Don't do this

If out of the blue you have a weird dream about a casual friend of yours... you know, the nice lady with the cute kids and sweet husband... to the effect that she's suddenly divorced and at a play with her new boyfriend... don't send her a Facebook message saying, "Hahahaha, I had this crazy dream last night, you'll never believe it..."

Don't do it. Take it from me. Just. keep. quiet.

If I had bet on this, I would have lost

"We're not in a big rush. We'll pause," Pelosi said. "We have to know what our possibilities are."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/01/21/pelosi-votes-pass-senate-health-house/

Juggling two shows as of this week

Ella is now Jellyfish #1 in a show The Little Mermaid, for ages 4-9.

Rehearsals start Thursday and are every Thursday evening through the end of March.

I'm having her do this partly because she wants to, and partly to see for myself what this program is like.

Hope she gets a decent costume. She's all about the costumes, that girl.

Pre-puberty

I think we can count pre-puberty as officially hitting our household last week. If this is PRE-puberty, well, let's just say that while I think I know how I'm going to handle puberty with the girls, this will be a good study-and-plan period with plenty of material.

She's 10.36 years old, just for the record.

Hold on to your hats, it's going to be a wild 6-or-7-year ride!

Weird finger thing

Okay, so this really weird thing has started happening with two of the fingers on my left hand: At odd moments whose similarity I can't determine, the top half of the either my index finger or my middle finger will go all yellowish and whitish and become numb. When this happens, I of course focus on the finger and try to get more blood to circulate into it. I can't tell whether that works, or if I had just waited the five minutes that it takes to force more blood into my finger that would work just as well. It doesn't just happen out in the cold, although the first time it happened, it was when I was hanging Christmas ornaments outside in Nature's Refrigerator (a.k.a. Rochester). It also doesn't happen just when I'm typing, although it DOES happen when I'm typing sometimes.

It's quite annoying.

So if someone knows that this is a sign of...well...something, please let me know. I've never heard of it happening.

I'm going to start exercising more. At least, if I have some kind of circulation problem, that can only help, right?

The bug has bitten Ella

Ella went over to watch Madison's rehearsal for Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday. She loved watching the rehearsal, she knows every song, and is fascinated by the whole process.

She came along with us tonight. Two-and-a-half hours. She has charmed the music director, who had her sitting next to the piano turning pages and singing. She wishes she had auditioned (even though it's for ages 10-16, technically she could have because there is another 8-year-old in the play), but she has the whole thing in perspective. She just likes breathing the atmosphere, I think. She has informed me that she'd like to go to every single rehearsal, just to watch, and be a part of it in that way.

Guess we know what I'll be doing for the next 9 or 10 years. "Theater mom" suits me just fine, especially if we stick with theater companies that have people running them who are as nice and capable as these folks.

10-year-old's bio

I had to write a little "bio" for the program for Madison's upcoming performance of Schoolhouse Rock Live at Stages.

It was due yesterday, so of course I wrote it at 11:00 last night. You know those little program blurbs, right? They always start off like this: "Jane Jones is thrilled to be back at Stages once again after having taken a brief sabbatical to appear on Broadway as Annie..." I decided that no bio of a child of MINE is starting "Madison Ross is thrilled" or "Madison Ross is delighted." But it's not as though she has lots of acting credits worth mentioning. So what to say?

Here's what I came up with:

Madison Ross (Ensemble) is a home-schooled fifth grader from Brighton. Schoolhouse Rock is Madison's first Stages show, and she describes the experience with lots of adjectives: Exciting, energizing, electric, thrilling, challenging, and fun. She studies musical theater with John Barthelmes at Spotlight Theatre Arts in Fairport, and plays piano, flute, and viola. Madison loves writing, reading, and computer programming, and hopes someday to be a science fiction writer.

Two potential issues made me hesitate before hitting the Send button:

1) I have technically never heard Madison Ross tell anyone that she wants to be a science fiction writer.

2) Madison Ross is currently in an argumentative phase. Granted, this is about a 10-year-and-counting phase, but it's gotten to where if you say there is about a foot of snow on the ground she'll be outside with a ruler trying to prove you wrong before you can say "six curse word degrees."

I hit the Send button. I figured that the volunteer doing the program wasn't going to send it to press at 9am today, and that it was fixable if suddenly the child told me that she was planning on a career as a televangelist or something.

I read it to her this morning. She listened without interrupting to object (!), blinked twice, said reflectively, "Science fiction writer. Huh. That sounds about right," and went back to what she was doing.

Okay then.

Speech at 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

If you take a worthwhile 42 minutes to watch Alan Charles Kors' speech to the Atlas Network at the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall last year, you can imagine what it was like to be a student in his class 20 years ago, or, I imagine, now. In the classroom, though, he only spoke of the history of others' ideas and their importance to political and social development, not of his own ideology. It was over sandwiches at the deli on 38th Street that students could appreciate Kors the Man.

Alan Charles Kors - Freedom Dinner 2009 Keynote from Atlas Network on Vimeo.

Give it a rest

The whole family wants Madison to give "God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman" a rest. Even Eastern Orthodox Christmas is past, for pity's sake. We hear it on the flute, piano, viola. She sings it in the car. Thank goodness she doesn't play any other instruments.

Of course, it's playing on a continuous loop in all of our minds as a result.

Ode to Winter

I never write poems.

Well, almost never.

Tonight, though, I was inspired to write this

Ode to Winter in Rochester

Being a publisher has its advantages. Namely, you can write any old thing and get it published.

I really do like this one, though.

A photo and a dedication

In youth, I had crappy parents.

In college, I had great parents, although I'm pretty sure they didn't know it at the time. And they weren't technically mine.

I was a rather depressed and brainy teen who was not taught anything about how to make my way in the world. This was not surprising, because I had parents who didn't know what they were doing. I think the brains saved me, though: When I got to college, I decided that what was required was a total makeover. What had those people done wrong, and what could I do better?

My sophomore year at Penn, I took an intellectual history course with Alan Kors, and after that started working on other projects with him. It was the early days of resistance to the invasion of the universities by politically correct thought reformers, and Alan was on the good side of that. His work ultimately resulted in the forming of FIRE (Freedom and Individual Rights in Education).

As much value as Alan was to me intellectually, it was nothing compared to what talking with him and watching him with his family did for me personally. Here was a guy who GOT IT; the first person I'd met whose ethics of respect for individual liberty were consistent through and through: politically, in professional dealings, and with his family and students. His kids (preteens at the time) were happy, healthy, intelligent young people. I watched how he talked with them. I learned all about his reasonable setting of rules and boundaries that let them flourish. I saw how an atheist taught his kids to be good people, the best. He was the first person to show me Chris Brockman's book What About Gods. I learned. I didn't forget. Once when I was there, Alan had his daughter Samantha tell me their family motto ("Don't take shit"), which profoundly changed the way I looked at the world. Three small words told me how to become a much happier person. I wanted my future kids to turn out just like the Kors kids.

We Rosses visited the Kors family at their home in PA last week; it was the first time Alan had met David, Madison, and Ella (although when the kids were babies we'd had lunch with Erika in Philly). Best of all, their daughter Samantha, now grown and with two baby girls of her own, was there with her family.

Madison and Ella LOVED Alan and Erika. The girls talked, they listened, they joked, and Alan clowned around with them. And, most significantly, Samantha noticed. My girls are the same distance apart in age as her babies, and she told both me and Erika that she wanted HER girls to turn out just like MY girls. "How do I do that?" she asked me. How gratifying that was. It was simple justice to be able to tell her about how I'm largely following in the pattern of her own parents.

The whole experience did make me realize, for a few minutes, what the girls are missing by not having grandparents. But I didn't dwell on what can't be helped. The girls are a lot better off for not having to deal with MY parents as grandparents, and as for David's parents, who would have been terrific, they unfortunately passed away long ago.

David took this photo of me, Alan, Erika, Ella, and Madison:



I hope I look like Erika when I'M in my late 50s.

I do love that man profoundly. It would have been too sappy and undignified really to show him the depths of my gratitude, but I'm pretty sure he got the general picture.

A milestone

I'm not going so far as to hope right now, but I just told Ella that her "half-hour-with-the-book" portion of school had run over.

"Can I just finish the story?" she asked. "It won't take me too long."

This is a first. Seriously. I know she's 8-almost-9, but the child simply doesn't (yet) like reading for pleasure. The rest of us will all all be sitting around reading for pleasure, and she'll be doing anything but. I'm holding out hope, of course, that this will change, that she's simply a late bloomer on this one. There is so much in the world of books for her to discover and enjoy, and I want her to get in the habit of doing so frequently.

Unfortunately, what Ella has going against her is that she's L-A-Z-Y. She can do most things she needs to do with little discomfort, and resents putting in effort. Not sure what I can do about this kind of thing except make sure she does what she needs to do, and push her to where she's expending some effort but not to where she positively resents the amount of work.

Today's can't-put-down story was one of those Rainbow Fairy books I hate. But I'll take it, with pleasure.