Seduced by Sequins & Ballroom Bods

Chuckle #504 | March 27th, 2013

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Thanks to some extended mother-in-law visits, I’ve developed a deep appreciation for Dancing with the Stars - and not just for the skimpy costumes and buff guys.  Ballroom dance is a tough sport.  And now that I’ve actually seen a live Pro-Am ballroom dance competition - featuring Latin dances - I’m even more impressed.  Ballroom dancing is Hot! Hot! Hot! 

In fact, there was so much ‘steam heat’ in the ballroom that they handed out fans.

It’s hard to believe that watching other couples rhumba is both socially acceptable and entirely legal, while peep shows and certain types of massage parlors are not.  I got so hot under the collar at one point that I nearly jumped up onto the dance floor myself, until I pictured my Irish/English booty trying to salsa.

If I’m really going to ‘do’ ballroom, I suppose I’d better take a few lessons before I lay it all out in public - preferably from a smoldering Latino, Antonio Banderas type.  As soon as I’ve got it down, I will of course teach my smoldering hot Jewish husband everything I’ve learned.

And don’t tell me that’s an oxymoron.  You haven’t seen my husband dance the hora.

Dance lessons are one thing, but an actual dance competition is another.  I lack the cojones to sign-up for a Pro-Am.  Even if I developed some bona fide skills, there’s that ‘tiny costume’ issue.  If you’ve seen Dancing with the Stars, you know that ballroom dance outfits consist primarily of a few strategically placed tassels connected by fishing line.  

Not a good look for me even under non-jiggling circumstances.

When your body is moving in ways that it hasn’t moved since traveling through the birth canal, even superglue might not be enough to keep those five critical sequins in place.  Some form of wardrobe malfunction is almost guaranteed.  In ballroom dance, this kind of ‘indecent exposure’ happens all the time.  (Hence the free fans.)

But despite these known occupational hazards, no dancers wear Spanx, and very few seem to wear any undergarments at all.  There’s just no place to put them.  This means a lot of exposed flesh.   I’m not sure I could own my love handles the way some women dancers do.  I have too many inhibitions, a touch of Catholic repression, and not nearly enough tolerance for optional hair removal.

That’s a lot of baggage to overcome without the safety net of a girdle, or, at the very least, a thong.  The key to my ballroom future might be to start out conservatively.  

Here’s my plan:

Step one:  Get some outfits.  A second hand EBay ballroom dress for me and the ‘guy’ equivalent for my husband.  (This would be a black shirt that opens to the waist to expose a completely hairless, nubile chest.)  I will simultaneously purchase 5 gallons of Nair at twelve different stores and insist, if asked, that I am not building a homemade bomb.  We can wear our new stuff around the house and gradually get more comfortable with our ‘ballroom’ selves.

Step two:  Couples lessons and channeling our inner Brigitte Bardot and Julio Iglesias.

Step three:  Local salsa clubs and the inevitable feelings of inadequacy.

Step four:  Return to wearing the outfits in the house, and if necessary, the bedroom, to restore confidence.  

I assume we’ll be repeating steps 2-4 until our hips begin to loosen up and we build some mambo muscle memory.  Truthfully, I don’t expect us to ever achieve any competitive proficiency in Latin dance, but we’ll sure have fun dressing the part.   

And as far as dance competitions go, watching the action isn’t so bad.  At least now I know to bring my own fan. 

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Meet My Alter Egos: Adult Onset ADD & Yahoo's CEO

Chuckle #503 | March 20th, 2013

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I can be really focused.  Give me a deadline and watch me give any project a ninja butt-kicking.  Give me a surprise snow day - where I make pancakes for the kids and stay in my PJs until noon - and watch me waste a cosmic amount of time Googling images of unaffordable 50 foot catamarans and beaches in Tortuga.

A day spent like this inevitably leaves me wracked with guilt.  I could have knocked 10 things off my ‘to do’ list, but instead, I wandered aimlessly through the internet wasteland, achieving a soupçon of nada. 

The ‘doer’ in me finds this kind of behavior extremely distressing.

Here’s the problem.  Lurking deep within my highly efficient self is my slacker-self, the black sheep of my recently self-diagnosed split personality disorder.  My slacker-self does stuff like troll Realtor.com and watch re-runs on the Food Network when what I should be doing is writing this column.  My ‘doer’ self then wastes even more time and energy despising my slacker-self.

 

I know; it’s complicated. 

I’m no Sybil, but I’ve clearly got some kind of epic alter ego battle raging in my head.  My slacker-self is my petulant side; the id to my ego, the Thor to my Loki, the Rove to my Maddow.  I need my slacker-self like I need my hot bath on Sundays.  It’s a question of balance.  Without a bit of harmless internet escapism, aka downtime, I couldn’t possibly keep up my ‘doer’ pace.

But I also can’t afford to spend my life distracted by dog vomit, pretty magazines and Pinterest.  When the need arises, I’ve got to be able to stuff my slacker-self back into Pandora’s Box and get cracking.

Not so easily done when you work from home, as Marissa Mayer discovered in the trenches at Yahoo.

Personally, I think Yahoo employees should be grateful to have a taskmaster like Marissa.  If I had the benefit of someone breathing down my neck - forcing me to maximize every nanosecond of my day – I’d be on that catamaran right now instead of just daydreaming about it.  With a tough boss and a padded room for my kids, I could have been somebody, maybe even another Marissa Mayer.   

Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a place to go where someone other than me is focused on my productivity.  The only 'collaborating' I get to do now is with my dog.  And let me tell you, nothing breaks up a ‘creative huddle’ faster than funky dog breath. 

I like being my own boss, but that puts me in the awkward position of having to police my own ‘time theft’.  Seriously, I must cost myself a mint.  I blatantly break my own rules about accessing personal email and certain sailing websites during work hours.  And I can’t seem to stop myself from staring at the contents of my fridge five times a day, which eats up a lot of my time. 

I hate to say it, but the personal calls from my husband are the worst time suck of all.  We babble on like newlyweds, saying things like “What are you doing now?”, “How’s the dog”, and “Did you hear from the plumber?”  Simply texting ‘luv u’ twice a day instead of picking up the phone would save me at least an hour.  But at what cost to love?

When I saw the CEO of Yahoo making such bold moves in order to prevent midday sock sorting and breastfeeding, I was inspired to do the same.  But in my quest for self-discipline and success, I’ve become a nearly intolerable boss, a real shrew.  I can barely stand myself. 

There are days when I’m seriously tempted to either quit, or fire myself.  Would I be better off without me?  It’s hard to decide. 

So I waste a little time once in a while, don’t we all?  It’s part of a balanced lifestyle.  You can’t always ‘lean in’.  As long as I get the job done quickly and done well, I don’t see the harm in looking at sailboat pictures whenever I want – off the clock, of course.

Do you think my Marissa Mayer alter ego will agree, or will she make me let myself go?

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My Yard, the Super Foul, Superfund Site

Chuckle #502 | March 13th, 2013

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I don’t often dwell on the negatives of dog ownership because my dog is clever enough to distract me from his many behavioral flaws with unconditional, slobbery love.  And, because my dog ‘completes me’, I cut him some slack - sometimes a lot more than my husband gets. 

That doesn’t mean I love my husband any less than my dog, I just love them differently. 

Men are often sent to the ‘dog house’ when they misbehave.  I just don’t get that.  My dog’s house, if he had one, would be a palace, and being sent to it would be no punishment at all.  I’d be more likely to send a ‘bad’ husband to the cobweb-infested crawl space or to the terrifying storage area under our porch, where I would never, ever confine my wonderful dog.

Despite playing second fiddle to the dog for the past 8 years, my husband has been won over.  He now agrees that owning a dog is one of life’s truly great experiences.  But he and I still have one Flintstones-sized bone of contention – poop. 

Some disagreements just can’t be swept under the rug.

Unlike my husband, I quickly came to terms with the fact that my yard had become a dog toilet.  My kids play volleyball and I barbeque for friends in this toilet.  I try not to think about it.  Some experiences are better left repressed, like oddly affectionate great uncles and your first French kiss.

A Zen state of excrement denial is pretty easy to maintain during winter.  The poops freeze, no one goes outside, and the backyard can be safely ignored until the first thaw.  This year I got lucky because Nemo dumped 14 inches of snow into my backyard, effectively burying the dog guano for thirty extra, totally liberating days.

Out of sight and out of mind, the buried poops peacefully festered to their hearts' content.  Life was good.  Then the snow began to melt, slowly unveiling my dirty little secret to the world.  My backyard wasn’t just a stool cesspool, it was a Superfund site.

I immediately applied for the EPA’s priority clean-up list in hopes of qualifying for federally assisted remediation.  Even a small grant would help with the decontamination.  Those ‘Doggy Doo NOT!’ scooper services are not cheap.

I was doing everything in my power to fix the problem, short of scooping it myself.

While I waited in vain for a response from the government, my husband accused me of using shady ‘delay tactics’.   He was anxious to start working on the lawn so he could retain his ‘lawn of the year’ title, a neighborhood honor that’s been shamelessly self-awarded for the past 15 years.  My husband complained that the poop situation was preventing him from achieving total lawn dominance.   Not that anyone on our street seems to notice that they're  engaged in a battle to the death for best-looking grass.      

So if he cares so very much, why can’t my husband clean-up some poops himself?  That’s an excellent question. 

Nine years ago we came to an amicable (and, I’m told, legally binding) agreement that ‘poops’ would be my job, and rodents, tech support, plumbing, wiring, audio visual issues and everything else, his job.  This puppy pre-nup seemed like a pretty sweet deal at the time, so I took it.  But I was so in love back then (with the puppy) that I failed to put a renegotiation clause in the contract (much like the Yankees with A-Rod), and as a result, we are both full of regret.  

Me and the Yankees, that is.  My husband’s feeling pretty smug.

Sometimes it’s hard to look objectively past your rose-colored glasses and into the future when you are clutching an adorable puppy to your chest.  I’d have signed anything.  In fact, I should probably go back and make sure that my husband didn’t attach a few unrelated riders, like lifetime foot massages, mandatory Victoria's Secret nights, or worse.

So that’s why I pick up the poop and my husband doesn’t.  My lawyer says I’m contractually obligated. 

The long overdue, much disputed winter clean-up yielded 160 individual ‘deposits’ in various states of decomposition.  That’s a record, by the way.  Some of them were just too far gone to scrape off the grass, so I left them.  I assured my husband that those half dissolved poops would eventually percolate down into the soil and fertilize the lawn. 

He’s not buying it, clever man.  

I may have been tricked into a lifetime of ‘fecal responsibility’, but looking on the bright side, at least I didn’t marry a fool.  My husband might have won this round, but I won the consolation prize:  The dog likes me best.

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My Disappointing Fried Chicken Fantasy

Chuckle #501 | March 6th 2013
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Do you remember your very first ‘bucket’ meal from Kentucky Fried chicken?  A bucket!  No other fast food chain put stuff in a bucket.  That red and white receptacle of joy was pure marketing genius. And that’s not all.  I could eat my mashed potatoes and gravy with a spork, the coolest utensil ever.  

It didn’t even matter that the gravy tasted like glue, because I was eating it with a SPORK! 

I was so easy to please as a child. Now I say obnoxious things like, “There’s too much arugula in my quinoa”, or “I think the risotto might be undercooked, don’t you?”

Back in the 60s, if my mother had a tough day at work the chances were pretty good that we’d have KFC. I’m not proud of this, but there were days when I actually prayed that mom would stagger in the door like a pregnant dairy cow, just so I could savor one of the Colonel’s deliciously deep-fried chicken legs. 

As you can tell from these deeply disturbing fantasies, I’m having a Kentucky Fried Chicken 

moment. 

I can’t move on with my life until I get a chicken fix.  Unfortunately I’ll have to risk my life twice in order to accomplish my goal; once getting to KFC, and once eating the KFC.  And don’t act as if you didn’t know that the unofficial KFC tag line is “if the neighborhood doesn’t get you, the chicken will.” 

The local KFC wasn’t always located in the scariest part of town (and the chicken wasn’t always disappointing).  So what brought this American icon to its knees?  And by that I mean, other than the 4,800 annual deaths directly attributed to eating fried chicken.

Well, corporate greed played a part, as it always does.  A series of inexperienced owners totally messed-up a good thing.  They tried to adapt KFC offerings to meet a perceived change in the American palate.  They introduced grilled chicken and healthy alternatives; then flip-flopped to ribs and ‘extra’ crunchy, but nothing worked. 

All they did was to confuse a nation of fried chicken lovers, and give Boston Market an opening the width of a barn door. 

And there’s always been a portability challenge. It’s relatively easy to eat a burger and fries in the car.  It’s really hard to eat mashed potatoes and bone-in chicken, even with the benefit of a spork.  America had become a nation of road trippers, and ‘finger lickin’ good’ KFC was not dad’s first choice to serve in his new Buick with the slate blue velour upholstery.  There’s absolutely no point to fast food that can’t be eaten in a car. 

Things were looking pretty grim for KFC, and that was before the avian flu pandemic.

Flash forward 20 years and things start looking up for KFC.  They finally stop trying to deny their past and embrace it instead.  They re-focus on fried chicken and people begin to ‘flock’ back to the chain. Michelle Obama does her best to foil the fast food industry comeback, but can’t convince Americans to stop loving lipids.

The infusion of cash allows management to advertise in this year’s super bowl.  And even though the ad was universally mocked, millions of people like me decide to give KFC one more chance.

So here we are in the KFC parking lot, wondering if it’s 100% safe to leave the car.

My kids have never had KFC, so they were pretty worked-up about helping me with the ‘research’ for this column.  For example, when I told my daughter that we were headed to KFC, she shrieked “I don’t want to die!”  I assured her that they’d long since switched to non-hydrogenated oil.  Turns out she wasn’t worried about the chicken. 

The meal surprised us all by being much better than we expected, mostly due to low expectations and residual adrenalin. The Colonel’s super-secret 11 herbs and spices still kick butt, even on the grilled version.  But like many things that feel good at the time, and that you later regret, I still couldn’t respect myself in the morning.

The main problem I have with KFC is an ethical one.  KFC chicken isn’t exactly free range, and it’s sourced from some shady overseas chicken farms that are rumored to use excessive antibiotics and growth hormones.  There could be something to this.  The two thighs in our bucket were so huge that we nicknamed them both ‘Lil’ Ray Lewis’.

I realize that the global demand for chicken and the resulting worldwide poultry shortage has put pressure on KFC.  But some corners just shouldn’t be cut, even by market dominant multinationals. 

Knowing that my red and white ‘receptacle of joy’ is actually a symbol of third world intimidation, deforestation, and terribly sad chickens makes it hard to enjoy my Ray Lewis thighs, no matter how crispy.

Corporate greed has taken all the fun out of fried chicken night - thanks a lot, guys.  My kids feel so bad that I doubt they’ll be giving KFC a ‘second chance’ in twenty years like I did, unless the market leader does something to make the world a better place.  Kids these days are such unforgiving idealists. They will be difficult and demanding future customers.

If KFC doesn’t act soon, they’d better start composing their corporate swan song.  That is, if the swans (in support of the chickens) don’t object.  

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