Monday Minivan Media

Picture yourself in the front seat of my Venture minivan. (Oh yes. You're already green with envy over my life of obvious excess.) We both have a grande skinny vanilla latte, and we have a little time to kill. We could be waiting for our kids, or for our meth dealer to show up. No matter. We're here, in the van, together. Let's talk pop culture. I promise to give you a 1000 word review where less than 10% is actually about the topic. It's like having an actual conversation with me.


Today's musical: Mamma Mia

I think I've figured out the smell from last Friday.  George the Superpet is extremely shaggy, because I don't get him groomed in the winter because I feel all guilty taking away his coat.  It's like saying to your cute, defenseless kindergartner, "Hey, I know you have this really awesomely warm sheepskin coat, but since it's about 10 degrees outside, I'm going to make you go outside in just a tank top and pee in the yard."  So George still has his very thick sheepskin/poodle coat on, but it's been thawing, and even though I picked up five grocery bags of poodle poop the other day, the dog still poops every day, and he has apparently been acting as a large Poodle Swiffer in my backyard, collecting mud, bracken, and the remains of the 30 or so feral cats from the backyard in his shagginess.  He's been banned from my bed, which makes him very upset, and I'm calling a groomer tomorrow.  He weighed in at 111.2 pounds at the vet last week, but I bet 10 pounds of it is his coat.  Poor George.

So last Saturday, I loaded up the girls and drove to Omaha, Nebraska.  It's a five hour drive from my house, and until Des Moines it's okay, but the stretch between DSM and Omaha is enough to make you want to drive straight off of a cliff.  If there were any cliffs between Des Moines and Omaha, which there are not.  It's very flat and devoid of much, so even if you wanted to drive into something, you couldn't.  It's especially awesome when your 7-year-old says, "How much longer, I can't take it any more" about every 15 minutes.  You can't even bribe the children because it is the longest stretch in the world without a McDonalds.

I grew up in Nebraska, and live in Iowa, so I can say mean things about them because it is said with love in my heart.  It's kind of like how I can say, "It drives me nuts how my husband can just sit on the couch all night and watch TV" but if you say, "Doesn't it drive you nuts how your husband sits on the couch all night and watches TV" I will be forced to say, "No, I encourage it.  It keeps him from screwing the neighbor like yours does."  This is how I am about Iowa and Nebraska.  If you say, "It's so boring to drive there" I will say something like, "It's beautiful in its sparseness - ever hear of Willa Cather?  Try driving through Kansas."

We got to my parent's house, which is actually just a summer cabin on the Elkhorn River, and of course, my mom wasn't there.  She was shopping with my sister, which is where she usually is when I show up.  This time, they were shopping for three queen-size inflatable mattresses, because my sister's house was full of natural gas as their furnace broke.  Oh, and I was on Day 2 of my period.  If only we had a leper and a whore and this story would take on Biblical proportions.

My mom was taking Oldest Daughter, my sister, and me to Mamma Mia at the Orpheum Theater in Omaha for OD's birthday.  We sat around talking until we realized with a panic that we were late, we raced to the restaurant only to find that the wait was too long and we ended up at Panera Bread to eat fast before the show.  Mom had accidentally deleted the tickets from her e-mail, so we had to drop her off for the Will Call window at the front of the theater.  We dropped her off for the tickets, found a parking garage a couple of blocks away, prayed for a crime-free night and settled in for the show.

She is not in ABBA, nor is she a Mamma, and it is not set in Italy.

She is laughing at us, not with us.

Mamma Mia was terrific, with two notable exceptions:  A) the girl playing Sophie was very ANIMATED and THEATRICAL to the point of distraction, and B) Colin Firth was notably absent from the role of Harry.  I moaned loudly about the lack of Firthiness in the show, and during intermission my mom very loudly told us all a story about the last time she was in the Orpheum Theater: 

"Suzanne from work and I came here to see a movie, it must have been about 30 years ago or so, and I looked across the aisle and there was this guy jacking off, and it was the only time I've ever seen someone do that in public.  He was REALLY into it.  But the Orpheum has really changed since then, it's so much nicer."

You're welcome, everyone in Loge seating section 2.

Inside the Orpheum Theater,

where no one masturbates anymore.

So the show ended and we drove home and mom wanted to know why everyone was going to bed?  Aren't you going to stay up and have a drink?  Um, Mom, it's 1 a.m., and I have to drive five hours tomorrow.  Stay up with me, I never see you.  Okay.  So I stay up with Mom and have a drink, and when I just can't stay up any longer I crawl into the air mattress and promptly roll into the middle with OD  because the mattress is already deflating, and it's freezing cold in there, and just as I get warm one of the kids gets sick.  All of the adults get up to sit with the sick child, and when that seems to be okay, we all go back to bed around 2:30 or so.  Then I wake up in a panic at 4 a.m. because it's almost dawn of Day 3 of my period and sometimes there is an emergency.  I woke up at 8 a.m. with the same kind of emergency, and at that point mom was up with coffee having her morning smoke, so I decided to stay up with her and eat chocolate cookies for breakfast.  Because we are ALL about health in my family.

At 11 a.m. I packed up the girls and we left, just in time to hit a small snowstorm in Des Moines, and then Youngest Daughter got carsick in Williamsburg and then in West Branch, so I'd like to take this opportunity to say Thank You to McDonalds for having the cleanest restrooms on the Interstate. 

All told, it was nice to see my family, and we loved Mamma Mia.  But Sophia can tone it down a little bit.  And the Orpheum Theater is lovely, even though Colin Firth would have certainly perked everyone up a bit.  The end.

The Hookers Gave Me Some Disease

Hello, Wifers.

I am sick.  I suppose one should assume that one will pick up some kind of disease at a hooker convention, but still, I was taken off guard.  I am now hacking up a lung regularly, much to the great joy of my co-workers and dining companions.

So last Friday morning I packed up all of my hooker equipment (rug hooking, for the newer readers) and set off in the swagga wagon for Lenexa, Kansas.  It is a seven hour trip from my house to Hooker Heaven, and while I managed to have a mostly uneventful trip weather-wise, I did have one stereotypical Missouri moment.  I need to fill up the tank and get a Diet Coke, so I took the next exit that had a gas station.  Oddly, most of the pumps had a bag over the handle, or a tag on it, but I finally found a pump that seemed to be operable.  I put it in and got back in the van to wait.  I few minutes later, I look out of the window, and the pump says I've only registered about $2.15 of gas in the tank, so at $3.26 a gallon, something has gone awry.  I look up, and there is gas flowing from the top of the hose at the very top of the filling station area, so there is gasoline running down the hose and onto the ground. 

My first thought was "I'm gonna blow this mother sky high."

But then I realized most of the gas had soaked into the snowbank around the pumps, so maybe I had a chance.  I got out of the van, replaced the pump handle, and moved the van.  I walked into the station to tell someone about the flammable liquids pooling around the ground around their gas station.  I looked around the room, and realized something terrible had happened in this town.  I'm going to start a charitable foundation for these people.  I'm going to go all Erin Brokovich on their asses, because they had obviously grown up on a toxic waste dump of some kind.

• Midget?  Check.
• No one with more than 12 teeth?  Check.
• Humpback? Check.
• Mullet as predominant hairstyle?  Check.
• Everyone sitting at a table and smoking eating Funyuns? Check.
• The strains of Deliverance playing in the background?   That might have been my head.

I said, "Hey, the gas is pouring out of the top of the pump onto the ground!"  They all slowly look at me, and the young gal/guy with the mullet said, "Huh."  I said, "So....you might want to shut it down or something."  And they said, "Huh."  And I said, "Okay then...thanks..." and backed slowly out of the door while they all sat and watched me until I pealed the hell out of there.

At the hooker convention, I made a big mistake - I wore black pants at a place where hooker wool was everywhere.  You heard me.  I got Hooker Wool all over my pants.  There are guys who would pay big money for that on the internet.  I made new hooker friends, drove home in seven hours and finished my last hour of the trip on the interstate in freezing drizzle and starting to hack my lungs out.

So I've just dosed on Nyquil for the third night in a row, I might have to join a twelve-step program to quit.  Particularly when I stayed up to watch the Oscars, and then had a Nyquil-induced dream about Colin Firth sending me a tool kit in the mail (for the hooker equipment) and asking me to run away with him, but I told him as much as I would love to, REALLY, he had a lovely Italian/Spanish-type wife and I had Current Husband, and it wasn't meant to be.  I'm hoping for similar Nyquil results tonight.  Wish me luck.

Monday Minivan Media

I miss the days of the auto play with playlist.com on this blog.  I really put a lot of time into figuring out which song would go best with the theme for the blog post that day, so much so that Vanilla Ice gave my laptop a virus.  Of course, back then I didn't have a job and this blog was about all I had going on outside of my mom life, so picking out a song was of paramount importance and could take another hour of time.  I don't really have that luxury anymore.  BUT.  That doesn't mean I don't get out once in a while, and since I really love movies and music, I am going to dedicate Monday's blog in January to my Minivan Media report.

Picture yourself in the front seat of my Venture.  (Oh yes.  You're already green with envy over my life of obvious excess.)  We both have a grande skinny vanilla latte, and we have a little time to kill.  We could be waiting for our kids, or for our meth dealer to show up.  No matter.  We're here, in the van, together.  Let's talk pop culture.

Today's movie:  The King's Speech

I saw this movie last week with one of my Mount Vernon homies, and it was awesomeness to the fourth power.  It had the trifecta:

1. Colin Firth
2. Gorgeous vintage sets
3. British people

I am an unabashed Anglophile.  It started with the Beatles and continued with Princess Diana, then paused for a moment at Sid & Nancy (a movie I LOVED, but it made British people look a little dirty and prone to junkie stabbings), and then came back full-on with the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice.  I love Brits so much that when Hugh Grant got his hummer from the prostitute in LA, I thought, "Unfortunate, but I'd still let him colonize me." 

Current Husband will not abide my travel into England because he knows damn well that the moment I step into Heathrow and someone says something like, "Spare a pound, miss?" I might be tempted to sleep with him.  "Fancy we get a flat together and go round for a pint" and it's over, I'm staying.

Call me Mummy and you can eat my crumpet.

The acting was terrific, the story was fantastic, and the movie was as rich as shortbread at tea with the Queen.  Here is a clip if you haven't seen it yet:  The King's Speech trailer.

Even Helena Costume Drama was excellent (that is a friend's brilliant nickname for her, but I would love to take credit) and I don't ever WANT to like Helena Bonham Carter in anything, because she was The Other Woman when Emma Thompson was married to Kenneth Branagh.  Kenneth left Emma for Helena, and Emma wallowed in depression for a year before her mother told her to get out of bed and pull herself up, for God's sake, and so Emma did and made a movie called Sense & Sensibility, where Emma won an Oscar and eventually married the man who played the hot but scoundrelly (and noticably younger) Willoughby.  SO, I'm always wanting to dislike HBC and say, "See, that bitch that helped break Emma's heart is a posuer", but guess what?  HBC is always good, and I can't help but admire her as an actress.

Colin, are you quite sick of that gorgeous Spanish wife of yours? 

Because I'm married to Tim Burton and I'm sure he won't mind.

As an important side note, I did have a large Diet Coke and eat buttered popcorn and peanut M&Ms concurrently, which added to my movie-viewing pleasure considerably, even though it cost $45.  Also, no one behind my talked on their cell phone, or yelled out one-liners at the movie screen in that age-old contest called "Who's the Cleverest Person in the Theater!?" where everyone is a loser.

The King's Speech rating: A+

Guys - while there are no tits, there are some nice bits of vulgarity.  No guns, robots, or Megan Fox, but it is more endurable than a romance and you'll get points for going.  You'll feel smarter when you leave, and can brag that you saw it and talk about the historical perspective without acting like you're really interested.  It's a win-win.