By: Ann Brown

The setting for my dreams is always outer space now. I float, free-falling in the vast darkness, surfing uneasily on undulating gusts of wind. Sometimes I am dressed in a space suit, but a dorky, homemade  space suit – the kind we used to make at summer camp during “Astronaut Week”: A helmet made from half a Clorox jug covered in aluminum foil, a mask of swimming goggles and a tissue paper-covered Slinky for an air hose.

Note to self: it’s your dream. Why must you scrimp, always going with the schmatte bargain wardrobe in it? Spend a little on the damn spacesuit; you’re worth it. Get Edith Head to design something fabulous. But nothing tucked in. I am an “apple” shape and – dream, shmeam, subconscious, shmubconscious -Mama don’t do tuck in.

I haven’t had an Earthly dream all week. I close my eyes at night and slowly hover above the ground, surfing away from my spaceship, drifting into the nothingness. I am lost, untethered, in both my waking and sleeping lives.  This morning, I stood in front of my bedroom window and wrote please help me in the frost. The “p” in “help” started to melt and ran down the glass to the sill in little frost tear drops.

I have been cut off from Facebook.

On Monday morning I received a notice that due to being phished, FB has disabled me. If you think that term, disabled, sounds a tad violent, let me just tell you that it pretty much describes the situation perfectly. I feel as violated, as pulled apart and subsequently, as marginalized as if Facebook thugs had come directly to my home in the middle of night, yanked me out of bed, wiped the Regenerist Night Repair serum right off my face, broke my bite guard in half, poked holes in my Breathe Right strip and left the toilet seat up. And then, oh cruel coda, came back to force me to tuck my pajama top into my pajama bottoms.

Where is Victim’s Assistance when you need it? God, I should have voted for the Republican Sheriff and Attorney General when I had the chance. What good are the bleeding heart, soft on crime Democratic  candidates to me now? I want revenge.

I got no Facebook wall to write on. No Facebook fan page. No daily Facebook salon with my girls. (Do you even remember me???) I got no Facebook Pathwords game at which – with a score of 1620; 1620! – I was number 2 of all my friends. No Facebook Scrabble at which I regularly get my ass kicked by my LA cousins and various online friends. Has someone started a “bring dr. strangemom back to Facebook” Facebook fan page? Did anyone even join????  How will I know what is going on in the world without my friends’ status updates? Is Barbara taking her dog for a walk today? Did Susan get my private message about Gary? Is Erika having salmon for dinner??? I will never know. I mean, you can’t count on Newsweek to report the essential shit.

If my blog had a soundtrack, right now it would be playing, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town”. I don’t know why.

It is so fucking weird, being cut off from Facebook until they determine if I can be invited back. I imagine that before I am released of my persona non grata status I will have to take some sort of Karen Silkwood cyber shower, you know, scrub me down to my private password, put all my belongings in a plastic gray bucket, take off my shoes and my earrings and pass through the scam detector. With my luck, Facebook probably has one of the new “I-can-see-you-naked” machines which will surely set off alarms as they notice that full frontal me, nekked, bears absolutely no resemblance to the from-the-neck-up photos of my profile pictures, taken, oh, a million years ago. That’ll put the nail on my coffin.

For now, I am stuck here; waiting, as it were, in the hallway outside the Facebook Principal’s office, not knowing if this is a suspension or an expulsion. And I didn’t even do anything wrong, although my son suspects I missed a few early signs that I was being phished. It’s all so unfair. The last time I was in this situation was high school, when I was a part of a group that took over the Administration Building in order to end the war in Viet Nam. (Are you snickering at our hubris? Really? Well, did the war end or not? I’m just asking.) We were one scary, badass militant gang back there at Ulysses S. Grant High School. Stormed the Administration building, yes we did. Locked the motherfucker administrators out. I joined arms with Nina and Katherine and Davia and Rina and Allan and we sang “We Shall Not Be Moved”. Or maybe we sang “Sweet Baby James” because, let’s face it, that is a totally better song. We sang and chanted “get your asses out of classes” and we roared our terrible roars and gnashed our terrible teeth and we laughed our scary badass laughter when we got the word they were calling the pigs on us. Well, actually, we opened the doors and quickly filed outta there when we got the word they were calling the police, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I am bereft without Facebook.

And never mind the upside, which is that I suddenly have found, like, a gajillion more hours in the day to get shit done. In the time it used to take me to come up a pithy status such as, “Ann is…..going to get shit done today”, I can actually clean out the droppings of petrified lettuce and cabbage from the refrigerator crisper, wash all of Molly’s forty thousand dog beds which are scattered throughout our two thousand square foot house, add my name to the MoveOn.org and Humane Society petitions filling up my email Inbox, schedule a mammogram, cancel a colonoscopy,  and run out to get a bowl of Pho from that hidden joint in Southeast. Not that I did any of those things. I’ve mostly just been sitting here at the computer, robotically typing in my old username and password over and over again, and despairing at the “you have been disabled” notice I get every time. It’s like pushing the “replay” button on those old answering machines just to keep hearing, “you have no new messages”.

Thank God it’s Girl Scout cookie delivery week; otherwise, there’d be absolutely no reason to go on living.

If you are on Facebook, tell the others I have a new post out. Speak of me kindly.

I’ll be out by the spaceship, catching the waves. Cowabunga dudes.

By: Ann Brown

This is our four-year anniversary, Molly and me. As you know, I adopted her from the animal shelter on the day Michelle Kwan dropped out of the Olympics so the Winter Olympics will always remind me of my dog.

Speaking of which, where IS Michelle K? I haven’t seen her in the stands at the Pacific Coliseum, so unless she is being hidden from the camera by the obscuring presence of that ridiculous bong-totin’ galoot, Michael Phelps, I guess she’s not in Vancouver. I hope she is okay. I hope she is doing better – four years later – than Molly is right now.

Poor Molly. She is not doing great. She’s old, lame and incapable of sleeping for more than two hours at a time. I am back to living the life of a new mommy – up every hour, stumbling and lurching my way towards the back door to let Molly out and then falling asleep on the kitchen counter while I wait for her to come back. Not that I put my newborns out in the back yard to pee while I slept on the kitchen counter, no sireeee. I stayed awake back then. And had headaches all the time. And I was very bitchy. Very bitchy. In fact, Robin once said to me, “I guess the beauty of you being a bitch every day is that no one will ever accuse you of having PMS.”

And now, almost thirty years later, here I am back in the world of the sleep-deprived, only without a baby. In fact, come to think of it, I am the one who sleeps like a baby these days, not Molly:  I wake up every two hours, cry, and then eat until I fall asleep again. All night long. If my pants get any tighter, I am going to have to take to wearing those stretchy Onesies with the snaps on the crotch.

It’s totally fucked up that at the two stages of life when everyone around us most needs their rest – babyhood and infirm old age – we are the worst sleepers. And exhausting the people who are in charge of our very survival is probably not the smartest thing to do. Robin once put that red-hued, gum-numbing medicine in our son’s nose because he was too tired to keep his eyes open while taking his turn soothing our teething baby.  He did it, like, four times during the night and when I saw the poor kid in the morning, he looked like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler.  My friend Julie once got her baby’s toe fungus medicine mixed up with the pink-eye medicine.  You’d think that squirting toe fungus ointment into your baby’s eyes would sober one into paying closer attention, but it just so happens that a few years later, Julie ignored her daughter’s complaints about boogers bothering her nose -ignored her for days – before realizing that the booger in there was actually one of Julie’s pearl earrings.  Oh, and my friend Wade once left his newborn baby in the car after dropping off his wife at a restaurant before he went searching for a free parking place. Which was five blocks away. Which was where he left the car – and the baby – and sprinted to the restaurant, ready to enjoy a nice dinner. Until his wife asked him where the baby was. I bet after that, it wasn’t such a nice dinner with the wife.

I was halfway through a vitamin C tablet at four o’clock this morning while waiting for Molly to finish peeing outside before I realized that it wasn’t a vitamin C tablet at all; it was seven Wheat Thins with Laughing Cow cheese on them. Okay, well, I guess I knew about that, but who can blame me? When you are tired, you do not make good decisions.

I’ve been through this before. Blacky was an old cat, and for most of her life she needed nothing from us. The kids found her when we lived in LA – she was a stray; self-sufficient and completely independent. It was a relationship that knew no demands. When we moved to Oregon, Blacky came with us and adjusted to her new life by settling herself in the upstairs of our new house and never setting foot outside – or downstairs – again.

By the end of her life, I hated Blacky.  I loved her, too, because sometimes even after she’d shit on my carpet and barfed up a bloody hairball in my bed, and even after we had to have all her teeth extracted  (to the tune of a thousand dollars) so all she could eat was baby food, I could still look at that dainty cat face of hers and feel my heart stretch out and soften. But I was exhausted all the time and she cried all night long. She needed a spoonful of food at 3 AM, and then another spoonful at 3:30 and then she pooped and then she meowed that mournful, primal meow for about a half hour.

I used to lie in bed and listen to her calls. Murr-ahow it began, in a soft guttural clearing of her throat. Murr-OHWHW it crescendo-ed, louder and more alien, but I pretended not to hear her. Once, I swear, she jumped on my bed and over-articulated her meows right into my ear, the way we speak loudly and slowly to non-English speakers. Me-ow. Do-you-understand-this, you idiot American human? ME-OW.

A few years ago I complained to my mom about how Blacky was taking over my life. “It’s not worth it, you’re exhausted” she said. “Put her to sleep. You need your sleep.”

I was aghast. My mom just laughed.  “Oh, come on. Stick a little poison in some brisket and give it to her. She’ll eat it right up.”  I didn’t know if she was joking or not.

But either way, I still make sure my mom eats the first bite of her brisket at Passover. I mean, I used to keep Mom up a lot when I was a baby. She might be holding a grudge.

By: Ann Brown

I may have mentioned I have this little, er, quirk wherein I imagine kicking the butt of a man near me. As I said before, I believe this is solely a function of wondering about my own strength and not a sign of any latent violent tendencies within me. Still, I am not unaware of the reaction my confession evokes. I see you scooting your chairs away from me as you read this.

And I feel a need to explain myself.

I read somewhere that the most important thing women over fifty can do to keep themselves healthy is stretch every day. As a woman over fifty, I generally discard the advice I read because so much of it  centers around changing my negative attitude about aging and, frankly, my negative attitude about aging is all I have left of my youth so I want to hold on to it.

But this stretching thing got me to thinking. They’re right. We rarely stretch ourselves. We don’t use all we’ve got.

After The Revolution, when we all live on my commune in side-by-side yurts and grow hemp, stretching ourselves to our limits will be a regular part of daily life. I mean, just chopping wood and folk dancing to the water hole will fulfill the 10,000 steps a day quota that the makers of New Lifestyles pedometers warn we all need to stave off premature death. And I bet our children would be perfectly well- behaved because after a day of using up all they’ve got, they’d be tired. In fact, we’d all be tired. The good tired. Not the tired I usually am, bitchy and distracted by afternoon, licking the morning coffee grounds from the compost pail for a buzz, and updating my list of transgressions the world has committed against me (most recent: water in my ear that is making me dizzy when I look down to type. Ow.)

I took a lot of dance classes in college. Mexican couples dances, Indonesian Gamelan dancing, Greek dancing, every day was filled with dance classes. (Note to the college bound: be an Ethnology of Non-Western Music and Dance major. Totally rocks. And when you graduate, the world will offer you a smorgasbord of jobs. Bitchin jobs. Like, once I sang Jewish folk songs in a maximum security prison in Tracy, California. Try to land that gig with a degree in, say, medicine.)

What was my point?

Oh, right. Dance classes. At the end of a day, I was wonderfully, satisfyingly, deliciously spent. I slept like a log (as opposed to these days when I sleep like a baby: wake up every two hours and cry until I eat). I believe that when we move to the commune, there will be no fighting, no bitchiness, no whining, no interrupted sleep because we will all – children, adults, parents – be well used up. Also, because we can smoke our hemp tunics when life gets stressful.

But in modern life, here in suburbia, we live such contained lives. We have to share armrests in movie theaters. We have to refrain from jumping onto the moving clothes rack at the dry cleaners and taking a ride. We are not even allowed to finger wrestle prospective employers when they shake our hands. And we are left with a bunch of leftover energy that has nowhere to go. We are left wondering just how strong, fast, loud, obnoxious, fearless and mighty we can be.

So I check out the men in my classes. I take in their upper body strength, the contour of their forearms, their overall look and I fantasize bopping them on the nose, kneeing their groins and, occasionally, swinging them over my head and twirling them round and round like Brutus used to do to Popeye before the can of spinach magically appeared.  I have no reason to feel threatened by men. I’ve never been in a situation that would warrant a need to hurt them or get away fast. Well, once a guy forgot to pay me for a parenting consult but he remembered as soon as he got home and he came back. With a ten dollar tip, as apology. No need to break his kneecaps.

My point being, there is no rational reason to fantasize about this. And, let’s be honest, unless a man was in the middle of a serious heart attack, I’d probably not be the victor. I mean, I am no weakling but my 45 minute daily stroll in the park with my dog and the occasional foray into Curves isn’t gonna get the job done against a forty-something dad. I suppose I could just sit on him and that would be that, but I am too vain to use my weight as a weapon because what if he lived, and told everyone, “she fucking sat on me and she weighs a ton. I thought I was dead” and then the papers would sleuth out my actual weight and report it and, yikes. Yikes.

Still, I crave real-life experience. Tae-Bo with TV Billy Blanks in my bedroom is like practice- kissing your pillow, you know? So with my late-fifties around the corner, I am going to do a little more stretching in my life.

I believe I will begin by reaching over my computer to that glass of wine.

Ow, my ear. Damn it.

.

.

Ann Brown

By: Ann Brown

Well, it’s all over but for hockey. And downhill. And short track. Oh, and the closing ceremony. But women’s figure skating is finished so there’s really nothing left for me. I feel pretty sure that my exit from televised Olympic coverage won’t be noticed; I mean, I get it – I get it – that life does go on without me although when I stopped watching “Deadliest Catch”, Captain Phil died. I’m just saying.

All in all, I was underwhelmed by Olympic figure skating this year. My mind wandered during most of the event. Oh, I started out glued to the tube, of course, but after a few seconds it suddenly seemed extremely important that I get a tangerine. Or check my emails. During the short programs I even hand stitched a hem in my beige pants, so unglued to the television was I.

I did perk up, however, when a Canadian won anything because I got to sing along with their national anthem. I know all the lyrics, you know, having spent a summer in the wilds of Quebec.

It was the summer of, approximately, 1972 and I took off to be a counselor for an Outward Bound kind of deal in Canada. If you know me at all, you would know that if given the choice between leading a camping trip and pouring hot tar up my nose, I’d reach for the tar and start snorting – and doin’ it, as they say in Quebec, TOOT SWEET. It would take a court order to force me to camp for an entire summer but I was following something stronger than the law: I was following a boyfriend. I am an outdoorsy sort of person in only the loosest definition of the term: I like being tan. I love the whole back-to-nature, outdoorsy experience of getting tan – the comfy chaise lounge, the paperback novel, mango iced tea, the way my silver bangles look against my sun-kissed arms as I dip my chip into guacamole and reach for another mojito. You know, nature.

Clearly, I was a natural for the counselor gig. Heaven help the kids whose survival was to depend on moi that summer. Thank God my boyfriend, Chris, and my friends, Donny and Joanie, were waaay more skilled in camping than I, in that Donny could play all of Jessie Colin Young’s songs on his guitar, Joanie knew how to batik and Chris brought pot. It was going to be fine.

As it turned out, the campers didn’t need us for their survival. Or much else. They were pretty much a self-sufficient group, many of them, ironically, having actually been court-ordered to the program. My job, basically, was to wake them up at the crack of o’ dark hundred and get them gathering and chopping firewood for breakfast, and even at that small task I was not a stellar success with those kids. They ignored me, they mocked me, one young man responded to my daily request that he get up and find the  wood for the morning, by showing me his penis and saying, “hey, Ann, I got your morning wood right here.” I only recently got the joke.

But we could sing. And sing we did every morning upon arising.

“Oh Canada, our home and native land.…”

I sang loudly, feeling a rush of militant activism. Those were challenging years for the two of us – America and me- those Nixon/Agnew years, and I was pissed off most of the time. It felt good to cheat on “The Star Spangled Banner” and climb into bed, musically speaking, with “Oh  Canada.” Every morning, when that  big red maple leaf flag was raised, I was stickin’ it to Tricky Dick.

These days, at least since the presidential election of 2008, I am feeling better about my country but I still love to sing, “Oh Canada”. And that is the song I sang during the medals ceremony for women’s figure skating last Thursday night, even though the Korean flag was being raised. It wasn’t just that I was not wowed by Gold Medalist Kim Ju-Na; she’s perfectly fine, but let’s just be honest, her mother did not die of a heart attack two days before she had to skate the short program so fuck her. Points, shmoints, give the gold to Joannie Rochette. The girl with the saddest story wins.

Kim Ju-Na did cry a little on the podium, however, and that warmed me a bit to her. But I wonder if she was faking, squeezing out a tear or two so she’d be more likable. Tying to think about a cat she once loved that was run over, perhaps, or about the fact that she clearly did not know the lyrics to her own national anthem and she was gonna catch shit when she got home. And I really don’t mean to sound bitchy but it’s not like trying to memorize the fucking Periodic Table.

The pine tree atop fore mountain

stands firmly unchanged under wind and frost as if wrapped in armor

As is our resilient spirit.

I mean, shit, I remembered it by heart just after looking it up on Wikipedia. I think that girl needs some more fat in her diet.

Oh, and little silver-medaled Mao Asada. She cried as she watched the Japanese flag wave. But I bet she was crying because she was afraid to go back to Japan without the gold. I am a little bit worried for her.  I think I saw her coach pinch her when she came off the ice.

Snow White and the Three Figure Skaters: Sad. Glad. Scared. I smell a Disney hit.

So, my Olympic coverage has come to an end. It’s time for me to put my socks back in the drawer and hang up my costume until 2014.

I hope by then I’ll be able to zip it all the way up.

By: Ann Brown

Man down! Man down!

And by “man”, I mean, me.

And by “down”, I mean I hit my ankle against the metal frame of my bed during elimination trials last night and I am injured. INJURED, I tell you.

I had to take Advil this morning, just to be able to sit down and write this post. TWO Advil. And a bagel and a half since I was getting up anyway to get the Advil. Light schmear. I am in training, after all.

If that sentence doesn’t make sense to you, go back and read my previous post. I don’t have time to catch you up – I have serious rehabilitation to do. I am going up against some strong figure skaters this year and I have to be in tip top shape to compete. It’s a cutthroat world out there for overweight 55 year old sock skaters performing in their bedrooms while watching the Olympics on TV. Just Bedazzling my pajama top is a part-time job this week. I’m thinking of calling in some Disney cartoon mice to help me sew. And maybe do a little light cleaning and water the plants while they’re at it. It’s okay to exploit cartoon mice, right? Oh, and perhaps they can give me a discreet little wax, if they are girl mice. Those skate skirts can ride up pretty high.

My ankle is so sore to the touch. This could prove to be exceedingly distracting. It’s hard enough to keep my mind on my routine, what with having to sidestep Molly’s dog bed, Robin’s dirty laundry on the floor, old issues of Cooking Light and Molly’s collection – updated hourly – of hairballs and drool. Did I tell you that I slipped in her barf a few weeks ago? Oh God, it was horrible. I was skating around my room and I suddenly slipped in one of those slo-mo kind of falls, you know? Well, I got up and I was so fixated on the fact that I didn’t hurt myself, it didn’t occur to me to wonder why I fell. It wasn’t until, I swear, like fifteen minutes later that I absent-mindedly ran my hand across my legging and felt something wet, and then I went to more closely investigate the floor. You know, there were times in my life when I’ve gone a little bit wild but I really never thought I’d end up being the kind of person who falls into dog barf and doesn’t even realize it. Hunh.

My short program requires more energy than I am used to exerting in the three years between Olympics when I sort of let myself go, in the sense that I mostly lay around, overeat, and catch up with my stories. My long program requires energy to the point of my not being able to breathe, resulting in my becoming light-headed and laying down on Molly’s dog bed until I am fairly certain that I am not going to die right then and there in my ratty old cotton briefs, Bedazzled flannel pajama top and socks. Oy. There’d be no amount of PTS therapy long enough to help the young paramedics expunge that image from their impressionable minds. I bet at least one of them would go gay on the spot.

Certain members of my family are prone to fainting, myself included, so I am taking no chances on my hard bedroom floor. I have strewn pillows throughout the room so I can grab one or two when the vapors hit me and I know I am going down. I’ve actually been thinking about working that into my choreography (double spin, thrust arms to grab pillow, smile, pass out, come to, lean up on elbows, pose, smile) just in case. Best not to make a whole deal over it, right? My son started to pass out in court the other day and he just said, “excuse me, Your Honor, I have to lie down now”. And then he stretched out on the floor of the courtroom, asked his client to hand him his file and conducted the rest of the hearing from under his table. This is a true story. And he won his case. As he told me on the phone after-wards (this is truly the kind of story a parent only wants to hear after-wards), “Guess I’ll be a kind of David E. Kelly character around this town from now on.” That’s what I call not making a whole deal about it.

But back to Anklewatch 2010.  This is serious. If I cannot sockskate, if I am doomed to merely watch the figure skating competition from my couch, like the rest of the global hoi polloi, well, I may as well just coat my head in olive oil, sprinkle it with salt and pepper and stick it in the oven at 350. My Olympic fantasy life defines me.  What else would I think about on the toilet or while waiting the excruciating two-and-a-half minutes for my microwave popcorn?

So, it’s heat and ice, ice and heat on my ankle for the next few days. Do you mind getting that for me?

Oh, and while you’re up, maybe a bagel. I feel weak.

By: Ann Brown

Valentine’s Day. It’s all over but for the wilted roses, the candy wrappers and the pundits.

My friend Andrea pretty much summed up how I feel about the whole thing.  She said,”All that perfunctory love. It’s creepy.”

This is why I am friends with Andrea. Well, this, and the fact that our friendship is based on the commitment ceremony we had that went something like this:

Me: (in an email to Andrea) I like you. Let’s be friends.

Andrea: Okay, I like you, too. You are smart and funny.

Me: You are smart and funny, too, and talented.

(Awkward pause, where I notice that she did not say I am talented, too)

Me: So, we’re friends now, right?

Andrea: Totally.

Me: I never want to have to actually see you in person.

Andrea: Cool. And we never have to speak on the phone.

Me: Excellent.

Andrea:  And we will never, ever say to each other, “let’s get together”, even just to be polite.

Me: Definitely.

Andrea: Only emails.

Me: Only emails.

(another awkward pause)

Me: Um, ‘k….so….bye.

Andrea: (message on my screen: “Andrea is now offline”)

We are going on eight years together.

I am the type who turns off the porch light and hides behind the couch when I see a car coming up my driveway. Andrea is the type who built a house that is very, very difficult to find and has no guest room. This portends a long friendship.

And there are others like us out there. Just run over and ask my friend Amy. Oh wait, you can’t; she won’t answer her doorbell. I love Amy. Ironically, Amy and Andrea once met in person. At my 50th birthday party. No surprise that they immediately liked each other. I wonder if they are email friends…I wonder if….huh, I wonder if they make coffee dates with each other and invite each other over for dinner parties and shop for bras together and…..and if they talk about me. And do they laugh merrily at how they have bamboozled me into thinking that they are not social, but it’s really that they don’t want to socialize with ME?

You know what, fuck Andrea and Amy.

(Andrea’s crafts website: www.onblueberryhill.com)

I have a salon, of sorts. My friends Claudia, Claire, Jane and I meet on Facebook every day or so to figure out the world. (I know I should put the word “meet” in quotes but it looks so weenie, so un-hip, as if having an “online” salon is still a novelty to me, or like the way my mom says, “bra” because, as a teenager, I told her to stop saying the weeniest of words -  “brassiere” – but now she says “braaa” as if she is saying only half a word and it sounds even worse.)

I know Claire, but I haven’t seen her in almost sixteen years. I met Claudia and Jane on Claire’s Facebook wall and although Jane has posited that perhaps Claudia is really a twelve year old boy masquerading as a middle-aged woman just to get in on our conversations, Claire has verified that she is, indeed, a bona fide middle aged woman. Anyway, if a twelve-year old boy wants to continue the ruse just to read our musings about menopause and SADD and raising children and shit, well, the more power to him. He will make a great husband some day if he pays attention to what we are saying about ours. Especially to the discussions about the transparency of “honey, why don’t I just give you a back rub” when what they really mean is, “honey, why don’t you just give me a blowjob.” Are you listening, “Claudia”?

(Claire’s website: www.clairelazebnik.com)

I also have an in-person salon, a once a month lunch salon with my friends Jeannette and Michelle. I know this flies in the face of my “don’t ask, don’t get together” policy but Michelle doesn’t really like email and Jeanette has healthy social impulses so she insists we actually get together.  She also actually reads the menu at the restaurant (we always go to the same Thai restaurant, except for a few weeks during the beginning of the Iraq war when we went to an Iraqi restaurant because we worried the owner would be boycotted and go out of business. Which he did, but it might have been because after every time we ate there we got really sick and she orders a different item each time, based entirely – get this – on what she feels like eating that day, not based on habit or fear of change. I run with the wild pack, baby.

(Jeannette’s website: oh wait, she didn’t want me to shamelessly plug her website. But she is an amazing artist and I am going to do it one of these days.  Not that Claire and Andrea WANTED me to shamelessly plug their websites. I just didn’t bother to wait for their responses when I asked if I could)

Now the two Adams in my life are a different story. They have both graciously conceded that I will never pick up the phone when they call nor will I show up at a gathering – chivalrous gentlemen that they are – but as far as I am concerned they owe me because they are the ones who talked me into letting my kid go three thousand miles away from home to college and as a result, I kinda had a little empty nest freakout and took to my bed for a while, catching up on my stories and my Xanax popping but missing out on a bunch of department store sales and, well, basically, Autumn of 2005.

(Adam Klugman fan page on Facebook)

And Robin. When his co-workers and friends suggest dinner dates with us or getting together for a drink, Robin has taken to saying simply, “my wife doesn’t go out.” I like the sound of that. It’s kinda scary, like he has me chained up in the guest bathroom or perhaps I have two hideous heads or something.

Oh shit. Hold on, someone’s at the door.  Turn off the lights.

Get down. Be very quiet.

By: Ann Brown

Talking Histories is all the rage, did you hear? It’s the new Yogilates.

So my sister and I set out to make a DVD of Mom. Just in case, you know, she dies.

Of course, the fact is that Mom is going to outlive all of us because that’s the pact she made with the Devil. I mean, how else do you explain a woman in her mid-eighties who -on her way home from a full day’s work- stops at Trader Joe’s, stands in line for student rush tickets to the Mark Taper Theater, simultaneously attends two meetings to save the Yiddish language from extinction, and still has time to get the eggplant in the oven for dinner? There has got to be some shady deal going on; nobody lives life to the fullest that much.

And then, she calls me and says, “hi honey, what did you do today?” The truthful answer to which is, I almost found the apple core that’s been under my bed for a month. And I feel pretty psyched about it, too.

So, really, making a DVD of my mother is moot because, clearly, she is going to be around to tell her life story in person to my great-children while I will have died years earlier, stuck under my bed, having followed the scent of rotting fruit in pursuit of that fucking elusive apple core.

But, a trend is a trend, and NPR is really pushing this storytelling thing, so Karen and I put Mom in front of the camera and – after forty minutes, five phone calls to our children for tech support, two batteries and a nap – we began to document.

As soon as Mom began talking, my mind wandered. I have the attention span of a baby gnat if a sentence does not begin with, “Ann Brown, this is going to elevate your position in life…” or “Here. I have fresh bagels.”
I remembered when I interviewed my grandma for some sociology class I took in college. My niece was about 3 years old then and she sat with me while Grandma talked into the cassette player. Well, first, Grandma talked into the phone answering machine and then directly to the kitchen table but that just isn’t as funny now as it was then in light of the fact that my kids recently witnessed me trying to remotely open the door of my car with an i-pod. But what I remember most about that interview was that when Grandma, talking about the Cossacks and the pogroms in Russia, said, “it vas a terrible, terrible period in history…a terrible period” and my niece exclaimed, “Oh! My mom gots her period right now!”

It makes me wonder if my sons know enough about my life. I mean, they’ve heard most of my stories, and what are our lives if not the sum total of our stories? But is knowing that I walked next to Stephen Stills at the 1968 San Francisco peace march or that I paid a friend to take my one science requirement in college or that I once had to sing Jewish folk songs in a maximum security prison in Tracy, California, really enough to give my kids the essence of who their mother was? Shouldn’t I sit down with them in honest, intimate dialog and share my life experiences with them, perhaps forging the way to a deeper understanding of who they are and surely strengthening our family bonds for generations to come? Isn’t that a parent’s responsibility? Isn’t that the greatest gift a parent can give a child? Isn’t that what the holidays are really about?

Or, I could just forward them my year of Facebook statuses. With a $25.00 i-tunes gift card. You know, to open the car door.

Ann Brown

By: Ann Brown

If Robin ever leaves me, I am going to have to rely on you to get me a date because I’ve been kicked off the online dating sites. And, frankly, it isn’t going to be easy to pimp me out. I’ve been letting myself go for the past, oh, fifty-five years or so. Recently, I thought I’d better get to work on my personality since, clearly, the wiles are running thin but, God, working on my personality is so much….well, work. Plus, my flaws define me. Who am I, if not this basket case wrapped in a couple of spare tires inside a smart-ass remark?

I’ve buried the lead, however, haven’t I? What am I, happily married for almost thirty years, doing trolling online dating sites?

I went online to pimp out my 85 year old mom. I went to JDates, the Jewish online dating site. And got my ass flagged. It’s such horseshit, really. I merely responded to the gentleman who listed his age as “in my mid- 70’s”, and under the category of the women he is interested in meeting, he wrote, “beautiful, active women between 50 and 64″.

REALLY?

I checked out your photo, sir. First of all, you are not in your 70’s unless there is such an age as seventy-nineteen or maybe you spent the past twenty years lying in a vat of cocoa butter on the surface of the sun. And, dude, you are wearing Velcro sneakers so I guess your activity level does not include tying shoelaces. Is that why you want an active woman? Be honest, asshole. Say, “I want a woman who can bend down and reach my feet.” That’s what I’d put in my ad: I am looking for an intelligent, attractive, financially stable man to do a monthly examination of the weird mole between my second and third toe because I cannot hold the position long enough to do it myself without pulling a groin muscle and falling over.

I really hate liars.

So I felt it was my duty to contact this guy directly. Just to share my feelings with him and hopefully, get him back on track, see the light, date women his own age, you know,  as a sort of public service. I am all about public service.

Well, I might have used some offensive language in my email. And I might have insulted the guy. I may have Google’d him, made a few phone calls to his home and, oh, I don’t know, egg’ed his Buick Electra and threatened his life; it’s not important. The important thing is that suddenly I am persona non grata to the Jewish online dating world. Excommunicated.

This makes me nervous because someday Robin might just decide I am too much work and split. I see him looking at me sometimes, in that inscrutable way he has. And then he lets out an almost imperceptible moan and rubs his temples in circles for a few seconds. The other day I swear I heard him whisper, “God, just leave already” when I had told him – for the third time – that I was going to Safeway to get the good Braeburn apples I like.  Plus, his blood pressure is already kinda high and he’s no spring chicken. Things can happen. I’m just saying.

So one of you is going to have to find me a new man if I find myself alone in the next, oh, forty years.

For your files: I am 55, I enjoy taking walks in the park with my dog, ironing, making excuses to get out of shit I don’t want to do, a glass of water with lemon after meals, Caller ID, revisionist personal history and fine wine.

And I am interested in meeting men between the ages of 19-28.

Dr. Strangemom

By: Ann Brown

This is a true story, and as soon as I find my digital camera I will prove it.

Some of you already know that I spent a few hours at a local shopping center with a big sticker on my butt, which I had taken off my new Oreck vacuum cleaner, that read: Pick Me Up – I’m Light! I knew the sticker was there; I had put it on my butt, in fact, when I opened the box because I thought it was so hilarious. What I didn’t do, unfortunately, was remember that it was still there when I left the house.

“Pick Me Up – I’m Light!” my butt called to shoppers. And, surprisingly, no one did. No one even tried. Now, I don’t know about you but if I saw someone with that kind of invitation/challenge on their person, I would totally give it a whirl. Maybe I could win a prize or something, who knows? But no one approached me. I mean, it’s not like my butt said, “Smell Me – I’m Funky!” or anything. No one even signaled to me that I might want to look backwards in a mirror (with the International Sign Language for, “hey, Clueless, check out your butt”). I don’t get it.

But then, there’s a lot of shit I don’t get. I once came home from an entire day in the recording studio and looked in the mirror to see a big ass streak of ketchup on my face. And no one had said a word about it. What the hell did they think, I put it there on purpose? So I can be prepared should there be a random gust of french fries?

Can’t we make a pact that if we see something potentially mortifying – toilet paper out of the top of our tights, pesto on our front tooth, booger on the back of our head, panicked fruit fly stuck to our super-glossed lips, maxi-pad on the outside of our jeans, baby in the shopping cart & baguette in the Snugly, anything that will cause us apoplexy when we get home and see it – we will tell each other? Can we just do that?  Anyone who doesn’t want to know, step forward. Anyone? Oh, you, okay. You, with the green plastic grass from your sushi container in your cleavage and sticky rice on your shirt. Okay. Never mind.

But I am signing up. Tell me what I need to know.

And while you are at it, pick me up. I’m light!

Ann Brown

By: Ann Brown

I need a couple of volunteers. I have a few theories I want to test.

I have a tendency towards the letters “f” and “s” and “asshole” in conversation and I did not clean up my language when I had kids. Oh, I tried but, honestly, when you walk by your four year-old’s bedroom and see him with the dog’s tail in one hand and a greased up thermometer in the other, the only suitable response is, “what the FUCK is going on in here????”  And when your four year old says to you, “the dog has a little fever but she still has to go to school today”, which means that – for one thing – you are never, ever, ever going to use that thermometer again, any response other than, “are you fucking SHITTING me?” is not going to cut it. And when he tells you that he’s been taking the dog’s temperature every day for the past week and you know for a fact that you put that thermometer in your mouth, IN YOUR MOUTH, only yesterday because you wanted to find out just how hot, exactly, a menopausal hot flash was, well, there aren’t enough “fuck”s and “goddamn”s and “holy shit”s in the dictionary to express your concern.

So my kids were raised in an “R” rated home, language-wise. Well, also nudity-wise, I guess, since we are not a bathrobe kind of family but that worked itself out once my sons were old enough to realize that they’d rather poke their eyeballs out with blunt ice picks than catch a glimpse of me darting nekked from the bathroom to the bedroom.

I averaged about two dozen bad words a day when my kids were little. They were mortified by the descriptive language I used. One year, when my older son was in college he brought a girlfriend to Thanksgiving dinner and after hearing me tell a story that was basically a Mad Libs of bad words with the occasional verb and noun thrown in, he said to his girlfriend, “so, judging by their language, guess which parent is the construction worker and which one is the preschool teacher?”

My children preferred the King’s English to potty talk. That cannot be coincidence.

So here’s my theory:

If one raises children in a home full of naughty words, the children will grow up to avoid that kind of language. I believe the reverse corollary is true, as well, because I have this one anecdote to support me.

The harshest thing my friend Alicia says in front of her kids is, “Holy Crackers!” and her three-year-old came up with “oh, for fuck’s sake” when faced with a particularly challenging puzzle at preschool last year. I rest my case.

My theory worked with my own two kids but I need more data. So if any of you have children under the age of, say, two, I could use a favor. Please use at least two dozen bad words a day with them. Begin today and get back to me in twenty years.

I have a really good feeling about this.