Women (and Men!) Who Blog

Randy and the girls dropped me off at the BlogHer conference Saturday morning and went on to have a fun day. They rode the merry-go-round on Navy Pier, played at the Chicago Children’s Museum and Randy rented a family sized bike to tool around with the girls.

I was sorry to miss all this, but I was busy with some fun of my own, the grown-up, smarty-pants kind.

I initially approached the conference as a chance to get some writing tips and network a little. It morphed into something that was more about the love and the issues than the craft, although I did nab a very useful handout How to Write a Protest Letter by Jennifer Pozner.

I met lots of great people, including some bloggers I’ve been reading for a while. The whole conference was fun and relaxed and it was so cool to see all the beautiful diversity of the women (and men!) there – all ages and hues and shapes and abilities and backgrounds. I met women from Oregon and Arizona and California and Philly and Canada. . . And I loved seeing all the beautiful babies the mothers brought! Yeah!

Here are some of the awesome people I met:

Kim Moldofsky is so cool and friendly and a great food writer with more than one blog!

Veronique Christensen at Little Elephants married a Dane, owns a merry and frequent laugh and blogs about creative and fun things to do with her kids, like fishing off the balcony with a stick and string. I’m going to try this with the girls today!

I met Leah Jones in an interesting session "Book to Blog and Back Again!" Leah writes about her conversion experience at Accidentally Jewish.

Catherine McNiel is lovely and a fellow Chicagoan mom blogger. Read her at Everyday Life as Lyric Poetry and Chicago Mom Blogs.

Kristin Park’s story of postpartum depression packs a wallop. Her blog helps women with PPD and those who care about them. I felt instantly connected to Kristin; she also lost a brother in a car accident and has a family member with a long denied mental illness.

Glennia Campbell blogs about travel, kids, politics and the American Idol tour! (Listing is such a blunt tool, isn’t it?) The cool name of her blog, “The Silent I” refers to the pronunciation of her own name.

Shannon Hutton had a trying time just getting to Chicago!

Cynthia McCune, a college media educator, works on balancing the public and the private in her blog, McCunications.

N.F. Hill rocks!

Gayle D. Weiswasser excerpts and links to book reviews in her blog Everyday I Write the Book. How super-useful is that!

Lori Shapiro is a mommy blogger (oh wait, do all women who blog about parenting use this title? – I’ll call her a mom who blogs) I met at the lunch with AOL Family coach Kathy Peel.

Peel is an adorable little cheerleader who exhausted me just by saying hi. When she asked if anyone had clutter issues and I threw my hand in the air, she offered the idea of trading jobs with a friend. Friend cleans my clutter, I offer my talents in exchange.

“What do you do well?” asked Cathy, fishing for a swapable skill.

“I can go to dinner like nobody’s business,” was all I could think of. Of yeah, and I blog. And I love playing with kids. So good luck with all that. We’ll be at the park.

Danielle Wood is director of editorial at the cool brand spanking new site education.com.

Kyran Pittman writes cute and soulful at Notes to Self.

Jeremy Pepper says he blogs for three people – himself, a good friend and one of two others, depending on who is in his good graces that day. Nice guy, his blog is Greek to me.

Judy Coates Perez creates amazing hand painted quilts. Go look at these! Beautiful!

Ten (?) Second Introduction

blogme2007

I blog weekly, adore my funny husband, cherish my curly-headed daughters, grieve the loss of mother, father, sister and brother. I escape in shutter flicker and pages, return to reality in my own writing. I've worked proudly as a mom, teacher and waitress, not so proudly in offices. Love apricots, Joni Mitchell, passive gardening, pie making, Montana.

This cool clock says you can read this in eighteen seconds. Edit, schmedit.

See you Saturday at BlogHer.

Sweet Tooth

My name is Cindy and I am a music dork. I got the taste for treacle early, cutting my music teeth on John Denver, Barry Manilow, the Cowsills and the Partridges. "Seasons in the Sun"’s syrup? Not too rich for me. “Patches” too sourly maudlin for you? Love it.

Mmm, Bread.

Typically kids with immature tastes experiment with excess – have you seen the extreme flavors in candy lately? But while I did eventually expand my palate, I never really outgrew the sweet. I may have posed as a Dylan and Lou Reed hipster in college but it was often the confections of Dylan’s widely panned Down in the Groove and Reed at his most upbeat that I gorged on.

I watch American Idol.

Clay Aiken was my favorite contestant.

I love his Christmas album. You see?

“We don’t have any U2 CDs,” I complained to Randy a while back. “No Simon and Garfunkel! Our collection is all spice and novelty. Where are the staples?”

“We don’t have any DaveHootieTraveler either,” he replied. “I may have a U2 album in the basement.”

Of all the yin and yang in our relationship, Randy and I swing farthest in regards to music. We have enjoyed some memorable concerts together – Prince at 4 am, Tom Waits twice, Neko Case opening for Nick Cave come to mind. Pepe Romero played a song Randy had cut into a Dove commercial. Caetano Veloso at Ravinia. John Brion from the front row.

But much of Randy’s musical preferences is strange and discordant to me. He has every Fall album ever recorded. Who? Yeah, exactly. He sings Ian Curtis to my Dolly Parton, who by the way, has two, count ‘em, TWO songs about dead babies on her lovely Little Sparrow album.

“They’re moving toward a mathematical theory of rhythm,” he said, trying to describe the Slint set at last weekend’s Pitchfork Fest. He spent an entire Friday night cutting one of their song for the website.

“Ick,” I replied. “Give me soaring vocals and discernable lyrics. With a narrative.”

Wednesday was a day I neither cared to hide nor control my dorkiness. Thanks to Melody (yes, Melody) our babysitter, I took the train into the city to a glorious matinee of The Light in the Piazza.

Oh, I feel like swooning, just remembering it. Christine Andreas’ voice had the density and glow of heavy velvet. Even her quiet lyrics were strong and pure, a silver wire suspending the gem of the melody.

The dazzlingly handsome David Burnham fell to his knees and tore at his shirt while singing to the rafters “Il Mondo Era Vuoto,” a song that is at the same time funny and sincere. And entirely in Italian! I bawled at the passion, at the mother’s conflicted love for her daughter, at the complex beauty of the melodies.

“It’s about a mother, a protective mother,” I cried later as I tried to describe the show to Randy, half considering asking him if he wanted to go with me to the final performance this weekend.

And true to dorky form, after the show, I waited in the alley to get my program signed by the callow leads. Actually, being the obsessive fan didn’t initially occur to me. I was walking down Michigan Avenue, still trying to compose myself after the last number (oh I weep now, just remembering it) “Fable.”

(“Love if you can and be loved/May it last forever Clara,” sings Andreas.)

Then I saw Senor Naccarelli coming out of an alley in shorts and a t-shirt. I ran up to him and shook his hand. “Thank you so much! I really enjoyed that.” He smiled, said something gracious, then it dawned on me to fish a Sharpie out of my backpack and get some signatures.

Burnham’s teeth up close were blinding. Katie Clark can’t be more than twenty-three. Andreas walked by in true diva form, transformed out of her character’s proper Southern lady in I Love Lucy suits into a Soho cherub in vest and jaunty hat over her close cut curls. I was not going to press her and I didn’t really have anything to say that she hadn’t already heard. After three signatures, I walked on, satisfied.

An hour and a half later, the rain clouds were loaded up and flying low as the Decemberists started their set with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion. Happy crowds under umbrellas, on picnic blankets. Lots of tattoos, sundresses, nerd shirts, some children.

I found a prime spot dead center. I could see the dot of Colin Malloy strumming. The first cool drops fell as the strings and horns swelled up behind the delicate lyrics of The Crane Wife Parts One and Two.

It felt like an Event was starting. One of those you-had-to-be-theres. The concert of the Moment, ironically starring a quartet that dresses like Victorian dandies, backed by an orchestra well versed in prior centuries.

But I felt lonely. A family with two young boys was sitting behind me. Watching the packed ground carefully as I stepped over picnic dinners, sleeping bodies to reach this spot, I had caught a glimpse of a woman’s hand wearing an engagement and wedding ring. I thought of all the debates going on around me, all the various levels of commitment to this hard won, hard defended patch of real estate on this special night. “Should we stay?” “Taxis will be impossible.” “I can’t miss the encore!” I wanted to share that conversation, share the experience with someone. Cause that’s the sweetest connection of all for any music lover, of pop or pap or whatever, finding those who join you in relishing it.

After two songs, I walked on.

Family Jokes and Family News

Where does the bear keep his roar? In his DRAWER!

What kind of bagel does a weasel like? POP!-pyseed!

Why did the chicken cross the road? Elephant under a rock!

Where does the zebra keep his stripes? In his garbage!

Why is afraid six afraid of seven? Because one two three four five six seven eight nine ten!

In the wading pool, the girls squat and drop golf balls into the water behind them. The familiar plop in the water makes them burst into arpeggios of laughter.

In the car we play Sing-a-Different-Song. Daddy insists on the same “deedle-dee dee dee duh-dee dee” from the Internet gophers every time his turn comes around. “It’s Nora’s turn!” but I don’t hear anything. I turn around to see her grinning, frozen, paralyzed with glee.

And now for our news:

Nora wears big girl underwear now! No more diapers!

“I’m peeing!” cheers Nora from her little potty seat. “It’s lemonade!”
Mia corrects her, her voice heavy with disbelief. “You can’t see it.” We call it a good pee when the urine is pale; the color of dark apple juice tells us to drink more water.

We have a chipmunk living under the stove.

The Painted Veil

I first got into the short stories of Somerset Maugham when I was in my twenties, intrigued by his strange mix of the sentimental and the cynical. A Maugham collection helped me pass the hours on a move from Iowa to Boston after grad school with a bellicose boyfriend, our chocolate Lab and a trailer of our stuff. On that long trip, Maugham’s "Winter Cruise," the story of a captain’s table of men conspiring to silence a chatty old maid by getting her laid struck me as somehow sweet. I was in that kind of a place then.

I reread some of the stories a few months ago and was put off by the racism, the sexism. I wasn’t in the mood to travel to the colonialism of early last century.

But a movie version of Maugham on Tivo? I’m on board! I love period dramas, or as our friend Brent calls them with a bad English accent, Pants and Possibilities! Merchant-Ivory, movies from Jane Austen, that kind of thing. There’s a tame bondage-y thrill in all that polite passion, corseted behind social mores and strictures. Fancy speeches, beating hearts behind the lace and embroidery.

The always interesting Ed Norton and the consistently good Naomi Watts both produced and starred in the recent adaptation of Maugham’s novel, The Painted Veil, directed by a relative newbie, John Curran.

I’ve been continually surprised by Watts – in Mulholland Drive, I Heart Huckabees, even King Kong. For each of these roles she milks her delicate blondness, then jumps over your expectations much as her steely Anne Darrow did backflips in front of the giant ape.

Norton plays a medical researcher visiting London on a break from his work in China who meets and quickly woos Watt’s Kitty, offering her an escape from a hopeless family situation. Bored in Shanghai, Kitty has an affair with a married government official (played by Liev Schreiber, Watt’s real life partner, who reappears in the film's moving coda) which Walter discovers.

Walter’s deceptive mildness transforms into something fiercer when he confronts Kitty over her infidelity. He offers her a choice – divorce him or accompany him as he doctors victims of a cholera epidemic in the rural provinces.

His offer and her acceptance bring up all sorts of interesting questions. Why would a party-girl follow her marriage of convenience husband into a cholera outbreak rather than divorce him – and why would he suggest this choice? Does he take her with him to punish her or to possess her alone in the only way possible? Is he mad with jealousy, desperate with love, intent on vengeance or some combination of these?

All these possibilities are revealed in Norton’s voice. The actor is always compelling to watch and in this film, he is especially interesting to listen to. “I don’t hate you, Kitty,” he calmly intones. “I despise myself for loving you.” Okay, that’s a little purple, but he adds shades and interest to a character who ultimately turns noble – and you know the doom that spells.

The macabre details of cholera include a rapid and painful death, suffered in the final stages with the horror and indignity of its victims turning blue. Norton and Curran are up for the challenge of keeping us focused on Kitty's love and Walter's humanity, even in the violent throes of the disease.

What was most interesting to me was to watch the arc of a marriage that recovers and reinvents itself from the lowest point – a contract for double suicide. Marriage can devastate as fully as it can save – Kitty and Walter’s thrashing against each other takes them deeper into the pit than either could sink alone. I couldn’t help enjoying the green idyll on the river as Kitty and Walter begin a newly found passion that is more precious for its brush with mutual hatred.

However. Maugham was a man and a writer of his time, yes, and yes, this story is primarily a love story between two Westerners, but the anonymity and marginality of the Chinese people is difficult to take. China is treated as a beautiful and exotic backdrop. None of Dr. Fane’s patients have personalities or identities. “This is no place for a woman,” says a character, ignoring (or worse) half the population. Curran frames the shots of Watts hurrying from an angry mob on her chair as if she floated above the rabble on her British superiority, rather than the work and sweat of the men who carry her.

Throwback Thursday

Here is Becky my niece (or, if you are a stickler for this kind of thing, Becky my cousin-once-removed) sitting on Aunt Ruth's lap. Her sister Andrea is behind with Uncle Phil. 1987? or so?

Becky got married to her beau Kevin on Saturday in Vegas. 7/7/07 - What a rockin' anniversary date! Congratulations, Kevin and Becky!! All the love and happiness in the world!