"At The Ballet" (in pink tights)

When I was 9, after taking ballet lessons for about a year, the teacher took me aside and told me that at my advanced age, it was time for me to decide between dancing & playing the piano, and given my ballet skills, she suggested I choose piano. (Yes, it's funny now, although I was traumatized at the time) But after a few decades (and a couple of good therapists along the way), I gave it another shot and enrolled in an adult ballet class, at a studio where I'd already been taking tap dancing for fun & exercise.

It was a scary transition. Tap dance is satisfying - it doesn't take long before you can make some cool sounds, tap prowess relies more on rhythm & relaxation than on the ability to put your leg over your ear, and classes are full of an assortment of body types, laughing and having a blast. Ballet is more serious, the music isn't as fun, and it tends to attract women who were serious ballet students as children - and who still have classic ballet bodies. (Every time I'm in class, next to those impossibly lithe, leggy beauties, I have this urge to hum the Sesame Street song, "One of These Things Is Not Like The Other". I'm a healthy, normal size who looks decent in regular clothes, but let's just say pale pink tights do not flatter my healthy, normal, and comparatively short legs, particularly when this nice Jewish girl is overdue for a leg wax!)

Still, I've persevered for several years, forgiving myself (sort of) for my slow progress, making adjustments for my limitations (proudly kicking my healthy, normal leg almost up to a 90 degree angle while everyone else has their feet at eye level or above) and trying to remember that my husband prefers my healthy, normal curves. And class has become my meditative oasis. Ballet is so demanding, my brain doesn't have room to focus on anything else, so I have an enforced break from money worries, kid stresses, or wondering if I forgot someone important on Ben's bar mitzvah invitation list. Plus there are wonderful moments of joy - watching someone who started out gawky do something graceful, hearing a favorite piece of music, or an unexpected bit of entertainment. For example, many of the women in my class are thin enough and wealthy enough to have had a bit of silicon enhancement. Most are extremely subtle and natural looking, but there was once a woman who must have been 6'1", almost all in her legs, gorgeously slim but with Dolly Parton's bustline; when she jumped, her double Ds didn't move an inch, despite having no more support than a flimsy spaghetti strap top. (To give you an idea of how weird that was, my healthy normal chest requires 2 bras and a leotard with a built-in bra, and I still bounce all over the place.)

And sometimes, I do feel like I've made progress. I realized how good ballet was for my healthy, normal body (have I said that enough already?) when I went for a physical several years ago. It had been 2 years since they'd measured my height (during which years I'd started ballet class and ended an unhappy marriage), and the nurse was astounded to see that I'd grown two inches. Vertically. All from the posture improvement I'd gained from dancing, with a bit of the divorce thrown in. There are the smaller accomplishments - like FINALLY remembering the 8 body positions (Efface or epaule?) or realizing I could do chainee turns across the room without getting nauseous, just dizzy. And this week, I completed a fouette turn (a pirouette while whipping the leg out & back in - hard to describe but it's what ballerinas do a dozen times in a row when they're showing off). It wasn't pretty, but I got around without falling on my face, and for a moment I felt like a real dancer. (Until my teacher returned me to reality by reminding me that my feet weren't pointed, my shoulders were hunched and my leg wasn't straight. . . . . But at least I did it!, I wanted to protest, which I guess was like saying, Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?)

So it's taken many years, but I think I've finally healed that childhood wound of being told I had no future as a ballerina. I still know I have no future as a ballerina, but after 41 years I can feel good about my healthy, normal body despite the pink tights and rail-thin gazelles, and occasionally do a wobbly fouettee. Sometimes, that's all it takes to make my day!

Easy Behavioral Modification (yeah, right!)

Usually, I delete those unsolicited emails offering tips on anti-aging superfoods (acai berries! no, tofu!, actually, now it's quinoa!), positive thinking ("send this to 5 supportive friends, and something amazing will happen in the next 9 minutes!"), and income ("Yes, you can turn your journalling into a 6 figure book contract!"). But one popped up the other day which I couldn't resist, promising 'Brand New Ways to Banish Bad Behavior for Good!' (Come on, the only person who could resist that title is the supermom down the block, you know, the one whose perfectly-dressed kids ASK for extra chores and love broccoli, the ones who've never heard of Burger King?)
So I read the article, which said that our culture gives kids too much of a sense of entitlement, and the only way to improve their behavior is to teach them gratitude, expressing thanks and by noticing small blessings. (This is brand new?) I can just see some harried mom, pulled over for speeding with 2 screaming kids in the car, doing her deep breathing and saying, "Justin, Ashleigh, let's say thank you to the nice officer for doing his part for our community." Or a frazzled mom breaking up a fight with "Boys, tell each other how grateful you are that this time neither of you actually drew blood."
I mean, come on. Kids act up, no matter what we do, and you can read 5,000 articles with tips on influencing their behavior, and have the exact same results. I've tried the gratitude thing - we say grace before meals by having each family member say two things he or she is grateful for. Usually I get a sullen, "I'm grateful for, food and family, um, do I HAVE to eat the tuna casserole?" Or the boys use the ritual as an excuse for pushing an agenda: "I'm grateful mom MIGHT let me stay up and watch Family Guy, and I'm grateful that Ben isn't as annoying as he usually is."
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for trying to limit this entitlement thing, where kids feel the world revolves around them. I give them regular chores, I'm sticking with being (in their opinion) the meanest mom in the world because we only have one television set in the house, and I not only make them do their own homework, I have never yet referred to a school project in the first person plural. (You know, "WE got a bad grade on the science experiment . . . ") But beyond that, I guess I sort of feel like bad behavior is part of childhood, and part of what we get to make them feel guilty for when they're grown.
Besides, if there really were brand new, fail-safe strategies for making kids behave perfectly, there wouldn't be such a proliferation of articles and web tips and emails advising us - the articles don't really help, but they do provide outside work for a whole bunch of moms who are probably thrilled to have something to do besides trying to make their own kids behave!
As far as I'm considered, my strategy for dealing with my kids' unpleasant behavior is
1) trust my gut instincts,
2) remember that the bad moments will eventually pass,
3) take the advice of the Wicked Witch of The West, when she used her broom to sky-write "Surrender, Dorothy", and
4) remind myself that the authors of those behavioral guides are probably the same moms I see with kids who behave even worse than mine!

Spam, spam, spam, spam . . .

Every time I turn on my computer, I hear that Monty Python song about tinned meat, and it’s not just the piles of unsolicited ads (“Lower your mortgage”, “You deserve sexual pleasure!”, “Money for you, Please to send account numbering to Nigeria bank”). I’ve also got accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and multiple blogging sites, and if I were to keep up with every message I get on every one of them, I wouldn’t have time to work, write my own blog, or deal with the kids who inspire the blog, much less eat or sleep.
So I was astounded to read an article in today’s paper about texting, which included the statistic that average teens send 2,000 texts a month and a case study of one 14-year-old girl whose parents cut her off when she hit 15,000 a month, and confiscated her phone until she promised to keep it under 5,000. (That's not a typo.) Even assuming that the girl’s texting skills are infinitely superior to mine (given that I take 20 minutes to send a single text, so I don't get much practice), those numbers are still both disgusting and impressive – disgusting because to rack up 500 messages a day, she had to be texting in class, at meals, and in her sleep; and impressive because she stayed so incredibly caught up with her messages.
I have no plans to start texting on a regular basis, TYVM, and I’m learning to delete the emails with cute cartoons of kittens, or touting ‘Free Shipping’ from stores I don’t patronize. And frankly, I don’t need to respond every time someone on Facebook lets me know she took the ‘What Musical Theater Leading Lady Are You?’ quiz. But I do want to get better at catching up with business emails, networking sites, and connecting with the old friends I’ve rediscovered on Facebook - you know, the point of all this internet access, right?
I imagine the 5,000-a-month whiz doesn’t fret over her piled-up inbox, she just responds quickly and concisely to the messages she feels are important enough, so that’s the one part of her story I do want to emulate. (The other good part of her story is that I was starting to get angry at my 15-year-old for exceeding his prepaid text limit of 200 – he looks really good by comparison, and now he’s won his argument that he really is saner about it than most teens.)
And I will no longer feel guilty deleting chain emails ( “Add your name to the panty-of-the-month club” – which I didn’t make up, even though it sounds like something out of a Monty Python skit . . . )

The Mothers' Day Reality Check

I've always hated holidays that smack of forced gaiety and commercialism - New Year's Eve, for example - and Mother's Day, after all, was created by the greeting card industry. But I couldn't help being touched by those grade school projects, the macaroni necklaces and coupons for services the kids never really meant to render ("one foot massage" "24 hours of no arguing"). And of course I always send my mother flowers and a sappy, totally heart-felt note that is as different as possible from last year's.

Now my kids are at that in between stage, too old to make something in school and too young to have an account with 1-800-ProFlowers, so for the past few years, I have to admit, mother's days have been pretty disappointing. Husband 2.0 is new to the concept (heck, it was only with my stellar example that he started sending his mother anything besides e-cards), but he's tried, usually without much success. There was the year they tried to make me dinner, and the power (conveniently) went out, so we celebrated with a gourmet meal at Burger King. A couple of years ago I told them I just wanted handmade cards, and I got a scribbled illegible message on ripped notebook paper from one, and an elaborate drawing of a fanged monster the other traced from his Star Wars encyclopedia. Not exactly the Hallmark moments I dreamed of, and frankly, I was starting to miss those preschool handprint cards.

So this year I lowered my expectations dramatically, figuring gender stereotypes DO apply, they're clueless boys and self-absorbed teenagers to boot, so if I get out of doing dishes it will be a miracle. And lo and behold, they did pretty well. David wrote a lovely note that included an accurate count of how many days he's been alive (and grateful for me as a mother), and Ben completely surprised me. Last week he told me an elaborate story about a survey they'd taken in social studies about preferences, and asked me to answer a few questions, including my favorite flower (sweet peas) and favorite type of cake (carrot), and then while I was teaching he rode his bike almost a mile to Safeway where he found a carrot cake and tried to purchase sweet peas (but had to settle for baby roses), and hid both in his closet for 3 days.

All the boys (including husband 2.0) also set a lovely table and prepared an elegant meal. (They didn't exactly cooperate in the menu planning department, so the feast included baked potatoes, french toast casserole AND garlic bread, plus the carrot cake, but let's just say with the leftovers, if I run a marathon in the next week I'm all set to carb load.) And the best part? We got through the meal with almost no bickering AND they let me watch reruns of America's Next Top Model, without teasing me, while they did the dishes.

Sure, it's only impressive in comparison to past debacles, sort of like finding $20 in your pocket when you thought you were broke, or how your headache feels better when you stub your toe, or how easy it is for Husband 2.0 to impress me compared to his predecessor. But sometimes I think that sort of lowered expectation would be good for us - growing up in southern California, I never understood the whole renewal concept of spring, until I went to college in Connecticut and experienced that first glorious day when we could go outside in short sleeves and see the daffodils. Likewise, my friends who are so comfortably familiar with sweet, unexciting husbands might value them more if they had bad memories of an ex. (Not that I'd wish divorce on anyone, of course . . . )

At any rate, of course now the boys HAVE raised the bar and next year needs to be even better - but by then David will have his drivers' license, Ben will have his bar-mitzvah-gift-savings account, and I think I'll have 2.0 hint that they could take me to dinner. (And I'll stop fantasizing about the creative way Ben will get me to reveal my favorite restaurant, or how David will calculate how many minutes I've spent driving him around . . . . . )

I’m a Real Housewife - Where’s My TV Show?

The latest entry in the ‘Real Housewives of . . . ‘ series is going to be set in New Jersey, where for a change of pace (not) we’ll get to watch rich, tacky, shallow women shop for size 0 designer clothes and fret about important priorities like redecorating their powder rooms and getting a last-minute Botox appointment. This time I guess the difference will be even tackier accents and the vague suggestion of mafia ties, but overall it’s the same excuse for ‘real’ real housewives to snigger and feel superior: “I may not have that kind of budget, but I’m a better mom and I don’t sound like such an airhead on national television.”
Come on, we already have tons of shows where we can watch shallow, tacky people make idiots out of themselves, from reality competitions to daytime talk shows to most sitcoms. What about a ‘real housewives’ show featuring REAL people, with real problems, like how to keep your kids from bickering in front of your neighbors, or what you can make for dinner with 3 frozen chicken breasts and an expired jar of salsa?
I can see it now - Real Housewives of San Mateo, featuring me and my neighbors as we cope with such thrilling challenges as an excursion to Costco (where I promise I’m only buying toilet paper and batteries!), or Carol loaning me her carpet cleaning machine even though I think my carpets are beyond hope. We don’t have any trampy neighbor to have affairs with the pool boys none of us can afford to hire, but there is a rather hunky UPS guy we can occasionally ogle, and instead of comparing notes about our designer shopping sprees, we can let each other know when there’s a sale at Old Navy, or a special on ground beef at Safeway.
Hmmm . . . I’m even bored, and it’s my life!, so I can understand why producers aren’t clamoring to make a reality show about reality. Watching normal people cope with typical problems we all face doesn’t give one that thrill of schaedenfraude (taking joy in the misfortunes of others - I still remember my SAT vocabulary!), because it’s fun to feel superior to superficial morons with too much time and money, even as we envy them, not just for the expensive trinkets but for having lives that are interesting enough to merit a TV show.
That’s my dirty little secret - I’m ashamed to admit that sometimes I wish I had a more glamorous, unusual life, even though I love my family and can even find joy in some of my more mundane moments. Oh, I know raising kids and teaching music (and all my other odd jobs) are much more important than getting on television because I’m an airhead with a sugar daddy, but every now and then we all yearn for a bit of glamour, something novel to break up the routine. I think I’ll go wild on my next trip to Costco and spring for some new socks.

Tomatoes, fish and blogs

No, it's not a list of ingredients for a weird recipe, just a list of things I have to remember to maintain, and all of which start out with the best of intentions, ending up in a few straggly brown plants, an algae-covered tank, and a bad case of writer's block.

To explain how these odd ingredients actually do connect, I'm borrowing a line from Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist & playwright (for My Fair Lady, Camelot, etc.). In his memoir, he wrote that he became a theatre writer ecause of "a cigarette, a left hook, and a wrong turn on the way to the men's room". (The cigarette got him kicked out of prep school en route to a diplomatic career, the left hook in a college boxing match damaged his vision & kept him out of the war, and the wrong turn was taken by Fritz Loewe, causing him to meet Lerner and launching a very successful collaboration.) I always loved that elegant combination of seemingly unrelated events (even though the memoir also contains lengthy descriptions of the writing retreats Lerner & Loewe spent at their various country homes, complete with a full complement of servants catering to their every need, taking 2 months to write one song, and I want to yell, "Okay, let's see you write a song while shelpping 2 kids around, running a home, teaching voice lessons, and doing all your writing at 5 a.m. before the kids get up!")

Anyway, my serendipitous combination of circumstances may not lead to a successful career, but it has shown me I need to slow down a bit and take better care of myself, as well as take better care of the tomatoes I planted with such optimism but occasionally forget to water. Meanwhile, the fish tank was a well-intended gift from the boys' godfathers (my best friend from college, Andy, and his husband-until-Calif.-figures-out-what-to-do-about-the-gay-marriages-performed-before-Prop.8, Bob, who has proclaimed himself to be the boys' 'fairy godmother'). The idea of the tank was that the boys were totally responsible for it* and I was to do nothing but watch and enjoy. I guess I missed the asterisk . . . *until they both get really busy with their respective activities and mom caves in and cleans the tank . . . . and since I teach my voice lessons in the room with the tank, I have to look at the algae on a regular basis.

Then there's the lapses in blog entries. I had all these noble intentions, to post twice a week, to cross-post to other more popular sites so I could follow in Diablo Cody's footsteps (she's the Academy-Award-winning screenwriter who got her start blogging about her work as a stripper . . . not that I'm stripping, but I figured someone out there is reading these blogs . . . oh, never mind). Anyway, it meant I stopped writing for my own enjoyment and was thinking of my blog as a promotional activity, which pretty much took the fun out of it, and sure enough, over 2 weeks have gone by where I didn't even realize I hadn't been posting, I just got busy with other things.

So - I hereby resolve to water plants, clean the fish tank, and write blog entries purely for my own enjoyment, and if my efforts produce edible tomatoes, a beautiful aquarium, or a screenwriting contract, that's icing on the cake. Meanwhile, after I get myself more serene and then become an overnight success after 35 years, I can use this series of events to launch my own memoirs, and make Alan Jay Lerner look lazy by comparison.

&*@# Ikea . . .

I've always had a love/hate relationship with Ikea, the build-it-yourself furniture superstore. One the one hand, even before the recession I appreciated a bargain, and I like to think that even if I had $5,000 to spend on an end table, I wouldn't be so wasteful. Walking through Ikea's beautiful but maze-like showroom and seeing the ridiculously low prices gives me the same high I got the first time I went to Loehmann's (back in the day when it was a real outlet with real discounts; heck, I went to the original one in the Bronx, where I fought for mirror space with an entire Mah Jongg club, only to emerge triumphantly with a beautiful lined wool coat for $40).

However, when I bring home my clothing finds from Loehmann's (or TJ Maxx or Target), all I have to do is cut the tags off, maybe fix a loose button or take up a hem. With Ikea furniture, even a simple end table comes in hundreds of pieces, and furthermore, there are no instructions, just a series of weirdly drawn, confusing diagrams. (hank goodness I helped my boys do all those stupid Bionicles and Legos, with pre-literate instructions - but it's still confusing. With almost every piece I've assembled, I've made a significant mistake (put on the drawer bottom incorrectly so the raw side shows, or screwed in the side legs backwards so the table is lopsided). And inevitably I lose or misplace one of the little annoying pieces, the wood pegs or odd-shaped screws.

Last night the boys and I started on David's desk (replacing the one he's had since he was a baby - he's almost 16, so even though we really couldn't afford new furniture, it was time!). For most of the evening it was actually a wonderful bonding experience, where I gained new appreciation for Ben's strength and David's coordination, and they realized that their mother actually knew something about assembling furniture. (It was also a great opportunity for the boys' favorite game, adding "that's what she said" to otherwise innocuous sentences to make them sound dirty - since we were dealing with screws, nuts, and protrusions that had to fit into corresponding holes, you can just imagine the conversation.) I was glowing with maternal pride (until we ended up screaming at each other about which parts needed to be put away so the dog wouldn't eat them, or something like that). I just pray today's session ends a little more smoothly - but I already have frayed nerves, scraped fingers and a sore back from the dresser we just completed, so even under the best conditions, assembling Ikea furniture leaves me pretty ragged.

So why do I keep going back? Sure, part of it is the money - I've bought (and assembled) 2 nightstands, a coffee table, the desk in my office, several bookcases, and 4 deskchairs for what a nightstand would cost in a regular furniture store. But it's also the thrill of the bargain, as well as that profound sense of accomplishment I get when I close the drawer in a bedside table that I built myself. (Okay, it doesn't close all the way, but I still built it!) And I hope I'm teaching my kids the satisfaction of doing something for themselves, as well as how to wield a screwdriver, how to read weird diagrams, and how to apologize to their loved ones after they lose their temper.