The 80s And Utter Lack Of Political Correctness

I wasn’t exactly Paris Hilton, thank God! No diamond tiaras adorned my head or hung from the edge of the my dream canopy bed. I didn’t have a horse or one of those fabulous battery powered Barbie cars that kids can ride in, although I did long for all of those things. 

What I did have was an imagination and an amazing mother who let me express it. 

“Mom, can I cut up the Halloween costume you spent hours making so that I can reenact Michael Jackson’s Thriller video?”

My mother's knowing smile. “Sure honey.” 

“Can I rearrange the entire house and put the living room furniture in the dining room?”

My mother’s puzzled look. “Umm, why?”

“I want to pretend to do Barbara-Walters-like videos with my Cabbage Patch dolls and the windows in there have the best light.”

The knowing look again. “Sure, but you have to put everything back.”

There were limitations of course. She was livid the one time that I pushed all the furniture against the computer room door locking her in there with no means of escape. 

My childhood, was always dramatic to say the least. Wether I was pretending to be Olivia Newton-John and making the neighborhood sit through the entire lip-synched concert of Olivia’s Greatest Hits Volume One or choreographing an epic dance number for all the kids to perform during our annual super-bowl party my dreams of putting on an awesome show never ceased.

Naturally, our house was the house to hang at. No one else’s parents would allow complete monopolization of the family home or a double birthday party with my little sister where we all dressed up like characters from the movie Clue and played a murder mystery game, complete with butler and candy cigarettes. Oh, the eighties were fun with their utter lack of political correctness.

There was always (except for the locking her in the computer room incident) fairly good parental supervision. A lot of the time these things would take place while my mom was visiting with her best girlfriends. We were just trusted. We weren’t going to give away the family dog or burn down the house, and we cleaned up the mess ourselves. It didn’t hurt that we lived on a really good sized piece of property with large trees for pretending we were on Endor and lots of room for creative playing.

The eighties weren’t the days of Leave It To Beaver where you rose at dawn, left the house and your parents didn’t worry unless you weren’t home by six sharp for dinner. Nor were they like how it is today, where kids have to stay in there own yards and carry their cellphone at all times so a pedophile doesn’t grab them. No, there were plenty of pedophiles around in my day, I just thought they were these super friendly people who really thought kids were cool that your parents told you to stay away from. 

It’s a scary thought to me now, but back then I didn’t have a care. I knew that I needed to always be within shouting distance of the house, which meant I lived in a rather noisy neighborhood, but I was lucky enough to live on a country block with lots of kids and therefore lots of parents looking out for me.

I rode bikes up and down these really steep hills all day with all the neighborhood kids and we took turns roaming each other's yards and houses. One time I convinced everyone to weed our garden by paying them all a penny for their hard work and in the end no one hated me. It was amazing, and our garden looked like a giant pile of dirt. I guess we did too good of a job.

I never did grow up to become Barbara Walters, but the blessing is that when I was little I thought that I could be, the future was limitless and I was fortunate enough to believe that nothing was impossible as long as I used my imagination and moved some furniture around.

I Never Said Goodbye

When I was ten my mother picked me up from school in her little blue Mitsubishi Mirage and told me that she had cancer of the liver. She was wearing a very ugly tee-shirt with turquoise cats on it and as she said those life changing words to me I was fixated on those crazy blue cats.

Liver cancer is a very slow growing cancer as far as cancers go, but she’d had it since I was born. She’d been told that she shouldn’t have anymore children, but she had my sister, who is two years younger than I am, anyway. 

My sister and I fought in our early days like any other sibling team.

“She’s stealing my friend,” either of us could be heard saying whenever we had play-dates, which was usually every weekend.

The cancer news really brought us together though. I could look at my sister and know that as much as I might be pissed that she was wearing my tank top, deep down she got me. We were on the same journey.

No one else I knew had a mother who spent hours a day giving herself holistic treatments like coffee enemas or reading books on reflexology and naturalistic cancer treatments. Macrobiotics became our life. We no longer ate yummy homemade chili and meatloaf. Now we lived on leak soup and barely cooked fruits and vegetables. I began to look forward to the weekends when we would head into the city to go to Kaiser Hospital. The city visits meant McDonalds and Grandma’s good cooking. 

My dad was an eighties commuter. He worked all week in the city at the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner Building. He was their chief engineer and he worked hard to make his money, but it left very little time to really know each other as a family.

So in part my parents lived very separate lives. My mom stayed home with us kids in our lovely mountain home shooting herself full of interferon to shrink those bad cancer cells and my dad, bless his heart, lived in a tiny camper shell that was meant to fit on the back of a truck that he rented from my grandmother, not ideal to say the least. It couldn’t have been very much fun for either of them, but they did this, for the most part, so that my sister and I could have an amazing education.

My dad created a tiny utopia to come home to on the weekends. He made himself an archery range because he is an avid bowman. He busied himself growing tomato plants over bricks and inventing crazy contraptions. He has a brilliant mind that doesn’t really ever turn off. He builds cars from scratch, and windmills, and has a music library that could be worthy of a museum. In many ways he is amazing, but he was often missing from our daily lives.

I imagine that my mother must have been pretty scared. She was a thirty-four year old woman living alone with two young girls and she was literally dying. I used to get so angry watching her gasping for air as she walked up the stairs into our house. I thought she was faking it, just seconds before she’d been belting out Sweet Baby James in the car and now she didn’t have enough energy to walk up the steps. I didn’t understand the congestive heart failure that came with her cancer was what was really killing her. Slowly creeping up, sucking her life and air out one beat at a time.

My mom had always been a big German woman, strong and competent with a sweet gentle save the world mentality. The cancer was making her tiny. Tiny and yellow and lost. 
When the holistic approach failed to work she threw herself more and more into prayer. Our lives then became about bible studies, and speaking in tongues, and following cars because she felt that God was sending her a sign. Some of it was fun. Some of it was crazy. And some of it was terrifying. Thank God I had my sister with me through all of it, the good and the bad. The weak body and the slipping mind and the grasping at anything you can find to hold onto because the thought of leaving your two babies alone in the world is just too much to bear.

Most of the time I tried to pretend that everything was normal, but there were many times that my panic attacks would send me outside of school to the pay phone to call home just so I could make sure that she was still alive. I didn’t really talk about her dying out loud to anyone, but I always knew that she would and that it wouldn’t be too much longer. I would try to imagine things like prom or my wedding and my brain would never let me imagine her into the scenario. There was always a black void where my mother should have been.

It soon came to a point when my parents realized that two pre-teen girls couldn’t take care of a dying mother and a dying mother couldn’t care for two pre-teen girls so we all moved to a rented house in the city. It was a hard adjustment. I was too used to running the show by this time and my dad was too used to being alone. We butted heads about everything. I was mouthy and creative and opinionated and he didn’t understand anything about me.

My mom cried a lot.

My sister hid from the world in her stories and her music.

I on the other hand, yelled and screamed and fought. I wanted to be heard in all this craziness. I wanted to fix everything. Heal my mother of her cancer, reteach my almost fifty year old father too be present, and mother my thirteen year old sister. The thing I hadn’t quite realized was that I was only fifteen and I hadn’t figured any of those things out for myself yet.

The very last day I saw my mom, she was hardly there, her body was present, but her mind had already left. She lay yellowed and limp in the hospice wing of the hospital and I was preoccupied with planning a shopping trip. I never got a chance to tell her goodbye.

The call came at five o’clock the next morning and sadly my sister answered. My dad had already left for work that morning.

When my sister woke me up to tell me I felt like I already knew. “Mommy is dead,” she said as she crawled into bed with me. “The hospital just called.”

The rest of the day was a daze filled with lots of relatives and Grandma’s house. A day that was crazy with a hectic love and even joy.

It was good to know that she wasn’t in pain anymore, it was good to understand that one small life could effect so many people. My mother was loved, and she is still remembered as the woman who sang crazy songs, and took care of the world in her own special way.

She taught me the true strength of a woman and that every obstacle in life could be met with some anger and fear, but pushed through with a lot of laughter and even more love.

I find that I’m glad that I never got to say goodbye to her, there is no goodbye because she will always be with me.

Katrina Parker, In And Out Of The Dark

I first saw Katrina Parker with the rest of America when she hit “The Voice” stage during the blind auditions in 2012. Her dress was classic and gorgeous, but her voice knocked me out. Those sexy, sultry, and electric vocals brought Joan Osborne’s One Of Us to life. http://youtu.be/gKTXkztmAsY The intelligent and pretty-easy-on-the-eyes Mr. Adam Levine turned his chair and the rest is history. Katrina has been making beautiful music via my iTunes ever since.

Her nothing less than stellar rendition of Jar Of Hearts has made every playlist I’ve ever made since it’s purchase. http://youtu.be/P72haOkymLU

I was extremely excited when Katrina announced the release of her new single In And Out Of The Dark and I ran to iTunes to buy it. http://youtu.be/-iYYUBRYgus I haven't been able to stop listening to it ever since. Again, she knocks the vocal out into the hemisphere. 

Then Ms. Parker wowed me once again, but this time not with her voice, but with her heart and cool-ass moxy when she posted this moving statement on her Tumblr account.

"Anyone uncomfortable with the idea of seeing a plus size woman onstage, in a magazine or on their TV needs to get with the program and look inward to figure out WHY they’re uncomfortable with that (because I can guarantee it’s not about the object of their discomfort). There is an undeniable shift happening right now (it’s slow but steady). Women can be plus sized and wear beautiful things…they can be plus sized and entertain…they can be plus sized and be as glamorous as anyone else…so people need to make peace with that fact and get on the train before it leaves the station."

Katrina's full album In And Out Of The Dark is set to be released on September 10th of this year and it is available for preorder on iTunes. I can't wait, my playlist is so happy to be getting a lot more Katrina Parker!

The Apple Of My i

Last Tuesday something magical happened to me, I fell in love. I’ve been in love before, but this was something different, something unique, something truly special. Around six on Tuesday evening I received a mysterious call. The caller ID read “unknown”. This is always frightening, but I still picked up.

“Hello, this is Sarah.”

Silence, muffled background noise and then...

“Hey Sarita, how ya doin’?”

It was my sister. I guess there’s nothing so mysterious about that, but what she said, those awesome words, made me ever so happy.

“I have your new phone.”

This was joyous news! My old phone, the phone that had jostled around with me for the last two years, was all but dead. It still turned on, I could make or take a call, but the battery life only lasted an hour or so and it liked to freeze at just the most terrible moments. Like when I’m just about to play a sixty-eight point word on my Words-With-Friends game. GEEZ, didn’t my phone realize it was reeking havoc with my life?

The little box she handed me contained some packing material and more importantly my brand new fancy little iphone 5. I named her izzy, and as she stared up at me with that fresh phone glow, I just knew that we would be fast friends.

izzy is awesome, but for some darn reason she thinks her name is Siri. Oh well, maybe someday she’ll agree on izzy. She almost instantly downloaded my entire itunes library and she took it upon herself to know practically everything about me. She knows my name and if I ask her who she belongs too she says, “I believe this iphone belongs to Sarah!” and then a little screen pops up with my picture, name, address, birthdate, and facebook handle. She’s a genius!

Of course, the clan of us have been a little naughty. We’ve asked her things like, “What do you look like naked?” She answered us with a robust ding, “You humans are so preoccupied with external appearance.” We’ve told her that we hate her and she said, “Well...I’m still here for you.” These things make me sad, I truly don’t want to hurt her little ifeelings, When I finally expressed how sorry I was she told me, “You are the wind beneath my wings.” She always answers with either an apologetic voice, a joke, or just the right answer. I love her, she’s so kind and helpful.

If ever there was a phone for me, izzy is it. She’s everything I ever wanted and then some. Thank you Apple.

To Pee Or Not To Pee

That is the question I often ponder when faced with a urinary dilemma. In the best situation I will often search out the nearest sparkling clean, zesty fresh Starbucks, however I am not always in the best situation.

While meandering this thing I like to call life, I have somehow developed a stellar memory. Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the important things like where on earth I put my car keys or exactly how to get to my best-friends house, however I seem to have no problem recalling what I was wearing last Tuesday, what you were wearing last Tuesday, or just what theater I saw Superman in when I was four.

The other thing I seem to have an uncanny memory for are public restrooms. You name the place and I can instantly tell you wether I’ve used that bathroom and just what it looks like. It’s an amazing talent that I know all of you are envious of. Who knows, maybe some of you have this sensational ability yourself.

While doing research for this blog I asked my assistant (aka my sister) if there was some glamorous way of going to the bathroom. Her response was incredibly close-minded. She said, and I quote, “There is know such way!” The audacity and know it all air she put forth was tiresome to me. I knew I just had to prove that little bitch wrong.

There are seedy, filthy, bathrooms in this world. I have personally seen many of them. There are also luxurious pristine toilet palaces with golden thrones that never run out of toilet paper and have an endless supply of soap. 

For $128 you can sit upon Donald Trumps golden toilet, is anything more glamorous than that? To hear about something so ridiculous, instantly makes me imagine The Donald sitting upon that golden seat. Too bad I couldn't find that picture.

I was lucky enough, in my quest to create a knowlegible blog on excellent places to pee, weird pictures of celebrities sitting on toilets. I enjoyed them so I thought I’d pass them along to you. There is Ozzy sitting upon the porcelain dias showing us how well read he is and Jude and Ewan confusing us in an artsy way. Is there anything more sexy than two men in a tub? Rub a dub dub boys.

Suffice it to say, sometimes you have no choice were to “go”, but wouldn’t we all prefer something sanitary, with soap, papertowels, and a place to hang your purse. Seat protectors are always a bonus too! Pee on my friends, pee on. :)

Songs Of A Silly Girl

I read a blog the other day written by my longtime friend’s daughter. It was her second blog post and it contained the lyrics to a song she wrote. Her song was about women being strong and standing up for themselves. It made me reflect back onto my own long ago song lyrics. 

This first little ditty was written on the floor of my bedroom around the age of nine. My besty Jeanette and I wrote it. We, as I’ve stated many a time, had no real idea of sex, but we thought this was the ultimate lovesong.

I think I thought I was Madonna here with Jeanette back in 1986

Two Country Girls 

Just two country girls 

In love with you 

You made it all seem right 

When we’re with you 

It’s worth all the time 

To care and love 

You’re so special to us 

We just want to hold your heart 

And love you until the end of time 

(hum) 

The first time we kissed 

You set a fire in our hearts 

And now we’re not sure 

It’s still going 

If it is 

We’d like to put it out forever 

(chorus) 

We just want to hold 

Your heart in our arms 

Love you til’ the end of time 

(hum) 

If you really love 

Prove it 

By a sacrifice 

Need I say more? We probably wrote this for our love George Michael, but who knows? Sacrifice? Really? 

When I wrote this next little number I was very into Stacey Q. Again it has a crazy reference to a less than stellar relationship, and I have a semi-embarrassing yet vague memory of singing this song to virtually the entire school during one silly recess. 

 Madonna again? Halloween 1987

Tell Me 

Last night I had a dream 

I dreamt that we were lovers 

Last night I had a dream 

I dreamt that we were forever 

Oh tell me 

Do you still love me? 

Oh, tell me 

How much you care 

Baby, tell me 

We’ll run away together 

Tell me that you’ll always be there 

My last lover was cruel 

He treated me like a fool 

Well I’ll always love you 

Tell me that you still do 

Oh, tell me 

Do you still love me? 

Oh, tell me 

How much you care 

Baby, tell me 

We’ll run away together 

Tell me 

That you’ll always be there 

I actually sort of adore this next one, I believe it is my homage to Tori Amos, it’s quirky, yet oh so spiritual. 

Me at 17 ala 1993

Can You See God? 

Come join the band now 

They’ve all left the room 

Her in his grey sweatshirt 

Him in her underroos 

Why’d she go on underneath that blanket? 

If only to hide her wandering hands 

until she bleeds 

Like so much nothing 

I can’t seem to understand it 

But why not? 

Can you see God there? 

I can’t see you from here 

But when I close my eyes (oh) 

I can still feel you 

The wanting is endless 

I used to call him Jesus 

I try to look out 

When it’s over 

But I can’t understand 

Can you see God from there? 

I can’t see you from here 

But when I close my eyes (oh) 

I can still feel you 

At this point you can probably understand why I didn’t pursue song writing as a career, but darn if it isn’t so fun to look back at yourself and see almost exactly who you used to be. I guess I wasn’t going to join Lilith as a female powerhouse ballad singer, but I can rock the living room xbox karaoke. There is a part of me that looks forward to the day when I can look back at the me I am now and laugh and think what a silly girl I was.

This is how I rock it in the livingroom

Ethan Hawke, More Than You Think You Know

I’ve always wanted to read an Ethan Hawke book. I guess it was the bit of teenager still left in me. I first saw Ethan on the big screen in Dead Poets Society and I found him captivating. In adolescent-jive that means I found him drool worthy. I did however tend to get him mixed up with Chris O’Donnell on a regular basis. 

I know very little about the mysterious actor. Ethan Hawke, I do recall, used to be married to Uma Thurman, he was fantastic in Before Sunrise, and then he did some weird movies and I lost track of him, but there was still something in me that occasionally thought “I want to read an Ethan Hawke book.” 

His first book, I spied on the shelf of a Barnes and Noble back in the 90’s and I was intrigued, but too poor at the time to shop for anything outside of the bargain isle. Still, the book has haunted me. I could see it’s cover of dripping green in my mind from time to time, and I wondered what was written inside.

Almost twenty years later, I was driving back after an awfully long road-trip when the book once again popped into my brain. It was a sweltering August day. I was traveling endlessly down the winding roads of Oregon when I started thinking, once again, about Ethan’s book The Hottest State. The overwhelming feeling to look it up had me pulling off onto the shoulder of the road right there, whipping out my Kindle and googling (in the Kindle way) for Mr. Hawke’s novel. Dammit, The Hottest State wasn’t available for Kindle, but it seemed that Ethan had another book out and it was available. The book was called Ash Wednesday.

Sometimes you find yourself pulled by that wonderful unknown force, the entity compelling you, and in that moment you know that you are walking down the path that you are one-hundred percent meant to be on. This was the overwhelming sensation I felt tugging at me when I clicked my little Kindle buy button. I was so lost in that single moment that I didn’t even take the time to read the synopsis. I was about to enter the world of Ethan Hawke utterly blind. I don’t think that I was entirely sure what I was about to get myself into. 

Halfway through page one I realized that the writing was spot on, the voice distinct, the character disturbing and that was all I needed. I was now on this crazy journey with Jimmy and Christy, and their cat Grace. I forgot about Ethan, I forgot about teenage drooling, and I was submerged in the fantastic, sometimes less than pretty, life of these two main characters. I felt like a voyeur sitting in the backseat of Jimmy’s Chevy Nova and the greatest part was Jimmy and Christy had no idea I was there with them. That is a true testament to how real the writing is.

Go get this book, you won’t regret it, and when your done devouring it go get yourself a copy of The Hottest State. I’ve already got my copy coming from Amazon, can’t wait!!!! 

BTW, what's your favorite Ethan Hawke movie? Leave it in the comments below or on Facebook. :)