any given saturday

We had a Saturday ritual in my house. Up early. Breakfast. Packing a cooler and a thermos, the same backpack - dark blue with tan leather. Daddy comes home with the bucket of KFC, and that means it's time to go.

Buckling in for the car ride. Not long, but long enough! The closer we get, the more we can feel it. My sister and I press our faces to the windows, eager for the first familiar sights. The flags. The license plate frames. The horns honking in anticipation. The people, thronging the streets, moving like magic in the same direction. We park our car and join the crowds.

Onto the USC campus, dappled with shade. Friendly greetings to people everywhere, on blankets and at tables, grilling, sitting in folding chairs, throwing footballs, listening to the radio, talking, laughing. People of all ages, grandparents, children, young parents, students, vendors with flags and pom poms and t-shirts and plastic mini-footballs. Everyone, everything in varying shades of cardinal and gold.

My dad greets friends and colleagues from his school days. He has a special glint in his eye, and a boyish smile on his face that he cannot hide. This is his world, and ours. These are our people. We don't know all of them, but they are just like us and we feel right at home.

We spread a blanket and enjoy our lunch. My parents teach me to shout and cheer with the best of them. And I take a gleeful pleasure in mixing up the words on purpose. "We're going to ring your lunch! We're going to eat your bell!" I shout in my tinny voice, and then dissolve into giggles. When the time comes, we move toward the Coliseum. I clutch my ticket in my hand, follow my parents into the dark tunnel and out the other side, into the glaring sunlight of a September afternoon. Climb the steep stone steps to our seats, our always-seats.

The old Coliseum, before they took out the track from the Olympics. How many shirtless men can you count in this photo? I see six, but I've got the original photo. Take your time.

That distinctive smell, a combination of peanut shells, cigar smoke, cold concrete, and drying beer. Maybe it sounds gross to you, but to me it's heaven. The feel of cool, too-big binoculars pressed up against little eyes. The slickness of the program. The hard, warm plastic of the seats. The faintly chocolatey ice cream in a plastic cup, eaten with a flat, dry wooden spoon. The soft drone coming from my dad's bright yellow radio headphones. And the band.

I love this marching band in a wrenching, unspeakable way. It never bothers me that they borrow from and freely intermingle ancient Greece and the Spanish conquistadors in the New World. Something in my childish heart thrills to the pageantry and tradition, the ringing trumpets and the way the sharp snap of drumsticks echoes and resounds. The slow, inexorable high-stepping. The white spats, the gleaming gold helmets. The glitter and twirl of the baton and the crispness of the flags as they whip from side to side. We jump to our feet, we lift our fingers in the victory sign, and we scream until we think we'll burst when the Trojan on his proud white horse begins his dash across the field. Our voices, mine, my sister's, my mom's, my dad's--his wild shouts of joy, blurred by a thick Cuban accent--mingle with the voices of many thousands, swelling into a roar. It is one of those moments. It gives me The Feeling.

It doesn't matter where I am. I can't hear these songs without my heart giving a sudden bound and a little flash of joy. Everything in me says Yes. But it's more than that. My dad passed away more than ten years ago, but when I hear these songs he is as vivid to me as if we are face to face. I remember the glint in his eye and the boyish smile, the soft drone coming from his bright yellow radio headphones, his wild shouts of joy, blurred by a thick Cuban accent. Every time the band starts to play, just for a moment, he lives.

Not bad, for a university marching band.

* * *

This post is part of Flashback Friday, hosted by my favorite Maine-ite, Jo at Mylestones. I'd love for you to play along because it's pretty fun! You can link up here, if you'd like.

Is it Friday again? Now THAT is a good surprise...

Remember how I said last week that the acting bug bit me? I wasn't kidding.

It was Christmas time, 1989. I was almost eight. Really, so close I could taste it. But who had time to think about birthdays? I was in two Christmas plays that year: one, that 1980s kids' Christmas classic, The Great, Late Potentate, at my church; the other, a stage version of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, produced by a local children's theatre group. Of the two, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever was by far my favorite. I had a leading role and I got to be incredibly obnoxious and filthy dirty all the time as one of the Herdman kids. Who wouldn't love that? Oh, and I guess it was my one up close and personal brush with anyone truly famous (although she wasn't at the time). I'm not going to tell you her real name because I don't want 100,000 Wicked fans bombarding my blog, but her first name rhymes with Sweden and her last name rhymes with Schmespinosa. She played the snotty church girl in the play. She was older than us by a few years and very pretty, and we were all a little bit in awe of her. Now of course she is a Broadway superstar and she would not know me from a bedbug, but I can still say we did a play together, all those years ago. :)

But that is not what I was talking about, exactly. I know you are all shocked because I never get distracted mid-thought. Anyway...that Christmas, my sister and I spent most of our free time shuttling back and forth from one rehearsal or show to the other, doing a quick-change in the car from your typical Sunday School shepherd-type outfits to scruffy, dirty orphan outfits. (Now that I think about it, we appropriated "It's a Hard Knock Life" from Annie for that play, and I can still remember the choreography. I'm adding it to the All-Sharone Musical Revue I'm planning. Of which, more to come.) So it felt like just another Saturday afternoon to me when my mom picked us up early from the church rehearsal so we could be on time for our matinee performance of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. But instead of going to the hall, my mom pulled into the parking lot of the local movie theater.

"The matinee's been canceled," she informed us. She tried to twist her mouth into a frown, but an awkward grin burst through anyway. "We're going to have to go see The Little Mermaid instead."

Oh, you do not know what kind of somersaults my heart did at that moment. We didn't go to movies much. I can remember three or four movies, total, from my young childhood. But the behind-the-scenes specials for The Little Mermaid had been all over the Disney Channel for months, and I greedily drank them in at every opportunity. That fall, I had played the Sea Witch in a Hans Christian Andersen show at my school, and the director convinced my mom that we had to buy the pre-released soundtrack so I could thrash dramatically around the stage in my costume--a frothy concoction of turquoise tulle, blue-silver spangles, and one mean headdress--singing "Poor Unfortunate Souls." I'm certain I drove my family crazy with that cassette, which I played at every possible moment. But with all this, I never dreamed I would get to see the movie. In the theater. On a Saturday. When I was supposed to be somewhere else.

I sat, entranced, in the darkened theater. I tried not to blink. I didn't want to miss even one second. There was magic in the music, in the rich colors that burst off the screen, in the dreamy, wide-eyed princess and the hulking menace of the villain, in the happily ever after. When it ended, I heaved a contented sigh and walked out into the sunlight. I had never known such perfect happiness.

Well, not until I was introduced to Muenster cheese. But that's another story.

* * *

This post is part of Flashback Friday, hosted by my favorite Maine-ite, Jo at Mylestones. I'd love for you to play along because it's pretty fun! You can link up here, if you'd like.

Also, since we're doing blog business down here, I know that I have basically been only posting for Flashback Friday lately. I'll address that later. For now, please just enjoy imagining my almost-eight-year-old self in a Sea Witch costume. It was fab.

Ok, that is all.

in which I tell you about all the things I can't remember, and a few of the things I can

Busy busy bee today. Crazy work projects and errands and phone calls and business. My head has been spinning so fast I am practically in orbit, so I apologize if this is discombobulated. But here I am, Flashback Friday, determined to finish this before too long, if it kills me. Or kisses me, which is what I typed first. At this point, either seems equally likely.

I'm not sure I can remember the first thing I really got paid to do...maybe it was pick dandelions out of our yard at 5 cents apiece. (Oh, friends, I just did a weird thing with my thumb, and it made a snappy noise accompanied by a sharp pain, and now it is all tingly when I bend it. Are there any doctors out there who can diagnose my condition based on that very clear description??) I debated whether I should tell you about the summer where I did every chore imaginable while saving up money to buy my American Girl doll, Samantha, but that story is about as interesting as this sentence, so I figured I'd skip it.

Instead I thought I would share my recollections of one of my first professional plays. I was seven, and the play was called...well now, I don't know. It was a contemporary musical re-telling of the parable of the prodigal son, set in Idaho. Yes, you read that correctly. I'm sure you're familiar with the basic plot. Son of potato king asks for his inheritance early; he goes straight to Boise in a fast car and blows it all on women and wine; he ends up vomiting in an alley; he decides to go home and beg for a job; the father welcomes him home with open arms; the other nice, obedient son gets jealous; they work it out; everyone is happy at the end. There was a little hometown love interest sprinkled in, and the cast photo on the poster had a fancy sports car in it.

I don't remember much about the director, except that he was tall and round. I don't remember much about what I did in the play, except that in the scene where the prodigal son blows town, two other kids and I had to cross to center, do a sweet little step-touch dance move, and sing, "Billy, has your life been that rough?" I can still hear it in my head, and if you were here, I'd sing it to you too so you could have the full experience. I'd even dance! I know, it's so tempting, right? Makes you want to just hop right on a plane.

Being in that play was one big thrill for me. I can still remember the smell of the makeup sponges and the tickle of the eyeliner, and what it was like to stand onstage next to my pretend family while my pretend mother belted out a song with so much power that her jaw shook. I can still remember having a gigantic crush on our leading man, Dwight Equitz, who was so dreamy in his white sport coat (there was a rumor that he had been in some straight-to-video movies, which only enhanced his appeal). We watched, awestruck, as he rubbed dirt on his face and shirt to give his homelessness some authenticity. We left secret admirer notes in his shoes and wondered which of us he would marry (the answer, it turns out, was none of us, which is good because he had at least fifteen years on us). And I can still remember how magical it felt to stand in the wings, waiting for my turn to move into that strange, outdoors-but-indoors world with its colored lights and heightened, multidimensional shadows, where we were all ourselves but not ourselves, and we had to play jacks and jump rope, but not really.

Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I actually got paid for that play, but it was a huge moment in my life. The acting bug bit me, hard, and I spent a lot of my happiest times over the next fifteen-ish years onstage, backstage, or in a rehearsal. I even started college as a musical theatre major, if you can believe it. Which I guess you can, if you have ever met me and know how easily I make a fool out of myself in public.

Sometimes I really miss that world, but I also love the life I have now and wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm sure that some day, another theatrical opportunity will come around and I'll give it a whirl. Who knows, maybe The Prodigal Potato Prince will do a 25-year reunion tour.

I'd better practice my step-touch dance moves, just in case.

* * *

It's another fabulous Flashback Friday! The lovely and talented Jo at Mylestones is our host, and quite a few other bloggy friends join in the fun. You can too, here!

testing, one-two

The hum and whoosh of an industrial-strength air conditioner have accompanied every exam I can remember taking. They have laid their strains in an insistent ritornello with infinitely subtle variations, little waves and vagaries of sound that can only be detected in a room dedicated to silence, such as this one. Thirty-one heads bow over laminate desks that gleam dully under the unwavering fluorescence of the overhead lights. A deep breath and, with it, the eternal aroma of the classroom: the blue book, which smells, somehow, like other blue books and like nothing else, mingled with the dry, slightly acrid scent of a photocopied essay prompt.

I am sixteen, and the woman at the front of the room is from the University of California, administering a practice placement exam as part of the college preparatory program. At the back of the room sits Mrs. Juhasz, the steely, sharp-eyed Language Arts teacher known for demanding excellence. She is always willing to help me untangle the perplexities I find in the works of Dostoevsky, Dreiser, and the other companions of my extracurricular hours, and yet she has no doubt puzzled over the general indifference with which I greet her actual assignments. In spite of my stubborn determination to work through a daunting personal reading list, in class I am often undisciplined, uninterested, too self-assured and only occasionally earnest, usually preoccupied with boys and friends and the things I will do in two short hours when the final bell rings. But today the prospect of college, of the first plunge into the waiting world, glimmers before me. My stomach will not stop writhing. My fingers are cold, my ears hot. We are told to begin.

I read swiftly, an excerpt from a Jamaica Kincaid essay about the estrangement of growing up as a black Antiguan under British rule. A story about alienation, set in an unfamiliar world and spoken in an unfamiliar voice. I imagine hot sun on my skin, picture Britons trying to coax shrubs and prim English gardens from the Antiguan earth, remember, through Kincaid's vivid words, a life I have never experienced.

My fingers crease the flimsy cover of the blue book. The pen feels deceptively light and insignificant. Without knowing what to write, I write anyway. My first words are tentative, my first sentences laborious, my first paragraph a rash of scribbles and hesitant half-words. But soon enough, thoughts are streaming onto the paper and I am following them. The snicks and scrapes and slashes of my pen and the tiny creaks of the paper as it is reshaped by the violence of my outpouring--to my ears, filled with the roar of silence, these sounds are like the leaping voice of the violin. I swim in a sea of words. I gather them in baskets and spread them on the shore to dry. I pause to admire them, triumphantly.

But my triumph is foredoomed. Halfway through the exam, I recognize the hot, shrinking feeling behind my eyes telling me that one of the terrible nosebleeds that have plagued me since childhood is imminent. In helpless disbelief, I leave my exam, leave my words, leave my belongings, and consent to be led to the nurse's office. My chance to meet with the college evaluator is gone. My own body has somehow betrayed and embarrassed me.

The following week, when the tests are returned and the scores analyzed, I sit sullenly. When Mrs. Juhasz calls me to her desk after class, I slump into the chair, unwilling to meet her eyes. Your exam couldn't be scored like the others, she tells me, because it was incomplete. I nod dumbly, sure nothing she can say will mean anything to me. But I asked the professor to evaluate it as if it were, she continues, and he gave it the highest mark. You were one of two students in the class to earn this score. You're a remarkable writer, and he asked me to tell you so. I think you are, too. She looks at me intently, with concern, as if there is more she wants to say, more she wants me to understand. I thank her, gather my belongings, and leave to meet my friends.

I could not absorb her words in that moment. And yet, when I look back from the space of more than twelve years, I can see the powerful influence they've wielded over me. I wish I could say that they shook me from my foolishness and indecision, and inspired me to work harder, but their influence was far subtler than that. At a time when I felt muddled and aimless and unsure, Mrs. Juhasz told me I was good at something, and it was a little, tiny thing I could treasure and hold onto.

It has stayed with me, all these years, and that little tiny thing has turned into a career. I remember it, every time I hear the hum and whoosh of an industrial-strength air conditioner, laying its strains in an insistent ritornello with infinitely subtle variations, little waves and vagaries of sound that can only be detected in a room dedicated to silence.

* * *

Can you tell I'm obsessed with exams lately?? Fits perfectly with today's Flashback Friday theme, School Days. The lovely and talented Jo at Mylestones is our host, and quite a few other bloggy friends join in the fun. Come play with us! :)

compendium

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

T.S. Eliot

Well, I am borrowing inspiration from my brilliant friend Jan, but I am actually stealing the format from a sports column I used to read, which I now can't even find. I know Jan will not sue me. I hope the mysterious sports writer from whom I am stealing will be as kind.

So, with all due respect to everyone, here is this week's Hot/Not/Ice Cold.

Hot: People who pass their qualifying exams! KB, Becky, Chase, Garrett, I mean you!

Not: People who are six months away from their qualifying exams and already feel nauseated.

Ice Cold: Any exams that involve someone touching your eyeball.

Hot: Sister blog posts.

Not: Sister Carrie.

Ice Cold: The spelling in this Sister Sledge video.

Hot: Advisors who tell crazy stories peppered with expletives while treating you to dinner.

Not: Advisors who are too busy to even email you back.

Ice Cold: Visors.

Hot: Reorganizing and de-cluttering living room bookshelves.

Not: Having to pack away beloved books until exams are over.

Ice Cold: Celebrity profile pictures on facebook. Doppelganger week is over, and you do not really look like Kim Kardashian anyway. If you did, you would probably be Kim Kardashian. And if you are, I mean seriously, can I borrow some shoes?

Hot: Gravity, that awesome force of nature which keeps you from flying off the earth.

Not: Gravity, that miserable sonnama@&$*#%$ which, when combined with inertia and momentum, sends your purse flying off the passenger seat of the car, so that you are guaranteed weeks of lip gloss surprises (surprise! It's not there when you need it! Surprise! It has melted all over the bottom of your shoe!)

Ice Cold: Gravitas. Have you watched a cable news program lately??

Hot: Memories of a fabulous salon blow-out.

Not: Blowdrying one's own hair in imitation of said salon, and managing it so that somehow, one side of one's head resembles Dr. Beverly Crusher's Season 3 triangle hair and the other side is all Mary Tyler Moore.

Ice Cold: Me. Seriously? Freezing right now.

Hot: Blaming punctuation issues on the influence of canonical authors (*ahem* Henry).

Not: Naming one's virtual secretary after Henry James' secretary in hopes the inspiration will be transferred.

Ice Cold: Having no more unread Henry James books to look forward to on the reading list.

Hot: My grandfather's weekend plans: skydiving.

Not: My weekend plans: readingreadingreadingreadingreading(olympics)readingreadingreadingreadingreadingchurchreadingreadingreadingreadingreadingreadingreading reading.

Ice Cold: The weekend plans of anyone in the DC area. Sorry, couldn't resist. ;)

Hot: Having a job you love.

Not: Having to get up for the job that you love after you stayed up too late watching the heroic exploits of this man:

Ice Cold: Having to go back to the job that you love, right now.

a timely re-post

Seeing as how it's the Month of Love, I thought it would be rather apropos to re-post the story of one of my healthier break-ups. I agonized over the decision back then, but a few years later I can tell you that once the initial shock wore off, I never looked back.

This post is about stepping back and seeing things for what they really are. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, am I being taken advantage of here? Sometimes you have to choose to be good to yourself. Sometimes, you have to have the courage to walk away from the website that done you wrong.

* * *

So this happens to me over and over. I see a recipe on Hungry Girl and get really excited about it. I go to the store, buy all the (totally random, not the kind you already have in your pantry) ingredients, make the recipe, et voila! I am always disappointed.

There are two reasons for this.

1. Hungry Girl WAY over-promises. Here's an example from the recipe I tried last night, the Sweet Cinnamon Fritter Fries: "This time around, they're sweet, sassy, and so good, they'll make your head explode. We're not even sure what these things are -- a snack, a breakfast, a side dish, or a dessert. All we know is that THEY'RE INSANELY DELICIOUS!!!!" So that sounds pretty good, right? Here's where the second reason comes in.

2. I am naive enough to get sucked in by the over-promises every time. What fool actually believes that butternut squash cut to look like French fries, battered in Egg Beaters and ground up fiber cereal with a little cinnamon and Splenda, and then baked, is actually going to live up to the promise of being INSANELY DELICIOUS with four exclamation points? Yes, that's me raising my hand.

Now, to be fair, Hungry Girl has some good recipes. Her 1-point peanut butter fudge is decent, and her beverages are too - the blended vanilla pseudo-Frappucino is actually pretty good. Here's what I think happens to me: I believe the promises. I go through all the work to produce the recipe - and they're usually pretty labor intensive. Measure ridiculously small amounts of 10 different seasonings. Peel the squash. Cut the squash. Grind the cereal. Batter the squash. Bake the squash. Turn the squash over and bake again. And so on...after all this work, you want the result to be rewarding, not ehhh. On the other hand, Hungry Girl has no business promising that these Sweet Cinnamon Fritter Fries are going to be "MMMMMMM!!!!!!!" as she does here. No offense, but seven Ms and seven exclamation points should be reserved for something that truly deserves them, like cheesecake or creme brulee, not gussied-up squash that would only resemble French toast sticks to an extremely imaginative person. These things are two Ms, three Ms max. No exclamation point.

So this is it, Hungry Girl. I think we should take a break. You don't keep your word often enough for me to keep trusting you. I'm choosing to break the bad cycle in our relationship because I can't trust myself to be around you.

No more recipes.

Originally posted here on January 11, 2008. I promise you, no one read it back then, so don't feel late to the party.

a special kind of double

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double.

Toni Morrison

I happen to have four amazing siblings, three sisters and one brother (as opposed to all the other options for sibling types, like dolphin or Windex). But due to the fact that some of us are more than twenty years apart in age (as well as the timeless magic of divorce, remarriage, and step-parenting), all five siblings never lived together at the same time. Most of my childhood was spent with the girls I've previously designated as Wonderful Big Sister (WBS) and Wonderful Little Sister (WLS), and since I've given some air time to WLS in the last few months, I thought I'd even it up for WBS.

She was born about eighteen months before me, and as wee children we were pretty much inseparable.

I'm going to guess we're somewhere on the Israeli Mediterranean in this one. Date, circa 1984. I don't know, moms, do I look like I'm between 2 and 3? On the left there, that's me.

We were so alike and so different at the same time. She looked much more like our fair-skinned, blue-eyed mom, while I inherited our father's Cuban coloring. We both loved to read, but I lived in a world of books. Maybe she did too, but she grew out of it, and I never have. And she was always much more active than I was. I mean look at my fat little knees, I was just made for curling up under a blanket with Little Women and a block of cheese.

July 14, 1988, at the Orange County Fair.

Do you see those dimples on my sister? Those always mean mischief. See Picture B if you're not convinced.

She was always the ringleader (well, of a ring of two, is that properly a ring?) with a fabulous, inventive, borderline-devious imagination that always meant fun. She convinced me she had witnessed a robbery in our neighborhood that we had to investigate. Another time, it was a plane hijacking and subsequent crash that she made up and I bought, wholesale. We scoured our neighborhoods for clues and had the time of our lives. Sometimes I led the way, like when we decided to rename all the streets and glamorous locales in our prosaic, suburban neighborhood, just like Anne did when she first came to Green Gables. And I was the big mover-and-shaker behind our failed Little House bakery. When WLS came along four years after me, we may or may not have ganged up on her, a little, in that innocent, harmless, only moderately traumatic way siblings always seem to do. There was definitely a time when we convinced WLS that we'd been to Narnia through our parents' closet. There was possibly a time when we, um, told her she wasn't going to heaven. Which we got in a corking amount of trouble for.

We read the same books and watched the same movies over and over again--Sleeping Beauty, Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music, Clue, White Christmas--and we planned to stage our own productions of them when we were really old, like maybe thirteen and fourteen. Maybe it was because we traveled so much as children, or because so many things felt unsettled about our childhood, but it always felt like it was the two of us against the world. I wanted to be like her, even when I thought I didn't. She was indisputably my best friend, ever.

Relationships change. Kids grow up, and siblings often take their growing pains out on one other, fairly or otherwise. Now we have an ocean and several time zones between us, and it doesn't take a powerful imagination to feel like we inhabit two distinct worlds. But when it comes down to it, no one knows me like my sister, something that I think continually surprises us as we keep growing up, together. We don't get much time together in person, but when we do it is indescribably precious, even when it's ordinary. We fall into the same rhythms and cadences as we always did, although now hers has an enviable hint of Britishness and mine has a rather less appealing hint of booky dorkishness. Every time I talk to her, I realize it anew: we will always be new and different to one another, but we will always be the same, too, and that's a nice kind of magic.

* * *

I'm sharing this post as part of Flashback Friday, hosted by the fabulous Jo at Mylestones. :) Want to play along but feel like you don't know any of the players? Well, I don't know any of these people either, not in real life. But they'll be friendly, I promise. They'll say nice things to you, and you'll say nice things to them, and before you know it, you won't know them like I don't! Which is to say, they'll become some of your favorite people ever, even though you've never been in the same room with them. So come join the fun!