Sheri's Blog

Books - The Other Boleyn Girl & Wicked

I grew up in a family where the women catered endlessly to the men. Not out of respect, mind you, nor even affection. No, their wooing and appeasement of the various husbands, fathers, uncles, and brothers in their orbit was a much more political endeavor. Like courtiers in the service of a childish and truculent king, they fawned and flattered the man in question, soothing his temper and his ego for the sake of a little peace and quiet. As a child I was struck by how effortlessly my aunts and grandmothers slid from gossiping about what a pain in the ass so-and-so was, to showering the man himself with compliments and praise the instant he materialized in the kitchen. My mother wasn’t very good at this game, mostly because she resented having to play it. And after all, as any good courtier knows, even the sweetest words fall flat if the delivery doesn’t convince. Not surprisingly, I take after my mom.

I hadn’t thought about the kitchen table gender diplomacy of my female relatives for a long time. Then I read Phillipa Gregory’s novel The Other Boleyn Girl. If you haven’t read it or seen the movie, (critically panned, stars Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johannsson) it tells the story of Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated second wife of Henry VIII. Married at 12 to a nobleman, pushed into an affair with the king by her scheming, socially ambitious family, Mary was schooled in the arts of flattery and seduction from earliest childhood. It’s a terrific book, by the way – the literary version of a juicy beach read. The similarities between the powerless women in King Henry’s court, and the powerless women in my grandmother’s kitchen were staggering. In both places, youth and beauty were prized commodities and if played properly, tickets to security. In both places, every effort was directed toward the continual comfort and amusement of the monarch, regardless of how exhausting or irrational that effort might be. Like the king, the men in my family saw such service and coddling as a birthright. And like the Boleyn sisters, I think the women in my family viewed their own financial dependency as a fact of birth, too. After all, as my grandmother once pointed out, there’s no point arguing with the world. All you can do is use what you’ve got to get what you need. 

Another book I read recently that I just loved is Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. It’s the novel that the very different (and utterly fabulous in its own right) Broadway musical of the same name is based upon. Wicked is the story of how the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz became the legendary bad girl on a broom. She wasn’t always a witch. Her name was Elphaba. She was a strange child, frightening to her parents, both of whom were too distracted - her mother by boredom and disappointment, her father by religious mania – to properly care for any child, much less one who bit, and resisted their embraces, and who was such an awfully vivid and unnatural shade of green.  From these difficult beginnings the seeds of wickedness are sown, right? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It’s an easy conclusion to jump to, but Elphaba’s story is far more complicated. And, I so want you to read the book that I won’t give away any more details, or spoil any of the wonderful surprises in Maguire’s rich, imaginative story. But I can’t resist quoting my favorite sentence in the whole book:

“Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?”

Boy, is that ever the truth.

Alright already! Here's the infamous spaghetti pie!

Bob’s been after me to make him a spaghetti pie for coming up on three years now. It’s a very simple dish, and I would have gotten around to it sooner if it weren’t for the kids, the job, the house under construction, the personal melodrama. You know - the usual things that make it easy to put off whipping up a spaghetti pie on demand.

Like a lot of the really good Italian food I grew up eating, this is a terrific example of poverty cuisine: amazing food from the simplest, and often cheapest, ingredients. In this case, pasta, eggs, a bit of meat, and some cheese. As with most simple Italian dishes, the quality of ingredients is super important. While you could probably throw this together using Velveeta and cocktail weenies, it wouldn’t be nearly as good and not a bit Italian. So, since the recipe only calls for 4 ounces of meat, get the best quality you can find. Ditto for the cheese. And please, oh please, do not use that nasty sprinkle cheese in the green can. Real Pecorino Romano or Reggiano cheese has an incredible nutty, earthy, slightly tangy-sweet richness that makes the powdered imposter “parmesan” taste like an old sock. 

You can serve this as an entrée, with a green salad. Or, as a great side dish with a roasted meat. And if you like cold pizza, wait till you try this.

Here’s the recipe Bob insists on, reprinted here with zero permission from the publisher. 

 

Spaghetti Pie

 

8 large eggs

½ cup freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano-Reggiano

Freshly ground pepper

1 lb spaghetti or bucatini, cooked al dente and drained

2 oz sliced Genoa salami or soppressata, chopped

2 oz sliced prosiutto or boiled ham, chopped

2 tbsp olive oil

4 oz provolone, chopped

 

In a large bowl, beat the eggs, grated cheese, and pepper to taste. You will not need salt, because the meats and cheeses are salty. Add the spaghetti, salami, and prosciutto to the bowl and toss well.

Heat the oil in a 10” nonstick skillet over medium heat. Pour half of the pasta into the skillet. Scatter the provolone on top. Pour on the remaining spaghetti mixture.

Turn the heat to medium-low. Cover the pan and cook 5 minutes. Slide a spatula under the pie and lift it gently around the edges to allow some of the uncooked eggs to slide underneath. Cover and cook 10 minutes, or until the eggs are almost set and the bottom is golden.

Meanwhile, preheat the broiler.

Place the skillet under the broiler to brown the top and finish cooking the eggs, about 3-5 minutes more.

Run a spatula under the pie to loosen it. Lift the handle of the pan and slip the pie out onto a serving platter. Cut into wedges. Serve warm, or at room temperature. Serves 8.

From Entertaining with the Sopranos Warner Books 2006

 

Broken Phone Booth

…And if I die before I learn to speak
Can money pay for all the days I lived awake
But half asleep…

from Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand

Primitive Radio Gods

I was in Philadelphia on business a few months ago, staying in a hotel at Penn’s Landing, just a few blocks from my old neighborhood. Instead of going to bed, I went for a walk through Olde City and up South Street. There’d been a lot of changes in the years since I moved away, and even finding my old apartment was harder than I’d expected. I used to live across the street from a legendary bar called J.C. Dobbs. It has a different name now. A tattoo parlor has replaced the antiques store that was a few doors down, but the funky hat store, the gourmet grocery, and many of the restaurants are still the same. It was mid-August, but the city was in the middle of a freakish cold snap. The people on the streets were bundled in hoodies and jackets, hands stuffed in pockets, heads down against the wind. Despite the crowds, there wasn’t much noise. Walking along those streets I once knew so well I felt oddly invisible. It could easily have been a dream; familiar and yet not, blurry around the edges, like an image out of register.  When I tried to explain it to the man who drove me to the airport the next day, he was aghast. “You did what? Are you out of your mind? You coulda been f---ing killed! You know the murder rate in this city? Don’t you ever do that again.” In typical Philly fashion, this lecture (from a total stranger) continued on for another five minutes or so, complete with colorful language and repeated invocations of the Lord’s name. This, by the way, is how a Philly guy shows he cares. No place like home, right?

When I left Philly, I didn’t mean to stay gone. I thought I was leaving for six months, a year at the most. The plan was to take a break from grad school, get some real work experience under my belt, earn some cash. I had a life there, and a lot of unfinished business. I could never have known that leaving would set my real life, the one I was meant to have, in motion. And I wouldn’t trade it now; I think I’m where I belong. But the weight of all that I left behind hit me that night, and it was hard to not regret some of those choices. In leaving that city, I threw away love, a potential career, and even to some degree, my family. You’re careless like that at 22, and even more so if you’re an emotionally shattered child stumbling around in an adult body. But that’s not something you understand at the time. That’s something you figure out later, usually after it’s too late to set it right. That’s when the wondering, or the doubting, or the regret sets in. Did I do the right thing? Did I make the right choice? Would it be amazing or tragic if, at the end of your life, you learned where all those paths not taken might have led? 

Imagine if that’s what hell was: the utter loss of God, and of love and hope, and the sure knowledge that it was you who destroyed whatever good might have been yours. That it all could have been different, if only you had been less selfish or less cowardly, if only you had been a more grateful, more loving human being. To know that it was you all along and no one else, not the people you punished or blamed or pushed away. Total responsibility: yours. All second chances: gone. You’d almost rather spend eternity as a pitchfork target – at least then you could hang on to the meager pleasure of thinking yourself a victim. 

The writer Joan Didion said it best: everything counts. But who can possibly live like that? Other than Buddha, I mean. To be so fully and completely in the moment, every moment, to understand and even embrace the idea that everything counts? I’ve been trying to celebrate the moment, and it’s tricky. For example, I had a dentist appointment this afternoon. Try making that a mindfully meaningful experience. Or is it a meaningfully mindful experience? People, it’s an x-ray. You hold still, you bite down. I stayed in the moment, tasting the hard plastic in my mouth, hearing the whirring noise of the x-ray machine, feeling the tile floor beneath my sneakers. And then, my mind wandered to concerns over irradiating my brain with yet another dental x-ray. Not to mention the radiation from my cell phone. And the various towers and relays and satellite dishes at work beaming God-knows-what at me. I went from mindfully aware back to seriously neurotic in less than twenty seconds. Which actually represents growth; before, I would have skipped the mindfulness exercise and just shown up at the dentist’s office already a panicky mess. 

If everything counts, than perhaps there’s another way of looking at the problem. Instead of seeing your life as a whole, maybe it’s better to break it into episodes. Since you’re not the same person you were ten or fifteen or twenty years ago, you ought to cut yourself some slack. What we think of as mistakes now surely seemed like reasonably good ideas to the people we once were. Some of those mistakes even felt like inevitabilities, didn’t they? Also, it’s a painful fact that many of us can’t fathom the cost of our actions until it’s past time to pay for them. So what are you going to do? Wallow in the past and wish for another try? Daydream about the future when things will finally be the way they’re supposed to be? Or face up to the reality that everything counts, and this moment, the one that’s slipping away half-noticed is the only one that matters. There’s no point chasing the ghosts of our former selves. What could we possibly say that would make any sense? We did what we did, and here we are, powerless to change even one single second. That’s the sting of regret: the knowledge of what needs to be put right, the impossibility to make it so. Kind of like standing outside a broken phone booth with money in your hand.

What A Feeling

A few weeks ago, in a hotel room in another time zone, wired on caffeine and unable to sleep, I stumbled across the movie Flashdance playing on CMT. I remember liking it well enough back in the day, though I can’t recall actually seeing it in a theater. I must have been in my brooding and/or weird foreign film phase, refusing to pay to see popcorn movies like Flashdance or Top Gun, while secretly inhaling them on cable. (Good golly was I ever a pain in the ass in those days.)  But anyway, there we were, Flashdance and me, floating in a sea of pillows on the Heavenly Bed, pumped full of Starbucks, all jacked up and no place to go. Might as well watch, right? 

In case you’ve forgotten, Flashdance tells the story of Alex, a beautiful young woman who works as a welder in a Pittsburgh steel mill by day, but dreams of being a dancer. To that end, she moonlights as a performer at a blue collar hangout called Mawby’s Bar. Mawby’s looks like the kind of place you’d head to drink beer, shoot pool, and maybe find some greasy chow heavy on the fat and carbs. If told that Mawby’s also featured dancers, you couldn’t be faulted for expecting to see some topless women twirling listlessly around a pole to either an old Motley Crue or Billy Squiers tune. It’s that kind of place.

But in Flashdance, the exotic dancing is of an entirely different sort. The bored, barely dressed Bada Bing girl is nowhere in sight. Instead, Mawby’s Bar features almost fully dressed women doing what might best be described as performance art, for an audience of apparently awestruck steelworkers. There’s one scene in which Alex, done up in kabuki makeup, towering wig, and enormous kimono, executes a rageful little number in front of a television set, as floor-level floodlights distort her features and cast giant shadows on the wall behind her. I don’t know what the intended message was – screw you Sony for alienating the human spirit with your might electro-techno fist? Then, Alex rips off the kimono and wig, revealing royal blue spandex bike shorts and a white t-shirt, and proceeds to fling her body against the walls. Message? That’s anyone's guess. But here’s something to think about: in the movie, men in the bar are shown nodding appreciatively into their beers as if to say, “After a long day in the mill, there’s nothing like watching a samurai dance in front of a strobe light to help you unwind.” In real life, there’d be a whole pack of guys yelling, “Show us your tits!” 

That’s sad, isn’t it? 1983, the year Flashdance was released, wasn’t so very long ago chronologically. But it might as well be an eon. A movie like Flashdance wouldn’t get made today. Who’d buy an exotic dancer who keeps her clothes on? Our world, a mere 24 years later, is one in which housewives take pole-dancing classes, college girls bare their breasts on spring break for roving camera crews , and kids in at least one middle school in this country are being handed contraceptives. This summer’s big date movie spun an unlikely love story out of a one-night stand between two people so painfully mismatched that only a barrel of booze and an unused condom could have ever brought them together. Even the movies we market to kids now are cynical and knowing, jam-packed with innuendo and leering references aimed at the ticket-buying adults in the audience.  God forbid we let kids be kids. What, and leave them to drift through their early days oblivious to the typhoon of branding and marketing that starts battering them before they’ve even learned to write their own names?  Let’s face it: our culture is sick and depraved, awash in empty sex, toxic foods, too-easy credit, and cheap platitudes that sit like Band-aids on bullet holes. The scariest thing is how quickly we got here.

Alex, with her welder's torch and her ballerina dreams, lives in a far more innocent place.  (And who could possibly have imagined that the greedy 80's might ever look so naive or unsullied?)  She wowed the faculty at the fictional Pittsburgh Dance Conservatory with a spectacularly unorthodox audition, proving that guts and moxie trump the system every time.  That's how it goes in Hollywood, the place where Julia Roberts' starry-eyed streetwalking Cinderella bagged a charming prince of a john in Pretty Woman.  If Flashdance were made today, Alex would be a stripper at Scores, and her big break would come in the form of a homemade porno video going viral on the internet.  There'd be a lot more frontal nudity, and a whole lot fewer cutaway shots of books about ballerinas.  Alex, in short, would show us her tits.  What a feeling, huh?

   

 

It's October - Time to Think Pink

My mother’s mother died of embarrassment.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t exactly the embarrassment that killed her. It was the cancer. Specifically, the lump she found one day in her breast. She was too embarrassed to tell anyone about it, much less see a doctor. So the lump grew and grew, and the cancer spread and spread, until it was too late for embarrassment. And then it was too late for her.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. You’re going to be seeing a lot of pink, hearing a lot of talk about self-exams and mammograms. Don’t tune it out. When it comes to beating breast cancer, early detection is the critical factor. That means actually doing the monthly self-exam. It takes a few minutes in the shower. It’s not difficult, it doesn’t hurt, and there’s nothing embarrassing about it. Mammograms have gotten a bad rap for being painful. They’re really not. Yeah, your boob gets smooshed between two glass plates for a couple of seconds. Big deal. Anyone who’s ever been a teenager with an overenthusiastic boyfriend (and you know exactly what I’m talking about so don’t pretend you don’t), nursed a baby, or worn certain styles of Wonderbra, has probably been through worse. A mammogram is so quick and easy that you’ll spend more time filling out the insurance paperwork beforehand than you will in the imaging room. If you’re 40, it’s time for your first baseline mammogram. If you’re like me, with a family history of breast cancer (on both sides – like it’s not enough that my relatives are all nuts, is it?) talk to your doctor or your ob/gyn. I know several women who had their first mammogram at age 30; my own cousin was significantly younger than that. Her mother, who nearly died of breast cancer, was only 34 when she was diagnosed. 

Encourage your friends to do their self-exams, or to schedule their mammograms. Nag your sisters, and your mom, and your grandmother if you’re lucky enough to have one.  If you’ve never participated in Race for the Cure, or the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, or BMW’s Drive for the Cure, or any of a dozen or more other fantastic events in communities all across the country, make this the year you check one out. They’re incredible, life-affirming experiences. I ran in my first Race for the Cure event six years ago, pregnant with Olivia, and nearly doubled over with morning sickness. I didn’t win. Not even close. In fact, the only reason I didn’t come in dead last was because an elderly woman in an over-sized pink cowboy hat let me pass her on the last turn. She was a 17-plus year survivor. And that, not being the fastest runner or the sleekest athlete, is what Race for the Cure is all about.

Check out www.komen.org. And tell a friend.

Physics & Favorites

Bob is one of those people who need to rank things. He’s got to have favorites: favorite movies, favorite songs, favorite TV shows, a favorite whatever. I have a hard time choosing a favorite anything, which drives him crazy. It took my entire childhood for me to finally settle on green as my favorite color, and I still feel bad for poor second-place purple. The biggest, the best, the nicest, the worst – it doesn’t matter what it is. I’m just no good at choosing a favorite.

Not too long ago, I read a fascinating article about quantum physics and the problem of choice. As I read it, I understood it. Five minutes later, I was completely confused. Ever have that happen? You feel like you’re following along just fine, but then it all gets so muddled in your head that there’s no way on earth you could ever repeat it back and have it come out right? So anyway, this article was describing the instant just before a decision is made. In that instant, you have a universe of possibilities spread before you, all equally probable. As soon as you make your choice, however, every single one of those possibilities winks out of existence, and along with them, the paths they represent. And you’re left with the one you’ve chosen, for better or for worse. That’s vastly, hugely simplified, but it’s the best this liberal arts major can manage.

All those possibilities – here one second, vanished the next. It makes you stop and think about all of the choices and decisions you’ve made in your life that brought you right up to this very moment. Scary. I’ve got a pretty detailed list of do-overs I’d like a shot at. Not necessarily the big things, but I do wonder how my life might have unfolded differently if I had been a whole lot braver where other people were concerned. Or maybe more reckless is a better way to put it. Like Nicholas Cage says in Moonstruck: we’re here to fall in love and break our hearts and just ruin ourselves. (Or something along those lines. That scene makes me cry so much that I can never quite remember the dialogue exactly.) I admire people who take Nicholas Cage’s advice to heart. It always looked so risky and messy to me. But that was the message, wasn’t it? Don’t live your own life at arm’s length. Get in there and play rough, full contact, no pads. So you might get banged up; so what? That’s the point of it all. It’s one thing to think about living your life on that kind of emotional edge, but it’s another thing altogether to actively choose to do it. It’s sad to say, but many of us don’t really make any choice at all about our lives; we let circumstances and other people choose for us. I guess that passivity is a choice in itself, which would qualify it as one of those infinite probabilities. But no one likes to think of his or her own life as a thing that just happened; we want to believe that it’s something we created.

Back to the problem of favorites. I’ve thought about it a lot, and it just seems that choosing a favorite signals an end to the whole process of sampling. It shuts down all those other lovely and mysterious possibilities. Why would anyone want that? That’s why I can’t fathom having a favorite book. There are so many to read. And as much as looks like banana ice cream might be my all-time favorite, I know there are lots more flavors still to try. Perhaps if a thing is reasonably finite, like types of sandwiches, it might be possible to choose a favorite. All-natural peanut butter and blackberry jam on whole wheat would be an excellent front-runner. And I’m pretty sure that my favorite Pink Floyd song is “Wish You Were Here”. (Though why I have a favorite Pink Floyd song in the first place, I can’t say.) The only other favorite thing I’ve been able to think of is a favorite place to run: the mountain bike trails at a nearby county park. Have you ever tried trail running? It’s the best. You have to concentrate so hard on the terrain that you forget all your crazy troubles and even your fatigue. It’s Zen. Until you trip over a root and wipe out, of course. I’d blaze through those woods like a slightly paranoid Pocahonatas: one eye on the ground, the other scanning for serial killers lurking in the trees. Now that I think of it, suspecting innocent strangers of being deranged killers should probably count as my favorite hobby, I do it so often.

If you mixed together the physics of choice with Nicholas Cage’s excellent advice, and then added Pink Floyd, and put it all into a computer and asked it to tell you one important thing about life, I think you’d get an answer. It’d be right out of “Wish You Were Here”:

did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

Better the war, and the ruin, and all of that risky, heart-breaking mess. Better the choice you make, than the one made for you. And better still, the possibility of all those infinite paths, glimmering in the darkness, waiting, like stars, to be wished upon.

World Vision - Dominican Republic

Picture a space roughly the size of a child’s bedroom, created out of sheets of plywood, metal, or, if you’re very fortunate, cinder block.  Roof it with corrugated tin.  Divide that into a kitchen/living area, a bedroom or two, and a privy.  There’ll be no television or telephone or even refrigerator, which is just as well since electric service is sporadic and unreliable, when it’s available at all.  Perhaps you’ll have a tiny gas stove to prepare the one meal per day that your family depends on.  But there won’t be any running water, and very limited access to clean drinking water.  When it rains, the rain will come into your home, and if you live too near it, so will the river.  And if that’s the case, when it rains heavily, you will have to take your few belongings and evacuate to higher ground, and wait, unsheltered, until the water recedes.  Along the narrow, deeply rutted and unpaved streets – often barely wide enough to accommodate a single vehicle – there might be piles of garbage, or open ditches flowing with sewage.  Dogs are everywhere, but it’s best to avoid them for fear of rabies.  The simplest things we take for granted, like streetlights, sidewalks, windows glowing with the blue light of countless televisions, are all absent.  It’s nearly impossible to comprehend that a human being would actually call this place home, this landscape so utterly deprived that it borders on the surreal.    

For some residents of the city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, that landscape isn’t a nightmare; it’s the norm.  They call it Sabana Perdida, the lost savannah.  More than one hundred and forty thousand people live there, many of them children.  This is the Third World, something we hear about on the news, but have managed to keep at a comfortable distance, not realizing how close to home it truly is.  Relatively few Americans know much at all about the Dominican Republic.  If you’re good at geography, you know it shares an island with the country of Haiti.  Or you might have heard of the incredibly posh resorts, like Punta Cana, that dot its coastline.  The combination of that growing resort industry and proximity to the US – the DR is barely two hours by air from Miami – is driving increased American tourism and awareness of the DR.  That’s good news for the Dominican economy.  But what they don’t tell you in the glossy resort brochures is that the Dominican Republic is the third poorest country on earth.  It’s hard to fathom this kind of extreme poverty, right at our doorstep.  Yet it’s the hidden face of the Dominican Republic, the one you won’t see at the airport, or at the rental beach villa, or in the charming, ancient streets of historic Santo Domingo.

The third poorest country in the world – how poor is that, exactly?  The average annual income in the Dominican Republic is $2,080 USD.  By comparison, the average median income in the United States - $43,318 – is just over 20 times that number.  In the DR, a poor family might scrape by on about a dollar’s worth of food per day.  In the US, where we feed a dollar into a vending machine in exchange for a Diet Coke, that’s a tough concept to wrap your mind around.  In the Dominican Republic, despite the taxes that citizens pay, basic amenities like water and sewage, power, transportation, and public education are painfully inadequate.   How inadequate?  For one example, there aren’t anywhere near enough public schools to serve the population.  This means, very simply, that a great number of the very poorest children will never have the chance to receive any formal education.  And without education, there’s virtually no hope of breaking the cycle of poverty.  Add to that poor nutrition, little or no access to healthcare, and the devastating effects of HIV/AIDS, and you have, in essence, entire generations of children just written off, condemned. 

Hopeless, you think.  The problems are too massive and complicated, too tangled a knot to ever unravel.  It’s easier to be cynical, to turn away.  And then you go to Sabana Perdida, or a place like it, and you see what’s possible when people don’t turn away.  When one individual reaches out to another, and using the most basic tools, creates hope where there was none.  This is the work of World Vision, the group we traveled with to the Dominican Republic.  World Vision, founded over 50 years ago and today the fifth largest relief organization in the world, operates on a simple principal.  One sponsor coming alongside one child, and, at minimal cost, providing access to better nutrition, clean drinking water, healthcare, and educational opportunities.  Sponsorship, like World Vision itself, isn’t about charity; it’s about finding solutions to root causes of poverty.  It’s about helping to create the environment and the opportunity for communities to become self-sustaining.  It’s about developing that most precious and valuable resource, the one found in even the most wretched and forgotten places: children. 

The children of Sabana Perdida are beautiful, silly, mischievous, playful, shy, clever, bold.  Just like your kids or mine, or kids anywhere in the world.  They’re smaller than our children, a result of poor nutrition.  Darling 9 year-old twin girls, their hair carefully braided and beribboned were significantly smaller than my 6 year-old daughter Olivia.  Their health is more fragile; the immunizations we take for granted aren’t available, and serious, even life threatening conditions like asthma and especially, HIV/AIDS, go untreated.  Most of the parents I know agonize over which chewable vitamin to buy; can you imagine watching your child suffer and being powerless to do anything about it?

I went to Sabana Perdida with a lot of expectations.  I expected to see terrible things.  I expected to feel pity and sadness and even despair.   I couldn’t have been more wrong.   Here’s what I did see: possibilities.  I know that seems impossible, but it’s true.  World Vision has been working in this area for a number of years now.   Sponsors – people like you or me – are the reason that so many of these children are now able to attend school.   The buildings are small, the classrooms overcrowded, but it’s school and it represents the first step, maybe the most important step, out of the slums.   There are job-training programs, there is a health clinic, and a clinic that treats and counsels HIV positive parents and their HIV positive children.  There is a youth center; so primitive by our standards that I had to be told I was looking at a “gymnasium”.  But every afternoon, that center fills with young teens.  They study and play music, learn computer skills, and most of all, have a safe place to gather.

I sat down on the ground in front of a house, in the dump, by the river.  Children clambered into my lap and pressed themselves as close as they could.  I tried out some of my Dora the Explorer Spanish on them, and believe it or not, we managed to have quite a conversation.   It seems that kids, no matter where they are, are surprisingly patient with adult stupidity.  They giggled at my pronunciations, and nodded with delight on the few times I found the right word.  Holding them, I was struck by how immaculately clean they were.  Again, those expectations – I was expecting filth and hopelessness.  One little girl who curled up in my lap was wearing a flowered dress.  It was faded and old, but it was clean and starched.  God knows how, in that crowded, sweltering, forsaken place, her mother found a way to iron that dress.  I sure don’t.  But I know this: that child is loved.  And that, more than anything, is what I learned in Sabana Perdida.  There’s no difference at all between my kids and those kids.  There’s no difference at all between them and us. 

Here’s why I support World Vision and am asking you to consider doing the same.  World Vision works in 99 countries around the globe.  And although it is a Christian relief organization, World Vision isn’t only about preaching Christ’s message.  World Vision staff and volunteers show Christ’s message of love through the work they do.  And they do that work in parts of the world where simply being a Christian is a life-threatening risk.  World Vision isn’t a charity where those of us who have feel ennobled by giving to those who don’t.  World Vision enters a region or community with the express purpose of eventually leaving it, strong, healthy, and self-sustaining.  And World Vision is a first-rate financial steward.  87% of your sponsorship dollar goes to the programs that benefit your sponsored child.   See for yourself at www.charitynavigator.org.

I know it’s hard to believe that a dollar a day can do anything for anyone.  But I’ve seen it in action.   I’ve seen what happens when a school appears where there was no hope of education.  I’ve seen a hundred or more parents and children standing for hours in the sun just to register, and receive a few notebooks and pencils.  I’ve seen what happens when a young mother is taught a marketable skill, or when a five year-old HIV positive orphan and his grandmother get enough to eat.   When you see what a dollar really can do, you don’t feel hopeless.  You don’t feel pity.  You feel energized and inspired and ready to jump in and help.  And believe it or not, you feel joy.  When I went to the Dominican Republic to meet my sponsored child, 7 year-old Perla Estafania, I thought I was bringing her a whole sackful of presents.  Little did I know, I was the one receiving the gifts.

You can learn more about World Vision and view videos and photos of our trip at www.bobandsheri.com/worldvision.

Stars with Cellulite

It’s random thought/recipe time.

Since John Frieda yanked Ocean Waves off the market, I’ve had to get creative.  Ocean Waves is this amazing hair product that makes your hair look like you’ve just wandered in off the beach.  It’s the only thing that’s ever worked on my wild, curly, insanely bushy mop.  You can buy Ocean Waves on e-Bay and I have, but scarcity is driving up the price.  So, I’ve whipped up my own.  In response to many e-mail  requests for the recipe, here goes:

Fill a spray bottle with 8 ounces of hot water.  (I used some distilled water that happened to be in the house.  I’m sure tap water would be fine.  And the only reason I use hot water is to help the salt dissolve.)

Add a couple of heaping tablespoons of sea salt (which you can buy at any grocery store)

Add ¼ cup of baby oil.  Shake well before applying. 

Generously spritz throughout wet hair.  Tousle, twirl, whatever.  Then try really hard to just leave your hair alone till it dries.  That’ll help keep frizzies in check.    

Note:  if you have limp or flat hair, or hair that tends to be oily, reduce the amount of baby oil.  If, like me, you’ve got dry hair that wants to frizz, increase the oil.  I use closer to 1/3 cup when I make this for myself.

Something that drives me crazy:

Have you noticed how in some movies and TV shows, after the big love scene in bed, the female character will wind herself up in the bed sheet before slinking off to the bathroom, kitchen, to answer the door, etc.?  Excuse me, but who does this?  I’m all for modesty – in which case, grab his t-shirt off the floor and wear that – but it’s never occurred to me to demurely swath myself in an acre of percale après amour.  Of course, being a giant klutz, I wouldn’t make it a foot past the bed before tripping and falling.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe other women do this all the time?  And not just in Kate Hudson-type movies or on The Bold and the Beautiful?

And now something that makes me irrationally happy:

The annual Stars with Cellulite issue of The National Enquirer.  It’s not that I wish imperfections on other women, famous or otherwise.  I don’t.  It’s just that, no matter how I’ve tried to fight it, I’ve bought the body propaganda that Hollywood, along with the fashion, cosmetics and advertising industries have been selling.  I will never, ever be thin enough.  My hair will never, ever be smooth enough.  I will never, ever be fill-in-the-blank enough.  Tall, willowy, exotic, bootylicious, mysterious, glamorous, sophisticated, whatever.  Pick one, pick them all.  None apply to me.  So, seeing some of the most iconic beauties of our time looking a bit dimpled or dumpy in a bathing suit, is a relief.  If Maria Sharapova has cellulite on her thighs, then by God, anyone can have it.  It’s not a crime.  It’s merely a helpful reminder that we’re all human, and that time and gravity spare no one.  Now, I do have to confess to a nasty bit of schadenfreude. When I see a cellulite photo of a young, childless celeb – like Paris, for example – I can’t help but snicker and think, “Think it’s hard now to keep that body looking hot?  Wait till you have kids, sweetheart.”  It’s evil, I know, I know!  But it cheers me right up.  Though it doesn’t make me feel any better about bathing suits.  Hate them.  I think we’d all look better and be happier if we could just frolic in the surf butt naked.

Okay, so now I’m off to the beach for a week of jellyfish, sun poisoning, sharks, riptides, undertow, and stranger danger.  Nothing like a relaxing vacation with the little ones, right? :-)

Glow flies

Maybe it's just my neighborhood, but I've noticed something weird.  There just aren't that many fireflies around this summer.   I hadn't really given it any thought, but the other night my four year-old, Caramia, bounced into the room wearing her very cutest Cinderella nightgown and demanded that we go outside immediately to capture a "glow fly". 

"Do you mean a firefly? " I asked.

"No, a glow fly.  A lighting-up bug.  Like Tinkerbell.  I'm going to keep it in a jar in my room!"

Out into the backyard we went.  Now, we live in the city - granted, in an area with lots and lots of trees - but it's still the city.  And I suppose that fact might account for the relative absence of fireflies.  After prowling the backyard for about fifteen minutes, we finally spotted one lone glow fly.  Unfortunately, it was cruising about ten feet off the ground.  Caramia was disappointed, but she was soon distracted by the sight of a bunny peering out from beneath a shrub.  You can bet that we didn't manage to capture that, either.

Later, after I'd tucked her in, I started thinking about fireflies.  They used to be so thick in the air when I was a kid that catching a jarful barely rated as a challenge.  There were always a few worldly and maybe even heartless girls on the block who'd capture fireflies, pull off their glowing tails, and then wear those phosphorescent bits on their fingers and earlobes like jewelry.  I was too squeamish for that.  Instead. I liked to hold one in my cupped palms, and peek between my thumbs as the poor creature flashed on and off.  I always let them go afterward.  It's not that I was a particularly sensitive kid, but I'd seen death up close with one too many pet hamsters.  (I'll never know if those hamsters were doomed when they came home with us, or doomed because they came home with us.  It's the eternal rodent enigma of my childhood.)  After that, I had little taste for keeping a living thing in a cage.

But where are the fireflies this summer?  And is it only this summer that they've been so scarce?  Have they been declining all along, and me too busy with other things to notice?  I've thought and thought about it.  Our old house bordered a pond, and although the frogs could be nearly deafening and there was other wildlife in the form of heron, racoons, and deer, I can't recall much in the way of fireflies.  In fact, the last time I remember really noticing their glow was about eleven or twelve years ago.  I was in the woods at dusk, on a favorite hiking trail.  I stepped into a little clearing and just like that, walked into an enormous cloud of fireflies.  They were everywhere, and it was amazing.  Flickering on and off, creating so much of that eerie green light that it was easy to see how our ancestors could mistake them for fairies.  I turned to the person I was with and said, "It's magic!  It's like we've walked into A Midsummer Night's Dream, isn't it?"  He said, "Huh?  It's just bugs."  So I broke up with him.

I sure do miss those fireflies.

 

His Dark Materials

I love books, and reading books, and thinking about books, and even just looking at books in bookstores.  Reading is just about my favorite thing to do in the whole wide world.  As a kid I used to believe that the worst fate anyone could suffer was a life deprived of books.   I know better now – there are far worse nightmares to be caught in.  But a life without books is still hard for me to imagine.

When you are a bookworm, falling into a new story brings you much the same rush of pleasure you experience when you are infatuated with another person.  It’s consuming.  There is a part of you that stays in this world, driving, talking, folding the laundry.  And there is another part, not the rest of you, maybe, but an awfully significant piece, that disappears into the story and remains there, suspended, until the book can be picked up once again, and the story resumed.

This is why it’s hard to live with a bookworm.  We’re forever being called away to places that only we can see.  And then, when we try to bring the story back to you, to share it, it seems to come out either too flat, or a little blurry, like someone else’s vacation photos.

This summer, I’ve been away in my head for weeks, almost totally lost in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.   It’s so amazing that I’m all but going door-to-door telling people to read it.  If you’ve been saying, hey – where can I find a great, sweeping adventure story that dares to grapple with love, theology, and particle physics? – then these are the books for you.  I’m talking especially to you, my fellow Rowling enthusiasts, all so sad over the release of the final Harry Potter.  Whatever will you read now?  Philip Pullman, that’s what, my bookish buddies.  You’re going to love His Dark Materials.  The three books, in order, are:  Northern Lights (published in the US as The Golden Compass.  And yes, you did just see a commercial for a movie of the same title); The Subtle Knife; and The Amber Spyglass.  Now don’t get all I-don’t-like-science-fiction or I-m-not-reading-a-kid-book on me.  His Dark Materials is great reading, period.  I can’t wait to read it again, and I just finished the final book about twelve hours ago.  That’s how good it is.  It doesn’t just whisk you away to an entirely new world – it whisks you off to multiple new worlds, each so fully and beautifully imagined that you’ll have a lump in your throat from knowing you’ll never really get to visit any of them.  I’m going to warn you, however, that if the absence of God or religion in J.K. Rowling’s books upsets you, then you might want to leave His Dark Materials on the shelf.  Because Pullman pretty much takes on all of organized religion and theology in a way that makes a pack of wand-waving Hogwarts kids look like a Sunday school field trip in comparison. 

 

Speaking of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and the debate over whether or not HP lures young readers away from Christianity and into the dark world of witchcraft and wizardry...On the one hand, I think, what a pack of nutters.  It’s only a book!  And on the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than a book.  This makes it an argument worth having.  All the more so since the thing we’re all so fired up about is a book, and not the usual vapid crap that fills our tabloid press.  Hurray! It’s damn near a miracle.

J.K. Rowling’s books deal with the nature of good and evil, with morality and responsibility.  Yes, the story is set in a magical world – and wouldn’t it be amazing to fly about on a broom?  But that’s not why readers respond so passionately to Harry Potter.  His story resonates because it’s so very human.  Like Harry, don’t we all at some point have to choose between what we know is right over what we think might be easy?  The characters in the Harry Potter universe may call themselves witches or wizards or giants or centaurs or what have, but they are no different from us.  Some are kind, generous, and altruistic.  Some are sinister, selfish, and foul.  Their values vary, and their motives are mixed - just like here in reality, where, as best I can tell, almost no one feels the need to cloak him or herself in a veil of magic before doing something completely rotten.  Just look at all the unspeakable things we manage to accomplish without casting a single spell.

I’m not criticizing those who believe that the Potter books are anti-Christian and dangerous for young minds.  A book can shake your faith.  Try reading Yaffa Eliach’s meticulously detailed There Once Was a World, a book about the Nazi extermination of an entire Jewish village.  Or Philip Gourevitch’s book about the Rwandan genocide, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.   These are stories that actually happened, right here, in this world, and nothing magical about it.  Look at the evil we’re capable of, and maybe even worse, our apparent indifference to so much of it.  If that doesn’t shake your faith, then surely your faith can’t be threatened by a make-believe boy wizard-in-training, right?

Whatever you think of Harry Potter, you have the right to read or not read whatever you like.  That freedom is our birthright as Americans.  But it begins and ends with you.  Which means you’ll need to mind your business when it comes to what I choose to read.  Likewise, what you deem unfit for your children might be absolutely fine for mine.  I’ll go ahead and make those decisions for me, and you go ahead and make them for you, thanks very much.  When I hear people pontificating about the need to restrict access to - or God forbid ban – Rowling’s (or any other author’s) books, I want to scream, then cry, then scream some more.  Censorship is profoundly anti-American.  The right to free speech is just bedrock.  It’s at the core of who we are.  And if you don’t like it, please – make petitions, go march in the streets, write letters to the editor, get yourself on TV.  Because that’s who we are too.  Freedom to dissent is freedom of speech.  Something it seems like the people who complain the loudest about what the rest of us are reading or looking at have conveniently forgotten.

Lamar (aka The People's Movie Critic) has a co-worker at Budweiser who's got the right philosphy.  Taterhead says, "What you eat don't make me fat."  Amen to that, brother.