Un-Dorsed
In my obsession with youth, I write a lot about beauty products.
I am willing to try just about any cream, lotion, oil – my favorite youthenizer is always giving way to my next favorite youthenizer.
And then there’s makeup – I love primer, foundation, concealer, highlighter, blush, bronzer, eyeliner, shadow, powder. And lipgloss, lipstick, lip stain, and lip balm. And I can buy one small thing every single week, and not dent my budget. There are thirteen blushers in my bathroom right now, all pleading with me to choose them tomorrow.
I have no loyalty whatsoever. Just an inexplicable optimism that the fountain of youth (and beauty) is out there.
So a few readers have wondered why I hardly ever mention a product by name.
Because:
A.) No one is paying me. (and I would gladly consider being a shill for cold hard cash.)
B.) They are all pretty good products but I’m still looking for the PERFECT one.
C.) If you bought something on my say-so and it stunk, you may not visit me anymore.
But I do have a product that I’d like to discuss.
This is not an endorsement, however. It’s an undorsement.
BB CREAM
I love to try stuff. So I joined this online “club” where, for a small fee, they send you a bunch of cosmetic samples every month.
It’s so fun. It’s like Christmas every four weeks.
Of course, these are just tiny stocking stuffers. Just .0006 ounces of moisturizer. Or enough lipgloss to cover just the bottom lip. But you get to try shit. I am happy when I am trying shit. I can spend 3 hours in Sephora and spend $9.50. I’m euphoric and I can’t even tell what looks good after a while because my cheeks are pink just from rubbing all the shit off. (Just ask my friend Chris.)
Anyway, I adore all these little products that come each month, especially the skin creams. They send me a lot of these, since they asked me how old I was. And one of these days they will send me a cream, or what they now call ‘serum’ – and bingo – no wrinkles, no age spots, no pores even.
With a little initiative, I can stretch a single application out for a week. I figure this will show me whether it will have any long term benefits. I don’t know why it hasn’t proved an effective technique.
Anyway…back to BB Cream. (you probably forgot – but that’s my topic.)
My beauty adviser (Mom) has been telling me for weeks now that BB Cream is all the rage. And Mom should know – she watches daytime TV. And she has great skin. She’s been using Pond’s Cold Cream (there it IS – an endorsement!) for most of her 88 years. But she’s sure that a better product is out there if she could just find it. I take after her.
BB stands for beauty balm. What it is … well, I’m not that sure. I’ve looked it up and it’s some kind of tinted moisturizer. And every cosmetics company now makes one – or several. Because you may need one for oily skin, or dry, or breakouts, or old-disguising.
And BB creams are great. Why in one single step, your face is creamed, primed, and perfected.
And this month, in my goody box, there it was.
BB Cream! And not a single serving size either. It’s 0.1 ounce. Why that’s enough for two months, the way I can stretch it out!
And guess what?
It’s awful.
Moisturizer makes my skin supple. And I love primer. It very subtly smooths my skin, creating a nice surface for my foundation.
This BB cream doesn’t moisturize much. It’s more like chalk.
And as far as primer …well, let’s just call this Spackle.
And as a foundation, I guess it would be perfect if my natural skin tone was ‘aluminum foil’.
On the positive side – it’s going to last for months.
Halloween Guilt: How I Scared The Crap Out Of An Eight-Year-Old
It was unintentional.
But I should have known better.
It was the Fall of 1974. I was a senior in college and doing my student teaching in Puerto Rico.
(Yeah, yeah. You’re doing the math and figuring out that I was 23. So I took a few extra years in college. So what? I liked school. I stretched it out a little. Just up to the point where my parents lost all patience. Then I reluctantly graduated.)
So anyway, I’m in Puerto Rico, teaching English in a private school, and living with a family from Indiana. To tell the truth, as a Connecticut native, I had less culture shock with the Puerto Rican environment that with Indiana wholesomeness.
But I digress again…
So anyway – again – there were three kids in my temporary family. Flossie was in college like me (okay, a few years younger). She went back to Ohio State after I had been there about a week. It was just as well. We didn’t exactly hit it off. She was a sorority sister and I was a commie-loving hippie. But I’m sure we’d be great friends today. Although I don’t particularly care to find out.
Julia was fourteen. She was sweet and loving, and exactly the kind of little sister I’d always wanted. The day I went back to Connecticut, she locked herself in her room, and wouldn’t say goodbye. See? Exactly like a little sister.
Then there was Matthew. Matt was eight. My own little brother was eighteen. But I remembered him at eight. He was nothing like Matt. My brother was already beating me in chess by age eight. Matt was still learning to read. He was smart but dyslexic. And observant but rambunctious. Short attention span but quick to laugh. He was – I found out later – just your typical little kid.
I’d been there two months by the time Halloween rolled around. I had become comfortable with these odd conservative midwesterners. I went to church. I wore a bra, even.
On Halloween, Matt went out trick-or-treating in his judo clothes. But he came home pretty early, and he got a kick out of opening the door for the older kids who rang the bell later in the evening.
Until one girl showed up like this:
Brown shirt, black beret, machine gun.
Patty Hearst had been kidnapped in February of 1974. By April, she had joined her kidnappers, changed her name to Tania, and robbed a bank. After a fiery shootout in May, she had gone underground. No one had heard a word since.
That’s all the story that anyone knew at the time. But everyone knew it. Including eight-year-old Matthew.
The Patty Hearst trick-or-treater kind of creeped him out, but he laughed it off pretty easily.
Or so I thought.
Later Matt shared a little of his Halloween candy with me. Over Snickers bars, he brought up Patty Hearst again,
“Where do you think she is?” he asked me.
And given that it was Halloween, and that I was totally unaccustomed to innocent kids from Indiana, I said:
“Here. She’s here.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell anyone, but …. I’m Patty Hearst.”
And here was this little boy, who had a total stranger living in his house.
He freaked.
His eyes filled with tears. His mouth dropped open. He looked at me with complete terror.
Oh no. What was I thinking? That it would be funny? Eight-year-olds like knock-knock jokes.
“I’m kidding,” I said. “It’s just a joke.” I pleaded. “Really.”
“Okay,” he said, still trembling a little.
He crept off to bed.
I felt horrible.
I read him his favorite book, “Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” seven times the next day.
I kissed him every time we got to the end of the book.
I was happy about one thing – neither of Matt’s parents had heard me say it. They didn’t send me to the airport in a taxicab.
But the poor kid (now 46) probably won’t answer a doorbell to this day.
Child Prodigy
By now I am sure you are wondering:
How in the world did Nancy acquire her unerring fashion sense?
Well, I don’t want to discourage you if you aspire to my ‘chic-ness’ – but the truth is:
I was born this way.
Why, I remember lying in my crib, watching my sweet old auntie (whose name I will not mention, as I wouldn’t ever want to hurt her feelings, even in heaven), and thinking to myself, “As soon as I can say more than ‘bye-bye’, I am going to tactfully bring up non-clumping mascara.”
My parents had one of the first TVs in the neighborhood, and there was nothing like Television to sharpen my fashion perception.
Even as I toddler, I was watching Big Three Theater – a late afternoon show which televised old Shirley Temple movies almost exclusively. And I loved Shirley. But I knew that it was gauche to wear your dress so short that everyone could see your underpants. How her mother let her make movies that way, I will never know.
***
One of the shows I watched as a really little kid was “Adventures of Superman.” I may have been six, but I often shouted at the snowy blurry, rolling image of Lois: “Your suit (or hat) (or earrings) (or lipstick) (or hairdo) is hideous!”
**
I became even more discriminating by age nine. I had a special dislike for bad wigs. Watching “Bonanza” often infuriated me. Little Joe’s girlfriend – who you knew would die at the end of the episode – would be riding her horse, with the wind whipping through her hair, and I could see where her fake long hair was attached to her short hair. Sometimes the color of the fake hair didn’t even match her real hair – which is really saying something with a black-and-white TV. “Get a better wig!” I’d sneer every Sunday night. (and a boyfriend who wasn’t fatal….)
**
As I got a little older, Elly May Clampett ignited my indignation. I may have been eleven years old, but I knew that pigtails didn’t make you seventeen when you were really 30. And even if I were raised in the backwoods, I figured it would take me about two hours to stop calling it the “Cee-ment pond”, and a week tops to get rid of the twine I was using for a belt.
**
(… which, by the way, reminds me again of my sweet father, and his favorite parody (copied from Roger Miller) of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line”: ‘I keep my pants up with a piece of twine… ‘)
**
When I was twelve came The Patty Duke Show. As someone who had been dying for three years already to be a teenager, I was tremendously disappointed in Patty’s style sense. Cousin Cathy was supposed to be a fashion failure. But Patty was supposed to be cool. Cool? Is that was Hollywood thought teenagers dressed like? It was as if they hired the nuns from my school to be the costume consultants.
**
(…Oh, and another by-the-way…. why would Ginger wear an evening gown on a three-hour cruise?)
**
Thank God for 1965. I was fourteen, and I saw them – my style icons. The Ed Sullivan Show. September 1965. It’s when I KNEW I was right all along. That Style is individual. It’s quirky. It comes from within. And you either have it or you don’t.
**
SONNY AND CHER!
**
And I had it! I had it up the wazoo!
Back To School
Several teachers weighed in when I wrote about my long-term affection for the first day of school. They get to feel that way every year, they bragged.
And I was jealous.
Sort of.
Back in college, I thought I might teach. Not Accounting or Business like I work in now. No, I was an English major.
Then I did my student teaching semester. Junior High.
Okay, I know you’re groaning. There’s nothing like twenty thirteen-year-olds to elicit significant groaning,
But I liked the kids.
Sort of.
What frustrated me most was herding them. I liked “Rawhide” and “The Big Valley” when I was growing up, and rounding up cattle seemed like a difficult job, but Rowdy Yates and Heath Barkley should have tried it with teenagers.
My typical lesson went something like this:
“Let’s look at this poem – turn around Michelle – what is this guy – everyone listen up – what is this guy – shh – doing in this – Scott, cut that out – look here everyone – do you think – please close that window – do you think that the raven – Kim sit down – really speaks – attention, here – what does – put that down – it mean – quiet – eyes front – what does – no you may not – nevermore.”
And back then, I didn’t even have to contend with texting.
And so I ended my teaching career and began to work with quiet and obedient debits.
But I’ve always thought that perhaps I could still do it. Maybe on the college level, where it’s not the teacher’s responsibility to make sure the kids pay attention.
I could just address the kids who are listening, and ignore the ones who are wasting their parents’ money.
I really believed this. Until a couple of years ago.
A close relative got her dream job – teaching at a prestigious university.
Then not so much.
She is working shitloads of hours. The preparation is insane. And then there are the kids. College kids with kindergarten parents. And the papers and exams to correct. And then there are the papers that she has to write to impress the tenure committee. And the conferences.
And on top of all of that, she’s in a technical field, with rapidly changing technology that is ridiculous to stay on top of. So…. reading and research fill every scrap of spare time.
This is definitely not my dream job.
And yet.
Teaching still has an allure for me. I love the way kids light up when they get it. I love the academic atmosphere… the very air crackles with energy – something important is going on. Learning is happening here. And then of course there’s the first day of school and the new pencil box.
So I have figured it out. How I can semi-retire and have an EASY teaching career.
I may work in Finance, but I was an English major after all. Language may be fluid, but that fluid moves like cold ketchup. And certain literature doesn’t move at all.
Like this guy.
Mark Twain was the focus of my studies as an undergrad.
While my classmates were struggling with pharmacology and engineering, I was reading “Huckleberry Finn.”
Mark Twain had everything for me. He told stories with humor and sarcasm. He lived in Connecticut. He wrote nasty letters to the gas company. He mainly thought the worst of people. He liked cats.
Not only that. He was fussy about his clothes and his hair. I recall that he did not rinse the shampoo out of his hair, because he liked how fluffy and white his hair looked with the shampoo still in. This is like the earliest precursor of mousse.
This is a person who I may be a reincarnation of.
And the best thing about Mark Twain?
He hasn’t written anything new in 102 years.
I can stay on top of this. I can write my lecture notes just once, and use them until Halley’s Comet comes back.
Mark Twain. My new pencil box. It’s so perfect.
One class a semester… starting at 10 am and I’m done by lunch.
Of Tom Mix and Clam Chowder
Today would have been my father’s 90th birthday.
In honor of the occasion, I’d like to honor some of his favorite things.
Tom Mix:
My father’s earliest memories included going to the theater to see Tom Mix in a silent movie. To Dad, Tom Mix was a real cowboy. (He certainly had a real hat, don’t you think?) Now Roy Rogers may have had Trigger, the Lone Ranger had Silver, and Gene Autry had Champion, but did you know Tom Mix’s horse was called Tony? What the heck kind of horse name is Tony?
**
Silly puns: My Dad loved silly rhymes and puns. He liked to make up stupid names for people. Whenever he spoke of Tom Mix, for example, he always called him “Tom Mixin’ Cement”. Doesn’t make any sense, but he liked it. Or he’d see Wayne Newton on TV, and he’d say, “I used to know his brother, Fig.”
How often would he say that? Every time. How often did we groan? Every time.
And speaking of silly puns – none of us will ever forget his favorite song: “It had to be stew. Meat and beans wouldn’t do.”
**
Peanut Butter:
Dad loved peanut butter. He especially liked cheap peanut butter. The type with oil floating on the top. In his last few years, he often needed nursing home care, and he hated the institutional food. My mother would bring him his favorite snack – raisin bread with peanut butter. Now you have to admit – that is a pretty good snack.
**
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.:
A while back I wrote about my old crush on David McCallum. I owe that infatuation to my father. Dad liked TV, but he usually let us kids watch what we wanted. When I was thirteen, I was still stupidly stuck on “The Beverly Hillbillies”. But my father heard about this new show “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that was on NBC opposite the Hillbillies. I was upset that he wanted to change the channel. I cried (which usually worked) – but for once he insisted. “Let’s just try it,” he said. And I fell in love. And his grandfather’s name was Napoleon (truly), so Dad was delighted too.
**
Golf: My father liked all sports. According to my mother, he was a very good athlete as a young man, and I certainly believe it. But except for his bowling night that I vaguely recall back when I was little, I only remember him playing golf. He played well into his seventies, and I played with him a few times. He had an easy swing, and I remember him aiming to the left of the flag to compensate for his natural slice. Our local course was a short par 3. He never used a wood – he could hit the ball as far with his iron, slice or not. He may have played a mean game with this friends, but I doubt it. I think he was probably as relaxed and calm with them as he was with me.
We watched a lot of televised golf once his health started failing. (Actually, we always watched a lot of golf – I remember watching Arnold Palmer.) Dad had some moderate dementia in his last years, and he came to believe that Phil Mickelson was his golf buddy. “See that guy, Mickelson?” he’d ask me. “I used to play with him all the time.” I’d say, “Did you beat him?” And he’d smile.
**
Clam Chowder:
My father loved clam chowder. But not the milky New England clam chowder. He liked Rhode Island clam chowder with a red clear broth that was an old family recipe. Or his recipe, maybe. My Dad didn’t do very much cooking, but he liked to make the clam chowder himself. He would spend the better part of the day creating his masterpiece. He was very particular about his chowder. He was not very particular about the state of the kitchen.
**
Family: Dad loved my mother and us kids and his whole family. His loved his parents and his aunts and uncles and his brother and his sisters. He loved his nephews and his niece. He loved his children’s spouses. He loved his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren.
On Father’s Day a few years ago, he had one too many martinis with my husband, and my brother-in-law practically had to carry both my father and my husband out of the restaurant. I drove home. Dad sat in the passenger seat and told me repeatedly that I was going in the wrong direction. “But I love you anyway,” he said. “Having you kids was the best thing I ever did.”
I think so too.
Happy Birthday, Dad.
**
The Big Reveal
I’m going to deviate from my normal format – Silly Vanity, and venture into
Serious Vanity.
For more than a year, I’ve been sharing my desperate attempts to be young, and six months ago, I decided on how much younger I wanted to be. I decided to be forty-six. I figured that subtracting fifteen years would about right.
So my husband and I began to think about food differently. That is, we decided to eat only REAL food. We have come to believe that when we eat junk food, we tend to overeat. Because no matter how much we eat, we want more, because our bodies are STILL looking for some NUTRITION.
So we started to eat real food in reasonable portions. And you know… we weren’t as hungry. We watched our intake of carbs too, but we didn’t eliminate them completely. We just cut back a little on the bread and potatoes, and upped our fruits and veggies instead.
And it didn’t take very long before our weight started coming down. And coming down.
But I didn’t want to be just slim and old. I wanted to be slim and YOUNG.
I’ve been practicing yoga for more than ten years. And I love it. But no one is kinder to me than me. I have always gone very easy on myself. So my yoga could best be called “yoga-lite.” So I decided to try just a little harder. And I got stronger.
But yoga doesn’t provide much of a cardio workout. Like my yoga-lite, I had also been playing around with a little zumba-lite. So I stopped shuffling my feet and swaying my hips and started jumping and dancing – faster, bigger, and more often.
Now I still can’t balance on one leg in yoga, and I still zumba to the right when everyone else is zumba-ing left. But I’m putting a lot more energy into my mistakes.
The whole point I am trying to make is this:
Keep at it.
Because getting and staying healthy is so great I can’t believe it.
I truly haven’t felt this good (or this young) in a lot of years. It can be done. And you can do it. It’s not easy, but it also isn’t that hard. Wholesome food simply prepared tastes good. Being able to walk a little further or dance a little longer is really satisfying.
And on the vanity side, looking good is awesome!
My husband has lost more than fifty pounds (!). I have lost 24 pounds and I’m down two sizes. I have discovered that I have fabulous legs. I have a decent belly. I even have a neck.
And guess what?
I’m forty-six again!
Me at sixty-one going on forty-six.
Life’s Stupid Paradox
Friday night we went out for our bimonthly treat – kiddie-size low-fat frozen yogurt (We are SO good). We were sitting in the car with our minuscule snack listening to the Grand Ole Opry. (Don’t even ask – let’s just say my husband has a serious Sirius issue.)
Little Jimmy Dickens told the same joke he’s been telling for about 50 years (he’s 91). Of course, just because he’s been telling it for fifty years doesn’t even mean it’s original. This joke could go back to the middle ages for all I know.
Anyway, Little Jimmy’s joke:
My wife said, ‘Do you want to run upstairs and make love?’
And I said, “I cannot do both.”
And even though the Grand Ole Opry is not exactly on my regular playlist, I have heard Little Jimmy tell this joke a dozen times.
But I laugh every time.
Because there is an elemental truth to this joke. Life is full of exasperating ironies.
As a little girl, it didn’t take me long to recognize the unfair, maddening paradoxes of Life.
Mom and Dad certainly helped.
“You can do ANYTHING you want,” they said encouragingly. “Absolutely anything.”
But I found out pretty quick that it isn’t quite absolutely anything.
For instance, I couldn’t:
Stay up past my bedtime.
Skip school.
Have a Hershey bar for breakfast.
Wear makeup to third grade.
Ride my bike in the street.
Cut my own hair.
Tell my little brother that there was no Santa Claus.
And about a zillion other things. But besides that zillion… oh yeah, absolutely anything.
Then there was high school. Leaving the house with my date, my Mom would call out, “Have Fun! Be Good!”
I wish my teenage self knew Little Jimmy’s joke: “I cannot do both.”
My career taught me the greatest irony of all: The “Work/Life Balance.”
Ha! (and I know you are all laughing your asses off too). The Work/Life Balance means that you can succeed at Work as long as you have no Life.
And the hits just keep on coming.
In my new passion to get healthy, I added a couple of Zumba classes to my Yoga practice. I attend Yoga classes in a beautiful old studio… up three LONG steep flights of stairs. Some days just getting to the top of the steps is challenge enough.
And then there’s Zumba. The gym I joined has the slantiest parking lot in town. I don’t need to do any biceps curls. Opening the car door is an uphill workout.
Do I really have to exercise before I exercise?
And now I see that Life’s Stupid Paradox has even more in store for me.
My mother is eighty-eight. It’s a good thing she has all day to get her errands done. Because the wonderfully amazing huge supermarkets allow you to buy ANYTHING you want, any time you want. How convenient.
But there’s a hitch. (of course). My mother can’t buy bread and milk on the same day. Because the bread is at one end of the store. The milk is at the other.
And she can’t walk that far.
Practice, Practice, Practice
You know the old joke – The tourist asks the New Yorker:
“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Practice, Practice, Practice.”
Well, I’ve been practicing all right.
This is my 200th blog.
I started fourteen months ago with a two-paragraph post about bathing suits, and I’ve been writing about bathing suits and other weirdnesses of aging several times a week.
I’ve had more than 55,000 views. And my mother doesn’t even read my blog, or it would be 100,000.
Thank you all for letting me have so much fun two hundred times.
I’ve learned a lot about myself – and about you – in all those posts.
1. Most obvious: I can write 500 words about anything. Toilet seats, Night-lights, Eyebrow plucking. You name it. Give me a subject and an hour to think about it. My words may be trivial, but they come gushing out like Niagara Falls. I actually did two posts that mentioned Niagara Falls. Writer’s Block is a myth.
2. I am obsessed with avoiding the aging process. I want to be young. I want: young hair, young skin, young clothes and most especially – young buttocks. Oh, and young ankles. But I don’t want to look like I am trying too hard. I am the sixty-one-year-old equivalent of prom hair.
3. Lots of people have the same ideas at the same time. When I write about Wonder Bread – there are fifty other bloggers also writing about Wonder Bread. Some even mention Twinkies too. I worried for a while that I wasn’t very original. But so what? We all live in the same world, all bombarded with the same stimuli. My subject matter may not be original, but I am.
4. I’m not the only woman who worries about swimsuits and miniskirts. Women executives, doctors, teachers, and grandmas find me every day – with the search term “skinny jeans.”
5. It appears that many women still have a big crush on David McCallum.
6. Reminiscing is sweet. Lots of people have similar childhood memories – school days, holidays, brothers and sisters, and teenage angst. And if your past was not as happy as it should have been, read me anyway. I’ll share mine.
7. Everyone loves my mother. And they should.
8. No matter how many times I proofread, I will always have a stuipd typo.
9. Single women tend to think my husband’s eccentricities are cute. Endearing even. Married women know better. They just sigh in commiseration. Everyone has the same husband.
10. Speaking of men – I get a lot of laughs when I laugh at men. And all my male readers (both of them) are usually very good-natured about it. But when I wrote – once! – that women can’t park…holy crap. I got a lot of indignant female responses. Come on ladies, lighten up.
11. No matter how silly I get, there is always someone out there who takes me seriously. I’m glad you think I have something important to say. I usually don’t.
12. I don’t have to steal (very many) photos from the internet. I can draw. And even if I draw badly, people seem to like funny drawings. This is better than when my Mom taped my drawings to the refrigerator. The internet is like having refrigerators all over the country.
Thanks.
Don’t put a magnet on your laptop though.
The Best Day
When I was a kid, do you know what my favorite day of the year was?
Yeah, okay, Christmas. (Good guess.) After all, I was a little girl who loved dolls and clothes and anything wrapped up. And unwrapping stuff. And tree-trimming and angel decorations. And parties and singing. And staying up late and getting up early. And Christmas lights, and cards in the mail. And tiny hot dogs wrapped in dough. And cookies. And having my hair curled. And money. And pie.
That’s pretty hard to beat.
So you do know what my second favorite day was?
The first day of school.
I loved summer – long hot days filled with swimming and biking, and warm evenings with night-time hide-and-seek and fireflies and the ice cream man and late bedtimes.
But by September I was ready to go back to school.
And that first day of school was so very thrilling.
First Day of First Grade. (me in the middle)
I went to parochial school that required homely navy jumpers. But we didn’t have to wear our uniforms the first day. I got to wear something pretty. And new too. My mother would buy me a special first-day-of-school outfit. No hand-me-downs for that day. And the whole school would go to Mass first, where I also got to wear a mantilla. A dress AND a lace headscarf. Very special. I loved that triangle of white lace, but if I could go back I’d like to wear my mother’s black lace mantilla. How cool.
I’d fidget all through the long Mass, and then Father What-Ever-His-Name-Was would come to the pulpit and start reading names.
“Grade One,” he’d start. “Sister Saint Adelaide: Denise Nadeau, Stephen Bernier, Janice Houle…” and all the way up to Eighth Grade.
And the children would get up as their names were called, and go stand by the Sister. And she’d line them up two by two and they’d march down the aisle and out the door and over to the big brick school across the street.
It was so exciting to find your new desk in your new classroom, and discover who would be your classmates for the year. Saint Anne School had two classes for each grade, and it took just that one day to be certain you had the better teacher and the best kids. You’d sneer at the “other class”, even if your former best friend was in it.
The September weather was fine and we’d go out at recess and run around the schoolyard. We had jump-ropes and cat’s cradles.
We’d get new textbooks. Well, not new, really – most of them were written about 1910. But they were new to us and we took them home in our new bookbag (I liked red plaid) and covered them that night with brown paper cut from old grocery bags. And I always had a new pencil case with ticonderoga pencils and a pink pearl eraser. And a protractor – though I had no idea what to do with it, except I could rub my pencil along the ridges and make a design on my new composition book.
Sister would give us lots of tests that first week to see what we knew. I sucked up like nobody’s business.
I got to write on the big old blackboard.
And be almost the last person standing in the spelling bee. Damn you, Andre Dorval.
Of course, it didn’t take long before I couldn’t wait until my third best day – the last day of school.
But that first day was so sweet.
I went to school until I was thirty. (My parents told their friends that I was majoring in Transferring.)
But that first day was glorious every single time.
When I retire, I am going back to school. I’ll find a class in an ancient brick building with heavy scratched-up desks and a real blackboard. The whole semester will be worth it for that first day.
**
Your New Hues
Because I am addicted to Fashion – and because I get a ton of junk emails just loaded with useless information –I have the scoop on the hot colors for this autumn.
The hottest of the hot is Burnt Orange. (Yup, Burnt is hot). This year it is softer and ‘dustier’ than last year’s orange. I’m not exactly sure how. Maybe some ashes got mixed in with the burnt part. Stylists are recommending that you wear Burnt Orange with navy. I’d have to agree. You can only wear orange with black on one day of the year. And if you wear it with brown you may look like your mother’s sofa from the seventies.
Next is Eggplant. Eggplant is very big this fall. According to the experts (also called the junk-mail senders), Eggplant is serious. Somber even. The problem with Eggplant (according to me, and I am an expert and, if not a junk-mail sender, I’m sometimes a junk-mail forwarder) is that it can make you look unhealthy. If you are dark-skinned you may look a bit gray – and gray is NOT a hot color this fall – although Titanium made the runners-up list. Titanium skin may not be the best choice, however. And if you are fair-skinned, or with the fading remnants of your summer tan, then Eggplant may make your skin look like the inside of the Eggplant. So stick with your lower half for your Eggplant color. Make sure your legs aren’t eggplant-shaped though. That could be unfortunate.
Venetian Red made the list this year. Did you know there are 285 shades of red? Looking at the Pantone color charts, I would describe Venetian Red as… umm… Red. Red is nice. Go for it.
Primrose Yellow is chic. This sounds like a sweet, cheerful color. But the experts describe it as Mustard. Now Ketchup is flattering (see Venetian Red above). Even Pickle Relish can be charming (though not on the list). But Mustard? Not unless you are playing “Clue.” And my idols, The Beatles, certainly didn’t think much of it. If you are determined to wear it, go with French’s, and not Grey Poupon.
Three Blues are on this Fall’s list.
Deep Teal is cool. It’s hard to describe, though. Blue, almost green, with a bit of black. No, wait. I’ve got it. Think “Old Bruise.”
And there’s Royal Blue. Worn with Black, according to the Fashionistas. I can see this, but I can also see “Dallas” – and not the new 2012 TV show. I see Sue Ellen Ewing, 1981.
My favorite is Cerulean. Cerulean Blue is a deep turquoise. Very complimentary to every complexion. Like Royal Blue, you can check it out on TV, as it’s worn by a big star, every day. Marge Simpson. Though you may want to choose Cerulean for your sweater, not your hair.
Finally, there’s Peach. Peach is trendy. Peach is “The New Neutral,” whatever that means. I like Peach, and it can be very flattering to your skin. A personal word of caution: You may want to skip Peach if your skin is also peachy. With the fashion trend this year towards colorful jeans –and with a closeout deal that I couldn’t pass up – I ordered a pair of peach cords from my favorite online store. They look pretty good up close. From a distance however, they look like I forgot to put on my pants.
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notquiteold 