See, this is my mother’s doing. One of my little projects has been collecting CD versions of records my parents had because some of those records were really good, and they’ve aged well, musically. Also: there’s no feeling quite like smiling as my co-workers make requests I fully intend to ignore while Harry Nilsson croons, “You’re breaking my heart/you’re tearing it apart/so fuck you.” For my birthday, Mom gave me Elton John’s “Caribou,” which I loved with my whole black heart but hadn’t heard during a Republican administration. It is just fantastic to rediscover a record you loved as a teenager, as I did last Tuesday night.

You’ve heard the expression “seeing the light.” I had no idea it could be taken literally, or that it’s not a metaphor one should consider in a Drug Free School Zone. Song 1 of “Caribou” was playing, and I was mumbling along, thinking about nothing in particular when I heard the words, probably for the first time since it was played to death on the radio in the seventies. I had a sudden, overwhelming revelation: ‘Oh. My. God. I get it! I have been too nice. I bent and broke myself to accommodate other people’s demands. I was pleasant to people who deserved public beatings! There’s no room in my life for jealousy. There’s no separating me from my friends, half of whom are my exes. I amputated the most interesting parts of my Self! No wonder I ended up on the couch watching TV and with no idea of what to do with me. Well, that’s enough, and I’ll never do it again. The bitch IS back.’ I was filled with this blinding, unstoppable joy. Nighttime Hamilton Street went white before my eyes, and I was so happy I almost drove off the road.

A few days later, Mom called. I can’t recount an entire verbatim phone call with my mother because you’d tear your eyeballs out with pliers and knowing that, I could be held liable if you did. She wanted to know what it would take to get me to a baby shower. I hate them, everything about them. Hate the preciousness, hate sandwiches with crusts cut off, hate women in packs – they’re like wolves with crystal punch bowls. Everyone knows I send a present and retreat to a defensible position with a liquor license. This’ll be different, she says near the conversation’s half-hour mark.

Mom: Your sisters are all excited. It’ll be like an afternoon tea…
Tata: It’d take an awful lot of gin for me to sit through this.
Mom: We could get you a flask. It’d fit nicely in those lunchboxes of yours.
Tata: There’d be no room for the elephant gun.
Mom: I think that’d be nice. Don’t tell your sisters. I’ll buy you some really good gin and with your propensity for…uh…
Tata: Drinking straight from the martini shaker in the presence of three or more women? You realize it’s pretty bent trying to lure me to a baby shower with booze, right?
Mom: Yes, of course! It’ll be like any other party you go to, only with gifts. And no strippers.
Tata: I’m not going, Mom.
Mom: Okay, we’ll talk about this later.

Mamie says the proper thing for me to do is to let her drive and fill a TV tray with teacups full of gin and lemon slices. Forensic experts can’t resist a lemon-scented teaspoon stabbing but that’s not really the reason I brought it up. The point is even after I remembered I was the Creamy Nougat Center of the Universe and not everyone was entitled to a nibble I was still reluctant to tell the deserving to friggin’ bite me.

Over at Running Scared this week, Mike tried to persuade us that some anti-abortion advocates had the same goals we on the left have, and we can trust them. For a variety of reasons, I will never fall for that bullshit. Let’s glance at history.

US reproductive rights history timeline.
http://www.ppnep.org/timeline.htm

Timeline for funding cuts based on administrations’ ideology.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/abortionus/

The opposition’s timeline sure does feature more events. Let’s call them losses for our side.
http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/facts/abortiontimeline.html

Coalitions are based on bargains. No one’s going to join your political team if there’s nothing in it for him. I said on Running Scared there’s no room for compromise with the Antis, and there isn’t. We have bargained for decades with reproductive rights opponents and the right have been chipped away to a bare and embarrassing minimum. In a time when pharmacists don’t have to dispense birth control pills, clinics burn to the ground, doctors are driven out of business or murdered, and Supreme Court is so lopsided we should have taken to the streets years ago, there is no room to ponder what you can trade for some company at the barricades. You can’t trust the Antis to want what you want, no matter whom you talk to or how you package your alliance. I’ve got two words for you: fifth column. Got it? When you consider joining up with anti-abortion activists to preserve abortion and birth control, the same thing should happen in your head as when you string together the words “gay” and “Republican”: HEY! The REPUBLICAN PARTY couldn’t HATE GAYS more without a nasty public breakup. Gay Republicans: the party is actively trying to hurt you. Get some self-respect and get out!

Finally, I think I may be tired of talking to people for whom women’s rights and reproductive rights are merely interesting to think about, especially if it’s big with the chicks. The next time I see a man on a clinic picket line I’m getting out of my car and shouting, “Get lost, you pedophilic chipmunk. The humans are busy.” If your life depends on safe and legal health care, we can talk about this further. If not, bite me.

Miss Sasha is getting married in May. This means everyone in the family has lost his/her mind in his/her own special way. On Sunday, Sister #1 and I came really close to an all-out brawl that didn’t happen because while we were still screaming I got my coat and left in a hurry since she’s six months pregnant and no jury in the land would convict her of stabbing me 88 times.

Prosecutor: What was she like, your “sister”?
#1: Oh, she was my sister all right, or our parents dressed two unrelated life support systems for ponytails in matching sailor suits for ten years and no freaking reason.
Prosecutor: Are you – by any chance – holding any cutlery?
#1: A shrimp fork and a rubberized baby spoon.
Prosecutor: Your homicidal rage is ADORABLE!
Judge: Case dismissed!

Miss Sasha wanted me to watch that tearjerking pabulum “The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood” because she grew up in an atmosphere where phones were often airborne and wirecutters were an essential survival tool. Apparently this flick’s filled with familiar violence against household appliances. Whatever. Now that Sister #1 and I were at DefCon 2, several days of tense silence followed. The family was upset. This tension was felt across the land, in the fields and on innocent clearance racks. Something had to be done.

I plotted. I schemed. I considered faking my own death, like on soap operas, complete with spooky phone calls from beyond the grave.

GhostTata: Woo woo You should have listened to me woo woo…
#1: TELL YOUR STORY WALKING! EVEN IN *DEATH* YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!

I couldn’t call her. She was wrong. If I called her, she’d say, “See, I was right,” and we can’t have that. A few days passed while I strategized. I developed a war plan for the blitz: one fast conversation, and then we could move on to other earth-shattering events, like the bridal shower I do NOT want to talk about but I am the Mommy. What are you gonna do? Thursday morning, I was staring at the clock, thinking ‘#1 is about to take her oldest to school’ when the phone rang.

#1: ARE WE GONNA TALK ABOUT THIS OR WHAT?

For this reason alone, you should never doubt we have the same parents. When I could finally breathe again, I put the phone back to my ear. She was still growling at an impressive volume.

#1: I CAN’T TAKE IT! ARE WE SPEAKING TO EACH OTHER OR WHAT?

We’re from Jersey. “Or what” is versatile and has many meanings in the lay vernacular; in this case it means, “Shut up and speak to me.” This struck me as so funny I had to tell her I’d planned to call later in the afternoon –

HypotheticalTata: ARE YOU DONE BEING SUCH A BITCH YET?

– and fire off loaded questions. Okay, so now it’s funny. And we can talk about that damn bridal shower.

Yes, it’s a ‘Fear and Loathing’ reference. So’s this. Captain Zeep returns from obscurity and offers this gem:

Ya know what the coolest thing is about playing vinyl records again? It’s the ‘ritual’. Yes, the ‘ritual’ that I’ve missed. There’s no ‘ritual’ with a CD…you shove it in and hit ‘play’. The record, on the other hand, has a distinct ‘ritual’. It’s the eye-squinting search through the thin, narrow jacket-sleeve edges with their sideways, faded titles to select a record….then the careful handling of the record as it’s removed from it’s sleeve…and then the Side One or Side Two? dilemma, before placing the disc on the platter and beginning the cleaning phase of the ritual…discwasher in hand, a few drops of fluid, rubbing the fluid into the brush with the butt of the bottle, carefully rotating the brush from toe to heel while the disc rotates…then the careful lowering of the tonearm til the satisfying, gentle, ‘ka-Thump’ of the stylus entering that long, continuous groove is heard.

No one records collections of songs in 20 minute blocks as an artful expression anymore. It’s more like 70 minutes of unthoughtful drivel. Gone is the beauty and artful expression of selecting two blocks of songs with a purposeful flow from outer to inner groove.

I love my records. I’m so glad I found them again.
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How often do you read email and say, “Ahhhhhh, beautiful”? Today, it was twice for me, since Audrey couldn’t bear to watch snow fall though window screens:

I went out with the poets and some real live fiction writers last night…lots of laughter and whiskey and good music. the snow was relentless. Just relentless. I couldn’t bear not to be out there, appreciating its sheer effort. I waited I don’t even know how long for a subway, but I had my new iPod and copies of my poems with nice things written on them. I emerged at 2 am. it was still going. when I woke up this morning, I wanted nothing more than to get outside immediately. and an egg & cheese on an everything bagel. my first thought as I hit the sidewalk was “I’d like to bean someone with a snowball right now.” it would be wonderful if random, benevolent acts of snow violence broke out as people make their way to work. I am going to spend the rest of the morning trying to describe what the trees look like, crossing their tops over the road, piled with white.
****************************************************************************************

It’s March, right? When I get little gifts like these I say, “Merry Christmas to *me*!”

Mamie and I have a new game. She emails me the song playing on her mental jukebox and waits. Sometimes, nothing happens.

Mamie: I’m listening to Mandy Moore sing [Insert Mandy Moore song].
Tata: Sorry to hear it.

I win; life goes on. Sometimes Mamie wins – or more to the point, sometimes I *lose.*

Mamie: This morning it’s Bryan Adams’ “One Night Love Affair.”
Tata: DAMN IT!

The wandering mind is a bitch. It goes out into the wide world and comes back with fleas. This morning, I woke up next to Larry, the little black cat bent on stealing your soul, and thinking of a man I loved ten years ago. He moved in and moved out a handful of times; why he bothered I’ll never know. I thought I’d die of the grief. In any case, it’s really difficult to lament a still painful loss while a very, very happy cat plays hopscotch on your ribcage, purring like an outboard motor. If you haven’t cut the cat’s nails recently, you arrive very suddenly in the present. “Good morning, Larry. Ow! Ow! I – ow! – love you, too! Ow! Shall we – ow! hey! I use that! – go look at your food bowl?” I forgot about that man, though.

Sometimes I think I could go on collecting paychecks and perfecting my pedicure until my number’s up. I feel like a ghost. Hey, at least I’m not Bryan Adams. I bet that’s song’s stuck in his head *all* the time.

When I look up he’s standing in the doorway of my cubicle with his coat on. He says, “Let’s go.” I get my coat and we go upstairs to the front of the building but he doesn’t turn the way I expect. He heads for a different door. I follow, uncertain. I ask, “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to see art,” he says.

“We are?”

“We said. We’re going.”

“So, we’re just…having an es-cape?”

“Yes we are, Alice.” My name’s not Alice. He’s referring to Arlo Guthrie, and how people his age have never heard “Alice’s Restaurant” but he has. In the middle of one’s day, life can be very predictable. Though your eyes are open, you may be asleep. Suddenly, I’m wide awake. Everything interests me. The campus bus we’re sitting on is cavernous. The seats are improbably fuzzy and colorful. The other passengers are epic poems. The gray snow sky is velvety. The bare trees are skeletal and acquiescent. I tell him that when I was a teenager I traveled back and forth between my parents’ homes on those interstate buses and Aqua Velva smells like bus toilets to me. He is a child of the late eighties and early nineties; the idea of parents buying a bus ticket for a teenager and saying, “Call me next month” is quickly followed the picture of that teenager on a milk carton in his mind. Yes, but Lassie and Timmy were always home for dinner.

The bus stops at Monument Square which isn’t a square at all. It’s a triangle. When you tell someone to meet you at this location you say, “Meet me at the triangle. You know, Monument Square. And don’t play in the fountain. You’ll get a disease.” I skip off the bus. He walks behind me, lighting a cigarette. I quit smoking a few weeks ago but I like the smell of smoke. I turn around in the wind to let him catch up. He’s having trouble with his lighter. I point. He futzes. It’s taking forever. I point. “Don’t play in the fountain,” I say sternly, the Oracle of the Crossroads. Eventually the cigarette lights and we cross the triangle, then the street. A woman walks behind us shouting, “Excuse me!” We turn. She’s not talking to us. We don’t know who she’s talking to. She shouts again and again. I say, “Watch – a thing is about to happen.” Ahead of us, a security guard turns around. She asks directions as he walks back to her. Something interesting *is* about to happen, but we’ve made an es-cape, and we’re on the clock.

The gallery has seven rooms consisting of one large main room as you enter, two rooms to the left and four rooms to the right. We have both been here many times but never at the same time. He went to school here. I visited school here, when the school was across the river and so not here at all.

We walk around the main room. I’ve seen most of these paintings before because I visited the studio of Lala (no relation) recently. There’s one painting in particular I’m hoping to see. It’s not in the main room, so I think she’s chosen to leave that one out. Quickly, we walk through the rooms on the left. He asks me about a painting we both survey and feel it’s unfinished. He asks why. I point to a corner, and swoosh across, and come to a stop where a line is too sharp, mumbling the whole time. He says, “I had the same reaction but in the exact opposite places.” Still mumbling, I stand in the middle of the room on one foot, extend my arms and lean sideways. “Yes, yes,” he says, and we both know the painting is off balance. We race to a room filled with plants and large plastic containers. Water is moving, motors race, pencils dance on unfamiliar surfaces. It’s not as exciting as I’d hoped from the enticing noise. The videos in the next room also leave me cold but video work often does. In the next room, we find more of Lala’s paintings, including the one I hoped to see. It’s several different shades of green, with some other hints of color. We look at the last room’s white vellum on white canvas works. There are also rocks piled and shaped. I can’t tell if that’s Lala’s work because the wall labels aren’t crystal clear.

We make a break for the door, and the street, and the bus stop. A bus comes. I am talking about the green painting. I am talking about an incident from Lala’s childhood. I say this painting feels like the doorway into all the others. If someone had taken a picture of that incident, violent and horrific, and blown up the photograph beyond recognition, and if that someone noticed a microscopic corner of green grass or mossy riverbank became cool green pixels, and someone painted that, that’s the painting, and that’s the way into the story, and that’s what’s left for us to see of when the neighbor killed his little daughter and burned up her body.

Now, I say this on the bus. And we are almost immediately back at our building, and no one really noticed we were gone, and my lunch is still where I left it, half-eaten. And I am wide awake.

It’s a morning for strawberry Jell-O with peaches. I admire the jewel-tone pinks and oranges and usher guests around the office. I connect a new employee with the dishevelled hero who fixes her disruptive computer problem. I tell an anxious co-worker to relax – if you can stand it – and let a colleague solve a big problem. He will. It takes two phone calls. My PC is playing Ramones Mania. My shirt is green silk. My coppery hair can be seen from space. I am sitting up straight and pretending to be the hostess this morning. I wonder if Suzanne Pleshette feels this way sometimes.

My aunt called, a bit depressed. She’s planning Miss Sasha’s bridal shower. Neither of us has ever planned a bridal shower but we’ve planned parties. Who can’t plan a party, right? You pick a place, provide stuff and stuff to do. Still, we never miss a reason to feel insecure, or lament a missing something we packed away in a cleaning frenzy.

Aunt: – And I was looking for my plastic grapes when –
Tata: You were? I’ve been whining about MY plastic fruit!
Aunt: I think I put mine into storage a few years ago when – you WHAT?
Tata: When I had long hair I used to pin the grapes around my ponytail to amuse myself so my friend borrowed the whole basket for a gigantic up-do. For the past few weeks I’ve been asking for it back. It’s been almost ten years.
Aunt: Where did you get it?
Tata: It was Grandma’s, remember? When she died, I got some ancestral plastic fruit. And a popcorn maker. I can’t explain that.
Aunt: I got some grapes, too! And now I can’t find them!
Tata: You’ll find them! So about my whining: I asked for my fruit back and yesterday, I went over her house to feed her pets. She said my plastic fruit would be next to the guinea pigs. I fed the guinea pigs and then I heard myself say some really interesting words I had never heard before.
Aunt: What’d you say?
Tata: I said [change to Inspector Clousseau accent], ‘That is not MY plastic fruit!’
Aunt: Of course you did! We know our plastic fruit!
Tata: Yeah, yeah. And I KNOW this because she tried to buy me off with low-quality plastic fruit. I can’t wear that!
Aunt: So what are you gonna do?
Tata: Do? What do you think I’m gonna do? I’m gonna toss her house for my plastic fruit!

This exclamation had the intended effect on my aunt: she stopped being depressed and spent the rest of the day bursting into apparently inappropriate laughter and muttering, “Plastic fruit!” wherever she went. My work here is done!

Because I am untroubled by conventional ideas about hair color, mine is currently a hue most often found in two-for-one bins at the dollar store. You know the vivid orangy-pink I mean. Even polite people turn the corner and gasp, “OH MY GOD!” Two hours ago, I walked through a building where employees are unaccustomed to my mood hair. I couldn’t wait to tell my boss.

“Nobody is looking at me,” I whispered.

“You’re dull,” she said.

“No. I mean as I walk through the room they’re averting their eyes!”

[I got distracted by my co-worker who rudely tried to reacqaint me with the terms of my gainful employment, and I forgot about the conversation stopper atop my head.]

“Perhaps they fear glare. Or contagion.”

Back in the library, an older and eccentric woman with whom I share a birthday marched – click! click! click! – across the office in her platform/spike heel combo shoes, talking at least thirty seconds before crossing my field of vision, “Where are you? I have been told your hair is some piece of work -“

“Hello, Shirley.”

“That’s a nice color. It’s really bright. How’s it feel?” She grabs a lock of my hair to feel the texture. I grew up with beauticians and hippies so I’m used to people greeting me by grabbing my hair and asking in a hostile tone, “ARE YOU CONDITIONING?!” Shirley’s amazed that a head of hair that went through three color lifting processes doesn’t feel like straw. This conversation made me miss my grandmother; one time she shooed Sister #1 and me up the stairs and bleached our youthful mustaches. We felt pretty stupid but once the peroxide door had been opened, Sister #1 and I stepped through, thanked Grandma and never looked back. I haven’t seen my natural color except by accident in more than two decades, and I don’t miss it at all until I see gray roots. Thus, we have orangy-pink. Maybe: in the liquor store, the owner chatters on the phone in a language I don’t speak as I pick out a bottle of wine. When I get to the counter, I find myself standing next to a very young looking man while the owner talk-talk-talks; then, “What color is that?” He’s smiling and I realize the proprietor is indeed talking to me.

“Sunset orange. My Little Pony pink. I don’t know,” I laugh. The kid next to me says slyly, “Well…I wouldn’t have known anything…if your eyebrows had matched…”

“That’s my ethnic identity. Nobody touches the eyebrows! Because, you know, I got dignity,” I said. The store owner is laughing so hard he can’t count change.

One of the glorious aspects of being a little old lady is getting to combine the unlikely and improbable, and doing it any old way you wish. I’m practicing up. I’ll need roller skates, no?

This week, everyone’s had trouble blogging, but that’s not why I’ve been quiet. On Monday, I lost interest in smoking during General Hospital – which I can’t explain – and simply didn’t smoke another cigarette. Sister #1, who shall remain pregnant for the foreseeable future, calls every day to offer positive reinforcement but it’s not necessary. On Tuesday nights, my girlfriends – some of whom lack a critical X chromasome – and Miss Sasha were a little shocked when I didn’t want a cigarette after they ate dinner. I can’t really explain this. All I can say is that it is so.

I *can* tell you how it feels. When I started gymnastics in the mid-seventies, girls didn’t dare start in the sport without years of ballet first. I had seven years of ballet before I began learning the basics of tumbling, so I can tell you this with certainty: when a person first tries to kick into a handstand, the body is young and rubbery and does not respond well to being upside-down. Gradually, the patient student learns to feel his or her own palms, the shoulders, the middle back, the hips, the knees, ankles and toes. Gradually, the student learns through kicking up many times against walls and falling down, or kicking up toward a spotter and slapping a shoulder that strength and a new sense of upside-down-ness grow. Time passes. Sometimes a student takes the body’s hints and moves forward. Sometimes not, and the student goes nowhere. Of the teenagers who take the hints of their bodies, some learn a secret – and it is a tremendous secret: the word ‘handstand’ is a misnomer. To stand upright, weight resting on one’s heels, is nothing. It’s ordinary, and there’s not really anything much to say about it. A handstand, however, is a contradiction in terms. A person doesn’t really stand on his or her hands so much as place the palms on the ground-most surface and push the whole body as straight and taut as the body can manage toward the toes, and if possible, past them an inch or so. It sounds crazy, but that’s what it is, and it you watch a really good athlete on the high bar or uneven bars, and try to feel where they’re putting their weight, you will see what I mean. It’s called amplitude and it’s only exotic if you’ve never studied gymnastics or wave function.

So there’s a gangly body, And it tries to be upside-down, which is a foreign sense of itself. And it reaches toward impossibly straight walls. And it resists the hands of persons knowledgeable in this endeavor. One day, the body kicks into handstand, and all the weight feels like it is stretched away from earth into the pointed toes, and the spotter, surprised, feels his hands instinctively note where the other, upside-down body is centered and balanced. That balance is now separate from the spotter in this moment, and the spotter moves his hands a centimeter, then another. The spotter knows first and now removes his hands. The student knows second: balance has been achieved. The body accepts inversion. The line away from earth is straight and perfect.

So. I have not smoked another cigarette in just about a week. It is not something I accomplished, really; I was simply there, and the time was right, I haven’t smoked a cigarette since last Monday, and I am stretched away from earth…

So the other day I was playing with my nephew the five-year-old engineer and realized: Oh. My. God! My triceps are flabby. I cannot believe my arms could be such fatty space aliens.

You have no way of knowing I was one of the young Title IX athletes – let’s say I was a few years behind the first girls – and that I vividly recall apologizing to boys for having muscular arms in the seventies when pretty girls had as much obvious musculature as rubber dolls. I lifted weights and did calisthenics while other girls studied Cosmo. At one point, I was doing about 250 military pushups a day in sets of 50. A chinning bar has always been installed in my bedroom doorways, and I used it. I opened my own pickle jars and expected to for the rest of my natural life.

Then I suffered an episode of Stupid and forgot to exercise for a few years while I was depressed and gained weight.

So after twenty years of twirling barbells and a few of “pass the marshmallows and kill me, please,” I had a bright idea, “Mamacita, get on the floor and see how many pushups you can still do.’ There was some stretching, some bending. I can stretch and bend. I got on my hands and feet (because girl pushups are for…girls…) and said, “One…and…a half…”

In the words of poet Boni Joi: “Humility helps.”

This afternoon, a woman I berated into getting an I-Turned-Forty-A Few-Years-Ago Mammogram mentioned she hesitated to take calcium. I stared at her. I hyperventilated a little. I’d just told her the whole faux-sad story about my lifelong-and-lost upper body strength when it became obvious that a dramatic gesture was necessary. I dropped to the floor to illustrate: ‘One…and…a half…” I got up. “We’re not children, lovey. Will you ask your pharmacist about the freaking calcium?”