Phoebe Kate

If you have a kid of some description in your world — son or daughter, grandchild, niece, nephew, godchild, offspring of your best friend – this post is for you.  (If you don’t have a kid around, well, you are one of the few who are able to go through life with their good self-image and their sanity intact.)

Children are observant — selectively so, though.  They don’t observe that their room is a mess, the dog’s water dish is bone-dry, the clock says 10 and their bedtime is 9 or that it’s pouring rain outside and they should find their boots in that mess of a room and put them on their feet.  They don’t observe the homework assignment written in 3-foot tall letters on the blackboard or the “QUIET” sign in the library or their list of chores affixed to the refrigerator door.  And speaking of refrigerators, kids also don’t observe that there’s an already-open carton of milk or package of bologna or brick of cheddar and use them instead of hacking into a new one.

What children observe with excruciating exactitude is YOU.  Hey, haven’t we always pissed and moaned throughout life that we weren’t the center of the attention we thought we were entitled to?  We weren’t Teacher’s pet or the most popular boy or girl in school, and the people we dated didn’t have eyes only for us, and the boss gave some schmuck the promotion we deserved, and our spouse or significant other is so busy with the daily grind that we’re last on their to-do list. 

But with the addition of a kid to your world, all that changes.  Oh, lucky you.

Recently, I heard from the Kid In The House (henceforth to be referred to by the acronym KITH) that I have:

     –big boobs (the KITH inquired if they were real or fake)

     –no upper lip (the good news is that I do have a lower one so I’m not lipless)

     –a double chin

     –funny skin on my hands

     –very short fingers

     –dark roots

I was also informed by my unfailingly attentive KITH that I smelled like bananas (???) and the second piercings in my ears are crooked.  After painfully close examination, the KITH declared that the piercings aren’t actually crooked but my ears are and the lobes are two totally different sizes – “Ewwwwww” was the parting comment.

That’s me, folks — the lady made out of odd parts with half a mouth and Pamela Anderson boobs.

Ha.

–phoebe kate 

Thanks to an 11-year-old informant who keeps me au courant on such things, I’m becoming an authority on the courtship rituals of fifth graders.  Here are ten surefire ways you can tell if a boy likes you.

     1.) He whispers something to his friends and they all stare at you and laugh.

     2.) He never speaks to you except to say something about him and his girlfriend.  Ahh, the old Other Woman routine.  Of course, there’s none.  He’s just saying that to make you jealous.  Things are looking hopeful for you now. 

     3.) He follows you around making rude noises — the ruder, the better.

     4.) You catch him rifling through your desk/locker/bookbag.  He’s not a petty pilferer, of course — he’s just getting more intimately acquainted with the object of his affection.

     5.) He sticks out his foot as you walk down the hall and trips you.

     6.) In P.E., he throws the basketball into your stomach instead of the bucket.

     7.) In art class, he always sits behind you so he can glue paper to your hair.

     8.) He belches and/or breaks wind and/or throws up when he’s near you.

     9.) In the cafeteria, he spills his plate of beanie weenies on your head as he passes by where you’re sitting.  Everybody knows that true love turns the male of the species into a total klutz.

    10.) He pelts you with things.  What he throws is very important.  If the relationship is still casual, it’ll be pencils, erasers, candy wrappers, his crumpled-up D-minus math test.    If things are heating up, his projectiles of choice will be well-chewed pieces of gum from his very own mouth or wads of Kleenex after he’s blown his nose into it.  Now you know he’s serious about you.  Congratulations!

–phoebe kate           

The phone woke me at 6:24 this morning.  Phone calls at funny hours are seldom — no, never — the harbinger of glad tidings.  I mean, who rings anyone up in the dreary dark of pre-dawn to say,”I’m in perfect health and in total control of my world, my life is wonderful and everything is going great”?  You know you’re going to hear something you wish you didn’t have to and the only question is, on a scale of 1 to 10, how awful will the news be?

So, at 6:24 I shoot bolt upright in bed with an adrenalin rush sufficient to give one apoplexy, mind racing with all the grim possibilities (with 2 kids in college, the possibilities are frighteningly endless), and grab the phone.

It’s my daughter and she’s stranded in Ohio.

Ohio?

I thought she was in college in NC.

Now, I knew she’d flown to Columbus on Thursday to spend the long MLK holiday weekend with her boyfriend.  The last I heard from her, a couple days ago, she was going to be back on Tuesday AM for classes.

Instead, the wicked Midwestern winter weather has kept her hostage for 36 hours.  Her first flight was canceled, she was rebooked on a later flight but it was so late arriving in Columbus that she wouldn’t be able to make her connecting flight in Charlotte so she had to rebook again and that flight was cancelled at the last minute due to weather.  She rebooked again for the earliest flight out this morning and you know what happened with that, hence the 6:24 call to good ol’ Mom to say she now knows how the Tom Hanks character in Terminal felt.

She’s rebooked on a 2:00 flight…but will Ohio let her go?  It’s beginning to remind me of the old “Twilight Zone” episode with an impossibily young William Shatner stranded in a diner putting pennies in a diabolical fortune telling machine and asking, “Can I leave today?  Can I leave tomorrow?” 

Omigod.  The diner was in Ohio… 

Watch that signpost up ahead…you just crossed over into –

–phoebe kate 

…where the saying “It cost me an arm and a leg” came from?

Luana Luconi Winner, a well-known portrait artist whose studio is located in Raleigh’s marvelous Art Space, explained the familiar expression’s origin when I stopped in recently to check out her latest work. 

Seems that in the 1800s, a widespread demand developed among the general populace to have their portraits painted, like the nobility of old.  A company in New York sent artists out across the country to meet this need.  The cost of the portrait depended on how many body parts the client wanted to be included in the painting.  

The basic portrait, showing head and shoulders, was obviously the cheapest for the customer because it was the quickest and easiest for the artist.  If, however, a client wanted more shown — arms, hands, legs, etc. – the price increased incrementally with each addition due to the greater time, effort and skill required by the artist.  Hence, a full-figure portrait would indeed cost an arm and a leg…and a hand and a foot… and a hip and a thigh…and a knee and an ankle and a – 

Well, anyway, you get my point. 

Thanks, Luana.  And I’m saving up, limb by limb, for my future portrait 

–phoebe kate              

A day of obit blogging, it seems — and with polar opposites as subject matter, too.  

Though she achieved household-name fame as Bob Newhart’s on-screen wife in a successful TV sitcom in the 70s, Suzanne Pleshette remained a largely under-utilized and under-appreciated actress.  Originally a stage performer, she replaced Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker on Broadway in the 60s, a performance that as a little girl (and an aspiring thespian) I was fortunate enough to see.  Her best and most memorable film was Hitchcock’s The Birds, in a splendidly subtle and nuanced role as the jilted ex of the heroine’s new love interest that far outshines all the other performances in the film. 

After that, the work she got was mostly commercial drivel — always well-executed in her customary highly professional way and well-paying, I certainly hope for her sake, but clearly not worthy of her time or her prodigious talent.  Her lack of fantastic roles, however, was hardly her fault.  She was an actress whose dramatic and comedic flair was designed for an earlier era — think Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy having witty repartee or lovers’ spats with the male screen idols of the past.  She’d have fitted in well there. I can see Pleshette in Elizabeth Taylor’s roles in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  

Like an iceburg, though, the depth and breadth of her talent remained under the surface and largely undiscovered.  Not that she moped over the lack of fabulous opportunities, apparently.  “I don’t sit around and wait for great parts,” she once said. “I’m an actress, and I love being one, and I’ll probably be doing it till I’m 72…”

A pity she didn’t get her wish.  She died yesterday of respiratory failure at her home in Los Angeles. 

Your passing is our loss, gifted lady.  You were a real trouper and you’ll be missed.

–phoebe kate