Our twenty-year-old washer works fine. Our twenty-year-old dryer works fine. They don’t work perfectly: the washer makes noise and the dryer will not dry if you have a towel in it.
Gary has decided we need a new washer and a new dryer.
He did the research, analyzed, measured, compared, asked me if I wanted a steam setting for when a shirt is wrinkled, and finally we were ready to look at those stackable little ones, but set side-by-side.
I don’t want a new washer OR dryer. I went with Mom to pick my current ones out, and she was worried I would be in a wheelchair before they were replaced again. So I want to see which lasts longer: my legs or the appliances.
I had a lovely time watching Bugonia with Gary. Afterward, he said:
”Emma Stone lost a lot of weight for that movie.”
I said, “Really? She looks the same as always.”
”Oh no. When she went to the award shows people were shocked at how thin she was.” Then, contemptuously, “Can’t you tell?”
I said, “Really, I don’t see it.”
Gary then clutched his head, doubled over, and said loudly, “WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO ARGUE? STOP DISAGREEING WITH ME.”
So. What makes an argument? I think that if I give an opinion in response that isn’t an argument. If I debated with a fact that might be an argument. Gary says I seemed dismissive of his views.
So, I think this is an argument:
Gary: ”Emma Stone lost a lot of weight for that movie.”
Me: ”YOU LIE!” or “Prove it” or “Are you saying I’m fat?”
That’s an argument. All I said was my eyes didn’t see what his eyes saw. How is that arguing?
I wonder how many “arguments” he has going in behind the scenes, on Facebook, with the neighbors, that I don’t know about. What’s up with him? Why does he need me to be blindly on his side?
This is an easy fix, of course. Just a day or so of saying the sun is the moon, in faith, it is the blessed moon, but it’s … wearing.
It’s remarkable to me how consumed I have been by Mom’s letters. It’s helped me plot the jumble of my childhood. I know the date Jerry broke his collarbone and made us touch his scalp stitches. (Same day Mom flew me to Saint Louis.) But then why was David in the car with us? (Because he was seven.)
The most notable thing is that during the divorce drama there are hundreds of letters. Carbons from Mom, responses from friends and family, and in all those letters, only one person mentions the kids. Specifically, Marilyn Ferguson, friend of Deepak Chopra, wrote of how poor David had no friends and his only playmate was Jerry, and “think what a divorce would do to David (not to mention Ellen).”
And really, speaking in my capacity as a parenthetical phrase there, she’s right. The divorce just gutted Dave. I was with Mom in St. Louis all summer, adjusting, but Dave kept living with Jerry while Mom was in St. Louis. Then she swept back to Texas, signed the papers, and left with Dave over the course of a week.
And would I have done the same? Absolutely. Just maybe … not so fast.
Britain’s version of Mother’s Day was on March 15, just a week ago. My British podcasts made reference to the past holiday and I freaked out. I learn this every few years.
No matter that it’s been almost 20 years since Mom died, I still panic in March if I think I’ve missed Mother’s Day.
It doesn’t help that the months March and May both start with “Ma” either.
Sure, Canada celebrates Thanksgiving in October. That’s as confusing, but missing Turkey Day isn’t the high crime that missing Mother’s Day is.
I’m also still chipping away at the broken links, and I found myself fixing a link on post shown below in some fancy intra-blog link style that you may never see again. No idea how that happened.
The post from 2010 is similar to the AFI best movies posts, in which I beat myself up for the dozens of classic movies I still haven’t seen, only this is just the best per the New York Times.
(First I’m horrifed I hadn’t seen Goodfellas. I have seen that movie at least four times since then.)
I still have not seen Rebel Without a Cause and Shampoo.
But I didn’t even try the TV shows, except for The Wire. I really enjoyed that.
I have a long weekend next month. Certainly, I could knock out those two movies. Of course, who knows what might happen if I see every movie on these lists? I might gasp out “It is finished” and perish.
Seventy-two years old, and forty years married. I’ve always thought year four was the worst year of marriage. Is year forty ten times worse? Kinda. Yeah, kinda is.
I’ve always known that one of our hurdles is how we deal with illness. He’s a baby, expects to be spoiled; I was raised by stoics, expect to be quarantined.
He has accepted that this really bad skin condition is going to be with him for life. He’s trying to be stoic, but while he’s accepted the resignation part of stoicism, he hasn’t adopted the SHUT UP ABOUT IT aspect of stoicism. So he’s in a holding pattern of: “There’s nothing the doctors can do, I must accept my fate and be brave and uncomplaining. But only in front of doctors. To my wife I must talk about nothing but my suffering.”
On the other hand, for a sick guy, wow, he’s turned into a workhorse. Yesterday he dropped things off at the recycling center, bought bird food, vacuumed, got the groceries, and cooked his weird stew of squash and chicken. (The blueberries are gone because they triggered the rash, as did everything eventually but the squash and the chicken.)
So, it’s a little maddening to hear him complain that only he can fix this problem that he claims is unfixable. I know normal lies between the two extremes of stoic and spoiled. Maybe he’ll settle there someday.
Naked ladies! ShowMe had crossed the line. The Board lost their minds. The December issue of ShowMe would not be going out until their penalty was decided. Instead, the magazines would sit locked in the ShowMe offices while the Board conferred.
ShowMe held a drunken party at the editor Noel Tomas’ apartment, attended by the journalism students and their friends.
One of those friends was my Dad, Danny. I think he was Noel’s friend, because they were both on the ’52 G.I. bill. Dad — who was drunk — offered to drive Mom back to St. Louis when Christmas break came along.
Mom was particularly sad that the December issue was locked in the offices, because it contained her vicious takedown of the girls at Stephens College.
Mom was sad her article was sitting in a box in the office. (That might have been mitigated by knowing no one would see the imame / inane typo.) But in addition to ShowMe, she had two side hustles. One was writing headlines for the independent student newspaper: The Maneater (Mizzou’s mascot is a tiger). The second job was writing comedy for the semi-satirical version of The Maneater: The Ladies Home Maneater.
The Ladies Home Maneater, or LHM, while humorous, was less edgy than ShowMe. They wrote a lot of parody poems. (On the other hand, the LHM didn’t like Jayne Mansfield’s squeal in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter which is the BEST PART of the movie.)
LHM had this remarkable recurring column.
Finally, LHM was the paper that reported, in big block letters:
SHOWME IS DEAD.
The Board had decided to shut ShowMe down completely, plus all those December copies sitting in the office had to be destroyed.
Mom has already rescued five copies of the December issue. She offered one to Dad after he drove her home at Christmas, because she liked him even better when he was sober. She was impressed with his ability to drive a stick shift, smoke, and drink a soda all at the same time.
I have always wondered why she had five copies of the December ShowMe. Anyway, that’s the last secret revealed, and almost the last bit of Mom unread.
Of course, she annotated her Dickens. She had the whole set. That’ll need to be a retirement project.
ShowMe had a variety of editors, but it was always a college humor magazine. It always had photos of pretty co-eds, jokes, cartoons, and a pre-digital layout.
It had to be profitable, so there were also lots of ads, sex references, and pandering to college rivalries (lots of references to how vacuous the girls at nearby Stephens College were).
With those constants, every editor put a stamp on the tone of the magazine.
One didn’t even use his name. He went by ECAT. I only have one ECAT edition.
Next there was a duo: Skip and Nanci. Skip and Nanci included personal essays from marginalized students. Written exposes of fraternity anti-Asian sentiments, a veteran’s experiences in Korea, an Indian student’s experiences at home. Slip and Nanci were great. I believe it was during their oversight that this appeared under every masthead.
And things were censored. There was a Board that governed what went in the magazine, and they would point to the offending part in the literal cut-and paste, and the editors would snip a joke or cartoon from a different page and paste it on top.
Most of the content went over my teenaged brain, but I do remember I caught on to one mildly dirty joke. Dick Noel had a running column in which he addressed his readers as “mothafs”.
I checked the dictionary. No entry for mothaf. Sometimes it was spelled mothaff. Eventually, the penny dropped.
“Mom, I just realized Mothaf is short for Motherf … you know.”
She argued. I showed her multiple examples of Mothaf in context. She was astonished at first, then said, “Good for you,” pleased I supposed for being less innocent than she was at that age.
The final mothaf looked like this.
After co-editors Skip and Nancy left, a new editor (named, confusingly, Noel Tomas) came along. He defiantly doubled down on the sex references and the gross-out comics. No more essays on the student experience. The post-Sputnik November issue was funny, but the Christmas one went so far as to print A) photos of fellow journalism students shirtless, on the beach, drinking beer, and B) these ads:
I KNOW. I can publish that, because I have a Mature WordPress designation, but the Board didn’t catch it until after it went to Press.
What happened next would change the course of Mom’s life.
Before she landed there at UofM in Columbia MO (Mizzou), Mom went to a local college for two years where she wrote a column for the school paper. It was very well received.
I recently re-read some old issues of the paper. Her column recieved excellent reviews in the letters to the editor. On this most recent reading I realized those letters came from her childhood friends. They were clever: they each changed one letter of their last names to ensure anonymity, and it worked for almost 75 years. They were life-long friends as well: “Aunt” Nancy, Claudette, and others.
During this time, Mom wrote a funny letter to the editor of ShowMe. When she left St. Louis for the University of Missouri in Columbia (“Mizzou”) two years later, the staff still remembered the letter.
So, when she got to Mizzou, she submitted a funny article for ShowMe titled “I Hate Men”. Again, it got attention in the letters to the editor — legit letters from other college humor magazines asking to reprint it. Plus, someone wrote a parody, and it doesn’t get better than that.
Suddenly she was on the masthead. She was in charge of publicity.
I imagine she did nothing, because Showme was about to become a scandal.
