Snackanada

O, CANADA

Sir Paul SnackCartney

Daddy snagged Mommy tickets to Paul McCartney in Phoenix this past weekend. They said it's her birthday. Well, they were right, cos it was. So she was the luckiest lady in town, and I was the luckiest daughter around because I was blessed with several Sir Paulian voicemails. I've saved them all and listened to them by the scores.

Here's the setlist for the show she attended:

Venus And Mars
Rock Show
Jet
All My Loving
Got To Get You Into My Life
Highway
Let Me Roll It
Foxy Lady

The Long And Winding Road
Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five
(I Want To) Come Home
My Love

I'm Looking Through You
Every Night
Two Of Us
Blackbird
Here Today
Dance Tonight
Mrs. Vandebilt
Eleanor Rigby

Something
Letting Go
Sing The Changes
Band On The Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Back in the USSR
I've got a feeling
Paperback writer
A day in the life
Give peace a chance

Let it be
Live And Let die
Hey Jude

Day Tripper
Lady Madonna
Get back

Yesterday
Helter Skelter
Sgt. Pepper's ( reprise )
The End

That's right. FORTY SONGS. Way to go, Pauly, you made my mom's LIFE.

And in the birthday card my dad gave my mom that morning:

"If Sir Paul asks you backstage tonight, GO FOR IT!!!!!!!!"

If that don't prove my parents are Supreme Beings, than I DON'T KNOW WHAT

Dad Snack

My dad's in town for his 40-year high school reunion. Well, he's not in my town, at the moment, my town being New York City I suppose. He's currently in Clark, NJ, the place where he grew up after being born in Elizabeth and moving away from Garwood and saving the kid who fell through the ice pond and walking that duck on rollers all the way across town and sometimes I get his life story mixed up with that kid from A Christmas Story, but I know for a fact that when he was little, the world was in Technicolor. And kids on TV shows were named Tommy and Beaver. And my grandmother's German accent was as strong as it is now. Anyway, he will be there tonight and he'll be back in New York City tomorrow night, after "going to the party at Cal's place and sleeping at Randy's parents' house," which leads me to believe he's picking up where he left off at age 18. He met The Boss like four times, always brags about jamming with him, though the truth behind that stretch-ed lie is never boiled down completely. Apparently he and Randy burned a building down accidentally once. Some things are too perfect.

I reflect on my own time in high school, a time when I totally lacked confidence or interest in tanning, two things that, at the time, seemed to run rampant around me and signify my own blaring insignificance. While I now have confidence (what a funny thing to acquire! it's not like i can chart it over time, it's the opposite of nickels in a jar, i can only measure my successes in looking back and knowing how lonely and true it felt!), I still lack interest in tanning, and I still hate doing things to my hair to make it look nice. And I still daydream a lot, and I still listen to some of the same songs, and I still love a lot of the same dear hearts I knew and trusted and confided in back then. I still like a lot of the same movies and I still quote most of them like we used to. I think I still have my old ID? In three pieces and taped. Found my Yellow Boat and Charlie Brown tshirts in my tshirt drawer when I was on a laundry prowl. I have my favorite Beatles poster, the Hard Day's Night one, hanging in my room in New York. Lots and lots of pictures of Amy and I, making faces or pointing at things or wearing wigs. Sunil's cackle. The Bell Jar, and Dickens.

Little and big things stay the same inside the person growing, up and down as my heart beats, a lot of confusion that in time yielded to hindsight and clarity and still-so-young. Things are never linear and we look back and them and put them that way. I still feel all sorts of the same way in glimpses and glimmers. People change and they don't change and stories lie in how those dos and don'ts are.

A picture of my parents on their wedding day, 1983. They were together for nine years before they got married. Met in college in California. She in a shortish white dress. He in a tux and checkered Vans. You can take my dad out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of my dad.

Dad Snack

The way he talks about things, he could be my dad.

War and Peace Snack

So I don't have work today, which is exciting because I also did not have work yesterday, which is exciting because I also did not have work Monday. Whoa! I'm spending my precious hours walking around outside, buying wine, seeing movies in parks, reading War and Peace, working on my research journal for a thing I'm writing, and eating delightful things.

These things include: shakes, shacks, snacks, hummus, carrots, cheese, cheese, cheese, crackers!, meats, meatballs, torts, tarts, cookies, couscous, corn, coffee.

We saw Harold and Maude on Monday. Tonight they're doing Paper Moon at Brooklyn Bridge, which is cool, but even more exciting is To Catch a Thief, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. That's next Thursday.

Right now I think I am going to watch A Room With a View which my father recommended to me yesterday after watching it with my mom:

"Our TV went out, the cable, so we've been dusting off our DVDs and watching those. A Room With a View, now there's something that was really most excellent. Helena Bonham Carter is nineteen or so, and she has so much hair, and it's puffed up like that early 1900s Edwardian, with the bonnet attached. And then there's Daniel Day-Lewis, who," he laughs, "in this movie? He's just a FOP. A giant FOP."

Snackstreet Boys

This Was Love at First Sight

I Would Sit By My Radio And Wait For This To Come On

This Was My Favorite Part of Middle School Dances

My first Backstreet Boys concert, I originally didn't have tickets to because people camped all night outside of Dillard's and even though we got there at 6 am, the line was already too long. My dad took me to the arena the day of the show and we bought scalped tickets for like hundreds of dollars. We didn't know until we got inside that they were in the handicapped section. This was a fact I was, at the time, oblivious to; the notion of tact in that situation was not really landing in my tiny prepubescent brain. So I was standing and jumping up and down and screaming and dancing wildly and...let's just say my father was probably dying of a shame I was too young and starstruck to understand.

This one's for you, dad.

Another Dream Snack

This one is actually more a nightmare snack:

So I was in this hilly harbor park somewhere along the Pacific with my mom and my brother, and we are walking around, looking at the boats. We notice there are a few rides, like a little mini-water park and some swings and a ferris wheel or so, and we wonder if maybe we've stumbled into some sort of theme park. We round the corner next to the bathrooms and we come upon this giant warehouse, like it looks like an airplane hangar, only one of the four walls is missing so it opens out toward the harbor. Then we see a Tyrannosaurus Rex playing with a girls hair and skipping around. And then it hits us.

It's not a harbor park. It's a Jurassic Park.

There are all these families looking at the T-Rex, taking pictures, musing about it to their spouses, letting their children pet it. It's pretty surreal. I think, I guess they must have found a way to housetrain the T-Rex. Maybe it's evolved from its more hostile '93 model. Sure enough, the T-Rex comes over and nuzzles my shoulder. He breathes on me. I am kind of terrified.

Then something happens, I don't remember, and he turns away from me to some other person and snaps on them. He literally opens his mouth and tries to eat this guy. But the guy, whoever he is, he's a fighter, and he takes the T-Rex's tongue in his hand and rips it out. The T-Rex drops the guy in a momentary fit of pain. The guy runs out of the warehouse. The T-Rex shakes it off and bounds after him.

Mom says, "Okay, we're going to go into the bathroom."

We beat the rush of scared people to the bathroom. There is only one toilet open, and it is not in the stall, it is in an open space next to the sinks and a few plush velvet couches. I have to pee so I do so, and this guy sits next to me on the velvet couches and tells me I'm pretty. I finish peeing, then I throw a water bottle at him and I'm like "Go fuck yourself. and have fun with the dinosaurs."

And he's like, "What dinosaurs?"

By this time, the bathroom is completely crowded. We hear a boom or a crash from outside. Mom and Ben and I run outside to see what's going on, and we see the T-Rex running toward us from around a hill next to the harbor. He runs through the water, onto land and directly past us, toward the parking lot. He is pursued by a fake T-Rex that is powered by a bunch of Jurassic Park employees on thousands of tiny bicycles.

We look out to the harbor, and a bunch of battleships have lined up to fight the dinosaur apocalypse.

Then, we hear a screech from inside the bathroom. I remember that it's probably the raptors because my dream flashes to the movie, when the unseen raptors eat the cow and the cow-strap comes back all magled fabric and bent poles. Mom and Ben and I run toward the entrance/exit.

We pass the water rides, which are now water rides full of dead people. We get a drink from the drinking fountain. The exit is blocked off, probably because they are fighting a T-Rex in the parking lot. But they're still selling tickets to go in, as is evidenced by the new presence of Andie MacDowell, that actress from Groundhog Day, who has just entered the park with her family. She is wearing the same outfit that she was wearing when I saw her on 68th Street like two weeks ago.

I'm like, "Andie MacDowell! You have to get out of here! The dinosaurs are taking over!"

She's like, "What dinosaurs?"

And then we all hear another screech from the bathroom. So we all run. Me, my mom, Ben, Andie MacDowell, her family, we're all running over hilltops, out toward the ocean. Bombs go off. We reach a cliff that has been fenced off. We hear crashes and screeches behind us, fast approaching. The sun begins to set over the water, and it shines over the sea in beams so it looks white, and I notice that all of the boats and sidewalks and harbor houses are entirely white, and then I wake up.

GobSnacked

For Parents Who Worry About Being "In The Know"

Magical Real Snack

I owe a lot to this guy:



Without him, the kinds of things that I write would raise multitudes of skeptic-brows. I don't know much about him, though. There's a whole bunch of links to Marquez interviews and stuff that the Flavorpill people put in my inbox. I am very interested in these! I guess there is a new biography about him by Gerald Martin that just came out. I might pick it up and read it alongside Love in the Time of Cholera, which, like my mother, I still haven't finished.

Other things I have inherited from my mother:
parking skills (read: lack thereof)





Shelley told me about a Steinbeck journal that's half-journal and process notes and half Grapes of Wrath so you read the musings and the final product side-by-side. I am very interested in this also! I am normally a huge fan of really fat books, although I frickin hated Grapes of Frickin Wrath and pretty much everything else by Steinbeck in High School. I might give it another try.

You know what I will never try again? The Scarlet Fucking Letter.

Unlikely Pairsnacks

Who knew Neil Young and Rick James had a band back in the day?

My dad did!

Under the Lemon Snack

My mommy wrote a book!

It comes out in bookstores everywhere in two days!

(March 17th, 2009)

Go and buy it! It is very very good.

Parentsnack

This from the mouths of my mother and father: Only two things, when on television, will cause them to stop whatever their doing and watch for hours:



1- The Godfather


"Is this part one or part two? I always get confused with the timelines."

"This is one of the greatest movies of all time. Probably THE greatest. Don't watch Part III, though, it'll ruin everything."

"I have so many papers to grade...Oh well."



2- VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s

"Oh, God. We're only on 81? We've got a long ways to go."

"I saw them with Oingo Boingo with Jason, remember? In China."

-"Mom has a secret crush on Billy Idol. That was how she spent that Lost Weekend. She came back a little more satanic."

-"Don't forget the snarl."