i could not have done this in january. this project has changed me. i am transformed by every friend i meet just a little bit at a time. this was a change that has taken six months of this project to come about! i am grateful every day for my facebook friends.
Tag Archives: facebook
but did i get the job on jerseylicious!?
the train from boston to new york was meant to be a four hour haul but it was five and it deposited me into the hell that is owned by satan. oh, whoops, michael bloomberg. new york at six o’clock rush hour, one hundred degrees, rain with a brisk wind of brimstone and sulfur. the boy scouts benjamin and brandon trailing behind me with their cameras and cases and tripod. i met up with my son joseph and the quintet found a quiet spot at a QUIET italian restaurant on 55th and 9th avenue to await the arrival of f2fb friend #169 steve ware.
by quiet, i mean the volume was set at eleven. new yorkers are loud people, pushy people, excitable people. they crowd up against each other and there’s little time for extended conversational openers like “excuse me” or “sorry i stepped on your foot”. . . i spent three minutes being polite and figured it wasn’t getting me anywhere. none of these people would last five minutes in kearney, missouri or cedar rapids, iowa or even morgantown, west virginia–places i’ve logged on this new years resolution.
i first met steve ware at a movie shoot that my younger son eastman was part of. eastman was just ten and steve watched out for him on the set when i wasn’t available. we have kept up over the years through emails and facebook but not so much in person.
steve and a young friend. he calls the picture "when former self meets future self" i think it's the coolest profile picture ever!
the waitress asked me if we were doing a movie because of all the equipment the boy scouts, brandon and ben, were hauling. i allowed as how i was sort of gonna being doing a, well, a “reality thang” which isn’t a bad way to describe two guys following me around making a documentary about my new years resolution. i mentioned that steve ware is working on the show jerseylicious, the scorching hot series about a beauty salon in new jersey. (i should put in a plug here for the show if i expect to be invited to be part of the cast, shouldn’t i?)
i didn’t put up any objection when she asked if she might seat us in the v.i.p. area. which was a good 3% quieter.
RECIPE FOR GETTING YOURSELF A VIP TREATMENT:
1. RENT FRIENDS IN CASUAL DRESS WITH LOADS OF CAMERA GEAR. THEY MUST WEAR CARGO SHORTS AND I WOULD SHOOT THEM UP WITH FRAPPUCINOS BEFOREHAND. JUST FOR THAT VIBE. (a clipboard isn’t a bad add-on)
2. HAVE THEM PUT THAT CAMERA LENS ON YOU. IGNORE THEM. TRY TO ORDER. PUSH THE CAMERA LENS AWAY. WAVE YOUR HANDS IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE. LOOK POUTY.
3. ****GUARANTEED*** WAITRESS WILL ASK “UH, ARE YOU WITH . . . ?” THIS IS AN IMPORTANT MOMENT:
4. BE VAGUE. VERY VAGUE. DREDGE UP EVERY REALITY SHOW YOU KNOW (GLAM FAIRIES? SISTER WIVES? JERSEY SHORE IN ITALY????) AND PEOPLE (SPIELBERG, FOR EXAMPLE, YOUR COUSIN’S LAST NAME ENDS WITH BERG. THAT’S PRETTY GOOD)
5. AGREE (RELUCTANTLY–WATCH THAT CHAMPAGNE TABLE STUFF) TO GO TO THE VIP TABLE AND WORK ON YOUR POSTURE: NOSE SLIGHTLY TILTED UPWARD. THIS IS KEY BUT I DON’T THINK I’M AS GOOD AS ALL THAT.
steve ware has a particular gift of getting himself into car accidents–and i asked him about that:
steve has battled back from an incredible health crisis and yet he’s managed it with grace, patience and good humor. and yes, he’s now working on jerseylicious.
i think steve and i agree that everybody should be the stars of their own reality series. maybe it’s not filmed. maybe it’s not on a cable channel. but it’s you. you are the central character of your own life!!!!! you are not just watching baseball, you play it. you are not wanting to be glam, you get it. you take adventures, you are the star of your own life,
however, i’m sorry because this is advice from someone who isn’t there yet. we left the cafe and the rain had become a gentle sweet smelling cloak. the commuters had scurried off, the tourists were in their hotel beds with visions of fifth avenue bargains dancing through their heads. the moon was just one of the twinkling lights overhead. i smiled in what i hoped was a most charming way and asked f2fb friend #169 if i had a shot at getting on jerseylicious.
he said i don’t have big enough hair.
i’m late! i’m late! for a very important date–my son’s college tour with f2fb friend #168
from rhode island, i got on a commuter train to boston. a short trip but an important one. i was meeting a f2fb friend for the first time. f2fb friend #168 mary mcmanus had worked with my son joseph on a film documenting her struggle with post polio syndrome. mary had found the strength to run the boston marathon despite her health setbacks and she wanted to share the struggle with others so that someone somewhere, even just one person, could overcome their own struggles with courage they absorb from mary’s story. the movie is “keeping the pace: the mary mcmanus story” and you can see it at http://marymcmanus.com/journey
just as joseph learned about mary in making the movie, mary learned something about joseph. i had never visited him on campus. it’s the sort of thing a mom is supposed to do–go to parent’s weekend or at least pick him up from campus in june or drop him off at the dorms in september. i felt ashamed and so i was great at coming up with excuses but bluntly, i was too scared. so mary gave me a gift two years after joseph’s graduation: a college tour.
she showed me the dorm where he lived, the sandwich shop where he would get his late night snacks, the classrooms and the student union. then i saw a church. and i pulled out my camera. we were such fast friends that we were making something we thought was funny!
of course, later that night, when i had taken the four/five hour train from boston to new york, joseph said “mom, i actually did go to church every week for at least the first two years of college”. . . . i felt like a jerk.
i share a lot with mary: we’re both mothers, we’re both rotarians, we both have hit the glorious age of fifty (although it’s a little more fresh for me). she has done amazing things with her life in the face of medical adversity. i want to be the positive woman that she is! maybe in my new years eve project, she’s f2fb friend #168, but she is truly a friend not just on facebook!
onward to new york, to see facebook friend steve ware. i haven’t seen him in ten years and i am a little nervous because he works on the hit show jerseylicious. i hope to persuade him that i would make a great addition to the cast.
before i left rhode island, i was reminded of my cousin meg showing me this picture in the train station. she said it was the building over which superman flew in the christopher reeve movie. she and her husband call it the doopyman building, not because they can’t pronounce the word superman but because my oldest son joseph couldn’t pronounce the world. superman ice cream–a mix of cherry, blue raspberry and orange, was his favorite–or doopyman ice cream was his favorite when he was four years old.
pippa’s papers and the art of forgiveness
i was extremely nervous about seeing f2fb friend #167 meg kafalas for two reasons. i had flown into new york the day before and from there took the acela express amtrak train. i hadn’t seen her in twenty years. what if i didn’t recognize her?
but as the escalator wafted me up to the providence, rhode island station waiting room, i saw a diminutive woman. sleek black hair. bright red lipstick. capri pants and a sweater worn with the sort of chic that only the french and my cousin meg kafalas could pull off.
“you look exactly the same,” i said. well, except that she wore adorable needlepoint slippers instead of her once favorite black ribbon ferragamos.
we got in her car and she gave me a tour of providence which was a decidedly short tour because providence is a town decidedly short on real estate. we decamped to her store pippa’s papers which sells chic stationery–it’s motto is “your own initials are enough” and you can shop there at pippaspapers.com
we had first met twenty five years ago when i found my biological father justin (f2fb friend #30) and my grandfather fritz leiber. i was very interested in meeting every family member, so fritz gave me the address of a cousin betty who lived in chicago. i wrote to her. i got a call from her daughter meg. . . . .
“hi, i’m your second cousin once removed,” she said. “and i have some bad news. you wrote to my mother, but she died before the letter was delivered.”
meg’s mother and father died within months of each other. we became close but i little realized how their deaths devastated her. to me and to others, she presented a “facebook profile picture” that was confident, cheerful and chic. but when she was alone, she struggled. at one point, she went away and we lost touch. it was only because of facebook that we came together.
i apologized to her at lunch for not having been more help. i always thought she didn’t need any. i never saw beyond her profile picture. and she forgave me with a generous heart. she has become the very happy person she was meant to be. nobody gets to jump very high if their feet haven’t hit the floor.
then we went to pick out stationery. i have a lot of thank you notes to write–to people who have been so kind to see me, people who have encouraged me, people who have sympathized when i have faltered.
every single day this year, i have had 1) a technical problem and 2) a geography lesson. my technical problem is i can’t upload pictures i took of rhode island so just imagine a charming quaint little state and several pictures of meg and me. my geography lesson? that’s what i call it when i get lost.
let’s see me make it from rhode island to boston and then to new york–
what do you most want to do when you grow up?
benjamin gonzalez had his birthday yesteryday.
my new years resolution is the same: i sat in my house in front of the computer and decided i will go out and meet every one of my 324 facebook friends. by the next morning, i had eleven new friend requests and i’ve honored those. i have to meet those 335 friends in their home turf, or wherever they suggest (thank you brian brethauer for directing me to san diego two weeks from now for the science fiction convention!). i have become a lot better at getting on planes, getting out of the house, getting where i need to go.
upside: i have learned so much about people–mostly, that everybody thinks they’re odd and some are even ashamed of that oddness, but that–really–there is so much room for normal. and i’m sort of within range.
downside: i have gained six pounds. i feel quite like a snuffaluffagus!
ben has a job that he has set for himself, which is to create a film–almost like making a painting of what i’m doing. like i said, yesterday was his birthday. i felt kind of bad that he’d be with me instead of with his family. but he said this project–which is to say, his project–is exactly what he has always wanted to do. i asked ben’s assistant director brandon what he wanted to do if he could do any job. and brandon said “i’m doing it”. . .
the weird thing is even though i’m scared sometimes and sometimes i think my new years resolution is stupid, i’m doing the thing i most want to do–i think i might like to do this when i grow up?
this is the scariest video i’ve posted so far!
the scariest clip ever! and not just because we talk about ted bundy type episodes. this is something i’ve been sitting on for two weeks and am only just now realizing i can’t weasel out of.
benjamin gonzalez is f2fb friend #140 and his wife marissa durbin is f2fb friend #141. marissa has been following the progress of my new years resoution and when i suggested a get together she was hardly surprised. i knew ben initially through his uncle laurence who is a photographer and did some (ahem!) portraits of me, one of which hangs in his house. i happen to have forgotten to wear clothes that day. that forgetfulness doesn’t happen very often but it does make an impression. marissa and ben have an adorable eighteen month and ben is so in love with marissa that when he talks about her it’s a little like listening to a twelve year old talking about the aphrodite of the eighth grade class.
i went to dinner at their home. marissa and i chatted. ben might have been somewhat baffled that our talk kept circling back to facebook. when marissa excused herself to put on the lipstick for a video, ben allowed as how he hadn’t expected that an old friend would haul off and play wedding party videographer. that’s when i explained my new years resolution.
now, ben has been in the film business for quite some time. most of that time he has worked for strata entertainment (you can see their stuff at http://strataproductions.net) their focus is real life events recreated in a manner to challenge the filmgoer.
i believe that letting ben document what i’m doing will help me finish my new years resolution. i am grateful every single day for the help my facebook friends give me, whether it’s meeting with me, driving me to another friend’s house, playing chaperone, making me dinner, helping me get an advance on a line of credit on my house to pay travel expenses, introducing me to their family, tellling me i had a good impact on their life at some point, or sending me a gps system (which is in the mail) or a lucky charm such as william clark or the hedgehog. i’ve twice had f2fb friends lay hands and pray over me. i’ve been stunned by friends opening their homes and hearts to me.
ben, on the other hand, made me feel so anxious that i bought a bottle of as good as i could afford and i sat down on the couch and drank it to the last drop. when i woke up, i figured if i get to pursue my determined, eccentric dream–i gotta let ben work on his. he and his crew are like a bunch of boy scouts working on that eagle badge.
tomorrow, i get on the plane for new york. then a train to rhode island. then to boston. back to new york. home again. and right back out to california (again!). i sure hope the boy scouts stay on their side of the plane to new york. i need my space to have my little freak out.
f2fb friend #166, flexibility, and NO beer! two out of three ain’t bad–
there can’t be a meeting between me and a facebook friend without me getting lost. i have spent a lot of time at rest areas and freeway macdonald’s with a road atlas and my index cards with mapquest.com directions. if my new years resolution is to see every one of my 335 facebook friends, that’s a lot of crying, driving in circles, and self-loathing.
when i drove up to milwaukee i was actually pretty damn proud of myself. i was visiting f2fb friend #166 john gion who has 17 facebook friends in common with me. i found his place quite easily. that was before there was trouble:
john is a costumer who has worked for many theater and film production companies. he has done work on many shows that my sons have been in. he did the absolutely wonderful thing of asking after joseph and eastman when i arrived.
i told him i was taking him the milwaukee villa terrace museum of decorative arts. i was sure that something like the milwaukee public museum or the pabst mansion would be too obvious. we sallied forth in the direction suggested by mapquest.
flexibility is the most important skill i’m learning this year. because we got lost. and i worried that i was disappointing john by not getting us to the new museum. but john is one of the most flexible people, one who takes the world as it is presented to him. he said “hey, we’re pretty close to the pabst mansion, let’s just go there”
i was so relieved. it was a beautiful tour of a mansion owned by the captain frederick pabst family. john has displayed his costume collection in some of the 20,00 square foot home so it is nearly as if he was an owner.
too bad there wasn’t a pabst blue ribbon tasting after the tour.
some people have asked me why i’m meeting all my friends and one part, small but significant, is that i am at an age where i am for the first time without children in the house. and i know that one day i’m going to be a caretaker for my dad justin (f2fb friend #30) who was instititionalized by his wife barbara after my trip to tallahassee but has since gotten sprung. i am at an in between phase.
one of the things i admire about john gion is that he was a caretaker for his mother for many years before her death and now he acts as a caretaker for his father. he has given up a lot to be there for him. i hope to put him together with lon kiefer, f2fb friend #111 ,who has a presence on facebook as defender of the caregiver, a resource for caregivers.
i left john at his apartment after a truly enjoyable afternoon–and i continue ahead to the next adventure. . .
next, andrew pearce helps me book flights for the international leg of the party–and i have news to share about the second half. . . .
christmas in july
it’s july one. the middle of the year. the middle of a new years resolution. and i have achieved twin successes–a milestone and an intriguing but daunting proposal–and both scare me as much as they delight me. but first, i must explain the blessed absolution i received in the matter of stealing the christmas trees from the boy scouts.
facebook posts and news feeds leave a lot of room for misunderstanding between friends. and friends of friends. my misunderstanding with f2fb friend #165 phil hoza had its origins in an event that occured even before there was a facebook!
it was nearing christmas. my then husband was working in england. joseph and eastman were eight and four years old. i had been feeling poorly. low energy. afternoons disappearing into naps, workouts disappearing altogether, boys watching a lot of television.
i went to the doctor who said he was going to admit me to the hospital because i had pneumonia. i said no, i have no one to take care of my children. he gave me drugs and made me promise complete bedrest. i drove home thinking about how the boys’ christmas was now officially ruined. i stopped at the parking lot where the boy scout troop sold christmas trees. nobody was there except for an old woman who picked out a tree, shoved it into the trunk of her car, and glided out of the parking lot with none of that shoplifter guilty look. i figured “what the hell?” and took a tree myself.
i put up the tree in my bedroom because it would make watching the boys easier. they asked me where i had gotten the tree.
“i stole it from the boy scouts,” i said.
i was instantly transformed into the cool mom. later i found out that after the last saturday before christmas the boy scouts abandon the tree selling business. so it wasn’t technically stealing. i never corrected the boys on this minor legal technicality. i let them think i brazenly stole that christmas tree. that i wasn’t scared of time in the pokey. that i was just a little bit of an outlaw.
after that, the boys believed that i stole every year’s christmas tree. to be fair, i only stole a christmas tree one other year and that was when the leader of the boy scout troop called me on the saturday evening before christmas to tell me that if i wanted to steal a good one, i’d better hurry.
“buying christmas tree is for suckers,” eastman told me as we dragged the tree along the snowy side streets.
this past christmas i posted on facebook that i had carried on the family tradition and stole a christmas tree. i actually must fess to having bought one. but still, the boys were happy. some of my facebook friends were not. f2fb friend phil hoza had a good suggestion “you should write a check to the boy scouts” but i was worried that he was really really really angry with me. and the compressed nature of facebook posts flummoxed me–how could i communicate the entire story in a 140 character post?
so i didn’t.
phil is a vietnam veteran who was shot during the tet offensive of 1968. his daughter carrie serve in korea during peacetime and iraq during the first gulf war. phil has volunteered his time to charities and public works projects in winnetka so much that he rightfully can lay claim to the title of secural saint. i was nervous about seeing him as part of this new years resolution. i shouldn’t have been. he gave me absolution and told me to sin no more. . . .
many people have christmas in july parties. phil hoza and i had our christmas in july party today!
the milestone today is that i am seeing friend number 166 tomorrow. i am halfway through the new years resolution. that’s a great milestone because i find so much of it unbelievable. the proposal? not for marriage, but for a project that would make this new year’s resolution something that would explain myself one day to my boys. this means the project becomes much more difficult, logistically and personally. when i first heard of this proposal, i went to lakeside groceries, bought a bottle of wine, drank the entire bottle while sitting on the couch, and then passed out.
waking up, i realized something awful about myself. i’m just as scared of success as i am of failure.
grace is the messenger of love
it is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of an ex-wife is must be in want of another ex-wife. my f2fb #164 carole smith is the first ex-wife of my ex-husband stephen and i am the second ex-wife.
when i first married stephen i was pregnant with joseph. i became an insta-stepmother to carole and stephen’s children david and elisabeth. carole had started a relationship with ann, and ann’s son adrian was a new sibling for david and elisabeth. with stephen and carole sharing custody of david and elisabeth, i spent a lot of time in the car waiting to drop someone off or pick someone up. and there was a lot of conflict as the parties negotiated expenses, holidays, and the usual he said she said moments.
so i never got to know carole until all the kids grew up. now we sometimes share holidays together. we have to a great degree been brought together by grace. not the grace of the lord, although there is the usual amount of that. but the grace who is elisabeth’s daughter has with her birth healed many scratches and bruises.
so i looked forward to seeing carole for lunch because we have so much in common and so much we share in our deep abiding ambition that our children–david, elisabeth, joseph, eastman and carole’s partner’s son adrian–will be close and supportive family to each other. it is as if grace has become the messenger of love. when elisabeth posts a video of grace on facebook, we all comment and hit like.
this is a tile in carole's collection that is painted with a bird delivering a love note--the messenger of love
carole collects tiles, most of them from the nineteenth century. she is such an expert that she can tell the manufacturer and the year it was made by the feel of the back of the tile. these tiles were used on fireplaces, bathrooms, kitchens.
i don't know about you, but my kitchen tiles aren't particularly interesting
carole’s collection is so immense that it is housed in boxes and cd shelves. she has bid on ebay (she thinks of it as voting) and scoured markets and shops. i don’t understand the compulsion to collect anything but i appreciate her expertise.
a greek god tile -- most of her collection is from the arts and crafts movement of the 19th century
when we first met, we were in a tense relation to one another–at lunch, we toasted our good fortune that we are now friends.
arlynnpresser 