One Girl's Trash...

I took a bunch of other things to the Swap Table the day I brought in our windfall “Nibble With the Marottas” tray. Among them were:

• Two pleated plastic lamp shades from the 80s, pleated not so much like the skirt of a Catholic school-girl’s uniform as pleated the way you used to fold the paper that encased your drinking straw before lowering a few drops of water onto it to make of it a writhing worm;
• Four sheet-sets that no matter how much I washed them still smelled like they were involved in the War Between the States;
• A ‘hot tray’ From The Land That Time Forgot meaning before anyone had a microwave which, when you plugged it in, rose to 900 degrees and, once you removed your casserole and tiny-wiener platter from it, offered a free third-degree burn to anyone foolish enough to let his fingers brush across it;
• A fuzzy pillow cover shaped like a lion’s head, only with a tail hideously growing out of the side;
• Two naked Barbies, exactly like all Barbie dolls everywhere who, but for their teensy waists and swelling breasts, are entirely free of  90% of your primary and secondary sex characteristics;
• A pair of headphones the size of dinner plates, and finally...
• My favorite sweater that survived the first culling a month ago but, looked at in the clear light of day, was seen to have just too many holes, too much hem-sagging all around.

This last I brought and set down with a heavy sigh – right before I spotted that cute linen jacket with the nice Princess Di shoulder pads which I whisked right home.All of which just goes to show : you can take the girl our of the 80s but you can never take the 80s out of the girl. :-)    

Gandhi was not Bald: Poofy Coifs

When you sweat you feel virtuous; it’s how you know you’re a good person and I’ve been doing some serious sweating this afternoon, or anyway my right armpit has been. Which must mean either that I’m only half the saint I like to think I am or that my mind wandered and I only rolled the Arrid Extra Dry onto the skin of my left armpit which happens all the time, of course it does think about it you’re using your right hand and it’s a nice easy reach across the body to get to the left armpit but a much more constricted curl to get to the right one. Kind of like when you sing the I’m a Little Teapot song and act it out at the same time which David does for us all sometimes and is frankly why I married him in the first place.

Well now here we are on the weekend which means it’s time for me to put up the new column which happens to just BE about what happens when you get to thinkin’ you’re deserving of canonization like a Gandhi or a Mother Teresa . All kinds of papers used it this week so as well as sticking it up at the top here under This Week’s Column why don’t I touch the magic wand to the words Citizen.com and let you click through and see how it looked in in New Hampshire.

Pride really does go before a fall, just as the story says. I thought I was so great one time, because Smith College where I went to school invited me to give as talk at the big reunion, calling me the Distinguished Alumna Speaker. I bought a silk dress just the bright–blue color of a peacock’s wing as well as a small scarf of that same hue with swirls of burnt orange and coral thrown in. I looked like the kind of lurid cocktail an 18-year old girl with a fake ID would order her first night at the Tikki Bar.

So there I was in the big the lecture hall where I once sweated earnestly over midterms and finals. Now I was up on the stage! With a microphone and a screen behind me! And everyone had to listen to ME, with my carousel full of funny and poignant slides that I just knew would make those 400 women laugh til their bras popped open, then cry a little, then near the end finish up with a last gentle chuckle and off to the class cocktail parties. I looked out at that sea of faces, went to take a tiny sip of water before I began.... and poured the thing right down my front and ended up giving the whole talk with a dark stain resembling the map of Argentina reaching from just under my chin clear down to my bellybutton.

It happens anytime you compare yourself to the great. In fact here’s a photo from the summer of '93 when I actually  'met' Gandhi at Madam Tussaud's Wax Museum in London and Zounds! By gosh if I’m not wearing the same ugly dress I refer to in this week's column! I see that I’m also trying to look like he and I are twins both inside AND out but anyone can see: his hair looks WAY better than mine

(But Yay for the 80s and early 90s huh? Look at me and my sister Nan up top here! We sure did have the poofy coifs!)