Tag: humor

Lance Bass is gay? You’re kidding. Does this mean he’s not going to be an astronaut? Because I really, really wanted him to go to outer space. Joan Collins has a paid-in-full ticket to go on the Virgin 2010 flight, but she’s kind of old, and though I love her, I think Lance Bass is probably more suited for the rigors of space travel. Joan’s eyelashes seem as if they might ignite upon re-entry.

I don’t care if Lance Bass is gay. It’s just that I’m always the last to know these things. As a young girl, I managed to harbor crushes on both Paul Lynde and the lead singer of Judas Priest. I’m into guys with a wild sense of humor who aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves. And who doesn’t prefer her rock stars swathed in studded black leather?

When I was a teen, my “gaydar” antennae could only pick up the strongest of signals. In the early eighties, I thought that maybe Boy George might be gay, but I wasn’t totally sure. Wearing muumuus and eyeliner could just be his look. Maybe under that stringy weave he was simply a Hawaiian with a Maybelline fetish.

As the eighties progressed, I was better able to discern the sexual orientation of celebrities by carefully examining the photo captions in People magazine. Any matinee idol who was a “confirmed bachelor” or starlet who had a “gal pal” could be batting for the other team, as it were. I had to keep up on these things because I didn’t want my romantic hopes to be dashed again, like they were with Paul Lynde.

Think of it this way: You don’t nurture the crush on the married Beatle. You go for the eligible one—the one you actually have a shot at a date with—in Pretend Town. (By the way, can you imagine, if on the Beatles’ historic Ed Sullivan appearance, under John Lennon’s camera shot the caption read, “Don’t bother girls—HE’S GAY!”)

When I was a young adult, k.d. lang’s refreshing lack of ambiguity drew these sorts of things into sharper focus. (It only took me a moment to discard the possibility that k.d. might be e.e. cummings’ soul mate.) Melissa Etheridge never tried to hide which chromosome she craved. The album titled Yes I Am, and the accompanying videos which featured luscious women as the objects of her desire, were obvious enough, even for me. But some fans missed the signals. I remember reading in an interview with Etheridge in Rolling Stone magazine that she had to keep dodging calls from country western star Billy Ray Cyrus—he of the “Achy Breaky Heart” and the magnificent man mullet. Apparently, Billy Ray just didn’t get it. He kept asking her out. She finally said that she had to tell him point-blank. The interview never got into specifics on what his reaction was. Judging from his public persona, I imagine it could have gone like this:

(Melissa picks up the phone.) “Hello? Oh. Hi, Billy Ray. Uh, no, I really can’t go out to dinner with you. I’ve got a girlfriend and we’re going out that night. What? No, I don’t want to bring her along. I know the more the merrier, but see, uh … My girlfriend and I are going out to dinner that night. On a date. Just the two of us. No men. No, you don’t understand. It’s not so we can have a heart-to-heart girl talk. I’m gay. She’s gay. I date women. Not men. You are a man, Billy. I don’t date men. No, that is not kinky! Cut it out, will you! I AM NOT JUST SAYING THAT SO YOU’LL GET TURNED ON! DON’T CALL HERE ANYMORE!” (Hangs up.)

Hands down, the woman with the worst gaydar in the world is, of course, Liza Minnelli. She’s the Wrongway Peachfuzz of sexual orientation. Her husband Peter Allen was a protégé of her mom and a Broadway dancer, for heaven’s sake. This may come to you as awful news—(or a relief, depending on your inclinations) but her fourth husband-for-a-minute—the eyebrow-plucking, Lalique Crystal-collecting producer David Gest—insists he’s not “that way,” as the worldwide homosexual community breathes a giant sigh of relief.

When Bruce Wry was a marine stationed in Vietnam, he spent some time studying the local language. He never would have guessed that, forty years later, the Vietnamese he learned during the war would come in handy for selling cheese at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market.

“It’s nice. When the Vietnamese come here I can talk to them,” he said. “Over the years the ethnic mix has changed. Once, you didn’t see any Russians, now, there are a lot of Russians. The Hmong, if you got it for two dollars they want it for a dollar, if you got it for a dollar they want it for fifty cents.

“There was one Amish family that sold cheese. They came up here and they only sat in their chairs, didn’t offer samples or anything, you know. They were right across from me, they were cheaper than me. They lasted about a month. You’ve got to sample and talk to people.”

Every weekend, he’s on his chrome bar stool at stall #248 in the long, tin-roofed arcade at East Lyndale Avenue North and Third Avenue North, sandwiched between Koa Vang produce and the Sleeping Cat Organic Farm, where the aromas of basil, cilantro, mint, and lemon grass intersect. In the multicultural hurly-burly of vendors, Wry is a standout: a towering, friendly fifty-six-year-old in an orange foam hat that resembles a thick wedge of Swiss. He sells twenty varieties of Wisconsin cheese, driving in every market day from New Richmond, Wisconsin. He’s not a farmer, but a reseller who understands merchandising and the value of brand identity.

“‘The hat?’ I started wearing this, I don’t know, six, seven years ago. Kids call me ‘the Cheesehead.’ They get up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s go down and see the Cheesehead.’ I hear that from a lot of people. And I laugh all the way to the bank.

“They know I’m from Wisconsin. It gets bad during football season. People ask me, ‘What the blank happened to the Packers last week?’ from a block away. My wife used to wear the horns, for the Vikings. People would say, ‘I don’t want to buy from you,’ so I’d ask if they wanted to buy from my wife. People would ask her, ‘Are you horny?’ Then she wouldn’t wear it anymore. That was that.

“People want me to wear this so they can tell where I’m at when they walk up and down the aisle,” Wry said, but the rubber headgear proved impractical during this summer’s record heat wave. “If I fell over from the heat, there’s nobody here that’d want to give me mouth-to-mouth. They’d say, ‘Too bad, that’s the end of that story, you’re gonna die.’ ”

Wry has had one full weekend off in twenty-seven years and maybe three days off besides that. He gets up at 3:30 in the morning for the Thursday market on Nicollet Mall. For the weekend market, he gets to sleep in until 4:00 a.m. He drives fifty miles before dawn, when there’s hardly anybody else on the road, in his battle-scarred, rust-pocked blue GMC van. It’s got half a grille missing, and the right-headlight-and-turn-signal assembly is held in place with probably half a roll’s worth of duct tape.

On a good day, Wry sells five hundred pounds of cheese. A regular refrigerator, packed tight, holds around two hundred pounds. About eight pounds of each day’s inventory goes to tasters. Just as Wry has regular customers, he knows the moochers on sight.

“We have people who sample every week who have never bought in seven years. And the worst is downtown. On the Nicollet Mall. You know ’em. Here he comes again. They take enough to feed a whole family. But you have to give samples because some people walk on a little ways and come back again and buy.”

Wry counts people watching as one of the great fringe benefits of his job. “That’s why I enjoy selling here. I fall in love a hundred times a day,” he said. “Downtown it’s worse. You wonder where some of these gals are working at. They’re sure showing it off.”

Wry’s customers aren’t looking for exotic varieties; he doesn’t offer anything fancier than Gouda. “Everyone thinks it’s from Holland. It’s from Holland, Wisconsin, about fifty miles south of Green Bay,” he said with a broad, knowing smile.

“Provolone, Muenster, feta—they don’t move. You can’t carry everything. If they ask ‘Do you have blue cheese?’ I just tell ’em, ‘No ma’am, I just carry happy cheese.’ ‘You got any goat cheese?’ ‘No, they’re too hard to catch.’ ”

People sometimes ask for help choosing the right cheese for a certain wine, he said, “but I don’t know a damn thing about it. I haven’t drank in so many years. I’ve had twenty-seven years of sobriety. See how it falls in line with my job? Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I couldn’t get up that early.”

Does Wry have a personal favorite among his wares?

“Extra-sharp cheddar,” he said. “The older, the sharper it gets. Women, wine, and cheese get better with age. That was told to me by a woman. She was pretty old.”

My husband and I recently went over our wills. This was pretty easy for me, since I don’t actually own anything of value. In fact, the only thing I am leaving my husband is a postmortem “honey do” list.

The first thing on that list is to throw away all of my notebooks and journals. These are the things I worry most about falling into the wrong hands. I’d hate to be remembered for grocery lists interspersed with late-night rum-fueled “comedy” inspirations. Sample page, New Year’s Eve 1998: paper towels; Windex; lime LaCroix; (then suddenly, in capital letters) DON’T FORGET COLLEEN—CAT POOP DOG OMELETTE—FUNNY!!!!; (then the Target shopping list resumes) spray starch; tweezers. Apparently my pen ran out of ink at the last, so the word “tweezers” is scratched deeply into the paper. As if it were actually written with a pair of tweezers.

I’d like to spare my kids from handling actual documentation of the nuts-and-bolts machinery of their Mama’s particular brand of goofy.

“Maybe I should’ve thought about that before I had kids,” you say? How many parents out there have ever been on the receiving end of that one? What I love most is when the mighty “should-a” sword is wielded by Those Who Are Childless. Particularly those who are Childless By Choice. Because, when a CBC nails you with a “should-a,” the implicit suggestion is that not only should you feel extra crispy crappy about whatever current conundrum that you’re in—but furthermore, you should also pat the CBC on the back for having the presence of mind not to get knocked up.

This has been on my mind lately because my daughter is now roughly the same age that I was when I was pregnant with her. She’s also got a pal who is pregnant and facing some tough decisions. This isn’t the first pal of hers to become a young mother. I thought my heart would stop a few years ago when Amanda came home from a slumber party with the news that one of the young party guests was expecting. I’d met the girl in passing. She was easy to remember because she was so pretty and outgoing. She was also fourteen. I’ll admit that my first instinct was to tug the reins hard and never let my daughter see this girl again. Like it or not, our peer groups help define our belief systems and our societal dance steps. This is true whether you’re forty or fourteen. This stance was more than a bit hypocritical on my part, because I remember all too well the isolation of what it was like to be young and pregnant.

In the hot summer of ’88, I was ready to drop. I’d moved back in with my parents so I could be close to help when the time came. I ran into an old classmate and her mother at the corner convenience store. My old pal talked to me animatedly about what was going on in her life, and didn’t really ask about mine. That was pretty weird, right? I mean, talk about the elephant in the room. We said our goodbyes and I walked next door to the Video Update. I was obscured by one of those giant cardboard cutouts so when my pal and her mother walked in—talking animatedly about running into me—they didn’t realize I could hear them. What stands out for me to this day is the breezy statement: “Well, she’s ruined her life, and now she’s probably going to ruin that poor kid’s life, too.” So good to know those stand-up folks are out there, ready to exercise their index finger muscles and point.

I’ve got a friend, Terry, who once told me that she thought all people should have to obtain a license to procreate. I asked her whether she thought this license should be a four-year kind of a deal that expires on your birthday, or could you apply for and secure a seasonal pass?

Under Terry’s rules, my kids wouldn’t exist—at least, not as they are now. And that would be a damn shame, because they are terrific. There’s no fill-in-the-blank space for this in my will, but, if there were, it would be: My greatest earthly treasure is that my kids love me. May you all be so rich.

Writer, performer, and femme fatale Colleen Kruse can be reached at colleen at rakemag dot com.

It was the Paris Hilton-Stavros Niarchos breakup that did it. I’ve decided that since the average celebrity liaison lasts less time than it takes Britney Spears to endanger a baby, I’m in favor of assigning these jet-set hook-ups shorter, more easily memorable names.

The TomKats, Brangelinas, and Bennifers of the entertainment world become shorthand for even shorter commitments. David Spade and Heather Locklear came and went as an item before we could even agree what to call their unholy babe-elf union. I would have voted for Spocklear, but I didn’t know whom to contact.

Assigning concise monikers to celebrity couples would free up hours for me each day by cutting my bathroom reading in half. In the 60s, adulterous Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the reigning queen and king of showbiz tittle-tattle, known to all as “Liz and Dick.” But that was a more leisurely era. If they were scandalizing today’s go-go, short-attention-span world, I’d abbreviate them as Lick. A single, recognizable syllable radiating spicy overtones, perfect for efficient cocktail-party chatter. Plus, it would move more copies of supermarket magazines. I imagine some lucky staffer at Cosmo or the National Enquirer has the task of dubbing showbiz couples with kicky pet names. I would love that job: Appellation editor has got to be the most desirable post in the whole gossip industry. It would be like naming perfumes or hurricanes or heartburn medications. Doesn’t Prilosec sound like a ménage between Prince, Lindsay Lohan, and Ryan Seacrest?

What makes an A-list celebrity couple (other than blinding good looks and oodles of dough) is that everybody knows their name. The easier it is to remember, the more powerful their superstardom becomes. Conversely, lack of an instantly recognizable name is an embarrassing disadvantage. Imagine George Wendt expectantly strolling onto the Cheers set, all ready for a big welcome, and the cast saying, “Oh, hi, you.”

Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt never had a shared tabloid name during their marriage, and that lack of marketable brand identity probably contributed to their breakup. Ben Affleck and J-Lo had already staked their claim to Bennifer, so Brannifer would have been too close and confusing. By the time Affleck hitched up with Jennifer Garner, becoming Ben-Gar (which sounds like a Tokyo-stomping dinosaur played by a man in a green rubber suit), the damage was done. Beautiful lives were tragically torn asunder, entourages were disbanded, forests of newsprint were leveled—all for lack of a cool, fame-enhancing nickname.

Now the publicity-challenged Jen—Aniston, that is—is with Vince Vaughn, and the tabs have saddled them with the klunky tag Vaughniston. If she and Vince want to stay in the game, they need a name makeover—something with some zing and pep. A confident, assured new handle that dumps her old marital baggage and proclaims, “Forget those losers Brad and Angelina! I’m having a great time with my hot giant boyfriend whose eyebags totally give his face character and make him more desirable! I am not looking for household cleaning products to swallow!” A super with-it name that tells the world, “Vaughn and Jennifer got it goin’ on!”

I propose Va-Jenna. Clear. Self-explanatory. Salacious. I can feel the Pulitzer in my hands right now.

Once Va-Jenna makes its mark, Brad and Angelina will have to respond with a re-branding of their own. Brad faces a challenge here. You can’t use his last name because “Pitt” sounds like something dank that you fall into—or worse, deodorize. So it’s good that he’s with the melodious Angelina Jolie. With Va-Jenna shoved in their faces, their retaliation must be bold and direct. Something that decisively tops their rivals and re-establishes their cred as Sexiest Couple in All of Human History.

After careful consideration and hours of tricky word games worthy of The Da Vinci Code, I hit the pot of gold: Bagina. I need to get this trademarked right away. Can’t you see the headlines? “Bagina Desperate for Another Baby!” “Bagina Opens Up in Exclusive Barbara Walters Interview!” “Bagina Clamps Down on Pushy Paparazzi!” “Globetrotting Bagina Snubs Tinseltown!” “Bagina Gains Weight in Bid for Oscar Nomination!” “Bagina Discharged from Hospital!” “Bagina Heats Up the Screen in Mr. & Mrs. Smith 2!”

OK. I’ll stop.

told my girlfriend Liza that I was going camping for a week with some friends at a remote nature preserve in the mountains of Tennessee, where there would be no modern conveniences. She peered at me over the rims of her geek-chic glasses. “Now, why the hell would you want to do that?” she said.

Liza is from New York City, and I take great pleasure in slathering her with folksiness whenever I can. I do this because when she talks to me about “last season,” I know that she’s probably not referring to the Farmer’s Almanac. By shoving my Midwestern-native status in her face from time to time, letting a little Fargo creep into my voice after a glass of chardonnay, I figure I’m doing her a favor. It makes her feel like more of an outsider, which is secretly what all transplanted Manhattanites love to feel like.

“Liza!” I said. “It’s a vacation! It’s an adventure! Hiking! S’mores around the campfire! Doesn’t it sound like fun?”

“No,” she replied. “But you tell me all about it when you get back.”

So OK, Liza. Here it is in black and white. It was one of the most trying, difficult weeks I ever had. I was bitch-slapped by Mother Nature. I thought that because I’d watched six seasons of Survivor, I had learned how to survive. All it really meant was that I could operate a television set.

The thing was, I may not be a hardened urbanite, but I’m not what most people would call “outdoorsy,” either. My nifty new hiking boots had never ventured beyond the rough-and-tumble terrain of the Lake Calhoun footpath. I borrowed a tent and lantern from my pal Jim, who gave a low whistle when I admitted I’d never gone camping before. “Well,” he said, loading the gear into my station wagon, “you should be fine. The tent is orange, so rescuers can find you.” But if the bears found me first in my DayGlo dome, they might just think, “Yummy candy shell.”

“At least you’re not going in the winter,” Jim said, slamming the hatch door. “I won’t go winter camping anymore. I only went once. Here’s the thing about winter camping. You pretty much just add the words ‘OR ELSE I’LL DIE!’ to the end of every sentence. As in, ‘Oh! I’d better get that fire started.’ Or, ‘I’ve got to get my tent set up.’ ”

Jim saw my eyes widen and hurried on. “You should be fine, though. If the weather holds out.”

The first day, it drizzled for ten hours straight. When my companions and I got sick of hiding in our tents, we huddled by the fire in our ponchos, with gray skies spitting all over us, and tried to make merry by opening a bottle of wine. I found that if I am drinking outside, and it is raining, and there is no live band playing, I don’t feel festive. I feel like Boxcar Willie.

I was starting to smell like him, too. The park ranger had told us to refrain from using perfumed soaps because it said to the bears, “I am here.” I quickly developed a ripe musk that a male Sasquatch might mistake for a female in heat. I imagined trying to let him down easy. “I’m sorry, Bigfoot, it’s totally not you. You’re great; it’s just that I’m married.”

Once the rain stopped, we had to go into town for dry matches. Only two days into my back-to-nature adventure, and I was itching to buy something. Anything. Because buying things makes me feel like a civilized person, a part of a larger whole, a world where printing presses exist, and frappuccinos. But the pickins were slim. The gift section of the convenience store offered jars of jelly with little pillows of gingham cloth covering the lids, pickled okra, and brown suede knee-high moccasins (the sort favored by Fleetwood Mac fans worldwide). There was also a broad selection of knobby, wooden walking sticks, for that stylin’ “woodland pimp” look. The cashier was wearing an angler’s vest with more pockets and flaps on it than an Advent calendar. He sure didn’t smell like he had any chocolate on him, though.

I didn’t go away empty-handed; at least I picked up some toilet paper. But when there is no toilet I guess you just call it “rump paper.” If you had told me a year earlier that I would be digging a hole in the ground to crap in, I would have wondered what apocalyptic sect you belonged to.

So, Liza, because I know these words will ring sweetly in your ears, and because I believe in admitting it when it’s true:

You were right.

A few weeks ago, when the Powerball was around $300 million, one of the chefs at my day job took up a collection among the employees at five bucks a head to buy as many tickets as he could. “Remember the Lunch Ladies!” he said. And so almost everybody pitched in for her share, and we had one of the best workdays ever. The driving force was the series of great, spotty conversations we had throughout the day as each of us considered what we’d do with our multi-million-dollar cut. I guess that’s what you’re really paying for when you buy a ticket. The dream.

Some of us knew right away what we’d do. For others it was a fantastic exercise in imagining a Donald Trump-style, full-tilt boogie cash wallow. For those folks, it wasn’t a matter of if they’d quit their day jobs or whom they would sever ties with. It was a matter of how they would do those things. One guy spoke wistfully of paying his mother-in-law a monthly stipend if she’d say things to him like, “You’re right!” and “I’m so glad my daughter married you!” for the rest of their natural lives. He guessed it probably would cost him about five hundred dollars a month, a bargain.

Later, I asked my husband what he would do with a few extra mil, and he said that he might quit his job. He wouldn’t make a big production out of it; there would be no rebel yells or end-zone strutting. He’d just come in, announce that it was his last day, and knock one item off every desk he passed on his way out.

“Of course I wouldn’t be selfish about it,” he said. “I’d probably buy the freedom of one of my fellow slaves, my best friend. My best friend would be determined on the spot by a talent competition. Break dancing, yodeling, whatever people felt comfortable with.”

I’ve never been rich, but once when I was in my mid-twenties, I had about forty thousand in the bank, cash. I don’t exactly remember what happened to it, although according to my journals from that time, it looks like I spent it all on eyeliner and beer. You don’t have to tell me what happens when money comes before breeding.

I know money can’t buy happiness. What it can buy are things, and sometimes things can make people very happy. Let’s say that someone in your field of vision parades his new thing in front of you. You can go out and purchase a bigger, newer thing to assuage your deep-seated fear of irrelevancy. The same feeling of satisfaction can be had whether you’re on Lake Street shopping the Jacklyn Smith collection under the Blue Light or off on safari in a $2,500 Ralph Lauren khaki camisole, hunting the magic goose that craps Fabergé eggs.

But if I came into a sudden fortune, I’d want to make sure it bought an experience, some form of change. That’s why I think I’d buy a congressman. The idea came to me when I learned that Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham kept an actual price list for bribes, noting how much defense lobbyists would have to slip him in order to win multi-million-dollar Pentagon contracts. “Duke” is in the slammer now, after pleading guilty to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, and a raft of other charges. I wonder if he has a new bribe menu posted in his prison cell. “1 pack Camels = 10 mins. of ‘personal services.’”

I know just the congressman I’d buy. That guy from Texas’ 22nd District, Tom DeLay. As the money man for the Republican Congress these last six years, he understands the role that moolah plays in politics, so I wouldn’t have to spell it out for him. Also, I expect he’d come pretty cheap right now, since, after being indicted on felony money-laundering and conspiracy charges, he announced his plans to retire from Congress. News reports say he’s down to the last $1.3 million in his legal-defense fund, so it’s a buyer’s market.

Once I had The Hammer in hand, I’d make him vote against all of his current positions. It would be fun to force him to make a stirring farewell speech calling for universal health care, lobbying reform, and a stop to the gerrymandering of political districts. I’d keep him on retainer for life, so even if Fox News hired him as a commentator, I could order him to advocate for clean government, the separation of church and state, and bipartisan cooperation. That would drive him crazy!

Finally, if he’s convicted, I’d make The Exterminator serve his full term without any wussy pleading for a pardon or assignment to a country club prison. I’d have him ask to go to a real hellhole where he could apply his experience with rats and cockroaches. Not only could he contribute there, he could grow. As the new guy on the cellblock he would learn to forge alliances and earn influence without corrupt outlays of cash and expensive gifts. He might find that a little tenderness goes a long way.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m cleaning out my change jar and heading over to the gas station.

I was hanging out with a group of buddies the other day and several conversations were going on all at once. During a lull in the chatter, I heard my friend Mike describe someone he had known all of his life as a guy who was once a world-class adventurer, but who wound up “a housepainter with hepatitis C.” Now, it doesn’t really matter what led up to this statement. What I found interesting was that no matter how many accomplishments, experiences, and successes this guy had enjoyed previously in his life, Mike had reduced his current existence to a menial job and a physical condition.

It was a twisted variation on that game where you create your stripper name by using your house pet’s name and the street where you lived as a child. In that case I would be “Fritzie Duluth,” though Mike might add, “that waitress from Mickey’s Diner with crabs.”

I shared this pin-the-personality-on-the-person idea with my husband, who was appropriately stunned to realize that he was “Tiger Burns, the Whirlpool washer assemblyman with Bell’s palsy.”

Of course, Milton Bradley could never market such a game. People are too protective of their personal myths. Deep down, we’re all terrified that not only are we frauds, but that we stink too—as in the case of my best friend, “Spooky Arcade,” who happens to be a successful stockbroker but once worked as “a school janitor with chronic halitosis.” (Spooky sez: Don’t forget to brush your tongue.)

I was reminded of our natural inclination to secretly reduce ourselves and not so secretly reduce others to the worst possible bottom line. Recently, on the telephone with my mom, the tension was running high; she was upset about something I’d done. Now, I appreciate that I couldn’t have been an easy child to raise, seeing as I spent a number of my teenage years as “a high-school dropout welfare mother with a pot-smoking problem.” Nor were my mistakes limited to youthful indiscretions. My two children were born out of wedlock by separate fathers. My first house went into foreclosure. My first marriage was a fiery train wreck; I was shacking up with my second husband before either of us was officially divorced. Yes, all this and crabs, too.

Later that day, I expressed the sadness I felt at upsetting my mother to my dear pal, “Grizzly Pinecourt,” a former “warehouse grocery packer with oral gonorrhea.” He said to me, “You know, Fritzie, sometimes I feel that to my mother I will always be the sixteen-year-old who ran away from home and ended up in the psych ward in a hospital two towns away. I get frustrated and depressed because I feel like she can’t see the best parts of me, because the bad parts for her outweigh everything else. But the serious, Hallmark Card truth of it is that I wouldn’t have arrived at the best parts of who I am without all the sketchy parts.”

I have a human-anatomy textbook with a series of transparency pages that build a whole person from the blood vessels out. As you lay each transparency down, you get the bones, organs, muscles, and skin. All parts working together to create a whole.

His sentiment and the images in that book followed me a couple of days later when I took my daughter to get her lip pierced. She was five months away from her eighteenth birthday, and I signed the permission slip. When she initially told me she wanted a piercing, she held my hand over the fire. She said coolly, “I have a friend who does piercings, so I can get it done without your permission. I’m just telling you, I’d rather get it done with your permission.” Weeeeeell. My administration doesn’t like to truck with terrorism, so I countered with a potential freezing of assets and a cell phone embargo. This amounted to pointless political posturing on my part since, for most of her senior year, she has been operating as a sovereign nation with her own income and resources.

I caved despite my misgivings and before I knew it we were standing in the waiting room of Saint Sabrina’s. My daughter was absolutely giddy with excitement and admitted to being nervous. I said lamely, “Uh, well, you know you don’t have to get this done.” A sweet gentleman with nostril grommets ushered my baby into a private room. I didn’t hear her cry out, though my heart was pounding. She came out smiling. “Bones Wabasha, the babysitter with a lip ring.”

I just saw Memoirs of a Geisha. In the movie, there’s a scene where the geishas play a drinking game with their clients. Somebody tells two stories, and then everybody else has to guess which is true. With that idea in mind, I have two stories for you this month.

Story #1 goes like this. Some gals send their fellas off to work with a sweet note in their lunch pail. I’m a little more extreme. It started out innocently enough. My guy forwarded me a dinner invitation from a couple we know. He’d added a flirty line at the bottom of the email asking me to be his date.

I thought … well. I thought, you know what? It’s going to be a busy week for the both of us. We won’t have too much time to spend together, but I can stoke the fire and make him wish he was able to spend more time with me. So I wrote him a dirty email. The filthiest, as in Specialty Magazine Filthy. I can’t even begin to tell you all the sordid details. Just take the raunchiest thing you can think of, multiply it by ten, and pretend you’re tailoring it uniquely to your lover’s eccentricities. Just take a moment and do that. Get the pictures in your head. That’s what I wrote. It wasn’t just a short paragraph, either. Nuh-uh. It was a full page in brilliant, widescreen, black-and-white sleaze-o-vision.

Screeching and giggling at my own audacity, I read my “scene delicate” over once, and, before I could lose my nerve, hit “Send.” I discovered later that I’d hit “Reply All” and sent the note not only to our prospective host and hostess, but to the entire e-chain of dinner-party invitees.

Now I find myself considering what to bring as a hostess gift. I’ve got it narrowed down to either a Barry White CD or a block of sno-cap lard and a shower curtain.

And here’s Story #2. I got into an argument with my husband. This argument was in no way related to the dirty-email story. It’s just that we’re married, and sometimes we argue.

So, we were in this stupid argument, but we both had to go to work. I had an evening class until 9:00 p.m. and since I had the car, I was supposed to pick up my husband from his office at 10:30 p.m. After class, I decided to take myself out for a glass of wine during my free hour and a half. I chose a place that I’d heard of but never been to before. A nightclubby kind of place.

It was a weeknight, so the club was a total ghost town. The atmosphere was more than a little bizarre because even though the place was empty, they still had the thumpa music blaring and full disco lights swirling around. I sat at the bar, pulled out a magazine, and ordered a glass of red. Within ten minutes, a woman sat next to me. Before I could even get out a hello, she blurted out her entire life story to me. All the while, the music thumped and the lights swirled. It took almost an hour, and was quite fascinating. After she ran out of gas, she begged me not to tell anyone what she’d just confided. She was absolutely manic about it. I assured her that I wouldn’t tell a soul, that her story was so outlandish, who would believe me? She flashed a mean smile, and threatened to curse me with a poltergeist if I breathed a word of it to anyone. Those were her words. She said, “I will send a poltergeist to you if you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone.”

I motioned to the bartender for my tab. The woman sitting next to me insisted on taking care of it, because I’d been such a good listener. She pulled out a clean, one-inch-thick bank stack of two-dollar bills. A bank stack. Like in the movies, with a paper band around it. She cracked the band, peeled off five bills for the bartender, and handed one to me without a word. I took it and scooted out of there as quickly as I could. I picked up my husband from work.

The next day, he asked for a couple of bucks to take the bus to work. I gave him the two-dollar bill. He said, “Where’d you get this?” I told him, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

I live in utter fear of motivational products—those soundbites of schlocky uplift that appear on calendars and posters, accentuating images of glorious sunsets, soaring eagles, big-eyed children dressed as cute hobos, and kittens dangling precariously from tree branches by their tiny, razor-sharp claws.

It’s because there lives inside me a deep-seated anxiety that everything I read (except Ann Coulter) must have a grain of truth to it. Or a strain. Like a virus. A strain of virulent truth, inoperable and drug-resistant, that will enter my bloodstream through my eyeballs. There will be no symptoms initially, other than a persistent snickering. One poster, featuring an image of a lush woodland path, says, “Fall down seven times. Stand up eight.” Why? If you’re that clumsy, it’s safer to stay down. Maybe invest in a helmet.

The snickering eventually clears up on its own, but this only indicates that the infection has progressed to a more dangerous stage. By then the uplifting message has been internalized, gnawing a sanctimonious new neural pathway through my psyche.

It may lay dormant, awakening only during a flare of activity, such as jogging. I could be half-heartedly chugging around Lake Nokomis, with only the sounds of my leaden footfalls to keep me company, when the endorphins kick in and “Just Do It” repeats in my brain over and over again, licking at my fiery hamstrings like a lash from an inspirational whip.

Or, as in the case of “WWJD?,” the homilies may go to work immediately, cross-contaminating every thought, word, and deed until I am no longer able to distinguish between reality or Wal-Mart’s professed focus on scriptural principles. (I’m pretty sure Jesus wouldn’t back a company that lines its management’s pockets with gold and drives its workers into poverty, while hiding behind a yellow smiley-face mask. I’m Christian myself. Look it up in our manual. See Revelations under “Great Deceiver.”)

Actually, if you give them any real thought, all of these sayings are problematic. Take “I grumbled at having no boots until I met a man with no feet,” attributed to “Unknown.” First of all, what does this mean to the guy who has feet but no boots? Stop complaining? Maybe the guy with no feet had feet until his feet froze off because he had no boots. Second of all, if I didn’t have feet, I wouldn’t need any boots. I’d need fake feet, and probably a ride to the fake-feet store to get a pair. And boots at that point would be superfluous, like balloon valances.

Also, doesn’t the fact that most of these sayings come from some “Unknown” freak you out? The Void is telling us how to live our lives. It’s like taking a prescription drug from a doctor you don’t know. Tell you what; just substitute “Beelzebub” for “Unknown.” It works almost every time. Imagine Lucifer in his blazing pit, pointing his pitchfork at you and cackling, “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday!” And that little kitten hanging from the branch—she’s dangling just above Satan’s head. The white-hot tines of his trident are poking at her furry bottom as he screeches, “Hang In There, Baby! BWAH-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Come to think of it, isn’t it a little suspicious that the kiosks selling these calendars all vanish after Christmas? Admit it, Anthony Robbins looks like the Devil, doesn’t he? How else could he be that big? He’s got paws the size of catcher’s mitts. Brrrr.

Nobody buys motivational calendars for themselves. They’re always given to you by someone who claims to have your best interests at heart. It’s like presenting someone with a can of Slim-Fast and a mirror and saying, “I know you’re going through a tough time right now. I saw these and I thought of you.”

Deep down, my real fear of these motivational posters is that eventually, if I’m infected long enough by the germ of truth in their sayings, I will have to face up to my responsibilities. And that’s scary because the answer for me is almost always: No. No, technically, I am not being “All That I Can Be.” I could be nicer, thinner, richer, smarter, and more loving to my fellow man. I could get up at five a.m. and walk my dog around the lake and come home and throw a load of laundry in and do the Times crossword puzzle and sing my children awake and pack healthful lunches and smile at my co-workers for no good reason. I could eschew takeout in favor of home-cooked. I could give up sugar, sugar substitutes, and trans fats. I could think globally, act locally, and visualize world peace. I could do more sit-ups and have more face time and look on the bright side until my retinas are French fried.

I could probably keep up this kind of schedule for a week, and then I would go shoot up a Wal-Mart.

Losing weight and quitting smoking are always the top two New Year’s resolutions for us Americans. Not to brag, but I’ve done both—quitting a twelve-year, pack-a-day smoking habit and losing (and regaining and relosing) a rather substantial amount of weight in my life. I did neither by making a New Year’s resolution. Like most really huge life changes, each event was the result of a series of minor shifts. I’d like to say that these shifts were a series of decisions that I made all by myself. That would be very bootstrappy, don’t you think? In truth, sheer willpower was a shockingly small percentage of the overall picture. In each case, circumstances maneuvered me to a place where change of some sort was inevitable.

Take smoking. I did decide to quit, that’s true. But not because I no longer wanted to reek of smoke, or because my habit was siphoning perfectly fine cash from my meager bank account, or because people who loved me wanted me to quit before something bad developed. These things were also true. But I only decided I to quit once I started coughing up blood. This was not just traces of pink every once in a while, like maybe with a really bad cold. Nuh-uh. It was more hardcore Bukowski style. Some mornings I’d wake up, shut off the alarm, grab a handful of tissues, and yak up roughly half a teaspoon of blood.

After six months of this, I knew that the blood wouldn’t just go away like I had hoped. So I decided to quit. But of course, that doesn’t mean that I was able to. Three months after that decision, the best I had done was to cut down to half a pack a day, and the coughing fits worsened, if anything. Instead of hitting only in the morning, they came on any time of the day.

One creepy component of those last months as a smoker was that I could get the coughing to stop—by lighting up a cigarette. It was as though my very cells were crying out in protest. My body turned traitor, and it wanted its fix, damn it. While I was taking in a drag I could feel some kind of internal smoothing out. Whether this was physical or psychological, I couldn’t tell you. It felt like a vacuum making tracks on a shag carpet. Like something was progressing. Like some kind of change was inevitable.

Sometimes it takes people that long to realize that even indecision is a decision.

I quit my job and left my apartment and moved to my parents’ place in Wisconsin for two and a half months. The nearest store was ten miles away. I didn’t have a car, a driver’s license, or the lung capacity for walking more than one city block at a time. The first week, I slept. Then for seven weeks straight I remember having daily screaming matches with my father in his pole barn.

Every swear word and oath that we belted forth was amplified tenfold by the tin walls and the fourteen-foot ceilings. I don’t remember what we argued about, probably the usual suspects. My lack of direction in life, poor romantic choices, my ever-changing hairstyle. My Dad was a world-class yeller, and I learned the craft at his knee. He could yell about anything, anytime, anywhere. Not everybody can do that, you know.

Blessedly, it turns out this was just what I needed. Like a priest performing an exorcism, Dad shouted painful truths in plain language and my demons came roaring out to meet him, gnashing their fangs, matching him round for round with sickening retorts. Devious comments were designed to mirror, escalate, and confuse, thereby ensuring the marathon duration of our contest. It got to the point where I could no longer tell what was burning, my chest cavity or my rage. Dad, meanwhile, stood strong. He took what I threw at him and dished out some more.

People who knew me in those days sometimes marvel at the fact that I no longer smoke. When they ask me how I quit, it’s difficult to explain. Too embarrassing, you know? Admitting the complete loss of control. The terror of the bloody coughing fits and the shame of still being unable to stop. My big bear of a worried Dad tearing into me. So sometimes I tell them the complicated truth. And other times, I smile and say I did it cold turkey, even though I’ve learned that there is no such thing as cold turkey, just like there is no such thing as overnight success. Major change doesn’t happen without many, many minor shifts. I moved myself away from cigarettes. I eventually put myself far away from them, like a child who can’t get to the candy jar. In a way, I didn’t really quit—I just don’t smoke anymore.