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.

Her Name is Jane

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Jane Honda

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

Her Name is Jane

We took her home on Tuesday evening, after a morning of testing, a discussion over a lunch of comfort food, and even using our “phone a friend’ option.

I said, “We should flip a coin.”

He said, “You know if we did that I’d insist that we flip it several times in a row, and then graph the responses.”

I said, “Three times is enough.”

We called our regular mechanic.

The manager said, “I like Subarus; they run forever. Get the 2015 Forester.”

The lead technician said, “I like Hondas; they run forever. Get the 2014 CR-V.”

After we hung up, he admitted that the manager’s first response was actually, “Buy whichever car the missus likes better.”
Smart man, that garage manager.

We called the dealer of the car we’d chosen, only to find that someone else was doing paperwork on it. “We have another one that meets all your specs,” he said, “but it’s got a navigational system, which means it’s $1,400 more expensive.”

He’d already tried to get us to consider a less expensive model than what we were considering, after listening to our needs and wants.
We bought the more expensive version.

Her name is Jane.

Jane Honda.

Sunday Brunch: That 70’s Summer

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Slumber Party

My latest Sunday Brunch piece is up at All Things Girl. We’re filling the blog, while we continue to rebuild the rest of our site since it was hacked – badly – in June.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

If the “slumber party” was small – me and just one or two friends – we’d set up camp in my bedroom. If the group was larger, we’d take over the den or the living room. I’m sure we watched movies, but since VCRs were not yet commonplace, and DVDs hadn’t even been invented, but what I remember are the games and stories.

Slumber party games when I was seven, eight, and nine, were still pretty innocent, and the favorite thing to play was “Light as a Feather; Stiff as a Board.” There are many versions of it, and many explanations for why it becomes possible for four girls to lift a fifth using just two fingers each, but the reality is that as much as, as children, we wanted to pretend it was magic, the chant just helps to unify everyone, and the rest is basic physics.

The rest of the piece can be found HERE.

Image Copyright: creatista / 123RF Stock Photo

Dormant

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reading in bed

It’s just over a month til my birthday (5 weeks from Sunday, actually) and I’ve entered the period of the year when I’m sort of creatively dormant. I think, I plan, I read, and lift weights, and play in the kitchen, but my writing slows down to the bare minimum.

Once the calendar page flips to August, however – once it turns to MY month – my creativity always comes surging back like a huge wave breaking over a jetty.

Cool, ferocious, blue-green creativity.

For now though, I have a pot of pasta that will soon become a bowl of aglia e olio, and a chilled wine that’s light and neither too sweet nor too dry, and a beachy novel to read.

Dormant? Maybe.

But it’s just part of my personal cycle.

KeithandVeronica

Sunday Brunch: Screen Dads

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KeithandVeronica

 

It’s Fathers’ Day, which means the internet is swarming with ads for power tools and sporting equipment, all of which share space with pithy articles talking about the greatest fathers in media.

I’ve noticed, though, that most of the memes which list great screen dads tend to stick with the stuff that’s so old it doesn’t even play on Nick at Night, or even TV Land any more. Not that I’m knocking Mike Brady, but I wasn’t even born when The Brady Bunch began, and not yet four when the final episode aired.

Besides, aside from a period when I wanted Scotty from Star Trek to be my father, the TV fathers (and father figures) I responded to were hardly cookie-cutter parents. The TV dads I grew up with included Charles Ingalls (Little House on the Prairie),  Steven Keaton (Family Ties) and Bill Cosby (The Cosby Show) but lately, I’ve come to realize that there are some great screen fathers (and father figures) from this century.

Who are they? Well, here are five of my favorites:

Josiah “Jed” Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen – The West Wing)

In addition to being the father of Ellie, Lizzie, and Zoey, Jed Bartlet also had this little job as President of the United States. It’s true that two of his three daughters were living independent lives, but he still had to balance country and family, with scales that were just a bit more particular than those measuring other fathers.

As well, Zoey was going to school at Georgetown University for part of the series, and living in the White House a good chunk of the time as well, which meant a lot more hands-on parenting, as in the scene where the president explains to his daughter why she’s got to have extra security:

“My getting killed would be bad enough, but that is not the nightmare scenario. The nightmare scenario, sweetheart, is you getting kidnapped. You go out to a bar or a party in some club and you get up to go to the restroom and somebody comes from behind and puts their hand across your mouth and whisks you out the back door. You’re so petrified you don’t even notice the bodies of a few Secret Service agents lying on the ground with bullet holes in their heads. Then you’re whisked away in a car. It’s a big party with lots of noise and lots of people coming and going, and it’s a half hour before someone says, “Hey, where’s Zoey?” Another fifteen minutes before the first phone call. It’s another hour and a half before anyone even *thinks* to shut down all the airports. Now we’re off to the races. You’re tied to a chair in a cargo shack somewhere in the middle of Uganda and I am told that I have 72 hours to get Israel to free 460 terrorist prisoners. So I’m on the phone pleading with Be Yabin and he’s saying: “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but Israel simply does not negotiate with terrorists, period. It’s the only way we can survive.” So now we got a new problem because this country no longer has a Commander-in-chief, it has a father who’s out of his mind because his little girl is in a shack somewhere in Uganda with a gun to her head. Do you get it?”

Lucas “Luke” Danes (played by Scott Patterson – Gilmore Girls)

Luke isn’t actually Rory Gilmore’s father. In fact, during the course of the show, he never officially becomes her stepfather. Nevertheless, he is the reigning father figure in Rory’s life, attending family parties and events (like her high school graduation) even before he and her mother, Lorelai tried dating.

Later, of course, he essentially raises his nephew Jess, and then he finds out he has a daughter of his own, April, but when it comes to parenting, Rory was really Luke’s ‘first’ child…and he even goes up against Rory’s biological father, Christopher, to demonstrate it:

“Oh, really? Well, where the hell where you when she had the chicken pox and would only eat mashed potatoes for a week? Or when she graduated high school and started college, huh? Where the hell were you when I was moving her mattress into her dorm and out of her dorm and back into her dorm?”

 

Burt Hummel (played by Mike O’Malley – Glee)

I knew from the start that Burt was a pretty special guy, raising Kurt alone, and supporting his son’s interests even when he didn’t understand them, but what sold me – and most of the viewing public – on Burt is this quotation from the episode “Theatricality,” where he busts his soon-to-be stepson, Finn, on the latter’s use of the word ‘faggy.’

“I know what you meant! What, you think I didn’t use that word when I was your age? You know, some kid gets clocked in practice we tell him to stop being such a fag, shake it off. We meant it exactly the way you meant it. That being gay is wrong. That’s some kind of punishable offense. I really thought you were different, Finn. You know, I thought that being in Glee Club, and being raised by your mom, meant that you were some, you know, new generation of dude who saw things differently. Who just kinda, you know, came into the world knowing what it’s taken me years of struggling to figure out. I guess I was wrong. I’m sorry Finn, but you can’t, you can’t stay here.”

Jonathan Kent (played by John Schneider – Smallville)

It can’t be easy, being the adoptive father of a future superhero, but it was always clear that Jonathan was parenting Clark and that the eventual Superman was the mask – a flip of the conventional version of the story. As Clark aged and began developing his powers, Jonathan’s life got a lot more difficult, but he still tried his best to answer every challenge with grace and wisdom, as in this quotation:

“Look, Clark, I’m your father. I’m supposed to have all the answers. It kills me that I don’t, but you gotta have faith that we’ll figure this thing out together.”

Keith Mars (played by Enrico Colantoni – Veronica Mars)

Another single father, Keith Mars is a bit grittier than the average television dad, but there’s never a doubt that he’s Veronica’s greatest ally, even when he has to choose being a parent over being a friend. Personally, I think their relationship is one of the best father-daughter relationships ever put on screen. Moreover, it’s obvious that Veronica shares his sense of humor, as well as his detective skills, as seen in this exchange from the second season.

Keith: So, senior year. How was your first day at school honey?

Veronica: Great! I beat up a freshman, stole his lunch money and then skipped out after lunch.

Keith: What, no pre-marital sex?

Veronica: Oh, yea… yes. But don’t worry dad, I swear you’re gonna like these guys.

Keith: That’s my girl.

Veronica: I missed you.

Keith: [While they hug] I missed you too. Now, where is my turkey pot-pie, woman?

 

These are just a few of my favorite “screen dads,” and while they’re no longer entirely contemporary, I think all of them are, at least, more relatable to modern audiences than the fathers in those older shows – even if we (well, I) still watch them when I’m flipping channels and they happen to be on.

 

Note: This piece originally appeared in the e-zine All Things Girl on 15 June 2014, but the original link is referenced but not archived at the internet archive.