Recently I’ve started writing my tell-all memoir about my childhood and teen years. Yes, seriously. Because it is a funny, sad, but mostly just rather weird story. I think a handful of people would read it. (And I mean a small handful, like, Zoe’s hand. Not a large hand.)
For some reason, whenever I’ve told different members of my family that I’ve started writing a memoir, they’ve all said, “Oh, no…”, like it will be a book mainly about them and how they are total jerks to me. Like I will recall every time I was slighted, or spanked, or had my hair pulled unjustly, or was forced to wear the bright blue, hideous, and incredibly painful orthodontic head gear. (Okay, the head gear may get a small blurb…) In truth, though, the main person to be embarrassed by the whole thing is me. Which is why I completely intend to write it under a fake name. I’ve decided that although it is a great story in need of telling (and this is all assuming it ever gets published), I don’t need everyone in my neighborhood, or every person in my acquaintance to know the sad, nasty undercurrent of every embarrassing (yet interesting) part of my life.
I have decided that, in addition to changing my name, I will also change the names of the people in my life… to protect the identities of the innocent and the crud-ball alike. So if you are reading this, and you knew me as a kid or young adult, and you are fearful of being fingered as the person who once made me cry because you threw dog poop at me or some other such nonsense, this is your chance to go into hiding. Ever wanted to change your name anyway? This is your shot. I’m taking “Moniker Requests”. You can choose the name for yourself in my tell-all memoir. It can be your middle name, or your stripper name, or your dog’s name… Whatever.
(Many of you, sweet readers, didn’t know me before this blog came to fruition, and therefor you will probably not be included in this particular book. You should really be thanking your lucky stars that our paths never crossed before the internet came about. But you can tell me what you’d change your name to, anyway.)
From the time I was 4 or 5, I always wanted to be a dancer. For a few months, my parents put me in ballet classes at the local community college. I was a natural (or so I’d like to remember). For a reason I can’t remember (but it was probably lack of money) my parents didn’t take me anymore. I was on my own as far as learning sweet moves. I turned to Mtv for all of my dancing knowledge. I wanted to be a Solid Gold Dancer. I wanted to be on Fame.
A few years later, after moving to another town, I got a new next door neighbor and best friend, Susie. She shared both my love of dancing and my lack of formal training. We talked our parents into buying us matching leg warmers (pastel stripes) and the work began. Hours and hours of choreographing and rehearsing in my basement. For weeks, people. We poured our hearts and souls into our routine. The song was “All I Need is a Miracle” by Mike and the Mechanics, and, indeed, what we needed was a real miracle… because our goal was to take our routine on Star Search. And win it, baby. We incorporated a lot of running in place, and floor rolls, and pointing at imaginary audience members, a la Flashdance (and yeah, I’d seen Flashdance, and no, I don’t know why my mother allowed me to watch such a sassy show at such a young age). After polishing our routine, we finally called our parents to the basement and allowed them to see what we’d been working so hard on. We turned the music up loud and danced our butts off. I thought for sure I really nailed it with the jump-off-the-couch-with-a-spin-and-land-on-my-knees-on-a-pillow move. I thought they were really impressed. But in the end, what they told us was that we needed to practice more before any calls would be made to the Star Search people. We were kinda crushed. But we kept dancing.
By middle school I had discovered a goddess named Paula Abdul. Her music was great, and her dancing was even better. I thought her CD “Shut Up and Dance” was brilliantly titled. I wished more people in the world would just shut up and dance. Except for me. I was allowed to talk while I danced. I bought Paula’s “behind the scenes” video cassette that chronicled her years from Laker Girl to Pop Sensation. I memorized it. I giggle along with her as she told the story of how she passed off her mom as her agent when the music industry came calling because she didn’t have a real agent. “Just tell them you’re my agent. I don’t know, tell them anything.” Haha, oh Paula, I would have done the same thing, you clever minx. I danced in front of any mirror I could find. Actually, I danced in front of anything that had any sort of reflective properties whatsoever; store windows, car door panels… At school dances, I danced in a circle of kids, pantomiming the choreography from Paula’s music videos. (Straight up!)
By high school I realized that there were girls who were better dancers than me. Girls whose parents kept them in dancing lessons. Girls who had seen and worked with real choreographers. As much as I still loved to dance, I wasn’t as confident as I once was. I found cheerleading and that gave me a little bit of dancing and performing, but it wasn’t exactly what I loved. I practiced routines to Janet and Paperboy in my bedroom. But only in my bedroom.
When I was 20, I had moved to Utah. I heard about the open call for dancers to audition for the Utah Jazz dancers. I totally had to do it. I psyched myself into going. The guy I was dating at the time offered to drive me over to the Delta Center the morning of auditions. Right before we left, one of his friends said to me “you do realize that all the girls who will get it will be girls who know Larry Miller (the owner of the Jazz).” That gave me a psychological kick in the gut. By the time we got to the Delta Center, I was deflated. When I saw the hundreds of girls walking into the Delta Center for auditions, I wanted to cry. I chickened out. I tell myself it never would have happened anyway, but honestly… who knows?
A few years ago I took a hip-hop class at the Gold’s Gym where I had a membership. I was a good 10 years older than anyone else in the class, including the instructor. The first night of class he explained that he was a dance teacher at BYU, and would there be anyone in the class taking dance at BYU this semester? Everyone’s hands up went up except for mine. Dude, I was old, and clearly not a dancer. But that was okay. I was just there for fun. I had given up on the dream of being a real dancer. I didn’t have to impress anyone, and I certainly wasn’t being graded. So he started teaching us a routine to a nice Craig David song. (I’m fairly sure I was the only person in the room who knew that it was actually a Sting song… and I was definitely the only one in the room to think that Sting is hella-hotter than Craig David.) I was also the suckiest dancer in the room. Hands down. By the end of class, the instructor was giggling at me and wiping a tear from the corner of his eye and giving me the condescending: oh, I love it, you’re great.
And with that, any wisp of the smallest hope of me being a dancer went out the window. He told me that the dirty dancing class might be a better fit for me. That’s the class lots of chubby moms take to feel sexy, and slowly melt away the post-baby pounds. Grinding hips, fist pumps in the air, zero talent needed.
Thanks, junior. You punk ass. (I quit Gold’s, also…but not just for that reason.)
Now I only dance if I am alone or with Zoe. Because Zoe doesn’t care that I dance in a stupid fashion. I still have a few good years before I become lame and dorky in her eyes. A few things still really get me going, though. One is the release of awesome movies like Step Up, (which I watched with Jon the other night and he said and I quote “How much longer is this stupid movie??”) and Step Up 2 the Streets which I’m dying to see. In my mind I am dancing with Channing Tatum (the cutie pants), and I rock it. Suspension of reality is good sometimes. And who knows… maybe in my next life I’ll be married to Channing Tatum and we’ll own a break dance studio and I’ll give lessons to the punk brat from Gold’s Gym, berating him all the while on his lack of skillz.
Monday afternoon, Jachin came rushing through the door after school, panting and red faced.
“Wow,” I said, “Did you run all the way home or something?”
“No,” he said, blurting out words between breaths, “someone threw a chicken leg at Cade, and I had to chase him down the street.”
“Wait… what?” I asked, confused. “Someone threw a chicken leg at you and Cade?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of chicken leg? Like, KFC?”
“Yeah, like KFC, and it came two inches from hitting Cade in the head.”
“Who threw it?” I asked.
“Some teenagers in a red car. Both of the windows were open and they threw the chicken leg at us and kept on driving. They were laughing.”
“So what did you guys do?”
“Well, first Cade kicked the chicken leg into someone’s flower garden, and then he ran after them, shaking his fist and yelling ‘You suck!’ at the top of his lungs. And then I ran after Cade and tackled him in the neighbor’s yard, and covered his mouth and told him that it was not a good idea to yell ‘you suck’ in public.”
At this point I was wondering a few things. One, who the hell is throwing chicken legs at my kid? Two, who would waste perfectly good KFC on a prank… especially if it’s crispy? And three, should I be happy that my son saved his friend from a potential beat-down by teenagers, or worried that the neighbors saw my kid tackle another kid and put his hand violently over the other kid’s mouth like he was accosting him?
I know, they’re all really good questions.
So, last night the whole family packed into the car to dispense some vigilante justice. None of us knew exactly what was going down, but something had to be done about the disrespect and the wasted chicken.
“Are you going to punch them when they open the door, Dad?” Jachin asked.
“No one is getting punched,” my husband said. I, personally, thought that we should have brought along some toilet paper… y’know, to fight teenage fire with equally childish teenage fire. But that probably would have sent a mixed message to my kids.
We started at the top of the street and Jachin ran us through the events.
“Here is where we were when the chicken leg came at us. And there is the flower garden where Cade kicked it.” A few houses down he said, “And there’s the yard where I tackled him and put my hand over his mouth.” We saw the indentation in the snow that was shaped like two boys rolling around, arguing about whether or not they should go after the punks who threw a chicken leg at them.
“Show me where the red car parked,” Jon said.
“It pulled up and parked at the house on the corner, at the end of the street.” So we drove down the street to the corner.
“Right there,” Jachin said, pointing to a house currently occupied by an elderly couple. In fact, the couple has lived there over 30 years.
“Are you sure?” Jon said. “A really old couple lives here. I don’t know why teenagers would park and go in here.”
“Yeah, it was this one,” Jachin said. Then, turning and looking in the opposite direction, he said, “Or else, maaaybeeee… It may have been that one,” he said, pointing to another house across the adjacent street. Now, we don’t know who lives in that house, but there was, presently, no red car parked outside.
“Hmm,” said Jon. “What should we do?”
“I think we should go home and forget about it,” I said.
“I think we should go find the chicken leg in the flower garden,” Zoe said.
“I think a cat probably already ate it,” Jachin said.
It was at this point that Jon turned the car around and started back for our house. “Do you think I’m making too big a deal about this?” Jon asked me.
“Yes,” I said, honestly. And man, do I wish I would have lied… because a big, fat argument started over the chicken leg, and how I was the lesser parent because I was not incensed about my child almost getting his eye taken out by a delicious projectile. “No one got hurt. Nothing was damaged,” I said. I kind of thought it was funny, even. (But I didn’t tell my husband the part about me thinking it was funny.) All I could think about was how I, at 16, would cruise around with my friend, Margie, in her car. In the summer, we would take the T-tops out of her car, and she would drive down the street while I sprayed people with a super soaker and yelled obnoxious things out of my cheerleading megaphone. (Oh yeah, I was one of those irritating teenagers.) And I thought of how much fun it was, and how we never hurt anyone (even if we irritated the ever livin’ crap out of them), and how if this wasn’t my kid we were talking about, it would really just be kind of hilarious.
As of now, the mystery remains in the unsolved case files. The chicken leg is becoming garden compost as we speak. We are, however, still on the look out for the elusive red car with wild teenagers and buckets of fried chicken in it. It will no doubt be parked at some corner house at some point. Nancy Drew is on the case… and she’s bringing toilet paper.
Ok girls, raise your hand if you remember the awesomeness that was “Fashion Plates”!
Oh yeah, you remember. Select a plate with a head, select a plate with a shirt, and select a bottom; put the plates in the thingy, put a piece of paper on top, hold paper firmly, and rub with a black crayon. Viola! A sweet looking, smartly dressed Barbie ready to color!
w00t! I had this same set of Barbie plates when I was a little girl. This set happened to belong to one of Jon’s sisters. I saved it from being sold at the garage sale last week. It’s one of Zoe’s and my favorite past times.
An interesting note: if you wait 25 years, Barbie’s clothes come back into fashion. Check it out:
Both of those outfits are now available at Old Navy.
When I was a kid, my little brother and I had this voice we did. It drove people crazy. Especially my step-dad. I don’t know who made it up first, my brother or me, but we could both do it and we sounded identical. We would walk around just saying, “Hi, how are you?” “I’m great.” And then we’d do this “heeheehee” that was particularly annoying to the auditory senses.
(I should add here that I thought about the possibility of making this post a video post, so you could hear the voice. But when I stood in front of the mirror and actually watched myself do the voice, I was embarrassed for myself. Really, Self. It wasn’t good.)
Instructions: In order to do the voice, you have to close off part of your throat. The only way I can instruct you to do this is to put your chin down almost into your chest and then try to talk like you’ve just sucked up a boat-load of helium. Once you kind of get the idea of how your throat needs to feel, you won’t have to put your chin into your chest anymore. As a grown-up, I can do the voice with my head almost completely upright. Almost. But not completely upright, which is why I look like a moron when I do it in the mirror.
Anyway, several years ago a Disney movie came out that shocked the crap out of me. (Not literally, but, you know. Whatever. I like to say “crap”. ) It was a little flick called “Lilo and Stitch”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. The story centers around a little blue mutant alien who disguises himself as a crazy dog. Oh yeah, and he has a really annoying voice. MY annoying voice! Someone totally ripped off our voice! Are you telling me that one has to travel across thousands of alien galaxies to hear a voice that my brother and I were doing in Cow-Town, Maryland in 1985? If only I knew then that I could trademark it… well, I probably wouldn’t have actually trademarked it. Have I mentioned it’s a tad annoying?
But moving on, my daughter thinks that it is hilarious that I can say “Ohana means family” in a pretty dang good Stitch voice. Then, keeping in irritating character, I will continue: “Sleep means, get your butt in bed, Princess Freaky Toes”. (”Princess Freaky Toes” refers to the freakish dexterity of her toes… but that’s for another post.) And continuing on a la Stitch: “Dream means, drool all over your pillow so your face sticks to it”. She laughs so hard her freaky toes hurt.
Perhaps I will swallow my pride and do a video post. Maybe I’ll do it in a dark closet so you get all of the voice (and metal hangers clanging) and none of the goofy face.
Every once in a while, when I’m browsing the DVDs at Wal-Mart, I’ll come across one of my childhood favorites… and it’s usually in the $4.88 bin. Being compulsive, sentimental, and bad with money, I of course buy them. Every time. My kids have now come to love these movies as well. As I type this, my kids are lying on my bedroom floor watching “The Dark Crystal”. A classic. Zoe is a little scared of it, though. She closes her eyes during the part when Chamberlain has his clothes ripped from his boney puppet body, and then also the part when Augra’s planetarium/house is ravaged by the big Goliath-beetle looking guys. I have to tell her when those parts are over. I remember being scared of the same parts when I was 5 or 6. (I was also scared of the part where the little podling gets her essence sucked out by the essence-sucker-machine, and her little puppet face goes all gaunt and her eyes kind of pop out. Disturbingly, that part doesn’t seem to bother either of my kids.) I also wanted to be Kira when I was little. She was a beautiful, even if she was only a puppet.
I’m glad I have kids so I have an excuse to watch these movies all the time again. Kids make it okay to sit here and laugh and giggle and be amazed and a little scared all over again.
Visit my list blog for a list of movies from my childhood. Did we watch the same ones??
w00t! My first video blog up and live. Check ‘er out:
The words, in case it sounded a bit garbled:
Big Mac, Fillet of Fish,
Quarter-pounder, French Fries,
Icy Coke, Thick Shake
Sundaes, and Apple Pies.
You deserve a break today,
so get up, get out,
and get away
to McDonald’s.
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
–ps: Note the polar bear fleece zip-up pajamas that Zoe decided to wear to bed last night. fyi- It never got below about 78 degrees last night. She woke up not wearing them…
First, I was wiping my bathroom sink thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve written a proper movie review for my review page. I’ve seen some awesome movies: Ratatouille, Once, Knocked Up, Ocean’s 13, Transformers, and we’ve got tix for Harry Potter tomorrow. There are a lot of movies that need to be addressed and tagged with my “yup” or “nope” (or the new-ish-ly added “m’eh”). But I am so far behind now… so I decided to start with the blockbuster “Transformers” because it has my cute non-crush Shia LaBeouf starring. I love this boy, in a non-icky way. So I’m scrubbing my sink and I’m thinking about the movie and what I will say about it after I’ve finished gushing on and on about how cute and funny Shia is. Yeah, there was one inappropriate part that parents might want to know about (think: parent/teen discussion about self-pleasure…yeah, ick). And there was one really annoying part where Shia is fighting for the honor of the hot chick (whom is not worthy of his affection, by the way. Step off, little girl) and Shia is demanding that his pretty young thing’s “juvie” record be wiped clean or he won’t help save the planet from imminent destruction. Umm, okay. I think pretty young girl will turn 18 in a month or so and it would be all well and gone anyway—or the earth will be destroyed… juvie record and all—but it’s sweet of him to think of her and her juvie record during all of the fire and shooting and earth-ending-ness. It earns him some make-out points at the end.
So then my ADD mind wanders from the movie to “juvie records” and how they work and although I’d never done (read: gotten caught doing) anything bad enough for a record, I’ve done some funny things. One was very funny, just because I was an idiot at 12. So for the moment, I will nix the formal Transformer review and tell you about the time I was kicked out of F.S.K. mall in Frederick, Maryland when I was 12.
(The following is a picture of me at my 11th birthday party. We were too poor to have two “1″ candles, so we used the 9 and two little single ones…whatever. The candles were the least of my worries…)
At 12, I was a follower, through and through. Especially when it came to my one friend, Cris, whom I was in complete awe of. She was a mere three months older than me, but the girl looked 16. And she was beautiful. She went to Barbizon modeling school and everything. She knew how to strut. She had “Head Shots”, people! And not the video game kind of head shots where you are shot in the head…with a gun. Modeling head shots… she had pretty pictures of her pretty head. So she was 12 and looked 16 and I was 12 and looked 9. It was awesome. I’m not actually sure why she hung out with me. Probably because it’s cool (for a while at least) to have someone follow you around and call you pretty and do whatever you want them to do.
*Please do not feel too bad for me, or think me too much of a loser. I eventually came into my own and stepped from her shadow (because she moved out of state) and I got some other friends who looked more 12-ish, like me. Except by the time I looked 12, I was actually 15.
But at 12 I pretty much hung out with Cris everyday, especially in the summer months. One day her mom took us to Francis Scott Key mall to hang out while her mom went to work, down the street. There was also another girl with us named Laura. So we hung out in the mall and Cris picked up guys and Laura and I stood a little bit away from her so that guys wouldn’t know that she was with us. It was fun! After an hour or so, we all went into the bathroom so we could check our makeup. My makeup collection was comprised entirely of various flavors of chapstick. Laura wasn’t even allowed to wear chapstick. Cris fixed her eyeliner, lipstick, mascara, and sprayed some AquaNet on her perfect bangs. She also adjusted her boobs. Yeah, she had boobs. I adjusted my tank top that I was allowed to wear under my other clothes to keep the not-yet-really-there girls under wraps. I adjusted the area where my boobs would have been, had they actually been there. Laura wasn’t even allowed to wear a tank top under her shirt. As we were about to leave, a cleaning lady came in and saw that there was a huge mess over by the toilet stalls. Toilet paper everywhere. We didn’t do it. I tell you that in all honesty. Cris, Laura, and I were vain, mousy, and followish (respectively), but none of us were destructive. The cleaning lady yelled at us. “If you girls are going to make a mess, you can at least clean it up!” I opened my mouth to tell her nicely that we had done no such thing. We’d been in front of the mirrors the whole time! But before I could say anything civil or nice, Cris flung open the door and yelled “We didn’t do it, b*tch!” and stormed out. I, of course, followed.
Five minutes later a young security guard caught up with us. No doubt he had been looking for three girls described as “pretty blonde 16 year old, brunette 12 year old, and a 9 year old with blue head gear and knobby knees”. He found us quickly. He told us that we had to leave the mall for verbally assaulting the cleaning lady. I told him nicely that we hadn’t made the mess. It was the truth. He didn’t care. We had to go. I’m pretty sure Cris told him to go screw himself. He took a picture of us (I was so glad I’d just fixed my chapstick and the area where my boobs are now!) to post in the security office so that “other guards would be on the lookout for us” that day and they’d know if we tried to come back in. I’m 99% sure that Laura and I were cropped from the picture and it ended up being taped to his bedroom wall.
So we left the mall. We were scared to walk over to Cris’s mom’s office because she would know something was up. Three 12 year old girls sick of the mall after an hour and a half? Yeah, right. So we went into Lowes. Yes, an odd choice. But Cris thought it would be an air-conditioned place to pass the time. After some time, people started noticing (or we imagined that they noticed) that we were just sitting in the hardware section, not buying or even pretending to buy anything. One of us (I’m not sure which) came up with the plan to act like we were looking for nails to fix up our new apartment. Yes, three 12 year old girls just browsing the drywall nails at Lowes. Nothing to see here. We had dialog to go with it. “Do these look long enough to hold up that wall?” “The wall by the fireplace? I think so.” “We are so lucky to have found a three bedroom apartment with a fireplace!” Okay. If people weren’t looking at us before, they were looking at us now. I’m surprised no one called Children’s Services to report two little girls with their 16 year old sister buying supplies at Lowes to fix up their first apartment. Or perhaps they just thought we were nuts, like all 12 year old girls are. But I was scared that people were looking at us… we had to actually buy some nails now, or the jig would be up!
An hour or so later we bought a box of nails and walked out. We finally went to Cris’s mom’s office because we were out of money and it was over 100 degrees outside. I think we ended up just telling her that we were kicked out, but it wasn’t our fault and blah, blah, blah. We didn’t get into any trouble. But what an unfun day! I was not used to being yelled at by security guards and being stared at by adults while I talked about getting a new bench for the porch at my new apartment. My nerves were frazzled!
Maybe next I’ll write about the time I snuck out of the house and locked myself out and had to break my bedroom window to get back in, almost slicing open my chest. I’m an idiot and I probably shouldn’t be alive.
Or maybe I’ll actually write that Transformers review.
Occasionally I will have a dream that will spark a memory from my childhood; something that I haven’t thought about in years. One of those dreams was last night, and here’s the childhood memory:
When I was about 8, my little brother, Sean, and I somehow got a hold of a short-wave radio. I have no recollection of how we got it. Anyway, we asked our parents if we could use it. They showed us the basics—turning it on, surfing the frequencies, certain choice short-wave phrases—and then my brother and I went out into the backyard, climbed the apple tree in the corner nearest the highway, and began trying to talk to people.
We decided that we needed “handles”. I can’t remember for the life of me what my brother’s was. Mine, however, was “Sheena”… as in “Queen of the Jungle”, which was my favorite movie at the time. So there we were in the apple tree and we started getting in touch with various truck drivers passing by on the highway. Sean and I only knew a few phrases that our parents told us (and those phrases they only knew from Smokey and the Bandit movies) so the conversations were usually pretty short.
“Hey, there, good buddy,” we’d say.
“Uhhh, hello. What are you kids doing?” the strange trucker would ask.
“Are you doing the double nickel?” (referring to the speed limit of 55) (*snickers*)
“Yep, sure am.”
“Ok. 10-4, good buddy.” (*more snickers*)
This was basically the conversation we had each time. Rarely, we would have a rude trucker telling us to “get the hell off”, but it never deterred us or kept us from snickering.
In retrospect, talking to strange truckers on a short-wave from the top of the apple tree in our backyard was the 1984 equivalent to sending your kids into strange chat rooms online to talk to weird grown-ups. But it was fun, and nothing happened.
After a while, we grew tired of saying the same three phrases to people. I think that’s why we stopped. Or maybe it was because my mom finally realized that we were actually contacting strangers on the highway. Either way, it was a short-lived recreational activity. But man, what a funny memory.
