Love Song for Snow

So this afternoon I brought the eighth-grader home from school, and an hour later turned around to bring her to a friend's house for the night. Except during that hour between getting home and needing to leave, the storm at the top of the hill had morphed from steady-but-manageable-rain to crazy-downpour-from-the-apocalypse-complete-with-perfectly-sideways-blowing-wind.

Still, what can you do? The kid's got to get down the hill.

I opened the front door and braced myself against the wind. "Ready to make a run for it?" I asked.

If eye-rolling could make a sound, there would have been a deafening one at our front door right then.

I sprinted full speed toward the car. Maya walked.

"What you think is bad I think is just rain," she said as she got into the car. "And you're from New York! And you lived in Iowa!"

Damned individuation process. If an obvious example of a mother's stupidity doesn't immediately present itself, you can always count on a thirteen-year-old daughter to create one.

"This is cold rain," I said. "New York and Iowa didn't have cold rain. You got warm rain or you got snow. At least with snow you had something good to show for it in the end. Here, we just get leaking windows."

Right. I know. I romanticize. And all of you on the East Coast and in the Midwest are probably thinking, "Yeah, yeah, Calfornia girl. Show me one good thing about snow this winter." But what can I say? I like snow. Even when I had to live with it all winter I liked it. I grew up in New York, went to college in Chicago, and did graduate school in Iowa. When you've grown up in those states, winter isn't winter without snow. Some of my best memories from childhood involve waking up in the morning to find a thick blanket of snow covering the neighborhood, and running to the crackly transistor radio in the kitchen to learn that we were having a snow day. And some of my best adolescent memories involve Ski Club nights where my hands and feet and nose were so cold as the ski lift raised us into the black sky, with the mountain gleaming spotlight-white beneath us, and the bone-cracking cold went so deep it skewed all perspective, so that by the time you got to the top you'd be wondering if it would be possible to ever feel sufficiently warm again.

This is the first winter in ... actually, I think the first winter ever where I won't see snow. Unless you count whatever was still left on the ground in Washington, DC, earlier this month when I was there for a conference and saw glimpses of it speeding by through the window of a cab to and from Dulles. Normally this is the weekend, over President's Day, when we might take the girls to see snow or even, in a particularly good financial year, go skiing for two days. But I'm working triple time this winter, and we just returned in mid-January from the three-week Monster Trip of the Decade to Israel and Rome, so we won't be going anywhere for a good, long time.

So, snow. I miss you hugely. I miss the way you used to turn brownstone steps into shapeless mounds in New York. I miss the way you required us to crank up the forced steam heat in old Chicago apartment buildings and how the radiators used to hiss and clank all day.

Ice, I even miss you, and the way you encase tree branches in Iowa like elongated crystal fingers. I loved the way you made me stay inside for a whole day (or three) emerging only to gingerly pick my way down the center of the street to get a carton of milk at the corner market because the roads weren't safe to drive.

Of course, back then I was single and rarely had any place I absolutely had to go. And certainly nobody who was depending on me for transportation. Now I have a floor of 43 degrees in February, rain that nonetheless feels too cold, and a mad dash to the car while a thirteen-year-old rolls her eyes.

She's right. It's just rain. Not snow. Just rain. And 43 isn't cold, unless you're naked. Or coffee.

California: you're making a wimp out of me.

The Making of Motherless Daughters

There's a really nice, very short clip over at Vimeo from the documentary-in-progress The Club about motherless women--the filmmakers did this interview with me about a year ago, talking about how I found the very first women I interviewed for the book. (Back in the pre-internet era.) They came to my house in LA and we had a beautiful afternoon together. Their hearts are 100 percent in the right place. Filmmakers contact me all the time about making a documentary about motherless daughters, but Carlye and Katie have gotten further along than any of them. Here's hoping they make it all the way to distribution!

I can't for the life of me figure out how to save this video to my hard drive and embed it, so I'll provide the link right here.

If you're interested in the documentary The Club, you can read more about it and see a trailer featuring Rosie O'Donnell here or join The Club's Facebook group.

Congratulations Katie and Carlye! You're doing beautiful work.

A Day at Disneyland

When you take five kids to Disneyland for your nine-year-old’s birthday and almost pass out when you see what admission costs for six people; when you watch families from all over the U.S. walking around with those thick-ribbon necklaces covered with character pins they purchased one by one, knowing this might be the only vacation they can take all year; when you see the trash bins (ironically labeled “Waste Please”) overflowing with paper goods and plastic bottles by 3 p.m.; and try to talk the nine-year-olds out of every sugar-laden treat on display that of course they all immediately want; and stand on line with 200 people for a ride that will last four minutes; and then walk to the next line and do it all over again--it’s frighteningly easy to start believing that you’re the only one here who notices or cares about all this excess, who realizes that the money being spent here in one day could probably solve a small nation’s hunger for a week, and it’s all too simple to start feeling smugly superior to everyone around you. And then you see a middle-aged mother and father dressed like Hell’s Angels, pushing a wheelchair with a severely disabled child in it who’s dressed in a Cinderella gown, and you realize, very humbly, that you don’t know anything about anything at all.

Along the Way

Lately a lot of people have been asking what I’m up to, and why they haven’t heard from me for a while, and why I haven’t blogged in a long time, and what I’m working on next. Excellent questions, friends. There's one answer to all four questions. My next project is one I'm very excited about. It’s helping Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez write their father-son memoir about family, fatherhood, and faith, set against the backdrops of Hollywood and northern Spain. At the moment it's titled Along the Way. You can read a brief article about the book here.

Most of you probably know Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now and The West Wing (among other films) and Emilio Estevez from The Breakfast Club and The Mighty Ducks trilogy(among other films, including Bobby, which he wrote and directed). They’ve recently made a new film together called The Way which was filmed along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain.

As soon as you have a chance to see this movie, run—do not walk!—to the theater. It’s the story of a father who scatters his estranged son’s ashes along the Camino after his son dies on his first day trekking. If that sounds like a downer it’s really not, because it’s also about the odd assortment of people he befriends how he walks and how they change his life. The story is absolutely inspiring and the cinematography is absolutely stunning. You’ll want to book a ticket to northern Spain and hit the path by the time it’s done.

And that’s all I’m saying until the book comes out.

Father’s Day 2012. Or sooner. I’m planning to write like the wind.

Happy February to all,
Hope

My New Favorite TV Show. You'll Be Surprised.

The other night I stumbled upon Billy the Exterminator on A&E, and I’m going to go out on a limb here to admit: I’m hooked. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a reality show a about a tough-guy exterminator who drives around greater Shreveport, Louisiana, in an enormous black Toyota Tundra pickup truck emblazoned with his company’s name--Vex-Con--on both sides, and takes on tough-guy exterminator jobs that include (but are not limited to) snakes, rats, cockroaches, crocodiles, foxes tearing up backyards, squirrels trapped in fireplaces, and in one unforgettable episode, a possum carcass rotting underneath someone’s house.

There is no job too large, too small, or too gross for this guy.

Billy Bretherton--that’s his name. He’s a former Air Force sergeant—I’m guessing he’s in his mid to late 40s—with a penchant for a black cowboy hat, thin wraparound black shades, black leather, chains and studs. Think Axl Rose meets the Orkin guy and you’ve got the idea. Though I’m not sure how I’d react if my Orkin guy showed up sporting motorcycle boots and a weird little goatee. It’d definitely make Thursday mornings more interesting around here.

Billy’s family co-stars with him and They. Are. Priceless. His mother, Donnie--a wisecracking Southern mama with excellent pouffy blond hair--calls Billy on the cell phone about every ten minutes with a new, challenging, and reliably disgusting or dangerous job, thus giving him the opportunity to slip in educational moments (while talking to her) about the biological or physiological risks homeowners will face if he doesn’t get there fast. (“A rotting animal under a house can be a breeding ground for bacteria and disease.”) There’s also Billy’s father, Big Bill, whose main purpose seems to be moping around in the background while he recovers from a recent heart attack and worries about the business end of things. Billy is often joined in the field by his younger brother, Ricky, who’s categorically stuck in 1985, layered, blond collar-length hair and all. Ricky is my favorite. I think of him as the biggest risk taker of the clan, since he’s apparently allergic to wasps yet, despite his mother’s frequent warnings to bring his EpiPen or wear a mask, consistently ignores her advice in favor of honoring his Inner Dude. In one episode he goes up in a cherry picker with Billy to destroy two wasp nests under the eaves of a hotel roof, with only his bare hands to protect his bare face. You can't help thinking, if this guy is really at risk for anaphylactic shock, is he crazy? Or dumb? Or both?

Billy and Ricky call each other “dude” and “man.” A lot.

As with many reality shows, a fair amount of this one is probably scripted, but something about it feels like it has an edge of authenticity to me. For one thing, the critters all look real. (Anyone who actually knows me knows I have a lifelong phobia of rats, so I have to flip the channel whenever he pulls one out of a trap.) And sure, Billy is a character, maybe even an invented one, but Vex-Con does have what looks like a legitimate web site and business that could have predated the show. Or maybe it’s the gritty surroundings of semi-rural Louisiana that lend the show its credibility. Definitely the clients look real; this is no beauty pageant.When an elderly guy with a lung condition sheepishly drawls about Billy’s stomping, leather-and-chains arrival at his cockroach-infested trailer, “Well, he looked kinda scary but I knew he was the one for the job. He looked like he was ready to kill something” you have to at least hope a line like that wasn’t scripted.

Plus, these client scenarios—I’m not sure they could be invented. I always found it insulting to the collective intelligence when Jeff Corwin’s just happened to stumble upon a rare viper while trekking through the jungle with a cameraman. Corwin’s expressions of anticipation and surprise at those moments were so disingenuous the veil between real life and cinematic orchestration evaporated on the spot. But think about it: would anyone right-minded let producers infest their trailer home with 10,000 dead and living cockroaches just for six minutes of televised notoriety? Or stick a rotting possum carcass under their bathroom floor so A&E viewers can learn that their house smells really, really bad? I kind of think not.

I was a guest on an episode of a reality show about six years ago, back when these types of shows were still relatively new. Naively, I still thought that much of what we were seeing on these shows was real. So I was completely unprepared for the amount of stage direction that took place, like producers watching the action on a back-room screen sending orders into the cameraman’s earpiece about how to direct group conversations, and having to reshoot “natural” scenes to do them differently the second time. And this was a very well-respected, well meaning show. The premise was a group of women who wanted to change their lives for different reasons were put up in a mansion in downtown Chicago and assigned life coaches to help them achieve their goals. I was there because one of the women was a motherless daughter trying to find out information about a mother who had died when she was very young. She felt she couldn’t move forward in her life until she found out the details of her mother’s life and death. I was brought in to have dinner with her and the local Motherless Daughters group, and to then go back to the house with her and see some art projects she had made to commemorate her mother’s life.

The experience was decidedly more surreal than real. Oh, what the hell: I'll be honest. It was a total mind f&#*. It's like finding yourself at a board meeting completely different than the one you thought you were attending, and you have to learn the rules of protocol on the spot so you can play along.

At one point I was brought into a back room for an interview and was instructed to begin speaking a sentence with the opening line, “When she told me about her stepfather, I was thinking…” What I really wanted to say was, “When she told me about her stepfather, I was thinking, ‘This woman needs a good psychologist, not a life coach,” but instead I said something blandly educational about motherless women’s relationships with their stepfathers. I felt obligated to offer something helpful and useful and to sound like an expert, given that I’d been flown out to Chicago, fed a five-star dinner, and put up at the Hotel W for a night. In other words, I was deliberately not being real, because I was trying to please people who seemed to have a very clear idea of what they wanted me to say. But maybe I was dead wrong about that. Maybe being honest would have been better, and maybe that was really what they wanted, because whatever I said didn’t wind up making the final cut. If I’d been authentically myself in that moment at least I would have been speaking a truth instead of trying to participate in a form of packaged and manipulated truth that, in the end, isn’t very real at all.

All this is a long way of saying that I know reality shows aren't really “real.” Just like memoir, they start with the raw material of life (which is often slow and dull in its purest form) and are then shaped and edited it into a narrative package that entertains. The closest thing to a Real reality show I can remember was back in 1973, when PBS ran the documentary An American Family, after filming the everyday domestic dramas of the Loud family of Santa Barbara for seven months. Anyone remember them? I was only nine, but I watched it religiously. Over the course of the season the typical American family was exposed as the anti-Brady Bunch. The parents’ marriage started to unravel (whose wouldn’t, with TV cameras in your kitchen every minute?). Their oldest son, Lance, was revealed to be gay. By the end of the show, we realized that an experiment to give us all a peek into ordinary middle-class life had devolved into a very big mess. More sociological experiment than award-winning TV, the Loud family should have been our cautionary tale about what happens when you ask people to live authentically in front of a camera. We should have learned back then it can’t be done.

Of course, this begs the larger question “What is real?” if so much of what’s presented as “real” today is airbrushed, scripted, orchestrated, tweaked, shaped, stretched, or just made up? I don’t know. Maybe all we can ever know for sure is what we feel—the love we have for each other, the grief that comes from loss, the triumph from achievement, the despair from lack of hope, the fear of danger, the exhilaration of risk.

Lance Loud died in 2001 from complications from a crystal meth addiction, Hepatitis C and HIV. That's about as real as it gets.

Maybe this is why I’m liking Billy the Exterminator right now. Because once you strip away all the attitude and the bad hair and the “Dudes” and the shades, it feels like it’s just about a guy showing up to help regular people deal with everyday problems. Sometimes a dead rat in a trap really is just a dead rat in a trap. And maybe Billy’s are planted there, but the ones that we trap a couple times a year in the space underneath our bathtub are real. I know that to be true.

Not that I actually look at them, of course.

An Open Note to Kids in Topanga

It is NOT FUNNY at all to leave a rubber baby rattlesnake on the file cabinet in the upstairs office when Mom is home alone. Not funny at all.

The Thing About Fumiko

This Sunday's New York Times Style section will contain an essay I wrote about the week my 11-year-old daughter had to carry a flour-sack baby--whom she named Fumiko--to school with her every day--to learn about the responsibilities of teen parenting.
Crazy week in our house!
Here's the link to the article, titled Maternal Wisdom (5 Pounds Worth)...and a photo of the one and only Fumiko himself.
For anyone wondering, he and Hursula Zero (who appeared in The Possibility of Everything) do share a bedroom, but not a cradle.
I'm sure it says something about me that I keep writing about my children's dolls..but I'll leave that conversation for the Comments section.
Enjoy!