The Parents of Spring Break

We were hanging out at Maria's, because she has a bar by her pool. Installed by the previous owners, so that when she and Todd moved in- before Ari and Phillipe became the blessed focal point of the household- there was already shelving and reinforced-canvas bar stools and Tiki embellishment waiting to resume it's previous existence as a social hub. They only used it during Spring Break.

All the children were gone- they were gone away, they were gone on vacation to various all-inclusive resorts in Cancun, Mexico. The neighborhood association had done its' math a few years back and realised that if all of the parents pooled their airfare money, they could hire a charter flight to bring their precious cargo to the babysat vacation clubs on the peninsula; this way, the offspring could practice some beginners hedonism within the assured confines and the parents could save some bucks. It had become the Grand Tradition that someone hold the week-long adults' sleepover in their house. The hosting parents were given the funds raised during regular Neighborhood Association shake-downs that happened at hotel conference rooms and Monday-night restaurants during the rest of the year. The hosting couple had full discretionary power to spend it outfitting their homes with the necessities of the week.

That power- the spending power, and more importantly the power to design themes for the Spring Break Sleepover- had been used poorly before: there had been strippers, of course (someone was going to be offended, no matter what sex the stripper was and no matter what costume they wore,) and there had been well-intentioned community "projects" involving the hire of a cement mixer to re-pave the path across one of the 48" wide strip of grass that separated the two halves of Willow Boulevard, and there had been mounds of PCP that was heavily cut with baby laxatives. There had been hyper, mildly hallucinating adults shitting in each other's yards for a week straight. At the next forum, it was agreed by all but one household that the association money would not be available to purchase street drugs. The couple that had voted Nay contended that they'd never had such a good layer of manure on their rose beds before; it had turned out to be a banner year for their yellow-and-pink All Americans. Still: only legal drugs would be allowed at any future Spring Break at-home parties.

"I'm not sure I know exactly where they are. I mean where on a map." Maria was saying. It was 3rd-Day brunch, so everyone's hangover was well established but not yet rooted in their stem cells, like on the 7th-Day Bar-B-Q Finale. Maria's face was tense. Todd reached over me and across the table, grazing my chest on the way like he always did, and put his hand over hers.

"We have a call later. We checked online this morning, remember? They are having a ball."

"I still couldn't find it on a map. That's what I mean- it makes me- it gives me this sense of unease," Maria finished. We all nodded. We were worried, and it was about the time in the festival when everyone started talking about the kids. There was a custom that we all followed instinctively, like lemmings, and it was to not talk about the kids at all until 3rd Day. The 1st-Day Kickoff Skinny Dip and Barn Dance was about nothing except letting the chaos of the mind that is subsumed during the rest of the year- for the sake of wholesomeness and just running a household- burst out in sketchy behaviors and at least one small, almost ceremonial accidental fire. 2nd-Day was somewhat mired in the neighborhood's first traditional steps toward pacing itself- it was the day when most of the workshops and professional lectures were scheduled. Most attended these things because they'd paid for them in association fees, and felt that they were going to get their god damned money's worth, though it was anyone's guess how many attendees were awake beneath their gigantic Jackie O sunglasses, worn by women and men for their voluminous and uncommunicative lenses.

"I told them they couldn't have any scuba time this year because of finances, but it was mostly me freaking out. I just could never get that story about those tweens who were trapped in that man-made coral configuration for five hours." This was Josie talking, and she was definitely a fusser. She was on the other side of the long table, too, and Todd took it upon himself to let go of his wife's hand so that he could reach over to her. He managed to boobgraze me again while he repositioned his arm to be heading in Josie's direction.

"That was smart. Limits. Kids respect them and all that." He twinkled sardonically. Josie smiled for the first time since the Dip-and-Dance, as it had come to be called. "Ari wanted to get a two-day club pass, have you heard about these things? You can buy this pass that lets them get into any club- and I mean any club- on the hotel strip, entrance fee pre-paid, and it comes with a traveling janitor."

I startled as if I'd been touched by a third, mystery arm Todd had been hiding. "Janitor?"

Maria leaned over and took my hand, possibly swiping the side of the breast attached to the woman sitting next to her. "They travel with the kid- yeah, it checks out- they come along to clean up. They clean up puke on any surface. You can get them cleaned up personally, like with a fresh T-shirt and that, but that's a la carte."

"The gouging, my God!" I half-squealed, and we all winced at the sound. "Sorry, too loud" I whispered loudly.

Josie was nodding. "I'm not surprised, I'm not surprised at all. Can you just see a bunch of teenagers in some ridiculous club, all the black-light on, the neon going, and next to every other kid is a janitor." We laughed. She continued, "I can picture they are all in coveralls- blue coveralls- except instead of Eddie on the name tags, it says Juan- right?" We laughed again, hard, and then abruptly stopped because of the racism.

Then, to make up for Josie's not-funny imaginings, we all started talking about how magnificent each other's children had turned out. We complimented each other on their child's bravery on the archery range that fall when that freshman had gotten scored by an errant arrow; another parent on how much compassion their kid had shown over the entire marking period when she offered to give calculus lessons to the less-gifted (that girl was too smart,) and how all the catcher-uppers she'd taken on had jumped one and a half grades that quarter; how another one's mind was so open and unassuming, basically just open to experience in a way every other child had not managed to retain past their pre-school years (this was lovingly intoned to Barbara and Angela, as predictably as taxation, whose sperm donor had been less than his dossier had described and whose child was merely average.) Then we made another pitcher of Greyhounds and took ginger bites of the catered stuffed french toast.

Spring Break Week tripped on, flashing by, and every day we would enthuse about our flock of underlings more and more. Stories became Bunyan-esque, so that the children were triathletes and had been scouted by Princeton, which did not normally scout for students but had just heard about little Turmoix/Evenellena...And we glowed, we did- we remembered, through the haze of recently-decriminalized pot smoke and perfumed Mohitos, how much we loved them. We remembered our pasts with those little imps with near-accuracy, and though we knew those re-tellings were full of air we kept our mouths shut about it. The inventions were too much fun, were a slumber party game that took all week to finish. We missed them, in the abstract.

On 6th-Day, there was a banquet. Everyone had become unusually still (despite the perfect champagne fountain that beckoned from Maria and Todd's front yard,) waiting for the host's toast. Todd stood, messily dressed in a 70's-era ruffle shirt tuxedo, and almost told everyone what we didn't want to know:

"Ok, all right, ok. Thanks for coming, you all. Maria and I had the best time ever of any of you. I don't say that to rub anyone's face in it, but as a compliment, because it was the most fun hosting our little crowd, wasn't it hon?" Maria nodded too enthusiastically to cover for Todd's lack of clarity. "Anyway." Todd looked around at all the puffy grown-up faces around him, and then sat down. He held a piece of paper to his wife. People looked at each other with wary, bloodshot eyes.

"So the limos are going to be here soon. They're sooner than expected, you guys." There was murmuring from us all- this had happened once, maybe twice before, and it was unwelcome news. "There's really more, guys." Maria swallowed. We all watched her throat work- her green lame minidress highlighted her neck so well it was hard not to. "I'd better just jump in. The limousine back from the airport is coming in almost exactly two hours."

There was silence, of course. No one wanted to give this thing any credit, so we played possum by not making a peep for thirty seconds. Finally someone said, "Are you kidding?"

Maria looked down at the paper her husband had been unable to bring himself to read, then back up again. "No, it's not a joke. The hotel had to evacuate late last night, and the kids got sent home early. They called and everything, but I guess no one was around." The association had thought itself clever when it had designated a singular land line as the contact phone number from the hotel or the charter company. That way there would be no repeated phone-calls that would take us from our 5th-Day Full Bacchanalia- the hired band, the beloved game of Orgy Charades that was anticipated with such pleasure during the year, the pup-tent vomitorium- to listen to details of sullen sun burnt highschoolers mistreating the local lizard population. Maria took a breath, exhaled it, took another one and said "two hours and zero minutes, people."

The place practically erupted in a fireball right then, fueled by the panic-sweat and pure adrenaline of a neighborhood's worth of very high responsible adults, flinging themselves out of their settees and laps that didn't belong to their spouses to run to the nearest service table or globe-sized water bong and make it go away. Fortunately, Maria and Todd had followed the prescribed emergency measures and kept their basement stocked with tarps, talcum powder, and three empty bathtubs; we managed to get everything put away or hidden, including the really shitfaced, who'd been thrown into a bed with their evening wear still on. There was no time to get changed, ourselves. The limousine arrived.

Fiona, the single mom from the very bottom of the cul-de-sac, suggested those not already in their underwear strip down, and that we would all get in the pool, except for Martin the widower, who was already in swimming trunks. He was stationed behind the Tiki bar, as if he'd been there making blender drinks all night.

Someone's child walked in, followed by everyone else's child. They were practically asleep on their feet, and the tans that we'd all paid for were indistinguishable under the group pallor. "Where is everybody?" the child said.

We all looked child-ward, as if we'd only just noticed them. Todd spoke first. "What was up with the hotel, sweetheart? You didn't get your last day!" This worked perfectly: all of the kids started up, saying the same thing about the unfairness of the situation and passing blame around like a tray full of crab-salad stuffed mushroom caps. We looked around at each other, wet and making plans to get out of the pool with unaccustomed poise, and there was an unspoken group spark: next year there would be a new fee, maybe- something to pay for the actors to play us, should this ever happen again, so that we could properly sober up while the children were telling their woeful tales and eating like caterpillars and someone else could be nodding their heads, listening.

Stupid Questions

One of the things that the UK wants to know is if I'm a terrorist. It seems worried, because it asks repeatedly. It uses almost identical language every time:

 Are you now or have you ever held beliefs that were in support of any actions that have led or might lead to acts of terror perpetrated upon the people or peoples of the UK?... Have you now or did you ever in the past or do you think you might some day in the unknowable future collect materials that could actively or subliminally sway a young and/or stupid person to perpetrate violence or concoct violent plots against a person or the peoples of the UK?... Will you now or might you ever or did you ever or do you think you might if you had a time-bending machine ("TARDIS") think about one day becoming/became/will become violences that might/did/may one day hurt or irritate or generally inconvenience a person or people of the UK?...How about now?

The questions seemed written expressly to fail at what they intend to do. I now believe that these inane, counterintuitively overt questions about the applicants' ideological leanings are designed to be such a barrage of ridiculousness that the terrorist-to-be will simply laugh themselves into answering one of them honestly, as a joke.

Terrorist: Ha ha ha ha ha- ah ha ha ha ha! Woo! Uh huh huh ha ha! Boy these questions are idiotic! I'll just put down "yes" right here, just to make it interesting for them! Morons!

If you see it that way, you understand that the second- the very second- the Terrorist answers affirmatively, National Security, Scotland Yard, The Queen's Guard, Agatha Christie and Lord Peter Whimsey will show up, taking the room from every possible direction, bursting through walls and windows and ceiling (except Agatha and Lord Peter, who will come in through the door,) grab the Terrorist and begin beating them gently about the head and neck in a very civilized way. Then there will be reading of rights- every right that was ever written down, from the defendant's rights as stated by the Vikings (consisting entirely of hitting on the head until the defendant no longer feels like protesting, or is dead) to current Alabama State law (wherein the defendant is asked about their local lineage and the answers duly recorded until one of two things happens: the defendant runs away and dives into the municipally-maintained gator pool, or everyone waits for the lawyer, who brings a pitcher full of whiskey lemonade so that they can whet their whistles.)

And Then: the Justice. Slow, slow justice- but justice nonetheless. Right?

It brings to mind other stupid questions of the bureaucracy. The multiple-choice questions on any Driver's Tests, like whether or not you should stop when you drive up to a stop sign at a four-way stop signed intersection? There are the questions at a doctor's office, asked by both the nurse who brings you to the real Waiting Room (only after you've passed the Waiting-Room test in the novice's Waiting-Room Facade out front,) about swelling and fever and vague feelings of unease when you're there with a kitchen knife buried in your ankle. (For the record, I loves me some doctors and nurses. Some of my best friends are health care professionals.) There are sheets you must sign and send back to your child's school IMMEDIATELY, stating that you received the sheet you just signed. The Chicago Public School system is masterly at sending papers home that you must sign and return so that the system has it on record that you received the paper you just signed... it's as if there's a secret society of public school administrators who've made a sacred vow to collect those piles of dead tree shavings so that they have some of every one's DNA on file (the blood from your pen-bruised writing fingers puts it there)...just in case.

Answering these queries- these stupid, stupid queries- has also brought to mind some questions that I really should be answering.

Are you sure you want to do this?

Does anyone really care if you look your age?

What constitutes "clean", anyway? (Please answer individually: laundry; carpet; family silver; hair.)

Do you now, or have you ever, used Ignoring Things as a viable life action?

Multiple Choice: what is Love? A. the power  that fuels all things good in the world, B. A warm blankie and a chilly dessert, C. The terrible propaganda that the infidels spread to lull the believers into a false sense of possibility, D. Love is the Universe, and the Universe is Love, E....Puppies! Gandhi! The opiate of the masses! PASS! NEXT QUESTION!

Are you sure you want to do this?

And, finally: Hey terrorist! I really think you'd like the show Dr. Who. Have you ever seen it?

...sorry, that last one snuck in there; it's from the UK's Visa application. Or it should be.

Artistry

Singe’s boyfriend was handsome once she’d done him up. She gave him a scar, because she’d always thought scars were handsome and rugged and made charming new creases in a face, if it was a lucky face. And she made him darker: she’d start with a wash, a gentle wash, of a slate-y blue that would offset the proclivity toward orange in almost every foundation. She would layer some bases, starting with the darkest one which she would brush upward from his neck with a Kabuki brush that she used for damp work. Then she would sponge a light base, on top of the brow ridges and cheek bones and chin, in tiny splots; finally a layer of medium base would be smoothed down with her fingers. It was an unorthodox approach- most artists would insist that it was not possible to get that kind of depth for any up-close screen time, but Singe let her boyfriend’s face speak for itself.

She talked him into eyelashes. Brian was reasonable about all of it- he was indulgent and calm when she’d first tried the scar, for example- but he’d balked at false eyelashes. “I’m sorry, I just think it will make me look like a girl” he said.

“You should try looking like a girl. I could make you into a very pretty one- you already have good eyes for that, which is why I want to put these little things around them.” She held up a few single false lashes. “But not like a girl. I’m thinking of Sean Connery lashes, Ricardo Montalban lashes. Carey Grant lashes, honey. He was beautiful but not a girl, get it?” Singe twirled a bit around the canvas chair that Bri was on, in front of her work station at TATT Studios, her regular gig that required she make young actors look older and old actors look infantile.  In the past year she’d started to make her young people look older and her older people look interesting. It had been subtle, just minute changes involving highlighter in pinpricks around a few lash lines, so that there was a naturalesque brightness; at the same time and on the same person she would add a drop of solution that made some capillaries pop up in the whites of those eyes. It made her people look like they were right at the peak of a smoky and fascinating party.

The mention of a Bond Man had worked its dependable magic. Brian looked at the lashes on her fingertip. “I always thought false lashes were- y’know- all in a line, like they were attached to a string. I keep thinking of that. Those are like the legs of some bug.” Trevor took one of the lashes from her fingertip by licking his own and pressing it to hers, like she’d mimed it.

“Yeah, they come like that and you cut them up. I just want to put these few on those peepers of yours.”

Brian sighed and decided to be charmed. “You can do it if you promise to always call them peepers.” So Singe got her wish, and put the almost unmanageably small, elegant false lashes on her boyfriend, and it was just as she’d promised: he was an exotic, a rapscallion; he was certainly a criminal and devastatingly good in bed. He was trouble, once the makeup was on. He liked it. They went out for the dinner that he’d been waiting to take her to. He pulled out Singe’s chair, which was new.

“You’re acting different.” Singe settled in and watched his behavior- sweet but distractable by day, the same by night- slide into a different gear, or plane, or something (she wasn’t willing to commit to which kind of change she thought it was by describing it too meticulously.)

“I don’t think so.” He said, relaxed and beckoning the server with a lowered brow and even gaze. Singe had never seen him lower his brow with any seriousness before. Once the server- a funny woman that needed a good concealer and concealer brush and a blue-red lip stain instead of an orange-red lipstick- came over, Brian ordered for the both of them.

“You just ordered for us.”

He smiled. He took her hand. "I thought- it just suits the mood-" he told her, and blushed, which she could discern because she knew what to look for.

She thought about blushing- her own blushing. She knew what kind of skin she had, and where she would blush (around the neck, seeping upward past her jaw to make two Medium Tuber Rose III saucers on both of her cheeks, low.) She hadn't felt the spark in the nerves under her collarbones that signified a coming blush yet. Then Brian kissed the palm of the hand he was holding. There was blushing from her, in discreet and indiscreet places on her body. When the food came, she ate it from the fork he offered- he refused to let her feed herself, and he smiled while he did it, and his fringed eyes shone in the glare of the poorly chosen three-bulb chandelier that was over their table, loitering just at forehead level. Then she ordered them both dessert and they took turns feeding each other, which resulted in dripped-upon shirts. They both thought of going back to TATT Studio to ostensibly wash their shirts in Costume/Wigs washers. The machines were part of any good TV studio's equipment, as were the union cots. There were three of those. They were kept in a supply closet, folded and expectant.

Singe and Brian put their dirty tops in the washer and Singe ran it. "It'll be a half-hour. We got them in early enough so I don't think they'll need any more than that- any soaking time and all that." She was looking at Brian's chest as she said it, watching the line at his neck where the foundation ended and half-thinking about what she needed to add (some Ochre, Some Nutmeg Series L mixed with it,) and half not-thinking. Brian watched her eyes.

"Does it need something?  I see you planning more of this-"  He indicated his own neckline in a strong, fiery way. She put her hand on his chest, between the pectorals and their tell-tale nipples.

"Yes," she said, and instead of her leading him to the cots, he took her forearm and led her.  They got to the supply closet (someone on the set who had a sly and patient sense of humor had put spotless hand towels and spray cleaner on the shelf directly behind the cots- just at eye level- where there were normally broken printer parts and black computer screens,) and pulled out a cot and unfolded it in the hallway. There was a dressing room not fifteen feet away, but rolling it there, bent over in an unsexy way for pushing, was too much to ask them; they took off their respective pants and lay down and kissed and petted and nipped (Bri had never nipped before, but he was somehow a sensate and knew just when to widen his jaws again, preventing a biting bruise that was not easy to render unrecognisable, no matter how much putty and Siren Pink One was used.) Singe was gratified by her success: he had changed, under her hands, into someone who was less considerate of her feelings and more considerate of her needs. She was absorbed, too: her mind layered colors like waves, washing up and down and back and forth, thinking about textures and false hairs or moles or contact lenses (not contacts, she decided during a change in position.) She thought, or half-dreamed, and then came hard.

The next week she was listless from too much imagining. Her job was the same, it paid the bills; it was a way to pass time, which made it unfulfilling.  Brian was somewhere warm for business- he was gone for six days. She'd told him to bronze himself in sunlight, not visit a tanning booth of any kind, and to put a washcloth on his face when he was laying out. "So cover my face? Is anything OK, do I have to use the washcloth or is it just anything, keep it covered?" He knew there were distinctions. He was beginning to name some materials, like latex and talc and eyebrow templates.

"It has to be a washcloth. It covers, but not entirely, so some UV gets under the edges and through the weave. The tan is more natural. You don't have the farmer's arm pattern, the hard line." He accepted this, and smiled, and they'd kissed and he told her she was crazy just like he would have said something romantic, like I'll Miss You or some such. She felt his leaving as a small deflatement. She'd spent two days mooning and mixing up palettes like the eternal walnut-shell guessing game, which was something she did regularly to see what might pair itself and make its' suggestion for a new shadowing taupe or reverse-cat-eye liner color. Nothing took her fancy. On the third day she picked up a brush for eyes ( a brush for creases, large, used for base vanillas and yellows to build bruises upon,) dabbed it in A Rose This Way Comes, and began rounding her cheeks, in efficient quarter-circles. Singe had phenomenal, almost childish, skin and so could afford to leave off the foundation. Still she picked up a liquid base brush, one of the tiny ones, and did pointelle over her jawbone with something luminescent and colorless. Her long, angled cheekbones widened with these effects and it made her look Slavic, or like one with some Slavic in the family thrown in with her natural light Jamaican. It was strange, and she liked it, so she continued: She was Slavic-ish and an insomniac with Deep Taupe gel under too-light concealer. The next day she played with scars until she'd created the old fused damage of a motorcycle crash survivor, with barely perceptible white hash marks to connote the 54 stitches she'd gotten on her face and neck. The next day there were the markings of 77 stitches, and poorly done so that the split cheek hadn't healed well and puckered deeply. After that she gave herself the bone-deep pallor of one who'd barely escaped drowning.

Her workmates were amused until the drowning one, so she made the next day a happy face, opening her eyes with liner and lash and over-glossing her mouth so that she looked giddy and coked up, which everyone found almost as bad. On Friday she made her masterpiece: she aged herself thirty four years. Age makeup is the most artful of all cosmetic devices, though there were some that disagreed with that assessment ( like Farrah at LTX, who had made her own periodic chart of bases and blushes and shadows and pigments, so that she could treat each of her people like they were science experiments; her people left her chair looking like changeable dolls, exact and lifeless. They each had a healthy respect for the other. ) But Singe approached ageing like a professional dowser, looking at the subject for an hour before starting, making unconscious notes about pores and dullness and blood patterns. Singe looked at herself for two hours before she started.

She layered all kinds of things, building her old skin with the usual Bone and Mint pre-bases and the liquid latex and the carefully chosen blend of foundations that were lighter than her present skin. She lavished her cheeks with the wrinkler and patted it into her brow lines and chin creases, which was the opposite of the standard application. Her face became striated with fine vertical lines on her cheeks and curving around the eyes. The crow's feet she made with moulded latex were so thin they were transparent, and she used a putty mixed with a toner to glue them on. The foundation was layered like veils or kerchiefs, covering some areas and not others, leaving skin open to a different interpretation with a different color. The whole round was five hours in her canvas chair, including the preliminary staring and the clean-up. A co-worker walked in.

"Have you seen Singe?" the co-worker said.

"I'm right here" she responded, in her natural voice. The co-worker looked around the room once and then left. Singe looked in her friendly behemoth of a mirror and smiled. The makeup moved with her as her skin would move with her in thirty-four years. Give or take, she thought.

Brian was due to come home that night, late, and he wasn't expecting her; she paid to park and waited for him at the baggage carousel. She hadn't changed: She had her work shirt- an old white men's button-down- and a skirt that was non-descript. Her hair was the same as she'd worn it to work, with the addition of a few tiny rhinestoned snaps. She waited for Bri- she was excited to see him.

Brian came down the escalator leading to the baggage area. He didn't see her. He went to the carousel and waited for his case. Singe wanted to say something, to jump up to him and smile, but she held herself back. He found his suitcase, leaned, grabbed, and picked it up and turned around. She was right in front of him.

He was tanner, but not too tan- he'd taken her advice and shielded his face. She looked directly at him, and he looked directly at her.

"You," Brian said.

Old and Embarrassing Things

So, this move is coming up- it's gigantic, probably the biggest move I'll ever have. I'm going to England. It's going to be fantastic, except when it's not, such as now. The particulars of moving your whole house (in the U.K. they call it "moving house"! So exotic!) are ridiculous, many of them small and annoying and almost too many to count, like Lilliputians. One of those little buggers- running up to my foot and stabbing its' tiny spear into my big toe- is old stuff.

The house is already littered with drifts of house-jam, as if I'd been packing for fifteen minutes every day and then just walked away from it (which is precisely what I've been doing.) This would be fine if I'd managed to come back to any of the previously started boxes, but I prefer to go all haphazard, grabbing the pieces of a dubious kitchen appliance and throwing them into a box of an ill-advised size, like a jewelry box or something. It keeps me fresh to walk into a room of confused moving materials wrapped around some but not all of these kitchen appliances or toiletries from the late 90's or mislaid piano keys. Naturally, when I say "fresh" I mean "nervous", but that's how I roll. My brain tends to...um...wander during these moments of "freshness," and it strikes me: all of the shit I'm pulling out now says a great deal about the stuff I was enthusiastic about some years ago. Like Rod Stewart.

 I took the girl ice skating today, and we'd both been looking forward to it for a week- I for the bliss of speediness (or perceived speediness- it doesn't matter) and she for the opportunity to wear her white mohair Hello Kitty vest in an appropriate environment, for once. The music they play is, naturally, a horrible radio station that seems satisfied in its' mission to take the worst pop songs from the "70's 80's 90's and right now" and mash them up into a rancid aural stew, with commercials. I tried to adopt the coping strategy of one of the many, many tweens that were on the ice by acting like I didn't care about the shitty music or the fact that I was wearing mom jeans, or that I could only skate well in one direction as long as I didn't try to pull any funny stuff, like stopping.  After many a round with my daughter holding on to me and all of the classic slaptick comedy that that required, she sat out and I skated on, totally not caring about what others thought, like, at all. It was fun: faking nonchalance kind of freed me to be secretly enthusiastic about songs I hadn't heard in decades, songs that under normal circumstances- such as being stuck in traffic with a small passel of fifth graders who've stormed the car radio- would have made me literally barf. There was a Led Zeppelin song, and a song by Asia, and some Taylor Swift. I took put my back into the pretense of apathy and remembered how freeing it was to be a tween at an ice rink, gratefully merging the fake with the real and genuinely not caring for whole minutes at a time: what a rush! What passion! The relief that used to come with those moments of emotional holiday was so fierce and so unusual that it used to make me cry (as long as there was no one around.)

So there I was, actually savoring the memory of being a teenager, when the song "Young Turks" by Rod Stewart came on. It may have been called "Young Hearts" or "Turk Love" or "Turkish Love Affair, Young Mix" or some such- I didn't remember the name, but I remembered the lyrics far too well- and at first my adult consciousness descended and I scolded myself for having those lyrics stored in the head but not know where the house is and yadda yadda. But the secret enthusiasm wasn't to be dismissed, and I thought of my friends and I at one of our homes, listening to "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" by RS, and commenting on how sexy we did, in fact, find him. Gross, but we were twelve so we didn't know any better, and really the whole point was to talk about desire with a safe and disco-oriented lightning Rod Stewart (yes, I meant to make that pun. You're welcome!) So this memory was a safe one, then: a place from back in the day when I wasn't abjectly disappointed in myself for something stupid and tweenish, like how my thighs looked or the fact that, no matter how hard I tried, I would never really want to be a Junior Varsity cheerleader. I was with friends; there was consummate giggling that left sore belly muscles for days afterward; Rod Stewart was sexy.

Ok, ok, even then I knew that he wasn't sexy. I was more of a Stewart Copeland fan, myself. I still have a pin that has a picture of him being much more sexy than RS, should one ever wish to make that comparison. My pin was, in fact, one of my old and embarrassing things that was unearthed a few months ago- I stuck it on the cork board that's buried in the office's blockage. I am joyful in a provisional way, because I recalled the way I felt sometimes as a teenager that didn't involve me bleeding Chi all over the rural New Jersey landscape. Right now, to expand on that beautiful theme, I plan to sing along to every Rod Stewart song I hear.