Pop That Cork!

I wish each and every one of you the year of your dreams. 

May I also add, I find you absolutely irresistible. 

Bottoms up, angel pants, and be joyous!

May all of your celebrations be just as spectacular

(please click & swoon...)

Tip of the Hat

Remember when men dressed in smart suits and wore hats? Me, neither. And neither does my next door neighbor who wears gray sweats with a hole the size of a silver dollar in what should be a very private zone.

To be fair, I'm just as guilty as he is. As I write this I'm wearing what I like to call, yoga pants, which is just a high falutin' word for, old stretchy black sweats. What happened here? When did we get so lazy and creepy looking? Just look at what's happened to Las Vegas. My god, it used to be alive with money, sin and glamour. Ladies dripped with diamonds and wore big huge hair-do's. And, of course, men wore suits. Now Vegas is just fat. We're too lazy to even put the Las in it. Vegas. Buttery buffets and sneaker clad visitors with buffoonish tee shirts that read, "Vegas, Baby!" or "Slot Slut!".  Good night.

People used to dress up to go the movies, to the grocery store, for lawn bowling. (I know lawn bowling is extinct, I'm just trying to make a point here.)

Listen, I'm wearing "yoga pants" because I'm indifferent about dressing. I work from home. Who's going to see me besides the UPS guy and my horribly dressed neighbor? And sometimes I kick it up a notch, put on jeans and a cute top, maybe even a charming little dress, but those days are few and far between. I think we all need to collectively do a lot better. What does it take, an extra 10 or 15 minutes to doll up? And for the men, more like 46 seconds.

Can you imagine? We'd blow our mutual minds with our snappy looks.

So it's agreed. We'll all cut the shit and start looking like the smart set that we are.

Or, and I'm just throwing this out there for the sake of comfort and conversation...we slip into our roomy sweats and cool all this fancy pants chatter.

Ho Ho Ho!

"Merry Christmas, nearly everybody!"

-Ogden Nash

Light Up Your Christmas, Old-School Style!

In Tofino with Toots

When I was nine I spent the summer in Tofino Canada, vacationing with my very best friend, Melissa, and her rich, oddball father, Rod.

In fact, I had spent the last three summers doing the exact same thing, but during those trips Melissa's mom had come with us. This was the first trip without her and I felt her absence immediately. For starters, Rod wasn't big on rules. Like staying sober. Or feeding us. He was big, however, on his new girlfriend, Toots. That was her name. We even stole her wallet late one night and checked her driver's license. Toots, it read. She arrived the day after we did, wearing a see-throughish orange sundress and you could glimpse her lacy black bra underneath. She was exotic and terrifying.

The Tofino house was enormous and sat on a huge piece of land in front of the ocean. Toots wandered around the house picking up the knick knacks and candlesticks Melissa's mom had lovingly arranged in previous summers, as if she were taking inventory.

Toots and Rod required a lot of privacy which left Melissa and I with time on our hands. This can be an exciting thing to a nine year old. We felt like short adults. In the morning we'd find the handfuls of crumpled twenties Rod had left us on the kitchen counter. We'd eat cold pop tarts in the back yard and then wander into town where we bought People magazines and postcards that I'd send home to Seattle, scribbling notes about the fine time I was having.

Rod always smelled of scotch and expensive cologne. He had thick wavy black hair and an elegant gold watch and looked the way I imagined a jet setter would. He was the first man I'd ever seen who actually had a money clip which made it seem like his money was worth more.  Rod normally wore tailored suits, but here in Tofino he favored linen pants and pastel colored shirts. He roared around town with Toots in a red convertible. And then a white one after he crashed the red one. Both at home and in Tofino Rod remained remote, like he was watching Melissa and I from another room. He always seemed just out of our reach.

A couple of weeks into summer there was no pretense left of Toots and Rod looking after us. The two of them slept late into the afternoons on the days they were home. Even at nine I knew it was sad for us to be left so alone. My parents knew my every move, my every friend, my every grade. Melissa could go missing for a couple of days before a red flag would be raised.

About this time we started spending long afternoons at sea. A little fishing boat sat at their pier and we'd start up the engine and head out. We took these trips seriously, packing food, rods, reels, bait and a stack of our People's.

We were living a life that was filled with freedom and fear. We were nine and it's really dark at night. We had to learn how to do our own laundry and make our own dinner. We made a pact with each other to not let our hair get too dirty. Of course there were many nights that we cranked up the Grease soundtrack, singing loud and bad while layering on Toots' makeup, telling each other ghost stories and secrets, but the plain fact is, nine year olds need to feel somewhat supervised.

Toward the very end of that summer we were out on the boat when a storm came. Our heads were buried deep in the People's and we didn't see it coming. By the time we did it was a little too late. Something like this was bound to happen. The long and short of it is that the boat was smashed to bits and local fishermen plucked us from the water and took us home. If Rod were there, they would have beat him up. Since he wasn't, they called their wives who dried our clothes, gave us baths and made us hot soup. Melissa and I laid awake all night, holding hands while we waited for Rod and morning to come.

That was the last summer I went to Tofino. Melissa and I saw less and less of each other as the years went on. She began to become what girls will sometimes become when they aren't parented all that much. In high school she acted tough and dated hard characters trying to hide it all away.  But from time to time, whenever we ran into each other,  we'd catch eyes and smile. We knew each other in a way that no one else ever will. We knew each other in the way that only nine year old girls who've been caught in a wild storm can know each other.

My fine, brave friend, Melissa.

No Way, Jose

I noticed that my garbageman, Jose, had lost a tremendous amount of weight. Yesterday afternoon I quizzed him about it.

"All carb diet." That's right, All Carbs! He breakfasts on donuts and toast. Lunch is a combination of tortillas and potato chips. For dinner, baked potatoes and linguini. Snacking on pretzels is a must!

What have we stumbled onto, I thought. Just what dietary walls are we breaking down today, America?

Not many, I'm afraid. On his way back to the truck he threw in that he also quit his 12 can a day beer habit.

So close. So very, very close.

She's Eternally Aces

"Show me a woman who cries when the trees lose their leaves in autumn and I'll show you a real asshole."

Nora Ephron

(my hero of all time)

My Bad Reputation

About one million years ago I stood in the middle of a boozy, smoky loft, the floor littered with bottles and crushed cigarette butts. It was about 4 in the am and I was quite drunk and so were the dozens of other mohawked attendees. This was more or less a routine evening for me at this time in my weird little life, but what stands out about this particular evening was what I overheard. A tattered looking lad was sitting on a tattered looking couch. He leaned in toward his friend (who appeared to have vomit drying on his chin) and said, "She can be so fucking harsh, man. Just so mean."

The "she" in question, was me. It was jarring to hear. I'd always thought of myself as kittenishly soft. Very affable. But, apparently, these two did not.  Why, I thought as I smacked them about their pale faces. Why on earth would they say that?

While icing my fist, I took a good, long, hard look at myself. Perhaps there was something to what they said. Yes, I yelled a lot. Yes, I sometimes stormed out of rooms when people were mid-story because I didn't want to hear the boring end. Yes, I chucked things when I got mad, occasionally leaving someone with a faint scar. (Very faint, you crybabies.) Things were beginning to add up.

As I stumbled home I decided it was probably time to mend my ways, lighten up a little, try out some charm school magic.  Nobody wants to be seen as a meanie,

But here's the thing - no one bothers to tell you how much fucking energy manners take. How time consuming it is to hold a door open, dash off a thank you note, give away your cabs, or smile. These were dark times for me. Just lifting a lit smoke to my lips was absolutely exhausting most mornings.

I spent the better part of a week doing what I could to improve my character before wearily flopping onto my unmade bed and deciding that in a certain light, there was a forceful beauty in a bad reputation.  Maybe not such a bad thing after all.