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MissMelisshttp://www.missmeliss.com

From the Vaults: The Gravity of the Situation

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Originally written for The Alchera Project, November, 2005

Deanna isn’t a novice at singing, really, though she feels like one as this is her first Christmas concert that involves an actual church. Oh, sure, she sang with school choirs, had solos, made her entrance into community theatre at the tender age of ten, but somehow, standing with the other choristers in the cold sanctuary, the music is different, her heart is different.

The mood is broken when the puffy-haired woman next to her opens her mouth. Sure, Martha is a sweet old woman, sort of grandmotherly, and not a little dotty, but some people just should not be able to sing. The notes she offers forth with a flourish are not known to human kind. (Deanna wonders, idly if Martha is perhaps an alien, attempting to communicate, or an exiled mermaid, unable to produce melodious sounds unless under several feet of water.)

Midway through the verse, the director stops the choir, and asks each section to sing their part. When he gets to the altos, he pauses near Martha and makes a face that, thankfully, the woman utterly fails to see, so focussed is she on singing the correct words, if not the correct notes. He glances past her at Deanna, and the two exchange a look, acknowledging the gravity of the situation.

The next week at rehearsal, Martha is positioned at the end of the row, where the microphone cannot pick up her graceless warbling.

Sleep Patterns

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I’ve never been very good at sleeping. I either feel like it’s so much wasted time, or I’m afraid of what my imagination will run on the movie screen of my mind, so I avoid it, or I’m so exhausted and cranky that I cannot get enough of it.

Last night, I took melatonin way too late. Today, I was a zombie.

But I was a zombie with incredibly vivid dreams, who woke to make dinner, spend time with my husband, and still get a blog post in under the wire.

Tonight? I’m hoping to be in bed by 1 AM.

Frittata

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frittata

We had leftover deli turkey, the kind with peppercorns and sundried tomatoes, and zucchini, mushrooms, and spinach that had to be used.

I found a recipe for frittata that used all those vegetables, and replaced the called-for bacon with the turkey.

It said to only use three cloves of garlic. I laughed.

I chopped, stirred, cracked, blended, and poured.

It’s in the oven now.

I’ve loved the concept of breakfast for dinner since I was a little girl. (To this day, I only go to IHOP at night, but only ever order breakfast foods.)

Comment if you want the recipe…

Leo Rising (Happy Birthday to Me)

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I asked the universe (and my mother) to send me a storm for my birthday. I woke yesterday to thunder, lightning, and torrential rain, which subsided into a steady, soaking rain around noon, and lingered throughout the day.

I love it when nature cooperates with my desires.

Turning forty-four was easy and fun, filled with laughter, good friends, good food, and special gifts: goodies from Lush and a bracelet from Fuzzy, flowers and plants from two of my favorite people, and a non-fiction book from my aunt that I’d never have chosen, but will enjoy.

Happy Birthday to Me, indeed.

By the Numbers

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My blog-friend Michael (aka WarriorPoet(2)) died last year, a veteran who fell, not to gunfire or missile blasts, but to cancer, at too young an age.

We used to challenge each other with memes and prompts over on OpenDiary, which also died, just a few months ago, of neglect, mostly – not by the participants but by the site owner who had moved on to other things.

I found this meme while sifting through archives, and thought I’d share it here.

10 words you like in your own language:
brilliant, decadent, fractious, glower, nostalgic, susurration, overzealous, tintinnabulation, zesty, zoetrope,

9 words you like in other languages:
allegro, attraversiamo, ciao, guacala, joyeux, melange, noir, pianissimo, scocciare

8 city names that are fun to say:
Albequerque, Boise, Carcassone, Istanbul, Marrakech, Tehachapi, Tuolomne, Waxahachie

7 words that make you uncomfortable:
autistic, cloaca, can’t, death, fear, truth, war

6 words that relate to your job:
creative, emotional, internal, nebulous, scary, undisciplined

5 words that describe someone you love greatly:
affectionate, forgiving, loyal, silly, understanding

4 words you would use to describe yourself:
improvisational, mercurial, sarcastic, vivacious

3 words that describe your pet:
canine, clingy, quartet

2 words that describe your higher power:
divine spark

1 word to end with:
imagine

DDoP: Fairy Dust

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Originally Written: June, 2008
Inspiration Word: fairy dust (I think)
Inspired By: Becca Rowan

She stopped in the village square, intrigued by the array of market stalls, all offering things never seen for sale in her own home town.

“Inspiration, just five dollars!” one of the peddlers called, holding up a glass bottle adorned with vines and flowers.

She was tempted, but was fairly certain that it was just an empty jar, however beautiful.

Booths offering warm nuts brushed shoulders with other booths offering half measures of imagination and ambition.

At the booth where fairy dust was sold, she could not resist, and traded $20 for a heavy cut-velvet bag.

Deep inside, possibilities glittered.

Listen: Bathtub Mermaid: Fairy Dust

DDoP: Pictophone

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Originally written: June, 2008
Inspiration word: Pictophone
Inspired by: Clay Robeson

Random sentences inspiring even more random drawings, which lead to other sentences, or just the connection between word and image in the slideshow of our own brains? Which is more real? More creative?

The answer? Both. And neither. To see a picture and be inspired is magic whether you share the results or not. To find a poem in a photograph, a novel in a portrait, a scandalous love story in the naturally occurring vignette of two people in the park…this is what the creative spark provides.

Whether with verbal pointillism or a game of pictophone, we connect the dots.

Listen: Bathtub Mermaid: Pictophone

DDoP: This Isn’t Treasure Island

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Tonight’s Dog Days of Podcasting post is a 100-word distilled moment written in August, 2009:

Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems were constant friends in childhood, poems my grandmother and I would memorize and recite. I knew all about having a little shadow, and going up in a swing.

One poem that I never appreciated until this weekend, which has been spent largely in bed, was “The Land of Counterpane,” in which a sick child turned the hills and valleys of his comfortable bed into all manner of landscapes for his imagination.

I don’t imagine my quilt squares as separate countries, but I do still let imagination run wild.
Even days spent propped on pillows have magic.

You can listen to it HERE.

DDoP: Polyurethane

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Transcript of yesterday’s entry for The Dog Days of Podcasting. Transcript may not match final recording.

Listen to the episode at The Bathtub Mermaid.

PolyurethaneThe first time I heard the word “polyurethane” I was nine years old, and begging my mother for new roller-skates – the kind that have the smooth wheels like the rental skates at the rink. It must have been around my birthday, or maybe Christmas.

Shortly afterward, I received a pair of roller-skates with white leather booties sporting blue stripes, and happy reddish-pinkish polyurethane wheels.

Every day after school, every Saturday after the usual cartoon hour (which I never watched), I would walk sideways down the three floors from our condo to the ground, holding onto the rail so I wouldn’t roll off the edge of a step. My daring friends and I would skate in the local park, racing down the steep hill and across the low bridge over the creek, and then up the gentle slope on the other side.

We never missed the sharp turn onto the bridge, or went careening off the unprotected edge, but sometimes we almost did.

Sometimes I think we secretly wanted to.

The most recent occurrence of the word “polyurethane” in my life was earlier today, when our hired contractors sanded our kitchen cabinets and painted them with a coating of the stuff.

I’m convinced the fumes have made me slightly high.

I’m also convinced nothing was as awesome as being nine years old, and roller-skating down a steep hill and across a bridge.

Polyurethane…it’s everywhere.

The Truth About Sharks

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The Dog Days of Podcasting challenge began on Thursday. This is the text of my second episode, which you can hear at The BathtubMermaid

Truth About Sharks

“Shark week starts on Sunday,” I told my partner as we lounged among the smooshed pillows and rumbled sheets of our bed one hot July afternoon.

“How does a woman named ‘Desert Flower’ end up obsessed with sharks,” he asked, his long fingers idly stroking the skin of my arm.

“I don’t know…they’re sleek, they’re graceful, they’re elegant – ”

“They’re vicious – ”

“They aren’t, actually,” I corrected. “Anyway, I met one once.”

“You met a shark?”

I rolled over in bed, propping my chin on my hands and kicking my feet up behind me. “Mmhm. I was nine , and I was at the beach with my cousins.”

“Marina and Estella?”

“No. Nicky and Tony. Anyway, Tony had a raft – nothing fancy, just one of those inflatable pool toys – and the three of us were using it as a kickboard, not really paying attention to where we were, and suddenly we were almost at the ropes and buoys marking the channel.”

“Ropes and buoys?”

“You seriously need to visit the beach more.”

“We live in a landlocked state.”

“Details, details. Yes, ropes and buoys. You’re not supposed to swim past them. We’d drifted pretty far out – the tide was carrying us.”

“No one noticed?” He caught the end of one of my messy braids between two fingers and rolled it back and forth, tugging slightly.

“Oh, people noticed. The lifeguards were blowing their whistles and screaming for us to come in, and Aunt Nunzia was jumping up and down on the beach, a veritable poster child for the tern ‘conniption fit.'”

“So what happened?

“We turned around and started kicking and paddling for all we were worth – three little kids, sprawled across a single raft, in water so deep we couldn’t see the bottom, let alone touch it.”

“Obviously you made it back to shore.”

I pulled my head back, freeing my hair from his possession. “Obviously. Anyway, it felt like forever, but we finally got into shallower water, and the boys were able to touch bottom – they were taller than me – but I couldn’t quite. I held onto the raft and stretched my feet way down and I touched something…”

“Something…?”

“The something I was touching moved past me in the water, and scraped against my skin – it was like swimming past sandpaper.”

“That’s it? That’s your shark encounter? Did you even see the thing?”

“Well, no.”

“Then how do you know it was a shark?”

“Because that stretch of water is a nursery for white sharks.”

“That proves nothing.”

“And because I just know.”

“You do?” He was skeptical.

“Women always know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, it’s true. For example, I know that if I kiss you, you always smile.” I did, and he did. “And I know that given half a chance you’ll spend the entire day sleeping, and then complain you got nothing done.”

“That might be true.”

“It is true.”

“It still doesn’t answer the question,” he claimed. “Not really.”

It was also true that when I straddled him and began to kiss him again, he completely forgot whatever question he thought he’d been asking.