Monthly Archives: January 2012

The pink tangle of girlhood

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Nostalgia-of-the-day:  V.C. Andrews

Oh come on, you know you read Flowers in the Attic.  It was a mandatory adolescent right of passage.  I think it goes: Judy Blume, V.C. Andrews, Anne Rice.  The perfect foundation for an angst-ridden, goth-girl must be done correctly and this was a great way to begin.

From what I can recall of that time, there weren’t the kind of YA options back in the eighties that there are now.  There wasn’t a smooth transition from childhood to adolescence as far as literature was concerned.  Hence the reason many of us of a certain generation found ourselves, at twelve-years-old, reading about incestuous, semi-albino children locked in an attic. I like to think it made us more prepared for the potential weirdness in the world.  The V.C. Andrew franchise is massive and I don’t think there is another writer who has produced more work from beyond the grave.   I couldn’t even begin to tell you what the intended age group of her series (and there were at least a dozen of them, all equally scandalous) was, only I don’t think I ever saw an adult reading them. They were the kinds of books that demanded to be read in a bedroom where stuffed animals were present and the color palette was provided by Laura Ashley. So, thank you, V.C., for making my formative years more interesting. And a little inappropriate.  I’ll never look at a paper flower the same again.

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It’s been established that I function in a cloud of nostalgia.  It’s where almost all of my writing comes from and how I think I attempt to make sense of the present.  It’s what I do. Everybody has their thing.

One of the things I am forever enchanted and fascinated with is our experiences with girlhood.  It’s such an amorphous time that seems to come out of nowhere and then leave you breathless a few years later.  It’s ugly and beautiful all at once, and it’s something I’m  convinced none of us completely lets go of.

Junior high is kind of where the madness begins. I can remember the first time I went to buy makeup. It was in the summer, right before school started, and a girlfriend and I made the pilgrimage to the local Walgreens to discover my “look.”  With my money rolled up in my new plastic wallet, I imagined what sage advice Seventeen magazine would have for me.  Something fun, yet natural. Except most of the girls in that magazine were blonde.  In fact, most of the girls I went to school with were blonde.  It was the first time in my life I thought about what it might be like to have blue eyes and have the distinct honor of using Sun-In when I went to the beach – what it must be like to turn into a goddess under the sun. The only thing that happened though when I laid out in the sun, was that my skin turned the color of bunt caramel while my hair remained a deep black.  Nothing became golden.  No flaxen streaks in my hair.  Coming back from vacation I always Iooked more like I was visiting on a some kind of Visa from some vast desert land. I was forever the swarthy, square peg.

The colors I was inextricably drawn to had names like “Sea Lily” and “Blue Lagoon.”  Meow.  There was no escaping it: the draw of pastels and palettes that fell under the category of “pearlescent.”  I was going to make my face look like a Now and Later if it killed me. And if the lip gloss tasted like watermelon, all the better. It’s always best to draw attention to your braces and the fact that you only just started bleaching your upper lip. Special Note: Jolen Creme Bleach is the devil.  No, bleaching black hair does not make it disappear, it just makes it sparkle in the sun like an orange tabby cat.

Memory can be unreliable sometimes, but it’s all that I have. It was that glorious time when The Limited Express split into two separate beings: The Limited and Express. I was particularly fond of the  offerings of the Outback Red line. I recall a very carefully chosen outfit for the first day of seventh grade: pink jeans, some kind of button-down shirt that also had a pink thing happening, with a rhinestone pin clipped at the throat.  I believe I finished it off with either white leather huaraches or taupe Mia flats.  My hair….oh sweet lord, my hair.  I had always wanted long hair but our hairdresser and my mother always thought something short and amazingly layered was where it was at. I started growing out my hair right before junior high because, dammit, I was becoming a lady. I had watched Jennifer Connelly in Seven Minutes in Heaven one too many times and was officially inspired. However, I was still left with a head full of shag on the first day of school, and figured a curling iron was the only obvious remedy  to help feather the top of my misshapen mushroom bob. Unfortunately, I hadn’t mastered that fine art yet, and had used the curling iron backwards, creating a jagged mass that I desperately tried to hairspray into submission. Welcome to junior high.  If you’re lucky, you can hide in your locker.

It’s such a weird time, but one that is so ripe with stories.  Never was there a time in your life when things felt so desperate and so full of possibility.  There was an infinite horizon of first experiences and everything seemed to hum a little bit around the edges. Of course, that could just be a side-effect of your hair styling products.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The fine art of Dinnertime…with or without pants.

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Nostalgia-of-the-Day:  The Drivers Ed simulator machine

I was recently having a great catch-up with my best friend and we somehow got on the topic of Drivers Ed.  We both went to the same high school and got to reminiscing about the god-awful driving simulators we were forced to clock-in time with.  Hysterical laughter ensued.  I pointed out that there was something eerie about the fact that the film they used was always from the early seventies – causing you to take a faux drive past restaurants that no longer existed, and to be on the road with cars you hadn’t seen since kindergarten.  It was a weird act of forced pop culture history. Sitting there in the dark, my Doc Martens hesitantly on the “gas” pedal, I would try with great intensity to not mow down innocent bystanders in Sansabelt slacks and polyester shift dresses.  Everything was imbued with a grainy hue of ochre, and if there had been a soundtrack, it might have been provided by Gilbert O’Sullivan.  Does anyone else smell Loves Baby Soft?

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I grew up in a house where both parents worked and, even after my father died when I was ten, my mother still made an effort to cook dinner every night for just the two of us.  There was nothing Janet couldn’t do with a can of Campbell’s cream-of-something soup or a bottle of Wishbone dressing. There is an entire collection of index cards with her squirrely handwriting – recipes passed down from relatives, or copied herself from the newspaper over the years.  Since I was little, there was a concerted effort on my mother’s behalf to mix-up the menu during the week and make sure we all sat the hells down for at least thirty minutes together.  That meant putting to great use the idea of “theme” nights.  Taco night, spaghetti night, hamburger night, etc.  It was how she made sense of the grocery shopping, and kept us from eating Stouffer’s in front of the TV and slowly devolving into chaos.  Sitting down to dinner and talking about our day was how we kept it together and remained accountable to one another, how we understood the weird little lives we led outside of the house – my latest wipe-out in tap class; my mother’s adventures on the “L” train; or how my father once sold a Hi-Fi system to Huey Lewis and the News.  Or just Huey, I can’t remember if The News chipped in. In any case, it was what we did to keep fed and keep informed.  Consequently, I’m a strong believer that “normal” just doesn’t  happen, you have to work at it and make sure you include a starch and veg.

The idea of Dinnertime is something of an anomaly to my husband, whose closest experience to the concept probably came from watching Family Ties while eating a pizza puff on the living room floor.  Dinnertime, in Jose’s world is “what white people do.”  He finds the whole thing kind of bizarre and foreign.  I remember when we first started dating when we were in culinary school, asking him what kind of dinners his mom would make when he was growing up.

“What do you mean ‘kind’ of dinners?  There’s a ‘kind’ of dinner?  She just made food. He was perplexed, if not totally amused.

“Yeah,” I said. “You know, did you have hamburger night, or spaghetti night or,um…taco night?”

“Taco night?  Hahahaaaaa!  That’s hilarious.  Baby, we’re Mexican, we don’t do ‘taco night’.”

“So, she never made spaghetti or hamburgers?”  Now I was the one who was perplexed.

“Hell no.  Why would she?  She just cooked, you know, rice and beans – which I would have for breakfast too – and, I don’t know, carne and caldo de rez.  You know, food.” He smiled at me like I was slightly touched.  It became very clear that I was raised on recipes while he was raised on, well….food.  

Fast forward fourteen years.  Jose finally has a chef job that actually has him (most of the time) home for dinner.  It’s been an adjustment – trying to get him to sit down instead of eating over the counter like he does at work. Working/living in a professional kitchen trains you to eat like a starving hyena, and makes you a bit socially retarded at the dinner table. I get it, I used to live like that for a little while myself. However, home is home and there has been much effort put into driving that point across.  I have tried to make it clear that home is a safe place to sit and have a relaxed dinner, not some mealtime version of Clan of the Cavebear. Sometimes the dining room table is just for having dinner. Hence, here are some commonly heard things around Dinnertime at our house:

“I can’t see your face when your laptop is in front of it.”

“Please don’t put your pants on the table.”

“Is that work calling right now? Don’t those jags know it’s m’fing Dinnertime?”

“I wouldn’t eat that – the cat just sat there.”

“Yes I made that with turkey instead of beef.  You’ll like it and maybe you’ll live longer.”

It’s an act of controlled chaos, that – it we’re lucky – results in a few sustained minutes of conversation and stories of the day. But, we’re getting there, little by little. I don’t even mind if he chooses, more often than not, to eat dinner in boxers and a t-shirt. As long as we’re sitting across from each other. After over a decade of Jose not being home for dinner, we are forging a new chapter in our version of domesticity. We don’t have the “theme” nights of my childhood, rather whatever I get excited about cooking and he has no choice but to eat. He still thinks I make way too big a deal about Dinnertime, but has been gracious enough to indulge me, and try and understand that this is part of what being a family means to me: We sit down together.  We feed each other.  We tell our stories.  And yes, pants are optional.

 

 

 

Are you there blog, it’s me, Ilana….

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I have no excuses for my absence.  Well, I do, but I promise they are long and boring and weirdly personal and that is why we all have therapists.  Allow me to start anew? I am flawed and scattered and will be joining a specialized rehab program in the near future for people who watch too much HGTV and Bravo. It’s a very real illness. One of these days you’ll find me curled up in the fetal position with House Hunters International playing on repeat.  I’ll be covered in glue and rocking back and forth, trying to retrace my steps to understand why I attempted to decoupage my washer and dryer using old Hanukkah wrapping paper and cat litter.

So, a new year and a new beginning.  I promise, blog, mama’s going to try and treat you right.  I won’t let you turn into the gym membership I only use once a year. You’re better than that, and far less sweaty and humiliating. Let’s really do this, okay?  Here goes…..

Over the past several months, I’ve been kind of fascinated and overwhelmed with nostalgia.  Okay, in all honesty, I’m just nostalgic by nature. I could be cooking dinner and all of a sudden become misty over how we used to tight-roll our jeans in junior high, or how no one writes handwritten notes anymore. I get caught up in the bizarre minutia of life. Somedays it’s amazing I’m able to make it out the door.  Why is this happening so much lately?  I think I might be close to an answer.  I’m old.  Alright, I realize in the grand scheme of life, I’m still relatively youthful.  I’m not a complete ass, I mean, there are things older than me, like….graham crackers and the wheel.  I have some perspective, however myopic it might be. But it still doesn’t change the fact that for however much I look toward the future, I’m winking over my shoulder to the past.  So, in order to make sense of all this sentimentality, I’m instituting a new feature on this here blog: Nostalgia of the Day. It could be a person, place, or thing, whatever strikes my addled brain at the moment. Stay tuned, I’m going to figure this thing out.  Here’s one to start things off with……

The Iron-on T-shirt

Sigh.  I have a very distinct memory of riffling through my parents change jar in a heated fury when I was around eight, trying to get enough money to buy a super-sweet, one-of-a-kind, iron-on t-shirt. There was some kind of summer street fair going on near our house, and I had to have this particular shirt or all was lost.  With my stolen bag of change, I picked out a classic baseball tee with purple, 3/4 inch sleeves, and the spangliest unicorn design they had. It went perfectly with my Joyce DeWitt shag haircut.  If I close my eyes, I can smell the plastic steam coming off from the t-shirt press. It was pure magic – watching your very own creation get pressed to life in a kind of contraption that very closely resembles the tortilla steamer they use at Chipotle. In just a few short minutes, you would have a warm shirt in your eager hands with a decale that would, if you were lucky, last for about two or three washings before the edges began to peel and curl up. I think a little part of me has been chasing the wonder of that long-lost unicorn t-shirt ever since I grew out of it almost 30 years ago. No Threadless vending machine t-shirt, or hipster vintage tee, will ever recapture the sheer bliss of watching some weird dude with long, stringy hair, at the mall, press a tropical sunset onto a cotton/poly blend t-shirt while your mom waits for you in front of the Wag’s “family restaurant”. Oh, that’s right, I’ve just aged myself all over the place. Enjoy.