Found Wisdom Written in Hot Pink Ink

Lost your pen = No pen
No pen = No notes
No notes = No study
No study = Fail
Fail = No diploma
No diploma = No work
No work = No money
No money = No food
No food = Skinny
Skinny = Ugly
Ugly = No love
No love = No marriage
No marriage = No kids
No kids = Lonely
Lonely = Depression
Depression = Sickness
Sickness = Death
DON'T LOSE YOUR PEN OR YOU WILL DIE!

and you thought I only picked up garbage from my classroom floor...

My Peeps

Can you spell S-U-C-K-E-D-I-N?  How could I have gone nearly 60 years and JUST be discovering the intoxication of series?  This group of doctors has taken over my conscious AND subconscious life!  Heretofore I had NEVER wielded a scalpel in my dreams, but now I regularly resuscitate, intubate, retract, and reconstruct!  Medical school it may not be, but my dreams have given me great confidence that in the right emergency I could pull my weight.  STAND CLEAR!!  These doctors make me alternately cry, laugh, and gasp.  I am awed by their textbook perfection of always having the perfect difficult words to say to their patients.  Would that ALL life situations could be crafted by Hollywood scriptwriters before we actually have to buffalo our way through them...I recently finished Season 5 in a bit of a marathon thanks to an unexpected 24 hours marooned in a Phoenix airport hotel--snow in Denver and lots of it.  The finale was totally unexpected, although I had been forewarned by one of my students, Britnee, who just rolled her eyes and said, "Just you wait!" when I pumped her for details.  I don't know if I can face the day without ________________, but I shall surgeon on!  Cristina, Alex, Izzie, Meredith, McDreamy, Calliope (now where was THAT name when Shelly needed one??), Chief, Lexie, George, Miranda.  You are all off-balanced and emotional pygmies much of the time.  You don't sleep enough, wolf down bad sandwiches, fall in and out of love probably more often than you change your underwear!  You see it all.  You wipe away the blood, stitch up the gore, rally the survivors and seem to do it all without a perfect hair out of place.  I pause to applaud you.  And Bailey, hang in there.  Don't divorce Tucker.  You are my favorite.  You have redefined "snarky" for me.  With ________________ gone now, I need you to be strong.  Oh, and Hollywood.  Thanks for letting Matt (the football hero from Friday Night Lights--my LAST series) show up in the ER with kidneys all aglow.  Nice touch.

As Good As It Gets Times 60!

Disclaimer:  This is my single most expensive vice.  I admit I have skipped school, crossed wide oceans, eaten beans for weeks after, and stood in countless lines to feed my vice.

Here is a list of 60 plays I've seen:  (note--I've only listed musicals I've seen on Broadway, at the West End in London, and traveling shows straight from Broadway in various cities across the U.S.)

Will Rogers Follies #
Tommy *
Swing! #
Starlight Express *
Secret Garden #
Music Man
Meet Me in St. Louis #
Martin Guerre (all-time favorite) *
Oklahoma
Kiss Me, Kate
King and I *
Jesus Christ, Superstar #
Hello Dolly #
Forever Plaid #
Five Guys Named Moe #
Fame *
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Contact
Cats (twice) #
Porgy and Bess #
Camelot #
Buddy Holly *
Evita #
Menopause, the Musical #
Blood Brothers *
Big
Beauty and the Beast (3 times)
Cowgirls
Sunset Boulevard
42nd Street
Annie Get Your Gun
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Smokey Joe's Café
Annie #
Fosse
Miss Saigon (twice)
Phantom of the Opera (twice)
Avenue Q #
Young Frankenstein #
Billy Elliot
Hair
Newsies
Mary Poppins
South Pacific
Wicked (twice) *#
Dreamboats and Petticoats *
Wizard of Oz *
Chorus Line
Grease *
Lion King
Little Mermaid (twice)
Monty Python's Spamalot
Color Purple
Jekyl and Hyde
Titanic
Ragtime
Sound of Music
Fantastics
Les Miserable (3 times)
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
Shrek, the Musical #

* West End, London
# Traveling shows in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Austin, Omaha, Washington DC, Las Vegas
All others  seen in NYC

Each and every play has a story--theatre mates, people met standing in line, circumstances surrounding attendance etc.  Like I say, it's my vice.  What's yours??

Leicester Square, London, where I have gotten the most incredible theatre deals of my life!  Ahhh...In a perfect world I would make an annual pilgrimage to bask in London theatre...

No Sweat

I'm actually not barking today--just popping in with a little follow-up story I mentioned in my post about jobs, although I have plenty to bark about--don't we all. 

Back in the late 80's me and mine found ourselves transported to a galaxy far far away in New Jersey.  It didn't take long for things to completely unravel, and unravel they did.  My goodness, I could really spin you some tails about THAT, but I shan't.  In an attempt to stick a finger in that dike, I ended up doing all manner of odd jobs--temp jobs.  One of the more fun ones took me to a Japanese company that made counterfeit money detecting machines a long walk from our home.  I worked with a spicy little gutsy Thai woman, Nancy, and when that temp job dried up, she put me in touch with a couple of men's shirt designers she knew in the garment district of Manhattan.  Joyce and Pierre were an interesting mix.  She was a former Chicago Playboy Club bunny, and Pierre (as you may have guessed) was straight from France. Together they designed and sold quite upscale  men's shirts.  I caught the bus into the city at a deli just down from where we lived in NJ at the time.  That bus wound its way eventually through the Lincoln Tunnel and spit me out finally at the Port Authority--the huge bus terminal on 8th Avenue.  This neighborhood metamorphosized during Guilianni's reign, but at the time it was aglow with homeless and trash which I maneuvered through.  My commute continued on foot south on 8th to a 2nd story walkup.  I spent the day kvetsching pleasantly with Pierre--Joyce was scarce.  Pierre piled multiple colorful bolts of silk and rayon on a large cutting table, and I cut out the pieces for the shirts using heavy cardboard patterns and stacked them ready to be sewn.  Then he'd run them down the hall to a bevy of little Puerto Rican ladies.  Somehow his French and their Spanish resulted in a finished product. On a couple of occasions I ventured down there.  That was a whole 'nuther world!  Babies, toddlers and some incredible cooking smells.  One day I spent sewing on buttons, and then the next Pierre and Joyce wheeled their rack of  wares to a trade show down the block at Madison Square Garden.  That was the end of my 3 week gig.  Did I sweat?  A little.  We kept the windows wide open.  That also added to the ambience.  Taxis honking all day.  New York streets are a dynamo of action--sirens, yelling, and the smells.  This was not my first taste of New York, but it was close to it.  If you've ever been intoxicated by that city, you need no further description.  And if you haven't you won't be able to picture this at all.   I saw a segment on a history of New York City on the history channel once about the shirtwaist factory that went up in smoke at the turn of the century--1900 something.  Those women were LOCKED into their workplace, so when fire broke out, they were sitting ducks.  Deplorable conditions.  80 years later I venture to say some things have probably not changed--especially if one looks at the garment industry globally.  I'm not making any political statements about the morality of that.  My experience was a mere slice.  I spent my days with a Frenchman (did I mention that Pierre was hmmmmmm...yeah he was VERY) who kept me in soda and could not have been nicer.  So sweatshop...probably just barely.



Lists

My "Pushing 60" project has sent me back to a Book of Lists I started on November 2, 1989 in West Caldwell, New Jersey.  How can I recall the date and place?  I very anally recorded that on the first page of the book.  There, now you know something that I have heretofore kept as secret--I have analities.  This book starts out with "Places I've Lived" (9 states, 21 cities) which really will most likely go on and on because the gypsy gene runs STRONG in me.  A few pages later comes "Best Friends I've Had", "Pets I Have Had", "Places I Have Visited", "Things That Say 'Yes!' To Me", and then romps right into all of my lists of 60 things to go, do, be, read, think etc. in the year between 59 and 60--which the astute reader will notice I have been alluding to but never really addressing directly on this blog.  Nestled right in between "Places I Have Lived" and "Best Friends I Have Had" is "Jobs I Have Been Paid To Do".  Because I have had to scrap my way through a good part of the last 60 years, that list takes up one and a half pages.  I thought I might share a few of those for the next couple of posts.  (Back to that astute reader--Have you noticed that once the resuscitation blocks were put to my chest, I have been a flurry of writing activity???)
Here's my list (in no particular order, but I suspect sort of chronologically):

1. babysit
2. pick raspberries
3. movie theatre concessions/tickets
4. busgirl
5. waitress
6. registration aid (B.Y.U.--think Fieldhouse)
7. housecleaning
8. catering
9. filing
10. seminary teacher
11. bread slicer in a baker
12. reader to the blind
13. housekeeping for elderly (social services)
14. sewing
15. public school teaching
16. tutor
17. sales (Fuller Brush, Tupperware, Discovery Toys, JuicePlus, Sunrider, Pampered Chef)
18. university library cataloger
19. clown (twice--Shakey's Pizza, grand opening of Chad's Rainbow)
20. secretary
21. mentor
22. advisor for Rent-a-Teen
23. ski shop clerk
24. attend classes
25. inventory (Radio Shack) 
26. housesit
27. cut out shirt samples for trade show in NYC sweat shop
28. edit
29. sell  random things I've made, baked, or bartered
30. Life skills teacher to at-risk kids
31. MADD advisor, Natural Helpers advisor
32. crash helmet assembly worker
33. Good Humor temp

I concede that each and every one of these might be a lengthy post--perhaps even a chapter in a book!  My friend Lana says I was more interesting pre-Paco when I was constantly scratching and plotting how to get money.  That's probably true.  Nothing like security to bring on the yawns.  I should put all of these into a hat and draw one out a day.  I KNOW you want to hear about my 3 weeks in an NYC sweatshop, and I'd be unforgivably amiss if I omitted my clown gigs.  Furthermore, my waitress jobs were smashing as well as my "careers" in New Jersey when I was literally keeping the thin thread between life and extinction viable by baking and selling bread DAILY.  I think I'll start tomorrow with the sweatshop.  Come on back!

Yes, I Named My Son Tsunami! Wanna Make Something Out of It?

I have a smart phone now.  Yes, I know you're probably reacting like you would if I told you I'd finally retired my Woody!  My phone is sleek and beeps nicely.  It fits comfortably into my palm and even receives photos!!!--something my former dumb phone could not.  I can check my email, surf the net, press myself silly.  But my enamoration with it stops there.  What I CAN'T do is text or enter contacts in the keyboard!!!!!!!!.  I'm writing this to explain why some of my texts to you may read thusly:  "Sure" (when asked if I will be attending the hockey game on Friday) or "Sweet" (when sent a quite heartfelt Valentine's message) or "Check my goodreads accounts" (when my good friend asked for book recommendations prior to her trip to Hawaii--so so sorry, Elyse).  My frustration peaked this morning when I was trying to enter my son's name in my contact list.  Do I just have such abnormally fat fingers that I am incapable of isolating one key at a time??????????  His name is Tag (actually I would have written out his full beautiful name, but for my purposes "Tag" would have to suffice).  So here's what I could come up with:  "Tagain", "Tavern", and over and over and over and over and over (despite my feeble attempts to man the backspace key)---"Tsunami".  My second beloved child is now Tsunami.  Why would my phone immediately assume that what I was REALLY trying to write (Heaven Help Me...) was "Tsunami" when over and over again I put in the letters T and A?--is tsunami becoming mainstream in our vocabulary?  No one told me.  This might also explain why I had to settle for "Body She Ever" when I was really trying to enter Safe Haven.  I suppose at some point I will learn to read the code and just as cheerfully press "Gaudy Cheese Cover" for the name of my florist or "Funny Root Sliver" for my Young Women's Group.  But gosh darn it!  Why should I????? 

Epiphany

Yesterday I apprehended a student attempting to copy another student's assignment.  World shattering news?  Not even.  It was a creative assignment (make up 25 of your own words using the 55 Latin roots.  Illustrate 10 of them and put the whole thing into a dictionary of your own making).  Good GRIEF!!  Passing someone's creative composition off as your own???????  School policy dictates that that kid receive a 0.  But what to do about the other gal...the one whose work was being exploited?  I took her out in the hall.  As I suspect, oftentimes schoolwork is not surrendered willingly to the thief. Such was the case this time.  We had a good talk about possible ways to fend off kids like that.  Sweet child.  My epiphany came as I continued my calm interrogation.  Without revealing anything personal (because sometimes my kids drop in here), let me just describe what happened.  As I looked into that young girl's eyes I was absolutely overcome.  You know those scenes in movies when the character has a flashback and about 50 scenes flash onto the screen in about 3 seconds?  I had one of those!!!!  Twenty four years of accumulated experiences with kids from 5 to 18 years old all came tumbling back, not only into my head (memory) but also my heart (soul), and I could call it all good.  Even as I write this I'm emotional once again.  I saw kids perched on my "editing stool" as we read their compositions together--laughing so hard that tears came, getting side-tracked, sharing secrets.  I saw moments in my classroom when the curriculum stepped aside so that REAL learning could take place as kids felt free to bear real feelings and frustrations.  I saw comradry.  I saw anticipation.  I saw little people in the palm of my hand for story after story after story.  Putty.  Two dozen years in a pretty mediocre pay scale in 3 different states from sea to shining sea.  I saw all the thousands and thousands of dollars I've given to universities to have that privilege--enough to buy 2 Subarus and take a trip to Kathmandu.  All leading up to that single fleeting moment yesterday.  I'm hoping death brings a similar experience depicting my whole life!  And I hope then too I can call it all good...