Dr. Strangemom (or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the blog)

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

My baby cousin is getting married this week. And, frankly, I am glad just to be invited to the wedding. It could have gone either way.

It's a good thing babies can't remember everything. Because then my cousin would know that when he was around three years old, his parents left him for a weekend with my parents and his pot smoking adolescent cousins  - Karen and me. Maybe it was for a week. Or two weeks. Or an afternoon. I really have no recollection.

But I do have photos. And if they are any credible evidence of the experience, I am going to have to get my cousin a REALLY good wedding gift. For one thing, I'm sure the weather in the LA Valley was, like, a hundred and forty degrees that August and our baby cousin was barefoot in every photo - standing on asphalt, standing on tumbleweeds, standing (and crying) in a field of wildflowers and stinging nettles. Which poses a brand new concern: there were no stinging nettles anywhere near our house. Did Karen and I drive little Adam out to Palm Springs or something? Uh-oh. I hope we brought him back.

And where were our parents?

People were more trusting back in those days, I guess. Karen and I used to babysit for actual babies when we were only, like twelve years old. We were clueless. And totally uninterested in the baby in our care, choosing instead to spend the evening making phony phone calls, sleuthing out the treyf in their refrigerators, and searching for porn. Those were the days when a dog-eared copy of THE JOY OF SEX was on the bedroom bookshelf of every married couple on the West coast, which made for very educational times for the babysitters. Although, and I just don't think I am alone in this, the couple in that book was, well, gross. That man's penis was not a good ambassador for the cause. The woman's armpit hair alone was enough to scare me into celibacy until pot lowered my standards.

I wonder where that JOY OF SEX couple is today. And if she ever jumped on the Epilady bandwagon that came rumbling along in the 1980's. I wonder if that man's penis ever got more attractive. Yeah, as if. Penises will never star in an episode of The Swan. You can give them a makeover, get their teeth fixed and work on their posture, but they will stubbornly refuse to change. Because they think they are already so damn hot.

Penises are, like, the motivational speakers for the other body parts. "I'm super attractive!" they scream. "Get closer! Take off your glasses! You'll see what I mean!" Whereas the vaginas and middle section spare tires hang back, insisting the lights are off and relying on Spanx and cheap wine to keep their partner happy.

Uh-oh. I have no idea how to segue back to my cousin now. 

I'll tell you one thing for sure: I am not getting him THE JOY OF SEX as a wedding gift. Maybe I'll give him THE JOY OF COOKING, instead. He can sleuth out the treyf. And, if I recall correctly, there is a picture of a couple cooking a ham on page 236.

Jewish porn for the honeymoon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Making The World A More Beautiful Place - One Pair Of Underpants At A Time

My sister recently declared that she is going to take more pride in how she dresses. Which is a capital idea so I am going to do it, too. But with one caveat: unlike Karen, I am not going to change how I dress; I am simply going to take more pride in the schmatte crap I wear.

It's all about attitude. Because it's probably not all about my belief that if I wear earrings that are big and shiny enough, no one will notice that I am at the grocery store in my bathrobe.

Karen and I are the progeny of a clotheshorse mother with impeccable style. Mom is more put together when she is home in bed with the stomach flu than I am on any given workday. Maybe it's a generational thing. Karen and I are the Woodstock generation, a generation that tore a hole in the middle of an Indian cotton bedspread and called it a wedding dress, a generation sandwiched between 1950's shirtwaist dresses and 1980's shoulder pads. We had more important things to do - integrating lunch counters, ending the war in Viet Nam, owning our orgasms - than learn how to pull together a casual weekend look.

Yes, well, Karen and I didn't actually do those things - even to this day I only rent my orgasms because, you know, the maintenance on them is huge and they just sit around in my G-spot collecting dust  -but we could have. Still, Mom's style and commitment to looking good did not rub off on me. Wait, no, I take that back. I honestly believe I do look good when I am within the confines of my house. I gotta admit, sometimes I look in the mirror and think, "damn, girl, you are rockin' those elastic waist stirrup Jeggings. And the way your roseacea doubles as blush? Brill."

And then I leave my house. And I catch a glimpse of myself in a store window or something, and what I thought was a Yeti riding the ass of a homunculus turns out to be me in my rain poncho. And I must take pause.

I have made occasional stabs at improving my presentation. I walk into, say, the MAC store and ask some Kardashianista to show me, say, a purple pencil eyeliner. And she looks at me like I had just asked her to give me pap smear, for fuck's sake, and I slink outta there with my toady tail dragging behind me.

Still, it is better to light one candle than curse the darkness, so I will take one baby step towards improving my presentation. Tonight, I am going to clean out my closet and throw away all underpants I bought before the Gerald Ford Administration.

Or, you know what? Maybe I'll just take more pride in the way Karen dresses.

 

 

What I Am Going To Meditate on During Yom Kippur This Year