Big Ugly Man Doll

On to the beach!  We made it down the shore in record time, stopping only for gas and hard liquor.  SOBUMD wanted to make sure there was some vodka for her cucumber vodka martini, and when I mentioned this to the lady ringing me up at the Jersey Liquor Store (everyone talks to the hat – in New Jersey, I’m the most interesting man in the world), she recommended that I get her the Cucumber Vodka on which they were running a special.  Knowing that we could put it to good use one way or another, I concurred on the cucumber and we motored on. 

We arrived at the Shore House at the precise moment I intended, which was Gin and Tonic o’clock – my scheduling skills are excelled only by my driving.  Following a settling in and unpacking period that lasted approximately 14 seconds, the Reigning Queen of Pink and the Human Tape Recorder were in the water, and Number One Son had retreated into a room with the iPad, not to be seen again until dinner.   We commenced relaxing immediately. 

We relaxed all day and into the evening, and picked right up relaxing the next morning where we’d left off, but with Scrapple on the grill, eaten on the deck with coffee and crumb cake.  It’s hard not to be relaxed in the face of an early morning ocean breeze, facing a lagoon, while munching on hot grilled meat product and crumb cake. 

The relaxation came to a screeching halt when we realized we were nearly out of beer.  A trip to Long Beach Island was planned, conceived, and executed in short order, leaving many of the tribe at home in the water.  Once on Long Beach Island, we found fudge, tee-shirts, bracelets, and beer.  Unfortunately, while putting the beer in the back of SOBUMD’s minivan, the handle that opens the hatch in the back snapped and broke in my hand. 

This would not be a big deal, but for the fact that you can’t open the hatch from the inside, and that the van’s power door not only isn’t ‘power’ any more but also does not open from the inside, and that the struts need work, and that the horn only functions on alternate Wednesdays while Mercury is in retrograde, and that it’s an 11 year old van with more than a few dings in it.  Without a simple way to get things into and out of the van, its utility is greatly diminished and its days numbered. 

We returned with our loot, sending the brilliantly diminutive RQoP into the back of the van to pass things over the seats to us.  Beer was consumed, new cars were researched, and relaxation recommenced.

Next up was a trip to Wildwoods, NJ, evidently an icon of beach life on the Jersey Shore that I’d never heard of, but since my experience with the Jersey Shore has been heretofore limited to last year’s situation and Snooki’s tan, that was hardly surprising.  We loaded kids, aunts, uncles, and towels into vehicles – some easier, some harder – and headed to the beach. 

Once in the water, we found dolphins swimming just offshore with us.  Number One Son, who does not usually like to get his head, hair, or face wet, decided that he liked the waves once he was past the point where they broke over his head.  He pulled me with him to this point – the fact that we were halfway to the continental shelf bothered him not at all.  The Human Tape Recorder and the RQoP also reaquainted themselves with their inner barracudas.  My response to a wave coming up that’s 5 feet over my head is to duck and cover.  Theirs is to dive into it headfirst. 

And We’re Dancing on the Top of the Wildwoods Sign

The beach rolled on for a few hours, after which we moved the party to the Wildwoods Boardwalk.   This is a magical place, by which I mean “very likely to remove your money from your wallet.”  We enjoyed the local cuisine, such as battered, deep fried Oreo cookies, along with a few life-restoring and badly needed pints of Guinness and the Snow White diner.  We were served by a few of the local Olgas – all the wait staff at the beach seem to be imports from Eastern Europe.  They make great roast beast hogies, command of the English language notwithstanding. 

I also noticed that after two days in New Jersey, my every other word to the kids is “fuhgeddaboudit.”  Perhaps I should keep my commentary concerning commands of the English language to my self. 

The other thing we noticed was the price of the rides – remember what magical means?  Some of the children wanted to ride a roller coaster, some others wanted to walk through a haunted ship.  Since the cost for these two activities came to more than $120, we had to explain that this roller coaster and SOBUMD’s next car had just became an either or proposition.

Katniss Drills ’em at the Dart-n-Die

In lieu of rides, the kids played some of the “everybody wins a prize” arcades; they seemed particularly drawn to the “Throw Darts and Pop Balloons” event.  Number One Son took a particular delight in the opportunity for wanton destruction, popping two out of three of his targets.  Since everyone wins a prize, the lady in the booth showed him his prize options for hitting two balloons – to which he replied, “No thanks; I’m only in it for the popping.”   The RQoP stepped up and declared that she’d add his two pops to whatever she got, and then of course pulled a Katniss and drilled three for three, walking off with a bear the size of her head.  

I Want a Job in the Department of Love

Once full of fried gooey goodness and tired from the waves and water, we started the long boardwalk back to the car.  On the way, we ran into one more example concerning one’s command of the English language.  Really?  The Department of Love?  Can you get a job there?

Driving back to the Shore House, we contemplated the Cheshire sunset as the sun slipped from the clouds and back to the Earth, through a hole in the pocket of the sky, accompanied by the strains of the new Green Day song on the radio.  It was a wonderful end to the day, and we looked forward to seeing if there was dessert waiting in the crab trap we’d baited before we left. 

There was, but he was too small and we had to throw him back.  Some days, everybody lives.

Next up, a drive through the marshes!  In the meantime, I’ll leave you with that new Green Day song everyone’s talking about.

Tags: Children // 1 Comment »

Pardon me – and join me! – while I a take a moment from recounting the tales of vacation to recall this evening.  We were gifted this evening by generous friends of the Human Tape Recorder with tickets to a new play being produced by the Acting for Young People (AFYP) group at George Mason’s Center for the Arts.  I accompanied the HTR to this play, Just So, to see our young friend Paul on what was not his first and what will certainly not be his last performance on stage.

The topic of the play, though, was a natural draw for me – it was written and directed by AFYP’s Lisa Nanni-Messegee as a re-imagining of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and parts of The Jungle Book, mashed up with the events of Kipling’s life as shown in the movie “My Boy Jack,” which is about the enlistment and subsequent death of his son John in WWI.  As a lifelong fan of Kipling’s work, as well as a solid fan of our friend Paul, I couldn’t wait to see it!

Having now seen it, I expect that this play could eventually find its way to a bigger stage with a wider audience.  It needs first to decide what it wants to be; the mashup takes tales written for children in the 1890s and finally published in 1902, and tries to find the intersection of these stories with the events of 1915, when his son died in the Battle of Loos, France, in WWI.  The Just So Stories treated in the play, both How the Whale Got His Throat and The Elephant’s Child, tend toward comedy, as do several of the parts of the Jungle Book.  (Baloo is hard to play as anything but a comedic foil.)  In the meantime, the guilt Kipling feels over his role in getting John into the Irish Guards is anything but comic, and the juxtiposition of the two doesn’t always work.  The audience may have been left in several scenes trying to decide which parts were supposed to be funny.  There were a few factual missteps:  for instance, at one point our young Kipling mentioned that he was the Poet Laureate.  In fact he was offered the post more than once, but refused it.   He *was* a Nobel Laureate, however – he remains to this date the youngest Literature Laureate, having been 42 years old when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Speaking of young and talented, the actors, ranging in age from 18 to 11, were brilliant for their parts.  They were well chosen for their roles and performed them like the professionals that they aren’t yet – and there’s no question that some of them will be.  Noah M_, who played the young doomed John Kipling, was particularly brilliant, as was our Paul, who played Mowgli on the cusp of manhood and made him seem every bit as real as any teenager caught between child and adult.  Jessi S_, the young lady playing Kaa, the snake, was also exceptional. 

It was a well choreographed, well thought out play, and I enjoyed it a lot.  It lasted nearly 2 and a half hours, and the time flew by – the story was paced so well that I wasn’t the only audience member surprised by the hour when we exited.  The music was used well and often, and the props were minimal enough that they never got in the way of the story.  There was a musical called “Just So” based on those stories in 1984; this isn’t that.  I’ve been reading Kipling since I was much younger than tonight’s actors, and I’ve never seen or heard of anyone revisiting these two very different points in Kipling’s life in quite this way.  I expect that with some minor variations, this unique perspective will be retold in increasingly larger venues, and it should be.   For those readers in the DC area, it’s playing again tomorrow at the George Mason University Center for the Arts at 2 pm.  If you’re half the Kipling fan I am, it’s more than worth the price of admission – and I thank Paul’s parents again for the opportunity to attend tonight! 

For further reading in case you need a refresher on why Kipling’s still considered one of the best short story writers ever, I offer you a choice:  The Man Who Would Be King, a novella from 1888, or The Brushwood Boy, a shorter story written in 1895 and included as the capstone story in The Day’s Work in 1898.  The Brushwood Boy is probably my favorite short story ever. 

Tags: Children // Add Comment »

Nothing says vacation like beer for breakfast.  If that’s followed by a beer with lunch, hey, we’re not going anywhere.  But that’s not today’s topic, though – today, we’re talking trucks! 

1968 International Scout

The first part of our trip was to Pennsylvania, where SOBUMD’s father was busy having a birthday.  SOBUMD’s brother, the Very Industrious Uncle, had gotten him a framed picture of a 1968 International Scout.  It was yellow and white, part of an old advertising campaign for International – cute picture.  We then found reasons for Opa to check on something downstairs while the rest of us stepped outside; he joined us in a few minutes to find an immaculately restored yellow and white 1968 International Scout in his driveway, with a big Happy Birthday balloon attached to one of the wipers. 

A Very Happy Opa

To say that Opa was speechless would be to court understatement.  The Very Industrious Uncle had spent the past 6 months restoring the Scout, finishing just in time for the birthday presentation.  I don’t know about you, but the last time anyone gave me a car for my birthday, I was maybe seven, and it was an International Hot Wheels.  I mentioned this to Opa as he took me for a spin in the Scout; he said “Yeah, me too!”  He may have slept in it that night; not sure.  For the record, we got him a tee-shirt, which we managed to forget to bring with us. 

The next day dawning bright and clear, we made our fond farewells to Oma, Opa, and the Scout, which the three lunatic children believe is their new cousin, and headed East to the Jersey Shore and the shore house of the Very Industrious Uncle.  The trip was only a few hours, not as long as the drive up, but we still had time to continue listening to our eclectic playlist and trading verbal banter and witty repartee.  The Human Tape Recorder noted the lyrics to a Sheryl Crow song, which included the phrase:  “maybe there’s something wrong with you.”  The HTR declared that she could tell the song wasn’t written by a teenybopper, since a pop-teen type would have written it as “maybe there’s something wrong with ME.”   SOBUMD and I mentally high-fived each other, considering this a sign that we’re raising confidant kids, or at least damned observant ones.  

Number One Son influenced our song selection as well, asking me what Reno was and why one would shoot a man in it.  (Having killed any number of six packs just to watch them die, I felt compelled to play him the Folsom Prison Blues, with the Man in Black himself, along with yours truly singing base.)  Number One Son also used the time in the car to expound on several of his many of his points of view.  For example, the topic of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder came up (as it so often will in our family).  Talking about OCD, Number One Son had this to say:  “It should really be called OCS.  I view it less as a disorder than a syndrome.”  If you know a more certain sign that you have OCD than arguing about what it should really be called, I’d love to hear it.  Meanwhile, the RQoP – who received a full sized upright vacuum cleaner for her birthday a while ago, so she could better clean her usually immaculate room – could not be reached for comment.

But we were headed to the beach, down the shore, where all these concerns would melt away.  We needed no further proof that we were well away from the Washington DC craziness than driving past a sign for a business called “Hell Yeah Watersports.”  Within a 100 mile radius of the DC area, that same company would have incorporated under the name “Safe-n-Legal Watersports.”  Luckily, we were north of Atlantic City, where you can still call ’em as you see ’em. 

From here, on to the beach!   I’ll leave you with Johnny again, with those Folsom Prison Blues.

Tags: Children // 3 Comments »

Happy Friday – another chance to catch up with your own personal astrological future. Your upcoming week will be poor, nasty, brutish, and short – but don’t let it get you down! Read on!

Aries (The Ram):    This week, you will find yourself asking the immortal question:  “What is he *doing* down there?”  Try not to be in a hurry to find out.  Trust me.  You’ll know soon enough.

Taurus (The Bull):   This will be a good week for heron watching.  Keep looking out your window.  No no, keep looking.  Go on, you’ll see one.  And elephants, too.  Just keep looking.  Your high-risk disease this week:   Potato Virus Y.

Gemini (The Twins):     This week will continue your travels, albeit in a more restricted sense of the word.  You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack, selling seashells out of the back of an unmarked white van.  Hey, a few clams here and there, it adds up.   

Cancer (The Crab):  As you face the lagoon on Tuesday, you’ll realize that everything you thought you knew about marine biology was waaaaaaaaay wrong.  Try as you might to erase that view from your mind, you will go mad with the memory of those two fish with that osprey.  Your high-risk disease this week:   Sandfly Fever Virus.

Leo (The Lion):   That unseasonable heat wave will break this week, finally, after shattering the previous record along with your plans for a garden.  Don’t worry about it – your dreams will grow back.  Your tomatoes, on the other hand, will need to be replanted. 

Virgo (The Virgin):   Consider buying a house down by the sea this week.  On Monday, price them out.  On Tuesday, drive 9 hours to the shore and visit one of the houses you’re interested in; realize the smell of salt water makes you ill.  Wednesday, buy a pack of gum instead.  Your high-risk disease this week:   Leprosy.

Libra (The Scale):  This week you will experience true desire for the first time in many years.  Unfortunately, it will be a true desire to paint the outside of the house.  Try very hard to resist this impulse; it ends badly.  

Scorpio (The Scorpion):   This will be a good week for finishing projects and getting ready for your new life.  Oh, wait, that’s next week.  Never mind – this will be another good week for doing very little and just banging around.  Despite your best efforts, you’ll be very, very busy.  Your high-risk disease this week:   Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

Sagittarius (The Archer):   What can I tell you, other than I don’t think it can get any worse than it already is.  Take one day at a time, and quit reading horoscopes – they’ll all bullshit. 

Capricorn (The Sea-Goat):   This is a good week for sunrises – unfortunately, you’re going to be awake to see most of them.  Good luck getting any rest with that new pet – you never knew a goldfish could make that much noise in the morning, did you?  Your high-risk disease this week:   Maedi-Visna.

Aquarius (The Water Bearer):  Have you ever noticed how many of the star signs are tied to the ocean?  Yeah, me either.  You should stay away from large bodies of water this week; it’s a good week for drowning.  You shouldn’t even put water in your Scotch this week.  In fact, just stay indoors and don’t bathe.      

Pisces (The Fish):  Extendyour vacation this week, who knows?  You might actually relax.  Also, put the phone down for a change.  Your high-risk disease this week:   Guava Wilt.

Tags: Children // 1 Comment »

So there we were, moving up the highway looking for adventure, surprise, birthday cake, and the thrill of the open road.  We’re celebrating many things this month, including SOBUMD’s dad’s birthday, our 20th wedding anniversary, and my leave balance – this is the longest I’ve ever taken off work – and we’re celebrating by getting out of the usual rut for a while.  For a change, I’m taking enough time off that I’m going to try to post a few notes from the road, rather than writing them all up at the end.  Plus, pictures to come!

We were making good time heading up I-95 on a beautiful Saturday morning, just the six of us in the minivan – myself, SOBUMD, the three lunatic children, and Mister Frank Sinatra.  Singing along with Come Fly With Me at the top of my lungs in that minivan, I realized that if I were any more whitebread, someone would have to pull me over and slice me. 

Thank goodness the whitewash didn’t last – we love Frank, but once that CD was over we started to rock that van, we gon’ drive all day, we gon’ light it up, with the Ella way.   With Taio Cruz dynamiting our speakers at top volume, it was a religious experience – it was almost like being in church.  This feeling was exacerbated by driving past the shrine to “Our Lady of the Highways,” which travelers zooming up the side of Interstate 95 in northern Maryland toward the Delaware border will see out of the corner of their eye as they pass it doing 85 mph.  The shrine, a 12-foot statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary facing northbound traffic, was created by the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales after a 17-car pileup in the 1960s that killed several people. 

Is it me, or does the term Oblate sound suspiciously like something out of a religious order invented by Dr. Seuss?  St. Bartholomew and the Oblates?  I think I read that one to the three lunatic children recently.

Like anything enjoyed at 85 miles an hour, though, even the awe and reverence inspired by the sight of a 12 foot BVM holding a bible like a radar gun didn’t last.  Our musical review moved into the second-most recent Green Day song, which reminded us of the new Foo Fighters song, which moved us to play the very newest Green Day song, which I mentioned sounded quite a lot like the Dead Kennedys.  The next thing I knew, we were rocking our punk-ass selves up the highway on our way to a Holiday in Cambodia.   I’m so proud – our little lunatics listen to punk!

I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Jello Biafra and the boys while I play connect the dots with the next installment.

Tags: Children // 2 Comments »