"Deep Tissue, Deeply Discounted"


I could have taken my experiences at cosmetology school and washed that cheapitude right out of my hair.

Hell no. One of my greatest hallmarks is the refusal to take a lesson, even when it's slapped onto my head and speared with swords. In the case of my follicular thriftiness, I could have learned that I get what I pay for, and if I pay nine bucks for a haircut, I generally get three bucks worth of smarts wielding the scissors and six bucks of spray spray clouding my brain.

Luckily for my battered wallet and the well-worn dollar bills that have constructed a permanent home within, I don't learn nuthin' nohow, Gomer.

That's why I also patronize a training program for massage, which is sort of like letting a four-year-old hang my wallpaper--if by "four-year-old" I mean a nineteen-year-old named Brittany and by "hanging wallpaper" I mean stroking my body with oils.

That's the euphemism you use for it, right? Remember when you were twelve, up in your room for three years, "hanging wallpaper"? Goodness, but your mom thought you were an industrious soul! She never could understand why the wallpaper you later hung in your first home as an adult was so crooked and droopy. With all that practice you'd had, she'd been certain you were a professional! And you were!! Just not at that!!! Tap me, wanker!!!!! But wash your hands first!!!!!!

Jinkies. I was channeling Brittany there for a minute. And let me tell you, having never seen her written work, but simply felt her hands on my back, I had to intuit her predilection for exclamation marks. My first hint was when she wrote one on my clavicle in ylang-ylang oil. It was all well and good when she drew the straight line of the exclamation point, but then she started searching for a place to put the dot at the bottom of it, and suddenly I found myself yelling out, "No nip! No. Nippledom. Step away from the nip, Brit-Brit!"

Oh, all right. So I'm just making up shizz. Like that's news, Cronkite.

Refocusing now:

Fact one: I love the feeling of getting a deal. Fact two: the college where I teach has a massage therapy program. Fact three: the massage therapy program offers "clinics" each semester, during which students gain valuable on-the-job experience. Fact four: the clinics cost $15 for an hour massage. Fact five: Fact Four makes me throw out some serious jazz hands.

At such a minimal cost, these clinics book up fast. Every semester, I call on the first day the schedule comes out, attempting to get appointments for both Groom and me, yet often we are too late. But last month, when the schedule was released, the Gods of Muscle Relief beamed my direction: I flexed my dialing finger and went buzzsaw on the phone, managing to book a total of three massages for the household.

Yea, two were for me, and one was for Groom. Who wants to know?

A couple of weeks ago, I went for my first appointment, the Relaxation Massage. After forking over my 1,500 pennies, I was greeted by, yes, Brittany. This Brittany was so imbued with the essence of her Brittanyishness that she made Ms. Spears look like a Velma in comparison. This Brittany, from her bleached hair to her glossy lips to her tight shorts to her faux-tanned legs, set a new standard for manufactured beauty put on public display.

However, she was there, studentizing with some seriousness; clearly, the homeopathic art of massage therapy spoke to something deeper within this girl, something existing in her naturally-beautiful heart (beating an inch beneath her pink push-up bra). Indeed, despite her off-putting facade, Brittany proved to be a total BFF honeypie!!!!!!!!!!

Having hooked up, Brittany and I headed to the room of massageual arts. But here's the rub (you know you totally read this blog for the puns):

The massage is cheap because it's part of a clinic--meaning there were nine other patrons getting their massages at the same time as I, and in the same room. About the size of my bedroom at home, the massage room has ten curtained-off cubicles, one for each patron/masseuse pairing. After ushering me to our little Island of Connection within the larger room, Brittany instructed me to disrobe and hop onto the heated massage table. Backing out, she took three clothespins and snapped me into some questionable privacy.

At this moment in the clinic, things got a little surreal. There we were, the ten of us, all getting nudie together in a darkened room, a scenario that felt, somehow, as though it should cost much, much more.

Personally, I'm not overly discomfited about dropping my bundies in a relatively public place; I've given birth, after all, which constitutes the ultimate modesty decimation. But it was strange to be stripping down in my place of work, one floor below my office, down the hall from my classroom. At this most-recent massage, I was three feet away from a colleague who teaches psychology ("Yo, Betsy! How's your sabbatical going?"), two feet away from a mustachioed lawyer, and generally able to hear the intimate shuffles, scratches, and coughs of my cheek-exposed peers.

Once everyone was naked and warmly tucked in, the masseuses returned and unclipped the curtains, pulling them back so that the cubicles disappeared, leaving the twenty of us sharing a unified space. At that point, the clinic got even more surreal, for the students practiced the "massage script"--all ten, simultaneously, dipping their heads down to their respective clients, loudly whispering in unison: "I'm going to start the massage now, (insert name of client), and if at any point you'd like me to use more or less pressure, please let me know. I'm going to begin by working on your scalp."

Because some spoke more quickly than others, those sentences tapered off awkwardly at the end, with the last student masseuse left self-conscious as his uttering of "scalp" rang out, a cappella, throughout the room.

For the next hour, the scripted lines were presented periodically--always simultaneously, as the various parts of the body received attention. Every now and then, I fought off the urge to counsel Brittany, "You can speak for yourself, Brittany! I will understand your own particular way of relaying the information; I can perceive that you are an individual, despite the script and the fake tan that are currently defining you!! Brittany!!!!! Hear me, Brittany!!!!!!!!!!!!! Brittany?? Brit-Brit?"

Ouch. Perhaps perceiving my internal monologue, Brittany dug one of her French tips just a tidge too hard into my calf. Of course, my heavily-muscled calf is made of steel, and her tip snapped off, where it remains embedded in my leg to this day.

Eventually, at the same pre-scripted minute, the massage was over, the curtains were redrawn and clipped, and the students retreated. We citizens re-dressed and made our way, cheeks flushed, out into the daylight, trying to preserve the sense of relaxation as we began recalling the grocery list, the kids to pick up, the meeting at 3 o'clock.

------------------------------------------------

Overall, the upshot of my reliance on student trainees is this: I am willing to pay people to put their hands on me, but I'm not willing to pay them much,

and this is--in no way

whatsoever--

at all indicative of any

deep and longstanding

self-esteem issues

I might have.

It's not at all kind of sad.




So stop thinking that.

You're just a big, dumb boozer anyhow, so what do I--WHAT?

Am not, either,

you kettle of blackness daring to call me Potsy.

You're the dumb drinker who passes unfounded judgments.



No, you're the dumb drinker.





No, you are.


A judgey drunk.




Maybe you need to go get your hair cut and your body massaged, and then you'd feel nicer.

I can hook you up. Bring five dollars.

"Arc of Some Skivers"

In the fall of 1985, my mom dropped me off near the little town in Minnesota where I would be starting college.

Fortunately, my aunt and uncle lived at the spot where she stopped the car, so it wasn't like I was left trying to hitch a ride to campus or anything. Mom had a meeting back in Montana the week my college experience commenced; thus, she dumped me on my aunt and uncle a little early with instructions to "ditch the girl at the dorm next to the smelly ponds sometime next week. Oh, and here are her sheets, size Extra Long."

They heeded her words, and a week later, Sheets and I were deposited at an imposing cinderblock structure on an otherwise bucolic campus. After the goodbyes, I felt as many freshmen do: a little excited; a little bewildered; a whole lot lonely. I tried to act confident and cool as I blasted my cassettes of Howard Jones ("OOOOH, what's love got to do, got to do with it?") and bought new highlighters, accoutrements which would, I hoped, help me decipher my HISTORY OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE textbook. Who was this Balzac, I wondered, and would covering his life story with bright yellow marker make it more meaningful?

Essentially, I was bewildered and adrift.

Gradually, though, that business of hanging in there and faking it did pay off. I met some people, and we flirted with each other. Pretty much, they all lived in my dorm. On some levels, they affirmed my feelings of worry and inferiority, for they were Big Smart, well-traveled, and accomplished. In comparison, I felt Just Smart Enough, provincial, and a touch hayseed.

More importantly, however, they affirmed my worthiness. They thought I was funny; they invited me to sit under their tapestries and listen to The Replacements; they wanted to go in with me on a late-night Domino's double cheese pizza. Together we wrote (in highlighter) own new history. They transformed me.

Now, twenty-two years later, these pals from college still rock me like a hurricane. After graduation, everyone cast about for careers, spouses, homes. While we threw our voices into the greater world, this college crowd also continued its common thrum. I was with some of them the first time they got drunk. Later, I was with them when they got married. We've carried each other through divorces and the deaths of parents and the joys of babies being born. Damn it if these people haven't turned out to be found-siblings that only cost our families about $30,000 per year in tuition to discover.

Along the way, there have been times when our closeness has waxed. Then it's waned. For a few years, I thought some of the relationships were gone, that they'd shriveled beyond repair or care.

Now that I'm forty, though, I sit at the vantage point of a queer maturity: I can see the larger arcs of friendship. It came as a big life lesson to realize that even when a relationship has seemed dead for some time, it can still be revived. What I sometimes thought was belly up had simply gone dormant. With the slightest puff of air, we always resuscitate completely.

Hence, when many of us gathered a couple of months ago to celebrate the birthday of one of our luminaries, it was a true celebration--and not just because there were little hors d'oevres of butternut squash soup served in shot glasses and shrimp tacos and scallop empanadas and free wine and Red Velvet cupcakes and itty spanikopitas.

It was a celebration of longitudinal camaraderie.


And buttercream frosting.

"That Michelangelo: Some Sort of Mutant Turtle, Right?"






I have profound deficiencies in my knowledge of art. Sure, I recognize dogs playing poker when I see them, but beyond that, my high-priced liberal arts education is artistically pockmarked. Certainly, I can enjoy the shadows of Rembrandt. I groove on the dribs and drabs of Pollock. I've even heard of that DaVinci dude (it took a group of Navaho speakers to break his code, right?). But I lack a comprehensive, well-developed overview of art.

This, I blame on cheese curds. And Long Island Iced Teas.

See, when I hied off to college and could have enrolled in and attended a host of mind-expanding art classes, I was otherwise occupied. As a Montanan transplanted to the Midwest, I was too busy taking my first delectable, delicious, delicate bites of deep-fried cheese castoffs to sit in a darkened room taking notes about delectable, delicious, delicate brushstrokes put to canvas three hundred years before. At the age of 18, I wanted the immediate, in-the-moment, contemporary gratification of the crisp-but-melty cheese curd. Once the curds were swallowed, I headed not to a class on masterworks; rather, with my digestive system well-protected by a coating of grease, I headed next door to the town bar for its Wednesday night tribute to the perspicacity that is rum, vodka, tequila, gin, triple sec, all capped by a splash of cola: the Long Island Iced Tea.

Frankly, I was too busy bringing on heart disease and killing brain cells to consider how Chinese sculpture might have toppled a dynasty.

So I'm a little dumm about art junk stuff.

Imagine, then, what a revelation Frank Gehry was to me last year, when I toddled in to the couch and turned on the tv, balancing on my arm the adult version of curds and Tea : a glass of wine and some pita chips and hummus. At that moment, PBS was broadcasting a documentary entitled SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY. With my hands too full to turn the channel, I had no choice but to sit down and swoon into the rapture of his work.

Who the frick knew? Who knew, I ask you?

Okay, as it turns out, a large part of the populace knew and is well acquainted with Gehry, as he's one of the most-ballyhooed modern American architects. His work is big-time stuff around the world. I can hear you "fa-fwa-fooing" now about how you've been versed in Gehry since your cloth-diapered Mother Goose years.

I, however, had spent my formative years with my head too deeply dropped into the works of Pearl S. Buck...and then into a bottomless cup of five-shots-of-booze...to have any idea that a guy was out there, coming up with such visions, and getting paid to produce them.

And really, that's the part that continues to inspire a certain faith: Gehry has created a very singular vision, one outside of traditional form, and people with money have gone for it. I'm not at all used to people with money putting their dollars behind ground-breaking, convention-flaunting ideas.

I, for example, once pitched a "rolling Halloween pumpkin, for when the candy outweighs the kid" to Proctor & Gamble, and they laughed me out of the conference room. I'd even bought a new black pencil skirt for the presentation, but they didn't so much as compliment me on it as they showed me the door, those corporate rat bastards.

My resulting cynicism lumped out-of-the-box thinkers like Jocelyn and Frank into the same Pile of Woeful Neglect (we're located, in the card catalogue, just after the Pile of Wondrous Nightshades).

And yet that PBS documentary reminded me that sometimes, in this world where big money generally fuels sure bets and more of the sames, the deep pockets can open up for genius and awe.





















And on days when I cannot breathe due to the frustration I feel about our president,

Or I am tempted to wrap my fingers around the throat of a bully who has called my 4-year-old Niblet "ugly" and "fat,"

Or I mourn that my students at the college have never left Minnesota, even though we live a 10-minute drive across a bridge from the next state,

Or I keen for parents standing at the open graves of their fallen children, having to close out the sounds of protesters chanting and holding signs about "Fags in the Military,"

Or I rage when the best people I know have their hearts ripped open by failed love,

Or I see The Backstreet Boys on Jay Leno,


I find solace in the knowledge that an artist like Frank Gehry not only exists but is rightfully heralded for designs that push us all out of the safe and easy.

Let's raise and clink our curds in his honor.

"Time After Time"

I'm currently the bologna in a Colorado sandwich.

I'm aware makes no sense, so don't scrutinize it too closely. Cutting through my nonsense, what I'm saying is that I'm currently in Minnesota, having recently come back from a kamikaze weekend in Colorado. And tomorrow, the family and I are taking off for, you guessed it, Colorado.

Compared to my opening statement, that makes lots of sense, right?

Here's the deal:

Last weekend, a good friend of mine from college who lives outside of Boulder, CO (she's in the sassy orange halter top in the photo here) was the recipient of a suprise 40th birthday party. Her husband, knowing how wiley she is, threw the party six weeks before her actual birthday; in addition to that, he went through all sorts of machinations, created tangles of lies, and even went so far as to fake a phone call or two in her presence...and if that isn't the definition of a loving relationship, I don't know what is.

Because my college years were a floodlit time in my life--when everything seemed heightened and special and life changing and full of promise--making the trip to Colorado for a patio-top restaurant party to honor this friend seemed well worth the effort. Of course, since I was so busy being all floodlit and stuff, I ended up majoring in English in college and then becoming a teacher, which means I now don't make enough money to pay for such a boondoggle weekend myself. Enter My Benefactress (the brunette in the photo--and if you want to say anything about her like "nice rack," go ahead. She can take it), the pal who funded the trip. In my defense, I would like to stress that, although she paid for plane fare, car rental, and hotel room, I did shell out on a $6.00 toll road, thus carrying my weight.

The party was gratifyingly fun, the after party back at their house even more so. Stir in some good meals, a lovely run up Boulder Creek canyon one morning, and my introduction to a new drink called a Dark and Stormy (check it, cocktail fiends: put some ice in a glass, squeeze some lime over it, toss in a shot or two of rum, top it with ginger brew [non-alcoholic...kind of a ginger soda pop, available at co-ops or organic food type shops], and, if you've got it, mash up some fresh ginger and stir it in, too), and the weekend was outrageously happy making.

I also considered it a scouting mission for the upcoming family road trip. Yup, we're leaving on Monday, the 18th, and will be driving a huge loop around the West for almost three weeks. First, we'll head down to Austin, MN, where I used to live, for a visit with a sainted friend; then we'll head through Iowa into Nebraska, where we'll stop over in Lincoln for many hours of play in the tremendous children's museum there (seriously, this is the third time we've worked that museum into our trip plans), eventually meandering into Colorado, where we'll see all sorts of friends in Denver and Boulder (including my sister, freshly back in Denver after her two years in Guatemala); after that, it's up through Wyoming, stopping to see my great-aunt in Cody, and then heaving over, bravely, for a glimpse of boiling mud pots in Yellowstone Park; after all this, we'll drive to Billings to help my mom clean out her storage locker there (she's now a Californian) before we hire a trailer to help us haul our storage locker spoils across North Dakota and back to Minnesota. At that point, we'll collapse in a heap and stare at the new furniture in despair, as it's not like we actually have room for it. But how very fun to go get it!

Indeedy, I've just been to Colorado, and now I'm heading there again. I do so love the shortness of breath and leathery skin I get while there, you see.

So I'll be trying to post from the road and check in occasionally. But my trolling through your blogs, which has already taken a hit this summer since I'm never in my office, which is where all the best computer loafing takes place, may suffer even more.

However, I have little copies of each of your avatars framed and hanging in a shrine in the corner of my dining room, and I'm hiring a neighbor kid to come light the candles and incense in your honor twice a week, so I'm certain you'll still feel the lurve, even in my absence.

Gotta go get the motor runnin' now.

And, even though I do intend to keep posting with my usual regular irregularity, if you start to miss the feeling of Jocelyn Holding Forth, just come here and gaze upon this photo

The sight of me, mid-monologue, is certain to quash any wistful pangs you might be feeling. I'm here for ya like that.