The Odd Broad

The Odd Broad wonders...

...why are they still airing Billy Mays commercials?  Is nothing sacred?  Can they not find another cocaine fueled high energy spokesperson to peddle the Jupiter Jack, Awesome Auger, or Big City Sliders?

Rachael Ray comes to mind. 

 

The reason Hubby only drinks bottled water...

My sister took Lukey the Wonder Nephew down to the JFK Library to watch the motorcade pass by. 

Clenched in my nephew's meaty little fist was the small silver cup from his Christening, inside of which he'd placed three Match Box cars.  (This baby is quite an eccentric.  He rarely leaves the house without some sort of tchotchke, be it an alarm clock, a tooth brush, the cell phone he got from the girl at the Verizon store...) 

In his other hand he waved a small American flag. 

Rest in peace Teddy.

Make it work!

Tonight was my first time ever using a sewing machine.  I am really enjoying the pedal.  Almost made me want to start driving again. 

I imagined Tim Gunn's voice over my shoulder murmuring, "Carry on!" and "Where's Andre?"

Here are my straps. 

Dear Reader, I'm sewing!

The crafty broad

Sissy has somehow talked me into taking...(wait for it)...a sewing class, at the Stitch House in Dorchester.  At the end of three weeks I will have created my very own Amy Butler Frenchy bag! 

Tomorrow is class number two, when we'll begin sewing on the machines.  Last week was strictly pattern and fabric cutting, and sticking myself with pins.

I can't say I've ever used a sewing machine, and I certainly wouldn't call myself a patient person.  This will surely be an adventure!

xoxo

Back on the horse

My heart was pounding and I was petrified my hands were going to shake.  But I did it; I sang in public again for the first time in years.  It wasn't my worst performance, and it certainly wasn't my best, but I did it nonetheless. 

I love weddings.  Afterwards, as I sat next to Hubby and listened to his cousin recite her wedding vows, I gave his hand a sweaty little squeeze at the words, "In sickness, and in health..." 

I had certainly been testing the boundaries of the in sickness category as of late...mental sickness, to be exact. 

I experienced a brief but potent meltdown on Friday evening, you see, after I ran through the song with the church's ancient resident organ player.  She didn't know the song, she told me, but she would learn it before the wedding tomorrow.  I was also singing it at a much faster tempo than she seemed comfortable with, but she told me she would follow along.  I'd be singing from up on the alter, out in front, holding a wireless microphone.  (We'd forgotten to bring a microphone stand, hence my worry over shaky hands.)  It occurred to me that if I was fourteen years old I wouldn't have batted an eyelid at any of this information.  When had I turned into such a wimp?

Back in the car, I called my mother for comfort but found she had none available.  I had made my own bed and it was time for me to lie in it.  This is when I hung up the phone and cried heavy, sloppy tears, my chest heaving in rapid, panicky gasps.  I was going to make a fucking asshole out of myself!  Holding a microphone, up on the alter?  Like Ted Neely or Carl Anderson in Jesus Christ Superstar?  I couldn't do it!

Hubby continued driving, the very picture of calm.  He reached out his hand and patted my knee, gently telling me I was being ridiculous, but still allowing me the freedom to blubber away.  I was hot mess central: broken, pathetic, and very, very ugly.  Ten minutes and one phone call to Sissy later, I wiped the smudged mascara from my cheeks and entered the rehearsal dinner wearing a happy face.  What was the alternative?  I had to be an adult; Sissy said so.  She also told me to make like Mary Magdalene and just sing!

My husband is an exceedingly kind person.  All the same, ten years ago it would have killed me to put on such a shamelessly vulnerable display in front of him.  These days it's a different story.  He loves me even at my very worst, when I am at my most atrocious, and for that I am truly grateful.  I trust him, more than I trust anybody in the world, and there's something very freeing about that. 

"I was being really pathetic and horrible," I tell my husband tonight, back at home on our red couch with Kittie.  "I was acting ugly and childish and hysterical, all for no reason." 

"Yeah," Hubby agreed, squeezing my hand, a smile flickering across his eyes, "But it's okay."

God I love that man.

PS: I capped off my singing performance by getting very, very, very drunk.  (Fast dancing drunk.  Telling my brother in law to shave off his beard because I hate it drunk.  Peeing without putting a liner down on the public toilet seat drunk.)  I then commenced to tell all of my in-laws how much I loved them, again and again, and apologized profusely to Hubby's parents for not providing them with grandchildren.  I also promised to get on this right away, in a year and a half or so.  (Thanks, chardonnay!)  Hiccup. 

All in all, the evening was quite a success.

Being braver

When I was younger, I started to sing.  I was a painfully shy child, and fought against that every day, but somehow when I got up onstage it didn't seem to matter.  This was a godsend, seeing as I probably wouldn't have made it through Englesby Junior High School otherwise. 

I sang all the time.  I sang at nursing homes and dinner theatres, I sang on the local telethon.  I sang in community theatre and even nerded it up show choir, where I was forced to sing wearing...spandex. 

I sang because I couldn't not sing.  It was almost compulsive.  I would stand in my parents kitchen, all alone except for Trustie, our Golden Retriever, and sing until I was hoarse.  I sang with complete abandon, at the top of my lungs, and didn't give a damn who heard me.  In college that started to change, but I'd come home on weekends and sing every song I heard my classmates sing that week, until there was literally nothing left to sing.  Trustie would howl along when I'd hit a note above high C.  I never thought I'd be able to stop singing. 

But then one day that's exactly what I did.  I don't even sing in the shower anymore.  In my defense, I've been living in apartment buildings for the past decade and you can hear a pin drop through those walls.  But why do I even care?  Does the maniacal violinist from downstairs care that I happen to think he's just horrible?  It doesn't stop him from terrorizing us all with his bow.

If I were to be honest, the last time I sang in public was at an audition for Temps, the Musical! which definitely went awry.  I'd come straight from work and hadn't warmed up, and the accompanist kept screwing up the tempo and it became an all around nightmare on Elm Street (parts 1, 2, and 3...)  There were people I knew from the Conservatory standing outside in the hallway, and when I exited that room I felt...dejected.  I don't like to think of it, really, for fear my inner child may try to off herself.

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a certain amount of guilt involved in giving up on a dream.  I'd be lying if I said I didn't occasionally wake up in the middle of the night feeling an odd sort of panic.  It's a biological clock of a different sort, but it's just as irksome.  Even more twisted is that I continue to define myself by something I haven't even done in years.  Why was I so much braver back then?  What changed?  And why can't I let it go, if I'm not willing to go out and actually do it?  In the sage words of my mother, should I not just shit or get off the pot?

That crappy audition was probably three years ago and was also the last time I sang alone in public.  Oh, I went on a few non-singing auditions after that, but after a while I even stopped going to those.  But when Hubby's sweet cousin Elizabeth asked if I would sing at her wedding this weekend, because she thinks I have a "beautiful voice," how could I say no? 

Hubby told me I could say no.  "It's okay," he assured me, probably more for his own sanity than mine.  (Somehow he sensed, after knowing me all these years, that this might be a source of self imposed stress, to put it mildly.)  But I thought back to this Spring, when my grandmother was sick, and the times when Elizabeth's mother would come and visit her. 

This was something I should probably do.

Which is why tomorrow, I'm getting back up on the horse.  It helps that my husband is a musician and was able to lower the song a minor third.  Even so, I really hope I don't make an asshole out of myself.  God wouldn't let that happen to me, would he?  In His own house, even?  Pray for me, Dear Reader!  I think I'm going to need it.  xoxo

WebMD: enabling hypochondriacs since 1998

I've had a vexing pain in my stomach and back since about Sunday.  At times it's been downright excruciating.  Many of my loved ones are already extremely tired of hearing about it, and therefore I am telling you.

At first I suspected Saturday's late night wing ding dinner from Cappy's was the bastard culprit; but now I'm not so sure.

"Go to the doctor!" my mother advises.  "Go to the doctor!" Hubby tells me.  "You should really call the doctor," Sissy keeps saying.

I probably should.  But I've been so busy lately.  And it's really much more pleasurable to moan and speculate. 

Today I went on WebMD.  I don't know about you, but WebMD brings out the absolute worst in me.  It awakens every paranoid, dreadful fear inside of me and invites them all out for drinks and tapas.  Painful memories come flooding back, of the five years in my earliest twenties I spent uninsured and tearfully conducting self diagnosis over my keyboard.  But still, I'm nothing if not a glutton for punishment, and so I decide to check my symptoms.   

I select the upper abdomen as the source of my anguish.  Muscle cramps and spasms?  Check.  Bloating?  Check.  Pain and discomfort?  You betcha!  Hey, this was fun!

Now to investigate my possible conditions.  Chagas Disease certainly sounds like a likely and thrilling candidate, although it's caused primarily by blood sucking insects and is mainly contracted in Central and South America.  For half a minute I wonder if any of those chicken wings may have contained a bloodsucking insect or two, but it does seem highly unlikely.  Damn.

A peptic ulcer is a burning, aching, gnawing pain between the belly button and the breastbone.  Some people even experience back pain.  Sounds promising.  Especially seeing as one of the causes can be the abuse of NSAIDs, and I do pop a fair amount of Advil tablets for my headaches.  (Hardcore pill poppage; Elvis and Cilla style). 

I have to admit, a peptic ulcer does sound kind of romantic.  But perhaps I have Diverticulitis.  Or intestinal Ischemia.  Maybe even squamous cell carcinoma while I'm at it.  I am suddenly compelled to click through a slide show of precancerous skin lesions and begin to feel lightheaded.  It is only when I commence inspecting the freckles on my forearm that I realize I have been foiled...yet again. 

Damn you, WebMD!!!!! 

The fish eating money runner

Hubby's brother has a very unique way of recollecting things.  And by unique, what I really mean to say is he remembers things...wildly incorrectly.  Slanderously inaccurately.  The man almost turns it into an art form.

There was that time in college when Hubby told him the only thing to eat in his dorm room were Goldfish (as in, Pepperidge Farm).  Over the years this story has somehow evolved into one in which Hubby cooked a live gold fish in the microwave...and ate it. 

For starters, I know for a fact that those guys did not have a pet gold fish.  Pets weren't even allowed at Berklee, for that matter.  And if they were, my husband certainly would not have eaten one.  The boy was eating crackers.  Tiny, fish shaped crackers.  Delightful, cheese flavored, bite-sized treats that his mother lovingly sent him in a care package.  But don't tell my brother-in-law this, because he will declare you are Dead Wrong. 

When Hubby was sixteen he was best man in his brother's wedding.  By the time he arrived at the bachelor party, all of the guys had been drinking for quite a while.  According to his brother, teenaged Hubby came in the door and immediately downed twelve consecutive shots of tequila in under three minutes. 

The truth is, Hubby probably had three shots.  In reality, twelve shots of anything within a three minute time frame would surely leave one...I don't know, dead?  Dying?

But the biggest, most erroneous, distorted, far fetched tale of all came only yesterday.  Hubby's brother is in town and they were having a visit.  As the two brothers walked around Boston looking for the Tall Ships, Hubby's brother turned to him and said, "Remember when you used to run money for people?"

When Hubby just stared at him blankly, his brother continued: "Remember when you worked as a money runner?  And that time when you had to go to LAX Baggage Claim to pick up a black trash bag with a box in it?"

Hubby said the first thing that came to mind: "Um, no?"

"You don't remember being a money runner?  How can you not remember that?  The box in the trash bag that you ended up taking to the Federal Reserve to deposit it?"

My husband worked in a tuxedo store in high school.  In a mall, for crying out loud!  Hubby said as much, in that calm Hubby way of his: "No, I never ran money for people.  I worked in a tuxedo store.  I worked at the mall."  (Which is why he is able to hem my pants, or sew on a button.) 

Not that this job was without its fair share of titillating excitement: he sold tuxes to the likes of Frasier Crane and Mark Summers (of Double Dare and Unwrapped fame, oh my!)  Later he even worked in a tux store owned by Jim Morrison's nephews (I won't lie, I found the latter exceptionally fascinating.)  But run money?  Hubby?  And what the hell does that phrase even mean anyway?

Apparently, when Hubby allegedly handed the woman at the Federal Reserve "the box," she asked him, "Do you know what's inside this box?" and Hubby allegedly answered "No."  She then handed him a check, for three million dollars, that was signed by the President.  He handed her back the check and walked away.

Hubby's brother would not back down.  "How can you not remember that?  I tell that story to EVERYONE!  What, did it happen to one of my other brothers?"  He gave a hearty guffaw.

Oh boy.  Hubby suggested that perhaps his brother had witnessed this scenario in a movie, or had maybe heard it from a friend of a friend.  In any case, it was definitely NOT HIM.  He did not run money, or anything else, for that matter.

They debated back and forth on this for awhile, and eventually Hubby's brother merely chuckled and gave a merry little shrug.  "Oh well.  I tell that story to everybody!" 

And from the look of things, he will surely continue to do so.  Holy fraternal libel.  Oh brother.

One year ago yesterday, my husband, Kittie and I left New York and moved to Boston.  I can hardly believe how quickly these twelve months have flown.  Hubby has already completed three semesters at Berklee College of Music and by this time next year he'll have earned his degree, finishing what he began thirteen years prior. 

I think back to last September, to that first day of classes, when I walked into the apartment and found him staring at the floor, a dark look in his blue eyes, convinced he wouldn't be able to do it.  The other students were teenagers, the material was dense and unfamiliar, he didn't remember anything.  I stood there dumbfounded; it had never even occurred to me that he'd doubt himself this way.  I hugged him hard, a little panicked to see him so vulnerable.  I'd have done anything to fix it, but there was really not much more I could do except hold him and cry.  What had I gotten us into? 

And now, a year later, he's earned himself a spot on the dean's list and is achieving obscenely high marks.  School definitely agrees with him the second time around.  To say that I'm proud of him would be a wild understatement.  After all these years he never ceases to amaze me.  He makes my heart full.

I wouldn't classify it as an easy year; to be sure, some parts of it downright blew.  But we made it, and I can honestly say that Boston is finally starting to feel like home.  Again. 

And Hubby, thanks for moving here for me.  xoxo