"Dancing with the Stars," "Sitting in the Audience," and "Hanging with the Host"

Last night I was “Dancing with the Stars”...OK, I wasn’t so much “Dancing with the Stars” as I was “Sitting in the Audience.”  But still, I was there with about a couple of hundred other random people who either are fans of the show and probably waited on line to get passes, or who won passes at an auction (the young blonde gal sitting next to me for example), or know someone on the crew or on the show.  

Here’s how I ended up there.  The host Tom Bergeron goes way back (waaaay back--like 27 years or something) with a dear friend of mine, Nancy Alspaugh Jackson.  They used to work together in television back east.  I met Nancy because she lives in my community.  She and I did a show at the little local theater here and we became fast friends.  I really can’t describe how amazing she is...you’ll just have to take my word for it.  Nancy is the mother of Wyatt, who has autism.  Upon learning of her son’s situation Nancy became very active in fundraising for an organization called ACT! Today (Autism Care and Treatment Today).  She is now the executive director.  Tom, being a friend of Nancy’s, helps out when he can, hosting and participating in events for the organization.  Last May I met Tom at the Kick-off party for Wyatt’s Run (a 5 and 10 mile race to raise money for ACT! Today).  He is hysterically funny (way more so in person than he is on TV) and very friendly and personable.  So...Nancy and I went to one of the tapings of DWTS last week and then, we went again this week.  It’s fun, and we don’t get out much.  Just kidding.  But not really.  Along with us were Amy (who works for ACT! Today) and our friend Lisa and her daughter Ashley (who won the passes that Tom had generously donated to an ACT Today auction).

Now...across the dance floor from us was Hugh Hefner of all people, looking rather old and frail, but dressed like a “hep cat” or at least what I imagine a “hep cat” would have worn back in the day.  He had on all black clothes and a black fedora hat.  He was flanked by three blondes who the young auction winning gal next to me informed me were his new “girlfriends” on his reality show “The Girls Next Door.”  Two of them are twins, and the third looks just like them so they may as well have been triplets.  They were all equally blonde and very, very young.  I think the twins are only 19.

Now I don’t consider myself to be a judgemental person.  And I also don’t think of myself a being a prude.  BUT...I couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.  These are his “girlfriends?”  Really?  Seriously?  I just can’t picture it.  First of all, where are these girls’ mothers?  I have a daughter who is currently 15 and I don’t think it would sit well with me at all if she told me she was moving in with some octogenarian no matter how cool his hat was.  Also, I have a hard time believing that this man can actually maintain a physical relationship with all three of these girls.  I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a defribulator by the bed--just in case.  A bottle of Viagra on one nightstand, and a defribulator on the other.  I hope these girls have had at least a little bit of first aid training.  They may need it sooner than they think.  Just before taping began I got up to get a drink of water.  When I came back one of my friends said, “Hey, I’m pretty positive Hugh Hefner was just checking you out.”  Well, maybe he was, or maybe he was just wondering if I had any daughters old enough for next season.  Yikes, what a thought.  Kinda makes me want to stab myself in the eyeballs just thinking about it.

Aside from being a bit creeped out by the Hugh Hefner sighting, we had a great time.  The musical guest was Michael Buble and he performed two songs without the benefit of a back track or lipsynching a la Britney Spears or Ashley Simpson.  He is a pretty “hep cat” himself, minus the hat of course.  By the end of the show Aaron Carter had been eliminated from the competition.  This may have upset some people who had a crush on him in the late 90s when his fame peaked (how sad to have your fame peak before you’ve reached puberty), but I was already married and had kids by then so I guess I am not part of his demographic.  I would imagine though that Hugh Hefner’s “girlfriends” were very disappointed when they went to bed last night.  And not just for the usual reasons.

Here are some photos of us pre-show and post...all in all it was a really fun evening of “Dancing with the Stars,” “Sitting in the Audience”, and “Hanging with the Host.”  Wonderful memories as I am now back to reality and “Waiting on the Plumber.”

The Good Advice that I Just Might Take

Why is it that we woman are so good at giving advice and so bad at following it?  Just yesterday for example, I found myself lecturing a dear friend about how important it is that she take care of herself, carve out time to "feed her soul" and not run herself into the ground.  I told her that I can see she has a very difficult time saying "no" and that I am concerned that she is not allowing herself to save some of her precious energy to do the things she loves.  She takes care of everyone else, but who is taking care of her?  You probably know this lecture.  I think we've all given it and received it at various points in our lives.  Yes, we give it and receive it, but do we really listen to it?

Women are by nature caregivers.  There are of course the few exceptions, but I'm talking now about the bulk of the women I know, myself included.  We're caregivers.  And I'm not saying that's a bad thing to be, a caregiver.  But while we spin around and turn upside down trying to make sure that the drycleaning's picked up, the bills are paid, the dogs are walked, the kids eat balanced meals, have time to study, time to play, time to pursue their interests, who I wonder, is doing that for us?  The answer most likely is nobody.

Now we are not children, we are adults.  And as adults, we should not expect someone else to take care of us.  That's why we need to do it ourselves.  Yes.  That's right.  In fact, we don't just need to add ourselves to our "to do" lists, we need to put ourselves right up there at the top.  I'm sure I speak for more than just myself when I say that it really goes against my grain to do this.  The second I start putting myself ahead of others I can hear a little voice in my head.  Maybe some of you have heard it too, it's the one that says, "You are a selfish person.  What makes you think that you should spend 45 minutes doing something as frivolous as reading a book when there is a mountain of laundry to do?"

Yes, this is the voice in my head that I hear every time I even consider putting something I want to do in front of something I feel that I have to do.  The thing is, that voice is full of it!  What exactly is it that I have to do?  Well, actually quite a lot of things.  But, what would happen if I simply didn't do them?  Or decided to dare I say it, do them later?  Tomorrow even maybe?  I have a feeling that the laundry would still be waiting there patiently on the floor in a heap where I left it.  Those dirty socks are very unlikely to sprout wings and fly away or burst into flames and become sock shaped piles of ashes.  But what will happen if I don't take my 45 minutes?  OK...I won't fly away either (although I might want to sometimes), and I also won't burst into flames.  But I will be a little...less.  Less what?  Less me, that's what.

So I am going to try something new, and I'm hoping that you'll join me.  I'm going to push the mute button on that voice in my head and listen to a different voice.  My own.  I seem to recall that just yesterday it was saying something to my friend about not running herself into the ground, being able to say "no", and taking some time for herself.  Hmmm.  That's some good advice my voice was giving.  Think I'll follow it.

VGNO, Ann's Giveaway, a Crazy Week for Me...Read Previous Post for Laughs...I Mean Details.

Ann of Ann Again...And Again is hosting another Virtual Girls' Night Out, and boy do I need it!  This last week has been a tough one for me.  I've been knee-deep in the mundane around here and finding it hard not to complain.  I wrote a little post below about how I think I need to find a wife of my own.  That would certainly lighten my load!  LOL  Read it and let me know if you think I'm crazy, k?

Ann is also having a really great giveaway.  Great for me because I (like Ann) love Harry Connick, Jr.  You guessed it, the prize is a copy of his new CD, "Your Songs."  I don't know if they're really MY songs, but I'd love to win it and let you know.  You all should enter, too.  Here's the link to Ann's GIVEAWAY CONTEST so you can do just that.  Wait just a gosh-darn second...did I just lessen my chances of winning by inviting the competition to enter?  Hmmmm.   See, that's the kind of thing that a wife (if I had one) would keep me from doing.  Or maybe she'd just buy me the cd and put it on my pillow with a lovely piece of chocolate.  A girl can dream, can't she?

Have a great weekend everyone and a fabulous VGNO!  But first...read my silly little post below called "MWF Seeks Wife".  MWF means "married, white, female" by the way.  It's "personal ad" lingo.  :)


xoxox,
Susan

MWF Seeks Wife

I’ve been married for 17 years--been a mother for 15 of them.  And after all these years of doing laundry and dishes, making beds, picking up toys and dirty socks, sorting crayons, doing homework, driving carpool, dropping off and picking up dry cleaning, filling prescriptions, shuttling children back and forth from soccer, football, karate, and whatever other sport is in season at the time, I’ve come to one conclusion.  I know what you are thinking...that I need a vacation.  As nice as that would be, it wouldn’t do any long term good.  Sure, at the end of the week I’d be tan and rested, but within five minutes of my return home I’d be smack dab in the middle of it again.  And by “it” I mean the chaotic, Bermuda Triangle, hurricane-like storm that is my life.  No.  I don’t need a vacation.  What I need is a wife.

Yes.  That is the only solution.  I need someone who can help me keep this house running, who will be my partner in Costco runs and my go-to girl at the grocery store.  I need a wife.  Someone who can take turns cooking, or at least take turns doing the dishes.  I need someone who is around during the day who can help make breakfast and pack lunches, who will drop the kids at the school bus once in awhile so I can actually make it to the gym.  I mean really, right now I’m feeling pretty hypocritical munching down stress snack number 34  of the day while wearing workout clothes that have not a drop of sweat on them.

If I had a wife we could really take on the world.  Why if I had a wife, I’ll just bet my bills would be paid, my invitations would be RSVP’d to, my car would be serviced, my library books and videos returned...and get this...wait for it...on time!  Yes, a wife.  That’s just what I need.  Between the two of us we’d have this house running like a well oiled machine.

And it wouldn’t just be beneficial to have help with all the household chores.  Oh no.  There are a lot of other things that would be better if I had a wife.  For example, if I had a wife there would be no argument about what movie to see, the position of the toilet seat (down, thank you very much), or what to watch on TV.  Tivo’d Oprah would never take the back seat for UFC fighting or English Premier League soccer.  And I wouldn’t have to explain myself when I find the perfect pair of peep-toed, black suede, four inch shoe boots.  So what if they cost $650?  She’d get it.

Not only would she get it, she’d help me find an outfit to match.

VGNO--"Would You Rather..."

Here's a fun little game posted by Ann of Ann Again...and Again.  Why?  Because it's Virtual Girls' Night Out, that's why!  Ann came up with this great way for all of us to have a fun friday night without having to actually go anywhere.  It's a giant party and everyone is invited.

Go to Ann's site (if you haven't already) for all the details and a great music video and cocktail recipe to get the party started.  Then join in the blog hopping fun--we can all visit one another's blogs and see how we responded to the question, "Would You Rather...be able to read your husband's mind or have him be able to read yours."  That's the fun game!  Then, we can come up with a little "Would You Rather..." question of our own.

I for one would NOT like my husband or anyone else to be able to read my mind.  So I guess I will say that I would rather be able to read his.

Here's another one..."Would You Rather...be rich or be able to eat anything you want and not gain weight?"

I would rather be rich...then I can use the money to hire a trainer to come to my house.  That way I get the money AND I get to eat what I want!  :)  See...You can have your cake and eat it, too!

Happy VGNO everyone...and check out my post below about an expensive lesson I learned at TARGET (which I will now not be calling Tar-jay).

xoxoxox,
Susan

Tar-”Jay”, I Hereby Demote you to Tar-”Get”

Have you ever been in a check out line at Tar-jay and the cashier says, “Do you remember how much this cost?”  Well, this happens to me regularly as I am notorious for choosing the one shirt on the rack with no price tag on it.  On my most recent outing at Tar-jay I went hog wild back to school shopping for my daughter.  The only problem?  She was already back at school.  I was shopping solo and guesstimating her size.  When I realized that it was almost time for the school bus to arrive my cart runneth over.  I headed for the closest open check out lane and began throwing the mountains of clothes at the kid behind the register.  He looked like someone should be back to school shopping for him.  He started scanning in my items one by one until he came across a gray tank top.  The hanger said medium.  The price tag?  Nonexistent.  Of course.  “Do you remember how much this cost?”  He asked.  I looked at my watch and realized that there was no time for this guessing game.

“I give up,”  I said.  “I don’t know.”

“There’s no tag.”

“Wow, I can see that...look, I’d run back and find another one, but I’m kinda pressed for time,”  I’d said looking at my watch again for effect.

“How about $blah blah?”  the checker said and with a swift shot with his scanner gun, “bleep,” the tank top went into the bag.  I say “$blah blah,” because I wasn’t really listening.  I was thinking about not getting to the bus stop in time, and wondering if my daughter really needed one more tank top edged in lace.  But before I could blink, it was a done deal.  The checker had saved the day (or so I thought) and gotten my stuff all rung up and into bags.

I made it to the bus with seconds to spare.  Once home I dumped everything out for my daughter to see.  I thought I’d picked some darned cute stuff, and that I’d come pretty close with the sizes.  Some of my choices made the cut, some did not.  The tag-less tank top ended up in the return pile because while the hanger said medium, the tag inside the shirt said extra large.  Oops.

And so today I went back to Tar-jay with my sack full of rejected clothes.  The woman at the customer service desk scanned each of my items and checked them against the receipt until at last she came across that tank top.  She was turning it inside out looking for a price tag when I remembered to tell her that it didn’t have one.  “The checker just typed in a price,” I explained.  She looked the receipt up and down and then handed it to  me.  “Do you remember how much this cost?”  What is this?  A store-wide joke?

“I’m not sure.  I think he said something like $9.99?”  But as I quickly searched the receipt I saw no such amount.  What I did see however, was that there were several items under “Misc.” that were each listed as costing $19.99.  Why that little...

I knew there had only been one item that didn’t have a tag.  The very tank top in question.  And since everything else on the receipt had a descriptive little title before the price, I knew that he’d typed it in as “misc.”  What the other items were, I had no idea.

“Well, I don’t think this could have possibly cost $19.99,” the woman said skeptically.  It dawned on me that she did not believe that I had purchased the tank at all, that I merely was trying to pull a fast one by returning a random item without a tag on it and trying to collect more money than the thing cost.  I’m sure that I must have looked like a hardened criminal standing there in my suburban soccer mom uniform (jeans and a tee shirt, sandals and a designer bag) with my twelve year old son (who was too sick to go to school, but not sick enough not to want to come to Target and beg for toys).  Yeah, I definitely look like someone who would go to all that trouble returning a cartload of stuff with a receipt just to try and pull one over on the customer service gal by trying to profit off of a single tank top.

“I agree,” I said, “This hardly looks like it should have been $19.99.  But, you know guys,” I rolled my eyes, trying to give the impression that this customer service woman and I were part of a sisterhood, that we needed to stick together, that it was all the boy-checker’s ignorance of fashion and the cost of all things ladylike and lace trimmed.  “If I’d been paying better attention, I would never have agreed to pay so much for it.”  I was selling it, but she wasn’t buying.

“Look,”  I said, “I know I bought it at the same time as all of the rest of these clothes.  And I know that it didn’t have a tag on it and that the checker typed some invented price into the system.  And since it’s not called out on the receipt, then it must be one of the “misc.” $19.99 charges.”  I left out the part that I didn’t know what the other $19.99 miscellaneous charges were.  I was trying to talk through my deductive reasoning so that the woman would reach the same conclusion I was reaching.  She did not.

Instead she typed some code into the system and declared that the item was now on clearance and since I didn’t have a receipt, she would only be able to give me $3.23.

“But I do have a receipt!”  I argued, “It’s not my fault if the guy didn’t type it in right.  I paid $19.99.  It just isn’t fair for me to have to eat the difference.”  The woman didn’t blink.

“Sorry ma'am, that’s the best I can do.  And with that she opened her register and handed me three dollar bills, two dimes, and three pennies.

Tar-jay employee put an XL tank top on a Medium hanger.

Tar-jay employee forgot to put a price tag on the tank top.

Tar-jay employee typed in a random amount (way too much if you ask me) under a heading that did not describe the item in the least.

Who pays for that?  Me, that’s who.

I’d like to say that I decided to boycott Tar-jay and that I will never, ever buy anything there again.  But, of course, I’d promised my son a toy.  He’d waited so patiently while I argued my case (and lost) to the customer service lady.  He got a toy.  I got another cart full of items that I never knew I couldn’t live without until I saw them there at Tar-jay.  This time though, I made sure there was a tag on every single one of them.  Just in case.  So I guess I won’t be boycotting.  But I am out of principle, dropping the “jay” from Tar-jay.  From this day forward that place will go back to being plain old Target.

Love, Lost, and Found on Facebook

Recently I talked my father into joining Facebook.  I was quite pleased with myself for doing it, too.  He argued that he didn’t need one more distraction, had plenty enough friends in his “real life,” that he couldn’t be bothered to figure out the technology involved.  

I argued back that it really wasn’t a distraction, there’s no such thing as too many friends, that real life was over rated and that I would be happy to help him with the technology although I was pretty sure that he could figure it out just fine.  I also pointed out that all three of his daughters were on it.

So he joined.

After a few months of keeping up with all the exciting status updates posted by me and my sisters (“Susan is tired,” “Elizabeth is running errands,” “Anne has added a new sticker to her profile.”) he got an interesting friend request.

It was from a woman he knew in high school some 49 years ago.  He sent an e-mail to me asking me what I thought he should do.  He said at first he didn’t recognize the name and so he almost hit “ignore” as a knee jerk reaction to all those news reports about Nigerian internet scams.  But, he thought the better of it and decided to weigh the pros and cons of “friending” someone with whom he hadn’t been “friends” with in almost half a century.  Could it be that after all these years she might have come to the realization that her life might have been oh so much more fulfilling had they stayed in touch?

I told him I thought he was reading too much into it, and that by all means he should click “accept” and see what she’d been up to all these years.  He’d married (more than once) and most likely she had too.  There was no reason to believe that my dad had a stalker.  I mean this lady was pushing 70.  Was it possible that she’d been neglecting her stalker duties all these years only to “snap to” when she saw him on Facebook?

Well, on my advice he did accept her friend request.  And after chatting back and forth via Facebook for a few days the woman showed up on his doorstep.  Apparently she only lives about 20 minutes away.  While my dad had not posted any of his specific personal info on his profile, it was easy enough for her to find him given that he did not have an unlisted number or address and she knew what city he lived in.  He was worried for a heartbeat, but it turns out he need not have been.  She was actually just looking to reconnect--has been gravely ill and probably in need of some friends with whom to reminisce about the good old days.  She and my father were both voted “Most Witty” in their high school class--which does not surprise me in the least.

But, it got me to thinking.  How many times do we get a surprise friend request on Facebook or any other social networking site that actually does turn out to be some would-be stalker from our past?  If you put your mind to it, I’ll bet that you can name at least one person on your own friend list with whom you have a history.  A history of a personal nature.  A physical nature even.  Someone with whom you broke up years ago.  I’ll bet you thought when you did, that it was over.  Truly over.  That you wouldn’t be running into them again let alone knowing whether they’d slept well, where they ate dinner, what their 15 favorite films are, what Shakespeare character he or she is, or that he or she just earned a Star Medal playing Bejeweled Blitz.

I’m not saying whether or not I’ve been visited by a ghost or two on Facebook, or whether when faced with a friend request from one of those ghosts I "accepted" or "ignored."  But, I do find it funny how the rules have changed.  There used to be an unspoken agreement between exes regarding keeping a safe distance, and going out of one’s way to avoid running into one another.   In the past when an ex was inclined to stalk, he or she hung up if someone answered their call, parked outside their home only in the dark, staked out the places the stalkee frequented, but then made a beeline for the exit when spotted...there was a code of conduct once upon a time.  Now if someone gets curious about whatever became of so and so, they can just search them outright, or snoop through mutual friends’ friends lists until they come at last across their old flame’s profile pic.  You are always one click away from being face to face with an ex, like it or not.  And even if you put them behind you long ago, they can get right back in front of you with a request of friendship.  Chances are if it took years to get over them, the memories that come flooding back will stay with you for months.  It’s a fact you have to accept, no matter how fast you click “ignore.”