Posts Tagged: Karen Berry Oregon
Poem up at NewMyths.com: A Robot Brings Flowers
Another poem in June!
I have a poem called “A Robot Brings Flowers” at NewMyths, a fantasy/science fiction journal. You can read it here:
Thanks to NewMyths, and also to Rattle
I wrote this poem in ekphrastic response to a beautiful piece of art, “Yellow Flowers” by Carla Paton. This was part of the Ekphrastic Challenge by Rattle.com, and when I saw it, my heart just kind of exploded with tenderness.
I’ve linked to the illustration below.
Yellow Flowers” by Carla Paton
Okay, all you other Karen Berrys
Karen Berry in Georgia
You signed me up for Match.com. I don’t want to belong to Match.com. That account is canceled, please sign up under your own email address instead of mine, “Mary.” I also get your job alerts, by the way. Maybe you found a job and now you’re looking for love, but listen, I get more Georgia stuff than I get from any other state. I’m not sure why you can’t type your own email address instead of mine and I don’t care. Just, please, make it stop.
Karen Berry in Europe Somewhere
Do you realize that you ordered your expensive something-in-Spain tour tickets to my email address? My email address here in Oregon? I am not currently in Spain (and never have been) but if I were in Spain I’d have definitely gone to see whatever that was you spent all those Euros on! I wonder if you arrived at your tourist location without tickets, or if you caught your mistake beforehand. I also want you to know that I didn’t cancel your taxi reservations to the airport this time, but I have before. Yes, it was me, so please use your own email address in the future.
Karen Berry in Central Oregon
You signed me up for CuddleMe.com or something like that. It’s like that site you signed me up for last year, LetsFlirt.com or some such garbage. These are sites for married people who want to cheat, and I am married but I do NOT want to cheat, so please stop. Last time you did this, I signed in and looked at your photo and profile before I cancelled (you’re very pretty). This time I just blocked all that mess. I’m not going to the trouble of changing the password and cancelling the account. But if you are wondering why you get no extramarital flirtation action, this is why. Are you the person who signed me up for Ashley Madison? Please please please. I tell my husband when this happens, just on the off chance that there is another data breach and it looks like I’m in the market for philandering. Use your own email account, please.
UK Karen Berry who is a Compulsive Gambler
Look. We share a name, not a proclivity for online gambling. But judging by the email I keep getting, and the number of dark web password theft alert notifications generated by your use of my email on gambling sites, I think you really have a problem. UK Karen Berry, I don’t know if you’re the Welsh Karen Berry or the Dublin Karen Berry or maybe the New Zealand Karen Berry, but you need help! Get help!
And that is enough grumpy ranting for the day.
Yanking the chain – Byron and Blake
A Non-trad student, that was me.
When I went back to school as a non-trad student (meaning old), I had a professor who was losing control of his classes. By that, I mean, he couldn’t keep the thread of his lectures. He wandered from topic to topic, reacting defensively when another student asked him what his ramblings had to do with Blake and Byron, who were the subjects of the only class I ever took from him.
The Byron and Blake class was one of the many classes in the English department taught to both high-level English majors (like me), and grad students (not like me). The grad students had to turn in an additional paper and an annotated bibliography. My friend Denise and I exchanged scribbled notes that mocked one grad student who kept drawing parallels between the Romantics and the Beats. Everything inspired him to draw long verbal comparisons, especially Beats-with-Blake, which is silly because Blake was his own visionary self, not really part of the Romantics (was he supposed to be their Kerouac? I can’t remember. Maybe he was their Ginsberg). Nothing could stop the discourses of this young man.
Okay, but at least he talked a bit about Blake, which was more than the professor did. He just kept going on about Byron. Our teacher loved Byron, but aside from the professor’s insistence on saying “Don Joo-ahn” (apparently that is the correct way to pronounce the title of Byron’s masterwork) I wasn’t learning much. In fact, that was nearly the sum total of what I absorbed about this poem.
I was not the only person feeling baffled by how little I was actually learning. I was 39 when I took this course as an undergraduate, but not the oldest person in attendance. There were several 65+ auditors in the class. One of them actually said out loud what most of us were thinking, words to the effect that she’d taken this class because she’d heard that our professor was an expert on Blake and Byron, but she was still waiting for evidence of that. “I took this class for your brilliant insights, and I’m getting nothing.” It was brutal. It was also true. I want to audit classes next year, and I wonder if I will ever be so pointed.
She was frustrated, and she was only auditing. Those of us who had paid money to take the course as part of our degree requirements were probably more frustrated, because we were expected to produce papers on these Romantic legends. How? I’d turned in exactly one paper in this class, a close reading paper on Byron’s poem, “Darkness.” There is so much meat in this poem that I certainly didn’t need an instructor to explain it to me. It’s long, but I’m putting it here because it reminds me of our present day situation of toppling institutions, billionaire oligarchs, and climate disaster.
Read if you’d like, or not–if not, you’ll need to scroll.
Darkness, Lord Byron
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,
And men were gather’d round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d
And twin’d themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again: a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer’d not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they rak’d up,
And shivering scrap’d with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.
And this is one of Byron’s shorter poems. Doesn’t it seem prescient? Or am I just recovering from watching “Eddington” last night? Maybe one day I’ll dig out the cardboard box that holds my college papers and read what I had to say about this dark litany, but there is another paper in that box more germane to this story, so back to the story we go.
Well, then. Anyway…
As the deadline for our final project approached, I became angry. Aside from his short works, Byron was doing nothing for me. The instructor would rhapsodize about how people would line up on the docks to get the latest installment of Don Juan, but that didn’t inspire me to read any more than the assigned passages. I found nothing in those to inspire a thesis. A topic was needed, so I decided to educate myself on Blake, because the professor had spent so much time on Byron, Blake had barely been mentioned.
Off I went to the PSU library. I researched, made notes, turned over motifs I’d noticed, wondered what to make of them that could be supported by criticism without recapitulating someone else’s ideas wholesale. I produced a final paper on Blake’s chain imagery. I was especially proud of this paper because I had gotten nothing out of the class. Whatever I’d written, I’d found on my own.
But wait. There’s more.
As relieved as I was to be done with this embarrassment of a class, it wasn’t over yet. We would receive our final grades in person, at a one-on-one meeting with the professor. My mood was slightly truculent as I went to his office and sat down.
I intended to tell him how hard it had been to learn anything in his class, but I didn’t have a chance. He began to talk about what a difficult quarter it had been for him. He’d been in denial about how deeply his lack of hearing had affected his teaching. He’d misheard or missed much of what his students had to say, and knew it had affected his teaching. He planned to get hearing aids, but after he read the class evaluations, he was so discouraged that he’d considered retirement.
He lay a hand on my paper. “But when I read a paper like yours, I know I’m still doing a fine job. I have to be, if my students are producing work of this caliber.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I nodded, and left with my A.
Image by Briam Cute from Pixabay
The Midwestern Table at Herstry
Why I’ll Eat Anything
As part of a call for “Feast” essays, Herstory has published my piece, “The Midwestern Table.” As you read it, I hope you laugh, cringe, and finally understand why I could never be a picky eater.
All the “Feast” theme essays can be found here (I am in good company):
Herstry: The Feast
Top 40 Blues – where is my station?
No more BELA105
So. A Portland radio station went off the air: BELA105. I’m irritated because they played women artists, and my longtime favorite station, KINKFM, never plays women anymore. KINK used to play women. That’s where I first heard Jonatha Brooke, Suzanne Santo of HONEYHONEY, Mindy Smith, Kasey Chambers-a host of Americana and indie artists. That’s where I first heard Lucinda Williams sing “Can’t Let Go.” And now it’s just bunch of angsty white guys.
Oh, they might throw in a little Billie Eilish now and then, but rarely.
I speak to the manager
I called KINK once and asked why they never play women. The program manager, who was DJing that afternoon, told me that their women artists get play on pop stations and then KINK can’t play them anymore. Well then, this happens all the time with male artists. Hozier? Teddy Swims? I can go on but those artists get plenty of Top 40 play and KINK still plays them.
Anyway.
BELA105 had a mix of current and older hits. Great radio music, lots of women’s voices, and maybe the worst sound bites of any station I’ve ever listened to. They ran with “Bella” as the personification of their listener, and she was into the gym, shopping, pumpkin-spice lattes (I do like those) and her job at NIKE. I think it was maybe Sheila Hamilton doing the voice work in this Cali-girl voice she uses. I found the whole Bella persona thing insulting and tone deaf, but I put up with it for the music.
So now I’m hunting around the dial for a third station. I still have KINK and Z100, but Z100 leans too heavily on John Jay and Rich, three people who talk all the time. I’m not much for excessive talking on the radio. I used to listen to Daria, Mitch and Ted, but Mitch migrated to KINK (he is absolutely wonderful as a DJ) and I don’t know where Daria and Ted went, and I don’t really care, because I do still have Mitch.
My point is, I am not that interested in listening to people talk on the radio.
I want music.
When my husband and I commuted together, back before the pandemic shutdown, he would have the radio tuned to the morning show on KINK, which was Mitch and Staci. He would turn down the radio whenever they played a song. When Mitch and Staci would start talking, he’d turn it back up. I was so confused. This is the exact opposite of what I do. I was baffled, but silent, as I do not talk much in the morning. That’s fine because my husband talks enough for the both of us.
But that was years ago. I no longer commute, but in the car, I want music. My husband always listens to sports talk radio. When I’m riding with him, he turns it off. I don’t even have to ask.
All this is dull to you non-Portlanders, I’m sure. But I do have a larger point (aside from the fact that I still listen to the radio in my car, like a dinosaur or something). I also have the jazz station and the classical station to listen to, but that is not car music. That is work-from-home music.
Car music is different. Car music makes you think and remember. Car music makes you want to work on your own fiction, instead of whatever you’ll be writing at the office that day. Most of all, it makes you sing along.
And you never know what you’ll be wanting to sing. It might be Earth, Wind and Fire. It might be Steve Earle. It might be Beyonce. I need ALL KINDS of music at my beck and call, because I am a musical omnivore and I want to devour it all.
My musical history
I come from a family of musical omnivores. I have never understood how you could choose one type of music, elevate it above all others, and declare this the one true music before which all others must submit. No one in my family did that, and we likewise extended that same tolerance to each other’s singular passions; my older brother’s jazz, my mother’s opera, my younger brother’s Johnny Cash. For me and sister, this was even true of our early taste for teen-idol pop, or bubblegum music.
It would be so easy to dismiss the Jackson 5 and “ABC.” Or the Osmonds’ “Puppy Love.” Sappy, poppy songs sung by boys whose voices hadn’t changed. But my sister and I loved these songs, which we tuned in on the tiny tinny transistor radios we found in our Christmas stockings in 1971. These boys sang in a register like our own, which added a special layer of enjoyment.
Jack Wild was not a gifted vocalist, but no one ever laughed at us or asked us to turn down his records. We played it loud and proud. When the Partridge Family came along, we devoured that first album, oblivious to the fact that David Cassidy wasn’t even singing on “I Think I Love You.” These were our songs, this was our music. We played it on the record player in our room, not the big stereo my dad shipped home while he was in Vietnam, but the avocado green record player with the square speakers.
Alongside these records, we played my parents’ albums by The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin. It wasn’t all bubblegum, just partly. But that sweet pop was important to us.
All told, I don’t think our bubblegum phase lasted all that long. When I was thirteen, we fell in love with Cat Stevens, and wore out Carole King’s ‘Tapestry’. The soundtrack to HR Pufnstuf was replaced by the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar. And then my older brother started bringing us home new music; Todd Rundgren, Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt. I bought my own Carly Simon records, even though I had trouble singing along with her. I have a head voice, and hers is all throat.
Today, that makes me…different.
My tastes matured right along with me, or perhaps my tastes enlarged along with the rest of me, but I still love all of it. I have no guilty pleasures. I’ll still belt out “Different.”
Disco? Love it. Retro funk? Blast it. 80s boy bands? Pump up the volume. I want it that way.
My early love of bubble gum has left me with a lifelong taste for Top 40 music, which I listen to in the car. I don’t apologize for it, despite the lip-curling disdain, the open contempt with which most of my peers speak of radio hits. I want to hear Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan just as much as any girl does.
Which brings me to my theory, of course. For the most part:
Who (mostly) listens to bubblegum?
Who (mostly) listens to Top 40?
Who (mostly) listens to KPop?
Why does society routinely take a big, gleeful dump on whatever girls like?
My conclusion
It is culturally demanded that whatever inspires happiness and excitement in girls and young women will be sneered at and dismissed. And women participate in it. We announce our graduation from girl to woman through rejection of whatever previously thrilled us. We are serious now. We can’t like the bubblegum. We have to grow up and set aside our childish things.
Maybe that’s what BELA105 was trying to defend with their snotty sound bites that championed a woman’s right to her pop music, aligning it with shopping, workouts, seasonal Starbucks and the like.
Well, pay attention, women. If you like it, it must be dismissed from the airwaves. In fact, what’s at 105 now? Sports talk radio. My husband’s station. I know he’s not personally responsible for this, but I’ve made it a point to forgive him anyway, because I have a big heart and all that.
A big heart, and no Top 40.
My Fatal Flaw
Picture, if you will, me at age nineteen.
I am in the honors program at the University of Montana, which means that instead of having my Western Civ section taught by a graduate student, I am lucky enough to take the section taught by the actual professor, the articulate man who gives the lectures in the large hall. The one with the eyebrows.
We have turned in our first papers on the pantheon of the Classical Greeks. This is before copiers, so I have dutifully typed my paper on a “master” and run off copies on the mimeograph machine with its fragrant purple ink.
I have given a copy to each member of my class as well as the professor. We have all done this, we have all taken time to read each other’s papers and make notes. We are the honors students. We over-achieve.
I’m also overly confident, which I shouldn’t be.
We were supposed to write a paper about whether or not the average Greeks believed in the existence of actual gods up there on Mount Olympus. As a generalizer, one who takes large swathes of information and finds ways to knit together the disparate, I have chosen a stupid thesis.
I should have said, yes they did, or no they just thought these were cool stories. Instead, I cobbled together some overly inclusive idea about making sense of the world, and have ended up with an undefined and indefensible thesis.
This is not why the professor takes me to task, though.
That comes later.
First, he tells the class to look at my paper. Then he announces, “I’d like to point out to you all the most extraordinary part of this paper. In every single instance where there is an ‘ie’ or ‘ei’ combination, this writer has written the word incorrectly.”
I erupt in flames of shame and burn to a crisp on the spot.
I know the rule. I knew it then. It’s never made any sense to me. I look at “ie” and “ei” combinations and am struck stupid. I have attempted to remedy my confusion by repeating “i before e except after c, or when sounding as a as in neighbor and weigh”, but then we have neither, seize, forfeit, height, codeine, protein, caffeine, weird, and heifer.
Is my confusion understandable? I think so. Forty-six years later, I’m still bad at it.
All You Dang Karen Berrys
Ye Old Email Complaint Ahead
It’s gotten a little absurd in the past couple of months at the old inbox, so I thought I’d update everyone on how things are going for all the Karen Berrys out there, those women with my name who like to use my email address. These are just the letters that get through my spam filter, which is a wasteland of feverish right-wing newsletters and fervent donation requests. I find it hilarious that those pleas continue despite the election results. A sucker is born every second, apparently.
I do have a first! One Karen Berry (very definitely not me) is being pursued by a debt collection agency. This request included the full address and phone number of this KB. Her phone number! I could call her! But I didn’t. I just wrote back saying it wasn’t me. For a debt collector, the person who replied was nice. He did not demand my social security number or the like, he just fixed something and I haven’t received any more emails demanding payment from a Karen Berry who lives in Texas.
Gambling
As I have posted before, there is a Karen Berry with an online gambling problem. I believe she kicks the habit, then starts up again, which involves signing up for a bunch of websites that end up hacked on the dark web (I get the alerts, the passwords are never mine, and so on).
Apparently none of these websites require you to verify your email address. I get a flurry of “Welcome to our family of games!” emails. These are followed by emails urging her to play play play! Then come the emails reminding her to gamble wisely and set limits. Eventually, emails arrive about where to get help for problem gamblers. Then I get a bunch of dark web password alerts.
It’s a vicious cycle, and here I am, trapped in it with a Karen Berry who is not me.
New Zealand adventures abound.
One of the New Zealand Karen Berrys is taking a trip to an inclusive resort with her family that sounds really fun. I got her booking confirmation, so I wrote to her travel agent and let her know she had the wrong email address. Also, I did not cancel her ride reservation to the airport when that email arrived. I’m nice like that.
Another of the New Zealand Karen Berrys kept trying to sign me up for dating websites. I guess those don’t make you verify your email, either. When my inbox was overwhelmed with invitations to connect from hoary-bearded New Zealand gentlemen of certain years, curiosity got the best of me. I signed in and looked at her photo and wondered what was going on, because she is as old as I am, but apparently she’s a hot property in NZ. Or she would be, if I hadn’t canceled the account.
More Dating Site Adventures
Another Karen Berry, this one in Oregon (but not the lawyer PI, that’s a different Karen Berry in Oregon), signed me up for a site called “BeNaughty.com.” I’m not sure what this site is about but suspect it’s not a site I want to be part of, since I’m married (though many people on there seem to be married, but anyway). Men in the Salem/Keizer/Dallas area were flooding her with behind-the-wheel photos taken in the cabs of their large American trucks.
So, of course I signed in and had a look because, again, the amount of email she was getting was staggering. Her photo was super cute! Whatever BeNaughty.com is, this Karen Berry could have had her pick. But she is not me, so I took the necessary steps to shut down the account. I hope when she signs up again, she is a little more careful with her email address.
She got almost as much email as the Karen Berry in Italy who used my email address to sign up for the Italian version of Match.com. That was an avalanche. I signed in and discovered the prettiest Karen Berry of them all. She was very young and VERY blonde, and the Italian men were all over it. I shut that one down, too, but maybe she’s had some luck because I recently have been getting a bunch of travel reservations in Italian. Maybe she signed back up with her correct email, and she’s jetting around Europe with a handsome Italian as I type this. I have not canceled a single one of her reservations. I hope she’s having a blast.
Ireland and Wales
A realtor in the UK keeps trying to find a flat for one of the UK Karen Berrys. The addresses are not in Ireland, so it’s not the Irish Karen Berry who let her teenage son sign up for SnapChat and TikTok with my email address (this is why I have those accounts, I had to sign in, change the passwords and take them away from him so now I guess I’m on there). The Irish Karen Berry has also signed me up for PlentyOfFish.com twice. I’m hoping my email address is flagged, because it’s been months since I had to make a stink to get the profile taken down. Or maybe she just learned her own email address.
That must mean that the Welsh Karen Berry is thinking about moving. I’ve had actual contact with the Welsh Karen Berry. I was privy to certain sensitive events in her workplace that resulted disciplinary warnings, and then her pension people kept sending me legal documents to sign. I am somewhat attached to this Karen Berry, because she is the only one I’ve corresponded with (I asked her in all caps to stop using my email address) (she didn’t take it well) (she found my use of caps uncalled for and most upsetting) (I DON’T CARE).
And…Yachting?
Today I found out I was signed up for a yachting newsletter for a Yacht Club in the southern United States. I’m not sure which Karen Berry has taken up yachting–possibly the realtor? Maybe the horse trainer? Or the eye doctor? Don’t you have to be sort of wealthy to yacht? I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of yachting knowledge. I have zero interest in yachting at this time, so I unsubscribed.
There are 338 women in the world with my name. And they all like to use my email address.
The Iron and the Bottle
Irons and Ugliness
I have a hatred of irons, which is only tangentially related to the fact that I don’t like to iron. I am frightened of irons. Currently, I don’t even own one. I mean, life is short.
Remember button jars? Darning eggs? Well, I do, but just barely. Ironing was one of many tasks central to wardrobe upkeep accomplished by women in my early childhood; weekly mending, darning, ironing. These tasks were still a thing. My mother used to take the collars and cuffs off my father’s shirts and turn them to hide wear and that old nemesis, “ring around the collar.”
The reason women did all this? Polyester clothing fiber was unknown when I was a child. Everything was cotton, and it needed starching and ironing. And then polyester came along, easy care, forever-wear polyester. Women embraced this new fiber with great relief.
Less Ironing is a Good Thing
I have distinct memories of my mother ironing clothing when I was a child. (“DON’T GET TOO NEAR THE IRON!”) And she liked to sew, and she liked to do it correctly, so that involved ironing, too. It felt sacramental, the way she pressed those tissue pattern pieces.
I have many impressions of Mom standing at the ironing board with the hot iron that scared me to death. My fear was balanced by the comforting smell of cotton fabric being pressed into submission. When I was that young, her electric iron didn’t have a steam feature. So Mom used a shaker bottle to wet cothes before ironing them into hot, crisp order.
Just like Mrs. Butterworth, this ceramic bottle was in the shape of a man. You filled him with water, which you sprinkled out the top of his head. I thought he was the cutest thing ever. Mom retired the shaker bottle when she purchased her first steam iron with S&H Green Stamps, which I help paste in the book, thank you very much. The steam feature added another level to my terror (“DON’T LET THE WATER RUN OUT ON THE STEAM IRON!”).
This was the iron I learned on, because if you were a girl, you had to learn. I did, but barely. (“DON’T TURN IT TOO HIGH, YOU’LL SCORCH THE FABRIC!”) Standing there by the ironing board, that creaking contraption that always felt like it was on the verge of collapse. (“DON’T LEAN ON THE IRONING BOARD! IT MIGHT FALL!”) And if the ironing board collapsed, what would happen to the iron? Would I be holding it? Ould it swing wildly, landing on my person to burn me? Maybe my fear of hot irons is the “why” behind my lack of skill with them. (“OH MY GOD DID I LEAVE THE IRON PLUGGED IN AT HOME?!?!”)
I Visit the Past
So yes, I hated irons, but I had a fond, nostalgic memory of that shaker bottle, remembering it with the admiration of a child for the clever. Imagine my delight when I found him in an antique store a few years ago. “Oh,” I cooed, “My mom had that shaker bottle when I was a kid!” I picked him up, held him fondly.
And then I looked at it.
The sensation was something like I felt when I took my then six-year old then-niece to Disneyland, and was so excited to show off my favorite ride, it was the best ride, just wait, the line is totally worth it, let’s climb in the little ship and take off and sail through the air to the dulcet strains of…”What makes the Red Man red…UGH!” Yes. Just like that. Just like that big sinking hole you feel in your gut when you confront the casual racism in your upbringing. It’s all over Disneyland, but that’s another post.
I have some figurines in boxes from the midcentury decor fad they call “Orientalism.” Decor was littered with representations of the Far East that range from elegant to cutesy, and it’s probably–no, definitely–racist stuff, but not like this. Why is this bottle worse? Because he helped with ironing + part of your laundry = Chinese laundry…give me a break.
I grew up in South Dakota. We had no Chinese laundries, but I understand them now. Ironing is part of laundering. Laundry is a hot and dangerous task, relegated to women and minorities. This shaker bottle illustrates it.
What do you do with this stuff??
I don’t know what to do with offensive crap from the past. I know there’s a market for racist memorabilia, and many of the buyers are of the stereotyped ethnicity. There are museums of racist objects, curated and displayed so that we never forget just how pervasive and ugly it was (and is). I don’t know what my point is, other than I hate ironing and I’m also embarrassed by a relic from my childhood.
This put me to thinking about a few pieces of jewelry I own. Just three, three old pins given to me in the 1980s by a relative who thought I’d like them because I’ve collected cool old vintage pins since I was a child. I’ve been troubled by these pins for decades, but I didn’t donate them or sell them because I consider them as valuable (I think one is an Elzac) as they are offensive.
I finally wrote to two museums that accession racially stereotyped memorabilia, offering them for donation. I’ll let you know how that turns out. I’m not hopeful. The Jim Crow museum is full, which should surprise no one.
And if you’re wondering, these are NOT my beautiful Elzac Victims of Fashion pins (they both look something like this, but more sophisticated). I consider these brooches beautiful. Though I don’t wear them anymore, I’m keeping them.
What a cheerful post. Happy Holidays, and now back to our regular programming.
The Television: What’s on?
TV with no Guide
I didn’t have a TV childhood. We had a black & white TV South Dakota. My sister and I never argued over which channel to watch, because we only had three channels, and there was only ever one thing on at a time worth watching.
I acknowledge that “worth watching” is a highly subjective term. We waited all year for our chance to see The Wizard of Oz, and Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. Go on, ask us to sing “In My Own Little Corner.” My sister and I will happily belt it out with all the whiny, screechy fervor of Lesley Ann Warren.
How did we know these yearly events were coming our way? Mom told us. People kept track back then, but how did they know? We didn’t use a TV Guide, I know that much. I’m not sure when I first encountered a copy of TV Guide. I spent my earliest years in a town with two channels, so we certainly never needed one in Claremont. Aberdeen had three channels, but that wasn’t exactly a buffet of choices.
We didn’t need a guide to lead us through the offerings of the Big Three. I suppose I might have encountered the TV Guide at the store, but there was no way my mother would have taken any of us kids along on a grocery shopping trip. We would have asked for things. In all my childhood memories, I remember being at the store with Mom once, an event so memorable that I wrote a poem about it.
The Advent of Color
When we lived in Aberdeen, one of my mother’s erstwhile suitors brought over a newer TV for her. It was a behemoth in a console, and our first experience with a color set. The first time we watched The Wizard of Oz, I went flying into the kitchen to retrieve Mom, to show her the miracle. Somehow, some way, they’d made it color in the Land of Oz! Mom let out gales of laughter. She had a wonderful laugh.
And so, we watched the offerings of the day in color for the first time. Petticoat Junction. Green Acres (which I hated but watched anyway). The Flintstones and the Jetsons. And I suppose we watched Saturday morning cartoons, but I don’t remember a lot of those. TV was a crapshoot. You turned it and hoped there was something. If there wasn’t, you turned it off and went off and played.
We left that behemoth TV behind when we moved to Rapid City. We might not have had a TV for a bit, but on his second or third visit to our house, my eventual new father brought a color TV to Mom. He was in the Air Force and probably got a nice deal at the PX. They married, we moved. We lived in Minnesota briefly, then moved to rural Arkansas.
Arkansas Airwaves
We lived on the farm, where we watched the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family. We found little to relate to in these shows. The Bradys in particular inspired a lot of mockery, but we watched their suburban lives play out with horrified fascination. What small concerns they had (aside from Marcia’s broken nose, that was a real concern)!
Then we moved to rural Montana. Cat and I watched even less TV there. We were up on a ranger station at first, and you don’t get much signal up there on the ranger station, and we’d outgrown the artificial families we’d watched in Arkansas. In Montana, we became unfortunately mature. Our tastes changed accordingly. I loved the Bob Newhart Show and the Mary Tyler Moore Show to pieces. I think I got a little Rhoda in there, too. Maybe some Phyllis. Again, there was no guide to what was on. You just pulled out the little knob and hoped for the best.
Yakima
I didn’t live with my parents in high school. I lived with my pretend husband (to make it clear, he was a real person but we were pretending to be married). Our apartment was across town from my high school, so I’d walk home with Bev, and stay at her house until my boyfriend was done with his day at the community college.
I think by the time I visited Bev’s house in Yakima, I’d lived in fifteen different places; houses and apartments both, many of which were charming, but most of which were decidedly lacking in mundane comforts. While at Bev’s, I’d marvel at the conventional ease of her family’s ranch home. My mother would have turned up her nose at the commonplace nature of it, but it seemed convenient to me.
They had an eat-in kitchen with a dishwasher, and a washer/dryer in the hallway. Two bathrooms, three bedrooms, which meant they had a spare room (what luxury!). In the living room were twin recliners facing the TV, with a well-thumbed TV Guide on the little table between them. This was my first exposure to this publication.
In my Yakima apartment, we didn’t have a phone or a washer/dryer or a dishwasher or a garage. We didn’t even have a TV, let alone a comprehensive periodical listing everything on the airwaves. I perused Bev’s parents’ copy with puzzlement. There was nothing in it that interested me. And the articles were about people I’d never heard of, on shows I’d never heard of. I didn’t see the point. Who cared what was on? None of it looked any good to me.
When we finally received a castoff black and white TV from my pretend husband’s parents, I was psyched. Finally, something to watch!
Disappointment
Unfortunately, we had entered the Rob and Penny Marshall era of programming, with a side of Charlie’s Angels. The TV offerings of 1978 held little to no glamor for me, with one beautiful exception. One afternoon, I found Dolly Parton’s syndicated half hour variety show. I’d never watched anything so charming in my life. I figured out exactly when it was on and watched it religiously. I didn’t need a TV Guide to lead the way to Dolly.
That TV stayed behind in Missoula Montana when I left the pretend husband, who had by that point become my actual first husband, in 1980. I didn’t have a TV again until 1982, after I had my first child. My little brother, who was 11 at the time, gave me a nine-inch black and white to watch while I was up in the night nursing my firstborn. She rapidly started sleeping through the night, but I’d wake up and pump anyway, as I was a super-producer and a friend from Lamaze class needed the milk.
I can’t remember what was on in the middle of the night—we certainly didn’t have cable—but I’d stare at that little screen, the volume so low I could barely hear it. Sometimes I dozed. Occasionally Tom Pederson (and Gloria, too!) would say, “WAKE UP!” and I would. I’d detach the pump and freeze the milk and go back to bed.
The Real TV
That little black and white TV was our only TV until 1984. During these years, I loved Taxi and Cheers. I enjoyed these dry and witty shows, and made a point of watching them on that teeny little TV.
Then my second husband went out and found us a good deal on a color Sony with a remote control. A note about this remote: it had twelve buttons, for twelve channels. That was enough back then, as we didn’t have cable for years. Another note about this remote: my oldest dropped it in her goldfish tank when she was four, and said, “Look Mom, I made bubbles!” She’d been disappointed that we didn’t have an aerator in there.
Cable arrived, then went away, then came back to our house, depending on the financial situation du jour. But of course, it eventually became a necessity. I was a single mother of three, just trying to survive the demands of working, going to school, keeping them all afloat through the chaos of our suburban life. If they wanted to take a little refuge in the travails of the Cosbys or the Winslows, who was I to complain? I thought those kids on Barney were creepy, as stiff and forced as if they were hostages performing with weapons at their backs, but if it made one of my girls happy to watch it, then she could watch it!
TV kept the peace.
Until it didn’t.
I was not prepared for the channel discord that came to my house once some of my girls aged out of the Disney channel and into the disarray of one wanting to watch Disney, one wanting to watch Mtv, and the other just wanting to fight with someone because that’s the age she was. The girls diverged, and the discord began.
Thankfully, these were three-way squabbles, not four-way squabbles, because I didn’t watch much TV. In fact, I hated most of what was on in the eighties and nineties. I could barely stand to be in the house on Friday nights, when they watched that block of insipid TGIF programming that included Full House. But I never made them change the channel. They would all watch that garbage peacefully, with no argument. Besides, my sister and I had watched Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. Who was I to complain about Steve Urkel?
But I couldn’t stand to hear it. And by “it,” I mean the TV and the arguments it started. So I bought all three girls their own small color TVs with DVD players built in, and had cable hookups put in their rooms. I took the larger TV out of the main room and put it in my bedroom—finally replacing the nine inch black and white I’d kept in there for all these years (bonus feature, it no longer had any knobs). Everyone had her own TV, her own cable, her own DVD player. There was no need to fight.
Of course, they still did. They moved all their squabbles to my bedroom, where they watched the larger TV in order to argue over it. It was on, and in my airspace, and there were things like Real World Challenge and Bad Girls Club penetrating my consciousness. The Kardashians. Teen Mom. I had eschewed TV for years, but pretty soon I was hooked on American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance and Project Runway. What a time suck. What a nightmare.
And then my friend Karl told me to watch Mad Men. And my oldest girl found Big Love and knew I would love it.
TV had changed, and I was hooked.
Today
I watch TV now. I’m somewhat appalled by how much TV I watch. When it’s time for mindless, I go straight to HGTV.
I watch all the NBA games with my husband, giving my own clueless commentary for a game I just vaguely understand but wholeheartedly enjoy. “He stands funny when he goes to the line.” “Those uniforms make the Nuggets look like old-timey acrobats.” “The Minnesota uniforms look like sailor suits.” “Oh, the guy with the deep-set eyes shaved all his hair off!” “Look at all the biceps for Jesus out there, what is up with that.” It’s really insightful and important commentary, let me tell you.
I’ve watched Game of Thrones all the way through. Twice. And I’ll watch season two of House of the Dragon once I can binge it. Season three of The Bear is coming soon. My favorite viewing experience, ever, is Schitt’s Creek. I think the best shows that have ever been on TV are Mad Men, Rectify, and Boardwalk Empire. I thought The Last of Us was phenomenal. I’ve never watched West Wing because I can’t tolerate how Aaron Sorkin writes women. I’ve never watched Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, and I couldn’t make it through Deadwood. And you know, I probably never will. Because there’s TOO MUCH GOOD TV now. A person has to make choices.
But if you’ve read this far, tell me what you love that you think I might love. Because, you know. I still like to watch good TV.
Siblings in Harmony – Regrets and Videos
No regrets? Of course I have regrets! Regrets in harmony.
I have a few regrets in this life, and not recording some songs in harmony with my siblings is absolutely one of them. I’m speaking of the original three siblings: myself (youngest), my sister (middle) and my Brother Steve (oldest). At my mother’s parties in Aberdeen, South Dakota, my sister and I used to bring down the house with our childish rendition of “Those Were the Days, My Friend.” The three of us together graduated from car-trip singalongs to rousing a crowd with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in 1971 at a political rally in Booneville, Arkansas. Despite the heights of our harmonic glory during the refrain, we remained staunchly liberal, like our parents, and we did not become the next Von Trapps, though my sister and brother were in a band together in the 80s (it wasn’t particularly harmonious).
Harmony came easier to my brother and me. We dueted constantly from about 1974 on, at home and at parties. It was our thing. Somehow, we never got a moment of it on tape. I regret that.
The way sibling voices blend moves me. Even when the voices are very different from each other, there’s alchemy in how they come together, constant infinitesimal adjustments to smooth the harmonies. I believe this is done by instinct rather than decision. Here are a few of my favorites, almost all of which fall into the country category. And please note, even though these are sister acts, I sang far more with my older brother than with anyone else. I miss you, Brother Steve.
The Chicks
I’m all for the rename. But in the Dixie days, the harmonies of sisters Martie and Emily provided a soft grounding for Natalie Maines’ forceful lead vocals. This band has been through the wringer both professionally and personally, andthey are still together. Gaslighter is a BRILLIANT record/song/video, but I like these earlier songs. Also, that fiddle, and the banjo. I mean…
The Browns
Talk about country! I first learned about the Browns while reading Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass. I had no memory of the Browns, and thought I was reading a not-so-good novel with real characters like Elvis Presley dropped in. At some point I began to understand that, yes, this was a not-so-good novel, but the Browns were real. At one time, they were one of the most popular musical acts in the country world. Bass described how they twanged and arced and hung in the air, blending and bending together like the tones of a bandsaw. I wanted to hear their voices. I ordered a CD, which took months to reach me. When it finally arrived, I played it obsessively.
Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne
These sisters have intense, rich voices. Shelby’s is full of emotional punch and power, and Allison’s is low and heartfelt, as big as the sky. I couldn’t prefer one over the other. Each sister has a record that sits on my all-time favorites list (Shelby’s Temptation, Allison’s The Hardest Part). They join each other onstage now and then, and have one joint project, Not Dark Yet. Individually, they are powerhouses. Together, they are sublime. The video below gives me constant shivers from beginning to end.
That’s pretty much perfection, in my book. Lest you think these sisters do not rock, here you go:
SheDAISY
I have one CD by SheDAISY, their debut “The Whole SheBang”, and that appears to be enough. I have never bought or even listened to another. I’ve been playing this record on car trips since the year 2000 and still love it. It’s straightforward commercial country done right. I have no idea if they’re still performing together, but the harmonies these three sisters create are grand, swooping, impossible to tease apart. I’m going to post two examples and I hope you listen more than watch.
The first one, “Little Goodbyes” is such a funny song, very country pop, but the video is of the “beautiful women make sultry faces while singing” variety. It distracts, then gets old.
“This Woman Needs” is a HEARTBREAKER ballad and has hair-raising shivery harmonies. It’s also an oddly crappy video with too many jump cuts. But it’s a gorgeous song.
Haim
Okay, finally, a sister act that is not country at all. My kids told me about these three sisters long before I actually heard them. “Mom, you’d love Haim.” “Mom, have you ever heard Haim?” “Mom, I think you’d like Haim.” I finally encountered them as actors in Licorice Pizza. This led to watching the video below and while watching it, I fell hard. Este, Danielle, and Alana (who starred in the movie) are so…talented, striking, odd, fascinating. They have quite different voices but listen to them blend into something special! And watch the whole thing because it builds in a wonderfully strange and subtle way. When did they film this, and how did they do it, and could they be any more cool?
I played this for my five year-old grandson and he was transfixed. He remarked, “They all have the same shoes.” He’s right. They sure do.
In conclusion
Did I miss anyone besides the Jacksons (can’t/won’t talk about them, it makes me too sad)? Because I’m sure I missed some people. Let me know in comments.