Just Remember Where They Came From

They’re like those flashing neon signs on a dark night.
For the people who can’t see how a country kid can make a success out of a simpler upbringing, I offer exhibits A and B – my most recent “Hollywood” interviews.
The one kid used to sit next to me in home economics. We had to make thumbprint cookies and devise a lunch menu together.
We got the same education. We were offered the same opportunities.
And we took different paths.
He’s an aspiring actor whose moments in television shows and an Old Spice commercial garnered him a spot on Extra TV’s America’s Most Eligible Bachelor list.
I’m a writer with a home, a daughter, a husband.
We’re writing small town success stories as we walk down two separate planes.
Because, let’s face it, I got a case of the giggles rewatching Thelonious Johnson’s Extra TV clip on YouTube a few days after it aired. He’s not the sexy young thing with the six-pack abs to me – he’s the pain in the butt boy who I had to cook with in home economics.
And I’m proud of him.
Proud because he’s doing well. His star is ascending. Just as I’m writing, writing, writing, he’s acting – and he loves it.
I’m proud too because he gets to represent the rest of us. TV, movies, the bright lights of Hollywood are their own form of success – they’re not better or worse than what the rest of us have – but they’re easy to recognize. A clip on Extra is real, watchable proof that “he done good.”
So too has Risa Machuca, the Liberty girl who admits she’s not doing what the other Class of 1994 grads are doing these days. She’s not settling down, raising a family.
Ironically, to her that is success – what so many of us take for granted. But Machuca linked her star to one of the brightest lights in the music biz and rocketed into the atmosphere.
Now she’s out on her own and smashing down barriers right and left. She’s a success story if we’ve ever seen one – a self-made success story at that.
My pride for TJ may be muffled by the giggles that he himself admitted would come from the people who “knew him when” as they watched the cameras panning his stomach as he climbed out of a pool soaking wet.
We can’t see him the way the world apparently does.
But I look at Machuca without the lens of familiarity, and I’m proud of her. I’m proud that she’s tackling her dreams. I’m proud that she embraces her past and has made it a part of her future.
That’s what makes her, makes TJ signs for the non-believers. Two kids raised in the country who’ve “made it,” they have let me write their stories in their old hometown paper.
They haven’t forgotten where they came from, because the country makes something out of all of us – even the big stars.

Sweet and tart - the best lemonade

There are two groups of people in this world – the one who can pass by a child’s lemonade stand and the ones who come screeching to a halt.
I’m the sucker on the latter end.
I blame my parents.
Growing up on a dead end street, I never had a lemonade stand.
Oh, I had dreams. I remember drafting a plan for a full-fledged snack haven with my cousin one lazy summer night.
We were going to bake cookies with giant chunks of chocolate and mix up pitchers of Country Time for an Army.
We planned to split the money right down the middle and buy, well, I don’t know what we would have bought. But I’m absolutely sure it was something good. Maybe the dolly with her own bathrobe that you could take into the bathtub, the one I marked in the junk catalogs my mom received month after month?
I’ll never know. Because my parents got wind of our plans. They came to the defense of their pantry – about to be raided to outfit our first foray into business.
They laid it out for us – back road, dead end street. No cars. No customers.
Those parents – always thinking.
Our dreams died on that hot summer’s evening, a pain eased by orange creamsicles devoured out on the lawn where we couldn’t drip on the floor.
When I see a little table and chairs set up on the roadside, a little boy or girl holding up a hand-lettered sign, I hit my brakes and flip my blinker.
Sunday, I’d gotten only a quarter of a mile down the road on my way to my parents’ house when I saw it.
A boy with his sign, a tent behind him.
I pulled over. I checked my rearview mirror. I did a U-turn.
“Where are we going, Mommy?” Jillian asked from the backseat.
“We’re going to get you some lemonade,” I told her.
Together we hopped out of the car and walked over to a family set up on the sidewalk.
The boy, I soon learned, wanted a remote control car. He had a yearning like I had for that bathtime dolly.
And thanks to a trafficked road and a fierce determination to hold that sign sky high for every driver, he was going to get that car.
I watched him carefully pour out Jillian’s huge cup of lemonade with a grin that got wider still when he handed it across the table and said, “thank you.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “But you didn’t tell me what I owe you yet. Don’t thank me until you get the money for your work!”
“Oh,” he said, sheepishly. “It’s $1.”
I shook my head.
“How are you ever going to get that remote control car if all you charge me is $1?” I asked him. “How about $2?”
The little boy’s smile made up for crushed dreams of decades ago better than any orange popsicle.

What's bugging you

Product reviews have taken off . . . and although swag is fun, it comes with certain responsibilities! First of all, I have to be honest. Which can be tough!

And with my most recent work - for Babble I'm only allowed to pick the five absolute best. With tons of products on the market, it's testing me more than Jillian and I ever test the products!

So here's the deal, to ease my conscience, I'll be posting the "losers" on here - at least the good ones that I wish I could have included on the list. Meanwhile, buzz on over to Babble to check out the BabbleBest: Insect Repellants!

And I didn't write it!

Now that my freelancing sideline is finally getting moving - check out the list at left of some of my most recent work on the Web - I feel like my hands are glued to the keyboard.

Thank goodness for Jillian! Even when she's being a nudge, she makes me take a few seconds for a cuddle.

But I weighed in on some of her antics for a story that . . . for once . . . I didn't have to write! Keath Low wrote a great article for iparenting - so check it out . . . Crash, Boom, Bang.

Tragedy begets good?

It isn’t often that good can come from tragedy. And it’s almost impossible to imagine the death of a child can promote something positive.
But I’d like to see it.
A few weeks ago, a child walking home from Callicoon was struck by a car and killed. It was tragic – no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Despite the rumors, the police have confirmed he was obeying all traffic laws. His skateboard was tucked beneath his arm. He was walking against traffic.
That doesn’t lessen the tragedy. Nothing can.
But this was a child who lived to skateboard. He was like hundreds of thousands of kids across America – some good kids, some bad kids, some little kids, some not-so-little kids.
And rumors which turned out to be false highlighted one thing about Callicoon and hundreds of thousands of communities in America – they’re places where skateboarding kids have been painted with a broad brush and treated to a cold shoulder.
There are kids who skateboard who are bad news – no question.
There are kids who play basketball who are bad news too. And kids who like to kick a ball around. And kids who like to throw the pigskin.
And, hey, if you want to get right down to it, there are some pretty awful kids who are lazy lay-abouts.
But wait, you say, there are good kids who do some of those things, right?
After all, we build basketball courts to keep kids off the streets. We line football fields and put together soccer teams.
There are plenty of good kids. And there are good kids who skateboard too.
There are kids who work their tails off to learn to ollie and nosegrind, kids who spend every waking moment from dawn ‘til dusk falling off that board only to get back up, dust themselves off, and try again.
And while, as a parent, my first thought at the death of a child went to his family, my second went to the skate park in Callicoon.
Oh no, I thought, when I was still operating on rumors. Please tell me they won’t close that place.
Because kids who don’t have an outlet are some of the worst kids I know. They’re frustrated. They’re angry. And they cause trouble.
They do stupid things, like skating in the street, and getting some air doing a 180 off a guardrail in a private parking lot.
There are stupid kids. And then there are kids who are just kids, kids who want to do something good. They just need our help.
The obituary for a child asks for donations in his name to the local skate park. Is this the way to bring good from a tragedy?
We’ll only know if we try.

You say tomahto, I say I'm hungry

I can’t face a summer without tomatoes.
Tomato, basil and fresh mozzarella – drizzled with a little olive oil. Tomato on crunchy bread slathered in mayonnaise and sprinkled with a little salt. Tomato in bite-sized chunks scattered on my garlic bread.
The salmonella scare hit while I was on vacation a few weeks back, and I laughed off the news in the Virginia papers proclaiming the state’s fruit safe.
Really, I didn’t expect to ask my waitress if the tomatoes in my salad were local.
Then I came home.
To savor relaxation mode for just a few more hours we stopped for heroes in Honesdale. Jonathan placed his order, and I stepped up to the deli counter. I wanted my usual.
As a vegetarian, my usual is heavy on cheese and veggies. Tomatoes are a must.
I was about to be disappointed. No one’s stocking tomatoes. No one.
The guy taking our order was apologetic, but I was bummed. A sandwich just isn’t a sandwich without tomatoes.
For that matter, a summer just isn’t a summer without tomatoes.
I like ‘em red, green, orange, striped and spotted.
I like the funky-shaped meaty heirlooms and the zesty little cherries.
The minute I was home, I went online. I traced the salmonella along with the FDA to Mexico and Florida.
Pheww. It’s a handling problem, not a growing problem.
Farmers’ market here I come.
I’d be heading there anyway, to be honest. Once summer comes to town, I steer clear of the produce aisle at the supermarket in favor of fruits and veggies that boast a little flavor, the kind I can only find fresh grown. The kind I’m not going to find fresh off the truck from Mexico or Florida.
The folks who promote the farmers’ markets here in Sullivan County talk about the importance of knowing your grower, and they’re right.
They talk about supporting the local economy, and I’m right there with them.
But my trips are fueled by an even more basic need – the need for real food with real taste.
I want my tomatoes – the meaty ones, the sweet ones and the tangy ones. I can’t face summer without them.

Mah haid hurts just thinkin' 'bout it y'all!

I wondered if I should duck as Jonathan drove us back over the line into New York on Sunday afternoon.
Raised here in the Yankeeiest of Yankee states, I’ve got a confession – less than a week back in the South, and it was back.
My Southern accent.
It’s nothing a good dose of “My Cousin Vinny” and a “Yankees” game won’t fix, mind you, but it’s there all the same.
The “Aahh” instead of “I.” The “way-ell” instead of “well.”
I called my poor little cousin “darlin’” three times before I remembered to call him Alex. Scratch that. I called my “po lil’ cuzin” . . . well, you get the idea.
Almost seven years after I moved back to New York (or, as any good Yankee says it, Noo Yawk), we took our second vacation last week to Jonathan’s hometown.
And people looked at me funny. They told me I talked too fast. They asked me to repeat myself.
I realized I’d spent the past seven years working my way back to where I’d started the day I moved to Franklin, Va. The place I spent my year and a half in the South trying to escape.
They thought I was plumb crazy. And if they didn’t, Mark Twain was right. The minute I opened my mouth, I removed all doubt.
The trouble is, I can’t keep my Yankee trap shut for long. So I adjusted. I slowed everything down.
In just a few days, I could match my husband twang for twang. If either of us could sing, we’d have fit right into a country music video.
I could blame the heat or the humidity, but it was just too easy to let it ride. I let the words flow off my tongue like molasses.
“Y’all,” was first. Then “cain’t.” And, well, I was “fixin’” to do something when I heard myself. Oops.
I tried. I really did. I wore my Yankees t-shirt and flashed my New York driver’s license to the store clerks. I told Jonathan we should get heroes for lunch – not subs – and moaned that we’d never find a good bagel.
But every friend I ran into, every old stompin’ ground I visited, made me too darn comfortable. I’d test out my tongue and let loose.
“My haid hurts,” I’d say. “It mus’ be the heat. Or maybe Ah’m jus’ tarred.”
It could have sounded put on. I didn’t care. It was as comfy as my holiest pair of blue jeans, the set I don’t dare wear outside of the house.
The Southern drawl has sent many an actress off to the speech coach – afraid she won’t get roles because she sounds uneducated.
But the most recognized of all American accents is the one I’ve always secretly wished was my own. While my speech is marked by the long “e” in creek and the “sneakers” on my feet, I’m not afraid of “y’all” or a drawn out word or two.
So I reckon I’m stuck – a Yankee with an identity crisis until her next Southern vacation.