I'm confused about inflation. Really, I'm confused about all aspects of the economy. But inflation in particular has me scratching my head this morning. The other day, I was watching "Swing Time" with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Oh, what a lovely little song 'n dance picture, full of the 1936 morality that kept women from being taken seriously by officers of the law and kept black men from being taken seriously by anyone. But great dancing! Anyway, early on in the film, Fred Astaire wants to buy a pack of smokes for 10 cents from a vending machine, but all he's got is a quarter. Along comes Ginger, who buys a pack for herself, and Fred asks, "I beg your pardon, but have you change for a quarter?"
In my entire life, I don't think I've ever needed change for a quarter. These days, a quarter in a vending machine will get you a pepto-flavored gumball, a dime will get you nothing. And to buy a pack of cigarettes in a vending machine, you'd need change for a twenty.
Fast-forward to 1969. "Sweet Charity" with Shirley MacLaine. Shirley's talking to her friends, telling them about her crazy night with an Italian movie star, how they went to this place full of celebrities, one of those places where they overcharge for everything, like "you pay 60 cents for a pack of cigarettes." Huh, 60 cents for an overpriced pack of smokes. That seems on par with our "Swing Time" rates of 30 years prior.
Fast-forward again to 1991. Charline's Drugstore in Summit, NJ. I'm working behind the counter, selling smokes for $1.90 a pack. Around the corner, there's a vending machine selling overpriced smokes for $2.25. In my 2 1/2 years selling smokes, the price went up in nickles, reaching $2.10 by the time I left. The vending machine was removed, as it was thought to contribute to teen smoking (though I sold plenty of smokes to teens at a much more reasonable rate). I remember thinking how expensive it was getting to be a smoker, once they raised the price over $2. That was 15 years ago. Today, Charline's Drugstore no longer sells anything, I think it might be a shoe store or a liquor store, but if you want to buy a pack of smokes in Summit, NJ, it'll cost you over 6 bucks. Holy crap. New York City, you'll pay $8. Of course, much of the price tag on cigarettes comes from taxes, which is why it's cheaper to be a smoker in many states outside of the NJ/NY area. But it's still averaging around $5 most places. Holy crap!
While cigarette pricing may not be an effective measure of inflation, it's quite telling nonetheless. Personally, I'm no fan of cigarettes, so I have no complaints about them being too expensive for people to buy. If only cigarettes were the one over-inflated item on our shopping lists! But everything seems to cost too much. Hell, everything DOES cost too much. Back in the days of Sweet Charity working the dance halls, a family of 4 could live comfortably off of one income. Today, it's hard for a family of 1 to manage on one income. The "Swing Time" Ginger knew that once she married Fred, she'd stop working at her dance studio (lots of dance jobs for women back in those day) as she would no longer need the income (and only sinful women worked jobs after they married). Ginger today would be in debt up to her eyeballs by the time she was 22. Forget marriage, she'd need a second job! For those people who are in favor of returning to an America more like the America of Fred & Ginger's time, an America where Dad went to the office and Mom raised the kids and no one divorced or had sex out of marriage, a more "traditional" America with more "traditional" family roles, well, those people are gonna have a mighty tough time doing all of that without Mom's income.
When I was a kid in Ohio, none of my friends had a mom with a job. Fast-forward to high school, and few of my friends had a stay-at-home mom. My mom was able to stay home with us until I was in 6th grade, but then we needed the income. And even with 2 incomes, it was still tough making ends meet. It's only gotten harder. Being a stay-at-home mom isn't an option for the vast majority of American women, no matter how much this might be a desired role. And I don't understand how we got here. In a matter of decades, our cost of living has skyrocketed, which has drastically limited our choices. While women once fought for the right to work, we no longer have the choice NOT to work, especially once there are kids in the picture, which is exactly when a lot of women would gladly stop working outside of the home and take on the mammoth task of working inside the home. There are many people in this country who would like to raise their families in a more traditional manner, where someone is always home when the kids get home from school, where the family shares dinner each night, where home is a haven of sorts. Instead, our times necessitate a lifestyle of latch-key kids, daycare, and after-school programs meant to keep kids supervised until a parent is able to pick them up. We're a nation struggling to define "family values" while clearly we have devalued the very idea of spending time with our families. A 40-hour work week is a luxury these days; most adults work at least 50, plus they're commuting long distances to be able to live in a community with decent public schools and reasonable housing prices. Having dinner with the family is no longer a daily given; it is now more of a weekly event, schedules permitting.
I don't have kids, and I don't plan on having kids. So I won't have to worry about the things that parents worry about. But I've got nieces and nephews, I've got friends with babies to raise, and I worry for them. I want these kids to have a chance to see their parents sometimes, and I want these parents to be able to catch their breath sometimes. I worry that financial struggles will bring about divorce, I worry about the lack of options available to kids without money. The truth is, I feel many things about my choice not to have kids (and I'm not saying that it's never gonna happen, but...), but more than anything, I feel relief. I am having a hard enough time just taking care of me and Alex these days, Alex is struggling to keep a roof over our heads (and win us a BMW), and both of us watch the news daily with a growing sense that the world as we have understood it is shifting in ugly and difficult ways. I feel relieved that I don't have to explain all of this to my child, that I don't have to wonder how rising sea levels and financial instability and terror-without-borders will shape the world of my children. I feel relieved that I won't have to tell to my daughter that I can't be at her school play because I have to work late. I feel relieved that I won't have to tell my son that his dad is gonna be working in Macao for the next year as all the casinos have gone kaput in the US. And mostly, I feel relieved that I won't ever see my kids smoking $30 cigarettes.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
What movie-musicals can teach us about life
I've been on an old movie-musical kick as of late, and it seems to me that we as a nation have much to learn from our nation's cinematic history. Take the economy, for example:
In "Summer Stock", Judy Garland plays a farmer, a no-nonsense, hardworking, up-with-the-roosters farmer. Judy inherited the farm when her father passed away, and even tho she was just a wee pretty lass, she had things running in tip-top shape. Until the droughts came and the crops failed. When the film begins, we meet a couple of Judy's farmhands who, after working the farm for decades, are leaving Judy to head for greener pastures (or at least, some place that can pay). Poor Judy is left alone with dozens of chickens and acres to plow and plant and no help of any kind. What's a farmgirl to do? All seems lost until Judy sees the solution in a magazine ad: She can do it all herself, if only she had a tractor. Well, that's the ticket! Get the girl a tractor and the farm will be saved!! So, Judy runs down to the general store, which is run by her fiancee of 4 years (a dud of a stud) and is owned by her would-be father-in-law (who sees no reason why a woman should be running a farm when she could just get married and be taken care of). Once there, she tells the two men that she knows what she needs to save her farm, and the gents seem somewhat interested in the words coming out of the pretty woman's mouth, seem to find her need to succeed in a man's field somewhat endearing if not entirely illogical, and they politely listen with fixed smiles drawn on their faces. Until she tells them what she needs: a tractor. And then...well, it's as if the needle was scratched across the record, the men jumped to their feet, they could hardly speak the word: "A- a- a- a...TRACTOR??!" What crazy pills was this woman taking? "A TRACTOR??" She might as well have asked for the Rockefellers themselves to come be field-hands! A tractor cost MONEY! Lots of it!! She couldn't simply be given a tractor to save her farm, because what if she had trouble paying for it? That wouldn't be prudent, not at all. No no, a tractor is a big purchase, far too big a purchase to be put on credit. CREDIT CAN'T BE GIVEN OUT SO EASILY!! Even if a tractor could save the farm, and therefore pay for itself in one harvest, it's still a huge financial risk for both the lender AND the borrower. Therefore, certain considerations must be made, payments must be agreed upon, etc etc... Eventually, Judy got her tractor. (And oh, the insanity that ensued! But it all works out brilliantly in the end, thanks to Gene Kelly.) But it wasn't easy. Not easy at all.
Fast-forward to today. Or, perhaps, fast-forward to a year or two ago. You want a tractor? No problem! Don't live on a farm? Who cares!! Don't have a job? Who cares!! Don't have any need for a tractor? Who cares!! The way we do business is this: You want it, it's yours!! Can't pay for it now, pay us later!! We'll charge you 25% interest over a long-term period so you will actually end up paying twice what that tractor is worth, which works for us! Okay, perhaps there haven't been a lot of shopping sprees that have resulted in the purchase of unneeded tractors. But just look at our highways: Are you going to tell me that all of those SUVs on the road are being driven by people who can actually afford them? We all know the truth, we've known it for years: We have been living way beyond our means with very little regard for how to pay for all of our stuff. And that's been perfectly acceptable! We're not living in the days of Judy and her tractor, when in order to make a big purchase, you'd better have good friends on the inside to help you get the money, and you'd better have a real solid plan for paying it all off. I guarantee no one was offering Judy an extended payment plan for her tractor. Knowing that the tractor was beyond her means, knowing that if she couldn't make the payments her tractor (and therefore her farm) would be taken away, this knowledge kept Judy working at sun-up every morning, this knowledge had Judy smile with pride each time she saw her tractor, this knowledge made it clear to Judy that there was no easy way out, that this tractor was an investment in her business and must be paid in full at the earliest possible time. Which makes perfect sense. When you are buying beyond your means, there should be a whole lot of thought going into this purchase. Is it a luxury or a necessity? How will it get paid off? How will the payments affect my other expenses? And yada yada yada, we all know what kind of thought process should be behind a big purchase. And we all know that this is not the way things have been working in our recent history. Again, check out the highways.
I'm going to keep watching old movies to gain perspective on current events. We know that the lessons of history can keep us from repeating history's mistakes (which is a good reason to know a thing or two about the history of the Supreme Court and the history of our Constitution, in case you might someday find yourself as a candidate for one of our country's highest offices). And yes, we know that buying beyond our means can be a recipe for disaster unless we've got a clear plan in place to make steady payments for our purchases. Yes, I knew all about it, even as I made the choice to go to graduate school at one of the country's most expensive training programs, to study a craft that has yet to keep me above the poverty line in my 10 years on the job. I truly couldn't imagine anyone giving me loans to pay for it, especially when you look over my earnings history, especially when taking into account that I want to be a STAGE ACTOR (no chance of a million-dollar payday on the regional boards, I guarantee you). And yet, all I had to do was enter in a dollar figure in an online private loan application and BLAMMO! I was in the Ivy League, literally in a matter of seconds. For 3 years, I was living off of loans from a bank that I never walked into, never met an associate of, never had to prove myself to. It took less than 5 minutes for me to create an account, fill out an application, and be approved for many thousands of dollars. PRESTO! I'm in debt up to my eyeballs for the rest of my life. And I appreciate every penny of it, as the 3 years I spent at Columbia were 3 of the most challenging, rewarding, exciting, difficult, frightening, exhilarating, artistic years of my life. Even if nothing comes of it other than what I've already received, it's worth every penny. However, I don't happen to have any pennies left. And I could have told you that when I applied for those loans. Had a loan counselor sat down with me and asked me how I envisioned my financial future, I would have been able to say little more than, "Well, making a living as an actor is a challenge. I've survived for a good portion of my adult years on little more than my actor's wages, but that didn't cover much more than rent and PB&J. In the future, I expect to make more. Grad school will help me earn more. But theatre is not a steady profession. There are many dry spells. There are many shows that are good for the craft but not good for the paycheck. And there is nothing in the world I would rather do. So, frankly, I don't know how I'll pay back my loans. But I will. Somehow. Someday." Yeah, no loan officer on earth would give wads of money to THAT applicant. But I didn't need to jump through those hoops. I just needed to give my name and social security number and the money was mine, all mine. And I made the most of it, I truly did. And I'll be spending the rest of my life reminding myself that it was all worth it....
Perhaps if I had sat down with a loan officer 3+ years ago, and perhaps if she had responded to my request with the same jaw-dropped, wide-eyed look of shock and horror that met Judy's tractor request, I might have felt silly for even considering such a venture. I might have walked right out of that office and looked for a nice office job somewhere, a job with a bit of security and and a decent wage and heck, even some benefits like health insurance. (Okay, there's no way I would've responded in that way.) Certainly, had I been unable to get the loans, I would not have gone to Columbia. And not knowing what I was missing, I would have been fine, once I got over the heartbreak. And perhaps if I was applying to Columbia next year, I would find myself unable to get a loan, as that seems to be where we're headed. Yes, after decades of thoughtless spending, we are now tightening our purse strings and trying to take some responsibility for all those tractors being driven on our highways by all those unemployed Ivy League actors....
In "Summer Stock", Judy Garland plays a farmer, a no-nonsense, hardworking, up-with-the-roosters farmer. Judy inherited the farm when her father passed away, and even tho she was just a wee pretty lass, she had things running in tip-top shape. Until the droughts came and the crops failed. When the film begins, we meet a couple of Judy's farmhands who, after working the farm for decades, are leaving Judy to head for greener pastures (or at least, some place that can pay). Poor Judy is left alone with dozens of chickens and acres to plow and plant and no help of any kind. What's a farmgirl to do? All seems lost until Judy sees the solution in a magazine ad: She can do it all herself, if only she had a tractor. Well, that's the ticket! Get the girl a tractor and the farm will be saved!! So, Judy runs down to the general store, which is run by her fiancee of 4 years (a dud of a stud) and is owned by her would-be father-in-law (who sees no reason why a woman should be running a farm when she could just get married and be taken care of). Once there, she tells the two men that she knows what she needs to save her farm, and the gents seem somewhat interested in the words coming out of the pretty woman's mouth, seem to find her need to succeed in a man's field somewhat endearing if not entirely illogical, and they politely listen with fixed smiles drawn on their faces. Until she tells them what she needs: a tractor. And then...well, it's as if the needle was scratched across the record, the men jumped to their feet, they could hardly speak the word: "A- a- a- a...TRACTOR??!" What crazy pills was this woman taking? "A TRACTOR??" She might as well have asked for the Rockefellers themselves to come be field-hands! A tractor cost MONEY! Lots of it!! She couldn't simply be given a tractor to save her farm, because what if she had trouble paying for it? That wouldn't be prudent, not at all. No no, a tractor is a big purchase, far too big a purchase to be put on credit. CREDIT CAN'T BE GIVEN OUT SO EASILY!! Even if a tractor could save the farm, and therefore pay for itself in one harvest, it's still a huge financial risk for both the lender AND the borrower. Therefore, certain considerations must be made, payments must be agreed upon, etc etc... Eventually, Judy got her tractor. (And oh, the insanity that ensued! But it all works out brilliantly in the end, thanks to Gene Kelly.) But it wasn't easy. Not easy at all.
Fast-forward to today. Or, perhaps, fast-forward to a year or two ago. You want a tractor? No problem! Don't live on a farm? Who cares!! Don't have a job? Who cares!! Don't have any need for a tractor? Who cares!! The way we do business is this: You want it, it's yours!! Can't pay for it now, pay us later!! We'll charge you 25% interest over a long-term period so you will actually end up paying twice what that tractor is worth, which works for us! Okay, perhaps there haven't been a lot of shopping sprees that have resulted in the purchase of unneeded tractors. But just look at our highways: Are you going to tell me that all of those SUVs on the road are being driven by people who can actually afford them? We all know the truth, we've known it for years: We have been living way beyond our means with very little regard for how to pay for all of our stuff. And that's been perfectly acceptable! We're not living in the days of Judy and her tractor, when in order to make a big purchase, you'd better have good friends on the inside to help you get the money, and you'd better have a real solid plan for paying it all off. I guarantee no one was offering Judy an extended payment plan for her tractor. Knowing that the tractor was beyond her means, knowing that if she couldn't make the payments her tractor (and therefore her farm) would be taken away, this knowledge kept Judy working at sun-up every morning, this knowledge had Judy smile with pride each time she saw her tractor, this knowledge made it clear to Judy that there was no easy way out, that this tractor was an investment in her business and must be paid in full at the earliest possible time. Which makes perfect sense. When you are buying beyond your means, there should be a whole lot of thought going into this purchase. Is it a luxury or a necessity? How will it get paid off? How will the payments affect my other expenses? And yada yada yada, we all know what kind of thought process should be behind a big purchase. And we all know that this is not the way things have been working in our recent history. Again, check out the highways.
I'm going to keep watching old movies to gain perspective on current events. We know that the lessons of history can keep us from repeating history's mistakes (which is a good reason to know a thing or two about the history of the Supreme Court and the history of our Constitution, in case you might someday find yourself as a candidate for one of our country's highest offices). And yes, we know that buying beyond our means can be a recipe for disaster unless we've got a clear plan in place to make steady payments for our purchases. Yes, I knew all about it, even as I made the choice to go to graduate school at one of the country's most expensive training programs, to study a craft that has yet to keep me above the poverty line in my 10 years on the job. I truly couldn't imagine anyone giving me loans to pay for it, especially when you look over my earnings history, especially when taking into account that I want to be a STAGE ACTOR (no chance of a million-dollar payday on the regional boards, I guarantee you). And yet, all I had to do was enter in a dollar figure in an online private loan application and BLAMMO! I was in the Ivy League, literally in a matter of seconds. For 3 years, I was living off of loans from a bank that I never walked into, never met an associate of, never had to prove myself to. It took less than 5 minutes for me to create an account, fill out an application, and be approved for many thousands of dollars. PRESTO! I'm in debt up to my eyeballs for the rest of my life. And I appreciate every penny of it, as the 3 years I spent at Columbia were 3 of the most challenging, rewarding, exciting, difficult, frightening, exhilarating, artistic years of my life. Even if nothing comes of it other than what I've already received, it's worth every penny. However, I don't happen to have any pennies left. And I could have told you that when I applied for those loans. Had a loan counselor sat down with me and asked me how I envisioned my financial future, I would have been able to say little more than, "Well, making a living as an actor is a challenge. I've survived for a good portion of my adult years on little more than my actor's wages, but that didn't cover much more than rent and PB&J. In the future, I expect to make more. Grad school will help me earn more. But theatre is not a steady profession. There are many dry spells. There are many shows that are good for the craft but not good for the paycheck. And there is nothing in the world I would rather do. So, frankly, I don't know how I'll pay back my loans. But I will. Somehow. Someday." Yeah, no loan officer on earth would give wads of money to THAT applicant. But I didn't need to jump through those hoops. I just needed to give my name and social security number and the money was mine, all mine. And I made the most of it, I truly did. And I'll be spending the rest of my life reminding myself that it was all worth it....
Perhaps if I had sat down with a loan officer 3+ years ago, and perhaps if she had responded to my request with the same jaw-dropped, wide-eyed look of shock and horror that met Judy's tractor request, I might have felt silly for even considering such a venture. I might have walked right out of that office and looked for a nice office job somewhere, a job with a bit of security and and a decent wage and heck, even some benefits like health insurance. (Okay, there's no way I would've responded in that way.) Certainly, had I been unable to get the loans, I would not have gone to Columbia. And not knowing what I was missing, I would have been fine, once I got over the heartbreak. And perhaps if I was applying to Columbia next year, I would find myself unable to get a loan, as that seems to be where we're headed. Yes, after decades of thoughtless spending, we are now tightening our purse strings and trying to take some responsibility for all those tractors being driven on our highways by all those unemployed Ivy League actors....
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
On New England sports franchises...
While it can sometimes be hard watching sports with a sports bettor, it can also take the sting out of a bad loss. Like this past weekend, for example. There was little for me to be pleased with. The Browns lost. Brett Favre lost. What brightness could come from so dark a scene? Alex made money on both losses. While such wins do not make up for such losses, they certainly make the pain easier to bear.
I was really rooting for a Red Sox--Phillies World Series. Not because I like either team, not at all. In fact, I care very little for baseball. I liked it a lot as a kid, when we'd go see a Cleveland Indians game every summer. We'd begin with dinner out some place fancy enough to make me a Shirley Temple (nowadays you can get an ST just about anyplace, you can get one at Friendly's for a buck-fifty that comes in a 32-oz cup with free refills, but once upon a time, Shirley Temples were only made in places with full bars) then head over to the stadium. I remember sitting high up in the stands looking down on the action. The action was always of less interest to me than the sky. I loved looking at the swath of sky carved out by the open dome of the stadium, the endless summer night sky of northern Ohio. I would be taken out of my reveries on occasion by the roar of the crowd responding to the action below me, and for a time I would follow the game. But mostly I just liked to sky-gaze. There's so much downtime in baseball that I couldn't stay connected to the game for long. My grandfather used to listen to every Indians game on the radio, and I remember the tinny voices of the announcers as I'd cross through the room to head outside, my grandfather's gaze far too distant to be seeing anything that I could see. Clearly, he was at the game. He needed no picture to connect him; listening to the action took him right to the stadium. My brother today listens to Yankees games on the radio, and the look in his eyes when he's really lost in the game brings me right back to my grandfather. Baseball is a part of the family legacy. My great-grandfather, Paddy Livingston, was a pro player a century ago. He played in the All-Star game in 1909 or 1911, I forget the year. The game-day photo of both teams shows Paddy with the 30 or 40 other players, in their pajama-like uniforms, few of them smiling for the camera. Though in those days, taking a photo took time, more time than one can comfortably hold a smile. It took so much time, in fact, that one guy is actually in the team photo twice, he just ran to the other side as the camera was taking in the full scene. I never met Paddy, but his pictures showed him to look much like his son, my grandfather, Robert. Grandpa had a shot at going pro, too, but the demands of the Depression took away many opportunities for many people. So Grandpa drove a truck and raised his family and listened to baseball on the radio. And his son, Bob, had his own talents on the field, a star player in high school. But again, limited means make for limited choices. Both my brothers played Little League in Ohio, and I was pretty killer on the TeeBall team (okay, I could hit a stay-put ball, that was about where my skills ended). But once we moved to Jersey, there wasn't much baseball in our lives. We weren't fans of the Mets or Yankees so we didn't go to see games, and my brothers weren't playing in school. This is about when baseball lost most of it's interest for me. Now, I get interested around the playoffs. And I was watching that game 4 between the Sox and Yankees a few years ago when the Sox made the comeback of a lifetime and beat the Yanks, which then had me watching the rest of that series, which was edge-of-your-seat excitement throughout. And even though I was living in New York at the time, I really wanted Boston to win. For one thing, I generally root for the underdog, unless my team happens to be the favorite (which happens rarely as a Cleveland fan). And Boston was a huge dog that year, the Yankees were at the top of their game, and the history of these teams was ugly all the way back to Babe Ruth. So I was really happy for Boston to win that year. But now....
I've got a problem with New England sports. I've had a problem with them since the Patriots responded to the Bears "Super Bowl Shuffle" with a terrible, terrible song, I can't even remember the name, I just remember the chorus, "New England, The Patriots are We!" which even as a 10-year-old pissed me off. I was a HUGE fan of the '85 Bears, with Jim McMahon Walter Payton and the Fridge. And what a tune they produced:
"We are The Bears, The Shuffling Crew
Shuffling on down, doing it for you!
We're so bad, we know we're good,
Blowing your minds like we knew we would."
At one point, I knew it word for word. And I truly believed, once I heard both the Bears and the Patriots songs, that there was no way a team that had a song as bad as the New England song could win. And I was right. Better song=better team. Years later, even as I lived in Boston for 4 years, I couldn't get behind the Patriots. The song had soured me on the team for life. I never became a fan of any Boston team, but I didn't take issue with any of them, except the Pats. Wait, I should take a step back: I have been a life-long liker of the Celtics. Not a fan, just a "liker". I followed basketball even less than I followed baseball as a kid, I went to a Cleveland Cavaliers game once, but basketball didn't do much for me. However, my OTHER grandfather, Grandpa McLynn (he who gave me my first car which Alex repaired with duct tape), he was a HUGE Celtics fan. My grandpa was a fan of all things Irish, and the Boston Celtics were representative of the Irish. In his later years, Grandpa's winter uniform was dominated by his wool Celtics sweater, worn on game day or not, and the outcome of a Celtics game determined his mood for the days to come. So, I have always liked the Celtics, mostly because I loved my grandad, and he loved his team, so I cannot see the Celtics without thinking of my grandfather, and so I cannot help but like them. In fact, I watched the NBA playoffs and finals for the first time in my life this year, and even though the Celts beat the Cavs in a game 7 heartbreaker, I was cheering for Boston every inch of the way against the Lakers. And I think I might have become a fan of the game of basketball. I was watching Team USA in Beijing this summer play their 3am games and was actually excited about it. ANYWAY. I'm not a Boston sports fan. And in the last number of years, Boston teams have dominated 3 of the 4 major sports in this country (the Bruins even gave a run for the Stanley Cup early on in the hockey season last year, but to no avail in the end). And frankly, I'm tired of it. Even as I was cheering on the Celts, I was hoping for the Sox to stay out of the Series, the Pats to stay out of the Superbowl. So why then, why would I have been hoping for a Sox--Phillies Series? Two words: Smack. Talk.
I do love some good sports-centered smack-talk. I can't give it out so good, but I try nonetheless. And even though my teams always lose, it's still fun to talk down my friends' teams. Especially when my friends' teams are from Boston. My friend Pete is a lifelong New England sports fan from the great state of Maine. I am always pleased to send him a text on a Sunday to let him know that the Pats just got scored against, and Pete is always happy to let me know how Favre just threw his 3rd interception of the day. Smack-talk makes game day extra-fun! Alex is a fan of all things Philly. And I do mean ALL THINGS PHILLY. (Greatest movie ever made? Rocky. Greatest actor/musician? Will Smith/The Fresh Prince. Greatest parade? Mummer's Day.) And he's got a lot of friends who are lifelong Boston fans. So a Sox--Phillies series would provide much fodder for the belittling of the home-town teams of lots of people in our lives. I will gladly take on the side of Philly to root down Boston. (Which makes little sense, considering how much I loved living in Boston for 4 years and think of my 1 year living in Philly as one of the worst years of my life.) But unfortunately, Tampa Bay handed Boston it's ass before Philly could do so. And I don't know anyone rooting for Tampa. Which means that I am almost completely without interest in this series. Go Philly, for Alex's sake. Blah. I just don't care...
But I do care about the Patriots. I care so much I want them to lose every game. I have to admit it, the Pats piss me off. The Sox might annoy me, but I still generally want them to win against all but maybe 3 teams out there. The Pats though, oh the Pats...I want them to lose. Against everybody. I want them to look ridiculous. I want them to suffer defeat time and time again. Granted, I didn't want them to lose their star quarterback. I feel really bad for Tom Brady, sustaining a 2-year injury when at the top of your game is just wrong. But he's got 3 Super Bowl rings, so he can suck it up. And Coach Belichick...I've got nothing good to say about him. Let's see, he was the Browns coach for 5 seasons in the 90's, and of those 5 seasons, he only managed a winning record in one of them. He took one of Cleveland's only bright spots (Quarterback Bernie Kosar, whose name would be substituted for the title name in the song "Louie Louie" to become a favorite Cleveland chant) and benched him for Vinny Testaverde. By the end of Belichick's reign in Cleveland, the Browns had a 5-11 record and the team's owner announced that he was moving the team out of Cleveland and into Baltimore, where it would become the Ravens, which is now an enemy team. So, I blame Belichick for Cleveland losing it's team (which it eventually got back, but the years were dark for Cleveland in between). Every time I see Belichick on the Patriots sideline, I get angry. I want to smack him. I want him to lose. The fact that he's done so much winning in New England just adds insult to injury. And the fact that he got caught cheating with the Spygate incident just makes him that much more despicable to me. He deserves to lose. And it's been a pleasure watching him do so this season. (Though the Pats kicked ass this week, beating the Broncos by 34 points. Bitches.)
I was really rooting for a Red Sox--Phillies World Series. Not because I like either team, not at all. In fact, I care very little for baseball. I liked it a lot as a kid, when we'd go see a Cleveland Indians game every summer. We'd begin with dinner out some place fancy enough to make me a Shirley Temple (nowadays you can get an ST just about anyplace, you can get one at Friendly's for a buck-fifty that comes in a 32-oz cup with free refills, but once upon a time, Shirley Temples were only made in places with full bars) then head over to the stadium. I remember sitting high up in the stands looking down on the action. The action was always of less interest to me than the sky. I loved looking at the swath of sky carved out by the open dome of the stadium, the endless summer night sky of northern Ohio. I would be taken out of my reveries on occasion by the roar of the crowd responding to the action below me, and for a time I would follow the game. But mostly I just liked to sky-gaze. There's so much downtime in baseball that I couldn't stay connected to the game for long. My grandfather used to listen to every Indians game on the radio, and I remember the tinny voices of the announcers as I'd cross through the room to head outside, my grandfather's gaze far too distant to be seeing anything that I could see. Clearly, he was at the game. He needed no picture to connect him; listening to the action took him right to the stadium. My brother today listens to Yankees games on the radio, and the look in his eyes when he's really lost in the game brings me right back to my grandfather. Baseball is a part of the family legacy. My great-grandfather, Paddy Livingston, was a pro player a century ago. He played in the All-Star game in 1909 or 1911, I forget the year. The game-day photo of both teams shows Paddy with the 30 or 40 other players, in their pajama-like uniforms, few of them smiling for the camera. Though in those days, taking a photo took time, more time than one can comfortably hold a smile. It took so much time, in fact, that one guy is actually in the team photo twice, he just ran to the other side as the camera was taking in the full scene. I never met Paddy, but his pictures showed him to look much like his son, my grandfather, Robert. Grandpa had a shot at going pro, too, but the demands of the Depression took away many opportunities for many people. So Grandpa drove a truck and raised his family and listened to baseball on the radio. And his son, Bob, had his own talents on the field, a star player in high school. But again, limited means make for limited choices. Both my brothers played Little League in Ohio, and I was pretty killer on the TeeBall team (okay, I could hit a stay-put ball, that was about where my skills ended). But once we moved to Jersey, there wasn't much baseball in our lives. We weren't fans of the Mets or Yankees so we didn't go to see games, and my brothers weren't playing in school. This is about when baseball lost most of it's interest for me. Now, I get interested around the playoffs. And I was watching that game 4 between the Sox and Yankees a few years ago when the Sox made the comeback of a lifetime and beat the Yanks, which then had me watching the rest of that series, which was edge-of-your-seat excitement throughout. And even though I was living in New York at the time, I really wanted Boston to win. For one thing, I generally root for the underdog, unless my team happens to be the favorite (which happens rarely as a Cleveland fan). And Boston was a huge dog that year, the Yankees were at the top of their game, and the history of these teams was ugly all the way back to Babe Ruth. So I was really happy for Boston to win that year. But now....
I've got a problem with New England sports. I've had a problem with them since the Patriots responded to the Bears "Super Bowl Shuffle" with a terrible, terrible song, I can't even remember the name, I just remember the chorus, "New England, The Patriots are We!" which even as a 10-year-old pissed me off. I was a HUGE fan of the '85 Bears, with Jim McMahon Walter Payton and the Fridge. And what a tune they produced:
"We are The Bears, The Shuffling Crew
Shuffling on down, doing it for you!
We're so bad, we know we're good,
Blowing your minds like we knew we would."
At one point, I knew it word for word. And I truly believed, once I heard both the Bears and the Patriots songs, that there was no way a team that had a song as bad as the New England song could win. And I was right. Better song=better team. Years later, even as I lived in Boston for 4 years, I couldn't get behind the Patriots. The song had soured me on the team for life. I never became a fan of any Boston team, but I didn't take issue with any of them, except the Pats. Wait, I should take a step back: I have been a life-long liker of the Celtics. Not a fan, just a "liker". I followed basketball even less than I followed baseball as a kid, I went to a Cleveland Cavaliers game once, but basketball didn't do much for me. However, my OTHER grandfather, Grandpa McLynn (he who gave me my first car which Alex repaired with duct tape), he was a HUGE Celtics fan. My grandpa was a fan of all things Irish, and the Boston Celtics were representative of the Irish. In his later years, Grandpa's winter uniform was dominated by his wool Celtics sweater, worn on game day or not, and the outcome of a Celtics game determined his mood for the days to come. So, I have always liked the Celtics, mostly because I loved my grandad, and he loved his team, so I cannot see the Celtics without thinking of my grandfather, and so I cannot help but like them. In fact, I watched the NBA playoffs and finals for the first time in my life this year, and even though the Celts beat the Cavs in a game 7 heartbreaker, I was cheering for Boston every inch of the way against the Lakers. And I think I might have become a fan of the game of basketball. I was watching Team USA in Beijing this summer play their 3am games and was actually excited about it. ANYWAY. I'm not a Boston sports fan. And in the last number of years, Boston teams have dominated 3 of the 4 major sports in this country (the Bruins even gave a run for the Stanley Cup early on in the hockey season last year, but to no avail in the end). And frankly, I'm tired of it. Even as I was cheering on the Celts, I was hoping for the Sox to stay out of the Series, the Pats to stay out of the Superbowl. So why then, why would I have been hoping for a Sox--Phillies Series? Two words: Smack. Talk.
I do love some good sports-centered smack-talk. I can't give it out so good, but I try nonetheless. And even though my teams always lose, it's still fun to talk down my friends' teams. Especially when my friends' teams are from Boston. My friend Pete is a lifelong New England sports fan from the great state of Maine. I am always pleased to send him a text on a Sunday to let him know that the Pats just got scored against, and Pete is always happy to let me know how Favre just threw his 3rd interception of the day. Smack-talk makes game day extra-fun! Alex is a fan of all things Philly. And I do mean ALL THINGS PHILLY. (Greatest movie ever made? Rocky. Greatest actor/musician? Will Smith/The Fresh Prince. Greatest parade? Mummer's Day.) And he's got a lot of friends who are lifelong Boston fans. So a Sox--Phillies series would provide much fodder for the belittling of the home-town teams of lots of people in our lives. I will gladly take on the side of Philly to root down Boston. (Which makes little sense, considering how much I loved living in Boston for 4 years and think of my 1 year living in Philly as one of the worst years of my life.) But unfortunately, Tampa Bay handed Boston it's ass before Philly could do so. And I don't know anyone rooting for Tampa. Which means that I am almost completely without interest in this series. Go Philly, for Alex's sake. Blah. I just don't care...
But I do care about the Patriots. I care so much I want them to lose every game. I have to admit it, the Pats piss me off. The Sox might annoy me, but I still generally want them to win against all but maybe 3 teams out there. The Pats though, oh the Pats...I want them to lose. Against everybody. I want them to look ridiculous. I want them to suffer defeat time and time again. Granted, I didn't want them to lose their star quarterback. I feel really bad for Tom Brady, sustaining a 2-year injury when at the top of your game is just wrong. But he's got 3 Super Bowl rings, so he can suck it up. And Coach Belichick...I've got nothing good to say about him. Let's see, he was the Browns coach for 5 seasons in the 90's, and of those 5 seasons, he only managed a winning record in one of them. He took one of Cleveland's only bright spots (Quarterback Bernie Kosar, whose name would be substituted for the title name in the song "Louie Louie" to become a favorite Cleveland chant) and benched him for Vinny Testaverde. By the end of Belichick's reign in Cleveland, the Browns had a 5-11 record and the team's owner announced that he was moving the team out of Cleveland and into Baltimore, where it would become the Ravens, which is now an enemy team. So, I blame Belichick for Cleveland losing it's team (which it eventually got back, but the years were dark for Cleveland in between). Every time I see Belichick on the Patriots sideline, I get angry. I want to smack him. I want him to lose. The fact that he's done so much winning in New England just adds insult to injury. And the fact that he got caught cheating with the Spygate incident just makes him that much more despicable to me. He deserves to lose. And it's been a pleasure watching him do so this season. (Though the Pats kicked ass this week, beating the Broncos by 34 points. Bitches.)
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Happy Hair Days!
I'm cheating on my hairdresser. I thought, perhaps, I'd be able to make it through till Christmas time, when I'll be heading back east for a visit, then I could go uptown to Rosey to have her undo all the damage this desert is inflicting upon my hair. But yesterday, I found a split end that was split into about 14 fibers. Clearly, I cannot go without a haircut for 4 months in the desert! But how could I possibly find someone to take Rosey's place?
I found Rosey 4 years ago. I was working at the Columbia U Bookstore and saw that across the street was a salon. Now, I like my hair. A lot. I am afraid of getting it cut by the wrong person, someone who does not understand the pain an afro can inflict on a white chick going through puberty. All I have wanted, since my waist-length locks were snipped off at age 8 in an attempt to make my mother's life easier (cuz seriously, this hair can be a bitch to take care of), all I have wanted is for my hair to be loooooooooooooong. And I do mean down-to-my-ass long. I want to get lost in my hair. I want to swim in the ocean and rise out of it like Venus, wrapped in nothing but my hair. But curly hair don't grow so easy, and once I got the afro, I was stuck with it for years. Growing out an afro is a lengthy process, and kids are not terribly patient. As it would grow, it gained nothing in length, everything in height. Not cool when you're in elementary school. It wasn't until junior high that my hair finally grew long enough for me to pull it back into an awkward banana-clip mohawk, and it wasn't until high school that my hair finally hit my shoulders when it was dry. I would get it chemically straightened and marvel at how long it was, how it could hit my cheek if I hung upside-down. But the chemicals made it brittle, and it would break and shrink. My hair has gone through many shrinking stages over the years, often when my ingestion of various chemicals would lead to brittle internal breakage. You can probably track my lifestyle choices by looking at the length of my hair in my photo albums. My senior-year-of-college hair was MUCH shorter than my freshman-year-of-college hair, and it had nothing to do with haircuts. But eventually, my lifestyle cleaned up, I traded my bourbon for beet juice and my LSD for Vitamin D, and I figured my hip-length hair would be right around the corner. But no, it would grow, then it would break, and it never got past my shoulder blades. ARGH!
Enter Rosey. I needed a haircut, it was falling out in clumps, so on a lunch break at the bookstore, I headed across the street to the Scott J Aveda salon and asked for someone who was good with curly hair. I got Rosey, a no-nonsense Puerto Rican woman of about 45. I said to her, "I want you to take off as little as possible while getting rid of all the dead stuff." She sat me down, looked my over quizzically, spun me around, and said, "When's the last time you got a haircut?" "I don't know," I answered, "maybe a year." She raised an eyebrow and gave me a most disapproving look, a look that withered me in my seat, then told me, "You want your hair to grow? Well, you need to cut it!" This made no sense to me. When she told me I should be getting a haircut every 3 months, I thought she was crazy. How would my hair EVER grow if I kept cutting it all the time? So I resisted, and waited 5 months, and then I sat in the chair as Rosey scowled and spun me around, then she showed me how much she was cutting off that day, usually about 2 inches. "I told you, you need to come in every 3 months, but you don't listen, so this is what you get." Each time I left, I would vow to return in 3 months time, then hang my head in shame as I walked out the door. It took over a year for me to start taking her advice. Mostly, I think I did it because I was feeling guilty whenever I saw her, like I had somehow let her down. I started going in every 3 months, and each time she would take off a little less than the visit before. But there was always something I wasn't doing right. One day she was brushing my hair, and her scowl made it clear that I had screwed up. "You don't brush your hair," she said. It was true. For years, I hadn't brushed my hair. Brushing made it so BIG, it took all the shape out of it and made it look like a bush. "You know how I know you don't brush your hair?" I lowered my chin and shook my head, knowing she would somehow put me in my place. And she did. She lifted up her hand, which was absolutely covered with my hair. "You don't brush it, your hair falls out. Your scalp is like any other part of your body, it needs love! You gotta brush it to massage it, to stimulate it, you don't brush it and it don't get stimulated and all your hair falls out." Again, didn't really make sense to me, but I did not like to displease Rosey, so I bought a paddle brush that day. And sure enough, when I went back to see her 3 months later, she brushed and brushed my hair with an unreadable look on her face, until finally there was a hint of a grin on one corner of her mouth. "You been brushing, haven't you?" I shyly nodded. "See, what I tell you? You brush your hair, it don't fall out. And look, today, I'm taking off not even an inch." I now found myself leaving the salon with a sense of pride. I had done right by Rosey, and I felt rewarded by her approval. It took 4 years, and much scolding on Rosey's part, but my hair is now the longest it's been since the days before the afro. And I love it. And I love Rosey. You can imagine how hard it was for me to say goodbye to her on my last visit in July. I told her I was moving to the desert, and immediately she looked at my hair and said, "Uh oh." Yeah, big time. She gave me some products to use to try to keep my locks lubed and told me to condition, condition, condition. And I have, oh have I conditioned.
It hasn't helped. Or maybe it has. But this desert has been kicking my ass, and my hair was feeling like straw. How would I possibly find someone in Vegas that I could trust with my hair? I decided to search out an Aveda salon, as I like a lot of their products. Turns out, there's a place just next to the Palms, less than a half-mile from my apartment. I stopped by yesterday to check it out, seemed safe, so I made an appointment for today, with "someone who's good with curly hair." That someone turned out to be Tesha. And Tesha...well, I feel bad admitting it, but I really liked her. Perhaps even more than Rosey. I know, I know, it's too soon to really know, I mean, we just met, this is all happening so quickly. But she snipped and trimmed and took off probably about 2 inches but it still looks long and it feels great and she was nice to boot, in fact everyone in the salon was nice, we talked about New York and different places we've all lived and yada yada...It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon in the salon. I was complimented highly on my hair (which I get in salons a lot, my hair is a wet-dream for some stylists) and on my skin (when I revealed my secret of "I sleep with Vaseline on my face when it's really dry and I wake up with perfect skin", I thought the receptionist might have smacked me then and there. I do have good skin. Thanks, mom). It was a feel-good visit, no head hung in shame, no trauma under the scissors. I now have my salon in Vegas. Happy day. Happier hair.
My dad called me this morning and said, "Guess what? I'm driving past a cemetery, and I'm not in it!" A big thank-you to all the doctors, nurses, orderlies, cafeteria employees, gift shop staff, everyone at Columbia-Presbyterian for taking such good care of my papa.
I found Rosey 4 years ago. I was working at the Columbia U Bookstore and saw that across the street was a salon. Now, I like my hair. A lot. I am afraid of getting it cut by the wrong person, someone who does not understand the pain an afro can inflict on a white chick going through puberty. All I have wanted, since my waist-length locks were snipped off at age 8 in an attempt to make my mother's life easier (cuz seriously, this hair can be a bitch to take care of), all I have wanted is for my hair to be loooooooooooooong. And I do mean down-to-my-ass long. I want to get lost in my hair. I want to swim in the ocean and rise out of it like Venus, wrapped in nothing but my hair. But curly hair don't grow so easy, and once I got the afro, I was stuck with it for years. Growing out an afro is a lengthy process, and kids are not terribly patient. As it would grow, it gained nothing in length, everything in height. Not cool when you're in elementary school. It wasn't until junior high that my hair finally grew long enough for me to pull it back into an awkward banana-clip mohawk, and it wasn't until high school that my hair finally hit my shoulders when it was dry. I would get it chemically straightened and marvel at how long it was, how it could hit my cheek if I hung upside-down. But the chemicals made it brittle, and it would break and shrink. My hair has gone through many shrinking stages over the years, often when my ingestion of various chemicals would lead to brittle internal breakage. You can probably track my lifestyle choices by looking at the length of my hair in my photo albums. My senior-year-of-college hair was MUCH shorter than my freshman-year-of-college hair, and it had nothing to do with haircuts. But eventually, my lifestyle cleaned up, I traded my bourbon for beet juice and my LSD for Vitamin D, and I figured my hip-length hair would be right around the corner. But no, it would grow, then it would break, and it never got past my shoulder blades. ARGH!
Enter Rosey. I needed a haircut, it was falling out in clumps, so on a lunch break at the bookstore, I headed across the street to the Scott J Aveda salon and asked for someone who was good with curly hair. I got Rosey, a no-nonsense Puerto Rican woman of about 45. I said to her, "I want you to take off as little as possible while getting rid of all the dead stuff." She sat me down, looked my over quizzically, spun me around, and said, "When's the last time you got a haircut?" "I don't know," I answered, "maybe a year." She raised an eyebrow and gave me a most disapproving look, a look that withered me in my seat, then told me, "You want your hair to grow? Well, you need to cut it!" This made no sense to me. When she told me I should be getting a haircut every 3 months, I thought she was crazy. How would my hair EVER grow if I kept cutting it all the time? So I resisted, and waited 5 months, and then I sat in the chair as Rosey scowled and spun me around, then she showed me how much she was cutting off that day, usually about 2 inches. "I told you, you need to come in every 3 months, but you don't listen, so this is what you get." Each time I left, I would vow to return in 3 months time, then hang my head in shame as I walked out the door. It took over a year for me to start taking her advice. Mostly, I think I did it because I was feeling guilty whenever I saw her, like I had somehow let her down. I started going in every 3 months, and each time she would take off a little less than the visit before. But there was always something I wasn't doing right. One day she was brushing my hair, and her scowl made it clear that I had screwed up. "You don't brush your hair," she said. It was true. For years, I hadn't brushed my hair. Brushing made it so BIG, it took all the shape out of it and made it look like a bush. "You know how I know you don't brush your hair?" I lowered my chin and shook my head, knowing she would somehow put me in my place. And she did. She lifted up her hand, which was absolutely covered with my hair. "You don't brush it, your hair falls out. Your scalp is like any other part of your body, it needs love! You gotta brush it to massage it, to stimulate it, you don't brush it and it don't get stimulated and all your hair falls out." Again, didn't really make sense to me, but I did not like to displease Rosey, so I bought a paddle brush that day. And sure enough, when I went back to see her 3 months later, she brushed and brushed my hair with an unreadable look on her face, until finally there was a hint of a grin on one corner of her mouth. "You been brushing, haven't you?" I shyly nodded. "See, what I tell you? You brush your hair, it don't fall out. And look, today, I'm taking off not even an inch." I now found myself leaving the salon with a sense of pride. I had done right by Rosey, and I felt rewarded by her approval. It took 4 years, and much scolding on Rosey's part, but my hair is now the longest it's been since the days before the afro. And I love it. And I love Rosey. You can imagine how hard it was for me to say goodbye to her on my last visit in July. I told her I was moving to the desert, and immediately she looked at my hair and said, "Uh oh." Yeah, big time. She gave me some products to use to try to keep my locks lubed and told me to condition, condition, condition. And I have, oh have I conditioned.
It hasn't helped. Or maybe it has. But this desert has been kicking my ass, and my hair was feeling like straw. How would I possibly find someone in Vegas that I could trust with my hair? I decided to search out an Aveda salon, as I like a lot of their products. Turns out, there's a place just next to the Palms, less than a half-mile from my apartment. I stopped by yesterday to check it out, seemed safe, so I made an appointment for today, with "someone who's good with curly hair." That someone turned out to be Tesha. And Tesha...well, I feel bad admitting it, but I really liked her. Perhaps even more than Rosey. I know, I know, it's too soon to really know, I mean, we just met, this is all happening so quickly. But she snipped and trimmed and took off probably about 2 inches but it still looks long and it feels great and she was nice to boot, in fact everyone in the salon was nice, we talked about New York and different places we've all lived and yada yada...It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon in the salon. I was complimented highly on my hair (which I get in salons a lot, my hair is a wet-dream for some stylists) and on my skin (when I revealed my secret of "I sleep with Vaseline on my face when it's really dry and I wake up with perfect skin", I thought the receptionist might have smacked me then and there. I do have good skin. Thanks, mom). It was a feel-good visit, no head hung in shame, no trauma under the scissors. I now have my salon in Vegas. Happy day. Happier hair.
My dad called me this morning and said, "Guess what? I'm driving past a cemetery, and I'm not in it!" A big thank-you to all the doctors, nurses, orderlies, cafeteria employees, gift shop staff, everyone at Columbia-Presbyterian for taking such good care of my papa.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The week in review...
First off, I only won 40% of $600 last week. A perfect ticket don't get you much in these hard economic times.
Vegas has been perfectly autumnal this week. Kind of. I mean, there's no trees on which leaves may be changing their hue, it looks the same as it did when the weather was in the 100's. But last week we went from days in the 90's to nights in the 40's. A rather drastic switch which I was not prepared for in the least. We had the AC running during the day, then I was trying to figure out how to turn the heat on that night. I like a little more subtlety in my seasonal shifts. However, after complaining about the heat for my first month here, I will keep mum on my cold complaints. At least until November.
Still haven't made it on my bike, but the cool air did inspire me to take an 8-mile walk the other day, opening my eyes to some new Vegas locales. Monday morning, I went to an open call for "The Lion King", which will be opening in Vegas in the spring. The audition was in a brand-new part of town for me, way out east near the Boulder Station Casino. Alex was able to give me a ride there at 9:15 for a 10am call. It was an Equity call, and I'm not in the union, so I was just gonna hang out and hope they had time to see me after all the Equity folks. I was very pleased when, after a few minutes of sitting in the waiting room, the talk turned to the election and why it's important that everyone get out and Barack the Vote. Once again, I was engaged in conversation with my "competition" at an audition. So un-New York! Everyone was chatting about the election, then we were moved to another holding room where I bumped into a girl I met at the Tony & Tina audition, and the chatting continued. I'm telling you, I LOVE auditioning in this town! If only I could do it more than every 3 weeks. I suppose if I was willing to do the many topless auditions around town...Anyway, I was finally seen, did my 16 bars, got the "Thank you" send-off, and I was out of there before 11am. No callback, but that's no matter. I was feeling good when I left the studio to walk to the bus. And there was no bus to be seen. So I just kept walking. And walking. I walked past some really cute houses with big ugly foreclosure signs. I walked past huge sections of town where all of the signage was written in Spanish, I walked through neighborhoods where I was the only person on the street not drinking out of a brown paper sack. At about the 4-mile mark, I walked into a shopping mall and headed straight for the Lady's Foot Locker so I could give my blistered feet a break. The woman who was helping me said, "You're not from around here are you?" I told her no, I was from New York. Her face widened into a smile and she said, "See, I knew it! I knew you were from New York!" Now, this is the 2nd time this has happened to me. A few weeks ago, I was at Home Depot trying to buy some kind of keep-em-out door stopper (this was shortly after my neighbor's hand found it's way to my ass; I was feeling a bit unnerved). The Home Depot guy said, "You're not from around here, huh?" I told him I was from New York, which he said he knew. When I asked how, he said, "You got that New York chick attitude." Huh. I took it as a compliment. When I asked my Foot Locker lady how she knew, she said she wasn't sure, she just knew. "I didn't think I had an accent," I said to her. And she said, no, it wasn't an accent, she didn't know what it was, maybe it was because of my long coat, but her boyfriend is from the Bronx and I reminded her of him. Huh. Anyway, I got fitted with some new cross-trainers then headed back to the streets. I was in more familiar territory at this point, so I decided to take some new routes. More brown-bag territory, as it turned out. "For Rent" signs that screamed of the housing crisis: 2-bed, 2-bath, all utilities included, furnished, free premium cable, sparkling pools, $799 a month, first month free. Complex after complex with similar signage. I found some good corners, too, should I decide I'd like to get back into the high-life of the drug scene. Easy pick-ups, and no concern about fixing on the street (at least, there were a few people fixing who didn't seem concerned). Understand, this section of town sits blocks behind the big elaborate Strip properties, like Caesars and Palazzo and Wynn. I found myself thinking of New Orleans, how when I was touring there and staying in the Garden District, I would take long walks past gorgeous old homes and cemeteries, then I'd turn a corner and suddenly be walking on broken glass and seeing trash piled up in the streets. Here in Vegas, the wealth of the Strip sits surrounded by drugs and poverty and gangland. Now, I know enough about bad parts of town to know that I wasn't really in the BAD 'hoods the other day. I've driven through some of those, and talk about depressing. But it was striking, nonetheless, to be walking towards the towering luxuries of the casinos while walking through blocks of broken windows and liquor stores. As I had been at an audition, I was definitely looking out-of-place, with my bright red coat and my super-big hair and my face-covering shades. No one messed with me, but I did get some rather bashful smiles. The rest of the walk was pretty dull. As I was crossing the bridge over I-15, I thought of my many walks across the East River bridges in Manhattan. I miss living in a walking city. But I certainly do not miss auditioning in New York. Hells no, I don't miss it!
My 8-mile walk had me all tuckered out, to the point that I didn't make it to the Santa Fe show Monday night. I was asleep before midnight. Missed a good show, but my feet couldn't handle the dancing. Besides, the Monday Night Football game took all my energy. For the first time in 5 years, the Cleveland Browns were playing on MNF. For those of you who don't know football, the Monday night game is the big-deal game of the week. It's generally reserved for teams with good records and/or large fan bases (large meaning extending beyond state borders). The Browns have neither of these qualifications. They had a 1-3 record going into Monday night, and seeing how they haven't been a good team for decades, they don't feel the love outside of the Cleveland area. But Monday night, they were meeting the undefeated Super Bowl champs, the New York Giants. Now, it can sometimes be difficult to live with a sports bettor. Alex has money riding on all of these games, and usually he's looking for very specific things to happen. On Monday, he needed the Giants to win by 3 points. I can't root against my team! Even if the Browns had been playing Brett Favre (who won his game on Sunday, woo hoo!) I'd be rooting for the Browns to win (while still rooting that Brett would play really well). But Monday night, I was all about the Browns, even while knowing that it would be in our financial best interest for them to lose. But lose they did not. In fact, they destroyed the Giants! Derek Anderson (Browns QB) had his best game EVER, and the team as a whole looked great. The game was in Cleveland, so finally that city had big reasons to cheer! It was hard seeing Alex look so distraught as the Cleveland score continued to grow, and we certainly could use a big win. But my boys kicked ass, so I'm good. Oh yeah, I'm good.
This week's Tuesday with Van was a lovely visit, as always. We discussed the state of the economy (frightful), the state of politics (bitchy), the state of Vegas (drug-fueled). I got to learn some bits about Van's stints in tech support, where he scored big in customer satisfaction (angry customers easily soothed by his no-nonsense approach and high-knowledge of all things tech, not to mention that smooth-as-butter voice) and very low in playing-the-corporate-game (he didn't use the scripts provided him by his employers when speaking with real people with real issues). Ah, bureaucracy! When employees use their own unique abilities to get the job done, it is seen as a slap in the face to the machine. Individuality does not a happy bureaucracy make! My favorite tale was one he told about some nasty higher-up at Western Union who did not like Van's "attitude" and managed to lay him off, even though all of his customer AND supervisor reviews were stellar. Van left the job by letting the higher-up know that, "Someday, you'll be working for me." And sure enough, years later, when Van's business was having issues with their Western Union service, who was it that was dealing with Van's case? Oh, you KNOW it was the schmuck who laid him off! And you KNOW that Van let him know that, yes, indeed, "you are now working for me." Oh, how I love a good bitch! And Van is a stellar bitch. Not only does he have the confidence to make bitchiness work to his advantage (and confidence is necessary if you want to succeed as a bitch), but he's smart as hell and therefore can support his moments of letting the bitch come out to play! I can only imagine how big a presence Van would be on a stage. Sitting behind a desk at the Postal Center, there's already a larger-than-life quality, made even larger when he stands, in pumps or flats, my 64 inches suddenly seem puny in his presence. On stage...Van is looking to put together a show for herself, new material in an acid-jazz vein. Sounds divine. Though I would love to see her Anita Baker...
I finally got a library card! I love libraries, I really do. When I used to tour a lot, I would always find the local library, which usually provided Internet service so I could check my email, but also provided a kind of tranquility that I truly enjoy. As a teenager, I used to hang out at the library a lot, but mostly because it was one of the only places my parents trusted me to hang out. Mostly, I would just kill time hiding in the stacks with my friends. But as an adult, I grew to enjoy the quiet feel of being surrounded by thousands of books. I love to read, though I haven't been doing much of it lately. When I was touring, I would average 2 books a week. Granted, I was usually on tour by myself, so there was plenty of free time for reading. And I would often be reading books about the Holocaust, which made for some vivid dreams. I would read every night in bed, but sometimes I would go to the library to read. Most libraries have big comfy chairs to curl up in, and I like the feel of sinking into a chair while sinking into a novel. The Vegas library branch nearest me doesn't have much in the way of big comfy chairs. It's a fairly small branch, and it clearly caters to both an elderly population (the Large Print section takes up 2 walls) and a non-English-speaking population. I went in with a couple of recommendations for novels, but none were available at this branch (in fact, it didn't seem that these titles were available in the whole Vegas library system), so I just wandered through. Picked up a couple of DVD's (a Judy Garland/Gene Kelly flick, and an Uta Hagen Acting Class docu) and 2 CD's (I'm trying to learn some showtunes, so I got "Assassins" and a "Bernadette Peters does Rodgers & Hammerstein" disk). I also meant to pick up Huxley's "A Brave New World" which was one of my favorite books in high school and seemed appropriate to our current times, but once I cracked it open last night, I realized that I had picked up "WRITINGS on A Brave New World". Not interested. So, I'm reading "The Audacity of Hope" by this guy named Barack Obama, maybe you've heard of him? I bought it for Alex over a year ago, when he knew very little about Obama and wasn't much interested in learning more. But he read the book and became an instant fan. And now that I'm no longer ignoring the presidential race (I stopped watching the news and following politics after the 2004 elections; I was too dismayed to pay attention and frankly I was angry at... well, I was angry at politics and the media as a whole, and I felt that I was generally being lied to and no politician was really good 'cause there's no such thing as a successful politician who has told the truth, right? Or so I felt for years, and the primary season did little to change my feelings. But I have decided that I can't be complacent any longer, because I've got a long time left to live in this country, and if I've already given up on it, what's the point?), I figure I might as well read this book. I'm tired of listening to the candidates repeat themselves endlessly in order to attack and defend, so I'll read what one of them has to say about himself. And more importantly, what he has to say about our need to continue to have hope, to aspire to something greater than what we've become. Because it seems like that's what it comes down to for a lot of Americans, especially the younger Americans who aren't looking at retirement and Medicare and social security as our big concerns; we're looking at being a part of a world that gets smaller and smaller and more and more divisive, we're looking at changes to our planet that may drastically shift our map-lines within our lifetime, we're looking at the end of "if you work hard and put your money in a 401K and play by the rules, you will retire with grace and dignity and enough money to take care of yourself in your golden years." Hell, my generation has never really expected to see it's social security benefits when we reach retirement age, my generation has little faith in playing by the rules because we've seen those rules broken time and again to benefit the rule-breakers and screw over those who tried to play it safe. This election really seems to be about young-versus-old, change-versus-stability. Yes, I want change, but not because of what might happen tomorrow; I'm afraid of where we might find ourselves in 20 years, when this election will be a fuzzy memory. I plan on being alive then, and I can't tell you how many times I've thought, "Thank goodness I don't have kids who are gonna have to figure out how to survive in this planet." Yes, I know that sounds a bit doom-and-gloom, but come on! We've been living in a world color-coded by terrorism! We've been living under a dome of fear for the last 7 years, and no one seems to be feeling any safer. We keep hearing of NEW threats to our way of life, we keep being told that the enemy is always on the hunt and will strike at any time, in any place. And then we're told that the sea levels are rising and in 50 years, New York City may be under water. Our American way of life seems to be centered around fear. And I'm tired of it. Fear leads to hatred and anger and McCain-Palin rallies. Not to say that everyone at those rallies is looking to kill that Arab terrorist who is running for President, obviously it is a very vocal minority who believes that the man who may in fact be our next President is an Arab-Muslim who wants to blow up the Pentagon. (It is a minority, right? I have to believe that.) But it scares me to see clips of these rallies, not just because of the fact that a candidate is being turned into an un-American symbol of fear, but because of the reality that he might actually win, and then there will be all these "Obama Nation" readers who truly fear their President. How do we move forward like that?
Sorry, I ventured into politics. Guess I'm just getting prepped for tonight's debate. Wonder where the DOW will be by then...
Vegas has been perfectly autumnal this week. Kind of. I mean, there's no trees on which leaves may be changing their hue, it looks the same as it did when the weather was in the 100's. But last week we went from days in the 90's to nights in the 40's. A rather drastic switch which I was not prepared for in the least. We had the AC running during the day, then I was trying to figure out how to turn the heat on that night. I like a little more subtlety in my seasonal shifts. However, after complaining about the heat for my first month here, I will keep mum on my cold complaints. At least until November.
Still haven't made it on my bike, but the cool air did inspire me to take an 8-mile walk the other day, opening my eyes to some new Vegas locales. Monday morning, I went to an open call for "The Lion King", which will be opening in Vegas in the spring. The audition was in a brand-new part of town for me, way out east near the Boulder Station Casino. Alex was able to give me a ride there at 9:15 for a 10am call. It was an Equity call, and I'm not in the union, so I was just gonna hang out and hope they had time to see me after all the Equity folks. I was very pleased when, after a few minutes of sitting in the waiting room, the talk turned to the election and why it's important that everyone get out and Barack the Vote. Once again, I was engaged in conversation with my "competition" at an audition. So un-New York! Everyone was chatting about the election, then we were moved to another holding room where I bumped into a girl I met at the Tony & Tina audition, and the chatting continued. I'm telling you, I LOVE auditioning in this town! If only I could do it more than every 3 weeks. I suppose if I was willing to do the many topless auditions around town...Anyway, I was finally seen, did my 16 bars, got the "Thank you" send-off, and I was out of there before 11am. No callback, but that's no matter. I was feeling good when I left the studio to walk to the bus. And there was no bus to be seen. So I just kept walking. And walking. I walked past some really cute houses with big ugly foreclosure signs. I walked past huge sections of town where all of the signage was written in Spanish, I walked through neighborhoods where I was the only person on the street not drinking out of a brown paper sack. At about the 4-mile mark, I walked into a shopping mall and headed straight for the Lady's Foot Locker so I could give my blistered feet a break. The woman who was helping me said, "You're not from around here are you?" I told her no, I was from New York. Her face widened into a smile and she said, "See, I knew it! I knew you were from New York!" Now, this is the 2nd time this has happened to me. A few weeks ago, I was at Home Depot trying to buy some kind of keep-em-out door stopper (this was shortly after my neighbor's hand found it's way to my ass; I was feeling a bit unnerved). The Home Depot guy said, "You're not from around here, huh?" I told him I was from New York, which he said he knew. When I asked how, he said, "You got that New York chick attitude." Huh. I took it as a compliment. When I asked my Foot Locker lady how she knew, she said she wasn't sure, she just knew. "I didn't think I had an accent," I said to her. And she said, no, it wasn't an accent, she didn't know what it was, maybe it was because of my long coat, but her boyfriend is from the Bronx and I reminded her of him. Huh. Anyway, I got fitted with some new cross-trainers then headed back to the streets. I was in more familiar territory at this point, so I decided to take some new routes. More brown-bag territory, as it turned out. "For Rent" signs that screamed of the housing crisis: 2-bed, 2-bath, all utilities included, furnished, free premium cable, sparkling pools, $799 a month, first month free. Complex after complex with similar signage. I found some good corners, too, should I decide I'd like to get back into the high-life of the drug scene. Easy pick-ups, and no concern about fixing on the street (at least, there were a few people fixing who didn't seem concerned). Understand, this section of town sits blocks behind the big elaborate Strip properties, like Caesars and Palazzo and Wynn. I found myself thinking of New Orleans, how when I was touring there and staying in the Garden District, I would take long walks past gorgeous old homes and cemeteries, then I'd turn a corner and suddenly be walking on broken glass and seeing trash piled up in the streets. Here in Vegas, the wealth of the Strip sits surrounded by drugs and poverty and gangland. Now, I know enough about bad parts of town to know that I wasn't really in the BAD 'hoods the other day. I've driven through some of those, and talk about depressing. But it was striking, nonetheless, to be walking towards the towering luxuries of the casinos while walking through blocks of broken windows and liquor stores. As I had been at an audition, I was definitely looking out-of-place, with my bright red coat and my super-big hair and my face-covering shades. No one messed with me, but I did get some rather bashful smiles. The rest of the walk was pretty dull. As I was crossing the bridge over I-15, I thought of my many walks across the East River bridges in Manhattan. I miss living in a walking city. But I certainly do not miss auditioning in New York. Hells no, I don't miss it!
My 8-mile walk had me all tuckered out, to the point that I didn't make it to the Santa Fe show Monday night. I was asleep before midnight. Missed a good show, but my feet couldn't handle the dancing. Besides, the Monday Night Football game took all my energy. For the first time in 5 years, the Cleveland Browns were playing on MNF. For those of you who don't know football, the Monday night game is the big-deal game of the week. It's generally reserved for teams with good records and/or large fan bases (large meaning extending beyond state borders). The Browns have neither of these qualifications. They had a 1-3 record going into Monday night, and seeing how they haven't been a good team for decades, they don't feel the love outside of the Cleveland area. But Monday night, they were meeting the undefeated Super Bowl champs, the New York Giants. Now, it can sometimes be difficult to live with a sports bettor. Alex has money riding on all of these games, and usually he's looking for very specific things to happen. On Monday, he needed the Giants to win by 3 points. I can't root against my team! Even if the Browns had been playing Brett Favre (who won his game on Sunday, woo hoo!) I'd be rooting for the Browns to win (while still rooting that Brett would play really well). But Monday night, I was all about the Browns, even while knowing that it would be in our financial best interest for them to lose. But lose they did not. In fact, they destroyed the Giants! Derek Anderson (Browns QB) had his best game EVER, and the team as a whole looked great. The game was in Cleveland, so finally that city had big reasons to cheer! It was hard seeing Alex look so distraught as the Cleveland score continued to grow, and we certainly could use a big win. But my boys kicked ass, so I'm good. Oh yeah, I'm good.
This week's Tuesday with Van was a lovely visit, as always. We discussed the state of the economy (frightful), the state of politics (bitchy), the state of Vegas (drug-fueled). I got to learn some bits about Van's stints in tech support, where he scored big in customer satisfaction (angry customers easily soothed by his no-nonsense approach and high-knowledge of all things tech, not to mention that smooth-as-butter voice) and very low in playing-the-corporate-game (he didn't use the scripts provided him by his employers when speaking with real people with real issues). Ah, bureaucracy! When employees use their own unique abilities to get the job done, it is seen as a slap in the face to the machine. Individuality does not a happy bureaucracy make! My favorite tale was one he told about some nasty higher-up at Western Union who did not like Van's "attitude" and managed to lay him off, even though all of his customer AND supervisor reviews were stellar. Van left the job by letting the higher-up know that, "Someday, you'll be working for me." And sure enough, years later, when Van's business was having issues with their Western Union service, who was it that was dealing with Van's case? Oh, you KNOW it was the schmuck who laid him off! And you KNOW that Van let him know that, yes, indeed, "you are now working for me." Oh, how I love a good bitch! And Van is a stellar bitch. Not only does he have the confidence to make bitchiness work to his advantage (and confidence is necessary if you want to succeed as a bitch), but he's smart as hell and therefore can support his moments of letting the bitch come out to play! I can only imagine how big a presence Van would be on a stage. Sitting behind a desk at the Postal Center, there's already a larger-than-life quality, made even larger when he stands, in pumps or flats, my 64 inches suddenly seem puny in his presence. On stage...Van is looking to put together a show for herself, new material in an acid-jazz vein. Sounds divine. Though I would love to see her Anita Baker...
I finally got a library card! I love libraries, I really do. When I used to tour a lot, I would always find the local library, which usually provided Internet service so I could check my email, but also provided a kind of tranquility that I truly enjoy. As a teenager, I used to hang out at the library a lot, but mostly because it was one of the only places my parents trusted me to hang out. Mostly, I would just kill time hiding in the stacks with my friends. But as an adult, I grew to enjoy the quiet feel of being surrounded by thousands of books. I love to read, though I haven't been doing much of it lately. When I was touring, I would average 2 books a week. Granted, I was usually on tour by myself, so there was plenty of free time for reading. And I would often be reading books about the Holocaust, which made for some vivid dreams. I would read every night in bed, but sometimes I would go to the library to read. Most libraries have big comfy chairs to curl up in, and I like the feel of sinking into a chair while sinking into a novel. The Vegas library branch nearest me doesn't have much in the way of big comfy chairs. It's a fairly small branch, and it clearly caters to both an elderly population (the Large Print section takes up 2 walls) and a non-English-speaking population. I went in with a couple of recommendations for novels, but none were available at this branch (in fact, it didn't seem that these titles were available in the whole Vegas library system), so I just wandered through. Picked up a couple of DVD's (a Judy Garland/Gene Kelly flick, and an Uta Hagen Acting Class docu) and 2 CD's (I'm trying to learn some showtunes, so I got "Assassins" and a "Bernadette Peters does Rodgers & Hammerstein" disk). I also meant to pick up Huxley's "A Brave New World" which was one of my favorite books in high school and seemed appropriate to our current times, but once I cracked it open last night, I realized that I had picked up "WRITINGS on A Brave New World". Not interested. So, I'm reading "The Audacity of Hope" by this guy named Barack Obama, maybe you've heard of him? I bought it for Alex over a year ago, when he knew very little about Obama and wasn't much interested in learning more. But he read the book and became an instant fan. And now that I'm no longer ignoring the presidential race (I stopped watching the news and following politics after the 2004 elections; I was too dismayed to pay attention and frankly I was angry at... well, I was angry at politics and the media as a whole, and I felt that I was generally being lied to and no politician was really good 'cause there's no such thing as a successful politician who has told the truth, right? Or so I felt for years, and the primary season did little to change my feelings. But I have decided that I can't be complacent any longer, because I've got a long time left to live in this country, and if I've already given up on it, what's the point?), I figure I might as well read this book. I'm tired of listening to the candidates repeat themselves endlessly in order to attack and defend, so I'll read what one of them has to say about himself. And more importantly, what he has to say about our need to continue to have hope, to aspire to something greater than what we've become. Because it seems like that's what it comes down to for a lot of Americans, especially the younger Americans who aren't looking at retirement and Medicare and social security as our big concerns; we're looking at being a part of a world that gets smaller and smaller and more and more divisive, we're looking at changes to our planet that may drastically shift our map-lines within our lifetime, we're looking at the end of "if you work hard and put your money in a 401K and play by the rules, you will retire with grace and dignity and enough money to take care of yourself in your golden years." Hell, my generation has never really expected to see it's social security benefits when we reach retirement age, my generation has little faith in playing by the rules because we've seen those rules broken time and again to benefit the rule-breakers and screw over those who tried to play it safe. This election really seems to be about young-versus-old, change-versus-stability. Yes, I want change, but not because of what might happen tomorrow; I'm afraid of where we might find ourselves in 20 years, when this election will be a fuzzy memory. I plan on being alive then, and I can't tell you how many times I've thought, "Thank goodness I don't have kids who are gonna have to figure out how to survive in this planet." Yes, I know that sounds a bit doom-and-gloom, but come on! We've been living in a world color-coded by terrorism! We've been living under a dome of fear for the last 7 years, and no one seems to be feeling any safer. We keep hearing of NEW threats to our way of life, we keep being told that the enemy is always on the hunt and will strike at any time, in any place. And then we're told that the sea levels are rising and in 50 years, New York City may be under water. Our American way of life seems to be centered around fear. And I'm tired of it. Fear leads to hatred and anger and McCain-Palin rallies. Not to say that everyone at those rallies is looking to kill that Arab terrorist who is running for President, obviously it is a very vocal minority who believes that the man who may in fact be our next President is an Arab-Muslim who wants to blow up the Pentagon. (It is a minority, right? I have to believe that.) But it scares me to see clips of these rallies, not just because of the fact that a candidate is being turned into an un-American symbol of fear, but because of the reality that he might actually win, and then there will be all these "Obama Nation" readers who truly fear their President. How do we move forward like that?
Sorry, I ventured into politics. Guess I'm just getting prepped for tonight's debate. Wonder where the DOW will be by then...
Thursday, October 9, 2008
I sure know how to pick 'em!
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, thank you, Van! Your green-tea-lemongrass bath soak is heavenly. I don't know how I found the will to ever climb out of the tub...
But here I am, hair wet and dripping down my back. No matter, I am in a state of blissful calm. I'm listening to some great tunes by a great lady, the one-and-only Anya Singleton. Anya and I were at Emerson together, and I'd lost track of her until this summer (thank you, Facebook). Seems she's been busy as an actor, teacher and singer/songwriter. Anya's CD was released this summer, and my first taste of it was at the release party in late August, which kicked ass! I've listened to it dozens of times since, and it keeps getting better. Check her out:
http://anyasingleton.com/
So, a number of the Vegas sports books have a weekly football contest. Way it works is this: beginning of the season, you buy an entry for the whole season. Then each week, you attempt to pick the winning teams for college and/or NFL games. There are prizes for first and second place, and there's a prize if you pick all the losers. But I like winners. And man, can I pick 'em! Last week, two of my entries were 2nd place winners, and this week, I picked a perfect ticket!!! Not that I actually pick any of them. Alex's partner, Max, is determined to win the contests each week. In order to make this happen, he is entered under a variety of names (including my megnificent moniker, Meg Mary McLynn, mmmmmarvelous), which enables him to pick many combos of teams, which ups his odds of winning greatly. The winning tickets are split 60-40 between Max and the "winner". Some of the contests have a top prize of $3000, some have a top prize of a BMW. Alex is hoping they win 3 BMW's, one for each of the guys in his group. So far, they've got one. Or, 60% of one. And a number of smaller wins. Like mine. Last week's 2nd place winners were worth about $70 each, and this week I hit it for $3000! (Unless someone else out there has a perfect ticket, in which case I'll have to beat him up and steal his ticket and keep all the money, it's mine mine MINE!!) Yes, I'm a winner, a winner all the way.
But here I am, hair wet and dripping down my back. No matter, I am in a state of blissful calm. I'm listening to some great tunes by a great lady, the one-and-only Anya Singleton. Anya and I were at Emerson together, and I'd lost track of her until this summer (thank you, Facebook). Seems she's been busy as an actor, teacher and singer/songwriter. Anya's CD was released this summer, and my first taste of it was at the release party in late August, which kicked ass! I've listened to it dozens of times since, and it keeps getting better. Check her out:
http://anyasingleton.com/
So, a number of the Vegas sports books have a weekly football contest. Way it works is this: beginning of the season, you buy an entry for the whole season. Then each week, you attempt to pick the winning teams for college and/or NFL games. There are prizes for first and second place, and there's a prize if you pick all the losers. But I like winners. And man, can I pick 'em! Last week, two of my entries were 2nd place winners, and this week, I picked a perfect ticket!!! Not that I actually pick any of them. Alex's partner, Max, is determined to win the contests each week. In order to make this happen, he is entered under a variety of names (including my megnificent moniker, Meg Mary McLynn, mmmmmarvelous), which enables him to pick many combos of teams, which ups his odds of winning greatly. The winning tickets are split 60-40 between Max and the "winner". Some of the contests have a top prize of $3000, some have a top prize of a BMW. Alex is hoping they win 3 BMW's, one for each of the guys in his group. So far, they've got one. Or, 60% of one. And a number of smaller wins. Like mine. Last week's 2nd place winners were worth about $70 each, and this week I hit it for $3000! (Unless someone else out there has a perfect ticket, in which case I'll have to beat him up and steal his ticket and keep all the money, it's mine mine MINE!!) Yes, I'm a winner, a winner all the way.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
A Spirit of Multi-Partisanship
The temperature is headed back into the 90's today. Me no likey to bikey. But according to the forecast, we're supposed to see a high of only 67 on Saturday...YEEE HAAAAAA!!!
I'd like to send a super-big shoutout to my superfriend Liz. Liz has been working hard to put together my website, which I have made even harder for her by taking forever to get her my stuff. But she kept at it, between rehearsals and jobs and Linklater training, and today, when you visit http://www.megmclynn.com/, you will be greeted by a whole lotta ME!! Lots of pics, my resume, and some other goodies. Thank you ever so, Lizziekins, and here's hoping I've got lots of reasons to bug you with those "Current Projects" updates.
I'm also in the process of creating a MySpace page. Yes, I know most people were rockin' the MySpace 6 years ago and now have left it for the fertile fields of Facebook. Once again, I'm late to the game. However, it seems that MySpace is a main networking tool in the Vegas musician's community, which I'm trying to butt my way into. Thus far, my page is looking kind of sad and lonely, so won't any of you who are still hanging out in MySpace be my friends? Go to http://www.myspace.com/megmclynn, and you'll be greeted by me singing my dirty grocery song from my days performing with Seattle Women in Blues. I'll be putting up a few more vocal tracks and pics and whatnot, once I get it all figured out. Look at this pretty ol' dog learning some pretty new tricks!
Monday's Sante Fe gig was another jaw-dropper. A couple of Alex's friends came along and were equally impressed. You'll always know where to find me on a Monday night in Vegas! I'm like a groupie, without all the grossness that goes along with groupies. Which I guess just makes me a fan. Alex bought 2 of their CD's after the show, and I think I know where I'll be doing my Christmas shopping this year...
Yesterday I had my weekly visit with my favorite mailman, Van. Last week, Van and I had a long discussion about bath salts, as we are both fans of soaking in a hot tub. It's one of the wonderful aspects of Vegas life: every home has a big tub. Okay, maybe not EVERY home, but there was definitely a lot of resort-style building going on in the development of this town, and big soaking tubs are a bit of a norm here. Anyway, I picked up my mail yesterday (still no sign of 6 weeks worth of mail), and Van told me he had something for me, that I should close my eyes and inhale, and as I did, the most lovely, soothing aroma penetrated my scent-ses: Green Tea and Lemongrass Body Soak. Zowee!! If I just kept my eyes closed, I'd probably still be at the postal center dreaming of exotic locales and Utopian existences. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh... But I opened my eyes and came back to reality. In a big way. Van turned me on to a page on the US Geological Survey site where you can check out all of the global earthquake activity over the course of the last week. And there's a lot of activity!! Most of it is pretty minor, but it's fascinating to see a world map with all of these little dots representing earthquakes. California is constantly shifting! And even more than Cali is Alaska!! Check it out: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/
Click on the map to zoom into a region. It's a whole different look at the world in which we live. Seriously, check out Alaska. Wonder where that pipeline is...
Did you watch the debate last night? I did. Mostly. I got bored. After almost 2 years of presidential campaigning, I'm just tired of listening to these people talk!! The same phrases are being repeated. One guy says something, the other guy says he's lying, which means that no one is telling the truth. Can we have a moratorium on campaigning until November 1, please?? Personally, I thought that McCain won last night, mostly because he didn't piss me off the way he did at the last debate, refusing to acknowledge Obama's presence on the stage. McCain went a whole different way last night, beginning by saying hello to Obama, right there on stage, where everyone could see! And clearly, McCain does well in a town-hall format. He came off as a man-of-the-people, easy to talk to, even kind of nice. (As opposed to the first debate, where I thought he came off like a crotchety ol' lizard-like asshole.) Obama seemed uncomfortable at times, like he really just wanted to get into a private room with McCain and take the gloves off. I thought he had some good moments, but overall I gave the win to McCain. Though a number of talking heads gave it to Obama. Not that it matters. We're at that time of the season when it's all about personal attacks, when Obama pals around with terrorists and McCain is a lover of lobbyists. SHUT UP ALREADY WITH THIS BULLSHIT AND SHOW ME SOME OF THAT "CHANGE" YOU BOTH KEEP TALKING ABOUT!! Seriously, I've got nothing but doom and gloom coming at me from every newspaper and news-channel, the stock market is in chaos, "the American empire is coming to an end" I'm being told by friends and foes alike, I know too many people who have lost or are losing their jobs/homes/savings, things are seriously (pardon my language) FUCKED UP in my country, and you really think I give a crap what McCain may or may not have done in 1987? I had an afro in 1987, but it don't mean I'd do it again! You think it matters to me that a professor who threw a party for Obama a few years ago wanted to blow up the Pentagon in the 60's??? It was the 60's, it was Vietnam, I would've been blowing shit up, too, if I could have stayed sober long enough!!! All of these character attacks only make certain that whoever does win this election is going to be HATED by a shit-ton of Americans. And how does that help us ring in an era of bi-partisanship? The lines between red and blue are being drawn with trip-wire; who the hell is gonna be bold enough to hang out in the middle?? This is why I remain an Independent in the political realm. I became a registered voter in the swing-state of Nevada last weekend, but I refused to attach myself to any political party. Yes, I'll be voting for one of the two major parties (bet you can't guess which one), but I really don't want to be too closely associated. Hell, the Green Party platform bets suits my political leanings, and I am tempted to vote for Cynthia McKinney (yes, there is a woman running for President in this election). I'm just tired of feeling so much division in my country. I've spent a lot of time travelling the US of A, and I've learned that people have very different needs and struggles and priorities, much of it mirroring the needs and struggles and priorities of the region in which they live. And this is a BIG country, with BIG differences from one region to the next. There is no one person who is going to unite us all. But the way the American political process thrives on finger-pointing and name-calling, we are pretty much guaranteed to see more division ahead. As much as Obama took a lot of shit for repeating "I agree with Senator McCain" dozens of times at the first debate, I have to believe that the more these two sides can find things they agree on, the more progress we can make as a country. They've both said as much (though Obama has been saying it for a long time and McCain jumped on it once he realized how well it was working): We may not agree on abortion, but we do agree that we need to have fewer unwanted pregnancies. We may not agree on gay rights, but we do agree that loved ones should have rights (though I can't wait for the day that a major-party candidate will support gay marriage). We may not agree on our economics, but we do agree that thousands of Americans losing their homes is a crisis. Yes, I understand that there are no solutions in these agreements, but the "solutions" being tossed out by these guys are consistently met with the other guy's version of why the "solution" is actually the "problem". ENOUGH!! One of you is gonna win, and if you both truly want what's best for America, you better start treating each other with respect. If Americans don't respect their President, what does that do to the country? (HINT: Take a look at America today.)
Sorry to go all political on y'all, but it was done in a spirit of bipartisanship! Or, multi-partisanship, since we don't all fit into one of 2 boxes, thank you very much.
I'd like to send a super-big shoutout to my superfriend Liz. Liz has been working hard to put together my website, which I have made even harder for her by taking forever to get her my stuff. But she kept at it, between rehearsals and jobs and Linklater training, and today, when you visit http://www.megmclynn.com/, you will be greeted by a whole lotta ME!! Lots of pics, my resume, and some other goodies. Thank you ever so, Lizziekins, and here's hoping I've got lots of reasons to bug you with those "Current Projects" updates.
I'm also in the process of creating a MySpace page. Yes, I know most people were rockin' the MySpace 6 years ago and now have left it for the fertile fields of Facebook. Once again, I'm late to the game. However, it seems that MySpace is a main networking tool in the Vegas musician's community, which I'm trying to butt my way into. Thus far, my page is looking kind of sad and lonely, so won't any of you who are still hanging out in MySpace be my friends? Go to http://www.myspace.com/megmclynn, and you'll be greeted by me singing my dirty grocery song from my days performing with Seattle Women in Blues. I'll be putting up a few more vocal tracks and pics and whatnot, once I get it all figured out. Look at this pretty ol' dog learning some pretty new tricks!
Monday's Sante Fe gig was another jaw-dropper. A couple of Alex's friends came along and were equally impressed. You'll always know where to find me on a Monday night in Vegas! I'm like a groupie, without all the grossness that goes along with groupies. Which I guess just makes me a fan. Alex bought 2 of their CD's after the show, and I think I know where I'll be doing my Christmas shopping this year...
Yesterday I had my weekly visit with my favorite mailman, Van. Last week, Van and I had a long discussion about bath salts, as we are both fans of soaking in a hot tub. It's one of the wonderful aspects of Vegas life: every home has a big tub. Okay, maybe not EVERY home, but there was definitely a lot of resort-style building going on in the development of this town, and big soaking tubs are a bit of a norm here. Anyway, I picked up my mail yesterday (still no sign of 6 weeks worth of mail), and Van told me he had something for me, that I should close my eyes and inhale, and as I did, the most lovely, soothing aroma penetrated my scent-ses: Green Tea and Lemongrass Body Soak. Zowee!! If I just kept my eyes closed, I'd probably still be at the postal center dreaming of exotic locales and Utopian existences. Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh... But I opened my eyes and came back to reality. In a big way. Van turned me on to a page on the US Geological Survey site where you can check out all of the global earthquake activity over the course of the last week. And there's a lot of activity!! Most of it is pretty minor, but it's fascinating to see a world map with all of these little dots representing earthquakes. California is constantly shifting! And even more than Cali is Alaska!! Check it out: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/
Click on the map to zoom into a region. It's a whole different look at the world in which we live. Seriously, check out Alaska. Wonder where that pipeline is...
Did you watch the debate last night? I did. Mostly. I got bored. After almost 2 years of presidential campaigning, I'm just tired of listening to these people talk!! The same phrases are being repeated. One guy says something, the other guy says he's lying, which means that no one is telling the truth. Can we have a moratorium on campaigning until November 1, please?? Personally, I thought that McCain won last night, mostly because he didn't piss me off the way he did at the last debate, refusing to acknowledge Obama's presence on the stage. McCain went a whole different way last night, beginning by saying hello to Obama, right there on stage, where everyone could see! And clearly, McCain does well in a town-hall format. He came off as a man-of-the-people, easy to talk to, even kind of nice. (As opposed to the first debate, where I thought he came off like a crotchety ol' lizard-like asshole.) Obama seemed uncomfortable at times, like he really just wanted to get into a private room with McCain and take the gloves off. I thought he had some good moments, but overall I gave the win to McCain. Though a number of talking heads gave it to Obama. Not that it matters. We're at that time of the season when it's all about personal attacks, when Obama pals around with terrorists and McCain is a lover of lobbyists. SHUT UP ALREADY WITH THIS BULLSHIT AND SHOW ME SOME OF THAT "CHANGE" YOU BOTH KEEP TALKING ABOUT!! Seriously, I've got nothing but doom and gloom coming at me from every newspaper and news-channel, the stock market is in chaos, "the American empire is coming to an end" I'm being told by friends and foes alike, I know too many people who have lost or are losing their jobs/homes/savings, things are seriously (pardon my language) FUCKED UP in my country, and you really think I give a crap what McCain may or may not have done in 1987? I had an afro in 1987, but it don't mean I'd do it again! You think it matters to me that a professor who threw a party for Obama a few years ago wanted to blow up the Pentagon in the 60's??? It was the 60's, it was Vietnam, I would've been blowing shit up, too, if I could have stayed sober long enough!!! All of these character attacks only make certain that whoever does win this election is going to be HATED by a shit-ton of Americans. And how does that help us ring in an era of bi-partisanship? The lines between red and blue are being drawn with trip-wire; who the hell is gonna be bold enough to hang out in the middle?? This is why I remain an Independent in the political realm. I became a registered voter in the swing-state of Nevada last weekend, but I refused to attach myself to any political party. Yes, I'll be voting for one of the two major parties (bet you can't guess which one), but I really don't want to be too closely associated. Hell, the Green Party platform bets suits my political leanings, and I am tempted to vote for Cynthia McKinney (yes, there is a woman running for President in this election). I'm just tired of feeling so much division in my country. I've spent a lot of time travelling the US of A, and I've learned that people have very different needs and struggles and priorities, much of it mirroring the needs and struggles and priorities of the region in which they live. And this is a BIG country, with BIG differences from one region to the next. There is no one person who is going to unite us all. But the way the American political process thrives on finger-pointing and name-calling, we are pretty much guaranteed to see more division ahead. As much as Obama took a lot of shit for repeating "I agree with Senator McCain" dozens of times at the first debate, I have to believe that the more these two sides can find things they agree on, the more progress we can make as a country. They've both said as much (though Obama has been saying it for a long time and McCain jumped on it once he realized how well it was working): We may not agree on abortion, but we do agree that we need to have fewer unwanted pregnancies. We may not agree on gay rights, but we do agree that loved ones should have rights (though I can't wait for the day that a major-party candidate will support gay marriage). We may not agree on our economics, but we do agree that thousands of Americans losing their homes is a crisis. Yes, I understand that there are no solutions in these agreements, but the "solutions" being tossed out by these guys are consistently met with the other guy's version of why the "solution" is actually the "problem". ENOUGH!! One of you is gonna win, and if you both truly want what's best for America, you better start treating each other with respect. If Americans don't respect their President, what does that do to the country? (HINT: Take a look at America today.)
Sorry to go all political on y'all, but it was done in a spirit of bipartisanship! Or, multi-partisanship, since we don't all fit into one of 2 boxes, thank you very much.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
This day in sports
Another NFL Sunday wrapping up. The Browns and Brett Favre both have Bye weeks so no real drama for me to follow. Which means I was able to pay a little more attention to the other teams I like: Eagles, Colts, Packers, Giants. The Browns are my #1 team, followed by whatever team Brett is on, which happens to be the Jets. (I really don't care much about the Jets, and chances are I will stop caring entirely when Brett retires. Which is bound to happen soon--he turns 39 this week!) Alex is a life-long Eagles fan, so I picked that one up from him. The Colts--well, I just like Peyton Manning. Yes, he's an advertising whore, but he's so darned likeable in all of his ads! I became a Packers fan in the mid-90's when Brett was really making a name for himself, but I did a show in Green Bay some years ago and WOW! That is a town that really loves its football! It has to be the biggest football town in the country, it filled me with Packers pride, and I will be a fan for life. Then there's the Giants, and I really can't call myself a fan, but there's Eli Manning, who is almost as likeable as his big brother. And I really liked Michael Strahan while he was playing. And, well, they won the Super Bowl last year, which is the first time I've lived in a city that won a Super Bowl, so I can't help but feel a little warm and gooey as a result. So these are my backup teams. And today, there were mixed results for my secondary line: the Eagles lost to the Redskins; the Colts won, but only because they recovered a couple of 4th quarter fumbles; Green Bay, with their new QB Aaron Rodgers (super cute, he could be my new Brett Favre someday) lost to Atlanta, which I have mixed feelings about. See, Atlanta's QB is the rookie Matt Ryan, who happens to be the boyfriend of my dear friend Anna's sister, Sarah, and his brother is dating Anna's sister, Maggie, and I am a big fan of the Marshall clan, which makes me a fan of Matt Ryan by default. Therefore, I find Green Bay's loss to be acceptable. Oh, and the Giants destroyed Seattle. De-stroyed. And yes, I was a fan of the Seahawks while living up there. In fact, the only NFL games I've been to have been in the new (and fabulous!) Seahawks Stadium. Mike Holmgren, the coach, was with Green Bay in the early Favre days when they went to the Super Bowl twice (and won once), so it was easy for me to be a 'Hawks fan. Until I left. Then I found that I really didn't care. (Though I was rooting for them when they played Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl a few years ago, as Pittsburgh and Cleveland are rivals, which means I must root against the Steelers. Even though I kind of like them. And both my brothers are fans. Traitors.) Anyway, such was this day in sports. And "sports" for me is pretty much football. Though I LOVE seeing live hockey games. And I highly enjoyed the NBA playoffs & finals this year. I would be a huge soccer fan if I lived in a country that appreciated it. Talk about athleticism! And if the World Ping Pong Federation has it's way and gets the female players to wear skimpy outfits, you know I'll be watching.
Hey, if you haven't checked out the Santa Fe blog yet, now's a good time to do it! Bobby G, the curator of said blog, was kind enough to give me a shout-out today:
http://santafeandthefatcityhorns.blogspot.com/2008/10/welcome-joey-heredia.html
I can't help but blush a little. Thanks, Bobby, and I'll start getting my MySpace page together!
The weather in Vegas is changing for the better. Today, the high was in the low 80's, which I found to be quite blissful. I wore jeans and long sleeves and didn't lose one drop of sweat! Think it's about time for me to pull my bike out of the storage closet (hear that, New Yorkers? I've got a storage closet!! On my balcony!!) and do some riding. Every city I've lived in, I've gotten to know it by walking it. As I've said many times here, I love walking. But this town does not make me want to hit the streets, not even a little bit. For one thing, there's the incessant honking from the cars driving by. Then there's the long stretches of street with nothing to see but shopping centers. Not my kind of scenery. So I think I'm gonna really get to know Vegas on my bike. I've driven around plenty, but we tend to notice very little when we're doing 50 MPH. Biking gets me out to places I've yet to discover while giving me the time to actually see them. I will admit, I'm a bit nervous about biking in Vegas. I haven't seen many bikes on the road. Except for the guys who fill the Sexpaper boxes, they ride their bikes from corner to corner to corner to corner. And they spend most of their time on the sidewalks. I don't know how much drivers in Vegas like to "share the road" with us bikers. Seattle was incredibly biker-friendly, and that's where I started really riding. LA was incredibly unfriendly for bikers, at least it was in the Hollywood and West Hollywood neighborhoods I was riding in. New York has lots of paths for riders in the parks and along the rivers, but I was too chickenshit to ride on the street there. And Vegas...well, the drivers here are a little scary. Alex got hit by a car in the Palms parking lot last year, and I mean HIT, like he got hit by the front of the car and landed behind it. And the woman driving yelled at him before peeling out of the lot. In Vegas, if you get a moving violation, you can pay someone to go to court for you and pay it off so you don't get any points on your license, which doesn't do much to steer people away from maniacal driving. But I have seen bike paths on some streets. I've seen plenty of "Share the Road" signs. And I'm kind of hankerin' to get out of my non-neighborhood and away from the casinos and see what Vegas has to offer a gal like me. So, a-bikin' I will go!
That's it for this Sunday night. Alex just finished work, so I'm gonna spend a little time loving him. (That sounds kind of dirty, but what I really mean is i'm gonna make us some dinner then watch some cartoons on Fox...then we'll get to the dirty stuff.)
Hey, if you haven't checked out the Santa Fe blog yet, now's a good time to do it! Bobby G, the curator of said blog, was kind enough to give me a shout-out today:
http://santafeandthefatcityhorns.blogspot.com/2008/10/welcome-joey-heredia.html
I can't help but blush a little. Thanks, Bobby, and I'll start getting my MySpace page together!
The weather in Vegas is changing for the better. Today, the high was in the low 80's, which I found to be quite blissful. I wore jeans and long sleeves and didn't lose one drop of sweat! Think it's about time for me to pull my bike out of the storage closet (hear that, New Yorkers? I've got a storage closet!! On my balcony!!) and do some riding. Every city I've lived in, I've gotten to know it by walking it. As I've said many times here, I love walking. But this town does not make me want to hit the streets, not even a little bit. For one thing, there's the incessant honking from the cars driving by. Then there's the long stretches of street with nothing to see but shopping centers. Not my kind of scenery. So I think I'm gonna really get to know Vegas on my bike. I've driven around plenty, but we tend to notice very little when we're doing 50 MPH. Biking gets me out to places I've yet to discover while giving me the time to actually see them. I will admit, I'm a bit nervous about biking in Vegas. I haven't seen many bikes on the road. Except for the guys who fill the Sexpaper boxes, they ride their bikes from corner to corner to corner to corner. And they spend most of their time on the sidewalks. I don't know how much drivers in Vegas like to "share the road" with us bikers. Seattle was incredibly biker-friendly, and that's where I started really riding. LA was incredibly unfriendly for bikers, at least it was in the Hollywood and West Hollywood neighborhoods I was riding in. New York has lots of paths for riders in the parks and along the rivers, but I was too chickenshit to ride on the street there. And Vegas...well, the drivers here are a little scary. Alex got hit by a car in the Palms parking lot last year, and I mean HIT, like he got hit by the front of the car and landed behind it. And the woman driving yelled at him before peeling out of the lot. In Vegas, if you get a moving violation, you can pay someone to go to court for you and pay it off so you don't get any points on your license, which doesn't do much to steer people away from maniacal driving. But I have seen bike paths on some streets. I've seen plenty of "Share the Road" signs. And I'm kind of hankerin' to get out of my non-neighborhood and away from the casinos and see what Vegas has to offer a gal like me. So, a-bikin' I will go!
That's it for this Sunday night. Alex just finished work, so I'm gonna spend a little time loving him. (That sounds kind of dirty, but what I really mean is i'm gonna make us some dinner then watch some cartoons on Fox...then we'll get to the dirty stuff.)
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Home Sweet Brothel
I've been in my new home long enough to be aware of some things. This apartment now feels like "the place I live" rather than "a place to crash for awhile". I've settled in, gotten familiar with my surroundings, and the shiny newness has worn off and the grungy reality is shining through. It's true that in some ways, this is the nicest apartment I've ever lived in. It is also true that in some ways, it is the seediest. It's an interesting reality.I live in the Desert Tides Hotel and Condo Complex, which is mostly a hotel, but there are also privately-owned apartments. On the whole, the complex looks very nice--palm and pine trees, shrubbery and lawns, a little "oasis" set-up in front of the office with a pond and small waterfalls. It's pretty, quaint, well maintained. The buildings look nice, no peeling paint or cracked glass. The interiors are tastefully designed (though the pineapple motif is questionable)--heavy, dark wood & bamboo furniture, pale beige walls and tiled floors, marble counter-tops. There's a huge bathtub, which pleases this bubble-bath fanatic endlessly! And the place is stocked with the washer/dryer combo, the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, the central air. None of which I've had in my numerous apartments (not counting our Philly pad, which was just wasted on us), all of which fill me with glee! But now that I've settled in, it has become quite clear: EVERYTHING IS CHEAP! And I'm not talking "What a Deal!" cheap; I'm talking "Quality Shmuality" cheap. I know a thing or two about cheap. I grew up with a "dented can" dad, a man who would return from a trip to the dump with more crap than he threw out. Granted, dad's cheapness was a result of growing up in the Bronx without much money, and there was a whole lot of financial juggling to keep things afloat in my childhood home in Jersey. Kmart fashions, baloney sandwiches, hell, I never even went to Disneyworld! (OH, the horror!) But dad got us through, sent three kids to college, and even has a little comfort in his life these days. Not that it keeps him from shopping at the dump and buying dented cans at the supermarket. Anyway, point is, I know a thing or two about cheap, and I can tell you, The Desert Tides was done on the cheap. I know when the neighbors come home because I can hear everything through the walls. When someone climbs the outside steps, my whole apartment shakes. I've told you about the numerous issues with the air conditioning (which has been blowing cold & strong for over a week now, woo hoo!). We also have a dishwasher which can be heard two floors below us and essentially steams the dishes without cleaning them. Our washing machine cannot handle 2 towels during the spin cycle; it literally throws itself into the wall due to the extreme weight. There's a brand-new water heater which still requires a good 2 minutes of running water before it can provide any heat. Yes, everything was done on the cheap. Which is fine, but it is telling...
Alex and I are renting from an owner, not from the hotel. We had to do the whole credit check thing, lease-signing thing, first-last-security thing, you know, the regular rental process which I've gone through many times before. However, this is not the norm for the people "living" here. Most of the other inhabitants of the Desert Tides are renting from the hotel, on a weekly basis, no credit check, no lease, no long-term plan. And from what I've observed, I don't believe that many of these people could pass a credit check (though, who can nowadays?). I don't know that many of them could come up with a month's rent. The apartment below us is in foreclosure, and the apartment behind us is empty, owned by the same man who owns our unit (he bought 4 of these places as an investment a few years ago; he must be kicking himself now!). But next to us are two units which are part of the hotel, and both of these places were inhabited when we arrived. Next door to us was Jay. Jay told Alex he had come out from Tampa a month earlier, so his "girl could make some money." I'm pretty sure that means his girl is either a stripper or an escort, as those are the Vegas jobs that a girl could come work for a couple of months and make some good money. I never met the girl, though I did get to hear her screaming obscenities at Jay from time to time. And I did see at least 2 kids in there at one point. Mostly, I just saw Jay, standing outside smoking. Behind Jay was Trey. Trey seemed like a nice enough guy. He moved out from Long Beach about the same time as us. We met him on the stairs one day, got to talking, told him we'd see him around. And did we ever! Trey began knocking on our door several times a day, usually to bum a smoke from Alex (back in the days when Alex was a smoker). He told Alex how he felt the hotel was ripping him off, charging him $350 a week, so Alex told him he would talk to our realtor and see if there were any other units available to rent. Which is cool, right? Alex did him a favor. Except that now Trey was knocking on our door multiple times a day, and Alex was never home, just me. It was clear that Trey knew neither of our names, because every time I'd answer the door, he'd look kind of stunned to see me, then he'd say, "He here?" Now, I'm a friendly-enough person, I was polite to him and listened to him repeat his cries against the hotel, I offered my opinions on the situation and assured him multiple times that yes, Alex talked to our realtor, I was standing next to him while he was on the phone with her, I don't know why she hasn't called yet...but really, I had nothing to say to this guy. He was probably about my age, but clearly living a much different life from us. For one thing, there were 4 kids in his one-bedroom apartment. For another thing, he let Alex know that he should give a call if he ever needed weed or "a massage", which leads me to believe that the woman he and the kids were sharing that one-bedroom with was an escort (though I suppose it's possible that Trey was offering to massage Alex himself...but I don't think so). Which is fine, sure, but I didn't really envision any dinner parties in our future. Whatever, I was polite when he came by, I tried not to judge him based on his living situation or his many gangsta tattoos (it is important to note that in all the visits I received from Trey, I never once saw him with a shirt on). However, I really didn't want him knocking on my door all the time! I finally told Alex that the next time he saw him, please tell him to CALL if he needed something. But before Alex had a chance to talk to him, I get a knock on the door. And I'm standing there listening to him bitch about his rent. And I'm trying to be polite. I never asked him into my place, I wasn't THAT polite. But I listened, I responded at the appropriate places, and I did my best to make it clear that Alex was the person he needed to speak to. At one point, he asked my name, which I told him, then I said, slowly, "And his name is Alex" as I was pretty sure he didn't know it. Blah blah, I told him I was gonna get back to what I was doing, and he starts up with the small talk, "How you likin' it out here?" Sigh. Again, I was polite. "Oh, it's fine, I don't really know anyone out here, and there's not much for me to do, since I don't gamble and I don't drink." "You don't drink? In Vegas??" He seemed appalled. "Nope, I don't drink, I don't party, I just hang out with my husband and his friends when they're done at work." I figured that if I was boring enough, he'd stop knocking on the door. Blah blah, he kept on with the small talk, as his kids and his masseuse walked past us, without him even turning to say hello to them (I waved to one of the boys, who had such a sweet bashful smile that I wanted to buy him a puppy and a lollipop). Finally I told him that I had to go, and before I even knew what was happening, he was moving in for the hug, which quickly turned into his hand grabbing my ass while he whispered, "Mmmm, you smell good" into my ear. WHAT?? I was entirely unprepared for this scenario!! But fear not, Mama, I handled it. I handled it well. He was on me for all of a second before I pushed him away, looked directly into his eyes, and said, "No. No way. Not even a little bit." I swear, I don't know how those words formed in my mouth, I felt as though time had stopped and some otherworldly power entered me and gave me the perfect comeback. And it was. Trey smiled and said "Ah-ight" and I slammed the door. And that was the last I saw of Trey. Granted, I did send Alex over there as soon as he got home that night, without telling him what had happened, and had him give Trey the "Call, don't stop by" speech. But I'd say I was crystal clear with the chap, wouldn't you? In any case, I'm sure that it wasn't ME that Trey was interested in, it was simply the fact that there was a female nearby. And since it seems that most of the women living here are strippers or escorts or "give good massage", he probably figured that I was in the profession.
Which is where the seediness comes in to my living situation. Since most of the units here are run as an extended-stay hotel, it is home to those with bad credit and low funds and short-term employment. Basically, the nicest place I've ever lived is where all the poor people live! It's kind of fascinating, really. Here are me and Alex, giggling as we load our dishwasher and flipping through our many cable channels (did I mention the FREE CABLE?? Again, not much cable TV in my adult life), thinking that we struck it rich when we found this place! And all our neighbors are strippers and dealers and baby-daddies. Though we are currently without neighbors. Yes, Jay and his girl and their young'uns headed back to Tampa a couple weeks back, and Trey and his brood left shortly after. I have had peace and quiet in my days, without a single knock on my door. There were lights on next door when we got home last night, but I've yet to see anyone. When I do, I think I'll be a little less polite...
Alex and I are renting from an owner, not from the hotel. We had to do the whole credit check thing, lease-signing thing, first-last-security thing, you know, the regular rental process which I've gone through many times before. However, this is not the norm for the people "living" here. Most of the other inhabitants of the Desert Tides are renting from the hotel, on a weekly basis, no credit check, no lease, no long-term plan. And from what I've observed, I don't believe that many of these people could pass a credit check (though, who can nowadays?). I don't know that many of them could come up with a month's rent. The apartment below us is in foreclosure, and the apartment behind us is empty, owned by the same man who owns our unit (he bought 4 of these places as an investment a few years ago; he must be kicking himself now!). But next to us are two units which are part of the hotel, and both of these places were inhabited when we arrived. Next door to us was Jay. Jay told Alex he had come out from Tampa a month earlier, so his "girl could make some money." I'm pretty sure that means his girl is either a stripper or an escort, as those are the Vegas jobs that a girl could come work for a couple of months and make some good money. I never met the girl, though I did get to hear her screaming obscenities at Jay from time to time. And I did see at least 2 kids in there at one point. Mostly, I just saw Jay, standing outside smoking. Behind Jay was Trey. Trey seemed like a nice enough guy. He moved out from Long Beach about the same time as us. We met him on the stairs one day, got to talking, told him we'd see him around. And did we ever! Trey began knocking on our door several times a day, usually to bum a smoke from Alex (back in the days when Alex was a smoker). He told Alex how he felt the hotel was ripping him off, charging him $350 a week, so Alex told him he would talk to our realtor and see if there were any other units available to rent. Which is cool, right? Alex did him a favor. Except that now Trey was knocking on our door multiple times a day, and Alex was never home, just me. It was clear that Trey knew neither of our names, because every time I'd answer the door, he'd look kind of stunned to see me, then he'd say, "He here?" Now, I'm a friendly-enough person, I was polite to him and listened to him repeat his cries against the hotel, I offered my opinions on the situation and assured him multiple times that yes, Alex talked to our realtor, I was standing next to him while he was on the phone with her, I don't know why she hasn't called yet...but really, I had nothing to say to this guy. He was probably about my age, but clearly living a much different life from us. For one thing, there were 4 kids in his one-bedroom apartment. For another thing, he let Alex know that he should give a call if he ever needed weed or "a massage", which leads me to believe that the woman he and the kids were sharing that one-bedroom with was an escort (though I suppose it's possible that Trey was offering to massage Alex himself...but I don't think so). Which is fine, sure, but I didn't really envision any dinner parties in our future. Whatever, I was polite when he came by, I tried not to judge him based on his living situation or his many gangsta tattoos (it is important to note that in all the visits I received from Trey, I never once saw him with a shirt on). However, I really didn't want him knocking on my door all the time! I finally told Alex that the next time he saw him, please tell him to CALL if he needed something. But before Alex had a chance to talk to him, I get a knock on the door. And I'm standing there listening to him bitch about his rent. And I'm trying to be polite. I never asked him into my place, I wasn't THAT polite. But I listened, I responded at the appropriate places, and I did my best to make it clear that Alex was the person he needed to speak to. At one point, he asked my name, which I told him, then I said, slowly, "And his name is Alex" as I was pretty sure he didn't know it. Blah blah, I told him I was gonna get back to what I was doing, and he starts up with the small talk, "How you likin' it out here?" Sigh. Again, I was polite. "Oh, it's fine, I don't really know anyone out here, and there's not much for me to do, since I don't gamble and I don't drink." "You don't drink? In Vegas??" He seemed appalled. "Nope, I don't drink, I don't party, I just hang out with my husband and his friends when they're done at work." I figured that if I was boring enough, he'd stop knocking on the door. Blah blah, he kept on with the small talk, as his kids and his masseuse walked past us, without him even turning to say hello to them (I waved to one of the boys, who had such a sweet bashful smile that I wanted to buy him a puppy and a lollipop). Finally I told him that I had to go, and before I even knew what was happening, he was moving in for the hug, which quickly turned into his hand grabbing my ass while he whispered, "Mmmm, you smell good" into my ear. WHAT?? I was entirely unprepared for this scenario!! But fear not, Mama, I handled it. I handled it well. He was on me for all of a second before I pushed him away, looked directly into his eyes, and said, "No. No way. Not even a little bit." I swear, I don't know how those words formed in my mouth, I felt as though time had stopped and some otherworldly power entered me and gave me the perfect comeback. And it was. Trey smiled and said "Ah-ight" and I slammed the door. And that was the last I saw of Trey. Granted, I did send Alex over there as soon as he got home that night, without telling him what had happened, and had him give Trey the "Call, don't stop by" speech. But I'd say I was crystal clear with the chap, wouldn't you? In any case, I'm sure that it wasn't ME that Trey was interested in, it was simply the fact that there was a female nearby. And since it seems that most of the women living here are strippers or escorts or "give good massage", he probably figured that I was in the profession.
Which is where the seediness comes in to my living situation. Since most of the units here are run as an extended-stay hotel, it is home to those with bad credit and low funds and short-term employment. Basically, the nicest place I've ever lived is where all the poor people live! It's kind of fascinating, really. Here are me and Alex, giggling as we load our dishwasher and flipping through our many cable channels (did I mention the FREE CABLE?? Again, not much cable TV in my adult life), thinking that we struck it rich when we found this place! And all our neighbors are strippers and dealers and baby-daddies. Though we are currently without neighbors. Yes, Jay and his girl and their young'uns headed back to Tampa a couple weeks back, and Trey and his brood left shortly after. I have had peace and quiet in my days, without a single knock on my door. There were lights on next door when we got home last night, but I've yet to see anyone. When I do, I think I'll be a little less polite...
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