Down on the ground, Frog!!

So I was on the streetcar and subway during rush hour not too long ago and I made a fantastic discovery.  I wasn't terrified!!! These modes of public transportation were jam-packed with people and I wasn't headed for a panic attack.

Many people have a fear of crowds.  Mine stems from when I was 16 and got trampled at a Michael Jackson Dance-Off competition in Assiniboine Park in Winnipeg.  (I couldn't make that shit up.)  One second I was sitting on the grass minding my own business, and then next my friend Heidi was rescuing me from people who were actually walking ON my squooshed body.  A direct result of the  Michael Jackson Dance-Off trampling was an abject terror of crowds that lasted 26 years.

Canada Day in on Parliament Hill had me sweaty and hyperventilating.  Travelling in rush hour pushed me close to vomit.  Security at concerts would attempt to eject me from a crowded venue with little success.  "Excuse me miss?  We're clearing the stadium now, you have to vacate your seat."  I would turn to them with wide and crazy eyes, and say something along the lines of, "I have a phobia of crowds.  If you don't want to clean up the mess that involves hysterical weeping, shrieking and almost certainly projectile vomiting, I'd let me have a few minutes.  Please."

The phobia was all about being IN a moving crowd.  Sitting in a crowd for me was fine.  Performing onstage in front of a crowded house was fine.  The minute there was any kind of movement that had me caught up IN it?  I was toast.

Then we moved to NY for 5 months.  NY is crowded almost ALL the time.  There were a couple of times that I'd have to wait for the next train, and the next train and perhaps the train after that before I could reach a comfort level of transit capacity.  

I can tell you the exact day that I got over my phobia.  It was the day before Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, November 24, 2010.  We'd decided to head down and see them inflate the balloons near the Museum of Natural History.  For the next 2 hours, I was shoulder to shoulder, heel to toe with thousands of people in a crowd.  In my mind, we were cattle on the way to an abattoir.  We plodded our way around the blocks where the balloons were corralled, I put one foot in front of the other, and two hours later?  Phobia was gone.  That's not to say that there wasn't a shitload of heavy breathing, nausea and heart palpitations on my part for probably the first hour of that cattle parade, but after that?  I was okay.  In a way that I hadn't been in 26 years.   David and Rissa kept talking to me to keep me occupied.  And what I remember most from the evening is that I got to see Kermit the Frog, apparently arrested and pinned to the ground with netting.

Down on the ground FROG!  ON YOUR STOMACH ON THE GROUND!!!  Drop the gun!

I highly recommend this method for curing a crowd phobia.  You're in a defined area with other people at the beginning of the holiday season, so the crowd is more apt to be patient and smiley.  Before you get into the crowd you can have hot chocolate.  There are LOTS of police and medical professionals in case of emergency, so if you start freaking out they can get you to safety relatively quickly.  The weather is cool so you won't overheat. PLUS you get to see them blow up cartoon characters which keeps you all distracticated from the reality of you being packed in like sardines with strangers. 

And now?  I can have these great moments on the TTC where I realize that I'm no longer afraid of crowds and I can be all smiley towards other people in the midst of the crowd who look like they're going to woof their cookies.

Bad Parenting 101

So sometimes you just suck at parenting.  You make bad choices.  David standing at the top of the stairs with Rissa cowering below him on the landing three steps below.  "Go get your book!  You are old enough to be able to go down the stairs by yourself with the lights on!  If you don't go downstairs and get your book, you will stand on this landing ALL night."  You draw the wrong line in the sand, lead with anger instead of patience.  Like I did when Rissa was about 4... "I am NOT killing that spider up in the highest corner of the public washroom for you because you're worried it might bite you.  And if you keep crying I will leave you in the bathroom to pee all by yourself.  (Wail!  Wail! Wail!)  Okay, I warned you.  You will pee all by yourself."  Just awesome standing outside that washroom with horrified on-lookers.  But I had drawn the line in the sand.  It was the WRONG line in the sand, but I couldn't go back.

 

When Rissa was two I locked her in the garage.  And before you threaten to call children's services... It was so I wouldn't kill her.  She was having a full-on tantrum, I picked her up under one arm to carry her up to her room.  She was wailing, screaming and scratching and I knew that I wouldn't be able to make it up the stairs without strangling her, so I opened the garage door, turned on the light, put her in and then shut the door.  I held on to the other side of the door as she wailed and screamed and told her that Mummy could not let her in because Mummy needed a time out.  David was horrified when he got home.  "What would you rather"? I asked.  "Coming home to a strangled child or a child who was in the garage for 2 minutes?"

 

As they get older you make different mistakes.  You think your mature 12 year old kid can see the 14A movie.  Yesterday we might have taken Rissa to see Looper.  It's a film starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis - Rissa LOVES both those actors, with a pretty big crush on JGL.  It is a film featuring time travel... murder for pay and.... apparently... limb amputation.  Well-written, did NOT go where I expected it to.  Great film... for ADULTS.  About 20 minutes in, after a particularly violent section of character-building plot, Rissa leans over to me and says, "What is this movie rated?"  If I'd been a good parent, knowing as I did how her body language had changed and sensing her discomfort, I should have then taken her out of the movie.  I didn't.  I was a bad parent.  But I DID cover her eyes when I knew that the really bad shit was coming up.  Does that help my case here?

WAY too much fun!!

Right after that we went to see Pitch Perfect, a movie about collegiate acapella singing - which our geeky little household absolute adores - we'd been following The Sing-Off (see the clip of all-girl group Delilah below) for the past couple of years.  I barked laughter at least a 1/2 dozen times, which happens rarely for me at the movies.  I'm more of a chuckler unless it strikes my comedic fancy which Hanna Mae Lee's character did.  ("I ate my twin in the womb.")    As the movie was ending Rissa announced, "WE NEED TO OWN THIS!!" 

It was the perfect movie to purge Rissa's mind of the 14A nastiness from the first movie. There, see?  Now we were the GOOD parents.  Of course I had to spend  45 minutes holding Rissa's hand in bed, having given her a couple of stress tabs to chew, waiting for her to fall asleep because she wouldn't let me leave and mentioned several times "I really didn't like the Joseph Gordon Levitt movie Mummy.  It was NOT Inception." 

When I was 12, I made the mistake of watching The Exorcist while having a sleep over at a friend's house.  (It was the 1980 and apparently it was okay to have rated R horror movies on primetime then.)  I slept with my little brother for 4 months after that.  To this day, if I see even a film still of Linda Blair from the movie I want to throw up.  She's 12.  We know that Rissa she can handle the F-word, adult comedic situations and cartoony violence.  There may be times when she acts 16, and talks about non-neutonion fluids, but as she clung to my hand last night - even in sleep - she's still my little girl and as much as I want to share the Kill Bill movies with her?  She's too young.  I can wait.  She'll be older all too soon.

Turkeys on the ledge...

I wasn't awake enough when I was reading the news this morning.  I read this:

"Turkey on edge as Syria widens offensive"  

and all I could think of was turkeys threatening to jump off the ledge of a building.  Which of course brought to mind the  WKRP episode where they have a 'turkey drop' from a helicopter in honour of Thanksgiving.  And as this is Canadian Thanksgiving it seemed appropriate to post.

Then, on my walk I saw Cerberus leaning out of a late 70s van window.
 

Like this, but more Rottweilery.

Pretty sure this was the van.

Seriously.  I did a double take.  Because it's odd that the guard of the underworld was in Cobourg. I mean, sure, it was probably three Rotweilers all leaning out the same window, but from my vantage point... totally Cerberus. It was a beautiful moment - could have been a vintage rock album cover.

Then, rounding out the surreality of the morning, I picked up a dead squirrel.  Not like a "Hey baby, how's the afterlife?" kind of way.  It was in the middle of King Street.  It wasn't squished flat, and cars so far had avoided running over it more and I did start to walk away, but then I just couldn't.  So I waited for a break in Sunday morning church traffic,  picked the poor little bugger up and moved it to the boulevard.  Don't worry.  If it had been squished flat, I would have gone home and retrieved a spatula to pry it off the asphalt, I'm not one for squirrel guts under my nails.

Happy Thanksgiving folks!

What's the deal?

WARNING: FEMININE GROOMING IS DISCUSSED!

Why, oh why, oh why can we women not be happy with our bodies?  Why do we obsess over details that other people don't even notice?  Yesterday, on the drive back from Toronto, what did I notice?  My arm hair.  Of course looking at it now in the light of the study it looks fine, but in the natural light coming in through the car windows?  I was  freaking Sasquatch.  Somehow, since the last time I looked at my arm hair, it was much darker and MUCH longer than I recollect.    Not braidable long or anything - that's the upper bikini hair if it doesn't get seen to - but long enough that I could brush it.  Like in a specific direction.  Brush, brush, brush... Now it faces due east.  Brush, brush, brush... Now it faces north-west.

All I want to do is get out the body hair bleach.  See, I'm in a wedding next weekend and I'm wearing short sleeves.  What if, instead of looking at my friend Amber, the stunning bride-to-be, people are so fixated on my hairy arms that their whispered, horrified comments circle the room?  "Did you see?"  "How can she NOT notice that?"  "She's like a macaque!"  And I know that, besides me, no one is going to notice it, except for everyone reading this particular post, who happens to be at the wedding next weekend - in which case, I'm definitely bleaching it today.

We preen, we pluck, we shave.  We gripe, we obsess and moan.  And that figure fault, whatever we decide it to be, becomes the centre of our universe.  Before my high school reunion in 2007, it was the lines on my forehead.  I have smile lines on my forehead.  And you might say Wait a sec!  You don't get smile lines on your forehead, you get them beside your eyes!   I have those too, but these are different and they're on my forehead because I did mask work.  HUH?  When I was MUCH younger, I did The Comedy of Errors with my Shakespeare company in Ottawa.  My eyes were always disappearing when  I smiled, so the director said that I had to raise my eyebrows when I smiled so that my eyes were still visible in the mask.  So that became what I did EVERY TIME I SMILED.  For 17 years that's how I smiled.  And as a result, I had the forehead of a 65 year old woman, or at least, that's how I perceived it.

In addition to the lines on my forehead you see my chicken pox marks and mylasma.

THIS was what I focused on.  OH MY GOD - EVERYONE WILL SEE THESE LINES!!!  So I got botox.  And you know what?  Of the 4 freaking lines on my forehead?  Only the top two smoothed out, so the bottom two were STILL there!  And you know something else - nobody noticed them.   And shortly after that, I started wearing bangs and stopped obessessing about the age of my forehead.

Now (besides the macaque arm hair), I obsess about the lines beside my cheeks. Which are totally fine when I'm smiling because they're supposed to be there, but when I'm not smiling I look like I might have been living in East Germany under a dictatorship for a long while.

There are times I think about getting some invisible duct tape, just at the hair line to pull those back, just a titch.  Not like a face lift, where your mouth then looks like the Joker's - because that's just creepy.  You know, like all those poor 40-something actresses who have had lifts done and now don't look like themselves anymore and it makes me want to rail to the heavens.  I saw Marisa Tomei in The Lincoln Lawyer and she was GORGEOUS!!!  She had lines on her face and was still drop-dead fucking gorgeous.  Smile lines and crinkles and CHARACTER on her face.

Marisa Tomei - looking how a woman in her 40s SHOULD look!

Because that's what we're supposed to have when we have lived life - isn't it?  So toss away your inner critique and try to see yourself through the eyes of your friends, your partners.  We have smile lines, BECAUSE WE SMILE!  Now the frown lines - those - those you can Botox the hell out of - 'cause you shouldn't be frowning so much - just stop doing it.

I'll let you in on a secret.  When I was doing my crazy-ass eyebrow lifting for smiles - I never took a good picture.  Because why?  Because I wasn't really smiling, I was making sure my eyes were open.  My friend Shannon, who recently passed away, never took a bad photo.  Whenever she smiled... she SMILED.  She embraced life and every single time she smiled she made other people smile too.  She was open without worrying about how her eyes looked.  And I know it sounds all crunchy-granola and new-agey - but when she died?  Shannon gave me her smile.  Or at least she made me remember how to use it properly.  So now, when complete strangers comment on my beautiful smile, I know that it and all the attending beautiful crow's feet that come with it?  It really comes from her and from the knowledge that worrying about how you smile isn't really smiling - it's posing.  And you don't want to be a poser in life, do you?

Crushing on the Drag Queen

My life will never be the same!

WARNING - ADULT CONTENT AND MORE THAN LIKELY TOO MUCH INFORMATION - IF YOU'RE A PRUDE - DO NOT KEEP READING.

SERIOUSLY.

I AIN'T KIDDING HERE.

ALRIGHT, IT'S YOUR FUNERAL.

You know it's a good bachelorette party when you come back with a broken baby toe and you fancy yourself in love. Last night was Amber's birthday/bachelorette party.  It was  an existential, gender-bending, re-evaluating my sexual psyche, kind of evening.  It proved to be one of the most mind-expanding nights in my life.  Why Heather, please elaborate.  Did you discover transcendental meditation, or hot yoga?  No, I discovered the true art of drag queens and I shall never be the same.

We went to the drag clubs on Church Street and I saw some amazing performers.  Nikki Chin at Crews and Tangos - stunning, funny, wry, crass, self-deprecating and a great dancer.  And then Vitality Black at Zipperz  who is  a teeny tiny Tina Turner with more spit and fire and fun than you would think could fit into such a little body.
 

The Fabulous Vitality Black

But then everything changed.  Heaven Lee Hytes took the stage.

Heaven Lee Hytes

I found myself transported to an alternate-reality version of Victor/Victoria, with me in the James Garner role, but instead of me lusting after a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, I found myself lusting, not for the spectacularly stunning drag queen Heaven Lee is, but rather the man underneath the drag queen.  I have NEVER IN MY LIFE experienced anything as psychotropic as what I experienced last night.
I was smitten.  L.U.S.T.  In bold capital letters.  That's right.  LUST.  My mind is still blown, and this is why...   Heaven Lee Hytes  is one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen.  A Lucy Lawless-esque statuesque brunette with piercing blue eyes who does NOT remotely resemble a dude.   She is a goddess in her own right.  A performer who has perfected her craft for a decade and is a paragon in the realization of her stage persona. GORGEOUS.  WITTY.  TALENTED.

But all I could see?  The man.  The man underneath the sequins and pancake and falsies.  The man beneath the scarlet lipstick, eyeshadow and stilletto stripper boots.  I found myself crushing on this guy in the least platonic way of my life.  I looked at him, who I should be calling 'her' out of respect for how brilliant he is at being 'her,' but honestly?  All I saw was the man.  There was something about the breadth of his shoulders that let me visualize him not as a perfect female impersonator but rather as a cross-dressing man.  And for the first time in my life, I could understand cross-dressing and I thought it was HOT.

To quote my friend Big Gay Jay... So there I was, wanting to hump the leg of a drag queen... I was lusting for the tall, dark, handsome, GAY man who stole the breath from my incredulous lungs.  My mind IMPLODED.  Looking at 'her' but seeing only him.  This man had me imagining things.  Dirty, decadent, ridiculously-cliched, romance novel things.  Him, dressed as a highway man in Regency England, his long hair tied back in a black velvet ribbon, sporting jodpurs and riding boots and some sort of great cloak. Riding a frickin' horse.  Preparing to... board my carriage and perhaps steal my... jewels... if you know what I mean.

And what did you do on YOUR Thursday night?

Use your MOM voice!

I am a medical mystery.

"Oh the medical mystery tour, they're trying to make me okay... trying to make me okay..."

You ever feel glad when the doctors tell you bad news?  Like when finally someone says "Oh yeah, your thyroid is completely screwed," there's this weird release of stress with the bad news?  Kind of fucked, huh? Like when my doc looked at my blood results that showed my antibodies were WAY past normal all I could think was, THANK FREAKING GOD!  At least there's proof that I'm not normal - it's not just in my head!  Because even though I knew that I was messed up - there was no tangible EVIDENCE to support that.  And doctors tend to treat you like you're a hypochondriac when the regular lab work doesn't give you evidence to back up your claims.  There's a lot of There, there-ing and Don't you worry your pretty head-ing - the kind of language that can make a woman see every colour within the red spectrum.

And yet, most women don't advocate for their own health.  We would step in front of a bus for our  our children, our partners, our parents - but when it comes to us?  We become little skittish wallflowers; don't want to make too much fuss. I was like that for YEARS with my GP.  He was an asshole.  Truly.  Ex-military.  Terrible bedside manner, treated me like I was a total hypochondriac and made me feel about this big.  Some might say, get a new doctor.  But the thing is, when you live in Canada, in a small town and you already HAVE a doctor - it's nigh on impossible to switch to a different, less assholey doctor.  There's a lot of politicking that goes on.  You're not supposed to poach other doctors' patients.  So I made do.  I complained to everyone (except the Doc), made do and I put up with the bullshit.  Until I didn't.

I had a breast cancer scare.  (I'm FINE.  Honest.)  I was living out of the country when some issues came up so I went to a private clinic and after they saw my previous mammogram results sent down from my Dr. in Canada, they recommended an MRI.  We cut our trip short to come back for the scan.  I made an appointment with the Dr's office and got the requisition and was assured that things would be done.  Three weeks later,  still no appt, and when I called the MRI dept to see when it would be, they told me that I needed a further breast workup first and that my Dr's office should have contacted me a couple of weeks earlier about scheduling and that until they had a request from my Dr, their hands were tied.  So I called the Dr's office and they didn't know what the hell I was talking about - not a clue as to what had been going on.  "We sent files where?  There's a request from which dept.?"

I LOST it.  Barely holding it together, tears clogging my voice,  I said to the receptionist, "THIS IS SERIOUS.  This is serious to ME.  Perhaps I need to find a Dr,  and a clinic, who thinks that my possibly having breast cancer is something to be concerned about."  Sensing my next step would involve picketing their office and possible phone calls to every news media outlet in Canada, they immediately booked my breast workup and I had a consultation the VERY NEXT MORNING with my Dr.

I went in and he gave me Dr. speak about how the clinic and he personally had served me well over the years.... yadda, yadda, yadda... and every time I tried to voice my concerns, he just talked over me.  For a few minutes I let him do it, before I dug deep down inside and pretended that the patient I was concerned about... was my daughter.  Using my actor's voice, I interrupted him.  I said very calmly, "You are not HEARING me.  You need to  LISTEN to what I am saying.  The level of care that I am receiving as your patient is unacceptable and if we cannot fix this I need to find a new Dr who will take me seriously."

And then a miracle occurred.  From that point on, this guy morphed into the best Dr in the world for me.  There must be a great big frickin' RED ASTERISK and a label on my files that says "THIS LADY WILL CUT YOU AND THEN GO TO NEWSWORLD" because now he calls me personally with results, good or bad, he discusses treatment with me, makes suggestions and listens to my concerns.  He LISTENS now.  And from the first time he changed his tune, I have gone out of my way to thank him.  Every single time he treats me with respect and professionalism, I thank him.  He listened to what I was saying and he changed, because I asked him to.  And shit like that?  It needs to be acknowledged. 

So ladies.  Please, please, PLEASE - speak up.  Fight.  Fight for you.  Go to the mat for you, the same way you would for your child, your partner, your parent.  Be your own health advocate.  Take care of YOU.

Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. 

-Ferris Bueller

The Twitching Hour(s)

There is a rule in our house that applies only to me.  I am not allowed out unsupervised between the hours of 3 and 5 p.m.  Basically from after school until dinner time.  If I leave the house alone during those hours, odds are I might not come home.  For whatever reason, my hypoglycemia kicks in REALLY hard in the afternoon.  When we had a Fabricland in town, David had been known to call and ask, "Has there been a red-headed woman in your store, staring dazedly at fabrics for the last hour and a half?"  Me, between 3 and 5 p.m. is kind of like me on 'shrooms.  Colours are very pretty, I want to touch everything and I have no concept of time passing.  Grocery shopping?  Forget about it.  A 1/2 hour shop can take me 4 hours if I enter the No Frills at 3:15 p.m.  "Look!  They have ginger beer now!  This shape feels nice and smooth in my hand.  The bottle is very brown-y"

Every now and again we forget the time and I sneak out before anyone notices.  It's worse this fall because  David teaches out of town now, and I don't have a car during the day.  So far I'm managing household errands by riding my bike most places.

This was my Mother's Day gift a couple of years back.

Except that I can't do a full-on grocery shop using my little bike basket, so when he gets home from work at 3:30, there's still shit I need to do that requires bigger than a bike basket and I'll hop in the car and disappear. David usually sends Rissa to monitor me.  "Make sure your mother comes home.  Take the cell.  If you guys aren't home in 45 minutes, I'm notifying the authorities."

Yesterday, I had to get a bunch of stuff at Staples.  Riding my bike up there usually isn't a hardship, I have a nice white rabbit helmet that makes me pretty freakin' visible and also adds a certain je ne sais quoi to our small town.  I needed to get a whole whack of rewritable cds and other stuff that would have been weighty and I wouldn't want all of that bouncing around in my basket (NOT a euphemism), plus, I was a wee bit stoned from the overdose of Tylenol that wasn't working and when I visualized the trip, this is what I saw:  Horrified bystanders converging upon an ambulance, firetruck and hearse on the bottom of Ontario Street.  "Hey  that delightfully eccentric lady with the rabbit bike helmet got hit by a mack truck when she tried to ride her bike while hopped up on too many Tylenol!  That's her head over there!"  So instead, I did NOT get on my bike.  See that?  Right there?  I was totally using my brain.  I made an executive decision and didn't bike while under the influence.  Gold Star for Heather!

You can't really see, but the inside of the ears are PINK!!!

Which meant that when David got home from work I said, "I'm just going to hop into the car and run to Staples..."

David - eyebrows raised.  "Uh... NO.  You're not.  You tell me what you need and I'll go get it."

My eyebrows scrunched down in a defensive, pouty stance.  "No.  This is my job to do and I can do it myself, you shouldn't have to babysit me!"

"If only that were true my Love."

"It's not your job."

"I'm afraid it is."

Eyebrows even lower on my face, gearing up to true petulance tinged with guilt at involving him in my errands and perhaps some tears at my hypoglycemic helplessness. "I... I..."

"Just stop.  I'll go with you.  We'll get the stuff.  We'll come home.  It'll be fun."

"Like a date?"
 
"Sure, we can call it a date."

"Okay then.  Rissa!!!  Daddy and I are going on a date to Staples!!"

And it's a good thing he WAS with me, because the aisle with all the fancy envelopes?  VERY colourful.