As Might be Seen on TV

Scented Nose Cover

OPEN ON shot of woman changing a baby's diaper, looking as if she is about to pass out from the smell.  The woman is wearing no makeup, her hair is messy and she is wearing an apron that is falling off her shoulders.

ANNOUNCER (VOICEOVER):  Oh, those putrid odors!

CUT TO shot of a well-dressed man on a New York City subway platform, holding his nose.

ANNOUNCER (VOICEOVER):  Bad odors!

CUT TO shot of woman mopping a linoleum floor, using bleach, with her hand over her nose.

ANNOUNCER (VOICEOVER):  Strong, bad odors!  Don't you wish you could find a way to get rid of them for good?

CUT TO shot of announcer, standing in a field of flowers

ANNOUNCER:  Your search is over.  I would like to introduce you to Smell-B-Gon, the scented nose cover.

Large image of plastic nose appears in top left corner of screen.  The plastic nose is equipped with what looks like two little oxygen tubes on the bottom.

Oops!  Wrong Nose!  But you get the idea.

CUT TO man on subway platform, who is pouring a liquid from a tiny bottle into a Smell-B-Gon, then putting it on his nose and inserting it, after which he takes a deep breath and looks happy and refreshed.

ANNOUNCER (VOICEOVER):  Just squirt a tiny bit of scented oil into the tube, insert it into your nose, and presto!  No more bad smells!  You will be instantly transported to an aromatic garden, laden with your favorite flowers.

CUT TO picture of four different plastic noses of different shades and four little vials of liquid of different colors.

ANNOUNCER (VOICEOVER):  Smell-B-Gon comes in four different skin tones, to match your natural coloring, and we include four fragrance vials:  lilac; jasmine; rose and mystery.  You can get all of this for just $19.99 plus shipping and handling.

Something like this, just not as old and a lot cheaper.

But wait!  There's more!

WRITING appears on the screen, showing 2 for 1 offer, 800 number and website URL.

ANNOUNCER (VOICEOVER):  You can receive an additional Smell-B-Gon and fragrance set absolutely free.  Just pay the additional shipping and handling.  And if you order within the next 20 minutes we will include, absolutely free, our two special fragrances:  antique mimeograph ink and antique model airplane glue.

CUT TO woman lifting baby from changing table.  This time her hair is styled, she is wearing makeup, she is well dressed and she has a Smell-B-Gon in her nose and she is smiling.  The 800 number and the website URL appear on the bottom of the screen.

WOMAN WITH BABY (speaking as if she has a cold):  Smell-B-Gon has changed my life!

(Woman holds the baby up and rubs noses with him.)

ANNOUNCER (VOICEOVER):  So don't let bad smells get you down.  Get Smell-B-Gon today.

Things I Will and Won't Do

Things I Will Never Do in My Lifetime

No need to lobotomize.

1.  Get a lobotomy.  Everyone thinks I'm spaced out enough as it is.

2.  Run a marathon, even if I get to eat a ton of spaghetti the day before the run without feeling guilty.  With my luck, the spaghetti would cause me to get a cramp and fall down, and all the runners after me would pile on top of me and crush me.  On second thought, it is highly unlikely that there would be any runners behind me.  In that case, I'd survive the race but die of embarrassment.

3.  Go swimming in the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey.  That would be like swimming in a giant toilet.

4.  Get a tattoo on my butt.  To do that, I would have to let the tattoo artist see my rear.  Then I would have to go to Confession for letting a stranger see my butt and disguise my voice so that the priest wouldn't know who he was laughing at.

5.  Ride any roller coaster, especially the Cyclone at Coney Island.  Well, maybe if you offered me enough money to live in luxury for the rest of my life ... even then, I'd have to think about it and get someone to hypnotize me before I got on the thing.

6.  Walk a tightrope between two skyscrapers.  I leave that to thrill-seeking idiots with a death wish.

7.  Be a Bond girl.  I'm too old, I'm too fat and too many of them get killed.  I’d also hate to get stuck with a name like Pussy Galore or Honey Rider.

8.  Be elected Pope.  I have too much estrogen and no Y chromosome and I don’t look good in white robes.

9.  Enter a beauty contest.  I could ace the talent part, but don’t ask me to wear a bathing suit in front of an audience.  Ever.

10.  Travel in a spaceship.  I have enough trouble just getting from The Bronx to Manhattan.

This brings me to:-

Things I Would SO LOVE to Do

It would be fun to surprise these people.

1.  Walk up Broadway from Times Square singing "Lullaby of Broadway" or "O mio babbino caro," really loud so that everyone turns around and looks at me and tourists take pictures of me.  Alternatively, I could stand in front of The Olive Garden and belt out some of my extensive repertoire of Italian songs.

2.  Learn to ride a motorcycle.  Buy a really cute helmet and some stunning boots and wear them every time I take the bike out.  Become known in the neighborhood as Harley Kate.

3.  Ride a carousel, like a little kid (but without an adult standing next to me).

4.  Finish that novel I started, finally.  Make it really funny.  Even though it’s about ancient Greek goddesses and gods in modern times, make it believable.  This isn’t as easy as it sounds.

5.  Take part in a flash mob.  This is something akin to No. 1 above, but with a bunch of other crazy, fun people, not just me.

6.  Sing a recital in one of New York’s classy concert halls, with just me and an accompanist.  Blackmail all my friends into coming and bringing all their friends, too.  Give them a crash course in recital etiquette a couple of days before the performance (i.e. “Please don’t applaud in the middle of a group of songs.  Wait until the group is finished.  Thank you.”).  Make sure to sing things they will enjoy, so they won’t suffer.

7.  Travel to Italy and, among everything else, visit my father’s family’s hometown.  Try to find some relatives and some family records.  Hope I don’t find things out about my family that I would rather not know.

8.  Take a Mediterranean cruise.  Buy so much stuff in every port that I won’t be able to carry it through customs when I get back to the U.S.

9.  Take a motor trip across the United States, like John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley.  I don’t have a camper or even a Winnebago and I don’t have a poodle, but that’s okay.  I can still write a bestseller about all the people I meet along the way and all the adventures I have, and my cat can come along if she wants to.

10.  Buy a bicycle and ride it all over The Bronx.  I could become a local celebrity.  “Hey, have you seen the old lady on the bicycle?  I’ll bet you 5-1 she falls off it today.” would become a daily neighborhood activity.

The Ten Best Uses for an Unwanted Fruitcake

Judging from some of the reactions I have seen, the majority of the human race in the Western World either hates fruitcake or thinks it hates fruitcake.  In the meantime, the giving of fruitcake is a Christmas tradition that goes back many centuries.  Such venerable customs are hard to stop, so most of us are exposed to fruitcake during the holiday season.  Those of us who like it (including this author) are thrilled.  Others are not.  Here are some ideas of what to do if you hate the stuff but someone sends it to you, anyway.

10.  Cut the cake into pieces, let the pieces harden to the consistency of large gemstones, paint them in bright neon colors and use them as paperweights.

9.  Leave the cake in the cupboard until it hardens to the point where it could break bones.  Use it as a decorative holiday doorstop.  You can cover it with pottery glaze if you want, but why bother?

8.  Use it for discus throwing practice.  Of course, this only works for the round-shaped cakes.  The rectangular ones can be used to play fetch with the dog.

7.  Re-gift it to that obnoxious cousin who borrowed your laptop and returned it with twenty different pieces of malware on it.

6.  Did you ever see the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding?  Remember the engagement party scene?  Well, a round fruitcake makes a lovely centerpiece when you stick a plant in the middle of it.

5.  Extract all the liquor from it and use the rest of it as mulch.  You probably don’t know how to extract the liquor, but the very act of trying to do this will give you many hours of holiday fun, especially if you are sampling a nice bottle of Kentucky Bourbon at the same time.

4.  Donate it to the office Christmas party.  When half your co-workers are too drunk to know the difference, offer it to them and tell them it’s chocolate.  After Christmas, tell them what they really ate.  You can all have a good laugh.

3.  Mash it into a powdery mess and add it to the cat’s litter.  Warning:  this might cause the cat to go on a litter box strike.  Just saying.

2.  Cut it into small pieces and put each piece between two chocolate chip cookies.  Feed them to the kids, telling them it’s a new kind of Oreo.  Kids eat grass and paper.  They will be sure to eat these.

1. Eat it!  It’s good!  Really, it is!  Would I steer you wrong?  Just add whipped cream.

Embarrassing Product Names

I had nothing better to do in the last couple of days, so I looked on the Internet for funny product names.  Your imagination can soar to great heights or fall to great depths with these.  Here are some examples.  Most of these are just so wrong that it would be a crime not to poke fun at them.

Bag Balm

What I imagine it to be:  A tranquilizer for unattractive old ladies

What it is:  A salve to be applied to a cow’s udder.  It can also be used by humans as a hand lotion.

Fagottini

What I imagine it to be:  A group of tiny gay men who insist that a “faggot” is a piece of firewood that provides light and warmth and, therefore, it is not an insult

What it is:  Stuffed pasta

Megapussi

What I imagine it to be:  (1) A witch’s brew that enlarges lady parts; (2) A giant cat.

What it is:  Potato chips

Nuclear Licorice

What I imagine it to be:  A minuscule device disguised as a piece of black candy, designed to blow up entire cities.

What it is:  Plain old ordinary brown colored lozenges

Soup for Sluts

What I imagine it to be:  A liquid aphrodisiac for women that turns them into raving nymphomaniacs

What it is:  A form of Ramen noodles

Vergina

What I imagine it to be:  Virginal lady parts

What it is:  Beer

So Write, Already!

For most of the past week, I have been stuck at home, courtesy of a big arthritis flare-up in my right knee that turned me into a temporary cripple.  A great chance to sit down and write, right?

It would be if I knew what to write about and how to write it.  But I don’t.  I have a disease called Writer’s Block.  It attacks the brain cells.  The patient becomes terminally bored with every single possible topic and unable to come up with an opening sentence.  As the disease progresses, the brain becomes more and more paralyzed, until all the patient can do is try to hold a ballpoint pen with his nose and toss crumpled paper at the cat.

Two Writers

The only thing I have written all week is this thing..

Words come and go, in no particular order.  Amanuensis.  I haven’t thought of that word in months!  Serial.  Horticulture. Hairy.  Hairy horticulture.  Meravigliosa.  Voleva una vita meravigliosa!  Sheeeeesh!  I can put together a halfway decent opening sentence in Italian, but not in English!  What’s wrong with me?

I need a subject.  What do they always say?  “Write what you know.”  I can’t do that.  My life is boring, even to me, and I’m the one living it.

I could make stuff up and write a fantasy.  I did that recently, and got more hits on that short-short story than on any of my others.  On the other hand, that story wasn’t completely made up, because I was envisioning my own apartment, I made myself the narrator and I used an old legend that I had already read about.  In other words, I took elements of my life and exaggerated them to the point where they were unrecognizable as anything human.  If I keep doing that, people will think I’m batshit crazy.

Actually, I am batshit crazy.  That’s why I became a writer.  It shouldn’t matter if people think I am batshit crazy when I AM batshit crazy, because something like that is bound to show, anyway, right?

I know.  I’ll write something about what it’s like to have Writer’s Block!

Problem solved.

Life in New York City

New York has a bad reputation, much of it undeserved.  In movies, television and newspapers New York is always dirty, crime-filled, blight-ridden and dangerous.  (“There are 8 million stories in The Naked City … .”?  Talk about lousy public relations!)  Actually, it’s a nice place to live, if you don’t mind the expense.  We pay for the privilege of living here – a lot.  But, in spite of what you see on Law and Order, we don’t stumble over gruesome murder victims every time we step outside.  Most of us never see a murder victim even once in our entire lives.  Really.  It’s true.

I have lived here for over thirty years.  Most of that time I lived in Brooklyn.  For the last several years The Bronx has been my home.  I only lived in Manhattan for a couple of months, but I’ve been working there for over 30 years, not to mention all the performances I have sung and attended there and all the friends I have who live there.  I know Manhattan better than I know either Brooklyn or The Bronx, which is very New Yorker of me.

The Weather

New Yorkers will get through a hurricane, a Nor’easter or a giant blizzard with great courage and fortitude.  High winds?  Flooding?  A week of blackouts?  Fuhgeddaboudit!  On the other hand, a little bit of rain or slush turns us into a bunch of grumbling sissies.

The reason is that most New Yorkers don’t have cars.  A car is a lot of trouble here, and we have good public transportation almost everywhere, except on Staten Island.* People in other parts of this country can step out of their houses on a crummy day and right into the car.  Most New Yorkers step outside into the weather and walk in it.  Sometimes we have to stand in it.  The curbs soon become littered with broken umbrellas that have been tossed aside and left to die alone and abandoned.  Very few of today’s umbrellas can survive the combination of bad weather and the anger of a New Yorker caught in the rain, especially if there is a high wind at the same time.  In that case, all bets are off and it’s every man for himself, women and children included.

It’s a good thing that it doesn’t snow as often here as it does Upstate or in New England.  Snow in New York City is pretty for about five minutes before it turns into Super Slush.  If there is any way to get inside your boots, Super Slush will find it.  Super Slush congregates in massive piles on street corners, turning getting across the street into a Herculean task.  Attempting a broad jump over the mess is likely to land you smack in it, surrounded by strangers, some of whom will want to kill you because you splattered dirty slush on them and the rest of whom might help you up after they get through laughing like hyenas or catching you on video.

The irony is that this city is in a protected little pocket and, aside from our legendary hot, humid summers, our normal weather is pretty mild, considering.  New Jersey, Upstate New York, Long Island and New England get hit with crazy weather a lot more than we do.  We complain anyway, because that’s what we do.

* Staten Island is like a separate country, which suits Staten Islanders just fine.  They don’t really believe that they are part of New York City, and they show it by making it hard for anyone who doesn’t live there to get there.  

Holy Week Hilarity

These people understand.

I like to think that Jesus was looking down at us and laughing.

Holy Week in a Roman Catholic church is always nerve-racking for those involved in the services, including the music people.  In the best of circumstances it's easy to forget, from year to year, exactly how each service goes.  If you have a new pastor in charge, though, and that new pastor has ideas of his own, you can end up with a train wreck.

That's what happened to us on Holy Thursday evening.

As "Leader of Song" I was the soloist during the mass.  The choir was there, too, and, as usual during times like this, I was singing with them as well as handling my own music.

That's enough background.  Let's get to the story.

The whole mass went without a hitch, including the washing of the feet.  Several men from the congregation came up to the altar, sat on folding chairs, took off their shoes and socks and had water poured over their feet.  We could only hope they had all showered that day and that their socks were clean.  During this, I sang a solo.  I know that some people were able to listen to me in spite of the more interesting things happening up on the altar, because I actually got a compliment for my rendition.  The compliment was for how softly I sang it, which might not be such a compliment after all, but that's okay.

Anyway, it came time for the end of the mass, where the choir chants the Pange Lingua and everyone processes to the smaller church downstairs.  Our organist, who is very good at staying on top of things and always knows what we have to do, told us that we would sing ONE VERSE in the back of the church, then hightail it downstairs through the main entrance, take our places in one of the front pews down in the lower church, and sing the rest of it when everyone else came down.  Nobody had told him anything different.

This is just what we started to do.  The choir members, who are better at descending church stairs than I am, went first and got well ahead of me.

In the meantime, our pastor was walking toward us, hissing "We're going up the middle aisle!  We're going up the middle aisle!"  We either didn't hear him or didn't understand what he was getting at. I thought he was referring to the middle aisle downstairs.

I made it outside and down the front steps of the church, and was walking toward the lower church when our organist came out and told me that we had to get back upstairs because we had to process up the middle aisle of the MAIN CHURCH, not the downstairs church!

I shouted, "Come back!" and waved my hands around in an effort to get the choir to come back, but nobody heard me, especially the ones who had already gone inside.

I was still doing this when a guy from the church upstairs came down, sent me back up and said that he would get everyone else back in place.

At long last, we all got back up to where we were supposed to be and were led up the middle aisle, chanting the Latin verses, by the same gentleman who had fetched us.  He eventually led us through a SIDE DOOR to the downstairs church.  Because I have to take steps slowly, one at a time, the pastor accidentally bumped into me from behind.  My 1950s Catholic school upbringing makes me think of being bumped by a priest as a major catastrophe.  This time, though, I hardly gave it a thought.  I had more important things on my mind, such as singing the right verses and getting to my pew.

The last five minutes were fine.

And I got a story out of this!

Fun Things to Do When You are Too Sick to Go to Work but Not Sick Enough to Stay in Bed All Day

     1.    Make prank phone calls to some nasty neighbor.

 

     2.    Play Dragon Mahjong on your computer until it makes you even sicker from aggravation because it’s so hard to win.

 

     3.    Call your workplace to assure yourself that they miss you.

 

4.    Get caught up on that novel you are reading.

     5.    Work on that novel you are writing.

 

     6.    Look out the window and watch all the people out there having more fun than you are having.

 

7.    Plan a redecoration of your living room.

 

8.    Give up plans to redecorate the living room when you realize you will probably have to do it yourself because your last bank statement shows insufficient funds to pay anyone else.  You are such a klutz that you can’t even hang a picture on the wall without help.

 

9.    Call all your friends, who will be shocked to hear from you.

 

10. Watch the ID Channel over and over.  If you are not addicted already, you will soon become so.

 

11. If you don’t have cable TV, get caught up on some DVD movies you haven’t gotten around to yet.  Your friends are dying to know what you think of “The Hobbit.”