Me, me, me, me, me, me

Oh, the things you do when you want your cool online friends to like you. I guess if I want to see Anna’s Linus pillow at BlogHer, I have no choice. Here are Six Random Things About Me:

1. When I was 12 a friend and I were caught shoplifting makeup at a Sears store in a strip mall. It was September, the first full week of seventh grade. We were in a new school we had been anxious about all summer. Junior high, where we were the youngest among teenagers (who seemed so old and so tough) in a big, new building. We had been told the previous school year how difficult things would be, and we were also worried about fitting in and dressing the part. Leaving the safety of elementary school made us feel both vulnerable and heady. The previous day we had gone to Sears and a drug store (I think it might have been a CVS) and pocketed tons of stuff. I don’t remember the specifics of whose idea it was, but we went with the express purpose of stealing lots of makeup. We were so emboldened by our first day’s success that we took really big purses to contain our haul the second afternoon. My mother even asked why I left the house carrying an old purse I hadn’t used in months. The small wooden-handled Pappagallo Bermuda bag with the removable covers was in then, so the fact that I was suddenly carrying a big floppy shoulder bag should have been a clue that I was up to no good. We went to the CVS first that second afternoon and then trotted off merrily to Sears. We thought we were so slick. We were even laughing as we went about our work. The security guy was standing by the doors, and it was like a scene from a movie: I saw him in my peripheral vision and just knew. But my friend had her hand on the door and had already pushed it open when he said, “Excuse me, girls …” We had to follow him back to an office where he called my parents. My friend’s parents were in Canada at their beach house, and she had been spending a few nights with us. My mother answered the phone, and when the security guy said we had been caught shoplifting she couldn’t speak. The man looked up at me and said, “She’s putting your father on the phone.” I had been stoic up to that point, but that’s when I burst into tears. My friend was already babbling things like, “We’ll never do it again. I don’t even like makeup. You can take back all the makeup we stole AND we’ll pay you for it. You know, I think I want to be a security guard when I graduate from school.” It was the worst thing I had ever done up until then, and even for some years to come. I think it changed the way my parents saw me, a little, which is your worst fear as a child.  

2. My parents’ families are oddly symmetrical. They are both one of four children with a gender breakdown of three boys and one girl (with the girl the third in birth order). In both families the oldest sibling is significantly older than the youngest. In my mother’s family, the age spread is 18 years between her oldest brother and younger brother, and my father is 14 years older than his youngest sibling. In both families, the youngest children – my uncles – are closer to me in age than to their oldest siblings, so they seemed more like cousins as we grew up. Both of my grandmothers were in their 40s when the surprise babies were born, and my uncles both had difficult relationships with their fathers. I think my grandfathers, in different ways, had trouble hiding their resentment of becoming fathers again so late. These uncles took radically different paths than the rest of their families. They are the most visibly “flawed” of the siblings, but they’ve also led the most interesting lives, full of experiences the other siblings only dream of.

3. People thought I looked like Madonna in her “Like a Virgin” days. Certainly not now in her Queen of the Thigh Sinews phase with arm pits that could – what was that? – crack walnuts. Remember when Madonna didn’t mind being pretty, when her goal wasn’t to look freakish and scary? That was the Madonna I bore a resemblance to, with our Cindy Crawford moles and tousled hair. I achieved that sexy hair with a series of loose perms and even tied my hair up in hot pink bandanas. My mother thought I looked like a cartoon character with a toothache. I sometimes wish it were permissible to have big hair again. The flat-iron look doesn’t work well on me (thankfully that one’s over), and while perms get a bad rap, they are ridiculously easy. Wash and go, no blowdrying.

4. My love for the Dave Matthews Band was like being hit by a thunderbolt. I was a working full-time professional, so I thought I was too mature to become so head over heels over music anymore. I was a complete fan yet I could be objective about the band’s musicianship and songwriting. Dave’s awesome but not the greatest guitarist ever, sometimes I sing along to the lyrics and want to ask them what they were thinking, and occasionally their in-concert noodling amounts to jam-band overload. But the Dave Matthews Band has some magic that makes them so much more than the sum of their parts. Their energy is like a current that runs through me. I have seen Dave 34 times, and that moment at 8:15 p.m. when he would walk humbly out on stage with a smirk on his face are among the 34 coolest moments of my life. I haven’t been to a show since 2005, though, and I don’t really miss it. It’s not that I think it’s unseemly to be chasing around a band now that I’m a mom. It’s just a time in my life that has passed.

5. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh grew up outside Buffalo, where I was a newspaper editor. McVeigh being a native son, of course the paper was all over the story. Crack reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck were put on the McVeigh beat and also wrote the definitive book on the topic, a book Walmart refused to carry because, I don’t know, it would hurt the feelings of Americans to be reminded that the bombing of the Murrah building wasn’t the act of dark-skinned Muslims but of an American trained to hate by the U.S. government. Anyway, because this guy was from my area code and I edited stories about him and we were so wildly proud of our colleagues Lou and Dan, I was fascinated by McVeigh. I was saddened by his execution – not because he didn’t deserve to die but because it was a cowardly way for our nation to deal with the tragedy. I remember spending the day at work unable to concentrate, thinking of the 168 victims of this awful crime, how this event had lent itself to more conspiracy theories than the JFK assassination and how McVeigh had gone to his death like a soldier. But, mostly, I was the news about his last meal that plagued my consciousness. I stopped on the way home, bought a half-gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream and ate two bowls for dinner.

6. I love white shirts. I’ve been wearing them since the ’80s. At my height I had almost 30 of them. I’ve owned shirts with puffy pirate sleeves, the skin-tight stretch kind, with long pointy collars and French cuffs. I have whittled my collection down to six. They are only slightly fitted, one with 3/4 sleeves – very basic. If I ever become famous, my white shirts will be talked about the way Vera Wang’s leggings or Diane Keaton’s gloves are revered.
 

The rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you. That would be Anna.
2. Post the rules on your blog. That’s this, right here.
3. Write six random things about yourself. I’m having that weird feeling that I overshared. Meme remorse, I guess.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. Sorry. Really.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog. Not looking forward to this part.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up. Off to do that next.

Here’s who I’m tagging:

1. Ben at Funjamin.
2. Ginny Marie at Lemon Drop Pie.
3. FADKOG at For a Different Kind of Girl.
4. Liz A. at Liz First Time. 
5. Karen at the new Naked Ovary.
6. Jen at Conversion Diary. Sure, she’s got nothing else to do.

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Tagged as: cosmetics, dating, DMB, family, ice cream, Madonna, music, parenting