Laurel, not Lauren's Open Salon Blog

Judgmental Bitch, redux

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:07:33 -0400

There are times when I’ve really loved this place. Last night was not one of them.

A number of years back, a producer named Julia Phillips wrote a scathing memoir about her experiences in the film industry and called it “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.” I should probably call this post “You’ll Never Get a Hit on This Site Again,” but what the hell.

Yesterday, a popular blogger here posted a story about a hunting trip she’d taken up to Alaska back in her younger days, and included a photo of herself in hot pants holding a rifle and posing with an absolutely spectacular-looking (dead) mountain goat, which she’d proudly bagged. She received nineteen rave comments, including this one: “A woman in hot pants, holding a high-powered rifle and squatting next to a fresh kill. DAMN! I’m going to have to get my pacemaker retooled after seeing that.”

And this: “You are still hot but my goodness you were SO hot in that last shot” (the one with the unfortunate “trophy”).

I don’t get it…haven’t we all been skewering Sarah Palin for months over this same kind of stuff? Would someone please explain the difference? (Oh, I almost forgot, one commenter already did, in response to my comment: “I was wondering when somebody was gonna make the Palin connection, but let me just say you were first and you were hotter and far smarter.”)

Time and again here, I’ve seen people fawning over crap. Heck, I’ve done it myself. You make friends, they say nice things on your posts, and so it goes.

But now I’m wondering what, exactly, is the point of it all.

So long…I’m checking into the Lucinda Bassett Center

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:07:30 -0400

Feeling a little unsteady this morning. Whoa. Make that a lot unsteady. And frankly, that ad for the molten cheese bacon taco supreme at the bottom of my blog isn’t helping. Urp.

Huh, it’s not morning anymore? Well, whatever.

Still trying to piece together what happened last night. It’s all a little fuzzy at the moment, but I’m thinking I might have been hitting the crème de almond a little too hard. Pink Squirrels are my Achilles’ heel; just one sip of that frothy pink elixir and all willpower goes out the window, or wherever it is that willpower goes. In my case, I think it’s under the bed with the dust bunnies (who have now evolved into dust hippopotami) and my stack of unread New Yorkers.

But wait…I’ve been out of crème de almond for two weeks now…

No, it’s got something to do with a casino…good god, was I gambling again? Even after being informed by my financial planner that nickel slots are not an adequate alternative to setting up a 401k? But I do see some sort of screen, and what looks like a lineup of…it’s coming, it’s coming…eureka! OS avatars!

Yes, it’s all coming back! I was reading Vegas posts until well past 3 a.m. I read the recaps. Then I read the recaps of the recaps. Then I read the posts by people who were hurt because they didn’t go to Vegas. Then I read the posts by people who didn’t go to Vegas but didn’t want to anyway. Then I read the posts about the posts by the people who were hurt by the original posts. Then I read the posts about the posts about the posts about the original posts. Then I saw pictures of Cindy Ross’ extremely cluttered kitchen, which makes mine look like Steve Blevins’ operating theater. Then I went to bed and had very peculiar dreams.

And now I am answering the siren call of that ad that keeps flashing at me from the bottom of my blog. No, not the molten cheese taco supreme. The other one, for Lucinda Basset’s Midwest Center for Anxiety and Stress Disorders. And, what’s more, I’ve decided that the whole OS enterprise is in fact one giant conspiracy to drum up business for Lucinda Basset. But I no longer care; I’m checking myself in.

See you in group therapy.

One small step for man, one giant leap for girl

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:07:30 -0400

Forty years ago tonight, on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the Lunar Module Eagle and proceeded to take man’s first steps on the untouched surface of another celestial body, an event that was witnessed by the largest audience in television history, some 600 million awestruck viewers from around the world.

That number would have been slightly higher if Carl E. and I had been where we were supposed to be, rather than parked at the edge of a deserted gravel pit lake, engaged in explorations of a far more intimate nature than Armstrong’s. Carl was my high school sweetheart, and that night he launched his own mission into virgin territory, all within the steamy confines of a ten-year-old rusted-out Bonneville sedan. I’d like to say that we flew to the moon together, but in truth the experience was a lot closer to those early less successful Soviet efforts. Still, with all the anniversary hoopla, I’ve been awash in nostalgia for days now, thinking about a summer that’s come to feel nearly as distant as the moon itself.

At the time, our family was living in a small town about thirty miles west of Detroit. Today the sweet little Main Street is dwarfed by sprawl, but back then the place had a real Lake Wobegon feel, its population made up mainly of tractor dealers and insurance salesmen and lumpish Lutheran potato farmers, a stolid and firmly-planted lot, not given to flights of imagination. From their vantage point under the leaden skies of the Upper Midwest, breaking the bonds of Earth’s gravity must have seemed like a particularly tall order, even for the folks at NASA.

But before the Saturn V rocket had managed to lift an inch off the shimmering Florida tarmac, I was already floating on air, head-over-heels in love. Carl was a fellow sophomore who’d occupied the desk next to mine in honors English for the entire school year without offering more than a quick hello until just a few days before classes let out, when, swept up in the contagious giddiness of imminent release from the rigors of William Shakespeare, he asked if he could walk me home. He was a serious-looking boy, with dark hair and expressive hazel eyes, and the elegantly muscular hands of a classically-trained pianist, which he’d been since earliest childhood, an accomplishment that dazzled my romantic imagination. Had I been in charge of the soundtrack that summer, he would have serenaded me with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Henry Mancini’s Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet, a song that had been climbing the charts for months. But this was the late sixties, when even nascent Van Cliburns in the middle of flyover country were succumbing in droves to the siren call of heavy metal, so I settled instead for garage band covers of every cut on the first Led Zeppelin album, with Carl on Fender Stratocaster in the role of Jimmy Page.

Carl’s father had died of a sudden heart attack three years earlier, leaving his mother, a high school counselor, to hold down the fort. His older sister quit school the day she turned sixteen and spent her days watching TV, throwing a ball for Fritzi, the family’s miniature schnauzer, and growing pudgy on a diet of ice cream and Gino’s Pizza Rolls. The state of affairs at my own house wasn’t any closer to an episode of Donna Reed, but for two young people under the spell of first love, our elders existed as little more than background static, sort of like the grown-ups in one of those classic Charlie Brown specials, whose intrusions were limited to the occasional annoying “mwah-wah” from an off-screen trombone.

During the school year, it took at least two hits on the snooze button before I could manage to emerge from my slumber, but with the advent of summer heat and surging hormones, I snapped awake at the thunk of the morning paper hitting our front steps, followed by the crunch of gravel in our driveway as my dad drove off to work. I would creep out of bed and throw on some clothes, trying not to rouse my mother, and after gulping down a quick breakfast, I’d slip quietly out the back door and hop on my bicycle. Our house was in the old part of town, while Carl’s family lived in a subdivision on the outskirts, one of several that had sprung up over the rapidly waning decade, leaving behind the tattered remnants of apple orchards and patches of corn fields that had long since gone fallow. Carl would meet me somewhere in between on his own bike, and together we’d ride the back roads in the tepid morning air, heading for nowhere in particular, but always with an eye out for a good place to pull over and neck.

When our lips weren’t otherwise occupied, we would lie on our backs in the still-damp grass and spin ambitious plans for ourselves. I imagined my fame coming from somewhere in the literary realm, while Carl saw his own glittering future as a lead guitar player in the rapidly expanding rock star field. Whatever our destinies, they would, we were certain, be forever intertwined.

Then, about a week before the Apollo launch, his mother announced that she’d accepted a position with a school district in Phoenix, Arizona. The Mayflower van was scheduled to arrive on August 20. Mwah-wah.

“Why don’t you kids stick around? We’ve got Jiffy Pop.”

My mother was straightening the pillows on the den sofa while my father tinkered with the foil-covered rabbit ears on our Zenith console. Our neighbors, the Shulkes, were coming by to watch the moon walk at our place, since we had the bigger TV.

“That’s okay, mom. We’re going to watch over at Carl’s.”

We’d told the same lie, only in reverse, to Carl’s mother. The car we got from Carl’s best friend, a goofy-looking kid named Mike, who was a year older and played bass in the fledgling garage band. I hadn’t yet turned sixteen, so car dates were still out of the question as far as my folks were concerned. Normally, they might have made further interrogations about the logistics of my evening, but their attention was already focused on the TV, where Walter Cronkite had begun his lead-up coverage. We were home free.

I guess I wanted to have some claim over him when he left, some way of making myself indelible. The astronauts’ destination might have been a staggeringly distant one, but for a girl who’d never been west of the Mississippi, or even beyond the borders of her home state, Phoenix was, from my untravelled perspective, only a marginal improvement. We parked at the edge of the water, glistening in the light of the soon-to-be conquered moon, and I could already feel him drifting away from me even as the first buttons were hastily undone.

He wrote me several times a week for almost a year, and I’ve managed to hang on to the letters through a couple of marriages and more than a dozen moves, still in the same battered Kinney shoebox, a personal time capsule currently nestled in my basement next to several cartons of old LPs and a stack of Polaroid photo albums, the frozen images inside now discolored with age. We spoke on the phone as often as our parents would allow; long-distance calls were relatively expensive in those days and placing one still something of a big deal. There was always a hiss on the line, a sound that made me think of bird-scattered wires strung up across lonely miles of open prairie, carrying my voice to places I had never been, till it finally reached the ear of the boy I loved, the boy who would eventually tell me that it was time for us both to move on.

“Hello, is this Carl?”

I’d hoped I wasn’t slurring my words. The glass of red wine I’d poured to fortify my courage had gone down more quickly than I expected.

“Yes, this is Carl.”

Forty years gone by, and I still recognized his voice instantly, older and deeper, of course, but hearing it was like dropping down a wormhole to the past. It had taken me just a few seconds to find him on Google, on a ten-inch laptop with more than 200,000 times the capability of the giant mainframe that guided the Apollo 11 astronauts on their historic voyage. I’d done a little research before I dialed, though I didn’t find much; fame, rock n’ roll or otherwise, had obviously eluded him. He was living in a mid-sized city, married with a kid in college, and he earned a living as a professional piano tuner.

As for my own high-flying dreams, they, too, succumbed long ago to Newton’s inexorable law. My prose has largely been confined to the pages of advertising and promotional materials, and even in that world, my accomplishments have been modest; my last big paying job was writing copy for a line of industrial safety products. But I’ve got a really great husband and a lovely home, and just enough free time to land myself in trouble on occasion.

“Um, this is a voice from your past. Distant past.”

There was a slight pause on the line while the mental gears clicked, about the same duration as my Google search. Then the unexpected reply:

“Heeeey, Janice! Holy fucking shit, is it ever great to hear from you!”

I read only recently that Armstrong’s iconic boot prints are, in all likelihood, still up there in the black dust of the Sea of Tranquility, along with the American flag he planted and a smattering of other artifacts from that first lunar landing; everything just as it was forty years ago, now resting quietly in the windless vacuum of space, preserved for all time. Or at least until space tourism becomes a reality and they cordon it off and start selling tickets. I sincerely hope this doesn’t happen. Some things are better left alone.

I quietly pressed the disconnect button, hoping desperately that my first love hadn’t gotten around to installing Caller ID.

Blogging here versus blogging there

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:07:26 -0400

I was sorry when Will Someone Feed the Cat pulled the plug on her blog here at OS. I thought she was an excellent writer, so I wasn’t surprised when she sent out a PM disclosing her true identity as a Canadian newspaper columnist. A couple days ago, I finally got around to checking out her official blog over at the Toronto Star. Same first-rate writing, as you’d expect, but I can’t really imagine myself going there to read her posts on a regular basis, even though I’d eagerly read the very same words here. How come, I wondered?

I decided to solicit the opinion of my buddy Mumbletypeg, a font of wisdom on many things. Interestingly, M-peg had a similar response when she visited Cat’s site. And she came up with a tentative theory: OS is like a box of chocolates (ack…not going there, exactly), while someone’s private blog is more like a bulk bag of caramels. You might like the caramels but they’re all the same and therefore not nearly as enticing as the box of chocolates, where you can fish around the box taking random bites of whatever you’re in the mood to sample. Might be a lemon creme. Or a gooey marshmallow. Even an occasional nut.

Sure, I can see that, OS as a nice box of all-dark Godivas, say, or maybe something more along the lines of a Whitman’s Sampler, depending on the day and your particular point of view. Back when I was a kid in Detroit, every now and then my dad would buy my mom a box of Sanders candy, the Motor City equivalent of Godiva, which she would share with me under strict supervision. When it came to candy, I had a definite larcenous streak and I remember sneaking into a near-virgin box one time, promising myself I’d eat just two or maybe three chocolates at most, a level of pilfering that I’d perfected on previous raids, one that was easy to cover by spreading out the remaining pieces to cover the gaps. But my resolve weakened that morning and in the time it took to my mother to shower and dress, I’d pretty well cleared out the entire box, leaving behind little more than a crumpled mass of brown wrappers and a couple of half-finished nougats, which have never been one of my favorites. Though my tolerance for glucose was stratospheric in those days, two layers of a Sanders Deluxe Assortment proved to be well beyond my limit and I felt woozy with self-recrimination.

I’ve experienced a similar sensation right here on occasion after binging on one too many posts, particularly where cute pets or salacious personal revelations are involved. As with chocolate, the feeling is only temporary, however, and it isn’t long before I’m rummaging around for more.

But getting back to the subject of personal blogging vs. community blogging, bear with me a moment while I extend the food analogy a bit further. Visiting a personal blog, I've noticed, is sort of like sitting in a restaurant where you’re the only customer. It can feel uncomfortably quiet. For better (and, every so often, worse) there’s a palpable energy here on OS, something more akin to table hopping at a busy joint where you happen to be one of the regulars. Writing can be a distressingly solitary occupation at times, and being here makes it less so. Sure, some folks always seem to get the great tables in the front while others languish in Siberia, but the management seems pretty reasonable and I appreciate the fact that they don't expect extravagant tips...at least, not so far as I'm aware...

Of course, a private blog can differ in other ways, too. Over at the Toronto Star, Cat is the professional and I’m just a lowly reader, a relationship that’s not nearly as appealing, at least from my perspective. Here on OS, we're all thrown in together like a bunch of kids in a freshman dorm (which may explain a lot, come to think of it).

Anyway, I’m curious about what you think. Are there personal blogs away from OS that you regularly read? Meanwhile, as long as I’m in meta mode, here are some guidelines I’ve established for myself to get the most out of my own OS experience:

Don’t get into the habit of hanging out with the same circle of people all the time. Expand horizons regularly.

Try never to comment with an eye towards boosting my own readership. Focus energy on posts I truly can take time to appreciate, rather than racing through too many at once.

Avoid praise inflation. If I think something is brilliant or if I LMFAO over somebody’s humor, by all means let them know, but don’t overdo it to the point where we’re all going to have to invest in shovels in order to wade through a comment thread.

Don’t ignore Gail Collins because I’m too busy blogging. Or that guy snoring over on the next pillow, whose name temporarily escapes me.

Further thoughts, anyone?

UPDATE: Cat said it was okay if I revealed her true identity. She didn't intend to make a big mystery out of it. Her name is Lorraine Sommerfeld and you can find her at www.lorraineonline.ca

My days in the Farrah Fawcett Minors

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:06:37 -0400

I didn’t have her skin. I didn’t have her teeth. I didn’t have her body. And I certainly didn’t have her hair. But for a couple years back in the late 1970s, I, along with about twenty million other women who somewhere deep inside themselves still believed in the existence of miracles, did have her haircut.

Unfortunately, there’s only so far a blow dryer and a round hairbrush can take you on the journey towards goddess stature. On Farrah, “the Farrah,” as the cut was called, looked like the mane of a magnificent lioness. On me, it looked like the mane of a magnificent afghan hound. Farrah undoubtedly had more hair clogging the drain of her bathroom sink on any given day than I had on my head, even after I started faithfully using Wella Balsam conditioner, a product that featured Farrah prominently in its advertisements. The last thing extremely fine hair needs, especially when it’s been razor cut into a Farrah, is something that will weigh it down further, such as a creamy substance made from the resin of pine bark. But as one who’s been bombarded by advertisements for hair care products since earliest childhood, when I was first forced to ponder whether it really was true that blondes had more fun, I am hard-wired to believe in anything I am told by clever copywriters, which is why right at this very moment there are something on the order of 75 different hair care products jammed into my bathroom cupboard, everything from texturizing gels and seaweed conditioning packs to spray-on glossers and color-enhancing shampoos. And my hair doesn’t look any more like Farrah’s now than it did $2,000 ago.

I still remember the first time I saw her. It was in that now-famous Noxzema commercial, the one where she shaves the face of NFL star Joe Namath.

“Hi, I’m creamy,” it began, speaking of clever copywriters.

I happened to be in the bar of a Northern Michigan ski lodge at the time, and every man in the place suddenly assumed the same peculiarly rapt expression that a dog gets when confronted with a platter of sizzling T-bone steaks. My new boyfriend, who sat next to me drooling into his glass of Blue Nun, was no exception, which didn’t help my mood. While he and his buddies had passed an enjoyable day barreling down the black diamond run, I’d been marooned over on the bunny slope trying, with very limited success, to get a handle on the snowplow. My muscles were sore, my ego bruised, and my hair flattened by a day spent under a reindeer stocking cap. I studied the blonde on the TV, who looked as though she had never experienced a minute of hat head in her life.

Farrah was the kind of girl that star quarterbacks fell in love with. I was the kind of girl that star quarterbacks copied homework assignments from.

I did ultimately dump that boyfriend, though Farrah wasn’t so easy to shake. The next guy to come into my life had the famous Farrah poster tacked to the door of his bedroom closet. But I’d sort of gotten used to sharing my boyfriends with her by then.

After awhile, I even learned to appreciate Farrah, without those terrible pangs of envy and self-loathing, sort of like the way a well-adjusted house sparrow must feel when it comes upon a spectacular-looking flamingo. We all have our niche in this world.

Some of us were born to grapple with split ends and cowlicks; others born to launch a thousand snips.