A Cautionary Tale

I have never complained about the United States Post Office.  I mean, of course the lines are long around Christmas, and I think my paychecks from movies and TV should arrive faster, but other than that, I conduct business (you know, paying bills and whatnot) just about completely electronically.

I am now complaining.  I have never seen such a bunch of blithering idiots in my LIFE.  You're going to just LOVE this saga.

On December 19, I got a package from one set of my in-laws.  Also in my mailbox that day was one of those little pink slips that tells you there's a package.  However, it was entirely blank.  So I assumed that the mail person had made a mistake...I already had a package, right?

Well, on Tuesday...yes, that would be Tuesday, the 22nd of January...I got another little pink slip.  This one WAS filled out.  Complete with date of first attempt at delivery...DECEMBER 19th.  Yup.  they brought it back ONE MONTH LATER.  Now, there was NO reason not to leave it with Jimmy the super, since it didn't say "needs signature" or anything like that.  But who knows.

So I called the 800 number for the USPS, and read them the tracking number for the package, which turned out to be wrong.  We tracked the thing down, and I got a promise that it would be redelivered the next day. 

It wasn't.  I called back.  It wasn't delivered yesterday either...in fact, it didn't even get on the truck where it was supposed to be.  Wasn't delivered today, either...and I know damn well the truck was there because someone else got a pink slip for a package.  And I had left a note on the mailbox saying PLEASE RING BELL AT APT. 5E FOR DELIVERY.  The note was missing.  There was no pink slip.

I have called my local post office, which doesn't answer the phone.  I have spoken to the 800 USPS number every single day.  Today, just for the sake of variety, I spoke to the NYC Consumer Affairs Department, which helpfully informed me that my post office is the worst in the city.  This doesn't make things better.

So I think the package is being returned to sender today, which isn't a disaster, since it must be a Christmas gift from another set of in-laws and probably contained chocolates and mixed nuts, which I would very much like to have, but which are certainly not desperately important to my life and continued well-being.  However, the whole thing is just INFURIATING.

Therefore, I exhort you all:  Use FedEx.  Use UPS.  Use DHL.  Use a goddamn mule train.  BUT DON'T GO NEAR THE POST OFFICE!

Love, Wendy

Yeeks!

I'm amazed I have any followers left.  I have just been awful about keeping up here.  Well, new year, new resolve.  I hope.

Now, let's see where we left off in the dim mists of antiquity.

We had Thanksgiving, of course, and I finally got the number of green beans right...that was exciting.  Unfortunately, I forgot to make a note of how many green beans I actually bought, so I'm going to have to go through the whole damn thing again next year.  Ah, well...I'm sure the number of eaters will change anyway, so it doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

Then (logically enough), we had Christmas, which wended its usual path through lobsters on Christmas Eve and roast beef for Christmas Day.  Nothing new there, either.  Sarah, God bless her, bought me a new ironing board...I had asked her to please take down my board and put it away, and she discovered that it no longer folded...so she told me it had to go and removed it and bought me a new one.  Yay!  You understand I haven't done any of the huge piles of ironing I've got yet...mainly because I haven't gone anywhere that required actual ironed grownup clothing.  Actually, I haven't gone anywhere.

I did, however, achieve an actual manager for my career!  This is also not going anywhere at the moment...she wants me to take an improv class, which I'm perfectly willing and ready to do...as soon as I get the necessary $350 together to pay for the damn thing.  What I need to do is call the class, for God's sake, and find out about payment plans.

However, I was hit with the flu from hell right after New Year's Eve and am just coming back to life...my God, I've never had anything last so damn long.  I was only really SICK for a couple of days, but I just couldn't get out of bed.  Yuck.  Now I just cough incessantly.

I haven't done a movie, I haven't done a TV show, and even my ambulance chasing lawyer is ignoring me...another reason why that damn $350 is looming rather large.

And you are now all as up to date as I am...bored and coughing, although I hope nobody's coughing.

Now I'm going to watch Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen, which is one of my favorite movies ever.  It's almost never on TV, so tonight I'm even skipping Downton Abbey (which I can get online anyhow).  Yay, Danny Kaye!

Love, Wendy

Goodbye

There were three of us once.  Peter was the eldest, then me, six months later, then Stevie, six months after me.  We  were the middle.  Carol and Cathy were older, and Mary and John younger, and then of coourse there were the New York cousins, who were around, but not really part of us.

Cathy, Stevie, Mary, John...the only brothers and sisters I, as an only child,  ever had.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, backyards, swings, everything to me.  I had an odd childhood...this was my only taste of reality, and what it might be like to grow up naturally and normally.

Stevie (forever Stevie to me) was my own personal still small center.  He was his father, all over again.  Calm and strong, and good and loving.  The army didn't change him...nothing changed him.  Whaat he may have felt about Viet Nam remained forever within him.  What he gave back to the rest of us was love, in huge measure.

I will, because I must must, adjust to a world without him, but I hate that I have to do so.  I still need Stevie at my back.  And I am not resigned.

Love, Wendy

Back From The Abyss

Well, here I am again.  Isn't that amazing?  I have survived Sandy, and the following nor'easter, and two days in my law office job.

Let's get all caught up.

Before the weather happened, I did this bizarre little deferred pay short film shoot, wherein I portrayed a crazy lady at a flea market.  This was a week or two before the Halloween that wasn't.  The outfit was superb...my own clothing, with the exception of an amazing hat, which I'll get to.  Now, you have to understand that NONE of these clothes have ever been worn together in the history of man...I had a purple mid-calf length street fair cotton skirt, black tights with white socks over them and my ratty old sneakers, a wildly striped sweater with a beige cardigan over it, a huge tie-dye silk scarf around my neck, and a shocking pink furry newsboy cap.  And then they made me up as one of those people who puts it on with a trowel in the dark...big pink circles of rouge and eyebrows drawn with a Magic Marker sort of thing.  And my hair was teased where it stuck out of the cap.  Oh, I was elegant as shit. 

These kids evidently succumbed to wanderlust when choosing locations.  We shot on a Sunday and Monday.  Sunday the shoot was in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which is impossible to get to.  You take a subway to some damn where in Brooklyn and then a LONG bus ride.  More or less parenthetically, I have never been able to understand Brooklyn bus routes.  A bus in Manhattan is named, say, the M14.  It travels on 14th Street.  See?  M14?  The 6th Avenue bus travels on Sixth Avenue.  Buses in Brooklyn, however, have routes that they evidently patterned after your basic corkscrew...they twist and turn and wander around.  Strange. 

Anyway, so we shot the flea market scene in a playground in Red Hook.

The next day we were called out in the extreme opposite direction.  A subway to Forest Hills, Queens, a place I've NEVER gotten the hang of.  Addresses in Queens are like this: 35-04 45th Avenue, on the corner of 74th Street.  Really.  I find the entire borough impossible.  But we were picked up in a van this time, and driven out to Long Beach, Long Island to shoot the dream sequence on the beach.  Yes, yes, children, there was a dream sequence on the beach.  These kids are aiming for the artsy market, obviously.  There was honestly a double bed, complete with quilts and pillows and all, and even a bedside table with a lamp.

Anyway, that was all quite fun, and I must say that when I went to the wrap party on Tuesday night, I was quite impressed with the clips of raw footage they showed.  Hey, you never know...they're talking about submitting the thing at Cannes.  Why not?

And then came Sandy.  It just occurred to me that Sandy slammed us on October 29...wasn't that the same date as the stock market crash?  Interesting.

Manhattanites are deeply complacent.  For reasons I've never been able to figure out, weather almost always goes AROUND Manhattan Island, instead of landing ON it.  This may perhaps be the concerted thoughts of Upper East Side women, all beaming "Don't you DARE rain on my Jimmy Choos!" at it, or perhaps the casual remarks of the downtowners, saying, "No, man, not tonight.  I got a good gig over on Ludlow Street."  But the fact remains, that while the rest of New York City gets trees uprooted, roof tiles blown all over the place, and all the other bits of disaster, Manhattan just doesn't.  Well, OK, there WAS the snow in 2010, but that's really, really rare.

So we here in the city kept saying, remember Hurricane Irene last year (wherein nothing at all happened in Manhattan, after days of weather person hysteria) and sort of ignoring things.  Oh, we stocked up on food, figuring it would probably rain (makes it a nuisance to get to the deli, you know), and some people got a couple of candles and maybe a new flashlight.

Boy, did we ever look stupid.

I was feeling pretty pleased with myself on Monday night, what with my elderly flashlight and my little box of small candles (yahrzeit candles, actually, for Jewish memorial flames and some menorahs).  I had a freezer full of food and plenty of cigarettes until it quit raining.  So I'm sitting there, when...flicker, flicker.  Hmmmm.  Well, Con Ed did mention brownouts.  Flicker, flicker.  Where did I put the candles?  Flicker, flicker.  Ominous music began to sound.  Flicker, flicker...phlumpf.  Darkness fell.

And darkness stayed, until the following Saturday.  By Wednesday, there was no edible food in the freezer and I was down to crackers and cheese and lukewarm water from the tap.  The cigarettes were gone and the only thing keeping me even reasonably sane was the fact that I have an electronic cigarette thing and it was still usable.  And of course no heat.  The flashlight was dying and I had two small candle stumps left.  My cell was dead...everybody's cell was dead.  Thank God the phone came back to life on Wednesday just long enough for me to get a message from Sarah that she had commandeered a knight in shining armor and a white horse and was riding to my rescue!

So off I went to Brooklyn.  (I'm so glad my kid understands me.  When she came to the door I hugged her and said, Oh, thank God. Gimme a cigarette.  NOW.)  The cure was almost worse than the disease, I must admit, since Sarah lives in a converted loft building with damn near no heat.  This I can live with, but the fact that all her friends were falling all over themselves to take care of me nearly killed me...their method of taking care of Mom was to keep buying her drinks.  And then more drinks.  And then...you get the picture.

On Friday night late the lights finally came on at home, and Saturday afternoon I got home to two cats who were very pleased to see me...and a freezer which had refrozen.  This waiting until Saturday was intentional because that's what I wanted the freezer to do.  There is an enormous difference between throwing out soft, rotted, smelly food and nice neat solid packages of frozen rotted food.  The second way is MUCH better.

And in the middle of the storm week, Andrew the lawyer kept texting and calling me to see if I could come into the office.  I thought this was rather charmingly optimistic of him, since there was A. no transportation from Brooklyn, and B. his office is in the middle of what was the dark zone.  I wouldn't have been able to do anything if I HAD been able/wanted to go to work anyway. 

So I finally did go in Tuesday and yesterday.  Yesterday was just ghastly.  By the time I left the office, it was snowing horizontally and there was a 35 mile an hour wind.  I walked two blocks to my bus stop and damn near died, but the fates were finally smiling on me and I got a taxi. 

I keep wondering...do you think that God has decided that we should have all of winter in one two week period?  Wouldn't that be a lovely idea?  If not, I don't even want to think about what comes next  On the other hand, OBAMA WON!  I swear, all this stuff with hurricanes and nor-easters paled in comparison with my absolute terror about this election...

So now I am going to do laundry, because there is not a clean piece of underwear any place here, and then I am going to restock my icebox, and then I am going to clean the damn house. 

I'm so glad to be home!

Love, Wendy

The Election

I have tried to stay away from this election, since I know where my vote is going, and I have no patience for most of the incessant ballyhoo and chatter.  However, as we get to the end of the whole thing, there is one thing that has started to bother me.

I certainly understand the fixation on the budget and on military spending.  The first frightens me, and I'm completely against the second, of course...once anti-war, always anti-war, as far as I'm concerned.  And the emphasis on jobs...well, of course.  There don't seem to be any.  (Of course, if we stopped outsourcing things, it might help.)

But I CANNOT understand this sudden seeming war on women.  We have children and the elderly starving to death and homeless in American cities.  We have crumbling buildings and indeed, whole neighborhoods.  We have ever-increasing crime.  Can someone please explain to me why none of these interesting little details seem to be being expressed by anyone?  All I seem to hear about is women.

If, as the Romney camp seems to feel, every single woman who becomes pregnant by any method whatsoever, including rape and incest, is forced to have that child, where are you going to put them?  And if you cut aid, how are these women going to raise these children?  How are they to be fed, or housed, or clothed, or educated?  What are these people thinking?  That the Lord will provide?  Somehow I don't think that calmly expecting manna from heaven to fall on the faces of the deserving is going to work.  And neither will the loaves and fishes...particularly not the fishes part, due to the ongoing pollution of our waters.  And will there be kind, caring, orphanges established, for when some of these increasingly desperate women simply give up?  Somehow I think not. 

I thought we had finished with this fight.  I thought cooler heads had prevailed.  I now think I must have been nuts to think it was so easy. 

What on EARTH have we poor women done to all these men that we are supposed to go back to being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen again?

Love, Wendy

Back From Chicago!

Well, that was a cold damn week.  I knew I was home, because when the weather actually got out of the low 50s I walked around like any other Chicagoan saying how lovely and warm it was.

We got there on Friday the 5th, with both of us dropping off because we hadn't had any sleep.  I meant to get a nap before we left, but I was trying to pack and clean up up bit for my pals Jiggers and Kathy to feed the beasts, so I never got around to it...we had a 6 A.M. flight, which meant a car at 3:30 A.M.  And Sarah had to work karaoke until 2:30 A.M.  I caught a short nap when we got to the hotel, but poor old Sarah just stayed up.  My pal Tommy took us out on Friday to a truly terrific show called A Class Act, which is about Ed Kleban, the lyricist for Chorus Line, and it was wonderful.  The show is excellently written, using exclusively his own songs, and the actors were great.

Then on Saturday, of course, was the big family party, which featured food (duh...my family doesn't go in for crackers and cheese...when they serve food, they serve FOOD).  I must say, that bridesmaid dress waasn't at all as bad in person (I mean in a photograph, obviously) as it was in memory.  I actually looked pretty good. Then Sarah and I went off to the Old Town Ale House where we ran into my old drinking buddy Bruce Elliott, who owns the place now, and we had a nice long natter about who's where and what are they up to.  This didn't take as long as one would think, for the eminently logical reason that these are people I've known for about 50 years, and therefore there's a fairly large attrition rate.  But a few are still with us.

Sunday Sarah took off on her own, having gone out with her cousins the night before and made all sorts of friends, and I went over to Cass and Charlie's for the afterparty from the anniversary party (of COURSE there was an afterparty...there were leftovers, weren't there?).  We had a great time laughing and scratching as usual.  The thing I like about my family and friends is that we tend to just pick up where we left off last time, which makes for much livelier conversation than everybody stating what they've been doing for the last six years or so.

Then Monday night was the memorial gathering for my friend Dolores, who died last year just before Christmas.  As promised, it was the most casual of gatherings, with more old friends and lots of conversation.  Poor old Sarah felt like she was in the world's liveliest nursing home, I'm afraid...since I started at Encore Theatre when I was 15, I tend to be the youngest person in the room.  This also holds true of the Ale House, since I was drinking there at 15 too.  This is not altogether a bad thing.  This was very much the usual Encore crew, with people singing snatches of song and occasionally tap dancing a little...Sarah kept wincing when peoples' knees went off like rifle fire.  Honestly, the young just don't understand.

Tuesday, God help us, we had lunch with Bill the trustee, who for reasons best known to himself, insisted on driving us all over hell and gone near Chinatown to show us all the new development over there.  I'm certaily glad there's new development (it was kind of blighted, after all), but I couldn't care less.  I never spent any time in Chinatown anyway (good Chinese lunch, however).   Tommy did much better by us on the way to the theatre on Friday, driving us through Near North and all those glorious houses.  Then I asked Bill to go by Buckingham Fountain so Sarah could see that great view of the city rising behind it, and he promptly took us BEHIND the fountain.  So what we saw was the fountain and the lake, which wasn't what I was after.  Sheesh.

That night our cousin Nick took us out for pizza (REAL pizza...take that, New York), and on Wednesday we finally got a small glimpse of what I had intended to see anyway...The Art Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry.

Wednesday night we went out to dinner at a lovely little French place on Wells Street, and Thursday my pal Carolyn took us to lunch (and God bless her, got us on the train to the plane) on our way to the airport.  (Thank you, darling!)

So I never got to do much of anything I had intended to do, but we had a great time anyway.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have a question.  WHY will people use unnecessary words?  There was an article in the food section in today's NYTimes about snails, which a nice lady seems to be raising.  However, in the course of this article, it refers to "cooking with snails."

I'm sorry, you don't cook WITH snails.  You just cook snails.  I can't see why I would want them in the kitchen in the sense of cooking WITH somebody.  They aren't good conversationalists (or talkers at all), and they are absolutely no help whatsoever...you can't ask them to get you something out of the icebox or mince an onion, which is what I think of in terms of cooking with someone.  If there are snails in my kitchen, I'm cooking them...not cooking WITH them, damn it.

Love, Wendy   

Peculiar

Would you believe that I have just bought a guidebook to Chicago?  Yeah.  A GUIDEBOOK to CHICAGO.  Yes, that would be the place where I was born, and the place where I went from kindergarten through high school and some college, the place where I got married and divorced and had LOTS of way less formal relationships.  That Chicago.  And I bought a guidebook.

There are sensible reasons for this, actually, chief among them being that I haven't spent any more than about 20 minutes in Chicago since Sarah was about three years old...and since Sarah is now 28, you see the problem.  Oh, I've been in and out, but for stated reasons...a reunion, my aunt and uncle's 50th anniversary (and now I'm going to their daughter's 50th anniversary...my, how time flies when you're getting old).  Really, though, I haven't spent any extended time there in years.  The other reason is that the whole transportation system has changed (I can no longer grab the Illinois Central at Randolph Street and get off at 55th, on account of it's now something called Metra, whatever that may be, and I don't know whether it even still GOES to 55th Street).  And naturally, few of the restaurants I frequented are still around, and on top of all THAT, we're staying downtown on Monroe Street, and I'm a Near North and Hyde Park kid.

All of this makes me feel deeply disoriented, obviously.  I want to take Sarah to a lot of places in my history, and I'm not even sure I can find them...or that they still exist.  It's a distinctly weird feeling.

However, our Chicago social life is coming together nicely.  We arrive Friday morning (this coming Friday morning) and my pal Tommy (I wouldn't like to say he's an old friend, but he took me to my senior prom) is taking us to dinner and the theatre.  Then Cass and Charley's anniversary is Saturday.  Monday we're going to Indiana...yes, I know that sounds strange, but it's a bit of Indiana that's only half an hour away from the Loop (that's downtown Chicago).  An old Encore Theatre pal died just before Christmas last year, and this is the memorial.  Luckily, Encore people don't deal in solemn anything (as I told Sarah when she tried to balk at this occasion), and it's a great way to let her meet a lot of the people who shaped my life a million or so years ago.  Tuesday or Wednesday we're having lunch with Bill the trustee, God help us, and Thursday is an early lunch with my best pal Carolyn (hi, there!) before the plane home. 

In between all that, there's the Art Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry and going out to Hyde Park and finding interesting restaurants (another reason for that guidebook) and just general wandering around.  It should be a great trip.

But it still feels decidedly peculiar to buy a guidebook to Chicago.

Love, Wendy