Child Employment and Character Building

I recently unearthed a diary from when I was 12 and planned to open a beauty spa in my parent's house. What I later learned in B-school was called the "Unique Selling Proposition" (USP) was that, after the neighborhood ladies had paid me to apply wet oatmeal to their faces, do their makeup with the Lip Smackers line, and french braid their hair, I was going to invite them to lie on chaise lounges in my backyard with Fleetwood Mac album jackets that I'd covered in tin foil. You know, to boost the skin-cancer properties of unprotected tanning.

It may sound like a pre-teen's fever dream, but in fact the spa was just another in the series of childhood businesses I started, each with their own USP. Yet people say "Child Labor" like it's a bad thing.

Today I'm over on "It Builds Character…And Other Parenting Clichés" with a post lamenting the loss of childhood entrepreneurship.  The team of contributors there tackles everything from home décor during the potty training phase to why Gwyneth Paltrow is never going to convince us that her life is as bad as ours. Clearly, I've found some like-minded ranters; I'm thrilled they invited me to guest post!

Hope you'll click through here to read more (and to see a picture of me in my Business Bandana when I was nine and co-director of a thriving neighborhood preschool.)

Misty Eyed Memorial Day Memories

You can keep your barbeques, your parades, and your sparklers. What really says Memorial Day to me is a large piece of sawdust sending shooting pains through my eye.

The Memorial Day Picnic of my childhood was epic. Living on one side of a driveway shaped like a capital "T", our little stretch of asphalt was the locus for an all-day party for the neighbors up and down Branford Road. It started in the morning when someone would show up to string a volleyball net across the driveway; meanwhile, kids knelt in their driveways with rolls of crepe streamers, tricking out their banana seat no-speed bikes.

By noon the grills were lined up in our driveway and people were showing up with folding chairs and dishes to put down on the long tables, jello molds and iceberg lettuce salads and bowls of pretzels. The Genesee Cream Ale keg was tapped right around the same time that the fire engines showed up, not to douse the roaring gas-fueled flames of the barbeques ("stand back, kids, this might jump a little!")  but to lead the kids around the block in a costume parade, streamers flying backwards off the bike. Truly, my dad's role as a volunteer fireman provided no end of perks for us.

We didn't have marching bands but whoever had a flute or a nose whistle would chime in, a cacophony of sound syncopated by the playing cards that the boys stuck in their bike spokes so the wheels would click-click-click with every turn.

By 2 pm the kids were back, the beer was flowing, the moms were laughing, and the volleyball was careening dangerously across the makeshift court. But the real action came when the sawdust pile was unveiled. Where my father found a 6 foot by 4 foot pile of sawdust standing three feet deep every year was and remains a mystery. But what it held was no mystery: coins, wrapped hard candies, lollipops, and plastic toys, all buried inside the sawdust pile by the grownups.

In the seconds before the whistle blew, we kids would line up with our toes on the square plastic tarp that held the pile, trying to plan a line of attack. But once the whistle blew it was kill or be killed, all of us diving in and feeling around for the goodies, quarters and nickels and Jolly Ranchers  and Bazooka gum that would set us up for the whole summer.

It usually took about 30 seconds of flailing before the first casualty. "Aaaagh! My eye!" someone would scream, staggering away with a chip of sawdust in one watering eye and looking for his mom with the other one. "Aaagh! Ouch!" followed in short intervals until pretty much all the kids were standing around pulling upper eyelids over lower to flush out the pain, sawdust clinging not just to eyes but to hair, shirts, and legs. Within a half hour everyone was back to normal, settling in for some serious socializing until way past bedtime.

If the firetruck was there to entertain the kids, I'm firmly convinced that the sawdust pile massacre was the main Memorial Day entertainment attraction for the grownups.

Here's a little scene from the Talking Heads movie "True Stories" that I always loved because it reminded me of the merry band of miscreants with whom I grew up on Branford Road. And the little girl in pigtails is a dead ringer for me at age seven. "I am the king of the world! The boss of the boys and girls!" May you have just that kind of Memorial Day weekend.

I Don't Need No Liberry

I've just heard that the mayor of Oakland is considering closing a passel of local libraries, including the one that my family frequents, in order to close our $58 million deficit. To which I say, Huzzah! Who needs libraries anyways?

I mean, what American taxpayer even reads books anymore? They're outmoded. The Google search bar can find any information that anyone with a computer or a smartphone or an iPad needs - and that's virtually everyone. ( I mean, it's not as though there are huge swaths of people in this country who struggle to pay for rent or food, let alone broadband access, these days.)  Why bother losing yourself for 72 straight hours in "The Josephine Bonaparte Trilogy" by Sandra Gulland when you can just type "Who was Josephine Bonaparte" into a search engine? It's much more efficient, and prevents you from delving into messy and unwanted French and Caribbean history, not to mention spares you from envisioning dead people as living, breathing beings whose lives influenced the course of history.

We all know that every single piece of knowledge in the world has been digitized by now, and if it's on the Internet it's true. So the argument that librarians can help separate the wheat from the information chaff is a false construct, meant to preserve jobs. Did you know that public librarians earn, on average, $350,000 each year and get summers off and get free massages? It's true, I read it on www.utterflamingnonsense.com, which seems like a very credible site. No wonder we're falling into the ocean, public debt-wise. Stop blaming the corporate titans and their wonder-bonuses; it's those fat cat librarians.

Speaking of public debt, how about we start making those giant, cushy, cavernous public libraries finally pay their own way? The American way is about earning money, not about lending things out for free. Ditch the books and put in some retail, that's my advice. A couple of shops, a few fast food restaurants, a nail salon, maybe a gaming arcade where the kids can hang out.

By converting libraries into malls, we'd head off the naysayers who see public libraries as "community centers." Come on. What kid wants to visit at a quiet library to do homework and check out a new novel or how-to book about science, when the alternative is to roam a mall with his friends? For the parents who bring their young kids by for story time and crafts,  I say: check out the kids' channels on cable TV and park your youngsters there. 

And as for the people who come to the library to meet with English language tutors and take citizenship classes so that they can take part in our representative democracy, well, you can probably guess where I think they could go instead. 

Look, if you need any further proof that libraries don't matter, take a look at me. Why, I haven't willingly set foot in a library or cracked a book since Aristonphanes Middle School, and I turned out just fine.

P.S. If this post makes you mad, good. Click on http://saveoaklandlibrary.org/, or look for a similar organization defending the role of public libraries in your neck of the woods, and take action!

My Inner Rebel: Tortured

It was the tiny Roma granny pulling on my cowboy boots that finally broke me.

Of course, that's not an excuse. Nor is youth, nor loneliness. But when I reveal to you my mortifying disclosure, I'd at least like you to know that those things, plus the bent-over Gypsy matriarch putting on my boots and doing a gleeful jig as I watched from my apartment window in Munich, influenced the embarrassing thing I did next.

I skipped out on a phone bill.

Specifically, I was days away from moving back to America after living abroad for the two years, working in my first post-college job. This was before the Internet, so my weekly phone calls home were my most vivid connection to the family I'd blithely left behind, intent on My Big Adventure. Moving to a country where I knew no one proved more challenging than I'd expected, so the phone chats - necessarily staccato, due to the cost of international calls - reminded me that I had a good foundation somewhere, even if I felt adrift some days living overseas.

Over time I settled in just fine, found a circle of friends, found many things to love about life abroad. But eventually I knew I wanted to move back to the States.

So I didn't pay much attention when a young American expat advised me there was a way to prevent the national phone authority, to which every consumer was beholden for phone service, from sending the last bill. "If you terminate your contract for the week after you leave, they don't know where to send it," he said, and went on to tell me about friends who had been on the phone for hours, days even, prior to departure, and never paid a pfennig.

I filed it away somewhere in the small part of my brain not given over to the miles-long checklist of things to do before leaving: sell everything in the apartment but my clothes, quit my job with an anger-prone boss, terminate my lease, decide whether or not to break up with my German boyfriend. When the classified ads I placed in the local paper turned up little interest in my household goods, Desperation settled herself on a tree branch nearby; my landlady was a stout, angry Bavarian woman who scared the bejesus out of me and told me she'd keep my deposit if the place wasn't entirely empty when I left.

Still, I kept my head down as I packed up my two duffel bags, began offering German friends and later mere acquaintances my bike, my bookshelves, my refrigerator.  All the while, the phone sat in the middle of the floor (I'd sold the table,) beckoning me. 

Finally, with only 24 hours left before I had to vacate the apartment, I took everything that was left, including a perfectly good pair of cowboy boots that didn't fit into my suitcase, and hurried it all out to the curb. In my pristine, quiet neighborhood, that was probably in violation of at least 37 regulations.

I am not a rule breaker by nature. But living in Germany, where abiding by and enforcing rules is a national pastime, I was frequently seized with a desire to do something really wrong. Once I dumped my stuff on the curb, what was left to stop me? I might just mix up my paper and aluminum recycling now, or cross the street against the light! I glanced out the window just as the large Roma family walked up and began weeding through my treasured belongings, all that remained of my Big Adventure abroad.

And I picked up the phone and called home. Then I moved away, leaving only echoes in the apartment.

Based on my calculations, the phone bill would have been about $25. If you were to put a price on the time I've spent over the past 20 years being mortified about not paying it, it adds up to about $250,000. Such a high price for a stupid decision.

When I lecture my children about the importance of being honest, this is the story that plays in my head while I talk.  "It's not worth living with the lie," I tell them, and I truly mean it.

How did you learn the lesson?

As the Rapture Approaches: No Regrets

I don't know if it's just in the Bay Area or nationwide that garish yellow and black billboards are telling us the Rapture is upon us: specifically, sometime Saturday, all the good folks are going to be sucked up out of their shoes to ascend to heaven in a burst of radiant glory, and the rest of us flawed sinners are going to be stuck down here wondering why it just got so easy to park.

Can't say as I'm too worried; the atheist billboards assure me it's not going to happen. Anyway I certainly would not be one of those transported to the heavenly beyond. I'd rather take my chances down here with the losers who will be in no position to judge one another. Wouldn't it be awkward if you were the only person in your circle who turned up missing on the day of the Rapture? "Oh, that Mary Louise, she always thought she was better than us. Now we'll never hear the end of it."

All the Rapture talk does, however, make me think about regrets. If it really all goes to Hell in a handbasket in a few days, what unfinished business would I wish I'd wrapped up first? Herewith, a partial list.

1.) I should have come out and told my neighbor, nicknamed "The Troll," that when I give her a friendly wave and a greeting, the proper response is not to grunt and turn away. Pull your lips back and grimace, lady, it's close enough to a smile and it's the civil thing for you to do.

2.) I should have donated that bag of dried beans in my pantry to a food bank two years ago, before they expired. As if a food bank recipient will have any more interest than I do in soaking beans in water overnight. What am I, a professional chef?

3.) I should have learned to play bass guitar with my band, the Moist Deluxe, instead of just thinking about what our concert t-shirts would look like.

4.) I should have worn large, line-of-sight-obscuring hats more often. The Royal Wedding really drove this regret home.

5.) I should have pulled out the artichoke from my garden and just bought some at the grocery store. At the rate I've nurtured that thing with fertilizer, insect spray, and backrubs, each of the 5 chokes it produced cost me $27.53 each.

6.) I should not have stopped dancing at Rachel's bat mitzvah party last weekend, just because the 7th grade girls were beginning to point at my friend Andrea and I dancing to "Shawty Got Low" by Flo Rida. Everyone has to die of something; it may as well be embarrassment.

So - Rapture. What song does it conjure up? This one. Enjoy your early Music Moment, I'm bumping it up for those readers who don't read Normalarkey until the weekend, which may not arrive.

Shoot - I regret never wearing a tube top and shorts while dancing with a man in a white top hat, add that one to the list.

Season of the Swan

Our refrigerator is covered in invitations right now, their brightly-colored edges and fancy fonts like a dusting of leaves from a Disney-fied forest. Each one, held up by its own homemade bottle-top magnet, heralds another junior high school student about to make a major transition in the life of their faith: bat mitzvahs, bar mitzvahs, confirmations. These fluttering cards just rub in the visual evidence that I am fastidiously working to ignore:  my 13 year old daughter, and all her friends, are hurtling towards adulthood.

My daughter goes to an all-girls junior high which my husband and I selected because of its academic excellence, not at all because of the reassuring lack of absence of male distraction in the place, no sirree, not us, never crossed our minds. Throughout 6th grade, she rolled out of bed and into whatever clothes happened to be on the floor under the giant stacks of books she loves to read, plopped her glasses on the bridge of her nose, and pronounced herself ready for school. I congratulated myself for keeping the "child " in "childhood" for her.

But the hairline cracks in my plan to keep my daughter forever young appeared at the start of 7th grade, and have been widening ever since. A co-ed dance here, a co-ed birthday party there, the realization that months of ballet study have given our daughter the long, strong figure of a dancer and the graceful carriage to boot. Who could have seen that coming?

This spring it's just picked up momentum. We sent out our own invitation a few weeks ago, inviting a small circle of friends to witness the culmination of our daughter's confirmation process. Then began a series of changes that could broadly categorized as "Getting Ready for Confirmation," and subtitled "Freaking Out Mom and Dad."

First, there was a haircut that took my daughter's long, straight locks from simple to sophisticated. Then we shopped for confirmation dresses (all her dresses had inexplicably shrunk) and the ones that fit her were in the women's, not children's, department. We found two that were sufficiently cute for her, and sufficiently modest for me, at least if I threw a sweater on her and buttoned it from neck to hip. Months of her surreptitious study of fashion magazines, which I have long pretended were just a kicky way to find collage materials for craft projects, meant that my daughter knew exactly what jewelry and hairstyles would complement each dress to best effect.

We'd agreed that she could wear her first pair of heels, but I insisted on buying the lowest ones available in the department store. Who would have guessed they'd also be the most flattering, nude patent leather slingbacks with little flowers on each toe? They managed to make her long legs look even longer. Backfire.

Then came the contact lenses, something that she convinced me she needed for ballet more than anything else. Until she took them off, I didn't realize how much I'd relied on her old tortoiseshell frames to fix her in my mind as the fourth grader she was when she got them. Without them, her blue eyes pop.

Only one thing to be done: buy more glasses. "The contacts will be uncomfortable when you're reading," I said, scrambling. "Better to have some glasses you like." At the opticians I encouraged her to buy the biggest, most Buddy Holly looking glasses they stocked, almost exact duplicates of David Byrne in the "Once in a Lifetime" video. Did they tamp down her looks? No, they did not. She now looks like a smart girl who has the added sassiness to pull off Geek Chic glasses. 

After her confirmation service last week the older church ladies surrounded me. "She's so grown up!" they said, marveling. "She doesn't even walk; she just glides when she moves!"

I only have one tool left in my arsenal: braces. When I mentioned to her that maybe we should call the orthodontist to see if she needs them, she nodded vigorously. "Because if I get them right now, I'll be done with them before high school," she reasoned. High school. As in the co-ed high school she'll be attending, or gliding through, with actual boys.

Am I crazy for thinking we should bring caftans and poke bonnets back into vogue before next year?

In honor of my daughter and all the girls in her posse who we are about to unleash upon the world (thank or blame us later,) here's the Airborne Toxic Event singing "Changing" from their latest album "All At Once," which I heartily recommend.

Looks like Oakland on a perfect Saturday night.

Concert Crone Report: Chris Robinson Brotherhood

The Concert Crone operates in a musical netherworld: too old for bouncers to ask her for ID, too young to give up the thrill of buying tickets for live performances using the secret presale code. In this first of an occasional series of concert reviews, the Crone braves the Bay Area music scene and answers the question: Worth Hiring the Sitter?

The Band: The Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Thursday May 5 2011. Robinson is best known as the lead singer for the rock band Black Crowes, and for being the ex husband of super peppy actress Kate Hudson. The only song the Concert Crone knows from the Black Crowes is "Hard to Handle," which she likes because the lyrics in the refrain are unintelligible, so you can sing along differently each time, like scat singing.

The Venue: The New Parish in Oakland, a smallish club on the back side of the much more ornate Fox Theater where on the same night, Fleet Foxes was playing. As Robinson pointed out, "There are a whole lot of beards within a five block radius. We're glad you came to see our beards." Interestingly, the Crone watched someone in front of her get busted by the bouncer for lighting up a joint, which was unexpected in a city nicknamed Oaksterdam.

The Company: Erin, who is in the Crone's writing group and is an effervescent thirty something hippie chick who looks a whole lot like Kate Hudson. This will become important later in the review. 

The Crowd: Dear god, is the Crone ever happy that she found her mate before the beard, newsboy cap, and skinny-jeans-on-men fashion triple threat kicked in. She doesn't think she could marry someone who looks like a cast member from "Newsies" stumbled out of the backwoods and then put on the first pair of pants he saw hanging on a backyard clothesline, which unfortunately belonged to the teenage girl in the family.

On the other hand, the two young African American women in halter dresses with Angela Davis hair: the Crone apologizes for staring, but you were magnificent even if your hair blocked her view of the show. 

Also: according to two tourists from Toronto who were in the crowd, Dave Chappelle was there, but the Crone never saw him. Maybe he was hiding in the Angela Davis hair thicket.

Age Humiliation Factor: Medium. On  the one hand, the bouncer did ask for ID, which the Crone eagerly produced from her purse. On the other hand, when Erin pulled out a own battered passport as ID, the bouncer was off to the races in a game of flirty travel one-upmanship. "I'VE been to 27 Asian countries, you? Oh, you've lived in Africa? Where?" The Crone's ID could have been a Costco card for all that the bouncer actually examined it.

Cool Factor: Extremely high. Walking toward the venue, the Crone wondered if they were on the right street. Erin said, "Well, we can ask Chris Robinson" as she pointed across the road. Indeed, there was Chris and his guitar player Neal Casal ambling in the same direction, and they gave the "hail fellow, well met" salute and crossed over. It's always cool when you walk to the door of the venue WITH the band, especially when Chris Robinson said "Well, gotta go, we have to use the back entrance," before parting. 

Then, on his way through the crowd way up to the stage, Robinson tapped Erin on the shoulder and said, "Hey, you made it!" before taking the stage. The Crone believes the Kate Hudson resemblance may have been a factor.

Worth Hiring the Sitter? Definitely. Hearing the Brotherhood is like taking a nostalgic visit back to the best '70s rock concert ever - guitars and blues and great classic covers. There was a heavy Grateful Dead vibe, including a "Space"-like jam that gave the Crone plenty of time to use the bathroom, reapply lipgloss, and get another beer without feeling she'd missed anything interesting. Even packing the lunchboxes the next morning on only 5 hours of sleep, the Crone was still glad she went, and humming Sugaree.

The Chris Robinson Brotherhood is touring all over Cali this spring and then on to points east - see their website for details.

Did you see the show? Is there another band you'd like the Crone to review? Are there other factors that you, as a music fan whose former concert t-shirt budget is now spent on things like kids' orthodontia and PTA memberships, might like to know about before hiring the sitter? Email the Crone at contact at normalarkey dot com or post your comment here. When she wakes up from her afternoon nap, she'll get to it.