Nightmare at the matinee

John and I settled into our seats in the middle of the some fifty patrons scattered about the traditional theatre seating. It was the 2:40 Saturday afternoon showing of Young Victoria. After the advertisements finished, the lights were dimmed and we watched the previews. Then lights were doused, we put our cell phones on quiet, and the main feature filled the screen before us. Just minutes into the story, late arrivals shuffled across the back of the theatre, popcorn in hand, talking over the film voices.

"Well, where are you going to sit?"
"I don't know, let's look down here."
"I don't want to sit that far forward."
"Let's look over there, then."

Who are these people? Kids mouthing off? In unison with others around us, we turned in our seats to see, to our amazement, five puffy, gray haired women in thick parkas with assorted scarves dangling around their necks.

"Be quiet!" someone said from the seats.
"Shhhhhhhhh" said others.
But one intruder refused. "We have a right to get to our seats!" she demanded. Someone ducked and went for an usher.

Gripping the arms of my seat with white knuckle strength, I seethed. I was about to jump up, raise my hands in the air, turn my back to the screen and yell straight into their faces, "Shut the (*&^% up!" But, before I could act, my anger turned to fright. Those ladies weren't even ten years older than me. Was I trapped in a time traveler nightmare? Was I in the future --surrounded by retirement home escapees? --surrounded by rude, demanding people? John saw the look on my face. He turned to me, squeezed my hand and whispered in my ear, "It's OK, Honey. That won't be us."

I calmed myself as the theatre finally settled into a hushed quiet, but all the things my mother did like that -- so unaware of the impact on others -- flashed through my mind. The pointing with her cane from her wheel chair with demands to "take me over there" without a "Please" or "Thank you" bubbled up only to be quickly replaced with her the loud complaints about the food service during dinner and her callous remarks after a third double vodka. Will I become my mother? I shuttered. I whispered to John, "Just shoot me if I get like that, please?" "Guaranteed. Now watch the show," he said sweetly.

45th class reunion

The post card came in the mail two days ago. "Save the date for the NCHS 45th class reunion" it said. I immediately put the date on the calender. I will not miss it. We were the class of '65, the first big baby boomer class -- the rebellious, disco dancing, dope smoking, love making, risk taking kids, rebelling against our parents rules and expectations. For some reason, our class is special, we've reconvened every five years since '65. Something always draws me back.

At the 40th, Diana rented a convertible--we envisioned ourselves as Thelma and Louise willing to drive off the cliff. If reality we just drove through our home town -- now more than gown up, trying to remember what was there before the restaurants, the Gap, William-Sonoma and the rest of the upscale shops that had woven themselves into the fabric of the old town. The stone library and red brick YMCA building still face Washington Street , deying modernity to take them. But, the old department store and 5&10 cent store have been obliterated. The bank is now a happening now cuisine restaurant. It is could not be different, but we remember and tell stories.

At the 40th, twelve of us girls stayed at Dottie's for the weekend, sleeping in beds, bags, sofa beds and anything else Dottie could conjure up. As we sat on the deck in the morning after the initial get together at the VFW the night before, we nursed our coffees, acting as if we'd just gotten together the weekend after the graduation parties. Time had not passed despite that fact that time had passed and had taken a toll on our lives. We've been married and divorced, lost husbands to heart attacks, grandmothered, reinvented ourselves and played out our fantasies or not. We couldn't believe how the years had passed. We looked at each other as we were, not as we are. It gave us great pleasure to once again smoke cigarettes without guilt, tell wild stories, drink too much wine, and make each other double over in laughter.

Those years of wanting to be popular and never quite being on the A list have given way to a pleasant acceptance of who I am. What was important then, no longer matters. Nerdy guys have become handsome. Cool guys have lost themselves to invisibility. Average guys have become outstanding and class clowns have become powerful capitalists. We'd like to think any success was was our choice, but mostly it was a matter of luck. Who knows why one of us fell into depression and lost his future or another who saw no future became a dynamic success. Who knows why, after 40 years, I still wished Billy had kissed me when I crawled up the tree in his front yard and only at that reunion could tell him what a crush I had on him.

Everyone has a story to tell, a story that is worth listening to whether it's sad or happy in the end. It's a nice place to be. Most of us still refuse to admit to our encroaching elder status, but we gain strength from knowing each other, for what we were to each other and what we continue to be. I hope to see so many classmates on the weekend of July 30 and 31st.

Watching the Olympics

I've never been an athlete. In grammar school, I was almost always embarrassingly last picked to play dodge ball. The words said with great sighs by team captains, "Well, I guess we'll take Dorine", will ring in my ears for eternity.

In junior high it got worse. I sprouted above most of my peers in 6th grade, making me clumsy as well as not very swift. Defensively, I became the girl who, in gym class, always claimed to have cramps so I could sit on the sidelines and keep from getting sweaty. I hated the dumb blue one piece gym suits we had to wear and the even dumber "girls" rules for so many of the sports, like basketball where you could only dribble the ball for so many steps before you had to throw it. I couldn't stop breaking the rules.

In high school, sports went outside and I tried but failed again. I was too short (everyone grew taller suddenly) and still not swift, so track and field hockey were out. Tennis was a bust as well when I discovered my depth perception sucked. Balls curved around me, over me and far away from me. My racket was everywhere except where it was supposed to be. Then, in high school, one gym teacher took me aside after watching me lead my classmates in warm-up exercises. Running her right hand through her short bleached duck tail of a haircut, she stepped on the stair with her leg with its scarred knee, looked at me like a disappointed mother and said, "You just don't have what it takes to be a leader. You let the girls joke around too much." That was it. I was never going to enjoy any kind of organized athletics.

I'm not one to sit around lumping my fate, so, I turned to unorganized sports, things I could do outside of school without teachers or having to be picked by a team. I learned to ice and roller skate. I wasn't too bad either -- after many falls and bruises, I twirled and skated backwards through a crowd. There were were no rules and I was happy just messing about. In my twenties, I beat guys twice my age with bad knees at racket ball. I compensated for my lousy depth perception because the walls were close and it was a short hop to reach the ball as it came whizzing toward at me. Then, I picked up on running in my thirties, surprising enjoying pushing myself, alone, for the first time -- until I went to cross the street just a block from home and got hit by a car that was trying to beat the light. The bastard hit me and drove away, leaving me lying on the blacktop in the sun's glare on his review mirror.

So watching the winter Olympics -- is, well, nice watching handsome young men and women compete and risk serious bodily harm -- but after a while, it fades into background noise. Can you blame me?

Sunday Afternoon

The afternoon sun blasts its way through the sliding glass doors into the living room, heightened in its intensity by reflections off the snow covered roofs we can see from the balcony. The light exposes every dust bunny and piece of glass streaked with doggy nose smears. But, today the sun light can't intimidate me because, in a frenzy of energy, John and I cleaned the house Saturday afternoon. We couldn't take it anymore. We couldn't wait for the snow to melt. It was starting to look like the home of a recluse with no cleaning lady to visit regularly. There were dirty dishes stacked on the counters, toys strewn about the house and dirty clothes litering the floors. The towels and sheets were starting to take on lives of their own. All of this, very unlike us. Guess the four days locked in at home and sloshing through two feet of snow every six hours with the dogs took a toll on us.

Our cleaning work paid off. We woke to spend a lazy day at home. The dogs are sleeping on the floor (instead of the furniture for some strange reason). John just finished a bunch of expense reports and is getting ready to cook a lucious Sunday dinner -- a whole chicken roasted with root vegetables. He's trying to outdo himself after a mouthwatering, aroma room-filling herb and mushroom suffed pork roast served with lemon buttered asparagus. It's tough to admit, but we are foodies--we live to eat.

I'm watching the Olympics while I do my "social media" thing--uploading pictures from our trip to NYC last weekend, posting messages and pictures of my grandchildren on Facebook pages and making dinner dates with friends using Facebook chat. What ever happened to the telephone? I'm going to try that old fashioned device to reach my girl friend in Connecticut later today. I don't know which is worse -- that I'm adapting to the new digital world and actually liking it or that some of my friends are stuck in email or, god forbid, the telephone as their major source of communications. I even have one sister who is still on dial-up.

It takes effort for me to be this lay-back. I'm itching to get out to Annapolis and the sailboat. But I can't get excited about working out in our exercise room downstairs -- something is my body is saying, "Oh no, not when you walk up and down those many frigin' stairs going back and forth to work on the metro." I know better -- I've got sagging arms to prove it; but the exercise fairy has not touched with me her magic wand. I'm such a bad girl! Whip me!

Winter Wonderland

We left home Friday morning, February 5th, just hours ahead of the weekend blizzard. We missed it all while we indulged ourselves at the Friend's of the Groundhog (Fog) party. It's an annual bash thrown by our dear friend Ed. (His wife Carol just smiles and lets him do it). This year's party is very special -- it's the 40th year of the party.

New York City sparkled all around us from the 12th floor of a warehouse on west 31st street. Sixty of Ed's closest friends mingled drinking wine, scotch and margaritas while eating bits of Asian delicacies amongst white leather couches, glass tables, and white decor. Antique chandeliers splashed soft light on everyone--the men in their tuxedos and the women in silks. Afterwards small groups of us retreated to a very euro west side hotel in the fashionably hot meat packing district for story telling, more libations and baskets of pom frits. The morning came too soon as John and I woke to see, through our toes, crystal blue skies stretching across the horizon framing the sky scrappers on the Jersey side of the half frozen Hudson River. It was a quintessential New York kind of weekend. I wanted to stay the princess I felt like, but fantasies don't last forever.

Early Monday, after eggs benedict in "The Grill", we packed our fancy clothes, put on our sun glasses and drove home on cleared roads, refreshed and pleased that we had so successfully escaped the weather. I was ready to dive back into work, confident that the federal government would be open on Tuesday. But it was not to be. Before Tuesday was over, a second blizzard, as predicted, beat our area relentlessly. Hurricane force winds made the sky white, blinding our view from the balconies. It left us stranded, blanketed.
( John's video)

The snow is now higher than Fred and twice as high as JoeJoe. They must jump and plow themselves through the snow to take a pee. Down the street, there's a bunch of five-foot icicles hanging from the eaves of one building. They arch out toward the street, bent by the winds. Others drip onto the sidewalk laying down a layer of sheer ice, waiting for unsuspecting walkers to slip and fall. The saying "Nature is cruel" is certainly true in this case.

It's been four days now that the federal government has been closed. But there is hope for tomorrow. Men with snow blowers have cleared the sidewalks of the drifts. Men driving front loaders (every little boy's dream job) have made the street passable by pushing the snow into mountains that surround the buildings.

This weather takes me back to Chicago and those winter mornings when I threw a coat over my jammies and ran out into the snow packed parking lot to start the ol' Chevy Malibu so it could warm up while I finished getting ready for work. That's why I left the Midwest--to get away from all that.

Oh, well, this will all go away soon. I will keep focused on the spring. It's time to dress the boys in their sweet little monogrammed coats and take them out into the cold night air for that last pee of the day. Tomorrow is another day.