now we're cooking with gas
� I'm finally succumbing to the mad cow disease I know I've acquired from all the vengeance-minded beef i've consumed over the ages
� my muse won an all-expense paid trip to Vegas by calling in the winning sound effect on a radio contest. Immediately upon her arrival in Sin City, she hit the jack-pot and wisely decided to open up a combination tattoo parlour and juice bar where she entertains the likes of Wayne Newton and Celine Dion on a weekly basis. It's true. She sent me a tacky postcard detailing the whole fabulous deal. She's apparently sent for a replacement, but thus far, all I've received is some mysterious government documents rabbiting on about quarantines and immigration laws. Damned muses. Having one always SOUNDS so glittering and fabulous, but it's really quite annoying. They're always off flirting with/getting knocked up by dangerous looking men with poetic potential and drinking problems, running off with rock stars or coming all undone in the Playboy Bunny grotto and being carted back home by angry god fathers (get it? angry GOD fathers?!! aha hahaha...I kill me) to rest and recuperate. It's really hard to find a good reliable muse these days.
� I'm starting to feel horribly guilty about devoting so much time to aimless Diaryland fun and so little to productive portfolio development.
Of course, Diaryland isn't the only thing inhibiting productive portfolio development. There's been plenty of obsessing about the woes of the wolf getting in the way too, and many a domestic chore related to visiting family members.
And there is yet more domestic duty and entertaining on the horizon. MY parents are arriving on Friday to visit for a week. Once again, updates will be scant. You must not worry about me (you in particular, darling Lydibug) if you don't hear from me. Aside from Jack and the Wolf, only two other people I know in real life are aware of my on-line rambles. I prefer to keep it that way. I would find it truly inhibiting if i knew family members were reading this. And so I generally ignore the siren's call of my beautiful mac and the delicious demon that is diaryland whilst hosting the brood.
I am looking forward to Mom and Dad's visit. They haven't been to see our new abode in Toronto yet. They were planning on visiting last September, but then everything kinda came unglued with the whole 9/11 thing and all.
I love my parents, of course, because I'm a dutiful daughter and that's you know, part of the job description. But I LIKE them too. They're characters. It's odd that I haven't really told you anything about them yet, 'cuz I'm very attached to them. I must rectify this at once. Let's start from the top.
That Girl
When my dad was young, he looked like a very preppy Kirk Douglas. It's the chin dimple i suppose, but also something about the eyes. He played guitar in coffee houses while in University and wrote bad social protest poetry and I think, fancied himself a bit of a beatnik. Sweet Daddy-o. He started University at sixteen and had graduated by the time he was twenty. He met my mother (who looked just like Marlo Thomas in That Girl at the time, only auburn-haired) in a small northern mining town (My dad was a mining engineer / mine manager before he retired five years ago) where she was teaching elementary school and waiting to turn twenty-one so she could run off and become an airline stewardess and see the world.
My mother is the oldest in a family of five girls (plus two brothers at the tail end). The girls are all separated by a year, so when my dad (let's call him Russ) arrived in town, there were three Romanoff girls of date-able age: My mom (let's call her Tanya), and my aunts, Katherine and Gina. All with auburn hair and fiery tempers to match, beautiful bods and Marlo Thomas smiles. And they were THE SHIT as annfrank would say.
Actually, I have another little story that sums my mom up rather well. My parents were living in another little mining town for about a year (I was entering my second year of university) when my dad was promoted from mine supervisor to mine manager. Now this is a small town. Small. Like 3,000 people or something. I was home from school for Christmas break and my mom and I went to do some grocery shopping at one of the three local grocery stores. As we were getting the shopping trolley, we passed by two dowdy women so deep in gossip, they didn't see us pass.
One was saying to the other "Can you believe that Tanya Carter? Ever since Russ became mine manager, she thinks she's the Queen of Everything..."
At this, I issued a little gasp and their heads swivelled in our direction. Their little piggy eyes widened in horror, their sagging cheeks suddenly flushed.
My mother froze. Her shoulders suddenly squared, her grip on the trolley tightened and then released all together. She turned on her heel and strode over to them, an icy smile on her lips.
"That's not true, Roberta," she purred sweetly. "I've always thought I was Queen of Everything."
And then turning like Naomi Campbell on the catwalk, all haughty and untouchable, she swept past them and stalked down the canned fruit aisle with me wheeling the squeaking shopping trolley behind her.
So you can see how my dad would be putty in her hands the moment he laid eyes on her.
The story of how they met goes like this. There was very little in the way of decent housing in town when my dad came to town, but he was lucky enough to find an opening at the bunkhouse, rooming with a great big bear of a guy named Ernie. Ernie's last roommate happened to have left the bunkhouse to marry none other than my Aunt Gina. And Ernie was dating my Aunt Katherine. Ernie, being a swell guy and generally friendly presence, invited my dad to come along to the wedding with him and my Aunt Katherine. My dad, being new in town and eager to fit in, agreed.
At the wedding reception (and probably, you know, before as my mom was a bridesmaid), he spied my mom from across the room. She was laughing and flirting, and tossing her shining Breck Girl curls, her date for the evening plying her with drinks and compliments and being as attentive as humanly possible.
And just like that, he fell in love. He didn't talk to her that night, but he some how got a photo of her from that event and, as the story goes, he posted it above his bed and from that day forth he told everyone that he was going to marry that girl. Even though he had never talked to her before. Even though he had all these grand plans to get a job in a mine in Sweden, pack up his guitar and Kirk Douglas chin dimple and go cash in on the free love his old engineering buddy kept writing to him about.
So for the next couple of weeks, he bided his time. He eventually got Ernie to set him up on a double date with my mom. It went swimmingly, although my mother was having none of that wrestling in the backseat business my dad seemed so keen on. Not on the first date, certainly. And not on the second, third, fourth or fifth as it turned out. And as if that wasn't bad enough, she was still dating the guy who had escorted her to Gina and Al's wedding. The guy with the flash car and loads of ready cash.
And you might think that the Swedish honeys were starting to look better and better to my dear old daddy-o. You might think his interest was beginning to wane. You might think that, but you'd be wrong.
It turns out that the only telephone in the bunkhouse was located right outside my dad's bunkroom door. And laying in bed, he could hear every conversation clearly through the wall. Including the conversations flash car guy was having with my mom.
Flash car guy would call her up, ask her out, and my mom would say, no, sorry. She's busy. Maybe another night. And then my darling Daddy-o would call her up right afterwards and she'd say yes, of course, pick me up at seven and don't be late.
And he knew. He was in like flint.
Okay, an aside: I use that expression all the time, " In like flint..." and I know what it means, but where the hell did it come from?
The rest, as they say, is history. Five months later, they were married. In a grand ceremony involving alot of black and white photography and oh yes, another bride and groom. You guessed it, they were married in a double ceremony with my Uncle Ernie and Aunt Katherine.
A year and three months later, I arrived on the scene, squalling my fool head off. But that's a whole 'nother story!
And in the meantime, every one lived happily ever after. The End. sorta.
In Like Flynn / Flint
Reference books almost universally assert that this set phrase, an American expression meaning to be successful emphatically or quickly, especially in regard to sexual seduction, refers to the Australian-born actor Errol Flynn. His drinking, drug-taking and sexual exploits were renowned, even for Hollywood, but the phrase is said to have been coined following his acquittal in February 1943 for the statutory rape of a teenage girl. This seems to be supported by the date of the first example recorded, in American Speech in December 1946, which cited a 1945 use in the sense of something being done easily.
The trouble with this explanation is that examples of obviously related expressions have now turned up from dates before Flynn's trial. Barry Popik of the American Dialect Society found an example from 1940, as well as this from the sports section of the San Francisco Examiner of 8 February 1942: "Answer these questions correctly and your name is Flynn, meaning you're in, provided you have two left feet and the written consent of your parents". To judge from a newspaper reference he turned up from early 1943, the phrase could by then also be shortened to I'm Flynn, meaning "I'm in".
It's suggested by some writers that the phrase really originated with another Flynn, Edward J Flynn - "Boss" Flynn - a campaign manager for the Democratic party during FDR's presidency. Flynn's machine in the South Bronx in New York was so successful at winning elections that his candidates seemed to get into office automatically.
The existence of the examples found by Mr Popik certainly suggest the expression was at first unconnected with Errol Flynn, but that it shifted its association when he became such a notorious figure. Since then, it has altered again, because in 1967 a film, In Like Flint, a spy spoof starring James Coburn, took its title by wordplay from the older expression, and in turn caused many people to think that the phrase was really in like Flint.
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