I try not to be embarrassed about the number of hours I spend watching reality television, but sometimes it’s hard. I have sworn that I will not get caught up in The Biggest Loser this fall, not because it’s emotionally manipulative (even though it is) but because it consumes four full hours per week of my precious post-bedtime evenings. I’m just not that committed to America’s weight loss trials and triumphs. I’d all but sworn off American Idol until Paula Abdul went down in a blaze of glory and now, well, I might have to watch. But NOT during the audition rounds. At least not all of them. I wish I could quit Dancing with the Stars but I’m not sure I can resist. I’m not proud of my weakness for the Paso Doble.
I am proud, however, to announce that I am a huge fan of So You Think You Can Dance. When I saw it for the first time I couldn’t quite believe that real dance – not fake ballroom, not Michael Jackson video ripoffs, not the Nutcracker on PBS – was on network prime time. I loved it but I was sure it wouldn’t last. Was the country that made The Swan a hit really going to support choreography starring electronica and a crash test dummy narrative? Would anyone tune in to a show with such a cumbersome title? Would we get it?
But, apparently, we do. The gorgeous host, Cat Deeley, manages to seem geniunely sweet and goofy and like the anti-Seacrest. The judges are nerdy and over-Botoxed but do seem to know what they’re talking about and generally don’t sound like they are on drugs. Well, except Lil C. The contestants are jaw-droppingly talented, and instead of being sold mainly on their back stories (The Widowed Church Guy! The Country Girl Whose Daddy Is In Prison!), they are featured for their talent. The prize, though nothing to sneeze at, matters less than the performances and the exposure the dancers receive. And, most thrillingly to me, the choreography is sometimes strange and inaccessible but always interesting.
Don’t tell anyone, but I think we, as a television-viewing public, are appreciating Art. And it’s on Fox. Please make every effort to keep this development from Rupert Murdoch, because this is a slippery slope. What’s next? Opera?
P.S.
I wanted Janette to win. I think Kayla was thwarted by her own weak choreography in her solos, but she absolutely rocked the stage whenever someone else gave her something to do. I believe it’s unfair that they split the competition along gender lines until the end, because at least three of the women should have made it to the final four. I loved the Butt Dance. Mia Michaels needs a new makeup artist. I’ve downloaded half the music from this season. I can’t wait until the new season starts.
I went to the dentist last week and smugly came home and announced that the hygienist told me I had pretty teeth, therefore validating my devoted flossing. And then I mentioned that I had to go back again to have a cavity filled and it didn’t even occur to me that the whole thing sounded sort of stupid. I mean, a tooth with a big ugly hole in it isn’t very pretty, is it? Especially to a dental hygienist. I think she was just trying to make conversation.
So today I had my cavity filled and the dentist had to dose me three times with the anesthesia and by the third try I just stopped reacting when the drill hit a nerve (sorry!) and dug my fingernails into my palms a bit further. Obviously I must have been somewhat medicated or I would have involuntarily shrieked at high volume but still. You’re not supposed to feel the drill, are you?
Anyway, the medication kicked in about an hour later and suddenly my whole head felt numb and everything on my right side, including my eyebrow, was rendered immobile. So my plan to go to the mall and hit up the MAC counter for some new blush was foiled and I just went home instead and tried to eat ramen. You can imagine how that went, with my droopy lip and half-numb tongue. I’m going to have to do extra laundry tomorrow. And then I baked my favorite chocolate chip cookies. Mainly to celebrate the temperature finally remaining below ninety degrees after a ten-day heatwave. But not inside my house because when you turn the oven on, it heats up the house.
Not my best day. But hey! I have a new bionic tooth and chocolate chip cookies and this week is the season finale of So You Think You Can Dance and after six hours or so I can finally feel my face again. Life is good.
Though I sometimes like to pretend high school was miserable for me, it wasn’t. It was, in almost every area, a good time. I had close friends. I liked my teachers and they liked me. I went to a small school where I was involved in everything from drill team to drama to student government. I got good grades. I went to a nice college. I had a date for the prom. But high school memories live in the portion of my brain that still is in high school. It’s the portion that can recite all the lyrics to “Right Here Waiting for You” by Richard Marx, and that is embarrassed that my best friends were always the ones with the boyfriends and I was always sitting in the back seat by myself on the way to the dance, and that flips the personality switch into Tracy Flick mode when I’m not looking. It’s the part that spent too much time feeling awkward and a little ugly even when I probably wasn’t.
So I can understand why people balk at attending their high school class reunions. When the invitation came for mine, I had a second of doubt. Did I really want to see people on whom the last impression I made was a yawn-inducing graduation speech about Following Your Own Personal Star? Or, worse yet, they might remember me as the girl who didn’t even know where the senior kegger was held, probably because there was a suspicion that she might call the cops. It’s hard not to focus on regretful behavior, but someone wise reminded me that it’s a very self-centered thing to do; most of my classmates probably don’t remember the idiotic things I did, or if they do, they’ve got their own litany of idiocy to worry about.
I didn’t let my thoughts linger for too long at the failed pep rally in my head, although it wasn’t because I made a difficult personal decision to overcome my fears and grow stronger in this difficult time. No, mostly I went to 20-year class reunion because I wanted to know the rest of the story. I wanted to see where people were living and how many kids they had and if they had become even more handsome than they were in the eighties (odds were good, considering the perms and Cosby Show sweaters everyone was sporting in our graduation photos). And maybe I wanted the opportunity to shock them all by drinking a beer in public.
Damn, I’m glad I went.
I saw my child racing gleefully through a sprinkler with the kids of one of my dearest friends. She and I were just a year or two older than they are now when we met. It made me a little tearful, until Theo threw a matchbox car at her son’s head.
I hung out with the wives of my junior high school crushes and it reminded me that small town boys have good taste (and so did I).
I heard a story about wrestling a mountain lion, masterfully told by a guy I could never persuade to be the prince in my four-year-old princess pretend games.
I recognized people by their voices and their walks which hadn’t changed in two decades, and I could tell whose kids belonged to whom because they looked exactly like their parents at age ten.
I was reminded once again that I married well as I watched my normally shy husband spend day after day conversing with strangers and politely laughing at reminiscences that made no sense to him.
I saw a lot less bad hair than when we were in high school, but that might just be because there was less hair in general.
I heard stories about children and partners and how great it was to be back in Montana, if only for just a little while. I heard no bragging about jobs or houses or status symbols.
I ate too many cheeseburgers. I drank a beer in public, but no one seemed too shocked.
If you have a reunion coming up, you should go. Ignore the part of your brain that’s embarrassed because you made out with that guy who never talked to you again, or worse because you dated that guy for ages and he might actually be there. Ignore the reminder that you never made varsity. Forget the suspicion that everyone might be skinnier/taller/richer than you. Instead, remember laughing together at your ridiculous World History teacher. Think about the time your car ran out of gas and the intriguing girl you’d never even talked to from homeroom offered you a ride. Expect to hear about the good stuff, the families and friends, because those are the stories that will get told. Don’t skip it because you “don’t want to re-live high school.” There’s no way it’s going to be the same as high school because twenty years have passed and everyone likes a happy ending.
I’m leaving tomorrow on a trip to Montana, where I will eat some steak and Theo will run amok due to grandparental spoilage, and then we will hang out with a bunch of my high school classmates who I haven’t seen in twenty years. I’m pretty sure none of us has changed a bit.
While I’m away, you should watch this trailer for the new Ricky Gervais film. He is a genius.
I’m not much for nostalgia. You’d never guess it, based on my musical taste and my pop culture knowledge, which are both firmly planted in the late 1980′s, but it’s true. I rarely sit around wishing things were like they used to be, or wondering why we can’t just slow down a little bit. I like to think about the future. I’m an early adopter. I like to see what’s next. Yeah, it was great when we could ride our bikes around the neighborhood until dusk and our parents didn’t have to worry about us, but I kind of like the idea of a helmet on my speeding child’s head. Yeah, it was great when traveling by air was a big deal and people used to get dressed up to do it, but I kind of like that it’s become part of everyday life and that we’re all more mobile and aware of the world. Yeah, I used to enjoy writing letters, but I love e-mail. Yeah, Twitter is weird, but it’s fun and really useful.
I’ve been a blog reader longer than I’ve been a blog writer. I’ve seen blogs morph from ugly journal pages that I swore weren’t really meant to be read by the public (but I’m not above a bit of voyeurism and I was reading them anyway) to somewhat more organized and entertaining collections of daily musings, to well-designed and well-written collections of personal essays. I cheered their progress. I saw ads pop up on many sites and that didn’t bother me at all, as long as they weren’t singing or screwing up my browser. Eventually I even added some to my own blog (See Exhibit A —-> ). And when the corporate sponsorships and giveaways appeared I thought, hell yeah, finally companies are marketing to me and not just to my grandmother. And then some of my favorite bloggers started writing columns at magazine sites and actually earning a living with their talent and I thought, this is how it’s supposed to be. Great writers earning a living with their writing.
These great writers have, of course, gained large enough readership that they’ve started to guard their privacy. I certainly can’t blame them. Those who began writing about their screaming babies now have older kids who aren’t as keen on having their poop stories broadcast to the world. More regular people, not just geeks, are reading blogs, which means that the risk of having one’s blog discovered by the next door neighbor is increasing. And that means fewer stories about the crazy neighbor who yells at his lawn mower, or the cute daughter who innocently likes to dance to “Pass the Dutchie,” or the book they absolutely hated because now the author is likely to find the blog and leave a cranky comment. And, well, I miss that stuff.
These successful bloggers are making an effort, I know. They try to make time to update their personal blogs, but it’s hard when paid deadlines loom. They honor the readers who love them by weaving personal anecdotes into their magazine columns, or giving away treats and prizes that relate to the stories they’ve told. They’re trying to balance the transition from hobbyist personal bloggers to career freelance writers. I get it and I applaud it and I understand that’s what the future holds. And I read way too many blogs so I realize that there are still zillions of fantastic personal stories being posted each day. I’m grateful for that.
I’m not naming names here because, really, this isn’t about individual writers. It’s about a trend. It’s an exciting trend that, at its core, financially supports art and quality. But like most changes, it means we’re going to lose something to gain something. So before I get excited about what’s ahead, please indulge my nostalgia for a moment. Do you feel it too?
I’ve been hanging out at the community center lately, near lunchtime when the local meals-on-wheels organization serves a meal to seniors in the dining room. They do food delivery too, but those clients who are able-bodied and socially inclined show up to eat and chat and pick up a sack of day-old bagels or a newspaper.
Before lunch, the center hosts exercise classes of the kind you imagine at senior centers – they sit on chairs and stretch their arms; they stand behind the chairs and stretch their legs; they bend from the waist to one side and then another. I like to watch them because they remind me of my grandparents, most of whom are gone. I lived within a half hour of all four of them when I was growing up, but when I moved away twenty years ago this summer, I saw them only a couple of times a year. I find myself imagining Grandma doing the slow-motion version of the hokey pokey at the senior center.
This week I was there a little earlier in the day, and instead of the swayers I was surprised by a whole different group. The ladies’ tap dance class was taking place on the stage at one end of the dining room and I swear I could have watched those women all day long. They were dancing to Rockin’ Robin (A Michael Jackson homage? Perhaps.) and man, could they tap. I took my share of tap-dance lessons and I never really mastered it; it’s all about ankle and knee control and I was better suited to stiff-legged ballet. The class of seven was led by a woman who must have learned tap dancing during World War II. She was serious, stopping the group when someone was clearly out of step and making them all start over again, and they were all way better than I had ever been, even at age ten with my young joints and brand new shoes.
I wonder what kind of class I’ll take at the senior center when I am seventy-five. Hip-hop? Maybe Macarena?
I haven’t posted about what’s going on with me in a while. And that’s mainly because, on a day-to-day basis, it seems like nothing much is going on. I eat Cheerios. I post boring things to Twitter. I take Theo to the park, where he spends most of his time begging to climb on the concrete skatepark and I spend most of my time pointing out that the kids with the low-rider pants and long hair would mow him down with their boards in 1.3 seconds if he toddled into their paths. I watch So You Think You Can Dance.
Aaaand I just killed a spider that was walking across the arm of my chair. Just then. I meant just to brush him off, onto the floor, but he was squashed in the melee. (This is real-time blogging, right here. Riveting, isn’t it?)
Fortunately there are a few other places on the internet where things are a bit more exciting. How about these?
Let’s Panic About Babies!
You might not want to click on that while you’re drinking your coffee because you’ll snort it out your nose. The 1-800-DINGOES ad did it for me.
John Cusack is on Twitter, another example of why it’s sometimes more fun to worship celebrities from afar than to actually know what they’re thinking. (Side note: It’s unfortunate that the more boring and misspelled the twitter feed, the more convinced I become that the celebrity is actually writing it himself.)
During the Tony awards, Bret Michaels wraps up a rollicking performance of “Nothing but a Good Time” with his Poison bandmates. Bret gets a little carried away taking his bow. The Tony show producers are hyper-aware of their schedule, considering this is the lowest-rated of the low-rated awards shows, and they need to get on with things to keep their advertisers happy. So they cue the scene change, assuming that Bret will notice there’s a giant piece of scenery barreling down from the ceiling at him and get out of the way. Bret, suddenly realizing he’s supposed to be exiting upstage along with his bandmates, turns around and makes a leap for the drum platform. C.C. DeVille tries to give him a hand. Bret almost makes it, but he’s on a collision course, and the audience cringes as he is clotheslined by a huge mural of the Manhattan skyline. Stockard Channing, gripping a fur stole, belts out “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” stage left.
That whole scenario sounds like a SNL sketch from the 1980′s, and I’m quite sure that until a couple of weeks ago neither Poison nor Stockard Channing could ever have imagined they’d be sharing a stage. But that’s showbiz, right?
Following the mishap, Tonys host Neil Patrick Harris takes the stage, makes a joke, and says, “Oh, he’s fine!” and gets on with the show. Because that’s what you do in the theatre. If Bret had been knocked unconscious during a swordfight in Romeo and Juliet (“Starcrossed Lovers’ Bus?”), they’d have dragged him offstage and his understudy would have appeared seconds later. He probably would have worn a little SuperGlue on his bruised nose during the next day’s matinee. That’s it.
Back in 1986, while promoting Look What the Cat Dragged In, Bret probably got beaned in the head by C.C.’s high kicks once or twice. Considering the way liquor hinders one’s reaction time, it’s inevitable. But I”m sure he just went right on singing “Talk Dirty to Me” while wiping the blood out of his eyes, no harm done.
But now that Bret’s a reality TV star and a blogger, he posts pathetic photos of his injuries. He blogs about how it’s not his fault, mentioning that Liza Minnelli rushed to his dressing room after the accident. He whines.
And though my fifteen-year-old self who thought hair bands were all badass would be sorely disappointed, I have to admit I’m not completely shocked by this turn of events. Just take a look at that album cover and tell me those guys weren’t ultimately headed for musical theatre. Or, possibly, the circus.
-Good Manners
I never pictured myself as one of those parents who says, “WHAT DO YOU SAY?” to her child after the checker at the grocery store hands him a sticker, but I have become the please-and-thank-you police.
-A Clean In-Box
Allowing e-mail sit in my in-box for more than a few days gives me hives. This affliction can lead to premature archiving.
-A flattering Facebook profile photo
Why, I’m not sure, considering that so many of my FB friends saw me in junior high, high school, and college, wearing an unspeakably frizzy permed mullet, braces, and/or stirrup pants. But I tried to put up a goofy one and I just couldn’t stand it.
-Comfortable shoes
I love my red patent leather heels but I can barely bring myself to wear them. I wish I could banish the worn-out Born oxfords from my closet, but they make my feet happy.
-Lipstick
I’ll wear it even if I’m not wearing any other makeup.
-Knowing all the words
I go out of my way to research the words to songs that I enjoy so that I can sing along correctly. Seriously. I’ve googled the lyrics to “Little Red Corvette.”
It’s the little things, isn’t it? What matters to you?
Though I sometimes like to 
