Shocked at how much I loved Patricia Volk's SHOCKED

Audrey Volk and her mother

Cookie has been reading the Memoir SHOCKED by Patricia Volk (2013, Alfred Knopf, 26.95), and I have to tell you that it's one of the best written books I have come across in a long time.  I could not put it down.

Volk's book juxtaposes a look at her own mother, Audrey Volk, against that of fashion designer (and trail blazer) Elsa Schiaperelli.  The common thread is that Audrey Volk is obsessed at looking her best and when a copy of Schaperelli's own autobiography "Shocking Life" falls into the hands of a ten year old Patricia, it launches Patricia on a life altering path that questions what is "beauty" and at what cost, as well her own study of her mother's life and how it is built around her own beauty.

I really recommend this book, especially for those of us who have tried to understand our mothers.  While you may not see your mother in Audrey Volk, you will most certainly appreciate the author's insights. 

And I can see this becoming a movie, a la Julie and Julie with Streep as Elsa Schaperelli herself. 

Your Daily Dose of Dysfunction: Amy's Baking Company

For those of you who have never watched Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares and live in cave, but have terrific internet access, this show is all about someone abrasive but talented going into a restaurant that is totally dysfunctional and trying to make it function as it should.

Its one of the few "reality" shows I enjoy because we've been to one of the restaurants (Hon Cafe) featured on the show and the food was absolutely mindblowingly delicious.

In his sixth season though, Gordon Ramsey meets a restaurant co-owner and chef, that would be Amy of Amy's Baking Company who is either the worlds best actress, or someone who needs a "different type of help" that Ramsey is not licensed to provide.

If you haven't seen this episode of "episodes" here are the two halves and the atypical ending.   They are worth watching.








I have my opinions, but I also have a sliver of compassion for folks like Amy because they are unable to see in themselves what everyone around them can see or experience, and they tend to blame everyone and everything thing around them for whatever happens to them.   People like Amy simply wear people down and the only energy anyone has walking away from this perfect storm is to say "What a total asshole."

Unfortunately, Amy will never be able to comprehend her behavior and the dust up it has caused on the Internet as everyone from Facebook, to YELP to REDDIT to even Forbes to take a stab at her and her behaviors on and off line.

My Mother insisted that we not send her cards on Mother's Day

My Mother never enjoyed getting cards on Mother's Day because Hallmark never made a card that that simply said "Have a happy Mother's Day".  In fact, neither did American Greetings or Gibson Greetings for that matter.

Since the card industry created this "holiday" - and is it really, I mean who gets "Mother's Day" off from work, or even gets the Monday following Mother's Day as Mother's Day Observed - they have been been laying on thicker and thicker every year.

The cards today say every over the top the sentiment imaginable.  Most seem to have the subtext of "Oh MOTHER, from thy loins I lept!" while others seem to go other other direction with verse that borders on Oedipal love and card verse in an over the top script that borders on font sex.

We were a dysfunctional non-demonstrative family, so choosing a card for her was a real pain.  Not because I didn't care, but none of them were simple enough.  With all that manufactured drama, it seemed insincere, and on her end it must have been as equally painful to read verse that was received as manufactured.

But she would always call and acknowledge the card and then the business of the holiday was done unless we opted to include a meal.

But after she hit 80, she started making it known that the cards really were a waste of money.  "Save your money and stop sending that stuff.  I know I'm your mother," she would opine.

For a while, we tried flowers, but that presented a bigger problem: she would complain about them.

Either they were too big, too expensive or they reminded her of funeral flowers.  One year she out did herself  in her call to us.

"These flowers are half dead and the water smells brackish," which was followed by "SAVE YOUR MONEY."

So eventually the flowers stopped, but the calls and the meals continued.

After her headstone was placed on her grave I planted red geraniums - her favorite - on her grave, but this year, now that we've moved, and with me being in Maryland for the first time, it will be a first that nothing got done for her grave.

When we visit later in the summer I drive back up to Marion and tend the family plot.  I will take a weed eater to trim around the head stones and brush to sweep the dried cut grass from the stones and I'll take a moment to miss her more than I do or she ever imagined.

But per her wishes, I will take no card and I will hold the flowers.

Found today: Ka-Bala and the Eye of Zohar

It's a bit like the Ouija Board, but it glows in the dark.  It combines the zodiac, roulette and tarot cards.  Its instructions tell you can play in the dark, but you'll need to turn on the room light to read the fortunes on the back of the tarot cards.  And the EYE OF ZOHAR follows the ball around the board.  Maybe this (From the Museum of Talking Boards) will help explain it:

Made by Transogram - that toy company of yore that did amazing things in very cheap breakable plastic, Ka-Bala is the type of toy that would never get made today for children.  NEVER!  Oh, Hell - can you imagine the media blood-fest One Million Moms (which only has 50,000 followers on Facebook) would have over this?  Sweet smoking Jesus, they'd be having a kniption fit!  All the more reason to own it!

Now if Ka-Bala could tell me where I can find the $100 smackeroo's to buy it, I'd hustle back to that store and get it.

We have dinner with my ex husband.

My mother and father had horrible marriage and an even worse divorce.  They battled their way through court over money, me and property.  Weekly my father would call me up and bitch about her and she would sit there and tell me that I needed to be nicer to him.

"Cookie," she would say, "he is your father."

And I would reply "and he is your ex-husband.  You know what an asshole Marvin is."

"But I," said she, "divorced him.  You can't."

To my mother and my father, divorce was something that happened to two people when the only thing that could be agreed upon was that knives would leave too much bloodshed and spoil the decor.   The idea that two people could break up, and then be civil, nay - even friends with one and other afterward - was something that neither of my parents could comprehend.

Cookie all too well remembers the phone call that he received from his mother about ten years ago when she said that she had seen the parent of a high school friend at the market.

"Mr. Cockenblocker said that Carol and her husband were divorcing because they were better "friends" than husband and wife.  What kind of idiotic nonsense is that?"

"Well," said I, "Maybe they want more out of life."

"Of all the asinine things," Mother harrumphed.

Then there were all of Cookie's father's subsequent divorces after father divorced mother.  All of them a three ring circus of vitriol, hate, moving vans and the old neighbors calling our house with the news that moving vans were seen.

"Picking up or dropping off?" my mother would ask.

For as much animosity as they had for one and other, he never could find the "one" and she never remarried until after she attended the funeral.

But hate is not the opposite of love.  No, where love is concerned apathy is opposite.  This lead me to at least suspect that for as much as they wanted to kill each other, my parents had some feeling of love gone sour for one and other.

Years and years ago, when Cookie was young and a newly minted homosexual, living in Washington, DC, I fell in love with an older man named Bob.  I was at the height of sexuality and thought he was just everything anyone would every need or want. And we fucked like bunnies and the sex was great, but it didn't work out.  He was older and had the maturity I lacked and  I was much younger than my physical age showed.  Immaturity has a way of killing off relationships.

And not that he wasn't a great guy, because he was.  But it wasn't the one for either of us.

In between this man and the love of my life, the Husband (with whom I celebrate 16 bliss filled years this coming Wednesday) there was my second husband who was a kind man, but not the man for Cookie. We were together for nine years, eleven months and two weeks when it dawned on me that I couldn't celebrate ten years when I wasn't happy.  This man took the very hard, which was what he had to do.  And he died from stomach cancer about 12 years after we broke up.  But we did eventually became friends before his death and I delivered a eulogy at his funeral that had people crying and laughing at the same time.

So, when a relationship wasn't right, I always tried to be on good terms with my ex, even when it was a real up hill struggle.

Anyway,  when we moved back east I sent a letter to Bob and said that we were moving to Charm City.  Between the move and our lives - and his - plans to get together for a meal never quite seemed to get together.

Until last night.

He is in town for a conference and would we like to meet for dinner.  I check with the husband and the plan is arranged.  I make the reservation at a good Italian restaurant - after all, who except Ethiopians doesn't love Italian food?

My friends from back home have said "What madness is this!"  But I remind them that I am now fifty, and Bob is now sixty-four, and the THIRTY years have passed, and those thirty years have been happily regret free.   And, I say to another friend from home, aren't we old enough to act like adults?

And of those thirty years that have passed, the happiest sixteen have been with The Husband, who is tall and handsome and makes me smile and laugh and feel, most importantly, loved in a way that I only thought was possible in dreams.   And our anniversary is May 15th, so I am aglow with true love.

Besides, isn't it all very civil, everyone sitting around and chatting over very good food?  And when the meal is complete and the check is brought, we promise to visit D.C., part as friends, and he to his hotel, and The Husband and I to our home, just the way it should be.

So the Rumor Goes: The grass is always much longer on the other side of the fence.

Mr. Husband and I maintain a nice lawn here at Casa d' Cookie, East - actually as nice as we can give the condition that the lot was in when we bought the house.

Instead of verdant lawn of velvet, ours is a patchy affair with many types of grass, and enough weeds to fill a garden's encyclopedia.

We are the third owners of the house, so the two previous families consisted of couples who bought young and stayed until very old.  As as things tend to do, the lawn got beyond their reach.

So last fall and this spring we fertilized, weeded and fed what was there in hopes of at least fooling ourselves that we could bring it back on our own. And now that it is May, everything is green, until the heat sets in.

We have also been clearing brush, English Ivy, violets, creeping charlie, plantain and other bothersome residents who have put down roots, everywhere.  The Creeping Charlie is the worse because nothing kills it, so you have to sit in the grass, and unweave it from the grass with your fingers until you find the tap root point then pull it.

In the Baltimore area, English Ivy is the Kudzu of choice.  People planted it as ground cover and it is everywhere.  I understand that sometime in the next couple years nurserymen expect it to be officially designated as an invasive species but the damage caused by the plant is broad and wide.  We have wrestled branches of English Ivy as thick as a child's arm from the bark of the giant elm trees that surround our house. First you sever the ivy at ground level, then you strip as much off as you can after it dies and dries. Nasty stuff.

But we are making progress, when we aren't being questioned.

When we had the roto tiller in the back yard in April, Nosy Nancy behind us, would poke her head through the hedge and ask what we were doing, and then say "You know that the guidelines say you have to have your landscaping approved by 'The Committee'!"  And we patiently point out that our neighbors were fine, it was in a back yard, and we were clearing weeds, not building landscape features.

And every time we came back with mulch, or gypsum, or manure, Nosy Nancy would poke her head through the shrubs to see what we were or were not doing.   When the husband dug the pit for the water garden, Nosy Nancy called "The Committee" on us, and I spoke with the committee and pointed out where water gardens, which hold storm water run off and allow the water to slowly penetrate into the soil instead of washing into the storm water sewers, are exempt from civic associations in Maryland if they aren't proximate to the public right of way.  In fact, Maryland is looking at giving resident tax credits for creating the swails and planting them with native plants.  Everyone wins.

But Nancy was undaunted.  "Well I could fall in that pit," which is 10" deep, "if I were walking in your back yard," she pointed out.

"Yes, you could, but what would you be doing in our back yard?" I asked.

"Well, Marley," her weazened dog, "could jump the fence if he were chasing a squirrel."  Really? The hound is so old it qualifies for social security.  But no, "Really," according to Nancy.

While all this was going on, Nosy Nancy's grass was growing and growing and growing.  In fact, she hasn't cut it yet and is well past the point of being able to stand under its own weight.   On her latest snooping ("Well, what are we planning on doing today?") I asked her how does her garden grow?

"Well, we're getting out mower blade repaired at the hardware and it should be ready any day."  That was two weeks ago.

On Monday she was all aflutter.  "Randy down the street will be cutting our yard once his mower is ready for the season!"

On Wednesday I saw her while walking the dogs and she started in on me and the mulching I had been working on and how the neighborhood association preferred hardwood mulch to pine bark chips, and blah, blah, blah.  I tried to bite my tongue, but "You know Nancy, if you put all this effort into cutting each blade of grass  in your yard by hand with nail scissors, the yard would have been cut by now," slipped out before I could stop myself.  Nancy looked at me with some disbelief.  "You, too?" says she.

Yes. Me too.

Evidently the neighborhood was by now, abuzz as well. I understand that Miriam heard from Missy who told Debbie who's son plays t-ball with Audra who lives next to someone that we'll just refer to as the "Woman in the Cream Colored House" that the "The Committee" stopped by Nancy's house Wednesday evening to have a talk with her about her yard.  Evidently, it is Nosy Nancy who has crossed the line, and the Realtor who listed the side-hall "not to be missed" colonial was getting unflattering comments from potential buyers who were concerned about the house down the street and its "condition."

So action is being taken.  So the rumor goes.

So last night, well into the wee hours we heard the chug of the lawn mower as Nosey Nancy ordered her husband Miles, a Judge, about as he tried valiantly to get her yard cut, and the engine's white noise lulled us into a deep sleep.

The husband reports this morning that the yard is haphazardly cut, so today, if the weather behaves I'll sneak over with our lawn mower and neaten it up for her.

After all, what are neighbors for.

After a weekend in the garden

We are exhausted.  Is that a live cat?

Overheard at Walgreens

Woman one: She wa' watching some old movie when I went over.
Woman two: I hate those boring old things. She watching dem all the time and 'spect me to watch'um too.
Woman one: Something call' Splenda in the Grass.
Woman two: What it in color?
Woman one: Lemma barrow you card - yeah, it was in color.
Woman two: A least it wadden in black and white...

Says Who?

Stolen from Jason: What's she jamming to?

Stolen from Jason

Cookie would like to know, what tune that she is getting down to in that tunic and matching elephant bells?

Culture Corner: A Tale of 37 Blueboys

I was talking to Donna Lethal on the phone yesterday about the trip to Southern California that the husband and I will be taking in the next few months and I mentioned that I had to go to the Huntington Museum to look over some documents in their library.

"Oh," said our Ms. Lethal, "Blue Boy is there!"

I started to giggle and as I told her, I shall tell you.

Way back in time - 1982 to be exact - I was trapped at a really wretched college in southeast Ohio.  Actually, its a great school, but it is not a place where Cookie thrived.  Anyway, my mother came out to get me so I could get out of that God forsaken place for the long weekend and to my surprise, she brought my beloved high school friend Kathy along for the ride.  Kathy had gone to college in the Carolina's and was home for stay.  Needless to say, I was thrilled to see her.

So on the way back home, Kathy explains to me that since her parents had split up, she would be staying with her father in a place that he had rented about three blocks from their old house.

Kathy explained that her father had rented a fully furnished house from a coworker whose mother fell and was in a nursing home.  Rather than leave the house empty, her father was renting it and the price was right.  "But you have to see the inside - this place is a trip."

So we get to my house, I get my car out of mothballs, and I take Kathy home.  From the outside, the house was a tiny two bedroom bungalow on a postage stamp size lot.  Modest is an understatement, but it was neat as a pin.  "Now I want to remind you that it is exactly as the old woman left it."    We get to door, she has me close my eyes, and I enter, open my eyes, and Reader, when I tell you I was stunned speechless I mean just that.

Furnished in cheap Louis XVI, the carpet and walls looked they hadn't been touched since Truman was in office.  But the walls!  The walls were covered - every square inch - with small pictures of every size of  ornate plastic and dime store wooden gilt frames with small copies of 17th and 18th century European rococo art inside of them.

And Gainsborough's Blueboy, and the lesser known Pinkie, were everywhere - there must have been twenty copies in the living room alone.  In the dining room, the same thing.  Both bedrooms, too.  The only two rooms that escaped her devoting to copies of fine art  that you could buy with trading stamps where the kitchen and that bathroom.

And the place smelled of grandma, too - the place wreaked of Dejr Kiss dusting powder and it overwhelmed your sense of smell.

From the baseboards to the ceiling, hundreds of frames from 5"x7"'s down to miniatures on the table tops, were prints of zaftig women being visited by cherubs, dutch men signing documents  lords and ladies posing, people sharing bread and wine, cherubs in clouds - but the copies of Blue Boy stood out.   It was the Louvre of cheap art and kitsch.  It was like drowning in Woolworth's.

"There are at least ten Blue Boy's in my room alone.  Six in dad's room."

All I could muster was a "What the fuck?" because the walls were starting move on me.

"She evidently loved collecting art, and her daughter said that she would save her Buckeye Stamps and her green stamps and would order this stuff from the catalog.  She wanted to go to Europe to see great paintings, and this is as far as it got.  An homage, gone terribly, terrible awry."

Kathy explained that the reason why her father got the deal on the place was that he couldn't take any of it down, because the daughter was afraid that one day Mom would want to go back home and no one felt confident that they could get it all back up exactly as the woman's mother left it.

So we did what we could to cope.  We got stoned.  This lead to us counting the Blue Boy images and the Pinkie images. And a lot of giggling.  After a while you really didn't notice it.  And the Dejr Kiss also went away.

When I got home, bunny eyed and all, my mother asked where I had been and why did I smell like an old lady.  I thanked my mother for her loved minimalism and went to get something to eat.

During the summer break I spent a lot of time with Blueboy and Pinkie, but the best was being there when someone new saw the pictures and the expressions on their faces.

That fall Kathy and her father moved to North Carolina, and the old woman died that winter in the nursing home.

The following spring, my mother told me that she had gone to an estate auction at a house but left after looking over the boxes.  "I think someone who lived there had an emotional problem.  Boxes and boxes of that painting Prissy Percy.  Why would someone want Prissy Percy around them all the time I'll never know. Shhesh!"

When I told Donna this she said "this is the type of thing that people out here would pay money to see."  We started to giggle.  Hindsight is 20/20 and I now regret not taking pictures of the place.  But I haven't seen anything like it since, and haven't really noticed anyone having a copy of the Blue Boy on their walls since either.

Anyway, when I visit the Huntington, this will be the first time in a very long time that I will come face to face with Blue Boy hanging on a wall.  I wonder if I'll giggle, I wonder if I'll get the munchies.

Ah, the French...

Such a way with a message.

I was right about John Paulk, and I knew I would be

Paulk running away from Wayne Beeson's Camera in 1997

John Paulk is at it again.  Running away from something that he proclaimed was the truth.

We should all be very aware of who he is and what his track record is, because he is a shape shifter, and all others be damned.

In 1983 I lived in an apartment complex in Columbus, Ohio called Alhambra Court.  I lived in the north building, looking south.  And John Paulk lived in the south building looking north.  Our balconies looked onto each other and I met him about a month after moving in.

John and I pal'd around a bit, then he got squirrely.

Then he got hostile.  Then he mercifully moved away.

And all this time I have been watching John on the big screen of life.

In a nutshell, this is what John has been up to since the fall of 1983:

1) He is a voice student at The Ohio State University
2) He is gay.
3) He is not a prostitute, he is an "escort"
4) He "borrows" things from people.
5) He lies to his friends.
6) He is not a drag queen.
7) He wears his mother's clothing to gay bars.
8) He becomes a drag queen and uses the name Candy.
9) He appears at a club called the Ruby Slipper in Columbus Ohio.
10) He burns bridges.
11) He surrenders his life to Jesus Christ.  He is Born Again.
12) He sheds his gay lifestyle.
13) He becomes the heterosexual that he always wanted to be.
14) He gets married to a reformed Lesbian who has discovered her heterosexuality.
15) He appears on Oprah! as someone who has shrugged off the gay mantle.
16) He gets involved with Focus on the Family's "Exodus" program of religious based reparative therapy.
17) He (and his wife) appear on the cover of Newsweek promoting "the cure" and their marriage.
18) He becomes the face of Exodus International in full page newspaper ads.
19) He sits on the Board of Exodus International.
20) He writes a book (actually its "as told to") called Not a Afraid to Change.
21) He publicly and frequently testifies about how he prayed away the gay to packed rooms.
22) He travels to Washington DC for such a meeting and on the sly enters Mr. P's Bar in DuPont Circle.
23) He tells men his name is John Clint, but leaves out the "Paulk" for he is well known in the gay community.
24) He gets busted hustling drinks by Wayne Beeson.
25) He is called back to Colorado Springs, where his boss James Dobson demands the truth.
26) He claims it wasn't him.
27) Dobson wants the truth.
28) Paulk admits it was him, but that it will never happen again.
29) Dobson puts him back on the road, but with minders to keep him on the straight and narrow.
30) Paulk leaves Exodus.
31) Paulk becomes a chef in the Northwest.
32) Paulk, while apparently still married, is apparently dating men.

But here is our dilemma:  Past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior. And in 1997, I wrote for a piece in the Gay People's Chronicle about Paulk:

"If the Christian right wing sleeps better at night safe in the comfort that people like John Paulk are there to defend their ideals and promote the "Exodus cure," then I would advise them to start sleeping with one eye open. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I predict that John Paulk will yet recreate himself again when this folly, like the ones before, runs its course."

For every action, there is a reaction.  And frankly, I have to hand it to him, he held out for 15 years.  But the jig is up.

So number 33 on my list above now reads: Paulk admits that Exodus and reparative therapy doesn't work and issues an apology for all the hurt he has caused.

Everything in this list can be found, either in John's book, Wayne Beeson's book, or in an internet search. John is a very public person and he and his life are exceedingly well documented.  He loves being on the center stage.  He loves the attention.  He can't help himself.  It is his compulsion.  And no matter what he does, what he says, the attention is like a drug and he lives for it.

As I warned the Fundies, and now to the gay community, do not be lulled into complacency.  For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction and if we welcome him and accept this "apology" we will pay a price for it.  He is saying this for his own gain, for the rest of us its a zero sum game.  And he is not someone we want on our team in this social tug of war.

Instead I say, sit back and watch. Something is bound to happen with John Paulk.  It always does.  And there is a pretty good chance that when it does none of us will be surprised.  And we'll all say "I told you so."  Because John Paulk is always running away from something. Always.

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

Boy photographed with two lobsters caught off the coast of New Jersey, 1915

From the National Geographic Society web site.  These are some big ass lobsters.

GIANT is on TCM tonight

Rock was just hoping beyond hope that James's fist was pumping on something else of Rock's, I bet. 

This evening, TCM will air James Dean's third and final movie, GIANT.

Giant is based upon the book of the same name by Edna Ferber, and if you are like me and get very tired of the Texans who act like their shit don't stink, then this is a movie for you.

In a nutshell, Rock Hudson marries a non Texan (Elizabeth Taylor) and takes her home to his cattle ranch where she meets his insane sister, Mercedes McCambridge.   Liz discovers that her new husband and his sister treat the Latino and Latinas like they are children.    Liz spend the rest of the movie dealing with her husband, his people, an economic change and a social transformation, which comes at the end.

James Dean plays the man that Rock treats like shit, and then Rock sucks up to.  No idea who sucked who on the set, but Rock would have liked to have a bit of James Dean, me thinks.

While it may not be good Texas - and Texan's hated this movie when it came out - it is great Hollywood.

My only complaint is that in writing the script the gave the weight of Elizabeth's confident to Jane Withers, who plays Vashti Hakey as a female oaf.  In the book, Vashti is a bit of a Texas stereotype written as a socially awkward woman who grew up thinking she was going to marry Rock Hudson's character. Also in the book is Adarene Clinch, the sensible Texas good wife Elizabeth's confident.  In the movie they are one in the same, but buffoonish.  (Adarene Clinch gets demoted to a walk on role that was played by Mary Ann Edwards.)

Giant's interior set is also something of an icon - the grand stair case leading to twin galleries on the second floor.  In Giant, the stair's are adorned with a large window.  When the same staircase was reused for the interior of the of the VanTrapp mansion, it was changed from brown to gray, and the window replaced by the Villa's front door. Interesting how they reuse things.

Still, its fine cinema and worth while, especially when Rock Hudson's Bick Benedict becomes his own man at the end of the film.

Make your Earth Day an Eartha Kitt Day

TJB tells us that he has slathered his lean taut body with bronzer in honor of Ms. Kitt.

How will you celebrate?

A minor miracle on eBay

Last Monday I received an envelope from a seller on eBay.  I was going to write about the contents, but the Boston Marathon Bombing happened, and other things got in the way, so this post got shoved to the side.

Anyway, the envelope contained two Carte d'Viste photographs, each from its own auction, and each unmarked save for the name of the photographer.  The seller used the headline "CDV of Pretty lady from Ohio" on one of the pictures, and the other said "CDV of lady in stripe dress from Ohio".

Sellers do this all the time.  There have to be millions of images of forgotten people floating around the world and they turned up in antique malls, ephemera sales and online auctions. As was the case with these, only the name of the photographer and the town were marked on the backs of these.  So they sell them as "pretty lady" or "handsome man" or "instant ancestor" and hope that collector of pictures, or local history, or even someone desperate for a pedigree will place a bid.

So about fourteen days ago I was cruising through eBay while sitting in an Eat n' Park in Wheeling West Virginia when two sales got my attention real fast.  I always scan the site for anything having to do with my home town - genealogy and history is me - when "CDV of lady in stripe dress from Ohio" not only caught my eye, but also grabbed my attention, and only because I have the same picture, with my grandmother's handwriting.

The woman in the striped dress was my grandmother's maternal grandmother, Rebecca.

Now the Husband has often said that if anyone finds a family picture on eBay, it would be me.  Well, this proved him right.

Now, I know where ever descendant of this woman is, and that includes the ones that my mother claims she didn't know about and that includes her children from her first marriage. I know this because I spent twenty years looking for her date of death and place of burial.  My grandmother died when I was ten, so I couldn't ask her, and my mother, who I adored was a bit of narcissist - if she hadn't known someone, they didn't exist.  And remember, she was the one who wanted into the DAR because they served delicious cookies and hot coffee.

Anyway, twenty years is a long time to stalk a dead woman, but I eventually found her death certificate in the correct state, found her death notice and found her unmarked grave.  And no one deserves that fate. So then, according to the Prosecutor back home, to get her name and dates on the marker I had to track down every known descendant and get them to agree to it, which I did.  And the marker got carved, and she was no longer lost to time.

What I had learned about her was that she married twice, once to man who used her to raise his children from his first two marriages, do his laundry, have two more children and when he abandoned her he took their oldest boy who never saw his mother or brother again.  Without a penny, she was awarded a divorce in 1865.  She was poor and divorced with a son to raise.  So she married my great great grandfather, a man who beat her, breed her and abused her son from her first marriage, making him sleep in the barn year round.   And when the bastard died, he left no means of support for her.

So she did what any woman would do with eight mouths to feed in Ohio in 1890 - she married her daughter off into a good family to a man twice her age.  Luckily for everyone, my great grandfather adored my great grandmother, and he took care of her family as it was his own.

After I got over my chill, I checked the seller for another family picture, and found "pretty lady with a somber look" was my great grandfather's (see paragraph above) step-mother Amanda.  This was a picture that I didn't have, but but a third cousin did have, so I knew for sure who it was.

I bid on both and held my breath.  Both images sold for under $5.00 dollars and the seller combined shipping.  They arrived on Monday afternoon.

Amanda, my maternal grandmother's paternal step grandmother on the left and
Rebecca, my maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother on the right.

Seller told me that he got them as part of a box at an estate sale in South Carolina, but that these were the only ones from all of Ohio.  Because I know the entire genealogy, I'm pretty sure who's auction that these came from - a second cousin (Pam) who got involved in a snake handling preacher and wouldn't talk to any sinners in the family unless they came to her husband to be baptized.  

"Fat chance of that," said my mother the year before Mom passed away.

"She threw her Marcella's ashes (Mom's only first cousin, and Pam's mother) in the trash, and told her sister that she had scattered them.  I told her that was illegal, and do you know what she said to me? 'Only if you get caught.'  I wouldn't let her use my toilet if it was the last powder room on earth."

Seems that Pam's daughters followed in their mother's footsteps and also threw these two pieces of their heritage away.  Here's hoping karma gets them.

And gratefully, a higher power has appointed me to find their toss outs and restore them to family - it was my personal miracle for April.  Lets just hope that I don't find Cousin Marcella's ashes, or worse, have them make me sneeze.

If its all the same to you Lord, let's just stick with the pictures.

To better times.

The husband's family is in the Boston Metro area and this past week have been very stressful.

I know the in-laws are safe, but at 91 and 89 I have to wonder what this is doing to them.  My brother in laws's mother lived in Watertown, but we haven't heard anything.  No news is good news.

AND to add insult to injury, I popped a case of diverticulitis last night and am in physical pain.

So I am going to take the dogs to daycare and hunker down here.  Things will get better and they will get this man.  But this isn't easy to live through.

No fun.

Neighborhood meeting agenda item: How many angles can dance on the head of a pin?

I am happy to report that minutia seems to be the universal topic of neighborhood association meetings.

Spent the better part of the the afternoon at a neighborhood meeting were we debated waves of issues on various topics, however all of them somehow ended up being about the little shit.

Old woman in a wheel chair: "I would like to put the motion on the floor that owners of cats be responsible for their pets obscene meowing and provocative mating behaviors."

Old man with dying hearing aid battery: "What did you say, Helen?"

Recording secretary: "I didn't get the name of the person who said that."

President: "Said what."

Recording Secretary: "That last thing said."

President: "About the cats?"

Recording Secretary: "No, who said 'What did you say, Helen?'"

President:  "That was Merle, Helen's husband."

After two hours I left.

As I am not normally one who would have a cocktail on a school night, I need it after sitting through two hours of that.  And it's still going on!

Picture challenge: Write the personal ad for this picture

From the "Celebrities Made Under" - a project to make celebrities look like real people we bring you that international superstar, Madonna as she could look if she were a normal run of the mill Wal Mart shopper

Your challenge is to write a personals ad for the woman in this picture.  What would be Madonna's aspirations, hobbies and avocations if she were the woman in the picture?

For Muscato: Dowager Quarterly

This is from my blog Periodically Anachronistic, which I have to start adding too.  I kinda stopped when this who transfer thing started and haven't been inspired to return since, but I should.

Anyhow, Muscato and Donna Lethal turned me onto this magazine.  Love the ladies ads.

I want this

I wonder if he played this while he and little buddy were hammocking...

From Farm to Moorish Fanstasia

Nice place, eh?

This was once the home of Mervin Jeremiah Monnette and his first wife Adelaide.  Mervin was/is my great great great uncle.

Mervin, not his sibling - from which Cookie is descended from - made a fortune and lost a fortune, and then made another fortune.  Just when life was looking good, he got the gold twitch in the early 1900s.  So he sold his farm in Nebraska and went west to Nevada.  There he met a Mr. Hayes.  Mr. Hayes had been studying the Mohawk Mine near Goldfield, Nevada.  The Mohawk was played out, but Hayes was convinced that there was more there.  Hayes couldn't afford the lease on the mine, and Mervin Monnette could.  So the two formed a partnership - and a back breaking job was undertaken.

And the hunch came in - big time.  The Hayes-Monnette (or Monnette-Hayes, depending on who you asked) partnership hit the single largest vein of gold in Nevada history to that date.   The gold ore shipped from that initial strike in 1906 was the single largest gold ore shipment in the United States History.

And with his share of the proceeds, Mervin bought Adelaide this house on Los Angeles' Western Avenue.   When they purchased the house, it had been built by the seller who found it to large for his needs.  And at that time, Western Avenue was still residential.

The design of the house can't be classified.  While it has Spanish  influences, the tower is defiantly Moorish.  My mother used to tell me that her grandmother - who visited it once - said that it was designed in the "Alamo" style.  And if you strip the front of the colonial Spanish gable of its Victorian bay windows, you can kind of see the Alamo influence.  But even I think that was pushing it.

The Monnette's were joined in California by their only living son, Orra E. Monnette who left his law practice in Toledo to help his father do something with the money from their mining haul.

Orra invested the money in banks in Los Angeles, and did well.  He started buying banks, merging banks and creating banc holding companies.  In 1923 he created the Bank of America, Los Angeles, which was - in fact - the only Bank of America operating in all of California.  But we'll get to the Italian from San Francisco in a second.

Orra used his business skills to develop the first modern bank branching system in the U.S.  He did this by centralizing cash vaulting, accounting and personnel.  He also instituted the first modern fleet of armored cars    to ferry cash replenishment, paperwork and other important papers.

In 1929 Orra sold BoA L.A. to a man named Amadeo Giannini of the Bank of Italy in San Francisco, and the Bank of America was born.  Orra retained his Board seat in the new company, and stayed on the board until his death in 1936.

Orra also Chaired the Los Angeles public library Board until his death.  During his twenty year tenure on the board he built L.A.'s public library system into a true countywide system, using what he learned  in building the branch banking business: Centralized library with satellite branches.  He centralized the business office and accounting, enable branch to branch book sharing, built a new main library in downtown L.A. and developed the funding base to build branch libraries.

Mervin and Adelaide remained in the Western Avenue home until Adelaide's death in 1912, after which the house no longer had its mistress. Mervin would eventually remarry, divorce and then remarry, but for the remainder of his life he lived in large apartments where he needs were met by servants.

Western Avenue was beginning to change.  In six short years, traffic on the street increased, and the families that lived in the houses along it began selling their properties.  While it was desirable for Victorian Families of means to live on handsome streets where their houses could bespeak their wealth, by 1914 the car brought dirty, noise and pollution to these broad streets.  So, well to do families in many cities sold off their mansions and moved to suburbs. In Cleveland, the families of Euclid Avenue (a street that as late as 1890 had a higher residential real estate value than New York's Fifth Avenue)  moved to Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights.  In Los Angeles, the families moved from this area to Pasadena and Beverly Hills.

The house was razed before long and its land parceled off for sale.  The only legacy of the Monnette house is  "Monnett Place," which intersects on Western Avenue in Los Angeles' Koreatown, where the house once stood.

How hot is it? And how to get beer (or wine or soda) stupid cold in minutes

Stupid hot for April.

As I had said before, the weather goons at husband's place of employment said that by the second week of April, the weather would change very fast from cold and damp to HOT.  And it did.

It was 84 fucking degrees here today.  EIGHTY-FOUR!  And, it will be eighty-four here tomorrow, too.

So I am toughing to out, windows closed to keep out the heat and the fans going at it to at least circulating the air.

The second floor is 80 degrees, but the first floor is a tomb-like 65 degrees.  Unfortunately, there is no way to move the air between floors and my office is up here.

So here is Cookie's tip for getting beverages ice cold in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

You could buy them cold, but here in Baltimore where few things work as they should, most of the coolers aren't the greatest.

If its just you and someone else, you'll need a bucket, half full with cold water, a mess of ice cubes and some rock salt - you can use table salt, but the rock salt works better.

Put your drinks on the water and handful of the rock salt.  Put the ice in and throw some more rock salt on the ice.  Stir this mess up and let it sit for 15 -20 minutes.  Remove your drinks  They will be cold - much colder than if you poked them in the freezer (it can take up to 40-60 minutes for the freezer trick to work) for the same amount of time.

This works the same way as an ice cream machine works, and I often wondered why my grandmother added rock salt to the ice on a ice cream maker, and here's the reason why:

1) Fresh water freezes at 32 degrees, but SALT WATER freezes at 28 degrees.  So when you salt the water you lower its freezing temperature meaning it stays liquid longer and is thus able to envelop the container more fully.

BUT something else happens - the law of thermodynamics kicks in - heat lost is equal to heat gained.

What do I mean by that?  Well, Mitch McConnell aside, nature abhors a vacuum. Nature likes things working toward balance, and that's a good thing for us.

2) The salt, in addition to lowering the point at which the water freezes is also working at melting the ice, transferring that "cold" into the water.  But it's also converting the heat of the container contents in the canned or bottled vessel through the aluminum can or glass bottle, and its storing the storing excess cold in the bottled fluids.   As the heat is exchanged, the contents get colder and the water uses that heat to speed the melting of the ice.

Pretty nifty, eh?  Anyhow, this is how it works.

Just remember to wipe the can or bottle off when you remove it.

I went back to Ohio

Actually, I'm in Columbus, but no one sings about Columbus. So this will have to do.  Back home tomorrow.

29 to 70 in 5 Days

As all of you know, Winter 2013 refuses to go away.

I, for one, know that when a ground hog predicts early spring, it usually means the jinx is on, and time to bundle up.

Why else would a ground hog get up in the middle of the freaking winter?  To eat something thats why.  Something innate is telling him "you better get up and eat because this winter isn't going away and you need more body fat to get through it, you handsome devil."

Anyway, its been cold, rainy and generally uncooperative over much of North America.

Then, about two weeks ago, husband comes home and announces that the weathermen employed by his employer had come round with their latest extended weather forecast, because these things impact Husband's job, and these goons are saying that by mid-April the weather patterns are going to flip, and fast.

And these goons are usually correct.

So imagine my surprise when we got up at 6AM today and noted it was a brisk 29 degrees out here in northern Baltimore (City) County.   DAMN!  Yesterday the low was in the forties!

Imagine my even greater surprise when I checked out the Weather Channel and the forecast temperature for Monday is 70 flipping degrees!

Let the spring come forth, Cookie, the Husband, Rocky and Kevin are ready.

In the meantime, here's my other boyfriend, Carlos Ponce, to warm you up right now:

Fill in the blank

Just what is nurse saying to her patient to get such a reaction?

Dear Edie,

Edie Windsor at IBM, 1965

Dear Edie,

Thank you.  Thank you for standing up for yourself.  Thank you for standing up for all of us.  Thank you for being full of life and verve.  Thank you for that smile on your face as you walked towards the Supreme Court Building.  Thank you for talking to the reporters afterward.

Thank you for loving Thea.  Though I never had the pleasure of meeting you or her, I imagine that she was quite a person, quite a woman and quite a good person.

Most importantly, thank you for being who you are.  Others wouldn't have pursued this.  You did.  Thank you and much love,

Cookie

In all seriousness: The Agema Issue

Dave Agema: Michigan's Republican Ass Clown



Readers of this blog know that I seldom attack current issues - that I lovingly leave to Bob over at I Should Be Laughing.

HOWEVER, there are some things that really rankle me up, and one of them is the matter of Dave Agema, a member of Michigan's Republican National Committee.

It seems that Agema is drawing fire for a post on his Facebook Page that quotes from a "report" written by a "Dr. Frank Joseph" entitled "Everyone Should Know These Statistics on Homosexuals".

The article claims many myths things that we used to hear back in the 1980s.  That Homosexuals spread AIDS.  That Homosexuals commit over half the murders.  The article claims that skyrocketing medical costs are directly attributable to the care od AIDS patients.  The only thing the report doesn't blame on LGBT people is the proverbial "ring around the collar". 

I could go on, but all of this is old news.

For his part, Agema says he has no regrets, and isn't going anywhere.  And the State Central Party, while not reprimanding Agema said that it supports "traditional marriage" and that is that.

Still, at a time when the GOP knows it is bleeding voters in the age groups and ethnic groups that it knows that it must speak to, something like this stings.

But what isn't old news is 70 Michigan Republicans acted swiftly and surely and called for Agema to resign his post. 

Grand Traverse County Precinct Delegate Dennis Lennox was reported by Associated Press as saying:

"You can't expect to get undecided voters to vote for you if you spit in their face, and that's exactly what he's done," Lennox said. "He has spit in the face of millions of American who would otherwise be inclined to support the party."1

So the question I asked was where in the heck did Agema get this Reagan Era Bullshit.  First its old hate propaganda.  Secondly, besides verifiable facts that dispute these claims, and a growing public opinion that LGTB Americans support marriage equality, did Agema just come across this "person" and who is the person behind the report.

I have no idea where Agema got this report but I am willing to bet that he went to a search engine and typed in "Gay People" and "AIDS" and it spat this shit out. 

But the report itself has been around for about 20 years.

The report was proffered up by an organization "Tradition in Action" (TiA), a LosAngeles based Catholic group that seems to hate just about everybody.  In addition to "Homosexuals", (TiA) also hates Jews and Masons, too.   One of the biggest things in its craw, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is that TiA dredges up all manner of heresy and still holds grudges against Jews for leaving Spain in the 1490s instead of converting to Catholicism. 

Now that's someone who holds a grudge.

TiA was founded by a woman named Marian Horvat in 1995, and the SPLC also states that Harvat wanted to attract "counter-revolutionaries" to help save the Catholic Church from itself, so to speak, and return to its traditional teachings.

My second question then is, who is Dr. Frank Joseph, M.D., the author of this report.   And the simple answer is that I can find no "real" to validate as the author.  In other words, there is no real "Dr. Frank Joseph".  In fact, all major search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. always return the same phrasing ("These were put together by Dr. Frank Joseph, MD...") and only return a limited number of hits leading me to believe that no such person exists.  And call me jaded, but the favored "cloak" of identity by wingnuts always seems to be the use of first names as first and last names.  My feeling is that someone wanted to give credence to their hate and created "Dr. Frank Joseph, M.D." as a straw man to bolster their irrational hate.

So what does this say about Agema's use of the report? 

It confirms to me that Agema is an idiot, quite possibly racist and a fool to promote "facts" that can and have been easily be verified as lies, in both logic and fact.

I know, I could have made that determination based on his use of these outdated wives tale.  But for those of you that know me, I like to be sure of these things. 

But It also tells me that the Michigan RNC has on its steering committee a wingnut who is too stupid to know what he is talking about, too stupid to check his sources and too stupid to be in a position where any political party would want an Ass Clown in their ranks.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

Mildred and her shabby shoes

I snagged this from IlDuce.

MORE Command Record Album Covers

Kevin's erection issues got me off schedule, so here are the other FABULOUS Command Record album covers!

We actually have this and the husband used in our old house to get the stereo sounding correct.

Again, the art is fabulous, and these are really under valued as collectibles.  Go buy some, enjoy the music and revel in the great design of these albums!

We live in fear of our dog's penis

I may have hit a new low with the subject line, but in matters such as this, it is better to be blunt.

Seen above, is Kevin, our 8.5 pound dog.  We love Kevin because he is sweet, funny and a cuddler.  The only problem with Kevin is that he has the penis of a dog ten times his size.  And no, I am not making this up.

When we got Kevin, we did a Wisdom Panel - genetics -  on him because we wanted to know what he was, because the dog pound had no idea.  And given his under bite and some other things the vet found, we had a pretty good idea that he was probably a puppy mill pup and those things never go well.

Three hundred dollars later, we had our answer.  Kevin was 50% Jack Russell (mother) and 25% Shih Tzu on his fathers side. The other 25% was just about everything else.  Plot hound.  Basset hound. More Jack Russell. Blah, blah blah, blah until you got to the smallest amount, .82%, which turned out to be the biggest dog of all: Great Dane.

Yes, it is possible for a eight and half pound dog to have some Great Dane in him.

The problem is, its all in his penis.

Now, I am not going to go into details, suffice it to say that when our Columbus, Ohio vet first examined him the day after we got him, which was four days after he had been neutered (which the dog shelter does with all males before they adopt them out), testosterone was still in his iddy biddy body.  So Adam, our vet, his giving him the once over the conversation went something like this:

"He's in great shape...and he seems to know that we're here to help him.  He has no issues with us handling him..." And this is when the vet placed his hand under Kevin's rib cage and picked him up, " and his skin is good and fur has good texture, and his eyes are bright and ...WHOA!  KEVIN, YOU STUD!"

And there it was, the policeman's billy club.  I felt like I was going to puke. 

This is when you the vet really suggested the Wisdom Panel because "Yeah, I'd say there is a very big dog in his not so distant ancestral past."

Think Wally Cox endowed with Long Dong Silver. The Great Dane rears its ugly head.

Anyhow, the further we got from the neuter date, the fewer his erections and the less freaked out we were getting.  Still, the thought of that monster makes us both queasy and we never know when it will poke its head, and looooong self out at us.

So last night the husband and I were reading in the living when Kevin ran into the sun room, twisted himself in a knot and began licking away.  Why?  Because that's what dogs do, that why.  And if men could do that, we probably would, although not in front of an audience, unless it enough were thrown up onto the stage as gratitude for the show.

The husband got annoyed first and called out to Kevin to "Cut it out."  Then like a school girl who had just seen a pile of earthworms, he shrieked "GROSS!"  Now you have to understand, the husband is a MAN - tall, good looking and not one to mince his words or mince about.  So if he shrieks  there is probably good reason to see what he is shrieking about.

I looked up and there was Frankstein's monster in all of its glory.

Now it was my turn to shriek:  "KEVIN PUT THAT AWAY!"

And what does Kevin do? Kevin had to twist his head around the monster so he could look at us with a "What?" kinda look.

Well, it was up and that was the problem.  Telling Kevin to cover up his penis or make it go away wasn't helping because dogs don't understand language, let alone the concept of social norms and modesty. So Kevin did what any dog would do and went back to lapping at his dog dick.

However, we can't have that going on, so we both, again - acting like parents will - called out his name to distract him.  Except he took it as our command to jump off the love seat and come towards us.  As he trotted out way, that donkey dick of his went into the rug and tripped him up and he did a somersault on his way to the carpet.  And not wanting him to jump up on either of us with that huge ass thing out of its hiding place, we got up and walked to the kitchen.  He followed us.  Back to the living room, and he (and it) came our way.  This game of follow the leader went on for a good fifteen minutes before he was distracted enough and "it" "went away."

Now, I love me my Kevin, but this isn't something you can go to the vet and have remedied.  There is no pill for this.  Its just that we are terrified of seeing it, even though we know its just his dick.  It freaks us out to know that in the people world, he would be Dirk Diggler.

So there, know you know.  We live in fear of dog's penis.  We love the dog, hate seeing the red rocket.

That Kevin, he is a stud.  But the Great Dane, we'd rather not see.

Command Album Covers

The husband has been collecting Command Record's albums for a few years.  Founded by Enoch Light, Command Records featured recording excellence and demanding standards from some of the top jazz artists of the day. 

Command records also are notable for their modernistic album graphics and titles like Persuasive Percussion, Provocative Percussion, and my favorite: Bongos, Bongos, Bongos - you think I'm kidding about the bongos, right?

And if you are a purist, then you'll enjoy:

See, I told you so. 

If you feel like dancing

Something more familiar? 

And my favorite:

Light's label also worked with Doc Severinsen:

And the one and only (white) Ray Charles...

To get you in the "mood"?

Or, another type of mood

Seriously, it is seldom that art on the outside and the art on the inside are this perfect for one and other.  

These are gorgeous albums.  Pick them up and give them a play!  (tomorrow, I'll post more!)