Sparkle, Mary Katherine, Sparkle

Thank God for mandatory public education. Without it, my kids would have to be home schooled, and by me, which is a scary thought. My knowledge tends to run very deep in a few frivolous areas, and quite shallow in the ones that count (fractions).

Left to my own devices, I’d educate my kids on stylistic differences in the work of Richard Rodgers when he was working with Hart vs. Hammerstein, but I’d probably leave out stuff that teachers tend to care about. Hey, I’d say, “I Wish I Were in Love Again” is way more fun.

Even though she has been forced to go to a so-called regular school for eight years, I have done my best to provide Mary Katherine, the budding thespian, with a bit of curriculum reinforcement on the stuff that really matters. With this goal, I’ve occasionally held “mandatory movie nights” (usually when Emma, who fears black and white, is not home).

Was I wrong to screen “All About Eve” when she was nine? Too late now, and she does a killer Margo Channing impersonation, complete with fake cigarette and cocktail. Likewise, she’s been forced to watch “Casablanca” (And “Play it Again, Sam” for reference), “Philadelphia Story,” and other lesser films, all with the goal of building up her knowledge of what’s vital to me and arcane at best to people who can add and subtract.

This weekend, I had occasion to wonder if my Classics Curriculum was perhaps a bit limited. My pal Joel came to town, and, browsing at a garage sale the day of his arrival, I found a great fifty-cent treasure – a VHS copy of “Valley of the Dolls.” It’s for happy circumstances such there is still a VCR in the house.

Joel was delighted with his gift and immediately began spouting lines: “The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that's ME, baby, remember?” and “They drummed you out of Hollywood, so you come crawling back to Broadway. But Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope.”

Well, then.

We watched the movie together that night, and, while its charms were lost on everyone else, Mary Katherine understood right away. Who needs a classic of script and cinematography when you can have Patty Duke spouting “SPARKLE, Neely, SPARKLE!”

Mary Katherine and Joel reveled in the movie’s badness. She learned the important “so bad it’s good” lesson from our visiting professor, God bless him. Monday morning, dressed in her uniform and heading off to school, she turned back to me with a wicked grin on her face and declared, “I want a doll! I want a doll!”

I can’t wait to see where this lesson shows up on her transcript.

Buying Groceries

When I was growing up, my family could have won a contest for Best Use of Euphemism in a Suburban Setting, had there been such an award. If a sensitive topic couldn’t be ignored completely, there was a strange set of Kendrick-only vocabulary words with which it could be dealt. My sister, for example, was in her first semester of nursing school before she learned that the correct anatomical terms were not “front bottom” and “back bottom.”

My own parenting goal has been to remain euphemism-free as much as possible, but it often gets me into trouble. A few years ago, for example, I was chaperone for a cabin of middle-school girls who were members of the youth symphony. As they were settling in for the night, gathered at the end of my bunk (it wasn’t my magnetic personality; it’s where the chocolate chip cookies were), their talk turned to boys and dating. One of girls said, “I heard it’s illegal to go on a date with a seventeen year old.” They turned to me. I glanced up from whatever I was reading and said offhandedly, “No, dear, it’s just illegal to have sex with him.” Talk about a way to make kids get quiet. The cabin was stone cold silent, and more than a few mouths were gaping open. The question-asker turned to Emma, awed, and asked, “Is she always like that?” indicating that my frankness was way-cool. “Yeah, she’s pretty much always the same,” Emma sighed, weary and miserable. Sexual frankness may be desired in a cabin chaperone, but it’s a trait to be avoided in a mother.

One day this summer, though, I fell prey to euphemising, if that’s a verb. And I not only initiated the euphemistic use, I invented the new term. Our family, I think, will never be the same. Here’s how it started -- I was entertaining one of my best friends, Maren Woodhouse, for the afternoon. Maren is what I would describe as the exact perfect age for a human – four and a half. She’s old enough to put on her own shoes, but young enough to have thus far avoided the demoralizing experiences that will be served up to her for the next 16 or so years in school.

Maren was at the kitchen counter, enjoying a frozen Gogurt, when Emma and Mary Katherine wandered in. Emma started talking about the foreign exchange student she was hoping we could get, and she mentioned once more how much fun it would be to get a boy and finally have a brother (significant look at Mary Katherine). I told her that I’d had a frank conversation with a family friend on that topic just yesterday, and that he had expressed astonishment that I’d allow a boy in the house under those circumstances. “They’ll be having sex all the time!” he told me. “Really?” I had asked, surprised. I had honestly thought that Emma was more interested in a basketball-playing buddy than a sex partner, but I thought I ought to let her know the word on the street and get her reaction.

“He Thinks I’m Going to Be HAVING SEX?!” she shrieked. “Having sex in the basement? In my room? Having sex with a foreign boy? Having sex?!”

At this point in the conversation, my attention turned to the little Gogurt-eater at my elbow. I have had occasion to witness her word-for-word reenactment of conversations she found interesting, and I didn’t think her mom would appreciate this particular line of dialogue turning up at the Woodhouse dinner table that evening. But I hadn’t seen Emma much over the summer (my hours being 5 a.m. – 9 p.m., hers being 1 p.m.– 3 a.m.), and I thought we ought to talk about this subject. So I fell prey to euphemism.

“For the continued purposes of this conversation,” I said, nodding significantly toward Maren, “let’s say, um …” I floundered for the right verb, then hit upon it. “Let’s say ‘buying groceries’ to describe this activity our friend thinks you will engage in with the exchange student.”

Emma picked up the phrase without a stumble and continued her rant. “If he thinks I’ll just haul off and buy groceries with some guy just because he’s in the same house, he’s cracked,” she went on. “I am not a grocery buying kind of girl. And I could go off and buy groceries anywhere, not just be so lazy as to buy groceries with my exchange brother.”

Maren kept working on her Gogurt.

Emma went on. “And what if we bought groceries and then I decided that I hated him? I’d be stuck here with him til June, and maybe he’d want to buy groceries and I wouldn’t. Ick.”

Mary Katherine got into the spirit of the thing. “What about double coupon days?” she deadpanned. “And recyclable bags?”

She and Emma laughed so hard they cried, and Mary rolled around on the floor a bit, which is a pretty normal occurrence that Maren studiously ignored.

“I’m done with my Gogurt,” my friend announced, “and I want to play with the Barbies.”

Since that day, my girls have trotted out “buying groceries” as the accepted description for all manner of sexual relations. Soon, I’m sure, they’ll embellish the euphemism with even more detail, including side-trip definitions for a quick trip to the market, or Sample Saturdays. I blush to consider the possibilities, but that might make them happier than anything. It isn’t easy to get their crazy old mother to blush.

Act Your Age

You could never say I was a girl who loved math (hardly), but there was one formula I always found fascinating – dogs age seven years for every one human year. I pondered this handy math fact quite a bit in my youth, considering the method by which all the dogs around me were racing ahead to grownupness, while I was still stuck as a little kid.

There weren’t any dogs in my house (mom and dad seemed to believe that caring for an animal would cut into all that precious time needed for addictive behaviors and bitter recriminations), so I amused myself by making calculations for the few dogs with whom I was acquainted – Tag the beagle, Tammy the pekinese and Tequila, the frightening mutt with one blue eye, one brown eye, and not a lot of hair, who lived in a house with nine kids. Even if he was a sophisticated 21 while I was just eight, I knew that Tequila had a worse lot in life than I did.

Like most of the things I was certain of in my childhood, this one turned out to be wrong. The actual formula, I am now told by reliable sources, is 10.5 dog years per human year for the first two years, then four dog years per human year for each year after that.

And that, my fellow liberal arts majors, is just too damn much math for me.

I’ve been thinking about chronological age quite a bit lately, since I’ve been spending time with people whose age is wildly different from my own. It’s exhilarating and also a bit unnerving. I understand that I was a born 40-year-old, and that my twitchy ways, which seemed very strange back in fourth grade, really hit their stride about 1998.

The great chronological disparity in the clan belongs to Mary Katherine. She arrived with degree of emotional maturity that pegs her at about 80 years old. Yet, for a great portion of her early years, Mary Katherine was content to live in perpetual slow mo. She never wanted to hurry up to the next developmental stage, and she didn’t care who knew it. “Don’t you want to do this, like all the big girls do?” I would ask about toilet training or giving up the high chair or whatever developmental next step on which I was currently fixated. She’d shoot me a pitying look and say, “No, not really.”

Then, this summer, little kid Mary Katherine became 23 overnight, bursting to move on-grow up-get started. The fact that she’s 12 is a major bummer to her at the moment, and I can only sympathize.

Her sister’s is an easy age to calculate. Emma was born 25, she still is 25, and I suspect she’ll be 25 when all her teeth fall out and she’s toddling about on a walker with tennis balls on the front legs. In Emma’s picture of the world, she has finished all the school she needs, has a great house on the beach, and holds down an incredibly lucrative job that involves handcuffing perps and saving the world. She is always driving down the coast in her convertible, her long hair flying back in the wind and remaining fabulously untangled. Being only 15 conflicts with this vision, just a bit. If there were a chance to leap herself forward, even one involving risky time machines or untested serums, she’d jump at the chance.

The new dog, Boomer, is about two, according to the shelter, and he is one person in the house who is doing a great job of acting his age, which is that of a teenaged boy. Only an adolescent could hoover up two-and-a-half-dozen cupcakes off the kitchen counter, with wrappers, and show such little regret, even on the, um, back end. Look long enough at his face and you can almost hear him saying, “Dude. That was sweeeeet.”

I think back to my envy of the mature 21-, 28-, and 35-year-old dogs of my youth. Why did I think it was so great that they were getting older faster than I was? They were just hurtling themselves that much more quickly toward the Final Appointment at the vet, or, in Tequila’s case, a one-way encounter with the Peavely Dairy truck. Like all kids, except Mary Katherine, I was in a hurry to grow up, and I was appreciative of those who’d tricked the system to do it faster.

I certainly wouldn’t want to be eight again, and I really still think that poor Tequila, from the family of nine children, earned himself a special golden doghouse in heaven. But I wish I had appreciated, back then, that there is no formula for time passing. Some years do go slowly. Some, the good ones, fly by. And sometimes, in retrospect, even the awfulest moments gain a golden haze, like the closeup shots in a Barbra Streisand movie.

In the meantime, I’m refusing to calculate Boomer’s age with the newfangled dog year formula. Besides the fact that it involves those pesky decimal points that always trip me up, I just don’t want to know. He’ll live while he’s alive, and then he won’t. Me, too, come to think of it. I just hope that I fill up some of those empty spaces in the years with something worthwhile. And there isn’t a math formula in the world that can help me do that.

Musical Perversity in Manhattan (with apologies to Mr. Mamet)

Last year, the highlight of my birthday celebration was when I got the oil in my Beetle changed at the Valvoline on 58th and Lyndale Avenue. (To answer your question, yes, I felt very sorry for myself). This year, the highlight was an evening of rapturous, transcendent splendor, or as close as you can get to such a concept in Greenwich Village. For this dramatic change in my annual fortunes, I have my good friend Virginia to thank.

On the cozy island of Manhattan, I’d imagine that there are bars which cater to every sort of decadence and perversity, including some that a sheltered Minneapolitan like me can’t even begin to imagine. Last Thursday night, it was my great good fortune to find a bar which catered to mine. Virginia has been telling me for years about Marie’s Crisis, a dank, dark, low-ceiling-ed slice of heaven, right there on Grove Street. In addition to absorbing her tales of a place that seemed like Oz, I’d also read Marc Acito’s take on a very similar place, in “How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater.”

Marie’s Crisis is a watering hole that caters to the sort of people who write bathroom graffiti about Julie Andrews (see below; it’s true). On one magical visit, Virginia told me that she realized she was standing next to (and singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” along with) Cheyenne Jackson, so she bought him a gin and tonic. But I digress, a Bway Queens are wont to do.

On the night we went, there were no stars in attendance, just people who prided themselves on knowing every part to every musical ever written, including whether the introductory chorus required an “oooh” or an “aaah,” and how many parts of harmony. The crowd was utterly diverse and, of course, completely unified. At one end of the bar, a big black lady had a voice so deep and low that I felt my chest rumble when she sang. Behind me, there was a boy whose hips signaled that he couldn’t be straight if his rent money depended on it. He swiveled happily to “La Vie Boheme,” performing a well-remembered choreography with his pal, apparently from their days in the chorus. “Now we cross!” he urged, and the two locked arms and grapevined stage left as if they were at the Wintergarden. At the other end of the bar sat an utterly unremarkable looking guy, one for whom the word “nebbish” was invented. Yet, he delivered a crisp, deeply projecting take on every tune. Hearing the remorse he brought to the simple line “I was happy” in “At the Ballet” was a highlight of my evening, if not my year.

Most people in bars are utterly distractable, while this crowd delivered laser-like concentration to the piano player and the music. And, while I suppose one hears lots of guffaws and sees plenty of fake smiles in a non-pervert bar, I could not recall, as I looked around the dim room, ever spending bar-time with people who seemed to be so deeply at peace, and so full of joy. There are precious few believers in the world, the ones who know that evenings really can be enchanted, that every mountain can most certainly be climbed, and that we can all be gayer than laughter. When we have a chance to sing together, it looks, and sounds like, the sort of church I could happily attend.

Thanks, Virginia. That was, truly, the best birthday ever.

Entertaining Angels

Summer Sunday mornings have been the same in our household for a number of years. They combine as much rugged outdoorsmanship as our group can handle (a few breaths of fresh air, but always with quick access to pavement and bathrooms) with an eclectic sort of spirituality that seems to fit our love for random variety. On Sundays at 10, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we are at the rotating church services held at the Lake Harriett bandshell.

We bike or walk, and bring along whatever able-bodied dog wants to join (and be used as a pillow for maximum lolling). We sit as far back as possible from the action, under a faraway tree that’s just within earshot of the service. We can never, ever, be found on the benches where the holy, attentive people are gathered. In fact, we’re as far back as it’s possible to sit while still calling it “going to church.”

With blankets, drinks, snacks and sometimes even the Sunday funnies to pass the time, we listen sporadically and comment frequently, with special attention to the quality of the musical offerings. We are heard to frequently marvel that the same 50ish woman with the awful voice seems to be trilling loudly in every denomination in the Twin Cities. She sure gets around.

Summer is winding to a close, and there are not many more semi-spiritual Sundays left for us. This past Saturday night, I looked deep into the eyes of my brood, realized that Sunday would be their last sleep-in for a while, and declared services “optional.” Much as I’d miss the kids, I thought it might be fun to sit quietly, act like a grownup and actually, you know, pray.

And then The Boy showed up. He used to be in school with my youngest, a few years ago. He has since left her school, which is a great place for an attractive blond child of normal intelligence, with a mommy and daddy and a minivan. For anyone else, not so much. He was in the not-so-much crowd, having some behavior and learning problems of which I was vaguely aware. Mary Katherine moved then, and moves now, in an ocean of girls, but his name came up frequently as the instigator of  actions she found repulsive. Boys.

We have run into him at outside church from time to time. He loved our old giant dog, and was very sad when he saw us in June and heard that the big dog had died in February. This Sunday, I saw him approach with a sinking heart. This kid is a talker. He found us right when the service was warming up, and came to meet the new giant dog and to tell me everything that had happened to him during the past six weeks. I was about to make some grownupy comment ("let's pay attention in church, dear"), when I happened to hear  what they were reading up at the bandshell. It was from Hebrews: Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.

There goes the Sunday morning.

The Boy was telling me his worries, but in that boylike braggy way those male types have. “I’ll be riding my bike to middle school,” he told me, and then described (in detail; this kid does not spare the detail) the way he’d be arranging his lock so no one would steal the bike. So he was worried about theft. He’d gotten a cell phone, and gave me a long description of its technical features, then told me he’d been allowed to get it because he’d be alone while riding his bike. So he was worried about kidnappers. The Ransom of Red Chief flitted into my mind, but I swatted it away.

He got out his camera and began to show me every photo he’d taken of his Chicago vacation, including those from the plane window. I heard the ubiquitous church lady warm up for a shrill hymn, and I imagined Jesus holding his hands over his ears from the misery of hearing her singing, and worse yet, about his own self. So I thought about what I was doing, just looking deeply into the eyes of someone who had so much he wanted to tell me. If he was talking to a boring old woman like me, he must be desperate for someone to hear him.  True, he didn’t seem much like an angel -- just like a skinny boy who was trying not to let anyone know how afraid he was.

I hope I did what I was supposed to on Sunday.  I certainly didn't pay attention to church, but I did  entertain. And even if he wasn’t an angel, I had a sense that spending time with this kid was truly how I was supposed to celebrate one of my last summer Sundays.

Good luck at school this week, Boy. God go with you.

Why Pea See

I’ve been reading a book about Stagedoor Manor, the famous performing arts camp in upstate New York that was attended by Natalie Portman, Robert Downey, Jr., and a whole bunch of neurotic Manhattanites. In the early pages, I was sold on what a swell spot it is. One camper quote that caught me was, “The camp is like Oz. Your real life is in black and white, but the minute you step off the bus, everything is in color.”

Wow, I thought, I wonder if I could set up a crack lab in the downstairs bathroom so I could raise the $15,000 to send Mary Katherine to this camp next summer.

Then, as I was about halfway through the book, she got a part in a Minneasota Fringe Festival play that was being produced by Youth Performance Company’s Young Artists’ Council. I finished the book while I waited for her at rehearsals, and I began to wonder if Stagedoor Manor was more like Oz than perhaps I’d realized at first – replete with a pill-addled teen who would soon become a boozy train wreck, and perhaps with a scary flying monkey or two thrown in for good measure.

Biding my time and sitting on YPC’s comfy red couch, I read about the highly sophisticated campers who clawed and fought for those juicy Sondheim show roles. One visiting instructor said she had middle schoolers describe themselves as “Kristen Chenowith types” or “Sutton Foster types.” There were many stories about the camp’s lofty industry connections, but after a while, it really began to seem like an industry – grinding out row after row of determined, ambitious stars, and very few whole, good people who just happened to be actors.

I began to compare the descriptions I was reading with what was going on in rehearsals across the hall. The play in which Mary Katherine had been cast, “Semidarkness,” was a parody of “Twilight” that was far from Sondheim and much closer to Looney Tunes. Written by a group of funny and energetic under-21-year-olds, the show was bursting with silliness, satire and plenty of physical comedy.

But more than the material, there was the production process, which was collaborative, inclusive and – have I mentioned this yet? – fun. Mary would bounce out of rehearsals with a glowing face, full of stories of how hard they had worked and how much they had laughed.

This was her first show, and the other cast members were much older than she is, with many heading off to college the week after the show closed. They were not veteran performers by Stagedoor Manor standards – no agents, managers or imdb listings. They’d started hanging around the supremely welcoming environment of Youth Performance Company, then they’d stayed and learned some stuff. Some of them were heart-breakingly talented actors, I thought. As I began to put the names with the faces later, I realized that some of the most talented ones were the very people who had gone out of their way to be kind to Mary Katherine. They were about to leave YPC for college at the end of the summer, but they still took the time to show my middle schooler how it was done. You worked hard. You created something good with your friends. You put on a show.

The results have been on display this week. The show has gotten good reviews (one public radio guy called it “the best of the Fringe,” but then he got the name wrong and called it “Sunny Darkness.” Critics.). The houses have been fairly full, even at odd festival times like 10 p.m. or 4:30 p.m. But more importantly, the cast has worked together to pull off something wonderful and entertaining, no matter what a bunch of old people say. To use an “industry” term, not only is their end product high-quality, but they had a terrific process all along the way. They cherished each other’s company and tried to learn from one another. They enjoyed the ride.

Mary Katherine is determined, for the moment, to pursue a life in theater, so it won’t be long before she understands what a rare thing her experience with this show has been. Perhaps I’ve seen “All About Eve” one too many times, but I have a pretty good idea that she will be shouted at, disrespected, manipulated and double-crossed, probably all before she graduates from high school. She knows now that it won’t be easy, but she’s the only one who can ever decide if it’s worth it. I’m just happy that her start in the “industry” was such a kind and glorious way to begin a career.

A Short Informational Meeting (and a Small, Tasteful Gift)

Henry David Thoreau warned that enterprises requiring new clothes should be avoided. I have an addendum for that one, Hank: walk quickly in the opposite direction whenever someone says that you are required to attend a short informational meeting.

Some people’s summers have been full, as Jack Nicholson famously said, of good times and noodle salad. My summer, on the other hand, has been full of informational meetings. I‘ve gotten the folder, received the complimentary pen and sipped the watery decaf. As the proceedings have unspooled, I have (so far) refrained from laying my head on the conference table and moaning; nor have I attempted to poke out my own eyeballs with that complimentary pen. And don’t think I haven’t been tempted.

A quick review of my summer includes the foster dog volunteer who made me drive all the way to the outer rings of desperate suburbia, and then informed me, upon noting my prompt arrival, that we’d postpone start time for 45 minutes “because people are running late.” When she followed up this news with the 411 that the meeting would be THREE hours long, I died, just a little bit, inside. The three-hour training turned out be one hour of useful information, larded with a two-hour-storyfest that covered every dog she’d every cared for, including a lengthy discourse on pustules that was not, I have to say, an appetite-booster.

I've got enough material for a SIM (Short, Informational Meeting) Hall of Fame & Shame.  Shame is for for the Crisis Nursery staffer whose idea of a four-hour training was to make the volunteer group take turns reading the training manual aloud to each other. Fame is for Shari DeBlieck at VEAP, whose information-packed volunteer introduction meeting stayed true to her promise.  It started on time, lasted exactly sixty minutes and included green lollipops at the end. Snaps to Shari.

Back here at home, Emma has officially become a Citizen of the World. Hosting an exchange student turned out to be her lifelong dream. Who knew? If this turns out to be the same sort of lifelong dream that the guitar was in fourth grade, we’ve got a problem, because we have a sixteen year old Italian arriving on Saturday, and I don’t think she’ll be happy with two weeks of enthusiasm followed by six months on the floor of Emma’s bedroom closet.

For an enterprise as lofty as world citizenship, there was both a home visit and a SIM. I sat for the requisite three hours in another room in another suburb, hearing many a wry anecdote of La Vie Internationale. Helpful tips included the suggestions to arrive at the student pickup point with a “small, tasteful gift.” Say again? Many families, I was told, had created interpretive posters and meaning-laden artwork.

Dear God.

We had a family discussion on the S. and T. gift idea, which went something like this:

Me: How about a photograph of us? We could be holding a sign that says “welcome.” I could even go to the dollar store and get a frame.

Emma: Gum. We should give her gum.

Me: After a pause for a Brian Keith rub of the face ("Family Affair” on You Tube!) Honey, it needs to be meaningful and welcoming.

Emma: Nothing says “welcome” like gum. If I came to a foreign country, full of foreigners, the one thing I would want is gum.

Me: It’s supposed to be lasting.

Emma: Minty mintiness, that’s what anyone would want.

Me: Let’s think about it and regroup tomorrow. Meet me in the living room at six p.m. for a short informational meeting.

Emma: Bring gum. I don’t go to meetings without gum.