Best Questions Ever

From Miladysa...

If you could perform a duet with anyone of your choice (past or present) who would you choose, what would you sing and where would you stage your performance?
That’s a really tough one. But I think I would choose to sing with Lea Salonga (the original Kim in Miss Saigon) in either a London or New York production of Miss Saigon. If you don’t know the story, it’s about a soldier (Chris) in Vietnam who falls in love with a prostitute (with a heart of gold) there and they get married. They are separated during the fall of Saigon and he thinks she is dead. Years later, after Chris has found a new wife, he finds out that Kim is not dead, and that she lives with their son in Bangkok. He and his wife, Ellen, go there, the two women (who don’t know about each other) meet accidentally and Kim realizes that Chris will never take his son to America where he could have a better life when Kim is still in the picture, so she kills herself. Anyway. The song we would sing is “I Still Believe” – it’s a duet between Kim and Ellen about how each believes that Chris will return to her (Kim) or share his tormented secrets (Ellen). It’s awesome.

Which bird would best describe you?
I would say I’m a parakeet. I can sing and talk non-stop and plus I would hop around and be really cute all the time.

Should drugs be legalised?
In general, no, but I would amend that statement for marijuana.

How do you picture your life 10 years from now?
Hopefully I will be a mom. In a perfect world, I would be staying home with my kids, but you never know. And I really hope that my parents are still around so that my kids will know how great their grandparents are. Oh, and I hope I’ll be married. Not to be all June Cleaver, but I’ve never been really interested in a career other than being a mom, so if the above happens, well, then I’ll have my perfect career as well.

If you were asked to re-write the dating bible ‘The Rules’ what would be your first six rules?
My Rules are for MEN to follow.

1. CALL. You would be surprised at how fragile women AREN’T. We would love to know that you don’t want to date us anymore, instead of tormenting ourselves, wondering if you might call today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. I think that nine times out of ten, the reason girls turn all psycho is because guys are weenies and don’t call to end a relationship, they just don’t call. That’s much worse. So yeah. CALL.

2. Don’t have the “where are we talk” after two weeks. Especially when it’s abundantly clear that YOU don’t know where we are. Here’s what will happen – instead of helping you make a decision (which is what you’re trying to do, right?) you’ll do one of two things. 1) You’ll scare the girl away by looking desperate and needy, or 2) You’ll get the poor girl’s hopes up that you want to be her boyfriend, and then you’ll crush her by breaking Rule 1 when you decide you want to bail.

3. Leave your baggage at the door. Preferably, a door MILES away from my door. Don’t rush into thinking that you’re ready to move on and then have a pathetic breakdown, which leads you to the land of indecision about whether or not you want to be in the relationship at all. Which leads you to break Rule 2, which leads you to break Rule 1. See how this is like There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly?

4. If you have a serious girlfriend, don’t practice your flirting with just any girl in order to boost your delicate ego. Because some girls will take that seriously and think you want a relationship. Some girls will play along, just for the fun of it, but unless you’re REALLY PERCEPTIVE about who those girls are, well, the risk is bigger than the reward. Fatal Attraction is not just a little story made up by clever writers. If it was, then Lifetime would never have so many movies featuring scorned women. Naughty by Nature said it best – “You down with OPP?” Because if she isn’t, well, look for your story to be the next movie of the week. Because yes, girls can be psychos.

5. Don’t jump to conclusions about the status of your relationship. This may come as a shock to you, but just because you sleep with a girl doesn’t automatically mean that she’s planning your wedding. It could just mean that you slept together. If she calls you, it doesn’t mean that she’s trying to figure out your china pattern preferences, it just means she’s a phone talker. This is a difficult concept, but an important one. It is a tricky situation, because some women DO feel that way. However, as foreign as this may be to you, you should probably hold off on sleeping with a girl until you are sure about whether you want to hang around for a while. Just to avoid causing the really emotional ones to have a psychotic break. That’s never good.

6. Don’t be an ass. I know, it might be difficult, because often, it goes against your very nature. But being an ass is not to your advantage. You may have heard that girls like bad boys, or that nice guys finish last. Maybe. But the KIND of girls who like bad boys are not the kind of girls you want to be with anyway. And once those girls grow up, they will realize that the behavior that they once thought was “edgy” has now turned into behavior better described as “childish” or “annoying.” Also, if you’re a generally nice guy, but feel as if you need to play games so that she’ll want you more, well, that’s going to backfire. She’ll get sick of your shit and kick you to the curb before you can show your true, non-ass self. Be genuine. That’s all.

You can lead a horse to water...

I may have mentioned the conversation my girls and I had a couple of years ago regarding what can only be referred to as “The Dating Horse.” I don’t remember the exact conversation – so girls, set me straight – but the gist was that they were trying to get me to move on from my boyfriend. To “get back on the horse,” if you will.

In true A-List style, we couldn’t just leave it at that. There were references to “beating a dead horse” and other increasingly inappropriate horse and/or riding references, and when the conversation ended, I was standing up, shaking my fist in the air at the imaginary dating horse and yelling “F*** you, horse!” Because frankly, I did not want to get back on at that particular time. Again, one of those moments that you really just had to be there. And at the same time, a moment when maybe you wouldn’t want to be there.

At any rate, it’s been a recurring joke/theme ever since. Anyway, in honor of the recent, ahem, adventures that we’ve had in the dating realm, I thought it would be appropriate to do a stick drawing of what I feel depicts each of our experiences. Therefore, I present to you “The Dating Horse.”



So yeah. Wish us luck.

...And then, hijinks most definitely ensued

So this past weekend was fun. After a really long week preparing for this big (boring) work event, I let all the stress go by drinking wine at Sally and Joe’s on Friday night. You know, enough wine to make you have a big fat headache the next day because you were drinking it as if it was the last day you’d ever drink wine. Ever. Luckily, it’s maybe 50 yards between the houses, and I managed to get home and into the house without stepping on one of the one meeellion apples in the yard and fatally twisting my ankle. Yes, I realize it’s probably nigh unto impossible to fatally twist one’s ankle, but this isn’t called dramatic sarcasm for nothing.

The good news was that I managed to pull myself together in time for the second night of drinking at Sally and Joe’s. The bad news is that I managed to pull myself together in time for the second night of drinking at Sally and Joe’s.

You see, their nephew Ian had come down to visit from Breckenridge, and so we were celebrating the fact that he had gotten here. Or something. We’re not hung up on finding reasons to drink, obviously. Ian and I have been friends for like nine years, ever since we both worked for Joe back in college. We hit it off from the very beginning, and have stayed friends through girlfriends, boyfriends, hookups with each other and hookups with other people. It’s just a cool relationship where things don’t get “wheird.” So it was awesome to see him because he just got back from a year in Japan in June, and I’ve only seen him once since. My friend Mandy came over too (she’s Sally’s daughter) and so the four of us were having quite the time.

Joe was fishing, and made the mistake of calling us around 9. This was after about four hours of the “open bar,” consisting of beer, wine, and tequila and a recently finished (sooooooo yummy) dinner where we could barely eat because we were laughing so hard. Therefore, Joe was the recipient of a lot of babbling accompanied by hysterical bursts of laughter and fragmented sentences which would inevitably turn into more hysterical laughing. It was definitely one of those “you had to be there” situations. When he came home on Monday, he still wasn’t sure what exactly we had been talking about.

So right around 9:30, everyone had kind of hit the wall. Yeah, don’t be jealous of our longevity in the drinking department. We shoot for quality AND quantity in a short period of time. So Mandy left, Sally went to bed, and Ian and I wandered to the Hot Tub House, intending to get in the hot tub. However, we got sucked in by Chappelle’s Show and also by laying down to watch said show. There was no hot tub.

I had to get up early to go to church (I have to show up EVERY week since I WORK there now), but luckily I had ever so wisely planned ahead by tempering my copious wine drinking with copious water drinking. And by not drinking the tequila. I’m a thinker! When I got home later, I went up to Sally’s, where I walked into the front yard, and Ian hugged me. His grandpa (Joe’s dad) lives across the street, and Grandpa yells “I should have known the chicks would start showing up!” And I yelled “Oh, so now I’m a ‘chick’?”And Grandpa says “A KNOCKOUT chick! I may be old, but I’m not stupid!” Oh that Grandpa – he’s a hoot. (Something you may have noticed by now is that I know pretty much every member of Sally and Joe's family -- I'm around there A LOT).

So yeah. That was the weekend. I have sort of toned down the extent of the hijinks for purposes of time and the "you had to be there" syndrome. Luckily, this weekend promises to have less drinking, even less hijinks, and more sleeping. Which is good and bad, I guess.

But you know what comes before the weekend? CSI!! Yay! I'm excited to an almost unreasonable degree about this! Can you tell?! Because of the exclamation points?! I love this show. It's because of the science. It's because of the writing. It's because of the investigatory techniques. You have to click on the links to know what I'm talking about. ALL THE REASONS TO LOVE CSI...

He's Born to Radiate

We got to the funeral home and it was packed. I heard later that upwards of 300 people had come through the receiving line. I walked into the room, sobbing, and straight into the arms of my grandma. My cousin Sarah said “are you ok?” And my grandma said “Of course she’s not ok” and she hugged me for a long time. Besides the fact that the place was full of people, there were so many flower arrangements, interspersed with tons of boards full of pictures of Vannie’s life, and there was his art. He was an unbelievable artist – my uncle is good, my brother is good, Vannie was good. I know I walked around for a while, looking at everything, and then I went back in the room. I went to my uncle, Van, and he put his arm around me and said “Stand here with me a while and hold me up.” The way my dad felt about Vannie was how Van felt about me. I was the first baby on my dad’s side, and Van was just a teenager when I was born, and so he loved to hang out and play with me and be an uncle. We stood there for a while, saying hello and hugging people who came through the line. Kids from Vannie’s high school, people he’d worked with, people who had met him once. I always knew how sweet he was and how genuine and easy to love he was, but every single one of those people confirmed it – he touched them even if they had only met him briefly.

The one that tore me up was a paramedic who came through, a guy, just sobbing. See, the night he died, Vannie had an asthma attack. He hadn’t had one in a really long time, and so there was no medication in the house. He went into his parents’ room, and they called 911. They live out in the country a bit, and it was dark, and the paramedics got lost on the way to his house. He died in his dad’s arms before the paramedics could even get there. This guy was one of them, and he was just so sad. He kept saying “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry.” My uncle hugged him and said something nice to him, and the line moved on.

I don’t know how long we were there. But when it was finally empty, the rest of the family was kind of milling around, and I was alone in the room with his body. When I had first come in, I had laid my hand on his chest, and it freaked me out, because it crackled from the tissue paper under his shirt. I remembered years before, when my grandpa died, my mom touching his face and kissing him, and how I thought that was so weird. But standing next to Vannie’s casket, looking at his beautiful face, I couldn’t not touch him. I touched the side of his face and I touched his chest again, and then I kissed him on the forehead. It was cold – a kind of cold that I had never felt before, but it wasn’t scary or gross. And then I just stood there some more until we had to go.

I don’t know what we did the rest of the time we were there. I don’t know how long we stayed. I don’t remember coming back home. I don’t remember talking about it or going on. And yet, here I am.

I remember looking at an incredible self-portrait Vannie had drawn, and asking my uncle for a copy. He took it off the stand and said “it’s yours.” I remember freaking out when my mom washed the jacket I had taken out of his closet, because she took his smell away – even though it had been a long time and didn’t smell like him anymore anyway.

I remember him playing the drums – he kicked some ass on that set. I remember him acting silly, doing impersonations of people and trying to make me laugh. I remember how fun it was when our families got together because we laughed a lot and were loud and there was just love there. I remember that no matter how long it had been since we’d last seen each other, it was like no time had passed. I remember him holding my hand while my uncle gave me my first tattoo. I remember staying up all night with my aunt, because my uncle worked the night shift and she waited to go to bed until he came home in the morning, and Vannie coming home from being out with his friends. He laid his head on my lap and I scratched his head, because he liked that. And the three of us sat there and talked until my uncle came home.

I remember his smile and his eyes and how he never went through a mean or selfish stage as a teenager. I remember how he would always be so sad when I left, and how he always told me that he loved me.

He has been dead for six years, today. He would have been 25 in August. I haven’t been back to Illinois since he died. I’m afraid to go, kind of, because my whole family isn’t there anymore. And I keep hoping that every year that passes will make the emotions less. But it takes time a lot longer to heal some wounds than it does others, I guess. I get surprised at the things that make me cry now – looking at pictures that I’ve seen a million times, hearing a song, talking about him. Sometimes they don’t affect me, but other times I’m undone. And yet, I kind of hope that I never stop feeling sad for losing him, because that’s my right and I want to hold onto him.

I’ve said before that the song “Shimmer” reminds me of him.
He's born to shimmer
He's born to shine
He's born to radiate
He's born to live
He's born to love…

And he was.

He's born to Shine

Here is Vannie's senior picture. It sits in the edge of a frame that holds the card Sally gave me with the verse on it that I love. All his poses have him with at least one piece of his beloved drum set. The picture doesn't do him justice, but he always had this mischievious set to his mouth, like he was trying to hide a smile over something he did that he wasn't supposed to. Or that he was just trying not to smile, but could barely contain it.



















Check out the flower girl and ring bearer at our Aunt Felicia's wedding. How cute is he? And yes, my hair is feathered and I'm wearing shiny turquoise taffeta or something. It was 1985. He's five and I'm nine.


















Here we are on the front steps of my house. My grandparents brought him out to visit and we did all kinds of fun stuff. Like sitting on the steps while my mom took one of her signature photos where she barely gets us into the shot.Good work, mom. I think we're six and two here.


















This picture isn't very clear, but I love it because he's such the man in his little cowboy boots. He's two or three here.