Sleigh-Over

Guys, here's my version of "Sleigh Ride," just in time for Christmas Eve. I recorded it in the guest bedroom at Dan's mom's house, singing into a cheap plug-in microphone, so the jing-jing-jingling and ring-ting-tingling gets seriously percussive and the Farmer Grey section sounds like I'm shouting a birthday invite into a wind tunnel. I also botched some lyrics and left out the "these wonderful things we'll remember" part. Having said all of that, I'm proud of my horse at the end. If you've had a glass (or three) of wassail, you might convince yourself that this is Karen Carpenter with asthma.

Happy holidays from the Miami airport!

Gym the Tree

Blizzard 09

Dan and I are stuck in Millersville, PA, riding out Blizzard '09 or Megastorm or whatever else the news outlets are calling it. Personally, I'm calling it Polargebiet. Which means "polar zone" in German.

We left Iowa Thursday night after Dan finishing teaching and drove to Englewood, Ohio, where we introduced Karaoke to Best Western. He loved Best Western. He kicked up his litter on the carpet and pawed it around like he was making Fresh Step castles.

Then Friday morning we roadtripped to Pittsburgh (another 5 hours) to spend quality time with our friend Anjali. She's graciously cat sitting for us. In Pittsburgh, we ate Chinese food at a restaurant that considers "diced beef and "fat intestine fish" vegetarian:


We almost went to Pittsburgh stripper karaoke (Bareaoke) but in the end, opted for a showcase of silent short films where two live bands took turns improvising a soundtrack. Also, "testicles hung from the ceiling" (Dan's words).


Sometimes I don't "get" art. After we'd already clocked 10 hours of Interstate driving, we were treated to a short film about... looking out a car window.





Dan and I made our own short this morning en route through Polargebiet! to Millersville (another 6 hours) to eat lunch with his grandparents, who are pushing ninety.





At lunch, we chowed down on homemade fruit salad, spinach soup, open-faced roast beef sandwiches, cocktail shrimp, and walnuts (in that order). I'm pretty obsessed with his grandparents. They're fun and feisty and full of WWII stories. Dan's grandmother is bad ass. She took a fall a few months ago and was like "Well, I just pulled myself out from under the car and crawled across the gutter and went inside and washed my coat. I was lucky. The stains came out." Here she talks about wiring the control panel of fighter planes:




Now we're snowed in at the Heritage Hotel. Weather permitting, we drive to VA Beach tomorrow. Hope everyone is safe and warm in their Snuggies!

And the (Silent) Night Goes By So Very Slow

Dan's older brother just reminded me that this happened:



I don't typically wear hard hats to karaoke bars, but there was a costume wall. It was a Heart hat.

I'm glad he unearthed this video because a)singing is a really big part of my life that I haven't written about and b) I've been giving considerable thought to recording a Christmas album. Dan would play the spoons and maybe rap the dreidel song (yes, a Christmas album). I'd like to lay down a vocal track over a looped soundbite of clydesdales whinnying. Basically, instead of gifting my friends and family half-finished scarves (I call them "knit ascots") I could tool around on Garage Band and come up with enough songs for a holiday EP. I think I can at least do better than Amy Grant. Hey! That's not a bad working title: Better Than Amy Grant. I also like Gay Yuletide.

Tomorrow we leave Iowa for three weeks to spend time with our families in VA Beach, Raleigh, and St. Thomas. We're taking Karaoke with us in a posh pet carrier simply called "The Sherpa." I'm not sure what to pack, and I'm terrified of forgetting something important, like my passport or yoga pants. Nicole Kidman's powder mishap at the Nine premiere destroyed any faith I had in personal preparedness:



This haunts me, and not just because she looks like she face-planted in the chalk bowl at a gymnastics meet. I feel like this photo captures the expression of a woman who has only just now realized the herky-jerky of her make-up, and we are right there with her. Adding to her humiliation is that Platonic ideal of ringlet. I don't know. I've studied this a lot today. The "nine" looming over her head seems like a different word altogether, a portent, if you unfocus your eyes and let the letters blur. It almost reads "talc."

In merrier news, her husband Keith Urban plays the ganjo. I need a ganjo on my Christmas album.

I'll try to write and post pictures of our trip. I'm asking you guys to vote on which song you'd like me to record as an MP3 to make available for download on the blog. I've pre-picked six for you to choose from. You reserve the option of writing in additional seasonal selections as a post comment, but keep in mind I'm going with majority vote and bottom line, I won't sing the theme from Polar Express or "Happy Birthday Jesus." I refuse to fake a child's lisp.



Vote at the top of the right sidebar now!

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Tonight, Dan and I brought Karaoke over to our friend Thea's house for a dinner party. She has two cats, Killer and Karate. The meeting of the K's didn't go so well. Karaoke acted like it was a murder mystery party where he was getting murdered.

Karate's breath smells like a dead skunk wrapped in a used diaper (sinus issues) which somewhat explains why our little man was keeping his distance.





In the Three's Company remake with cats, I think Karaoke would play Janet.

Making the Call

According to a recent year-long Harvard Medical School study of 141 teens (ages 13-17) from well-to-do families, "40 percent of the boys and 46 percent of the girls had had sexual intercourse before their parents had ever given them advice on how to ask someone out on a date." This is a scary statistic. Keep in mind that the parents in this study who failed to communicate with their children were the same parents who had willingly volunteered to participate in a study about communicating with their children.

I read about these findings (published Monday in Pediatrics) on Newsweek's Nurture Shock Block. Earlier, I'd watched a CNN special report on the difficulty American parents have in initiating conversation about sex with their children. I don't have children -- just a neutered cat who humps his stuffed bunny -- but I do think about my own hypothetical offspring, how I will one day show little Bryon or Millay how to roll a condom over a banana.

No wonder adolescents are confused. Edward in New Moon exhibits supernatural self-control but Tiger Woods can't keep his putter in his pants. We promote abstinence while obsessively fingering the sordid. Sorry, bad choice of words. But if your fourteen year old insists on bumping uglies, shouldn't you first discuss protection before forbidding the behavior? The Centers for Disease Control report that a third of U.S. ninth graders claim to have already had sex. At what age do you have the talk? Not just the one about the birds and the bees, but the birds and the bees and the STDs.

I was a teen anomaly. I didn't even have my first kiss until the spring of my freshman year. Of college. It took place in the dingy basement of a dance club in Durham. Since this was 1996, I was "clubbing" in denim overalls, a flannel shirt, and Caterpillar boots. My hair was pulled back with an actual rubber band. I was sober. He was six years my senior, a sportswriter from Fayetteville who had one of those interchangeable first and last names (like Todd Scott). He told me I was really pretty (right...) and, in a gentlemanly way -- is that even possible with La Bouche playing? -- expressed his desire to make-out. I had that feeling of simultaneously being inside and outside of history. One of my pledge sisters in my music fraternity gave me a thumbs up from the bar. I didn't love the kiss but I didn't hate it. I know I didn't love it because while it was happening I was wondering what kind of sports writing he did and if maybe I should be a journalism major.

I never told Todd Scott that he was my first kiss. I did thank him after.

I like to think that I will be cool and collected (though perhaps go into too much detail) when my own children come to me with questions. I watch enough Oprah to understand that the jump from Rainbow Brite to Rainbow Party can happen all too fast, and I want to be thoroughly, realistically prepared. I take pride in my sexuality and I would hope to cultivate a similar sense of responsibility, safety, and self in others. In fifth grade, I was at a slumber party where someone suggested we watch a Skinemax movie. One of the girls said "Hold on a minute, I need to call my mom first." We all gathered round and held our collective breath while she phoned her mother at 11pm to ask permission to watch soft core porn. We couldn't believe what was happening. None of us would have hazarded that call. None of us had that kind of relationship with our parents. In the end, her mom said yes, but not before posing questions I've returned to many times in my own life: "Is this something you want to do?" and "Do you think you'll regret it?"

Grand

Jeffery just wrote a great post on Cats, which got us both thinking about our favorite musical moments. At the top of my list is the late Michael Jeter's and Brett Barrett's 1990 Tony Awards performance of "We'll Take a Glass Together" from Grand Hotel. Brett Barrett had just taken over the role of the baron from the legendary David Carroll, who had AIDs, and was too sick to perform at the Tonys. Carroll later died of a pulmonary embolism while in the studio recording the original cast album. The whole performance is fraught with emotion, and features some of the best choreography (Tommy Tune) I've ever seen. Michael Jeter won the Tony that year.

Check out a very young Jane Jane Krakowski at 0:32.

I used to listen to this song on repeat while getting ready to go out in Manhattan. It's hard to dance the Charleston and apply mascara at the same time.



Here's a rare clip of David Carroll singing "Anthem" from Chess, another one of my musicals in heavy rotation.

High Fashion

There's a blizzard. I've been wearing the same pair of sweatpants for 48 hours. I'm like, totally shutting it down here in my sweatlace (which is a a necklace made from drawstrings).

Picture Book, Of People with Each Other

My friend Mireia, whose beach wedding Dan and I attended in Costa Brava, Spain, back in May 2007, just emailed me this photo snapped by the hired photographer. It's nice when strangers capture your candid happiness. It's ever nicer when you discover that candid happiness a year and a half later.


(photo by Michel M.B.-Eva Rubio Fotografs)

Six Years

I wrote this in my New York City journal, six years ago last week. I was twenty-six, drinking Jameson and reading a thick biography on Elizabeth Bishop in my local east-side Irish bar at happy hour. Yeah, cliche. My writing anxieties are pretty much the same.

12/3/03

I am seized by horrible paroxysms of fear when I attempt to write -- like climbing the ladder up, up, up to the high dive. There are pictures of me age 3 or 4 in Chandler Pool, frozen on the edge of an immense water, learning it. I assume everything can be traced back to childhood. It's amazing that you can be present in time and not remember it, to have to be shown what you experienced firsthand. My awareness of time passing is a claustrophobic tightening in my chest. Elizabeth Bishop felt it too. I have an abundance of fears. I'm in O'Neils, "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies" playing. Sometimes I despise writing because it isn't living. It's pitching a tent inside time. I want to understand everything: Kant's philosophy, the exact location of Borneo, Latin for circle. "The suspicion that poetry, her poetry in particular, was somehow beside the point stayed with Elizabeth for a long time." What is my ultimate destination as a poet? There's the problem -- needing to arrive. Am I in love with D? There are moments when I forget his lips, the sharp chin -- when he is simply a globe of soul beside me, or caught on me, like a sweater snagged on a closing screen door. Writing is impossible. We never get at what we mean to get at. I'm thinking of that afternoon my mom and I spent in the Titanic exhibit at the NC Museum of Natural History. Those boarding passes we received with the names of actual passengers -- I was Emily Alice Brown, 31, from Stroud, England, with a husband and son -- and all that touring, the studying of artifacts, wondering all the while whether or not we had survived. It was so much like what I do now: see the present moment already embalmed. My mother and I placed our hands on the block of ice in the iceberg room, school children leaned in cheeks and eyes, like greedy primitive fish, I was afraid, for both of us, but in the end, the museum attendant told us we lived.

Christmas Past

I went to middle school with Grammy nominated country singer Tift Merritt. She was two years older than me. We both auditioned for the big winter musical, "A Christmas Carol," and at callbacks (which took place around a wooden piano next to cubby holes) we were up for the same choice part: the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Tift had the pixieness of Peter Pan coupled with the allure of that actress in Crocodile Dundee 2. Her voice sounded like fame, even then. I was a sixth grader. I cross-stitched. I wore head gear to sleep that left faint indentations in my cheeks. In my spare time, I prank called the 1-800-Elvis hotline, or wrote and recorded monologues in the voice of the Mennonite woman who pushed the school milk cart. I sold dog food door-to-door in my neighborhood -- dog food I'd won at an NC Fairgrounds expo and simply repackaged with Print Shop labels made on my father's PC -- and had a crush on Johnny Tremain from the 1943 book Johnny Tremain. He had a disfigured hand and joined the Whig party.

Basically, I suffered from crippling self-consciousness that manifested itself as an eye twitch. But I knew I could sing. Ms Moore, the language arts teacher, had told me so. Of course, she had also told Tift the same thing. I was desperate to get that part. At the audition, after perfectly coiffed Tift twanged out "The Lights of Long Ago," and I delivered my own successful-in-its-own-way rendition, I felt I had an actual shot. The Ghost of Christmas Past, after all, should be a little shy and maybe sound like Anne Murray and have a nervous tick.

I bet you know where this story is going. Well, you're wrong. Tift was cast, not me. I wasn't even a soot-faced lamp-lighting extra. At assembly I crowded into the gymnasium with the other students to endure a hard bleacher, hard like hate. I spent most of that performance thinking about how Tift's name sounded like the new vocabulary word I'd just learned, tiff, "a slight and petty quarrel." Yes: I was having a slight and petty quarrel (with myself) about her vocal merits. Tift Merrit. I completely ignored Michael C Hall as a be-stockinged Ebeneezer Scrooge. Or maybe he wasn't even in this show. I swear he went to my school.

Tift Merritt is super talented and friendly. This post isn't about a life-long grudge. I don't smash snow globes whenever "A Good Hearted Man" comes on. It's important for me to tell the Story of Tift Merritt because she became the Ghost of Becca's Past. Flash forward to 2006. Woody and I are sharing the ground floor of a house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Ainslie Street, two blocks from the L train. I spend most of my time writing shitty persona poems and booking other people's travel. One afternoon, I'm sitting on our front stoop drinking a cup of coffee from one of those cliche and kitschy NY coffee cups that say "We are happy to serve you" and reading Sophie's Choice when I happen to glance up and see a blond girl in vintage cowboy boots, leaning on our entrance gate, talking on her cell phone. I hear her say "Yeah, I'm lost." Instinctively, I know it's Tift Merritt. I just know. So I yell "Tift Merritt!" It's the wrong yell -- the kind reserved for people you spend a lot of time with, people who are equally as excited to see you. We're both surprised. "Do I know you?" she asks, sweetly.

Now folks, here's where I should have just stopped, dropped, and rolled. I mean, at this point, she'd been Grammy nominated. I should have played it cool. Tift and I were in an Honors fiction workshop together at UNC-Chapel Hill (she wrote beautiful short stories, too). That would have been an appropriate, viable, more recent reference. But what occurred to me in that moment -- me in tattered sweatpants, broke, reading a book about the Holocaust and hung-over after drinking too much Dessert Guinness (a kinda cocktail Woody and I invented at The Four Faced Liar circa 2005)-- was how much her presence felt like a divine visitation, an ethereal manifestation of middle school. I was totes seeing the lights of long ago. Also, maybe Tift Merritt was stalking me?

"You were the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Huh."

"We went to the same middle school. Ravenscroft. You were --"

I have no idea what happened next. There was warmth, an exchange of email addresses. I remember we talked about Doris Betts. I remember giving her directions. Then that was it. She disappeared around the corner. From a distance, she looked like any other cute hipster.

Today, I was thinking about this chance occurrence for several reasons. One, it's almost Christmas, according to those Gap cheerleading commercials. Two, I wonder if my life would be different if I had been the Ghost of Christmas Past. Three, as you all know from my last post, my mind is on the vagaries of fate.

I still can't understand what chooses to visit us, and why.

Litany

One of my best friends was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She's 32 and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl in October.

She doesn't eat meat. She doesn't drink, doesn't smoke. She doesn't own a cell phone. She doesn't scrub her bathtub without wearing gloves or spray Shout stain-removal into her clothes without removing them first. She's never taken Accutane or Zoloft. She's never lived in Brooklyn four blocks from a shiny generator that hums at night. She doesn't make photocopies with the machine cover up. She hasn't poked through an Olie sticker and held her sheeny finger up for a fourth grade boy to admire. She doesn't put plastic in the microwave (she doesn't own a microwave). She doesn't spray chemical drying agent on her nails. She hasn't chewed through a Glowstick at Lilith Fair. She's never digested a Milk Bone. She's never accepted fried Yojoa impaled on a pole and held up to a bus window in Tegucigalpa. She's never woken up drunk next to a Big Apple Circus clown. Never run her tongue along the spot where a cheap mall ring tarnished her skin.

See, I can't figure out why she's the one with the cancer.

I've been having nightmares. The most recent: Robert Young, the father on Father Knows Best, as my sous-chef. He wore golf gloves and gesticulated with a whisk. A goth pregnant Padma Lakshmi was there. She had wings. We were making an angel food cake. How is this a nightmare? Why couldn't I stop crying?

I have inappropriate thoughts. That "carcinogen" sounds like a sweet roll sold at Cinnabon. That a twin sympathy cancer is growing in me too, a celery root, a gnarled heart, a way for us to be physically closer when she is over 4000 miles away and on an island. This girl I have known since I was fourteen.

Today: I started a Tumblr blog to photograph my cat. I upped the wattage in our bedroom floor lamp. I bought new dishwashing liquid, the brand that purports to save seals from oil spills. I read part of a depressing novel by Joyce Carol Oates who additionally depresses me by being prolific. I fantasized about opening a 24 hour diner that specializes in punny literary dishes: Joyce Carol Oatmeal, Tony Toast, David Eggers and Hash. I went to a friend's art instillation. I held Dan's hand in the snow. I thought about how much I love Dan. I ate goat cheese pinwheels.

In Tuesday night's nightmare, Robert Pattinson is bleeding from the neck. He begs me to drink from his two delicate puncture wounds, leans in close and shakes my shoulders in a rough but not callous way. I recognize this as sexual tension. He whispers into my mouth: "I am the key to Lou Gehrig's Disease." I wake up on the living room couch, sweating. I've knocked the cat brush off the sill.

I'm angry that my friend has cancer. I'm angry that I dreamed about Twilight and not Buffy, which is really to say I'm angry that my friend has cancer.

I try to decide if Tiger Woods was drunk or beaten or just unlucky. I reread Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I'm Not a Christian" when I'm expected to be praying. After reading it, I try again to pray. I check the bikram yoga schedule online. I write down the day's times even though I know I won't go. I try to call my friend even though I know she's having a hysterectomy. There's no recorded voice so I hang up. I decide to cook something with celery root. I go out and buy celery root. While holding the celery root, I think to myself "This is how cancer looks. I should write about her cancer." I'm disgusted with myself. When I get home, I open two pages on my browser. One is AllRecipes and one is WebMD. I search for "celery root soup" in AllRecipes and "ovarian cancer symptoms" in WebMD. I immediately close WebMD.

I put on Sondheim's Into the Woods. Last Christmas, she didn't have a baby or a cancer. I think about chemo. I think about "prayer" rhyming with "hair." I don't write poems anymore. I think about the one-letter difference between "prayer" and "player." I dated a player once -- he never answered his phone when I called but would call back later, hours later, days later. "I missed your call," he'd say. I'd be in my room. I'd be listening to Dark Side of the Moon on LP, my body jumpy with the anticipation of his calling, and I'd be grateful when he did, finally, that jocular baritone, but it wasn't the same. He never picked up when I called. I think about God.

So now it's Thursday night. Tomorrow we're hosting diner for a 3 year old and her mom. We can't watch Fox and the Hound because it's too scary. I agree. I don't want to dream of Mickey Rooney's disembodied voice, of bear traps. I feel my belly under my robe. I re-read my own disembodied voice.

New Catographer

My fun new side project. A little litter in lieu of literature. Link up!

All the Wolves, All the Lies, the False Hopes, the Goodbyes, the Reverses

I just finished designing my freshman course for spring term. In an effort to post on my blog everyday, here's the catalog proposal. Can't wait to teach this!

Grey Matters: Thinking Beyond Black and White
In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods, Cinderella sings, “Witches can be right. Giants can be good. You decide what’s right. You decide what’s good.” In this course, we’ll explore how moral choices depend on the subjectivity of the choosers. By examining texts engaged with familial, racial, and national identity, we’ll map the ambiguous grey space that frequently exists between extremist positions. Just a few of the difficult questions we’ll consider: What happens when an American soldier in Vietnam unexpectedly sympathizes with the enemy? When a child goes “bad,” how responsible are the parents? Does an illiterate war criminal deserve the chance to learn to read? We’ll deconstruct moral certainty through contemporary multi-genre study, looking closely at Stephen Sondhiem’s musical Into the Woods, Yusef Komunyakka’s book of poetry Dien Cai Dau, Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child, Stephen Daldry’s film The Reader, selected short stories by Adam Haslett and George Saunders, and a smattering of fairy tales, criticism, and philosophical tracts. How easy is it to empathize in a post 9/11 world that so often defines us in opposition to an “other”?

I'm currently obsessed with Rachel Bay (not to be confused with Rachel Ray, ew) Jones' gorgeous folk rendition of the Into the Woods song "No More." She really showcases the lyrics: