make 'em laugh

One of my favorite movies, and certainly my favorite musical, is Singin' in the Rain. I could watch Gene Kelly all day. He embodies such power and grace simultaneously, and clearly enjoyed all he did in the movie (and, well, I think he's quite a looker too). For those who haven't seen it, I urge you to do so at the earliest opportunity. For those who have, please imagine the scene where Don Lockwood is depressed, having been snubbed by a woman for the first time in his professional career. His friend tries to cheer him up with the song, "Make 'Em Laugh," in which he falls all over himself in a hundred absurd ways, ruining a movie set in the process. Here's the first verse:

Make 'em Laugh, make 'em laugh,
Doncha know everyone wants to laugh--HA HA!
My dad said, "be an actor, my son--
But be a comical one!"
They'll be standin' in lines
For those old honkeytonk monkeyshines [creepy? not sure what those are]
Well you can study Shakespeare and be quite elite
And charm all of the critics but have nothin' to eat,
Just slip on a banana peel--the world's at your feet!
Make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh!

A few months ago, D and I watched the movie with A, and he didn't seem terribly interested. Then recently, D showed bits of the movie again, and A was totally fascinated. His favorite songs are "Shingin' Rain shong," "Guh monin" (Good morning), the "Keek" song--"All I do is dream of you"--which begins with a girl bursting out of a cake. Figuring out that "Keek" means cake, and that cake is associated with a song, took an agonizingly long time. (Just yesterday, a friend figured out that "maggit" was magnet, which had really scared me as he pointed to the fridge saying maggit, maggit, maggit!) Last on our greatest hits is "Mekit Laugh," also called "fall-down guy shong."

We have a bit of a medley going on during the day: if I sing a verse of something, he requests another from the catalog, and now occasionally he will fill in the last words of each line. Imagine a two-year-old saying "Elite." (well, "leet" is how it sounds) I especially enjoy "honkey-shiiiines." Sounds like a trailer park horror movie.

Maybe he'll just skip the eensy weensy spider bit, and graduate to Gilbert and Sullivan straightaway. Here I am talking about moms pressuring kids...

the "shoo"

"echo, echo!" in the otter exhibit

riding a very lifelike "teetul"

much cuter than Daddy's Teetul face!

Tuesday some friends, D, A and I went to the Maryland Zoo. It was A's first experience seeing all these animals in person, after seeing them in books and an Elmo episode about wild animals (wiyud am-mals! raow!). He was transfixed most of the time, running from exhibit to exhibit, and afraid of birds bigger than himself. ('cared me, mommy! beeg bord, 'cared me!) He saw fa-fents, raffs, go-reelas, seebas, fogs, and ran around in some very creepy cave exhibits. I felt a panic attack coming on in the caves, literally, and was glad to be out. It was just so dark and close, and I didn't want to look up in them for fear of what I might see. Too much "Lord of the Rings," probably.

low self-esteem week

At certain times of the month (can you guess when?), no matter my actual appearance, I feel like one of the ugly stepsisters. Nothing fits right, my hair goes lank, I feel wide as a tractor-trailer, I can't cook or accomplish anything, and any stray comment stings unnaturally hard. (Please pity D during these times, because nothing he says is taken to mean what he meant to say)

And for the second time in my adult life, I have received a bad haircut. I'm not too hung up on my hair normally--I have a nice collection of hats for bad-hair occasions, and bandanas that I wear around the house like Aunt Jemima. My older sister has always been more concerned about hair than I have, being in high school in the 80's (feathered hair, curls concealing the right eye for a year, big, Paula-Abdul hair...) and even went so far as to get a wig when an overzealous pair of scissors made her look like Joan Jett.

This present haircut is not quite Joan Jett, but it also isn't the curly tapered bob I showed my very faithful hairdresser. Right now, it's more like a curly hobbit-head (minus pointy ears) unless I tuck some hair behind my ears. Salvagable, yes, but it will take much longer to grow out than I would like.

Enter my low-self-esteem time, and you have a woman who would very much like to stay indoors all Fall, or wear a protective shell of one-way mirror material when venturing out.

I did go out yesterday to a meeting, and then to Target to load up on halloween candy and other "necessities." Luckily for me, I did not run into any old boyfriends--something which happened the first day I went out after breaking my tailbone. I looked and felt like complete crap, hunched over nearly double at the video store, looking for some movie that wouldn't depress the hell out of me. Then I heard a horribly familiar voice saying my name, and I thought "God, you really know how to kick a girl when she's down." The guy I had a crush on all through middle school, who dissed me because my boobs looked "like mosquito bites," then went out with sophomore year and summarily dumped, was right there in the store, looking like "Whew, dodged THAT bullet!" at me. A painful conversation ensued, and I vowed to always wear makeup whenever I go out, especially if I have just experienced a nervous breakdown.

No, yesterday I didn't see him or any other boyfriend. But I did run into a girl who I shared a studio with in college, who I saw as my competetive rival in art education. I am not sure how she felt about me, though I reckon she didn't think much about anything but working insane amounts and living at the library. We were both wrecks by the end of student teaching, but I won a student teaching award from some obscure teaching organization, and she won the school's award for student teaching portfolio--which accompanied a hefty prize check as well. "I got a rock," as Charlie Brown would say. My award was a lovely certificate, a nice line in my resume, and a book full of altruistic quotes about teaching.

Any sensible person in the world would say, "get over it! you got an award, dammit!" And you are perfectly right. My only defense is that in college I was insanely ambitious--high school, too, to the point that nothing was good enough, even the best (or seven-eighths best, or dang good). That was my lovely ego snarling out at the world, when if I looked at it like a sane person, I would see that I was probably at that moment one of the best new art teachers in the country.

So how did it feel to see this person, after a gulf of seven years? Even though my hair was a mess, I was tired from a day of chasing a toddler around, and I was in shopping zone-out mode, it felt good to talk to her and hear how her life was going. She got married a year ago, her husband is super-nice, and she's teaching in a middle school very close by.

If I had not had so many bouts with depression and weakness and dependence on other people, I would be jealous right now, thinking about my ambition being sucked out of me by a two-year-old, bitter about my choices. But I really do feel healed of so much junk from that time, this insatiable need to be recognized and effusively rewarded for every bloody brilliant thing I did. Even if it was brilliant, I was just teaching Art for pete's sake. I wasn't out solving the world's problems with a pack of crayons. My bitterness at that time made me resentful of normal student behaviour, like showing up late or--gasp!--not wanting to do homework for my class. It just seems so dumb, looking back on it. I really hadn't grown up.

I looked through my teaching portfolio tonight, looking for a lesson I did with some second graders, that I could use with some of my new students. I had forgotten so much from that time. My first impression was, dude, did I ever rest? No. I was always thinking up new stuff to do, new ways of teaching a lesson to work out the kinks. Classroom management was really a strong point, lots of structure and rewards and what-not. I gradually became very lazy, in my opinion, at the private school I eventually taught at. Partly because I was too tired to be innovative--burned out in a way--and partly because I no longer needed to be THE BEST TEACHER IN THE WORLD.

It is such a relief to not be trapped in that mind-set anymore. I can be the slacker I always dreamed about. --I am not a slacker, really, and am very active, but I don't have to worry about doing enough anymore. There's a lot of pressure on moms, to get their kids into all this stuff early on, have them scheduled out the wazoo and taking violin lessons before they can even use a fork. I don't want that pressure on myself, first, and definitely not on A. I struggle to get out of the house before 11 now, because everything moves so much slower with a little person, and I'm always forgetting one thing and another. But that's ok. I'm good enough, smart enough, and goshdarnit, people like me.

coldplayas

I am writing this in the morning, because A is at his grandparents' house and I need to write this down to purge it from my system. I am eating "shimin-sheol" (cinnamon cereal) and having a cuppa, and am staying quiet because D is still asleep. I could be doing any number of things on my "morning off," but it's impossible to get to sleep again with all that's in my head.

We went to the Coldplay concert last night, at the Nissan Pavilion outside of Manassas VA. The trip there, though the company was great, was a nerve-frying 4 hour crawl-along, ending at the ONE entrance to the pavilion way after the opening act was over (Rilo Kiley). Note to self: never ever visit Manassas again on a Friday afternoon.

We arrived, and were so excited that our seats were 3 rows away from the pit, so about 30 yards away from the stage--a great omen, since our seats to the U2 concert in Philly were similarly spaced, and that was by far the best concert experience of my life. The stage was HUGE, the entire place was packed with people, a sea of mostly-white faces as far as you could see. I talked to a friend next to me, Kate, and I heard "Miss Newcomb?" in a deep but boyish voice behind me. Out of the 30 thousand people there, one of my former students was right behind us. "I'm in college now," he said, and all I could think about was the fact that he was one of the first kids to get a C in my class at the private school I worked in. Awkward!

The concert started, and I was a little annoyed at myself for not wearing higher shoes, because the people in front of me were pretty tall--2 brown-haired girls, a New Jersey-looking guy in a backwards baseball hat, and then with a beer or two, a shorter pock-faced guy in a paisley shirt. Several people from our row kept coming and going throughout the concert, like some kind of selective exodus, and knocked over D's beer on the ground. Bad start, but the music was great.

At first things were ok, nothing more than a bit more movement from the row in front of me than normal, where it became obvious that baseball-hat guy was on some very strong drug (Viagra, we wondered later?), and paisley-puss (as D later called him) was slightly more aware. The girls looked like they were just interested in Chris Martin, and singing along like the rest of us. Then the guys started moving in.

What followed was probably the single-grodyest scene I have witnessed in my life. Paisley was pawing over the tall girl, then the short girl, with Baseball joining in on the groping and semi-kissing, but being pushed away by the short girl, who kept singing the lyrics to everyone like they were a conversation she was having. The girls were clearly uncomfortable one minute, then willing victims of the grope-fest, as their "dates" swapped back and forth in front of me. Eventually there was a sort of threesome right in front of my seat, obscuring everything on the stage, and I yelled something like "for pete's sake!" with my hands out, to everyone who could see this event unfolding. I moved over next to my best friend, who had a clearer view over this guy's head--an Asian guy who looked like he was by himself, and trying to enjoy the concert but not having much luck with his neighbors' expansive swaying and slow-mo club dance moves.

In the beginning of all this, D said that these guys reminded him of the complete losers in Sideways, much older than the girls and trying to score. Then they reminded me of the two guys on Saturday Night live who would dance up to women together with their heads bopping to the side at the same time. But then, after what must have been 5 excellent songs I can't remember at all, Pasley started literally humping tall girl from behind, and Baseball was pointing to them to show short girl, and making "why aren't you doing this too" motions to her. It would have been funny if this was a sitcom, but I just wanted to puke, and turned away to try and focus on the concert that I had paid for.

D took another tack: he decided to fake-laugh hysterically, maniacally loud, while pointing at the people in front of us. Everyone turned around to stare at him, and it was a semi-quiet part of the concert too, while he continued to cackle and point. Baseball turned around with his glazed-over stare, and pointed at D, and they did this sort of mirror-image pointing while Baseball started to realized that D was laughing AT him and his pal, not because he was drunk or whatever.

Things calmed down for a minute or two, then the band did a small set at the front end of the stage, of a great song from the new album (can't remember the title, but he's talking about waiting for his love), and then Johnny Cash's song, Ring of Fire. It was great. The groping continued, however, and I tapped the Asian dude on the shoulder and asked him if he wanted to come up to our row, so he could get away and see something better than this horrific spectacle.

I looked around, and Baseball, who had given up Short Girl as a bad job, was looking around for some more prey, after dancing rather close with a clearly old woman at the end of the row. Baseball turned around, and was looking my friend Kate up and down like a piece of meat, and was motioning to her that she should be tempted by him. Then he reached up to touch her shoulder and I snapped into Detention-Giving Teacher Mode and smacked his hand away, and pushed him back shouting "DON'T TOUCH HER! GET AWAY!"

At first he looked like he wanted to hit me, but then he turned around and left the row entirely. D went down to talk to the beefy security guard, who came back and found that Paisley and his recently-humped date weren't even in the seats named on their tickets. I was shaking and I wanted to cry. When Tall Girl and Paisley Puss left, we all cheered.

They returned at the last song, which was somewhat too late according to the security guard to do anything about it.

We discussed this gross spectacle for quite a while, sitting in the car waiting for traffic to ease up.
It was 2:15 in the morning when we finally got home, and luckily I had dreams completely unrelated to our experience, only to wake up feeling like I had to take a purging shower. Or at least, put it all in my Blog, and hopefully rid myself of the dirty feeling by spreading it to all my dear readers.

My best friend and I, incidentally, are convinced that going to big events together is a cursed experience. Our last concert we attended together was the Baltimore Symphony. Literally five bars into the first piece, a woman behind us began to snore in a very manly way. She continued to snore, harmonized by another snoring patron of the arts, throughout the first half of the concert. At intermission, we got up and asked to be moved, and got free tickets three rows from the front. We could see every hair on the violinist's bow. It was eventually great, but again, I don't recall anything terribly positive. Like now.