Showers of Hypocrisy

The older I’ve gotten, the more deliberately I make choices that are eco-friendly. Part of the reason is because it's easier than ever to know what the right thing to do is; for instance, when the garbage cans at the elementary school are labelled "Compost," "Recycle," and "LANDFILL" (the latter with skull and crossbones and death heads drawn on it) it's a fair bet that you want to reduce your inputs to that bin. 

I also happen to live in a part of the country where large scale systems have been put into place to make it second nature to go easy on the earth. Our curbside recycling takes nearly every kind of paper and plastic in a single stream, the county composts our food scraps, and bins at the local grocery stores collect used batteries and compact fluorescent light bulbs. So it’s an ingrained habit now to carry reusable bags to the grocery store, to store leftover food in reusable containers, and to read by the humming yellow light of a CFL. I have put my arm (gingerly) into the nasty morass that is our green compost bin to fish out a piece of errant aluminum foil for recycling, and I switched to a homemade green cleanser that makes everything in my house smell minty fresh.

I even put a bucket in my shower to collect the water as it warms up, so I can use it later to pour on my (drought-tolerant, native, organic) garden plants.Then I step into the shower and all my good eco-intentions rise up in the steam. 

I love a long, hot shower.

I know the numbers – an average shower uses 5 gallons water per minute. If you're going to stay in for more than 5 minutes, you may as well sink into a claw foot porcelain tub (30-50 gallons of water per bath, on average) and have a servant fan you with a palm frond. Here in Northern California we’ve had drought years where short showers can make a big difference in maintaining enough water for the things we really need, like toilets that flush and water to drink. So it’s particularly virtuous where I live to keep showers as short as possible. 

For those who want to stand in the shower longer, experts recommend stepping in, getting wet, turning off the water while lathering up, and then putting the water back on to rinse off – what my friend Andrea, a native Californian, taught me is called the Sailor’s Shower.

Me? I start off every shower thinking – “just a quick rinse off today.” Things start to go south almost immediately as the shower stall fills up with steam and that kink in my right shoulder blade, the one that tells me I’ve been sitting at the computer too long, starts to unclench. The jets of water against my neck act like a lever to lower my shoulders two inches, and I can feel the pinched wrinkle between my eyes start to smooth out.

I’m nearsighted and have long observed that when my glasses are off I don’t hear as well either, so being in the shower is as close as I’ll ever come to a sensory deprivation tank. Staring at the white wall of tiles, all sorts of ideas form, flit, and take flight. I think, “Ok, one more minute, then I’ll get out.” I think that 15 times or so. When I finally do shut the water off and step out into a bathroom that is like a nice Boca Raton steam room, I am filled with self loathing to the tips of my wrinkled fingers.

A few months ago I bought a shower timer at a store, something that I could just stick to the wall of the shower and watch as 4 minutes and 59 seconds went by. I've used timers before at various campsites, the ones where you have to feed in quarters every few minutes to keep the water flowing, so I know that even a three minute shower is within my capacity.

On the second use, the fancy timer fell to the floor of the shower and broke. I know I could set a kitchen timer. But it seemed as good a sign as any that in return for all my other earth friendly exertions, the universe has decided to give me a pass on the long showers.

Ready for a Glee-ful Weekend

The big weekend is here, the one that we've been anticipating since last fall's school auction: we're co-hosting the annual neighborhood Cocktail Crawl. Since straightforward would be way too easy for an event as manic as our public school auction, there's another layer of complexity on top: each of the four stops on the tour has a TV show theme, and victims - I mean, auction bid winners - will face a challenge peculiar, and I do mean peculiar, to that show.

Since  some of our twenty-two high rollers are Normalarkey readers, I don't want to give too much away. But things will kick off at Survivor Island, hosted by our friends Jenn and Tom who, conveniently, have an extremely long, extremely steep driveway. (Whenever I drive our kids up it to pick up or drop off a child, my daughter shields her eyes with a forearm until I set the parking brake.) Have fun getting through whatever obstacles the faux Probst and his Aussie medic sidekick set up for you along the slope, winners.

After refreshments that carry on the Survivor theme (someone always feasts, and someone is always famished on that show, right?) the Crawlers will be off to the Mad Men house, hosted by Andrea and Neil. This year's party planning was a challenge for them, what with Don and Betty splitting up on the last season of the show. However, appearances are appearances and Betty will once again be greeting her visitors at the front door with a freshly ironed hostess apron and crispy beehive, while Don mixes martinis and grimaces in the background. The challenge revolves around advertising copy. Can you finish this jingle?  "Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a bit of that…" And no, it isn't "football cream."

Third stop on the route is Top Chef, where minivan-driving Dawn and her husband Patrick will be fulfilling hair follicle fantasies in a long black wig (for Padma) and bald cap (for Tom) respectively. The sous chef relay challenge will undoubtedly be made more interesting by the fact that the cheftestants will be at least two cocktails in at that point, hence the "no knives" rule.

Finally, the weary crawlers clomp on over to our house, which will be transformed for the evening into William McKinley High School, home of Glee. I'm not saying much about what we plan to put the revelers through, because my alter-ego Coach Sylvester will do it for me tomorrow night. With a bullhorn. And venomous wit. And sticks. Andrew will be appearing in a sweater vest for the second time in his life (last year's Crawl being the first.)

Why do I bore you with all these party details? Because this week, pink slips went out to one fifth of Oakland public school teachers - including two teachers out of 11 at our elementary school - in order to prepare for an anticipated loss of $30 million from state coffers, a loss of $900 in state funding per student. Given that California already ranked 43rd in the nation on per-pupil spending, we seem to be locked in a race to the bottom. Eat our dust, Arizona!

While there's a chance that teachers could be rescinded if a more favorable budget agreement is reached by May 15, there's no guarantee. And even if teachers are spared (and let's do all we can to make it so,) funding for other programs like art, PE, and computers are sure to be cut. Once again, parents are going to have to fill the gaps to fund quality public education in our city.

So take this Cocktail Crawl idea, run with it, improve upon it, make it your own (we've considered choosing shows from the '70s for next year's party. I am SO going to be Maude.) Turn it into a moneymaker for a local school - not a bad outcome on a night that is so absurdly fun.

And in gratitude to our Crawlers for opening their wallets so generously to bid last fall, I am leaving you a musical hint. This is the one Journey song that is guaranteed NOT to figure into your Glee challenge. Enjoy it, and the fact that while air guitar lives on, the mullet/sideburn combo worn by Steve Perry has mostly fallen out of favor. Except maybe in Arizona.

Not so mighty mascots

It’s almost time for March Madness, the brackets full of college men’s basketball teams with rough and tough names like Bulldogs, Badgers, and Demons. Proud names, powerful names, names that really beg to be chanted by rapturous fans. Names that imbue the teams who bear them with a sense of import, and perhaps render their opponents a wee bit intimidated.

Experiences with which I’m unfamiliar, having gone through high school and college cheering for teams named after wealthy English nobles and pacifist Christians, respectively.

It can be hard to get charged up at high school pep rallies when the team mascot, the Brighton Baron, wears a top hat and a monocle; frankly he looks like he is asking for an ass-kicking from the cheerleaders. On the other hand, any success our athletes achieved came from sheer blood and guts and effort.  I seem to remember the Lady Barons (not the Baronesses, too Sound of Music I guess) winning a field hockey championship one year, and we had some good ice hockey talent too. The jocks could be confident that no one had been psyched out by our posters of the Baron, scowling as though his tea was too hot.

When it was came time to pick a college I should have paid more attention. While I knew that Ben Franklin had founded my university, it never occurred to me that he'd name its athletes after his religious convictions. It's not like we were the Snake Handlers or the Holy Rollers either, which at least sounds like you could put some creepy religious juju on your opponents once they started beating you. No, to be on a team named "The Quakers" is to live in receptive mode, like Buddy the Elf testing Jack-in-the-Boxes at Santa's workshop. How do you exhort your athletes to battle when one of your mascot's main convictions is non-violence? “Go, preferably do not get in a Fight, Win if you can do so in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone!!”

Now I live in California and have tried to go native by remembering the names, if not the mascots, of all the schools in the UC and Cal State systems. This is a challenge for someone who has been heard to say, more than once, "You lost me at San. Are you talking about the San town that's down near the airport or the one up near the grapes?" But there is one school whose mascot I learned right away, probably through some sort of conditioned response.

And I can say with confidence that had I been educated in California, I'd surely be a UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug.

Of School Auctions and Self-Flagellation

Finally! The giant pink thermos of my dreams!

Every year on the eve of our school auction, the main fundraiser for our childrens’ public elementary school, my husband asks if we can just send a check and stay home. He’s generous: the amount he names would cover not only the amount we normally spend, but also the sitter’s fee and the cost of auction tickets and drinks. “Wouldn’t that just make more sense?” he asks.

He’s absolutely right. The auction is a lifeblood-sucking monster, and I’m not even one of those selfless few who volunteer to organize it.

It starts as soon as school is in session, with a "Mark Your Calendars!" announcement in our back to school packets. Already, before you even know which teacher your child has, you're asked to solicit local retail establishments for donations, set up or check out on the day of the auction, and purchase your tickets in advance to the event, which is held at a swanky local country club. This year promises to be the best auction ever, if only you people will get up off your butts and make it so.

Meanwhile, the auction committee pushes on parents, hard, to donate: professional services, sports tickets, airline tickets, expensive bottles of wine. I suspect that when people receive a gift during the year that utterly misses the mark, they secretly think: "YESSSSS! Auction donation!" Parents also band into groups to host highly coveted group dinners - the Crab Feed, the Cocktail Crawl, the Photo Safari - that cost at least a month's private school tuition to host.

Then the kids are dusted with Auction Fever by that most irresistible siren, the Auction Fairy. This good natured volunteer stands, resplendent in fairy wings and a wand, before an audience of rapt children a month or two before the auction, displaying plasticky detritus from China. She tells them that for every bunch of auction raffle tickets sold, they'll earn a jar of Mars Mud, or a plastic telescope, or the Holy Grail for elementary schoolers: the Lava Lamp. The kids come home, frenzied, with sheaves of blank tickets for their parents to buy, the $500 Visa gift card prize for the raffle winner a possibility that starts slim and moves quickly to none. Once your own wallet is emptied, you're pressed into service to push tickets on unsuspecting neighbors, family members, and co-workers.

On the morning of the auction, while volunteers arrange the treasures on tables arranged carefully around the country club, stress runs high - this item lacks a tag, and that tag lacks an item, who was supposed to show up with the helium balloons and where are they now? That club policy prohibits denim contributes to everyone's anxiety, since we volunteers must create festive arrangements of the goods while wearing uncomfortable pants. Then you rush home to shower and change and feed the kids before the sitter arrives and you have to rush back, because all your daughter wants from the auction is the Gingerbread Cookie Party with her beloved teacher and there are only six slots.

To gird yourself for the inevitable elbow-throwing and pen-hoarding of battle, you down two stiff drinks once you arrive back at the auction and hope that your shoulders will soon unhinge from your earlobes. Of course, two drinks in, all that crap you set up earlier in the day starts to look more appealing, and soon you possess a new sewing machine, a Mexican beer stand, and a restaurant gift certificate for which you accidentally bid more than face value, as well as an exasperated husband.

I am certainly not going to talk about the panic you feel when someone overspends on an item you've donated. The amount of work and worry you'll have to put in for when you actually host the "Egészségédre! Hungarian Dinner Party for Twelve" that your fellow parent just bought climbs exponentially as each new bid is called. It's hard to resist the urge to stand up and yell at the tipsy bidders, "It's not going to be that special of a night! My goulash is substandard!”

And I won’t mention the buyer's remorse you feel when you wake up the next day, head throbbing, and discover a giant wicker basket of Semifreddi's bread and a gift certificate to an estate planning seminar strewn with your handbag, earrings, and shoes across the kitchen table.

So why do I wheedle and cajole my husband to take me every year?

In part because I’m curious to see how the other parents clean up. We’re used to seeing each other in the school hallways clothed in the Harried Parent uniform of sweatpants and fleece. But on auction night, all bets are off. Every once in awhile someone will trot out what looks like an old bridesmaid dress, and there was a year that one woman was a dead ringer for a Flaming Red Hot Cheeto – orange from her roots to her shoes. But for the most part it’s nice to see the moms and dads who trouble to put on a dress or suit, spritz on a little cologne and wear something other than sneakers. It’s like running into an old n'er-do-well college friend who, you're glad to see, turned out okay after all.

But the real lure is the camaraderie when the rumor of how much we've raised starts to circulate through the crowd. “How much so far?” “They think it’s at least as much as last year, and they haven’t even auctioned off  'Principal for a Day' yet.” “Could you BELIEVE how much the Brazilian Dinner party went for?”

Suddenly all that crazy-making auction prep begins to have tangible meaning: field trips and hands-on science experiments, symphony concerts and daily gym class, computers in the classroom and teacher aides. It means providing all the things to a school that the state school budget should cover, but doesn't anymore. It means we can even make a donation to another public school in our district, one where the parents don't have the means (or aren't crazy enough) to throw an auction.

It means that even when jobs are scarce and funds are low and everyone carries economic worry with them like a low-grade fever, you're part of a community that still puts public education first.

And that, to me,  is the ultimate auction treasure.

It's All For the Kids

Here in Cali it's the annual tax season for parents with school aged children. Thanks to Prop 13, we don't pay on April 15; we pay all year round via raffles, book fairs, and fundraiser auctions so that our children can have luxuries like libraries, music and art. (Yes, that's sarcasm you're hearing in the pixels.)

This weekend is our local elementary school's big event - the annual auction. Along with goods and services donated by local merchants, parents band together to host a slew of themed parties that other groups of parents bid on, during an evening at the Sequoyah Country Club (our motto? "no denim!") where no one is busier than the bartender or more exhausted looking than the Auction chair.

In the past we've helped host an Italian dinner and a "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" night of Improv comedy. This year a friend came up with a brilliant plan: "Tiptoe through TV Land." It's going to be a progressive cocktail party through our neighborhood, with the following stops:
1.) Survivor: if you can scale our friend's 45 degree angle driveway, you'll be greeted with gummy worms and a food challenge. Don't worry, vodka kills all the germs.
2.) Madmen: guests will be greeted with bubble gum cigarettes (or real ones, depending on how harrowing the Survivor house is) and martinis, along with a hostess wearing an underwire from the 1960s. Careful she doesn't put your eye out!
3.) Top Chef: the group will be split into teams to do some sort of food challenge involving Twinkies and Sno-balls. When faux Padma says "Pack your knives," it's time to bring it on over to the last stop:
4.) Glee. Yes of course that's us, hosting the final stop and forcing guests to work out a Vocal Adrenaline-worthy dance act. Although three stops into the evening, my expectations are not high. Grape slushees to the face have not been ruled out for the losers.

This Friday we'll be out drumming up excitement, or derision, for the event during the car pool dropoff time. Look for Sue Sylvester, Betty Draper, Padma Lakshmi and an Australian medic cracking themselves up at 7:45 a.m.

And for those of you who don't have the good fortune to have to underwrite your kid's education quite so desperately, feel free to borrow and build on the theme for your 2010 entertaining schedule.

This state is about to BLOOOOOWWWW!

Have you ever seen a movie where the director builds suspense by showing the infrastructure of a building beginning to buckle? People are either trapped inside, or clueless, as the first spurt of water comes out of the water pipe, or a crack appears in the foundation, or the rope supporting the elevator begins to fray...the audience sucks in their breath, knowing that disaster is imminent.

Yeah. Those clueless and/or trapped people are all in California this week, and our house is on the verge of collapse. Last weekend there was a huge water main break in Los Angeles:

The Saturday night break in the giant pipeline that forms an underground river between the Los Angeles Reservoir in Sylmar and the Franklin reservoirs in Hollywood drew attention to the city's aging infrastructure.

According to the press coverage, that pipeline was built in 1914 - that's just shy of a century ago, back when people thought the horseless carriage wouldn't catch on. And now it's serving a county where people think nothing of putting fountains in their pools and building one bathroom per bedroom.

My LA friend Ledette said she was surprised but not too worried about the water main break...and then she woke up Tuesday morning to find water coursing down her street in Valley Village, the result of another rupture. This is the one that swallowed half a firetruck, if you haven't seen the photo yet check it out here. Glad that the crew got out unhurt.

I would have commiserated but was too busy feeling relief that last weekend's planned closure of the Bay Bridge to put a new temporary span in place turned up a 1-INCH-WIDE-CRACK elsewhere on the bridge, heretofore undetected. All hail C.C. Meyers, the same construction crew that fixed the Macarthur Maze in Oakland ahead of schedule after a truck fire destroyed a segment a few years back - despite the unplanned surprise, the bridge opened up only a couple of hours later than planned. But how many times have I driven the kids over that bridge during the summer, blithely ignorant of the problem?

C'mon. If this were a movie, there would be only one more incident before one character, the one mocked by the others for being paranoid or too serious, would say, "Hey guys? I think we may have a problem." And in another 5 minutes, we'd all be running for our lives in slow motion, with enormous orange explosions behind us.

I'm getting my gas tank filled and strapping on my running shoes.

Boom to Bust, 19th Century Style

We had ample time to contemplate the current economic crisis over the weekend, which was spent in Mokelumne Hill CA (affectionately called Moke Hill.) It's in California's Gold Country, a couple of hours northeast of the Bay Area, so about a hundred and fifty years ago, Moke Hill was suffering an economic hangover of its own. But it's held on, and a friend had rented outed the town's one hotel, the Hotel Leger, for a funky 40th birthday celebration for her husband.

First thing we figured out was that there's not a lot to do in Moke Hill besides hang out at the saloon or pool of the Hotel Leger. The town, which sprang up in the 1850s along with the discovery of gold in the area, was once so bustling that it was the county seat for Calaveras County (made famous in Mark Twain's story.) The picture, above, was taken in 1900, and that building is the hotel in which we stayed. The town has a great historical society and web site, source of all I now know about Moke Hill's history, including this snippet on Asians in Calaveras County.

Nowadays, Moke Hill is about one block long and as we stood on the balcony with our birthday beers on Saturday night and peered up and down the street we noticed two signs on every building: one, giving the year it was built and a bit of history, and two, a "For Sale" sign. We resolved to spend some money in the local establishments before we left and now I can tell you there's a good corn nut sale going on at Moke Hill Nuts, if anyone's got a hankering. And Frank's Diner makes the best cowboy biscuits this side of the old Hub Cafe.

The hotel itself was a great place for a party, but not for the faint of heart - aside from the Victorian period furnishings that had my 6'1" husband's feet hanging off the end of the bed, the place is also furnished with ghosts. We were booked in Room 7 which supposedly is haunted by George Leger himself; I took one look at the dark brown wallpaper and yellow light streaming through the window and begged them to change us to a ghost-free room, thanks. But the manager on duty said there's a failsafe way to avoid the spectral disturbance: "Just tell them. Say, 'I'm not interested in seeing you'," she counseled. "I do that and I've never seen them, but lots of my staff have."

So I was the lady running back and forth to the room for beach towels and cameras muttering "I don't need to see you!" if you passed me in the hall.

The people at the hotel and in the town were friendly and welcoming, and after buying beers all night at the saloon for our party and for the peppy SoCal bachelorette party that stopped by, my bar bill was $24.

The pool was great (if bracing) and there are rivers nearby for tubing; Calaveros Big Trees State Park is supposed to have good hiking, and Jackson has antiques and such. So I'm contemplating a visit back to Moke Hill with the kids in tow, and maybe some Mark Twain short stories to read in the car on the way there. And some holy water and garlic.