Category Archives: Notes of a She-Hack

What we do on a Friday night these days

After swimming in the pool with his dad and Giga until he turned blue, Declan went to sleep earlier than ever (and longer than ever) before. Therefore, I finally got a chance to update the Little Brother’s web site while Dan flipped back and forth between an Indians game and a rerun of The Sound of Music.

Our cultural schizophrenia isn’t limited to musicals vs. sporting events around here. I’ve also been collecting space songs lately, because Declan has to be exposed to every musical genre there is or ever has been before he turns three. I made a cosmic playlist that you can listen to:

Launch it.

Of course, I’m sad that I can’t seem to find “Galaxy” by WAR or Mr. Spaceman by the Byrds, but I’ll keep looking…. Any other suggestions for songs that I’ve missed?

P.S. Hilly Kristal passed away this week. He was the proprietor of New York’s CBGBs – which closed after a dispute with its landlord last year.

If you came here looking for random suggestions about things you can do on a Friday or Saturday night, click here.

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Charting Cyberspace

Here are a few selections from my week in web stumbles and ‘net exploration.

Moms
In light of the recent Mattel/Fisher Price recalls of toys produced with lead-based paint, two different blogging moms have taken the initiative to put together lists of toy companies with higher safety standards. Check out the lead-free toys lists at My Two Boys and Mamanista. If you don’t know about the risks of lead paint, particularly to very young children, you can read about them here.

Moms in our playgroup compared notes on Time-outs and other forms of toddler discipline on Saturday, and then I found out that Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution, has recently released The No-Cry Discipline Solution: Gentle Ways to Encourage Good Behavior Without Whining, Tantrums, and Tears.
Her web site also has a fair amount of good, free advice.

Fun
It took surprisingly little time for me to create myself as a character on The Simpsons. (Pictured above.) Dan made one for himself, too. (Right.)

Oddee has a genuinely funny list of 15 unfortunately placed ads.

Space
The space shuttle may be the big news of the week, but there’s always so much going on in the world of space news, like the potential discovery of a new “invisible” form of dark matter.

In a couple of weeks, folks in the Western U.S. may get a rare look at the Aurigid Meteor shower.

There is also a cool feature with pictures of the top 10 views of earth.

Environment
The first ever Blog Action Day will be devoted to environmental issues this October.

The imaginative people at Craftster challenged their community to come up with recycled uses for plastic shopping bags.

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West Side Story, Chapter 2

I got stuck in an automatic car wash on West Broad Street* two days ago. I input the code numbers to make it go, the thing pulled me in about 20 feet, then stopped. Trapped in the somewhat foreign space of my stepfather’s Crown Victoria, I watched the spindle of fat, soapy rags twirl through an entire cycle and realized that I couldn’t take the keys out of the ignition without putting the car in park. Being on a track that demanded the car stay in neutral, this didn’t seem like the smart choice. Instead, I chose to lean on the horn like the most annoying person who ever lived and hoped that my oil-stained white knight would arrive soon.

My mother called me on my cell phone at that moment. Learning of my peril while listening to me beep for several minutes without getting any response, she serenaded me with, “Did she ever return? No, she never returned, and her fate is still unlearned/Though for years there were fond hearts watching/for the little girl stuck in the car wash who never returned.”

She tried to call the BP station for me while I kept on honking, and after about 10 minutes, a young man finally showed up to help. After a series of “turn the wheel this way” and “hit the gas!” instructions, I wound up safely back in the right place and miraculously, without any scratches on the car. He sent me back though with an upgraded car wash, which is apparently more expensive because you get to sit there and watch yourself get encased inside of a rainbow of sherbet-colored foam instead of plain white soap.

Yesterday, on the same stretch of road, I stopped at a traffic light close to the outerbelt, right at the moment that an ambulance and firetruck pulled over to examine a person lying on ground beside the offramp. I saw an EMT pick up one of the person’s arms and drop it. As it flopped to the ground, I decided that I would add an errand or two to my trip, which had been to simply ship a camcorder back to Canon that they have now failed to fix twice. I didn’t find anything about this person in the paper today, so I’m hoping that means the man or woman (I couldn’t tell which) is okay, or recovering from whatever happened somewhere.

When I finally drove home, I soaked in the friendly sight of Westgate’s neighborly-looking streets. A young woman in a ruffled blue shirt and spectacles walked a three-legged dog in front of these 1940s homes, where canna and petunias and sunflowers are embroidered into the landscape. There is enough obvious house pride around here to keep us feeling the peer pressure to weed and fix our crumbling front step. As commercial or institutional as West Broad Street can feel, Westgate is equally welcoming.

Dan keeps joking that living on the West side is like being in the witness relocation program. In our old quarters, closer to North High Street*, he couldn’t walk ten feet without bumping into some musician, artist, know-it-all, music fan, cult of personality or new or old friend. I have run into someone I know out in the neighborhood (in this case, at the hardware store) exactly once since we moved here last November. Dan, of course, has run into a few more, but nowhere near the level he did around our old stomping ground.

This is probably a blessing this summer, because we certainly can’t go to a festival or music event without his experiencing some degree of interrogation about what happened to Little Brother’s and what he’s planning to do next. Around the closing, it was very touching when so many people said “I’m so sorry,” and a few people actually cried about losing the club, or because they hurt for us, knowing that despite Dan’s veteran status as a music man, our life as a family is very new and financial instability is scary. It is touching, but exhausting.

For the sake of trying to figure out how we are going to rebalance our lives, it’s good to get stuck in a West Broad Street car wash.

* For those not familiar with Columbus, West Broad Street is the primary east-west road that runs through Columbus, while High Street is its North-South counterpart. The two street intersect in the center of Downtown, where the Ohio Statehouse is located.

Life soundtrack
: Doc Watson, My Old Country Home, “The Ship That Never Returned”
Doc Watson - My Dear Old Southern Hom - The Ship That Never Returned

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Childhood dreams

Here is a stab at my first blog collaboration, with its topic, “Childhood Dreams,” courtesy of the Crazy Hip Blog Mamas.

This is a tough topic to write about without sputtering into platitudes and cliches, so I’m going to take it literally, and write about a few day and night dreams I had that I can still remember.

Most of my early childhood memories took place in a house on the water in New Jersey, where the backyard, house and front driveway were all bordered by feather-topped bulrushes. My friends and I would taunt each other about seeing the faces of monsters and masked people poking through the tall reeds, sometimes until we actually started to believe that we could see them.

Once, while playing with friends in an ocean cove on a beach in Sea Bright, I stepped in something squishy and awful. Fear of Jellyfish made me jump and swim back to shore without looking back. An hour or two later, two boys I knew had retrieved a small squid from the area. It was partially decapitated – a cephalopod Nearly Headless Nick that they gruesomely stuck inside of a clear sandwich bag and gleefully taunted me with. The sight of it wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the realization that I was likely the squid’s killer. I started to stay out of deep water, believing that a mother squid would soon be after me for revenge.

When fall came and hurricanes flooded my backyard, I lay in my bed and imagined a mother squid, laying in wait in the cul-de-sac behind my house, waiting for the water to rise high enough that she could exact her revenge.

Life soundtrack: Hollywood Symphony Orchestra, Hollywood Symphony Orchestra Selected Hits, Theme From 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Hollywood Symphony Orchestra - Hollywood Symphony Orchestra Selected=

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Interpret this!

Last night I dreamed that I was out at a club with the judges from American Idol, watching a band from Argentina. Everyone was raving about their performance, but particularly the title of their song: “I Am the Pope of Your Embarrassment.”

Then Declan woke me up. I tried to fall back asleep to find out what happened next, but it didn’t work out.

I think this song needs to be written.

Life soundtrack: Dinah Washington, The Complete Dinah Washington On Mercury, Vol.7, “Dream”
Dinah Washington - The Complete Dinah Washington On Mercury, Vol.7 (1961) - Dream

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Moon drops and perfect days

It was a recipe for chaos: the Little Brother’s 10-year anniversary and Declan’s 2-year birthday fell on the same weekend. The class that Dan is taking at OSU had a field trip planned for the entire day of said birthday and then, of course, the club’s anniversary took on a whole new significance when its closing was announced. It felt like Dec’s birthday was going to get sucked up by everything else in our lives.

Instead, the appearance of old friends and reunited bands at the club really put Dan at greater ease than he’s been at weeks. The whole weekend felt like a vacation. Dec and I spent most of his birthday on our own, taking phone calls from singing relatives, opening the cards and gifts that people had sent to him and enjoying each other’s company. I let him lead the day, happily fulfilling requests like “let’s hug and snuggle” and “read it again, mommy.”

When a packet of glow in the dark planets arrived in a package from my dad, I dutifully put them up in order on Dec’s bedroom wall. Because he’s watched a Science Channel special about the formation of our solar system on the DVR several times, he was able to name every planet after I went through them with him once or twice. Uranus tripped him up a few times, but he’s now an expert who runs into the room yelling “panets!” several times a day, then points at each one expectantly: “Murkee, mommy? Wenus, mommy? Earf, mommy?” And yes, the set does include the recently demoted “Fluto.”

Most of the adults in his life don’t remember learning the planets until well into elementary school, so again, he is blowing our minds.

His Giga (my mom) got him an amazing blue and silver indoor/outdoor spaceship tent and a Moon in My Room. The latter slipped from his hands as my mom and I were putting a play kitchen from Target together that involved approximately 6,231 screws.

“Baby dropped the moon,” he told us.

Everyone tells me that two is a magical age. And it is. We had a little cake with a number two candle when Dan got home. Declan was every bit as excited to pretend to make his daddy dinner in his play kitchen as he was to sit inside his tent and pretend to be launching into space.

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All good things

As The Sopranos goes into its final three-episode countdown, actors keep making appearances on talk shows, reminding us that they first started filming the series ten years ago. That was right around the same time that Dan was holding staple-pulling, linoleum-laying and painting parties in a former library and used furniture shop, then gritting his teeth at commission and city council meetings as he encountered an unexpected and expensive fight to rezone the building.

Today, I also realized that 1997 was the year that Harry Potter first appeared on bookshelves in England, and his final volume is due this summer. (I was deeply relieved when I read this article on Salon a few weeks back, and found out that I wasn’t the only woman in her thirties who is steeling herself against the loss of these vivid characters.)

All I can say is, as far as endings go, at least we’re in good company.

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Believe the hype

There’s an interview with Dan about Little Brother’s history here.

Yesterday he was asked (by a different reporter) if the announcement of the club’s closure might be some elaborate media ruse designed to manipulate the landlord into letting him stay. If that were the case, it would have needed to have happened over a week ago.

Dan truly thought that if he could get the landlord to sit down and talk in a room, something could be ironed out, but the man and his lawyer flatly refused any negotiations. It was basically presented as “you can sign this document or be prepared to be asked to leave.” At that point – the one when a person you’ve maintained a working relationship with (however frayed) for several years won’t even look you in the eye – how do you fight to stay? I know people do it. I also know that there are those who can sleep well at night as they tell themselves that “business is business” as they make bloodless decisions that profoundly affect the lives of the people they are financially entangled with. My husband isn’t one of those people. And he’s definitely not a person who can deal with those sort of people.

I had fantasies where Declan and I stormed the landlord’s office (he has never met us so he wouldn’t know to hide the way he did when Dan showed up), and asked him, if he couldn’t face my husband, to face us – two people who count on Dan – and justify his actions. To look at us and tell us that he hadn’t worked out details with Dan before disappearing behind his glacial attorney. It would have been manipulative (not to mention very daytime TV drama). But if that harebrained scheme somehow miraculously worked, then where would we be?

We’d still be in a business where the owner of the building had clearly demonstrated that he has no understanding or regard for what the club is, was and has been. It has never simply served a small group of people from the neighborhood nightly – it has always drawn people to the area from all over the city, and sometimes even the state or region. (And obviously musicians from all over the world.) Unfortunately, it will be long gone before civic leaders and the landlord realize this. And I do believe that eventually, they will realize this. All of you Richard Florida groupies who research the reasons cities like Austin or Pittsburgh have an easier time attracting the “Creative Class,” put this one in the minus column.

So… anyone have a line on an ice cream truck?

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End of an era

We have had a rough couple of weeks. You can read about it here (my husband’s business).

There is too much to say about this. Closing looks basically inevitable at this point, it’s just a question of when. After many sleepless nights, I am working on at least trying to do something positive and focus on collecting and preserving the legacy of the place.

Within hours of putting out this notice through Internet channels on Friday, we received about 25 emails where people laid out some of their memories, and they keep coming in. There are some incredibly moving testimonials that aren’t just about particular shows, but the deep sense of personal loss people feel over the shutdown of their countercultural home – a place that helped to shape some part of their identity (for better or for worse), even if they haven’t come though its doors in some time.

We’ve had our moments where we’ve lamented the shows our son won’t get to see. And the fact that he won’t be old enough to remember running around on the stage where his parents got married. I cannot imagine ever wanting to lay eyes on it again after we have left. (This is assuming that whoever is signing the lease that is undermining and forcing Dan out might leave the stage standing. I almost hope they do not.) I definitely will not miss the stress Dan has endured under this landlord for years.

At any rate, these are going to be a long last couple of months.

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