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.

Yard Work Be Dammed

On Friday I wrote about Spring Cleaning.  Back in the 70's when I was a kid in the 'White Lights Christmas City' in Nebraska, one of my Spring Cleaning responsibilities was raking the leaves.  We lived on a lake, so there were lots and lots of trees, and the damn things littered those leaves everywhere.  I was a lazy and asthmatic child, so I usually got out of some portion of the raking in one of two ways:

1. I would have to go to the bathroom, A LOT, and each trip would usually take about a half hour.  I would saunter into the house, grab an apple, watch a little TV, all the while looking out the window to see if my dad was coming in to check on my whereabouts.  Eventually they would come looking for me, and I would be on my way out the back door as they came in to check.
2. Once the bathroom excuse was exhausted, I would just stick my face in a pile of leaves, which would make me sneeze and get wheezy, and then my parents would send me inside so they could avoid a hospital trip.  Have I mentioned that I was a deviant and manipulative child?  (But I really did have asthma.)

The leaf did not fall far from the tree with my children.  We live on a corner lot with lots of trees, and every spring and fall we force the children to grab their rakes and head out into the yard, where multiple bathroom trips and small injuries ultimately occur.

Since I like to think I am cleverer than the children, I sometimes disguise work activity as play.  We have a huge crabby tree in the front yard that spends its time swearing and throwing small branches at our house, and in the spring we will end up with hundreds of branches in the yard.  Over Spring Break, The Son had an out-of-town friend over for a few days, and I suggested to them that it would be really, REALLY fun to build a beaver dam in the front yard.

ME:  "I bet you guys could build a HUGE beaver dam here."
THEM:  "How would we do that?"
ME:  "Just like beavers do!  With all of these sticks!"
THEM:  "But won't they cave in?"
ME:  "Nah!  First you put up a frame with the bigger sticks, and then you build around it with the smaller ones.  It will be easy."
THEM:  "Hey!  That sounds like fun!  Let's do it!"
ME:  (Walking back into house) "MWAH HA HA HA HA HA...suckers."

The idea was that the sticks would be in one location, and therefore easily bound and prepared for pickup.  Four hours later, I did an abduction check (and really, they could've been in Ohio in that amount of time) and found a beaver dam in my front yard.  A real, legitimate beaver dam.  And not only had the boys built a four foot by six foot hut next to my front door, they walked over the three million leaves in my yard to get the BAGGED leaves by the garbage, and dumped them over the top of the dam.  

DAM IT ALL!!  Now I had the same amount of sticks in the yard, AND my previously bagged leaves were back in the grass.  Just when I started to think about getting annoyed, two of the happiest boys I've ever seen came bounding out of the Dam Thing.

"MOM!  This is the COOLEST thing EVER!  Take pictures of it!  Can we sleep out here?  Do you think actual beavers will move in?"  

 Boys.  Enough said.

I was a goner.  Who cares about the Dam leaves?  Or the daffodils coming up that are now in the side room of the Dam.  There is nothing like the joy of a 10-year-old kid.  So we took pictures of the boys, and of course, pictures of Todd "Hot Nuts" Epstein in his formerly natural habitat.  Now that he is a dead taxidermied squirrel and unused to the elements, he needed his stocking cap.
  

 Todd loves the Dam Thing.

Youngest Daughter carried approximately 12 sticks to "help" with the dam, and she was angry at the end that she was not included in the Building Credits.  Hell hath no fury like YD scorned, as the boys were soon to discover:

 Sleep lightly, boys.  YD will have her revenge.

It snowed over the weekend, and as we live two blocks from the Mississippi River, Current Husband and George the Superpet found themselves wondering how many critters were squatting in the Dam Thing for the night.  Our neighbors found themselves wondering why no one thought of writing a neighborhood covenant when we moved into the area.  The boys found themselves wondering how much candy it would take to buy their safety.  And I found myself wondering how I got outwitted by the children, again.  Dam it.

Dancing on Laura Ingalls Wilder's Grave

Mary yawned, and Laura said: "Ma, can't we get out and run behind the wagon? My legs are so tired."
"No, Laura," Ma said.
"Aren't we going to camp pretty soon?" Laura asked. It seemed such a long time since noon, when they has eaten their lunch sitting on the clean grass in the shade of the wagon.
Pa answered: "Not yet. It's too early to camp now."
"I want to camp, now! I'm so tired," Laura said.
Then Ma said, "Laura." That was all, but it meant that Laura must not complain. So she did not complain any more out loud, but she was still naughty, inside. She sat and thought complaints to herself.

Since we are on the downside of October, it's time to get all sentimental about Laura Ingalls Wilder month. Sniff. Even if Pa was crazy as a coon in heat, and Ma probably spit in his porridge in acts of passive aggressiveness, if Mary was so perfect that she kind of pissed you off and then you felt guilty when she went blind, and Carrie seemed kind of dull and Grace was spoiled, as a girl in the '70s you just had to love the Little House on the Prairie books.

I lived in Nebraska in a small town that made up the ribbon of civilization between the Omaha metro area and the grasslands that everyone hates on their drive to Colorado. The Little House books were my first love affair with history, and I could picture what Nebraska might have looked like 100 years before, and what girls my age were doing (which, by the way, was not playing Atari, eating Lucky Charms and watching Gilligan's Island.)

When I was 10 and my sister was 6, my mom took us on a summer trip to see Laura's home in Mansfield, Missouri. By then, I had probably read all of the Little House books three times, and was completely entranced with everything in them. I had to see it. My dad managed to bail out on that trip, since 8 hours in the car with three women to see Laura Ingalls Wilder's house held as much appeal as learning to make ganache or scrapbooking or talking about his feelings.

Here is what I remember from the trip to Mansfield:
* My mom drove her kick-ass white Thunderbird. In the pre-sunroof days it was complete with the T-roof feature where you had to stop the car, take out the heavy and highly breakable glass panels, and put them in the trunk. If it started to rain or birds kept crapping in your car, you'd have to pull over, open the trunk, and replace the heavy, highly breakable glass panels.

* My sister and I wanted McDonalds, and we got it for every meal because my Dad, Thrifty McThriftmiester, Mr. Bring Bananas In The Car, Mr. I'm Not Paying For That Crap, wasn't with us to say no.

* Mom found a hill in northern Missouri that would make you lose your stomach when you drove over the crest, so we made her stop, turn the car around, and go back and forth over it about 10 times, and she did it, earning her a place in the Mom Hall of Fame.

* My sister and I got bored, and found a really annoying way to amuse ourselves.

ME: "Can we stop and get out of the car?"
MOM: "No, Julie."
ME: "Aren't we going to be there pretty soon?" It seemed like forever since our most recent slop of the trough at the Golden Arches.
SISTER: "Yeah!" (She was six, her role was to play backup to whatever position I was taking.)
MOM: "No, we aren't close yet. Let's play a game - when you see a truck, you can honk my nose!" (This is one of those moments a parent looks back and says "What in the hell was I thinking!?!?")
ME: "TRUCK!" And I pushed my hand on Mom's nose.
MOM: "HONK!"
SISTER: "TRUCK!"
MOM: "HONK!"
ME: "TWO TRUCKS!" And I smack my hand on Mom's nose twice.
SISTER: "Me too!" And she semi-punches Mom in the nose twice.
MOM: (Dodging our blows and trying to stay out of the ditch) "Honk...honk...ouch..hey..Knock it off Dammit! No more honking!"
ME: "But Mom, it is a fun game!"

Then Mom said, "Julie." That was all, but it meant that I must not complain. But instead of being a good girl like Laura, I rode shotgun and complained the rest of the way to Mansfield, because I was that kind of child.

We did go to Rocky Ridge Farm, Laura and Almanzo's house in Mansfield, and to me it was the most amazing thing on the planet. The house, which Laura and Manly built themselves, was lovely, and it held all of the holy relics of the Little House series: Pa's actual fiddle, Mary's organ, the 'Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread' plate that survived the fire, the rocking chair Almanzo built for Laura, and of course tons of photos, brooches, letters, and other ephemera. I was in heaven.

From Rocky Ridge, we proceeded to the graveyard, where we visited Laura's grave. There she was, next to Manly. And then something a little undignified happened. My sister, who had gamely followed me through the house and into the gift shop and now to the graveyard, was having a revelation.

"WAIT A MINUTE!!!" she screamed. "Do you mean to tell me that we drove ALL THIS WAY to see some DEAD LADY'S HOUSE!?!?!"

She agreed to this trip on the terms that Melissa Gilbert would come bounding out of the house, braids flying behind her, to bring us in to camp out in the attic, go for wagon rides and play by the creek and mess with Nellie Olson. But she had NOT signed up to poke around some dead person's stuff. It was too much. My little sister proceeded to have a full-blown meltdown, dancing on the grave of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Because that dead bitch had done her wrong.

We don't speak of the "Dead Lady Vacation" in my family, but let's just say that my sister never became a fan of the books, my mom never again proposed games that involved smacking her about the face while driving, and I still send messages of apology to LIW every once in a while.