Dryer Sheets of Death

Looks so innocuous, doesn't it?

Our laundry/bathroom is on our main floor.  We have two doors leading into it, one from the back hall and one from the back staircase.*  There are occasions where I might bound into the room from either direction.  Did you know that you can slip, in your bare feet, when previously used dryer sheets have been rubbed into the floor.?  Residual fabric softener, it turns out, is a great floor waxer.  Who knew?  Not I.  Until I galloped down the stairs, skittered into the laundry/bathroom, hit a slippery patch, IN MY BARE FEET, and went careening into the door jamb, sliding down the jamb, full weight upon my arm to rest in a pile of legs and arms.  I believe all the neighbours on our street could hear me colourfully peppering the air with Danish expletives.

Åh for Satan da også!

I looked around to see what had caused me to slip and there was nothing there. I mean NOTHING.  Not a piece of clothing, not a rug without a slippy-pad, not a dryer sheet.  So I crawled across the floor and started feeling around the way a blind person might, my hand out in front of me brushing from left to right and back again to feel the floor.  And somewhere around the chrome waste basket (where dryer sheets are supposed to be put), I felt a bunch of really slippery spots.  So what did I do?  I got up and tried to walk over the spot and SLIPPED AGAIN!!!  Which means that I fell on my ass TWICE.  The second time as an EXPERIMENT.  I lay on the floor, laughing at my own stupidity for a few moments as the cats mocked me from the doorway.

I bruise if someone breathes on me so if I actually injure myself, it's a sight to behold.  There will be bruises on me that I don't even remember getting.  I bump into a shopping cart at the grocery store and end up looking like I've gone three rounds with a welter weight.  David frequently looks at me and says, "What the hell did you do to yourself?"    This has happened when I've been massaged:

I trip, slip, scald, goose-egg, gouge, sprain and gash myself... I am THAT clumsy.  I always win the "How many scars do you have?" game.  It used to really put potential boyfriends off because they'd want to be all manly and itemize every wee little mark they had on their bodies and I have literally DOZENS.  I've split my head open, fallen through a glass table, punctured my leg through a snowsuit...   It's only because people know me so well that David hasn't been picked up for abuse. Thank God (touch wood) Rissa seems to have more grace and coordination than I ever had.  Although she does excel at collapsing to the floor in dramatic gestures.

* I thought it would be too poncy to say we had a servants' staircase, but we totally do!  By no means do we have servants, we just live in a century home that once had them.  When we were renovating, we saw what looked to be the top of a run of stairs in the upper hall, so we opened the walls and discovered two sets of stairs in the back of the house.  We found one from the main floor to the 2nd floor and a second staircase from the main floor to the basement.  I felt like Indiana Freaking Jones!  I had always wanted to have back stairs.  One downside to all these various stairs in the house, when a bat finds its way in?   It can be REALLY hard to catch the sucker because it has several escape routes.   

And THAT'S how you burn a house down!

I have a tendency to get distracted.  Like today, when I was making very healthful (HAH!) nachos for my lunch.  I walked away from the oven when I was broiling.  This is a mistake.  'Cause THIS is what happened.   Nothing like a little oven fire to get the angina started.

I once melted the bottom off an aluminum sauce pan because I got all distracticated.  I tried to multi-task while boiling water.  I walked away from the pot, and then the pot MELTED.  It looked like the molten metal thingie from Terminator 2  (another movie that we shouldn't show Rissa yet, no matter how cool it is).


 
It looked exactly like this, except that it was all over my burner drip pans and the stove.   I realized then that I should NOT walk away from the kitchen. EVER.

And I try not to, but today  - I was multi-tasking - trying to clean the house and cook and write and voila!  Parchment Paper Fire.  Thank God that's all it was.

I'm notorious for forgetting to turn the stove off.  They say that if you keep forgetting where you put your keys, but still know what keys are actually used for, you don't have Alzheimer's.  I still know what a stove does, so I think I'm okay,  but this sort of shit happens to me all the time now.

When I can't remember the word "ambition"?  Or the name of a movie star that I KNOW I know?  That scares the crap out of me.  But this?  This could burn the house to the ground.  Usually though, Rissa or David are around and have the presence of mind to turn the oven off.  If I'm the only one in the house and something lights on fire, I'd be the only casualty, so that's a positive.  CRAP.  And the cats.  That would be bad for me to burn three cats.  I better get on this.  AH-HA!!  Oven timer!!  Perfect thing to actually use.  There.  Problem solved.  No krispie kitties nor ashen Heathers. I just have to remember to pay attention to it!

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?