The Nutcracker debate

Writing a review of the Nutcracker must be torture for a critic. There's really no way not to come off as either a grinch or a pushover. In a recent spate of articles, the Times "debated" the Nutcracker as either
a)the salvation of dance company budgets or
b)the doom of quality ballet in America.

We're definitely Pro-Nuts, taking the kids to see it for the 4th time. Being little New Yorkers, they now compare the performances from year to year. (Last year's Dewdrop was ethereal - a weightless wonder. This year's Candy Cane was the best yet. Tea is always the favorite.)

When we first took my son I feared it was going to be torturous for his then-8 year old soul. He came out beaming with delight. Eager to have justified the ticket price, we said, really? You liked it?
He said “Dancing candy! What’s not to love?”

And that friends, is the last word on the debate.

Bitter is the new Black

Are we over cheerful yet? Can we cut the power of positive thinking and wallow properly in bitter? After all, bitter goes with everything.

Bitter goes with the economy: On the cusp of my 50s, waiting for 25 years of hard work to pay off...we get the biggest recession in decades. Meanhile China is threatening to replace the dollar as world currency with some denomination I can't even pronouce. And my plan for getting out of debt? Waiting for people to die.

Bitter goes with my body: I was looking forward to my 'letting it go' years. Now it looks like I've got to keep fighting, as uber-olders with arms of steel and the discipline of a Viking grace every magazine cover. Demi Moore? Michelle Pfeiffer? Please. Is it too late to convince anyone that my pot belly is actually a pet?

Bitter goes with the weather: Perpetual rain in the northeast is drowning us in muck. Perpetual drought in the deep south is eradicating the soil. Which makes fruit bitter. Perfect.

Bitter goes with my marriage: I'm entering my husband in Olympic complaining. His mascot? Eeyore.

Bitter goes with the holidays. I sang the national anthem at a 4th of July party -- to universal acclaim. My husband's reaction was to ask "Why do you do that?" So I told him the bitter truth: It beats listening to other people sing it.

Okay, my friend in the office says I'm too bitter and I have to end this on a happy note. So let's see. The kids are healthy and away at camp. Harry Potter movie #6 is next week. And oh yeah, I have a friend at the office who cares enough to hate it when I'm bitter, but laughs anyway.
Crap. Now I feel better. Better clashes with everything.

Boys R Stinky

About a month ago my 12 year old daughter had 4 friends over for a spend-the-night. It was exactly what I expected -- 9 hours of non-stop giggling, snacking, screaming at a scary movie, group decisions about 'what we're going to do now' and a 3 a.m. raid on the donuts -- my arrival at which made one girl quake in fear until I asked whether they'd left me one. Exhausted, frowsy, and still dear friends, they all left at 10 the next morning and I'd felt I'd had my friends over, too.

Last night my newly 11 year old boy had five friends for a sleep-over. My unbiasesed, cooly anthropological conclusion? Boys are stinky. Every single one had a DS, of course, and mysteriously, they could all tell which identical white DS was theirs, whose dropped identical white stylus was whose, and whether the power cord on the left of the sofa or the right of the sofa was theirs. Whatever.
They played Wii and some game they can all download on the DS at the same time, and spent so much time bossing each other about what to do with their imaginary fighting creatures, screaming in occasional victory and telling each other to 'shut up' that I had to leave the room.

Is this normal? I asked my husband. Are they having fun? Are they getting along or should I send them home?
This is what boys do, he assured me.
Then you go in there. I don't understand it.

At 2:30 they woke me from a doze playing flashlight tag, after I told them it was too small an apartment for flashlight tag. They asked me where the toy click gun and the light saber were 10 seconds after I wrenched them from sweaty hands and hid them in my room. They yelled at each other to shut up some more, and giggled fitfully whenever someone said 'fart'.

Apparently it was all okay because they lived through the night, although I told them a 1, 2, 3, and 4 am to hush. At 5 a.m. I told them to shut up.

Exactly one child brushed his teeth and two of them never even changed clothes.
Strangest of all was the food. At midnight, none of them wanted a donut. This morning they had left an entire bag of potato chips and an entire bag of Tostitos. There were peanut M&Ms still in the bowl!
My son, who must be on his 20th straight hour of video games, (It's his birthday, after all) assures me that everyone had a good time. I'm going to have to take his word for it.

How to make it when money's tight

I heard a "Financial Advisor" on the TV this morning -- have you caught any of these guys talking? Somewhere between "out of touch" and "completely insane."
Omigod.
His advice was "calculate your expenses for the next five years and take that much money out of your stock portfolio and put it in cash." What!!!! Who has five years of expenses in savings? Financial Advisors. Brokers. That's who. The guys who got us into the mess in the first place. Poor Ace Greenberg, busted from 15 billion to 911 million. I weep.

Want some real advice from a real used-to-be-middle-class-now -I'm-not-so-sure mom?

Here's my vitals: I'm working, (for the moment) and have insurance (for the moment) so I'm still on the treadmill so to speak. I have a home equity loan, a car loan, three credit card payments, and I live in a co-op in New York, where nothing is cheap. Take that as disclosure.


I've run my own company for 18 years and for 14 of those years money was too tight to mention, as the song goes, and I've skipped more than a few paychecks in my life. So here's what I do when it gets tight:

Check your credit cards for those 'automatic' charges. Over time you forget about the 10 bucks a month for the kid's penguin website, or 15 for netflix -- but it adds up. Get rid of it.

Catch up on your health insurance files. There's always some doctor bill I forgot to put in for, and that can bring in an extra 50-100 when you least expect it.

Discover the library. DVDs are free to check out there. Oh, and they have books, too.

Go generic brand on anything you can stand to: you're probably already doing this.

Cook. A $10 roast chicken is good for two meals and soup afterwards. Make your coffee at
home, pack your snacks for work (healthier anyway), pack your lunches.

Pick your luxury: taxi? haircut? movie? Pick one.

Get to know your neighborhood tailor and shoe repairman: they can make old stuff look new enough to love again. But watch the charges -- it's not that cheap!

Iron. Wash your shirts, hang them to dry (they wrinkle less) and get some of that Downy wrinkle release spray. It works great, your clothes will look fine, and you'll save a TON.

MOST IMPORTANT:
Write down your budget.

I keep an excel file (paper works fine) of my income and my expected expenses.
I break it out by week (okay, I'm a little freaky) but you should look at it at least in two-week increments because that's how your bills run due: those at the first of the month and those at the end.

Start with your expected income at the top and Total that.

Then write down the absolute Must Pays that are Fixed Amounts -- the same every month:
Rent, electric, phone, car payment, insurance, credit card payment minimums, whatever.
Total your Fixed Amounts

If your income doesn't cover your Fixed Amounts, you have major decisions to make: move to a cheaper place? turn off the phone? sell the car or give up insurance?
No small amount of husbandry will really help with these major expenses. If you can make a second income, try. And try talking to the credit card companies. If you pay on time, they can try to help you. If you miss payments, they get really pissy.

Next write down your Variable Expenses: groceries, church donations, dues, those sudden checks the school needs for picture day, clothes, etc.
Your Variable Expenses will -- well, vary -- from month to month. Some of them you can control. Look for little things, like magazine subscriptions, that don't seem very expensive when you do them, but really add up. As my mother taught me, "strain a gnat, swallow a camel." (It's from the Bible.) It means watch out for the little expenses and you'll have enough left for the big ones.

If a little extra comes in one month, pay off more than the minimum on your credit cards. Every little bit helps. Some people pay off their cards twice a month -- if you have online bill pay this is easier, and it helps keep the interest down. Interest charges steal $100s out of you every month.

All this takes some planning and maturity. Is it fun? Of course not. But can you do it? People do it all over the world and have done it for centuries. Only in the last couple of decades have we become spoiled by prosperity. Conscious spending, like motherhood, is one of those duties that terrifies you at first, then makes you feel accomplished and righteous, and finally, becomes part of your character. Will you start sounding like your grandmother who talked about the depression and saved every scrap? Rather her than another pompous financial advisor.

Good luck to us all.

Channel Surfing the Bible

I broke my kneecap and spent weeks in bed trolling the TV channels. Little wonder the major networks are in trouble – there’s only so much reality any sane person can stomach.

So in a classic moment of bargaining I picked up the Bible and started reading it. I think there was a definite element of “I’ll read your book if you’ll fix my knee,” at least in the beginning.

I kind of had the gist of it -- 45 years of church gets you a fairly decent grounding in the main points -- but really reading it – without napping – from the first words -- uncovers some real surprises.

Things that don’t seem Bibl-ish at all. For example, in Genesis they mention that (I paraphrase) “The sons of God liked the women of Earth and started mating with them – which begat the race of Giants known as the Anakim.” I’m not making this up.

But once you get past these oddities, the whole book of Genesis is action packed. Most of the stories you know – Noah, Sodom and Gommorrah, Lot, Isaac, Abraham, Jacob and Esau . We’re well into Moses before the chapter’s up.

Which makes Genesis easily the best book of the Bible. It’s like HBO – all of It’s quality, It changes all the time to a new story, and It moves right along. Excellent! I finish Genesis, and I’m thinking, this is great, why didn’t I read this sooner? And then I hit Exodus.

Which starts out okay, but quickly devolves into something closer to the Home Decorating channel, interrupted by Jerry Springer.

Chapter after chapter the family conflict repeats: The Israelites bitch and moan about the accommodations in the desert –“why did you bring us out here to wander around, we could’ve stayed nice safe slaves in Egypt. It’s manna day in and manna day out.” Can you believe it? Bread from heaven and they complain? You know what God does about that? Pelts them with doves. Seriously. He says, “You want meat? I’ll give you so much meat you’ll puke.” And this is him in his good mood.

Moses, the negotiator, gets sick of them all and says to God, Why did you put me in charge of these whiners? So God says, fine, I’ll kill 12,000 or so. To which Moses replies, no, no, don’t do that, I was just tired. They’re fine, really. Great people. Your people. Let’s don’t kill them. How about we build you a temple instead?

And God gets all like, “Well, if you insist,”, and then gets REALLY SPECIFIC about the décor. 12 cubits hung with purple cloth trimmed in gold with an eagle affixed to the top and swags of gold in between the columns, and yada yada yada. For pages and pages. It’s all about the curtains. Did the weavers and dyers union underwrite this one? Because it’s product placement for days.

I almost quit reading. But I slog on and get to Leviticus. I’m thinking at least the temple’s built, we can move on to bigger issues. No such luck.

If Exodus is the Decorating channel, Leviticus is the Food Channel. Or more specifically, the Barbeque channel. It’s a guide to what to burn to gain forgiveness of each of your sins. Sin by sin, animal by animal, entrail by entrail. No wonder Orthodox Jews don’t consume any blood. They need it to sprinkle around and burn. It’s gory, repetitive, and kind of creepy. You just have to ask yourself why God would need people to do this. Having never gored a Bull and poured its blood on my head, I’m fuzzy on the intended effect, and rather grateful John the Baptist switched to water. All I can think is, I hope they have good shampoo.

27 chapters of this and I’ve finally gotten to Numbers. True to its title, Numbers is the Census Channel. It names the 12 tribes and divvies up the goods for each. Oh, and God gets mad and wipes a few thousand of the chosen off the planet. That was one time Moses couldn’t talk him down. Bummer.

Deuteronomy is where I am now. It’s a lot of summation, repeating the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) twice, and yammering on about traditions and holding on through the generations. Definitely the History Channel, and not that interesting, but you know what? My knee is better. Who knows how I’ll be by the time Joshua Judges Ruth?

Spa-mie, Hate Me

So night before last, my eleven-year old declares, "Mommie, it's spa night for you. I've run you a nice bath, I'm going to wash your back, and then I have this lovely baby lotion to give you a massage." And she did, and tucked me into bed and loved me because I am clearly the best mommie in the whole world. (And because I made meatloaf on Sunday.)

And today she hates me.

Would she comb her hair for school? "Oh please," says she, with enough sarcasm to melt through the decks of Ripley's spaceship, (Alien, remember?) "Do I ever do that?" Will she wear a long sleeved shirt? O-KAY, but only because I have the unmitigated gall to suggest it. Huff. Huff.


Now, I know for a fact I never spoke to my mother in this way. We were raised in a regime of terror. All my mother had to do was lift one eyebrow and give us THAT LOOK and my sisters and I were reduced to quivering blobs of obedience. Human Shitzus.

Do I credit the difference with my daughter to some fatal lack of skill on my part? Perhaps my devotion to the New Laxity in Parenting? Not so much. I think it has more to do with the fact that, growing up, mom had the car. Here in NYC, my daughter can walk home from school if she has to. But in my hometown, walking all the way home from school to our little subdivision was unthinkable -- tantamount to crossing the moors in the dark of a new moon, wolfhounds in pursuit. When a woman has that much power over you, you play nice.

To gain equivalent power these days you have to encourage your child to develop a serious passion for something you can easily withhold. For my son it was Pokemon cards. If he stepped out of line, ha! The collection was ours! Worked like a charm until we forgot to give them back for a couple of months and he completely lost interest. That’s the trouble with these parenting tricks. You have to stay on top of them. Like the time I tried my husband’s trick of counting to 5. It’s simple in theory – if they don’t hop to when you ask them to do something, you say, “You’ve got until 5” and start counting. I saw him do it, it worked like a charm, so one day when the kids were too noisy in the car, I thought, okay, my turn. “Quiet down now!” No response. “1…2…3…4…5!” I boomed in my most stentorian tone. No response. I turned to hubby and said, “now what?” He said, “I don’t know – you’re not supposed to get to 5!” Now he tells me.

I’m sticking with meatloaf.

The Return of the 23 Pounds Thinner Blogger….

Dear Readers,

Sorry to have been persona non writa. Allow me to explain.

Two years ago my business partner and I got a routine blood test for insurance purposes. I’m 46, in decent health, I like veggies, no big deal I assumed.

Well it turns out my liver was about to shut down. Apparently two enzymes that are normally 35 and 40 were 630 and 750! Scared the living you know what out of me...

After consulting two top liver specialists in New York (we may have mega-taxes, but by golly you can get multiple specialists on the phone), getting a liver biopsy (really big needle, really scary, avoid this) they tell me it’s “idiopathic autoimmune hepatitis.” In English that’s “Your liver is wonky, we don’t know what caused it, and we have no idea how to make it better.” Idiopathetic.

They offered to put me on Prednisone (a common steroid that is the strongest psychosis-causing prescription you can buy – it causes massive weight gain while it destroys bone and makes you bark at people in public!) and Immunosuppressants.
Great idea. Suppress a New Yorker’s immune system.

I said “for how long?” They said, “For life.”

I said, “no.”

I seemed to remember that the liver is the most regenerative organ in the body. So I found a French doctor who practices naturopathic medicine – he prescribed plant bud drops instead of pharmaceuticals.
First he took every kind of blood test known to man.

Then he took me off of Wheat (Aagh!) Dairy (hm...) Sugar (Oh no!) Red Meat (ok) and Alcohol (no problem). He gave me a mix of vitamins and nutrients to boost my immune system and a range of plant bud drops to take every day and off I went.
It was hard. But he’s a triple-Virgo, so you do what he tells you.

This was in October. Now it’s May. I just got my new numbers back. I’ve lost 22 pounds (which feels pretty fab at 46), my liver numbers are now 39 and 49 (almost there!) and amazingly, I have energy and feel good – not creaky and old.

I haven’t written about it because a) it’s taken a lot of my daylight hours to readjust my diet and b) I couldn’t find the sunny side of it – I just couldn’t – until now.

But I’m writing now and if you’re still with me, here’s the message: you don’t have to feel exhausted after 40, you don’t have to run on fumes or accept the gradual decline of your body and the creep of weight. And you don’t have to take a doctor’s advice if it doesn’t seem right. Not even a fancy New York specialist.

This hasn’t been easy – anyone who tells you a major dietary change is ‘quick and easy’ is lying to you for profit. If I hadn’t had really strong motivation (eat that cookie? Or see my grandchildren?) I wouldn’t have been able to do it.

But here’s what I got when I gave up all the unhealthy food and lost 22 pounds; I lost having to think about my weight all day. I had no idea how much mental capacity I was devoting to wondering if people thought I looked awful, trying to overcome being judged on my physical appearance by being charming (how many calories did I burn by waving my hands a lot?) and feeling apologetic because I knew I ‘used to be pretty.’ I have more energy and I also have more time now to think about other things because I’m not obsessed about my weight. And that may be the healthiest result of all.