding a new 02 sensor.  It was only a matter of time before it would break down on my weekly treks to Port Deposit, and I worried it might happen while the grandkids were in the car.  I hadn't had to make a car payment in nearly ten years.  So, reluctantly, I went car shopping.

The price of gasoline rises relentlessly, so I decided to go for a hybrid.  I could've gotten a car with lots of interior bells and whistles, but had to make hard choices.  It pained me to leave the Honda brand that I've loved so much, but the Toyota Prius is the mileage king.  So I defected...sadly.

I'll miss my luxury car and, strangely, this is the first car I've ever owned that is NOT a manual transmission - a stick shift.  The strange, spare interior is a plastic egg.  I have to LEARN how to drive it.  It is an alien creature that rolls silently at low speeds and has an all-electric drive for traffic jams and bumper-to-bumper crawls.

Don't think that I bought this car because I'm forward-thinking and mindful of the fragile ecology.  I wish I could present myself that way.  I bought it because my income is half of what it was when I was working, and because the price of gas and everything else I need keeps rising.  The bell curve of life is now on its downward curve, and I learn to adjust what I can.  I don't have a name for this strange vehicle yet, but the voice in my head keeps saying, "The queen is dead.  Long live the thing."        

Off-Key: The 2012 Grammy Awards Show

Was I the only one who felt the 2012 Grammy Awards Show was seriously uneven and off-balance?  Granted, I'm no professional music critic nor do I fall in the 16-24 age demographic, but this is an event that I enjoy every year.  And this year's show had more minuses than plusses IMHO.

I'm sure there was a lot of shuffling to include the last-minute tribute to Whitney Houston, beautifully performed by Jennifer Hudson, but did anyone else notice that there was no mention of Soul Train's Don Cornelius or Etta James during the "In Memorium" segment? 

If you are over 30, do you find yourself wondering who more and more of the "celebrities" are that make their way down the red carpet?  And why does the media continue to give air time to such wannabees as Amber Rose, whose only claim to fame is that she dated Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa?

I'm not a fan of singer Chris Brown, but I found myself laughing at the outfits that his back-up dancers wore.  My daughter aptly characterized them as flying squirrels.  And, please, I don't need two performances by Brown when so many others could have been included. 

Is anyone else convinced that male country singers who always wear cowboy hats are doing so to cover their balding heads? 

Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt joined for a lovely tribute to Etta James, but the transition from Raitt's naturally aging face to Reba McEntire's Gelfling stretched smile was unsettling. 

Some of the older stars had supporting acts to bolster their failing voices.  Tony Bennett certainly needed help, and Paul McCartney could have used some for his "My Valentine", a sweet song that he wrote for his new wife, Nancy Shevell.  He managed to redeem himself mightily, however, when he closed out the show with a dead-on performance of "Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End" with Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl and Joe Walsh providing the guitar shredding.  I guess the lack of celebrity recognition works in reverse too, as droves of clueless young viewers revealed their ignorance by asking "Who's Paul McCartney?" on Twitter.  Last year's tribe of the musically uninformed tweeted, "Who's Arcade Fire?"

It was fortunate that the show ended on such a high note.  The lows included Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, who both failed to impress despite the blue raspberry hair and the aren't-I-shocking Roman Holiday number.  It felt like Minaj was trying to out-Gaga the curiously understated Lady Gaga.

Aside from Hudson's tribute performance, one of the most enjoyable segments was the robust farewell performance of Glen Campbell who is retiring due to the progression of Alzheimer's disease.  A showman to the end, he was rewarded with a standing ovation after he ended with, "Now I'm going to go somewhere and shut up." 

Also remarkable was the 50th anniversary tribute by the surviving members of The Beach Boys.  Despite Brian Wilson's disturbing what-am-I-doing-here facial expressions, the segment was impressively supported by Maroon Five and Foster The People.

I'm hoping next year's show won't have the notes of desperation that surfaced frequently, perhaps as performers watched songstress Adele collect SIX Grammies.  The strobe-lit efforts to make the show appear to be taking place in a club, complete with Dangermouse and light stick-waving fans fell flat.  So for 2013, please, less we're-so-trendy and more of the awesome mix of music that the show exists for in the first place.