First - no, second challenge of the year
CHALLENGE:
Write short memory clips about all these experiences: giving an oral PRESENTATION, buying candy, catching a bus, having your height measured, shopping with a parent, getting a haircut.
#1 Oral Presentation
For my last class in library school, I took storytelling. It was a one-week 40-hour intensive, and the class had three factions: the school librarians, the public librarians, and me, the law firm librarian. Our first story was an Aesops fable, and the teacher had us do these because they are short (most are 250-300 words, 500 words at the most), so it’s hard to imagine anyone forgetting them. And yet, people rushed through them as if they were on fire.
I took twelve minutes.
Yeah, I took twelve minutes, and they all stared at me in silence, listening so completely. Their eyes were huge, taking in everything I gave them, though visually, I gave little. I may have moved my head, but I stood quite still. That was fine, because the story was in my mouth, and it needed nothing from the rest of me to convey anything to the audience.
(Oh, and how do I know they weren't staring in amazement of the bad? No one wanted to follow me. Our final was a concert-style performance of another story, and I was told I was going last, no arguments. No arguments, I echoed, my ego the size of Southern California.)
The thing is, I’d been a theater major in school, and I’ve done some stand-up (and by some I mean six months of open mikes). And I’ve been a writer since I was eight.
But.
Standing in front of them, telling the story of the fox and the cat, seeing them mesmerized… I was a different person than the actress and comic I’d try to be. I can get an audience laughing, and I’m rarely the worst actress in the play, but the way this clicked together, and gave my brain a sense of mmm, the audience mine to do with as I wish … this was something new.
#2 Buying Candy
He was short, and youngish, and he tried to talk me of out what I asked for.
“You won’t want the sugarless candy,” he said. “It’s just not nearly as good as the regular.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I understand. But that’s what I want.”
He still balked. He tried to talk me into the regular because he didn’t seem to understand that I am someone who should not have been in that shop. I wasn’t a diabetic just looking for a sweet, someone who could make a box of eight chocolates last eight days. I was someone looking to stuff my face, but looking for any sort of loophole. I don’t eat sugar and I didn’t eat sugar and this candy was sugar-free.
“If it has an -ose ending, it’s a sugar,” people told me. “Also, if it’s a -tol ending then it’s an alcohol, and when used in candies, it’s most likely a laxative.”
In my head I rationalized that the -tol ending candies were sugar-free and a box of candies was okay, and as he kept talking I grew angry and told him to just put ten dollars of the fucking sugar-free caramels in a bag.
I was home before I realized what I’d done. I still ate the caramels. The hole in my psyche needed filling and I thought they would do it. Well - no. I knew they wouldn’t do anything to help me but I still wanted them. I was still willing to cast off decency to have some fucking sugar-free caramels.
When I went back the next day to apologize, I realized he wasn’t short, he was a boy, not even in puberty. It was a family business, and while he was too young to work there are probably rules that allow children in small businesses to work.
He was too young to have to deal with me, and this memory might be what keeps me on the other side of the fence from the hole in my psyche.
#3 Catching a bus
The Rapid Transit District, RTD, was the bus system in Los Angeles. At some point it became the MTA, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and it covered buses and trains, included the commuter trains from Amtrak. It is chaos but it’s better than driving, to my way of thinking, and for years I drove to the train station to go to work. People would shake their heads, “I can’t believe you take the train.” They’d drive two hours each way, commuting in from the High Desert or Ventura, but I was the crazy one?
What I was, was lazy. I’d even take the bus to the train, the stop just the corner from my apartment, rather than drive to the train. Read, write, knit, sleep - why would anyone drive, I wondered? I’d call a friend on the east coast as I left for work, and she can still call out the bus announcements from my place to downtown Long Beach: Cherry Avenue. Transfer here to the 55.
On the bus and train there were things I hated: I saw fights, I had my wallet stolen once and my tablet another time, I heard preachers who loved a captive audience and people who try to outshout each other with their little portable speakers. I would wear big-ass can-style headphones to block it out.
It was still better than driving in Southern California.
#4 Having Your Height Measured
My friend Dina is the same height as me, but she’s much thinner. We have the same bone structure so really, she’s very near to what I ought to look like, if I weighed what I should weigh. We aren’t tall: at five-feet-five-inches we are apparently one inch taller than the average American woman, but we are both wondering where all the shorties are hiding.
Dina’s son, at age 5, told her that he wanted to grow up to be tall like her. “Dare to dream, kid,” she told him, and then told me, and I laughed.
I thought of my mother, whose body conspired to rob her even more, not only shrinking with age but exacerbating her scoliosis, her body curving and making her less than five feet in her last years. I don’t know if they measured her after a certain point, and I wonder if they only sought to see the highest peak they could set for her, penciling the wall, or did they rather go for the body’s distance, and with a measuring tape curve it up her spine so that only geriatric compression could be counted against her, and not the long detour of a secondary condition.
I wonder this more now as I am apparently no longer 5’5”, but 5`4-and-change-ish, and there is a lump at the top of my spine that could be what happens to fat women, or it could be the shape of things to come.
#5 Shopping with a Parent
Fred Meyer stores are now owned by Kroger, but when I was a child Fred Meyer was a living man, who created superstores where they had not been. Groceries, apparel, gardening, hardware, said the marquees, and it was only in later life that I realized these were the proto-Walmarts that some small businesses saw as competition, even though to me, they are childhood. A family code: SSTF, which means a Slow Stroll Through Freddy's.
Fred either had a wife or mother with the name Eve, for in several stores, Eve’s Buffet was a restaurant attached to the supermarket side of the stores. All I could see was the giant cameo-style silhouette outside the entrance into Eve’s, there were no windows. Or maybe their were windows on the outside, but you entered Eve’s from the inside, near the grocery.
I thought they must be fancy in there. After all, we never went in.
(this may have had something more to do with the fact that my mom wasn't about to take five kids into a restaurant without backup)
If you asked me what it was like in Eve’s, I would have to assume that you wore something nice, a cocktail dress, perhaps. There was a maitre ‘d inside, most likely in tails, who would show you to your table and place the one-page menu in front of you. I suppose there might have been music. It was elegant, that was all I was certain of.
My mother stared at me when I told her this, the first time I was in an Eve’s, which was when I was twenty-one, and she and I were in Portland for a funeral of someone from the old neighborhood, and we were early, so we ducked into a local cafe near the church. It was one of the few (or only) free-standing Eve’s in existence.
It was a cafeteria. Everything had a price tag, and seemed both cheap and marked-up in cost. Even the baked apple, a dessert I knew they’d serve because that’s fancy, was a fucking golden delicious and not worth the buck fifty they wanted.
My mother’s laugh is something I will always treasure and if it took a shattered dream to hear it, well, that’s fine.
Dare to dream, kid.
# 6 Getting a Haircut.
When I first left Los Angeles, friends asked me, are you leaving your shrink? I’d answer yes, and they’d shake their heads. But then they’d seem to realize something, and they’d ask, are you leaving your HAIRDRESSER? I can understand their distress.
It’s a quintessential SoCal query, who does your hair? Before I moved down there I’d gone to beauty schools, because they were cheap, and sometimes my mom gave me a perm. But living there, well, maybe it was a way to adjust, to have a hairdresser meant having an answer to a question you hoped to be asked, who does your hair?
I’d had a hairdresser, this guy at a salon in West Hollywood, but as I’d gone to him with a friend that I later fought with, I realized I had to give custody of the hairdresser to my former friend.
CC, a man I knew who worked at a cosmetics shop in Century City, wanted to do my hair. He may have had a license, I don’t know, and didn’t ask. He wanted to do my hair he because thought I should be blonde, spectacularly blonde, and the dye bottle said either “Yellowest Blond” or “Blondest Yellow,” I can’t remember, but I can tell you that after your hair has been cut and dyed, it is the best of all worlds to shower off, as opposed to holding your head in a bowl. There is far less hair sneaking into your clothes if you have a good shower and shampoo.
But more important was the fact that I had people who wanted my hairdresser’s card, and when I said it was just a friend of mine, I had to shrug and say something to the effect of sorry, we can’t all be this beautiful.
Alas, CC moved to New York and I was again in the market. I was fortunate to only have about six months between CC and Barbara, whose tenure in my life proved to be my longest relationship outside of my blood relatives.
I have long considered my relationship with Barbara to be a matter of roles. She had chemicals and sharp objects, and I had a credit card and no wish to cause a fight. I went to her for almost twenty-five years, following her from salon to salon, and seeing her at home when she worked for a shi-shi salon in Beverly Hills where she would not have been allowed to both cut and color my head. During her employment at that salon I even saw her when, for a six month period, she lived next door to my ex, so yes, I suppose you could say I was loyal, but I wasn’t her only client so devoted.
When she moved to Arizona, Barbara promised to come back once a month and cut heads: most of us stayed with her, and I’m sure others thought the same as me, that she would quit this after three, maybe six months. It went on for over two years, and when she finally stopped I was just grateful for every single cut. I was sad to give her up, even as I knew she was doing too much. I’d referred at least three people to her before her move, and after her move, it always felt good to answer who does your hair with Oh, well, she has a very tight book, I doubt you’d be able to see her.
When I left Los Angeles for good, I had a couple hairdressers in Salem, but my annual trip to the Midwest for a conference had me in need while away, and I ended up in a salon recommended by a local friend. I was already out of the natural colors by that point, and when I was asked how I wanted my hair, I considered the question and said, “I want hair that makes people say they wish they had the balls to do that.”
Some severe cutting later I had exactly that, and more than once on that trip did I have someone declare they’d love to do that, but it was so risky! I’d tell them I was wearing this hair on interviews and getting jobs.
And now here I am in a small town, having been hired with this hair, and every time I shop it’s not just me out shopping, it’s THE BLUE-HAIRED LIBRARIAN OUT SHOPPING, or THE BLUE-HAIRED LIBRARIAN DOING LAUNDRY, or THE BLUE-HAIRED LIBRARIAN BUYING A LOTTERY TICKET. I have no anonymity, but I have people who want to know who does my hair, and wonder if they too, could have the balls to do this.
Write short memory clips about all these experiences: giving an oral PRESENTATION, buying candy, catching a bus, having your height measured, shopping with a parent, getting a haircut.
#1 Oral Presentation
For my last class in library school, I took storytelling. It was a one-week 40-hour intensive, and the class had three factions: the school librarians, the public librarians, and me, the law firm librarian. Our first story was an Aesops fable, and the teacher had us do these because they are short (most are 250-300 words, 500 words at the most), so it’s hard to imagine anyone forgetting them. And yet, people rushed through them as if they were on fire.
I took twelve minutes.
Yeah, I took twelve minutes, and they all stared at me in silence, listening so completely. Their eyes were huge, taking in everything I gave them, though visually, I gave little. I may have moved my head, but I stood quite still. That was fine, because the story was in my mouth, and it needed nothing from the rest of me to convey anything to the audience.
(Oh, and how do I know they weren't staring in amazement of the bad? No one wanted to follow me. Our final was a concert-style performance of another story, and I was told I was going last, no arguments. No arguments, I echoed, my ego the size of Southern California.)
The thing is, I’d been a theater major in school, and I’ve done some stand-up (and by some I mean six months of open mikes). And I’ve been a writer since I was eight.
But.
Standing in front of them, telling the story of the fox and the cat, seeing them mesmerized… I was a different person than the actress and comic I’d try to be. I can get an audience laughing, and I’m rarely the worst actress in the play, but the way this clicked together, and gave my brain a sense of mmm, the audience mine to do with as I wish … this was something new.
#2 Buying Candy
He was short, and youngish, and he tried to talk me of out what I asked for.
“You won’t want the sugarless candy,” he said. “It’s just not nearly as good as the regular.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I understand. But that’s what I want.”
He still balked. He tried to talk me into the regular because he didn’t seem to understand that I am someone who should not have been in that shop. I wasn’t a diabetic just looking for a sweet, someone who could make a box of eight chocolates last eight days. I was someone looking to stuff my face, but looking for any sort of loophole. I don’t eat sugar and I didn’t eat sugar and this candy was sugar-free.
“If it has an -ose ending, it’s a sugar,” people told me. “Also, if it’s a -tol ending then it’s an alcohol, and when used in candies, it’s most likely a laxative.”
In my head I rationalized that the -tol ending candies were sugar-free and a box of candies was okay, and as he kept talking I grew angry and told him to just put ten dollars of the fucking sugar-free caramels in a bag.
I was home before I realized what I’d done. I still ate the caramels. The hole in my psyche needed filling and I thought they would do it. Well - no. I knew they wouldn’t do anything to help me but I still wanted them. I was still willing to cast off decency to have some fucking sugar-free caramels.
When I went back the next day to apologize, I realized he wasn’t short, he was a boy, not even in puberty. It was a family business, and while he was too young to work there are probably rules that allow children in small businesses to work.
He was too young to have to deal with me, and this memory might be what keeps me on the other side of the fence from the hole in my psyche.
#3 Catching a bus
The Rapid Transit District, RTD, was the bus system in Los Angeles. At some point it became the MTA, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and it covered buses and trains, included the commuter trains from Amtrak. It is chaos but it’s better than driving, to my way of thinking, and for years I drove to the train station to go to work. People would shake their heads, “I can’t believe you take the train.” They’d drive two hours each way, commuting in from the High Desert or Ventura, but I was the crazy one?
What I was, was lazy. I’d even take the bus to the train, the stop just the corner from my apartment, rather than drive to the train. Read, write, knit, sleep - why would anyone drive, I wondered? I’d call a friend on the east coast as I left for work, and she can still call out the bus announcements from my place to downtown Long Beach: Cherry Avenue. Transfer here to the 55.
On the bus and train there were things I hated: I saw fights, I had my wallet stolen once and my tablet another time, I heard preachers who loved a captive audience and people who try to outshout each other with their little portable speakers. I would wear big-ass can-style headphones to block it out.
It was still better than driving in Southern California.
#4 Having Your Height Measured
My friend Dina is the same height as me, but she’s much thinner. We have the same bone structure so really, she’s very near to what I ought to look like, if I weighed what I should weigh. We aren’t tall: at five-feet-five-inches we are apparently one inch taller than the average American woman, but we are both wondering where all the shorties are hiding.
Dina’s son, at age 5, told her that he wanted to grow up to be tall like her. “Dare to dream, kid,” she told him, and then told me, and I laughed.
I thought of my mother, whose body conspired to rob her even more, not only shrinking with age but exacerbating her scoliosis, her body curving and making her less than five feet in her last years. I don’t know if they measured her after a certain point, and I wonder if they only sought to see the highest peak they could set for her, penciling the wall, or did they rather go for the body’s distance, and with a measuring tape curve it up her spine so that only geriatric compression could be counted against her, and not the long detour of a secondary condition.
I wonder this more now as I am apparently no longer 5’5”, but 5`4-and-change-ish, and there is a lump at the top of my spine that could be what happens to fat women, or it could be the shape of things to come.
#5 Shopping with a Parent
Fred Meyer stores are now owned by Kroger, but when I was a child Fred Meyer was a living man, who created superstores where they had not been. Groceries, apparel, gardening, hardware, said the marquees, and it was only in later life that I realized these were the proto-Walmarts that some small businesses saw as competition, even though to me, they are childhood. A family code: SSTF, which means a Slow Stroll Through Freddy's.
Fred either had a wife or mother with the name Eve, for in several stores, Eve’s Buffet was a restaurant attached to the supermarket side of the stores. All I could see was the giant cameo-style silhouette outside the entrance into Eve’s, there were no windows. Or maybe their were windows on the outside, but you entered Eve’s from the inside, near the grocery.
I thought they must be fancy in there. After all, we never went in.
(this may have had something more to do with the fact that my mom wasn't about to take five kids into a restaurant without backup)
If you asked me what it was like in Eve’s, I would have to assume that you wore something nice, a cocktail dress, perhaps. There was a maitre ‘d inside, most likely in tails, who would show you to your table and place the one-page menu in front of you. I suppose there might have been music. It was elegant, that was all I was certain of.
My mother stared at me when I told her this, the first time I was in an Eve’s, which was when I was twenty-one, and she and I were in Portland for a funeral of someone from the old neighborhood, and we were early, so we ducked into a local cafe near the church. It was one of the few (or only) free-standing Eve’s in existence.
It was a cafeteria. Everything had a price tag, and seemed both cheap and marked-up in cost. Even the baked apple, a dessert I knew they’d serve because that’s fancy, was a fucking golden delicious and not worth the buck fifty they wanted.
My mother’s laugh is something I will always treasure and if it took a shattered dream to hear it, well, that’s fine.
Dare to dream, kid.
# 6 Getting a Haircut.
When I first left Los Angeles, friends asked me, are you leaving your shrink? I’d answer yes, and they’d shake their heads. But then they’d seem to realize something, and they’d ask, are you leaving your HAIRDRESSER? I can understand their distress.
It’s a quintessential SoCal query, who does your hair? Before I moved down there I’d gone to beauty schools, because they were cheap, and sometimes my mom gave me a perm. But living there, well, maybe it was a way to adjust, to have a hairdresser meant having an answer to a question you hoped to be asked, who does your hair?
I’d had a hairdresser, this guy at a salon in West Hollywood, but as I’d gone to him with a friend that I later fought with, I realized I had to give custody of the hairdresser to my former friend.
CC, a man I knew who worked at a cosmetics shop in Century City, wanted to do my hair. He may have had a license, I don’t know, and didn’t ask. He wanted to do my hair he because thought I should be blonde, spectacularly blonde, and the dye bottle said either “Yellowest Blond” or “Blondest Yellow,” I can’t remember, but I can tell you that after your hair has been cut and dyed, it is the best of all worlds to shower off, as opposed to holding your head in a bowl. There is far less hair sneaking into your clothes if you have a good shower and shampoo.
But more important was the fact that I had people who wanted my hairdresser’s card, and when I said it was just a friend of mine, I had to shrug and say something to the effect of sorry, we can’t all be this beautiful.
Alas, CC moved to New York and I was again in the market. I was fortunate to only have about six months between CC and Barbara, whose tenure in my life proved to be my longest relationship outside of my blood relatives.
I have long considered my relationship with Barbara to be a matter of roles. She had chemicals and sharp objects, and I had a credit card and no wish to cause a fight. I went to her for almost twenty-five years, following her from salon to salon, and seeing her at home when she worked for a shi-shi salon in Beverly Hills where she would not have been allowed to both cut and color my head. During her employment at that salon I even saw her when, for a six month period, she lived next door to my ex, so yes, I suppose you could say I was loyal, but I wasn’t her only client so devoted.
When she moved to Arizona, Barbara promised to come back once a month and cut heads: most of us stayed with her, and I’m sure others thought the same as me, that she would quit this after three, maybe six months. It went on for over two years, and when she finally stopped I was just grateful for every single cut. I was sad to give her up, even as I knew she was doing too much. I’d referred at least three people to her before her move, and after her move, it always felt good to answer who does your hair with Oh, well, she has a very tight book, I doubt you’d be able to see her.
When I left Los Angeles for good, I had a couple hairdressers in Salem, but my annual trip to the Midwest for a conference had me in need while away, and I ended up in a salon recommended by a local friend. I was already out of the natural colors by that point, and when I was asked how I wanted my hair, I considered the question and said, “I want hair that makes people say they wish they had the balls to do that.”
Some severe cutting later I had exactly that, and more than once on that trip did I have someone declare they’d love to do that, but it was so risky! I’d tell them I was wearing this hair on interviews and getting jobs.
And now here I am in a small town, having been hired with this hair, and every time I shop it’s not just me out shopping, it’s THE BLUE-HAIRED LIBRARIAN OUT SHOPPING, or THE BLUE-HAIRED LIBRARIAN DOING LAUNDRY, or THE BLUE-HAIRED LIBRARIAN BUYING A LOTTERY TICKET. I have no anonymity, but I have people who want to know who does my hair, and wonder if they too, could have the balls to do this.