suburban kamikaze

More reasons to love the English

I really could not be more excited to be speaking at the upcoming BlogHer conference in New York.

And not just because it is a chance for me to tell a lot of other writers How to Do It, but because it also gives a whole new life to all of those posts I've written over the years that, in retrospect, seem to have no other purpose than as shining beacons of How Not to Do It. And that is really a cornerstone of good writing: Show, Don't Tell. 

For example, I could tell you that one of the best bits of copy editing advice ever written is Rule 17: Omit Needless Words,* but think of how much more relevant that becomes after you read the word "really" for the third time in just three paragraphs. It is inspirational, really. 

As if we needed another reason to love the English, there is nothing more satisfying than whipping a well-built collection of nouns and verbs into a piece of writing that does what you want it to do.

Looking forward to seeing many of you there.

-SK

Photo: We take a keen interest in English composition.     

*William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White: The Elements of Style

 

from the Why Should You Listen to Anything I Have to Say About Writing? archives:

The first cut is the D list  

99 Reasons to Drink in the Suburbs #21: Top secret English recipes

We gather at the house of the Queen's Own Jane, in a little English suburb roughly 4,500 miles southwest of London, where we all adopt English accents and succumb to the charms of her pre-Revolutionary take on all things American  liquor cabinet, which isn't exactly a cabinet, more like a landscape.

There are little sausages, top secret cocktails and an orgy of book talk. I want to have sex with her bookshelves, but she says no.    

We are allowed to play with the finger puppets however.      

Photo: Hem, F. Scott, Zelda and I share a Pimm's outside of London.  Way outside. 

Cheers,

-SK

Royal Bonus Feature: In which the English repeatedly show us how it is done but we always manage to screw up royally

Verona of the Midwest

One household, where we lay our scene, marks Shakespeare's birthday with multilayered drama and colorful insults. Just like every other day.     

All's well that ends mostly well, A midsummer night's drama queen, The first cut is the D list

In which the English repeatedly show us how it is done but we always manage to screw it up royally.

I call my friend Jane first thing to congratulate her.

"What a lovely couple,"  I say in my best English accent. I know she has been up since dawn, descaling her tea pot and assembling the proper English breakfast required of such occasions.

The menu includes sausages, bacon and egg  "butties," biscuits, ginger lemon cookies and something called Jaffa cakes. The telly is tuned to the BBC and Jane is singing along as some old hymn called "Jerusalem" fills the Abbey. She says it's as English as it gets. She says the same thing about curry.

I wish I was there, I tell her. Not in the Abbey. I'm talking about Jane's house just a little southwest of London, near Fort Lauderdale, where my friends and I have eaten our weight in sausages and trifle over the years.

It has been our tradition to observe any and all English occasions at Jane's house. Most of them we just  make up, like Sting Night and High Tea for No Reason at All Except to Coerce Jane into Making Trifle for Us.

We insist on rigid adherence to English traditions and cuisine, bait her into anti-American ranting and eat like royalty. We have also made a very poor showing for the U.S. educational system by repeatedly losing to the English at such things as U.S. presidential trivia, but that's another story. We drink Pimm's with cucumber and after more than a decade, have very nearly learned to make tea.

And so we are here today to honor the English, who have given us so much of what makes life interesting. Like men with English accents. Camelot. James Bond. The Tudors. Also, some of my very favorite people, without whom I would have no way of knowing how to properly wear a tiara. Or anything else with the word "properly" in it.

"No tilting," Jane says firmly. But why haven't I got a nice hat with a feather in it instead? I will get one, I promise.  It is not easy being English, even for one day.  

Royal Wedding Commemorative Bonus Features: How not to wear a tiara. How not to make a proper pot of tea. Men with English accents.

The first cut is the D list

I am prepared to swallow my pride and accept that a part-time career as a journalist and shallow humor writer does not qualify me as a literary critic. Still it stings when the Macbeth paper I edit for my son's 10th grade English class is returned with a D.

In my defense, it was honors English and I've never read Macbeth, so probably that works out to more like a C+ when you factor that in. Or rather, when in you factor that.  (Or is it "whom?" I can never keep those straight.)

My point is, I'd like to see his English teacher try to write a coherent story in 15 minutes with an editor standing over his shoulder screaming "15 minutes ago, lame ass," and the ballots are not even all counted! and the phone is ringing with a call he has to take or he won't be able to finish his other story which is due seven minutes after the first one and the only thing he's had to eat all day is Cheez-Its.

Whatever. I am prepared to cede the point when it comes to Shakespeare.

But the next assignment? A parody of a news story. And  I don't like to brag, but I have been writing news parodies for decades, sir. Sometimes even on purpose.

I pass on to my son a bit of the craft, the word play, the deft substitution of the ridiculous for the absurd. His piece, in which House Republicans draft a proposal to repel health care, makes me laugh. It's good, I tell him. But what do I know? 

It comes back with the word "repel" repeatedly crossed out. Above the first one, the teacher has written "repeal" in red ink.

Now my son is convinced that his mother could not even pass tenth grade English.

"Honors English," I say.  Because how hard could the other class be?

 

From the literary archives: A Stapler of One's Own, All's well that ends mostly well, Portrait of the agent as a young man

Suburban Kamikaze Dictionary: Word of the Day

11 minutes to yourself, or EMTY \'em-tee\ for short:  noun  1. Short break from the responsibilities of career and family for watching, rewatching and working out the implications contained in soft-porn video clips of a bearded, shirtless Daniel Craig asking "do you want to touch me?"  Yes, yes we do. But we only have 11 minutes. 2. Any similarly inspired break. 3. Material deemed likely to inspire such a break. 

Milkmaids and man candy in Manhattan

"It is so nice," I confess to the Executive Suburbanite during an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "to be able to walk through a museum like grown-ups, stopping to read and absorb." 

Her back is turned and she is absorbed in her attempt to capture the image of a giant wooden penis with her iPhone, but she knows exactly what I mean.

As parents, there is enormous fulfillment in the experience of trotting through these temples of learning and culture behind a pack of children who race from exhibit to exhibit as we speed-read and recite fun facts across the widening breach of marble floor.

"THE GORILLAS OF WESTERN AND CENTRAL AFRICA," we call out to them, "GET ALL THE WATER THEY NEED FROM THEIR MOIST DIET AND..."  - and here we pause to heighten the dramatic impact of the knowledge we are about to impart - "HAVE NEVER BEEN SEEN TO DRINK IN THE WILD!"

But, oh! To be without them in New York City, doing what grown-ups do, at the pace of grown-ups, in grown-up places. 

There is nobody rushing us along as we contemplate anything we feel like contemplating, from the habits of gorillas to the cultural achievements of the Asmat people, whose carved representations of their male family members are a tribute to the concept of endowment as the lifeblood of a great museum. 

We take many pictures.  

Later, we walk through an exhibit of paintings built around Vermeer's shamelessly provocative portrait of a woman pouring milk from a pitcher while engrossed in a fantasy in which she, Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman swim naked under a milky-white moon. I am not making this up, entirely. 

From the exhibit: "For at least two centuries before Vermeer's time, milkmaids and kitchen maids had a reputation for amorous predispositions."  It is speculated that she is dreaming about a man, who may or may not have been swimming naked, but it is the kind of thing that clearly invites further speculation of a grown-up nature.

"Netherlandish artists adopted this theme in works ranging from coursely erotic to slyly suggestive,"  the exhibit adds. 

"Milkmaid porn,"  says the Executive.  Which leaves pretty much everything to the imagination. 

On the other hand, there is Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman in the flesh, in the milk-white glare of a hundred flashbulbs as we stand outside the theater following a performance of A Steady Rain. 

Craig and Jackman are first rate as a pair of Chicago cops whose dysfunctional relationship plays out in a series of escalating tragedies. They are so good that for 90 minutes I completely forget to picture them naked. Luckily, the Executive is on top of it. Having seen the play four nights earlier, she waits for me outside the theater door to secure our place in the line of women squeezed up against the police barricades waiting for the two stars to come out and have sex with them. This is what is known in the grown-up world as theater appreciation. 

The real cops are making fun of us.

"Move back ladies," an officer calls out. "I've been here every night and he hasn't yet proposed marriage to anyone." 

Hah.  No one is looking for a marriage proposal. We're all grown-ups here. 

Photos:  Man candy at the Met

Because you can't throw underwear at the symphony

For years we had to content ourselves with nothing more than longing looks cast over the heads of a thousand strangers. 

From Miami to West Palm Beach to New York, I could only look on from a distance insurmountable by all but the most creatively launched underwear.  He could see nothing past the first few rows.

But I never gave up hope that one day I would be close enough to hurl my own underthings onto the stage where he would scoop them up, admire the rows of pink and blue bunnies and squint into the crowd in the direction from which they had flown. A connection would be made.  A song written.  A bathtub filled. Something like that.

Years went by. The last time I saw him was in Miami. He was so far away I had to use the binoculars to see him on the big screen. 

Then last night, with very little warning, I found myself practically holding his hand.

It began with a broken blender. Defying all expectations that winter would continue forever, a patch of sunlight had appeared in Chicago over the weekend. But in my enthusiasm for making mango Margaritas, a blender was shattered...

And that was how I found myself backstage at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra having the following conversation with the handsome English rock star whose music is the soundtrack for the soft porn movie all women carry around in their heads.

Me: "Do you have any applications for middle-age groupies? Because  I could really use a job." 

Handsome English Rock Star: "Excuse me?"

I am just kidding. It actually went like this:

Me: "Have you ever signed an iPod? I have a Sharpie." 

Handsome English Rock Star: "Sure."  He takes the iPod and the Sharpie, holds the pen out for me to pull the cap off  (rock stars do not uncap their own pens, apparently) and signs with a flourish that covers the entire back of the iPod.

" Hey!" I say. "Leave some room for Tori Amos." 

Sting looks up. "I'm joking," I say.

He points to a teeny little space in the corner. "Tori can sign here."

I am not sure how Tori is going to feel about this.

Later I take this picture:

   

 

I am joking, of course. We are just good friends.

A piping hot cup of scorn

In grief, as in so many things, the English turn to tea.

So I know I am in hot water as I head to South Florida  to try to be of use to my very dear English friend who has lost her husband. 

"You're going to have to learn to make a proper pot of tea," says my other very dear English friend, whom we refer to as The Queen's Own Jane, or sometimes "Jane" for short. "Not like the last time," she says darkly.

Bloody hell, I think, in the English accent I use in my head sometimes.  It has been six years since the tea party I threw for my daughter's fifth birthday and the English still cannot get over it.

There were pink roses, china cups and little sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

But I made the mistake of boiling water in a saucepan on the stove, committing what is apparently a felony in some parts of the U.K. and scandalising (and here I am using the preferred British spelling in a vulgar attempt to curry favor) the entire ex-pat British community throughout South Florida and the West Indies. 

Later, "Jane" sent me the full 343-step process by which a proper cup of tea is brewed and served.

I meant to learn it, I really did - but somewhere between the descaling and the pot warming and the steeping and the precision of a guard-changing ceremony at Buckingham Palace, I could never quite muster the energy.

It is, dare I say it?, only a cup of tea you are left  with at the end. Meanwhile, the world around you has moved on.

"I was thinking," I say cautiously, "to get her drunk."

But that, as they say in the colonies, Would Not Do. When an English friend has suffered a loss, it is  incumbent upon her friends to prepare tea.  Properly.

Noreen, of the West Indies British Tea Standards Committee, confirms this.

"There is nothing," she says, "that a good cup of tea or a bicarbonate of soda won't remedy."

Bicarbonate of soda? I pray this is a rum drink. But no.

Jane scoffs at the idea that I can get the tea right but insists that I do it anyway. "It will do her good to laugh," she says.

But I am determined to provide more than comic relief. Also to salvage my tea-stained reputation, which now appears in danger of spreading across the pond.  

Does Michelle at the British pension office know?

Lovely Michelle, whose lilting accent and impeccably good manners make me wish I was wearing gloves. "I do apologize," she says repeatedly, as if the 5-second interval during which she retrieves the answers to my questions is an unacceptable delay.

Michelle is as smooth and competent as Raymond at the American social security office is useless and rude. I find myself falling in love with her.  

But maybe that is just the tea talking.

Photo: British Delights.com

Mommy is Pissed, And She's Wearing a Tiara

My tiara came today.

You're goddamn right I'm wearing it.

I consider it my prize for a week spent providing key logistical, clerical and requisitioning support for a science fair, violin recital, orchestra concert, talent show, student council fundraiser and teacher appreciation week.  I remembered to send in the school picture money, re-register for baton classes and sign the take-home folder.

It was an impressive if exhausting performance right up until the day we were supposed to turn in all of the pop-tops the fourth-grader had been saving for a year in a coffee can in the hall closet.

I blew it.

I was one sticky note short of beating those sadists at the local school district who designed this week's schedule, and by the time I remembered the coffee can in the closet, I was already at work and someone else's class was collecting the pop-top honors. 

Nevertheless, when the tiara arrived, I donned it. It was, technically, my payment for a parenting essay selected for publication recently. But I am claiming it as my prize for having navigated a week in which I did not kill any members of my family, despite ample provocation.

I am particularly proud of the fact that the 13-year-old survived recycling day.

I was scrambling around that morning trying to get breakfast, lunches and coffee made while be-ribboning the potted plant the fourth-grader was bringing for that day's teacher appreciation tribute.  And frankly, I was a little off my game, having been up the night before until 1 a.m. typing up the results of his painstaking inquiry into the electrical conductivity of various chemical compounds.  Luckily I was up by 6 a.m., so I had time to cut out lightning bolts for the display board.  But  I knew I would never get the recycling bin to the curb on time and so, uncharacteristically, I asked for help.

The teenager declined, and when I showed him my frowny face, he offered this explanation:

"Mom," he said, in an exasperated tone, "I have had kind of a busy week."

I know, I know. I should at least have wounded him.

 

 

Photo:  Frowny face with tiara. Now they will respect me.