Marissa Flaxbart

Buttercream as Metaphor

Last week, one of my two roommates had a birthday. In any other year, Kat would have arranged for a picnic outing in Malibu or a chicken parm dinner at Little Dom’s, maybe. But this is 2020, and we live in Los Angeles. The guest list and the venue were predetermined by the rules of quarantine.

Something extravagant seemed necessary to make a Safer-at-Home birthday feel like a celebration, so I volunteered to make a cake. A BIG cake. I pulled out a cookbook called Sky High, which — no kidding — exclusively features recipes for triple-layer cakes. My baking bible has long been Shirley Corriher’s Bake Wise, my cookbook shelf is crowded with workhorse volumes: Julia Child, Joy of Cooking, The Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook. But in my 20s, when I went through my primary cake phase, Sky High was my go-to for fun party cakes. I only stopped making them because it never seemed like anyone else was as excited to eat a slice of cake as I was to offer it. The cakes were beautiful but huge, and they rarely got finished off. Is there anything sadder than putting cake in the trash?

I asked Kat to flip through Sky High and choose any cake in the book. She went with a “Mile High Devil’s Food Cake,” which the authors paired with a lovely “brown sugar buttercream” frosting. Classic, straightforward. Or so I thought.

I made the three cakes with relish. It was distracting, even meditative. All my old, learned tricks came back to me — dropping the filled pans onto the counter from a few inches to knock out air bubbles; folding 3 pieces of parchment in half to create identical pan liners; rotating the pans just once during baking so that the cakes were even but the oven stayed hot. The cakes came out springy and fragrant, filling our third-floor walkup with the aroma of chocolate and vanilla.

Then it was time to make the frosting. Buttercream. What could be simpler? All I had to do was follow the recipe.

On closer inspection, this recipe was something unfamiliar, totally unlike any frosting, buttercream or otherwise, I’d made before. It called for (1) beaten egg whites; (2) a brown sugar/water solution cooked to soft-ball stage, then added to the egg whites; (3) a full pound of room temperature butter. That was it. Four ingredients, four steps.

Any baker (successful or failed, in fact) can tell you that specificity and exactitude are more important in baked goods than in any other type of cooking. The only saves for a vague (or bad) baking recipe are wisdom or luck; ideally you bring both into the kitchen. I was operating with only a little of the former and (as always) an unknown amount of the latter. As I got going, I became aware of a great many ways my buttercream could fail. Was this one of those egg white recipes where the bowl must be scrupulously clean? The recipe didn’t say. Must my whites be fluffy before I add the sugar solution? The recipe mentioned nothing about this. Is this butter really supposed to be room temperature? Or had that been a mistake in the ingredient list?

This recipe had the audacity to specify that the brown sugar solution needed to hit precisely 238°F on my candy thermometer, but then suggest that I blend it with the eggs whites until that mixture reached “body temperature.” Body temperature! 98.6º? The temperature of my cold baker’s hands? Who knew. I put my hands on the mixing bowl and tried to remember what it felt like to touch a human body. Then I added the butter.

Here’s what the recipe told me about what would happen next:

“When all the butter has been added, raise the speed to medium and beat until the frosting almost appears to separate. Continue beating, and it will suddenly come together, looking like smooth whipped butter.”

What is missing from those two, simple sentences? After a minute or so of mixing melting butter into my feverish batter on medium, the deficit became obvious: no amount of time was specified. How long was this supposed to take?

HOW LONG WAS THIS SUPPOSED TO TAKE?

Sometimes we come across a situation so metaphorically apt that, for a few moments, it is as if we can see the matrix. The world snaps into focus with a certain poetry that is invisible to us most of the time. As I let my supposed buttercream spin away for minute four…five…six…I saw that churning mess in my KitchenAid for what it really was. The buttercream was the quarantine. It was this whole situation.

Right now, all we want to know is how long? But we just don’t know. We have vague instructions to wait for things to come together, with no timeline, our only assurance a warning that they will get worse before they get better. We know how we got here, we know what we want things to look like in the end, but in the meantime, we watch the beater spin and hope that we haven’t already ruined everything. There’s no real reason to think that it’s ruined; only our fears that, without better guidance, hope itself is foolish. How long is this supposed to take? Why haven’t things changed in a way that I can see? When will it look like it is supposed to? Will it ever?

Seven minutes passed. Eight. I really needed this frosting to come together, and not just for Kat. I needed it to work out because of the metaphor. We were going to be okay, right? We were going to get the world back, right? I had great idea: I consulted my bible (BakeWise; see above). Alas, the only comparable recipe was so different from this one that there was no usable advice. Classic bible. So I consulted a couple of other valuable sources while the beaters spun on. I found a few buttercream recipes with similar ingredients, but the details were different, as were the methods. I put my cookbooks away. They had been little help, beyond the affirming my feeling that this whole situation was totally bizarre.

Nine minutes. Ten minutes. I leaned on the counter’s edge. It was already after 10pm. The smell of warm chocolate on the air had long since faded. I watched the blade spin and tried to determine if anything at all had changed. Was the color finally uniform? Had all the butter pieces finally dissipated? Was anything working here?

And then, it started.

“…Until the frosting almost appears to separate” is a scary directive. In whipping anything, be it mayonnaise, cream, or frosting, separation is a crisis. It means that all your hard work, your ingredients, your elbow grease, have gotten you nowhere. And yet, as my frosting appeared to separate before my eyes, I felt a rush of relief. It looked awful, but that was what was supposed to happen. It was supposed to come apart so that it could come together. My hope restored, I watched a few moments longer until, finally: brown sugar buttercream. Looking like smooth whipped butter.

The cake was delicious, and gigantic. The three people that live in my apartment polished it off in 5 days. And even though it was Kat’s birthday cake, my roommates saved the last piece for me.

 

 

A Seat at the Table: A True Allegory

Every Tuesday night for nearly a year, a small group of friends and I had played bar trivia at one of West Hollywood’s oldest, smelliest bars. On an average night, the skimpily-clad waitresses at this dank, storied hell-hole might serve paleo salads to a cross-fit class afterparty in the back, pitchers of Coors to a shaggy-looking couple shooting pool, and burgers to incognito celebrities sitting at the bar. In our year of weekly patronage to the place, my groups’ celebrity sightings have included Robert Pattinson, Chris Rock, and a One Directioner. The blonde one. On the extremely popular trivia nights, you can add to that unfathomable sea of humanity a smattering of birthday girls, socially awkward old men, nerds and wannabe-nerds of all stripes.

As if all this weren’t eclectic enough, it’s also a sports bar. Televisions hang from every corner of the bar’s highly-cornered interior, broadcasting a mix of whatever is showing on ESPN and ESPN 2-10. This cornucopia of sports-package programming draws even more people to the already-crowded bar during any kind of playoff season, and should one of these games fall Tuesday Trivia night, finding a seat becomes a full-contact sport of its own. 

Never in a year of Tuesdays was the Table Dash more challenging than during the 2015 NBA finals. The Clippers were out of it, and the Lakers were nowhere near it. But Golden State, California’s last hope, were set to win it all if they could only take down LeBron James and his supporting cast. On the night of game three, trying to snag seats for eight, we arrived early for trivia to find the place as crowded as we’d ever seen it. It was the fourth quarter; we’d have to wait out the game, at which point tables would clear as the clientele shifted from jock to nerd. Some of us stood outside with the smokers while a few of us floated awkwardly in the narrow passage between the front door and the seating area. After several minutes of dodging harried waitresses and drunk Warriors fans, I shifted to a spot in front of a young couple’s booth in an attempt to get out of the way.

The couple was seated side by side on one part of the booth – whether for intimacy or a better view of the TV, it wasn’t clear. Very aware that I was standing conspicuously in front of them, I asked if I was blocking their view of the game. When they said no and asked if I wanted to sit down in the empty half of their booth, I decided to go for it. They seemed nice enough, and it would allow me to stop worrying about finding a table, as the group across the aisle was about to leave too, meaning my friends could swoop in, no problem.

Over the next 15 minutes, I surprised myself with my own energetic friendliness. I learned that my new tablemates were visiting from New Jersey; like me, they were rooting for Golden State out of ill will for LeBron; and the woman of the pair was a hairdresser whose lavender hair had just been dyed that shade earlier that day. The highlight of our brief encounter came when I told them that I was trying to make it as a screenwriter. The purple-haired woman looked at me earnestly and said, “You're going to make it. I truly believe that you get back the energy you put out into the world, and you have such a positive energy.” As if that ego boost weren’t reward enough for my stranger gamble, after the couple left and my friends sat down, I was congratulated for my dedication to table getting and my prowess at friend-making. Trivia night began with me feeling like a real champion in this little game called life.

It was one week later, on the heels of this social success story, that I met Joe. It was the night of game six of the NBA finals, and we came to the bar ready to do battle in the seating wars that we were sure to find there. The first wave of our group made a miscalculation, snagging a four-top that had no nearby seating prospects for the rest of us. The game ended – Golden State won the championship – and the sportsfans began to pay their tabs and finish their beers. I was on the lookout for someone leaving, and my eyes landed on Joe. To be honest, he was hard to miss. He was a hefty, middle-aged, white guy, red-faced and seated by himself at a booth, an empty beer glass and a giant pizza box on the table before him. The people at the table across from him had just left, and he'd been sitting there looking like he’d been ready to leave for the past 10 minutes. My friend Nick slid into the newly empty booth, but it wasn’t big enough for our whole group. Dammit, I wanted this dude’s neighboring table.

So I went in, leaned over to this puffy man and, as politely as possible, asked, “Are you leaving soon, or are you staying for trivia?" He turned to me slowly, uncomprehending. But hey, it was loud in there. So I asked again: are you leaving? He said that he was, but made no move to depart. When he added, speech slurred, that I should sit down, I hesitated. But then I thought of the week before. I thought about what a wonderful, friendly, warm hearted person I am, that kind of person who gives strangers – even dazed, bloated strangers – the benefit of the doubt. So I sat, just perching on the booth’s edge. 

My left butt cheek had barely touched down onto the vinyl when Joe jerked his head across the aisle to my friend Nick, who stared ahead at the front door, completely unaware of Joe. The din of the crowded bar made it difficult to hear anyone more than a couple feet away. "Is that your boyfriend?” he slurred. He must have seen us talking before.

Already second guessing my benevolence toward odd strangers, I lied. ”Yes, yes he is,” I replied, trying to sound like it was obvious. 

"You guys having good sex?" Joe, the total stranger, then asked.

I should have walked away. Instead, I forced a pivot. “Were you rooting for Golden State?” Very clever. 

“No," Joe pouted. I nodded, disappointed that my attempt to change the subject had run aground. But hey, I thought, maybe he’d get up and leave now.

Joe did not get up and leave. He stared at me with a sloshed blankness. "How is the pizza here?" I shouted, pointing to the giant box before him. The to go box. TO. GO. 

He shrugged his shoulders. It's pizza. He offered me a piece, but I declined. He patted his ample stomach, adding, “You can probably tell I've had a lot of pizzas.”

What is the appropriate response when a fat, drunk stranger asks if you can tell that he's fat? I pretended the question was about pizza. "Oh me too. I'm from Chicago. We have all kinds of pizza."

"You're from Chicago? I'm from Chicago!" Of course, I thought of course this doughy drunk guy in a striped polo shirt is from Chicago. "What high school did you go to?”

When I explained that I went to high school in Northwest Indiana, he told me his four kids went to Culver, which is a kind of fancy prep-school in the area. I knew a girl who left my seventh grade public school class to attend Culver, so I told him I was familiar with it. “Culver’s the fuckin’ best school,” he asserted.

I was relieved to find that this pervy loner guy was perhaps not such a pervy loner after all. Here he was, an out of town visitor, an Midwesterner, a proud father of four. I learned that he was also a businessman who financed films. When I told him I was a screenwriter, he handed me his business card and said that I should email him. And sure, he phrased it by slurring ”If you don't e-mail me in the next twenty four hours, you're dead to me," but still, this encounter was starting to seem like a real networking win for me. He took at piece of pizza out of the box and handed it to me, and this time, however reluctantly, I took it.

Across the way, our friend Russ arrived and started talking to Nick. I ate my slice of pizza slowly, refusing multiple times when Joe tried to offer me another. Instead of getting up, he ate another slice, so now we were both sitting in the booth eating his leftovers straight out of the to-go box. I propped my chin up on my hand and watched Steph Curry thank God and his teammates on the nearest corner television, out of things to say to Joe and hoping he would decide to head home already to sleep it off. 

"How do you do that?” he asked me.

“What?” I replied, genuinely confused.

“Sit so still like that. And make that face. Like a model.” Oh shit. Had he just gotten drunker?

“I'm just watching TV." I forced a polite smile and, instead of turning back to the screen, began trying to will him to boredom telepathically. 

Joe took a deep breath, "I'm just going to throw this out there…" he began.

I was suddenly struck by that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when bracing for terrible news, like the death of a loved one. What the hell was this man about to say to me?

“Is there an amount of money…that could be exchanged…and you’d go back to my hotel…and we'd…have sex?”

I wonder what face I made. I can guess, but my brain temporarily shut down for a moment, so now I can't be sure.

“Say, $500? $1000?” He was starting high, which was peculiarly flattering.

“I don't think so.”

‘2000? 3000? 5000?”

Look, I get that those are large sums of money, and I am poor. But I mean it when I say that there was no part of me that was even remotely entertaining the idea of having sex with this man, ever. Or, to be fair, with any man. I could consult the short list of celebrities I lust after — Dan Stevens in Downton Abbey. Theo James in…Downton Abbey. Possible Regency Fetish aside, if you offered me $50 to have sex with Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, I’d tell you to keep the money so that I could actually enjoy myself. Some women might get off on being paid for their services; many more find the act fundamentally transactional, and thus might as well get paid for it. I am neither one of those types.

“6000?” I just kept shaking my head. I sneaked a look over to the first group of my friends, seated in the corner on the left. Not one eye was on me. I turn to the guys across the aisle to my right, shouting silently "Are you getting any of this?" But the bar was beyond noisy, and they weren’t even glancing in my direction. Clearly (or so it seemed to me in the moment) I’d created a monster out of my own independent friendliness. These dudes were SO not worried about me and my ability to look out for myself. I loved and hated them for it.

“7000? Seriously? Still no? Why?”

“I think you’ve got the wrong girl.”

Joe stopped at $50,000, finally getting the message through his loaded skull. I think we both knew that there was never a chance that he’d actually pay me $50,000 for sex; it was more that he needed to know that there was a price at which he could buy anything he wanted. When I still did not assent, Joe took a dejected, momentary timeout before telling me that the whole thing had been a kind of thought experiment. A joke, really. ”She said she do it for $1000” he said, pointing to a passing waitress who had not stopped, or even glanced, at the table since I'd been there. “I'm happily married to a wonderful woman. I've got four kids.”

“I remember. They go to Culver.” Drunk as he was, this response still seem to make him nervous. I pretended to believe that his indecent proposal has been a joke from the beginning. I laughed and nodded, feeling like I had passed some kind of cosmic test and desperately trying not to picture this man's tiny penis. Then the people at the table behind Joe got up and left. I could move to that table and be a bit closer to one faction of my group, or, if my friends moved to it, they could be closer to me. It was after 9pm by now — trivia set to start any minute — and I had a decision to make: should I continue to sit across from this man who had now proven himself to be every bit the pervy loner I had once feared him to be, or should I abandon my post, thus rendering the entire ordeal a complete waste?

“So there’s really no chance we’re going to have sex?” Joe then asked, as if trying to help me with my decision.

"Sorry," I said, standing up."Thanks for the pizza." I still had the stale crust in my hand.

“You're leaving?”

“I am trying to play trivia with my friends, and we want to sit together,” I explained. A hurt look crossed his face, as if he was just now learning that I’d been waiting for him to leave ever since I first asked him if he was leaving soon. 

“Can I at least have a kiss?“

“Sorry,” I sighed, exasperated. What had I done to deserve this?

“Fuck you then,” was Joe’s charming rejoinder.

I threw my purse into the adjacent booth. "Watch my bag,” I hissed to Russ and Nick. 

“Everything ok?” Russ asked me, suddenly aware that I was looking flustered. I just shook my head and rushed off to the bathroom, wanting to be as far away from this stranger as possible. Once in the bathroom, I suddenly felt very dirty. I hurled the tasteless pizza crust into the trash with violent disgust. Why had I even taken it? I didn’t want it. Why had I even sat down? I was just trying to be nice.

When I returned to our new table, Joe was still sitting there in front of his pizza box. He left a few minutes later. He probably wouldn't remember any of this in the morning. But I would.

I debriefed my friends on the encounter. Reactions were divided sharply along gender lines. The boys were over the moon about the unreality of it all. One of them asked me why I didn't take Joe up on his offer, laughing when I answered that it would have meant missing trivia; another said that once he saw I had scored a piece of pizza, he figured I must've been doing pretty well for myself.  The girls, however, bought me a milkshake and gave me hugs, telling me how sorry they were that they hadn't noticed I was in trouble. And you know, both sides were right. Being asked to join the worlds oldest profession, if only for a couple of minutes, had been both horrible and hilarious. I was both traumatized and kind of flattered. I mean…$50,000?

We came in second at trivia that night. I was tasked with saving the gift card we'd won, and I stashed it in a purse pocket, right next to the business card Joe had given me. When I pulled both cards out the following week, I noticed Joe's card was double-sided. An investor service was listed on one side, a commercial real estate firm on the other. Under his name, on both sides, were the letters “CEO.”

* * * * *

Is there a moral to this story? I don’t fucking know. I don't want it to be "don't talk to strangers." For one thing, that puts the onus on me. Is it my fault a Midwesterner got drunk alone with his pizza and tried to pay me for sex? Had I been “asking for it” by my mere willingness to sit down at his table? The sweet couple from the week before hadn't tried to sleep with me, and they were from New Jersey!

So let the moral be this: Don’t get drunk alone in public if you’re a total asshat. Don’t try to pay people for sex unless they bring it up first. And when in Los Angeles, be prepared to put up with some weird shit in the name of finding a goddamn seat at the table.

 

We and They Go to Breakfast

As my time abroad continues, I am feeling called to resist the urge to check my phone for messages, emails, and updates. I have very limited data to use while in England, so I’ve turned it off entirely, and I can only get internet access when I’m back at the hotel, where there is a reliable (if molasses-slow) WiFi connection.

I have to admit: it’s shaping up to be a really great time to be far away from America, unplugged from the headline deluge and tweetstorm feedback loop. 

That being said, even in this sacred, quiet place, the troubles of home are on my mind. This is supposed to be a travelogue, however, so let’s talk about something from my travels:

We have breakfast included at our hotel — hot and/or cold food, coffee and/or tea, butter and/or jam, the works. It’s a small place — 15 rooms in all — and it’s almost entirely filled with choristers from All Saints Beverly Hills like myself. 

ALMOST entirely. This morning, I mysteriously awoke before my alarm (despite a late night drinking local cider at the pub) and was the first down to breakfast, where I looked wistfully out at cloudy Sadler Street and listening to to the local radio station music they pipe into the dining room. I was shortly thereafter joined by one other early riser, who sat at my table. Then an older British lady sat down at the table behind me, dining alone. I had nearly finished my meal (of mushrooms on toast) when the rector of All Saints, who is along with us on our pilgrimage, came in and greeted us warmly, then sat down at a nearby table to await the breakfast companion he’d planned to meet.

“The mass was just beautiful last night,” he said to us, referring to the eucharist for the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He was referring to a rich and transcendent service we’d had the privilege to sing yesterday at 5:15, complete with the incense and communion and pomp and circumstance that won’t be featured at most of our evensongs. I told him that it had felt good while we were singing as well, and we began talking about the incense and how it was different from the incense back home.

From behind me, so quietly that I don’t think it was meant to be heard, came a “Shhh!” Apparently the older woman behind me was upset that she could no longer enjoy her breakfast with the pop hits of Dragon Radio, UK as her only soundtrack. The other two men hadn’t noticed, and they also didn’t here as she continued her bitter muttering. “I don’t want to hear your conversation,” she said to herself, but of course she wanted to say it to us, and I could hear the subtext of “you horrible loud Americans” in her voice (whether or not that subtext was intended). I clammed up. I suddenly felt very rude. 

But then I felt angry. We were talking about INCENSE, for God’s sake, and in a public place! There were three of us, but soon the dining room would be full of American church music nerds and she’d have to shout if she wanted her objections to register. I’m not sure whether or not she intended to be heard at all, but I had, and I was now annoyed. I left the room, finished with my breakfast and coffee and unwilling to stew in my mixed feelings of both tourist guilt and self-righteousness. As I left, I found myself thinking that in America, at least we have the decency, when alone in public, to voice our annoyed gripes only in our own heads, and not aloud in a passive-aggressive whisper.

And then I nearly laughed at the thought. Like, what total bullshit. We have nasty old ladies in America. We have passive-aggressive whispers and aggressive-aggressive whispers and entitled customers and people who want everyone else to just shut up. We have lots of people like the Boots Pharmacy patron I overheard on Monday scoffing “that’s ridiculous!” when the clerk told her she’d have to pay 5 pence if she wanted a bag. And the other day, when I was so bowled over by the hospitality of the pub owner who reopened the kitchen for us? We have people like that in America too. Of course we do, because people are people and there is every type of person everywhere.

It might sound like a stretch to connect this to the white supremacy shit show that is happening in America right now, but the angry voice that I had to shut down in my own mind is not entirely different from the louder, angrier voice that so many in this world don’t, or won’t shut down. It said — for the briefest moment, mind you, in an otherwise amazing morning and week thus far — it said “these people are different from me and I hate that about them.”  But the thing is, there is no “them.” Or, if we say that there is an “Us” and a “Them” (my “Us” might be women, Americans, writers, singers, etc.) we must remember that every group is made up of unique human beings who are no more or less human than ourselves, who have differences as well as similarities, who have good days and bad days and good moments and bad moments. One nasty old British lady comment doesn’t reflect on British people (or old ladies) any more than Katy Perry’s latest interview reflects on me as a female, American singer. 

Look, I don’t think any Neo Nazis are going to read this. I don’t know if anyone at all will read this, but one reason I often keep my mouth shut on social media about matters of social justice is that I have very little contact with those who disagree with me — and not by design, but by…oh, let’s call it the grace of God. So, speaking to my “Us,” I see now that I have written myself into a quagmire. If we are casting aside “Us versus Them” and seeing “Them” as a group of unique individuals, how do we shut down groups of people who, en masse, are working to support the opposite of this belief? How do we stop White Supremacists, or religious militant organizations, or even Republican congressmen if we can’t see “Them” as “Them” and see ourselves as “Us,” the justice warriors on the right side of history?

I don’t know. That’s a hard question. I’m not there, that’s for sure. As much as I loathe to generalize about groups of people, I’m not ready to sit down with an individual Klansman, say, and get to know him as a human being. But from deep in my heart, I hear the question simmering: How much in this life can any one of really us do in any way but as an individual speaking to another individual? When we vote or call our senators, it is with our one individual voice. Anything we do, even if we all do it together (as with a rally or a march) is an action that we take on our own. And the individual on the other end, hearing us or seeing us, is the only mind we can affect. We will have more luck changing one individual’s mind, over and over again, than we will ever have by trying to change “Them.”

I’m going to go back to my peaceful pilgrimage now. I’m going to shut my laptop, leave the hotel, and go out into the world to see this new and different place. I am a stranger here, but it is still my world, as the whole world belongs to us all, equally. I will try to be easy, be grateful, be humble, and remember to treat whomever I meet as a part of that equal, universal Us that we aim for. 

 

Barbie was her maiden name. (#thedollevolves repost edition)

I originally wrote the following post way back in 2009, on the occasion of Barbie's 50th anniversary. I'm reposting it now in...you know, I'm gong go ahead and call it celebration of the new, more realistic, way more beautiful line up of dolls Barbie just announced. My first thought on seeing photos of these new dolls was "these aren't real, are they?" And, upon realizing, to my delight, that they WERE real, my next thought was that my mom would have been flabbergasted, in the best way, to see this day. And I'm not join to hide it: I really, really want to collect them all.

---

 

Barbie, that plastic minx, is 50, and I'm celebrating with my Official Barbie Story. It is a story of profound reverse-psychology, the only blotch on the otherwise stainless parenting record of Mr. and Mrs. Don R. Flaxbart.

My dear mother, God rest her feminist soul, hated, HATED Barbie and her stupid proposterous physique, her cheerleader-preppiness. So, as a child, I was given a rule: if I wanted a Barbie, I would have to buy it myself.  My parents both had brothers and sisters, so neither was quite prepared for their only-child daughter's doll obsession; I had one in the worst way. I was a six-year-old mother to seven cotton children, I created tiny universes with my playmobil people, and Barbie...Well, she was just so tantalizingly cheap! For a week or two of saved-up allowance, I could own a doll that was totally my own. And I would treasure it.

And so, over the course of about ten years, I built up a portfolio of Barbie dolls, complete with brushed hair and attached heads (ripping the heads off of dolls or giving them awful haircuts was apparently a common practice among my peers). As a young child, there was nothing else that I was required to buy for myself if I wanted it, making my Barbies (and some other over-the-top dolls I saved up for) the only possessions that were truly mine. So this was no mere collection; this was a soap-opera of interconnected families, the Jensens, the Ratners, the fledgling Williams family waiting for a father to join them from "out of town."

Yes, that's right. My Barbies had storyline.

It all started with a matriarch. Barbie was her name, uncreatively, and she was a rock 'n' roll Barbie by birth. I have no idea where she came from, but I couldn't have been over 4 when I got her, and to this day, she remains in my posession.  She had special hip-shaking action, which allowed/forced her to move her arms back and forth, karate-chop style, when you twisted her torso.

By the time I was 10, this twisting created a creaking noise that I jokingly referred to as "arthritis" when introducing her to others, human and doll alike. At that point, I'd already formed the basis of an extended family tree that I would have a hard time abandoning if I tried playing with my dolls today. There were the Jensens, Barbie and Ken's family, a popular but slightly trashy clan with two blonde daughters and a hunky jock son, Kevin. There were the Walshes, named for daughter Brenda, a 90210-Mattel crossover. This was my star family, with the beautiful Rosa at the helm; my favorite doll, Courtney, had shiny brown hair like her sisters, and was very serious with boyfriend Kevin Jensen. If you're surprised how well I remember it all, so am I; I suppose it's a testament to how much time I spent creating and living in this tiny world.

I do so wish that I had photos of Loren Ratner (a stylish aerobic instructor) or the look-alike eldest Walsh sisters (two identical 90210 dolls modeled after Shannen Dougherty, one of whom was missing a leg on account of my cocker spaniel puppy). I could present to you my formal list of names and connections, or my huge collection of matchless tiny plastic shoes. You would marvel at the ingenuity of my bedroom backdrops made from cardstock and pictures from bedding catalogs. Perhaps you would truly comprehend the breadth of my polyvinyl planet.

I don't have those things with me at the moment. 4 years ago, my father sold the house I grew up in, and I had to search through all of my belongings, deciding what to keep and what to throw away. It was pretty ugly.

Don't panic. My carefully manicured collection definitely made the cut, much to the confusion of the rest of my family. For now, they live in a giant RubberMaid container in a cousin's garage.  There they sit - Barbie, Ken, Skipper, Kevin, Courtney, Stacey, Janet, Shannen, Brenda, Brandon, Luke -the list goes on- waiting for the day I can bestow their storyline on children of my own.

On second thought, maybe I'll keep them too myself. I wouldn't want their heads to get ripped off.

Some Thoughts on All This Horrible Stuff That Happened Today That I Just Had to Write Down But It Was Too Long For Facebook

A couple thoughts:

When I was in high school, I got to take a trip to Germany. During my trip, my peers and I spent some time at a German high school, and one day, toward the end of our trip, we went to a few different classes and answered questions about America. A boy's hand shot up: "Is it true," the boy asked, "that everyone in America has a gun?" We told him no, lots of people don't have guns.

"But you can get one when you are 18? And it's very easy."

We didn't really know. I remember we asked among ourselves, Do you have to be 18? Yeah, I think it's pretty easy...we were 16-year-old suburbanites. This was post-Columbine. We probably should have known. But, even in our ignorance, the significance of the question, and the fact that it was, for at least one kid, a defining trait of Americanness, was not lost on us. Some of the kids in the class were surprised by our answer as to the ease and prevalence of firearms in our country; some were probably scared, some excited. But they all, every one of those teenagers, thought it was weird.

But back to today. It is so strange to me that I've become one of those people who gets her news reports from Facebook. Blame grad school and not having a TV, I guess. Stranger still is that, even with only FB as a news-getting tool, I don't miss a whole lot. Especially when something really great happens. Or something really, really bad.

We are a reactionary people. Maybe it's because our country is so large and diverse, but in order for change to take place, it seems like we need hard proof that things are broken. I wish, for the sake of families that lost loved ones today, that we could be more proactive.

At the same time, it would be nice if we could hold off on politicizing every tragedy our nation faces, out of a moment of respect for the grieving. But we can't help it. When something terrible happens, we want to fix it. One way to fix a problem is through legislation. Another is through education. Some Americans prefer the government to stay out of their business, and that makes sense. But when a problem becomes a plague, an epidemic, and talking about it or putting band aids on it isn't working, I think it's time for legislation to step in.

I know this is vague, but this is not a news story. And I think this logic applies pretty well to lots of things in our country: gun control laws, sure, but also mental health care, the impossibility of a one-income household which keeps many parents away from their kids, sloppy national discourse, 21st century isolation-based anxiety, 24-hour news cycles and fear mongering, the list goes on... But another thing about this big, busy, diverse country: we have strength to make an impact, but we lose momentum fast. That goes for me and blog-post writing too. So, I don't know what we're supposed to do now - start a petition? Sign a petition? Call our congressmen? - but I know we need to do it. Soon.

Good Stock Market News? Celebrate with an AAPLtini

I thought about calling this post "Marissa's Tips for Living the Dream: Celebrate Any Damn Thing," but that just didn't seem informational enought.

Today, as some of you are sure to be aware, Apple stock (aka AAPL) passed 600 and Apple announced they'd begin paying out quarterly dividends. This is kind of bittersweet news for me (I had a tiny bit of the stock once, but had to sell it to survive my year of joblessness), but my dad was pretty psyched. In fact, he decided he had to celebrate by creating a cocktail. 

And it's good.

Here's the recipe

AAPLtini

2 oz vodka

1 oz Goldschlager

3-4 oz Martinelli's, chilled

Combine vodka and Goldschlager in a shaker (ice optional). Strain into a martini glass and top with Martinelli's. Sit back and think about how you bought Apple stock in the 1980s when people thought the company was going down the tubes. Alternately, stare blankly into the glass, enjoying the pretty gold color and the bubbles.

Said the drink's brilliant inventor, "We'll enjoy it for today. The stock's been going up so fast, something's gotta...[trails off]."

Genius, master chef, goofball, pessimist. That's my dad. 

Why is 'Rolling Stone' anti-cursive?

I'm a little behind on my magazine reading, but I've been leafing through the August 4 issue of 'Rolling Stone' I've had stashed in my desk at work. One of my favorite recurring features is the news-bite infographic, "Threat Assessment," where recent occurrences are rated on a scale of "With Us" to "Against Us." Far down the scale toward "Against Us," this issue lists the spike in birth control prices after New Hampshire's defunding of Planned Parenthood and government shutdown that caused "beer shortages" in Minnesota. On the "With Us" end of the spectrum is the birth of South Sudan, a Bahamas ban on shark fishing, and..."Indiana schools stop teaching cursive."

What? Really? Putting aside the fact that I clearly remember learning D'Nealian cursive in an Indiana public school, I'm totally confused as to why 'Rolling Stone' would take an anti-cursive stance. Yes, in a digital world, cursive is probably less important to the average human, Hoosier or otherwise. But handwritten communication is still a part of life — think of memo boards, greeting cards, phone messages — and all that NOT teaching it does is create a generation of Indianans who can't read half of other people's handwriting.

I know, I know. There are text messages, emails, digital display screens, and probably cursive-reading apps out there to help the confused reader of analog text. But this obsession with how ubiquitous virtual text, information, and possessions have become seems to assume that there will someday exists a people that don't need ACTUAL anything. Personally, though, I doubt that paper and ink will ever die out completely. A paperless, hadwriting-free world would be one where we all stared at screens all day long, for everything. Does that really sound appealing to anybody?

We'll see. For now, the world is still full of paper and ink, and, hand to God, I use cursive every single day. I guess I'll just have to hand-write a desultory letter to 'Rolling Stone,' sadly knowing that none of the little third-graders in Indiana will have any idea what it says.

Politics Imitating Art (?)

I do not know much about James Cappleman, and I don't have the option of voting for him in Chicago's upcoming elections, as I don't live in Chicago's 46th ward. He's on twitter, which is cool. He has a pretty logo. But when I saw his sign for the first time yesterday (when I happened to be in the 46th ward) all I could think was "Is he going to change our money, and make it super-fly?"

Here's why:
 

Sorry about all that, Mr. Cappleman. Leave it to a Sifl & Olly fan to draw connections to obscure 3rd-season, DVD-only nonsense skits.

Snow Photos, River North Style

Here are the results of my Wednesday afternoon photo excursion. Please note that every snow pile seemed bigger in person, proving that the camera does NOT add ten pounds to errant precipitation.

As for the LSD photos, they were taken between Chicago Avenue and Huron Street, which is a bit south of the real craziness. A cop on the scene said that all the drama was up further on the road, and we know that all those parked cars are on the northbound lanes only. Nevertheless, it was very surreal to see Lake Shore (and Michigan, and Chicago) essentially empty in the middle of the day.

 

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For Snow's Sake

In case you haven't heard, Chicago just got hit with a snowfall that topped 20 inches, the third highest fall in recorded history. Because I'm a home typing, surfing, and moviemaking, my "snow day" is pretty business-as-usual. That said, I don't usually have the WGN Chopper Cam Feed playing as I work. Last time I checked it, there were tons of people standing on the bridge over Lake Shore Drive at North Avenue Beach, looking at the snowy, abandoned car-filled aftermath.

It occurs to me that I live within walking distance from Lake Shore Drive.

I'm going to head out and check it out, and hopefully get some pictures. For the city's sake, I hope I'm too late to catch anything of interest, but I kind of doubt it.

More later.