DARK SHADOWS - at least the special effects are improved...

Back in 1968 I was a HUGE fan of Dark Shadows. I would come home from school and sneak over to the next door neighbor's house to watch it with Janice. She was a teenager and I was in second grade. 

I remember sitting in the armchair in the den and the second that eerie theme music started I would tuck my legs up under me and try to keep my shit together because Barnabas Collins, in all that fog, scared me to death and appeared in my frequent nightmares.

Years later when I watched reruns on some random cable station I laughed at the clumsy production and overwrought acting - even for a soap opera it was way over the top.

So last night when I attended a screening of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp, I was really looking forward to see what kind of fun would be had with such rich and cheesy material.

As usual, with a Tim Burton film, it was visually amazing.  The production design, art direction and special effects were spectacular. The casting combined with the costumes, hair and make up was spot on, especially Dr. Hoffman, the scheming psychiatrist and Roger, the disgruntled brother.

The issue was the story and the script. It wasn't that great. I'm sorry, it just wasn't. Don't get me wrong, there were great lines, and given what they were working with the performances were good, but I was ready to go home after 90 minutes and the movie went on for another 25 minutes.

I haven't read any reviews so maybe it's just me and my affection for the original that's disappointed, but I'm really glad I didn't fork over $15 to see the movie. That said it was nice to fondly remember all the gothic shmaltzy horror of my afternoons with Dark Shadows.

RIP Jonathan Frid.

MAD MAN

It's spring and that means it's time to get Pete, my big black pussycat, shaved for the summer.

He's a rescue and of indeterminate breed, but he's got a ton of hair and despite best attempts to groom him every day - oh the drama when he spies the Furminator - beginning each April there is a frosting of black hair all over my house.  That which doesn't shed off him stays behind to make lots of mats.

He's like a husky, feline Bob Marley with tiny dreadlocks and anxiety issues.

Yesterday he went in to The Best Little Cat House to get his annual Go-Go Lion Cut,and when he got home I noticed that they had given him a little Mad Men tie.

 Which is appropriate because he got really mad when I started laughing at him.

Moving On

The small business that I have been working for the last 6 years is closing and I will be moving on.

This is simultaneously producing feelings of anxiety and anticipatory excitement.

Anxcitement.

I'm terrified to be out there looking for work in an economy that is less than robust and where I am competing with people who are much younger.  There is an age bias in our culture and although I don't look old, I am older and I know it matters.

There's also excitement because I would love be in a position where I'm not stressing about cash flow and wondering how we're going to make payroll, or where the money is going to come from to pay the huge insurance bills.  The cost of doing business began to consume every bit of profit.

At some point you have to draw the line in the sand and say - "enough" - because it gets to a place where you're not only not making money, you're paying to not make a profit. 

So as I'm closing the business which is exhausting and trying and sad, I'm also beginning the search for new work.  I love beginnings of anything because you can bring all of your ideals and perfect visions and focus on the qualities that you really want to experience.

My issue is that at the same time I'm consumed with the fear that I will end up with a shopping cart like so many people I see every day down in Santa Monica.  People my age or a bit older who are not raving mad and talking to themselves, but who are clean and healthy and who probably were living indoors a year or two ago.

Friends have been out of work for more than 2 years.  When I listen to the news and they report jobs numbers it doesn't sound very encouraging.  When I look at what's available in the want ads it feels like I would be stepping right back into the kind of mind numbing work that contributed to the depression I have just slipped off.

Moving on is something I'm looking forward to - I enjoy change and I'm making a list of all of the things I'd love to get paid to do at work, like read, write, work with others on a project that we all contribute to and make fantastic and while we're at it the project will bring great value to the world.... or at least make people laugh.

Already I've learned to ask for help and to say out loud all those things that scare me about an unknown future.  I'm learning to embrace change, although sometimes it feels more like getting mugged by change. It's all happening and it's going to happen whether I want it or not.

Might as well focus on creating everything I want instead of fighting to keep everything that I've been complaining about for the last two years.

Moving on can be bitter sweet, but mostly it's a good thing.

PASSOVER...and over and over and over




This year I did not get to go to a Passover dinner, something I have done almost every year since I was a kid because all of my best friends were Jewish and then I seemed to have developed a penchant for Jewish men.

Passover is one of the big celebrations akin to Easter without the necromancy, ham and chocolate bunnies.

It's a celebration of the freeing of the Jews who were enslaved by the Egyptians.  God got really angry with the Egyptians and punished them with plagues.

Here are some fun things to do with your kids for Passover:

1. Nile waters turning to blood –put red food coloring in the water glasses at the dinner table, in the bathroom sinks, in the dog’s water bowl, and anywhere else you can think of.
2. The frogs–Use green construction paper to cut out roundish frogs with thin green legs. Bend the legs to make the frogs look as if they are jumping. Put them everywhere, in cereal boxes, in the shower, refrigerator, drawers, etc.
3. The lice–Use a hole punch to make many small white “dots” out of plain white paper. Scotch tape them on your body and leave them on for a few hours. The appearance and irritation will make you think of itching lice.
4. The flies– Use clear scotch tape to tape pepper or small “dots” of black construction paper in different areas of the house, the windows, the bathroom mirrors, etc.
5. Disease afflicting the Egyptian livestock--put stuffed animals in different areas of the house, upside down.
6. Boils–Use a hole punch to make many small red “dots” out of red construction paper (or cut out circles). Cover each other with boils by scotch taping them on your body and leave them on for a few hours. The appearance and irritation will make you think of the boils.
7. Hailstorm–Put ice cubes around the outside of your house, the porch areas and on the outside window sills.
8. Locusts– Use brown construction paper to cut out oval-looking locusts. Put them everywhere as you did the frogs (you’ll even think of some new places to surprise your family).
9. Darkness–Tape brown paper bags over all the windows, draw all draperies to keep it dark in the daytime, or don’t turn on any lights in the evening.
10. Death –Put red ribbon on the sides and top of door post of your house to avoid the death plague. When the neighbors ask what the ribbon is for you can witness to them!

It's a long night's celebration - as I write this my neighbors are going on three hours of singing - and although I missed being with my friends this year I'm kind of happy to just celebrate the beginning of spring.

Happy Passover!
Happy Easter!
Happy Spring!

Havin' a Do (over)...


Today is my birthday.
I've been here 52 years.
That's a long time.
Now I'm one of those people who waxes rhapsodic about how much better music was "back in the day" and the back in the day I'm referring to is the late 60s and early 70s.

The music I used to dance to like Molly Ringwald in the 80s is the "oldies" they play on K-RTH 101.

The last couple years have been rather challenging - the economy has created struggle for so many including myself.  It's been like running through molasses in January in that any forward motion has taken so much more effort.

Even more difficult has been the loss of so many friends.  They have been jumping off this mortal coil in mostly tragic ways.  Jacob, David, Jim, Dan, Caroline, Philippe, Abe, Laura...all but two of whom were my age or younger.

For a while it seemed like every time I answered the phone the news was shocking and bad.

It did a number on my psyche and I have found myself profoundly sad and depressed, as in crying all the time and thinking dark and exhausted thoughts.  I was not participating in the world very well.  Honestly I just wanted to lie down and not wake up because I was just so sad.

And all that sadness was completely appropriate to the circumstances.

I tend to be one of those people who believes that it's better to feel your feelings, even the icky ones, until you're done feeling them.  Usually I get bored with feeling sad, or in anyway bad, because, well, if you think about it those kinds of feelings take more energy.

But, something chemical happened inside of me and it was like I got caught in an undertow of sadness and I couldn't get back to feeling good.  I was getting pulled deeper and deeper into the Sea of Inertia and Numbness.

All of the loss combined with the menopause, which is like living in some bleak, soviet country where you have a personal Chernobyl every hour or two, you never sleep for more than three hours and your rear end migrates to your belly so you can't get your pants buttoned without shutting off aortic flow, has made celebrating anything feel like a chore.

About a month ago I started taking supplements that my mom recommended to help me sleep.  Nothing is worse than being horribly depressed and insomniac.  One of these supplements is called SAM-e and in limited research it's shown good benefit for depression.  I didn't really give that much thought because I wanted good benefit in REM.

Amazingly, about 2 weeks after I started taking it I began feeling like myself again.  The tired and sad began to ebb and the small pleasures in doing simple things began to flow.  I could totally feel the difference.

I still wasn't sleeping 8 straight, but I was able to go back to sleep when I woke up after 3 hours and since my glass was feeling half full I could see the blessing in that new ability.

Two years ago on my birthday I started my day with the news (on Yahoo!)  that my friend David had died the night before from a brain aneurism, and I spent the day traumatized and in tears.  Turning 50 and any feelings that I might have had about it wasn't even on my radar because Dave was 48 and he was never going to see his hemi-centennial.

A couple weeks ago my friend Heather said to me, "I'd like to be old, but when I die who will be left to speak at my funeral?", and I thought about how many funerals I've been to in the last two years and all of the love expressed for the person who died and I thought - why wait?

This morning the only news on Yahoo! is that Jerry Lee Lewis is getting married again at 76 for the 7th time - news that I find hopeful because how much of an optimist do you have to be to keep getting married when you're one slip and fall away from your last ball of fire.

Then I opened my e-mail and Justin Bieber sang happy birthday to me.

So far, so good.

Tonight I am having a do-over do for  my 50th birthday and I am going to tell everyone who comes how much I love and appreciate them.

...And there will be much celebrating because life is short and being joyful is way better than being sad.

NOT DOWN WITH THE CELEBRATION...

After 9/11 in the midst of processing the horror of the event, one of the most disturbing images, to me, were the video clips of people in the Middle East celebrating the attack on the towers and the deaths of more than 3,000 innocent Americans.  They were in the streets dancing around and handing out candy, waving flags and chanting and wailing.  It was terrifying to think that people could hate Americans so much that they would celebrate the crime perpetrated on the innocent.

Last night when I was watching the news to gain more details about the death of Osama Bin Laden I saw images of Americans in the street celebrating his death, and while I am happy to know that he is dead, I believe that he needed to die, I was never in favor of capturing him - much preferring a well aimed killshot - I found that it made me just as uncomfortable to watch people dancing in the street, chanting and waving flags to celebrate his death.

I want to believe that we are better than them.

I'm old enough to remember those John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies where justice is delivered with a gunshot, after which the hero blows the smoke off the end of the pistol and rides off into the sunset.  That is the iconic American hero - someone who stoically gets the job done cuz it needs doin' - and then moves on to the next town and the next bad guy while the town people gather around the body and watch him go.  They don't dance in the street and have a party.

They do that not us. 

My fear is this:  that these radical extremists, watching images of us celebrating, just like they did, will start coming over here and blowing themselves up in our malls and on our freeways during rush hour traffic.  We will have to start living in a way that is not free.  We will be living lives that always contain the fear of a kind of violence that we have never known.  

When that happens the terrorists will have won.  And since I'm thinking about this in a place of "us" and "them" perhaps they already have.

THE SRING! IT'S SPRUNG!!

This past weekend I was lucky and blessed to spend time at an avocado ranch up near El Capitan State Beach.  We went to celebrate Leisa turning 50 and three others, including myself, had just birthdays as well so it was quite festive.  The property itself is amazing with vineyards and avocado groves and a stream and a zip line, but I was mostly into the hammock.

It was nice, cool and damp, misty giving over to rain a few times, which was great because at least 1/3 of the 12 women that were there were having hot flashes at any given time.  One of us who is fighting breast cancer had just had her last radiation treatment, so she was experiencing prickly heat that was so extreme, the material from her shirt was driving her nuts, not to mention the extreme pain from the burn.  She showed me the scars on her chest where her breasts had been and the charred black and red flesh over her left side, at the site of the radiation treatment.

While red and black are sort of her signature colors, the accompanying pain was bad and it was wearing her out, but she was a super trooper for making the trip.  Now that the treatment is over she can move on to the next thing - which will be marrying her best friend in August.  She is also a force of nature and a scrapper, so it seemed appropriate that as the earth is on the verge of bursting with verdant life, she is at the stage in this fight where she is kicking cancer's ass and looking forward to moving on to grand future, a full life, and a really fun wedding in this amazing place later this summer and it will be my honor to perform the ceremony.

I think that's why I love spring so much.  Beyond the fact that the days are longer, there is also literal budding of life which hints at the abundance of goodness and beauty to come with summer days.  When times are challenging there is nothing more important than this reminder of the inexorable forward motion of life and although it can feel bleak and challenging and exhausting, it will once again renew and there will be light on the path ahead.  It's more difficult to find these signs in the middle of a city, but they're still there.  In Southern California we don't have the obvious movement from snow to sun, but we have so many plants that show us that spring is here.  I love that we have hibiscus bushes.

They are floribundufull - not a word, I know, but it sounds like they look, and while this is from the ranch they live on almost every corner of the streets in my neighborhood. 

But back to the ranch, the frogs sang to us all night and the roosters woke us in the morning.  I tried to get a good picture of the little dudes but they were less than enthused about a photo shoot and did not cooperate.  Turns out it's hard to get a good shot when you're running towards bushes at full speed.

We took beautiful walks and ate the most delicious food and did art projects and read and napped and danced in the living room in front of the fireplace, and then ran outside to wait for the hot flashes to mellow out.  We sat on the porch swings and talks and talked and climbed up into the tree house and talked some more.  We walked the rows of the vines which are just starting to make little grapes...

And we look forward to one day drinking the wine that is promised in each little nugget and toasting Nancy and Byron this summer with the first vintage grown on the ranch which will be ready this summer.  Thanks to the Doty's for allowing us the great privilege of staying at their magical ranch.