“MORE” Fun Than Usual Today

(This post was started on Saturday, September 16. I wasn't able to finish until today.)


As I approach my mid-40’s, I find myself in a place where I didn’t expect to arrive while traveling on this road called life. But the journey, with all of its detours, brought me to a destination that I’m becoming more comfortable with every day. I think I’ve finally come home. And that home is in my own skin.

Today, with the encouragement of my husband and the supportive company of my two daughters, I decided to trek into New York City and enter the MORE Magazine Modeling Contest. What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, for someone like me, who grew up with no confidence, this was quite the big step. I don’t know why I never believed in myself growing up—or as an adult, either. It wasn’t like I had parents that were always putting me down, or abusing me in any way. I don’t recall a major incident happening in elementary or junior high school that would have scarred me for life, such as throwing up in the middle of a chorus concert or walking around with my skirt tucked into my pantyhose. Whatever this “curse” is, my 60 yr. old brother has it as well. And for all I know, this alleged “curse” could’ve been the reason why my dad had a problem with alcohol. But whatever the explanation is, entering modeling contests is just not something that someone like me does. Until today, that is.

I want to be an example to my daughters; a positive example. I want them to have dreams and desires for their lives that they are not afraid of reaching for. How can they learn these important lessons of life with a mother who is constantly afraid to take that chance, a mom who persistently waits for everything to be “perfect” before she can act on her ideas? They can’t. I realized that I needed to enter this contest for them as well as for me. I was breaking this “curse” once and for all, and I needed them to be with me to experience risk-taking at it’s finest.

You see, I am short. I’m not too short, but I only stand about 5’2” (well, maybe a little over that…I stretched it a bit and put 5’3” on my registration form). Models, as we all know, are tall and thin. Amazon tall and reed thin. As we approached the offices of Wilhelmina Modeling Agency on Park Avenue, I noticed that there was a very long line of hopeful, over-40, would-be models, and quite frankly, most of them were towering over me. And, I might add, most of them were very, very pretty with attractive figures to match. Although the contest rules state that height and weight are not considerations, I noticed that all of the former winners prancing around outside the agency were at least 5’6”, which is probably short by Wilhelmina standards, and they did not weigh much more than 120, if that. Okay, what am I doing here?

I internally calm myself down so as not to externally paint an insecure picture to my girls, all the while trying to tell myself that I really do have a right to stand on that line, even if I didn’t actually believe it. After all, I am over 40. There were, um, about three other women who were about my height. And although I’m no Angelina Jolie, I don’t really think that I’m a dog. Okay, maybe I can fake this…stand up straight. Take a deep breath. Be social, turn around and talk to the six-foot tall, gorgeous blonde woman behind you.

As my girls were taking pictures of themselves modeling in numerous poses with the ever-important backdrop of a New York street and all of its activity, I decided to turn around and face the competition in back of me. The six-foot blonde was talking to a beautiful black woman, not much shorter than she was. They stopped their conversation, and directed their attention towards the tall, dark-haired woman in front of me…and then looked down at the diminutive little woman that they failed to notice, almost with a look of, “Oh, how cute!” on their faces.

We engaged in some small talk about the unusually hot September day we were experiencing, and how we hoped that our makeup didn’t melt off of our faces by the time we made it up to the front entrance of the modeling agency. Since we were around the corner and couldn’t even see the entrance, we knew our chances of keeping our faces intact were pretty slim. We began to loosen up a bit, and proceeded to complement each other on how nice we looked, and how great most of the women on line kept themselves for being over 40. “Well, I’m not really ‘over 40’, I’m ‘over 50’”, the 6-foot blonde announced. My girls, who were by this time sitting on a window ledge next to the line comparing their “modeling” photos on their digital cameras, looked up for the first time in the half hour since they plopped themselves there. “You’re not over 50,” I sternly scolded this clearly delusional woman. “There’s no way.”

“Yes, I am! I’m 56, I’ll be 57 soon!”

“No, you’re not.”

“No, really, I am!”

“………”

Yes, I was speechless. Okay, she looked like she might have had just this much work done. But 56?!? Her body looked like Elle MacPherson’s! Her hair was long and golden like a teenager’s! Where were her wrinkles?!? Wow, I thought, she deserves to at least place in the top 10 finalists. But then she announced that she had entered last year, and nothing happened. She also lived in California, and planned on entering out there as well when she got home from visiting her friend here in New York. I began to wonder again what in the world I was doing on that line. If a six-foot, beautiful blonde who’s 56 can’t even make it to an honorable mention in a modeling contest solely for women past middle age, well then, I sure have a lot of nerve even standing there.

Eventually, one of the reps comes by and gives us our forms to fill out. If we don’t have a picture, she states, they will be more than happy to take one for us once we get in. We wait a little longer, and now the six-foot blonde is talking to another very pretty blonde behind her about—I knew it—Botox. The smaller blonde states that she will never live without her Botox, and the six-footer agrees. I asked the smaller blonde if it hurt (“Yes, very much”). I asked her when was the last time she got it done (“Well, I’m actually due to go soon, but I don’t like how it looks when I first get it done. I wanted to come here and have a little…I don’t know…” “Expression?” I blurted out. “Yes! That’s it!” she replied). I asked her how old she was (“Fifty-four”). I decide at that point that I will probably dump my “Frownies” by age 54, and take up Botox. These women look great. As for the cost of Botox versus “Frownies”, well, I’ll just pull a Scarlett and worry about that tomorrow.

Finally, we get closer. The entrance to Wilhelmina is now a lipstick’s throw away and I’m feeling relieved. A very nice man comes out and announces that anyone who wants to have their makeup touched up by professional makeup artists should stay in line, and anyone who doesn’t, up to ten people, should come with him. I tell my girls that we should go for the whole experience, and we decide that I should wait just a little longer to see what it feels like to actually sit in a makeup chair like a real professional model, and be “made beautiful”.

We arrive inside the building and are immediately escorted up the elevator to the second floor. When we walk out, there looks like a mardi-gras going on with balloons everywhere, gift bags from one end of the room to the other and beautiful displays of prizes that you could win from a drawing of tickets that we filled out earlier while on line. We are informed that whoever wants a touch-up needs to stand to the right; whoever doesn’t can go into another open room, pay their registration fee and have their picture taken. By this time, my girls are having a blast. My older daughter, who wants to be a magazine editor, points out an office cubicle and says that she wants to work in an office “just like that”. Both she and my younger one are still taking photos, and when I finally get into the makeup chair, I feel like I’m part of a fashion shoot with all the flashes going off.

The makeup artist blots me a little, and proceeds to put the slightest bit of bronzer on my face, and then some blush. She thinks my eye makeup is fine, but decides to put some berry-colored gloss on my lips. Oh, no. Do I really want lip gloss? My makeup looked so nice when I left my house, and now she’s putting gooey glop on my lips, and it’s not even clear. It’s berry-colored. I start panicking to myself that I’m going to look ridiculous, but my girls are loving every inch of my lips (well, every millimeter, anyway). I leave the chair, thank the adorable young makeup artist, and walk toward the next line, the final frontier of the day’s agenda.

I watch now as women from every walk of life traipse back and forth from registration to “photo shoot”. I don’t quite know when it happened, but at that moment I realized that I wasn’t nervous anymore. Yes, a lot of the women were tall, but there were definitely some that were not. There were some that were heavy, and some that were probably great-grandmothers. They were every different color and shape, and yet everyone was the same in that room. We were all asserting our inner being who guided us to this point in life where we could say, “I’m okay with myself, and I can do this.” I am willing to bet that at least half of the women there, myself included, would not have gone on this cattle call in their twenties. Cattiness has been replaced with encouragement. Jealousy has been replaced with admiration. How far we have come as women. How far I have come from the self-doubting, insecure person that I was. I allowed myself to take a chance and enjoy an adventure just for the fun of it, all the while showing my girls how important it is for your self-worth to take risks. It doesn’t matter if I win the contest; I’m a winner already just for having the nerve to show up. And I’m darn proud of myself for that.

I’m called up for registration. I pay my entry fee, and off I go to have my Polaroid taken. I stand in front of the camera, and allow myself to experience the joy of being right where I am at that moment. I smile, and the camera flashes. Before I leave, I wait just long enough for the picture to start developing…

My girls and I had a wonderful time today, an experience not to be forgotten. We got to see the inside of one of the world’s most famous modeling agencies, we chatted it up with interesting people, and we just had plain, old fun doing something completely out of the ordinary for us. As for that Polaroid…well, let’s just say that it may not resemble Cindy Crawford, but staring back at me was someone who was truly, sincerely happy in her own skin. What’s not beautiful about that?

"S.E., BABY!"

As women, we know the value of friendship. We have the ability to create extensions of our own family, or “sisters”, whether we are only children or come from a family of twelve. And our sisters see us through life as only they could…they understand what it means to be empathetic, they understand what it means to be thoughtful…and they understand it when life gets so hectic that friendships may wane for a short time, only to come back stronger than ever (and usually with some great gossip to make up for lost time)!

With a heart brimming with pride, I can truly say that I have been blessed with amazing friends from all walks of life, some that I know since childhood, others that I met as an adult, and some who are actually relatives. Friends that I have been able to be vulnerable in front of, friends who have shared my every joy as if it were their own and friends who could be downright outrageous with me to the point where we’re almost causing trouble (…or did we actually cause it? Hmmm, I can’t seem to remember…)!

Although I have so many wonderful women in my life, I would be remiss if I didn’t devote a column to one of my oldest, dearest friends, Maria (or “Tortilla”, as I’ve affectionately called her since we were small. And yep, you guessed it…I’m “Lisa Pizza”). We go all the way back to Kindergarten, and have been friends through more of life’s ups and downs than even I care to remember! We have seen each other through 38 years of friendship, and are so close that we finish each other’s sentences and complete each other’s thoughts on a daily basis. We have many things in common; for example, our moms were older when they gave birth to us; we have brothers who are much older than we are; and we find the same nutty things hysterically funny (“Napolean Dynamite”, anyone?). She is a beautiful, vivacious woman, and one of the strongest people I know. So let me see if I can summarize a lifetime in a few detailed paragraphs:

In grade school, Maria was the little girl with the pink, frilly dress on, her hair always pulled back in a torturous half-ponytail that looked as painfully tight as it must have been. Maria had “stomach issues”—Crohn’s Disease would be the diagnosis in her 30’s—and spent many of her school days down in the nurse’s office, so often that the nurse finally got fed up and put a band-aid on her belly-button! I can recall the time that she told me and another friend that she felt like she was going to throw up. We ran away from her as fast as we could, screaming, “Maria’s gonna throw up!!” the whole way, causing the whole playground to clear her path.

When we were 10, our lives started to take on serious tones of change that would challenge any friendship, as well as our emotional state. I started to realize that my father had a serious drinking problem. And on the first day of school in 5th grade, Maria sat next to me on the swings and told me that her dad had died over the summer. I had never gotten to know her dad, and I felt confused and sad for my friend. We became much closer after that, partly because we were getting older and approaching puberty, and partly because we both had an unspoken agreement that we could trust the intimacies of our family lives with each other without the other one hashing out the details to anyone else. Plus, we knew neither one of us would ever spill the beans about her crush on teen crooner Donny Osmond and my obsession with the plaid-clad Bay City Rollers!

Life takes unexpected turns, and a few short weeks after school let out for the summer in 1974, my family and I were on a plane heading towards Los Angeles, CA…and the pursuit of a new home. I had only known for a short time after school ended that I would be leaving, and I was extremely sad about parting with all of my friends, especially my “Seesta”, Maria. However, as fate would have it, one of her older brothers lived not too far from our Thousand Oaks home, and she would actually come to visit once in a blue moon! We were allowed one phone call a month to each other (long distance cost a lot of money 30+ years ago), which we always took advantage of. We would say, “Okay—one, two, three…BYE” so we could hang up together…only to lift our fingers from the hook to say, “HI!!!” again (you can imagine the chorus of screaming mothers going on in the background)!

One of my best memories happened the weekend after I moved to CA. My uncle was a comedian—the opening act for Frank Sinatra, to be exact—and he was opening for Frank in Las Vegas, a town that would produce a jaw-dropping reaction out of me upon arrival, not just for the lights, hotels and action…but for the fact that the sign on the Tropicana said that the Osmonds were playing there that weekend! Through a little finagling, my uncle got us tickets to see their show, and a backstage pass so that I could meet them in person. I almost fainted when I saw Donny, and when my dad asked him if he would kiss me on my cheek, I DID faint! My dad carried me out, as a few hundred girls waiting outside the backstage entrance all sighed in unison upon witnessing this pitiful sight, each one secretly wishing that it was them.

When I returned home, I found myself some Donny Osmond stationary and promptly wrote Maria a letter explaining that I was sorry, I knew that he belonged to her, but I was now in love with him, and it was “…not a ‘Puppy Love’” (yes…I really did write that…)! Maria continued to nag her mother to take her to see the Osmonds for the next 4 years, and finally met him herself when she was 15. He didn’t kiss her cheek, but he did grab her so she didn’t fall down some looming backstage basement steps.

In the interim, my mom was having a tough time adjusting to CA, and after much deliberation, my parents decided to move back to Long Island. My dad would stay in CA until he found another job in NY, and my mom and I would live with Maria and her mom, Millie, until we found a house. Talk about FUN! Maria and I slept in her brother’s old room in a queen-sized bed, and basically had a laugh-fest every night (yes, sometimes with our faithful companion, the tape recorder)! Since we were now full-fledged teens, we got up at 5:30 in the morning just so we could shower and concoct our Farah Fawcett hairdos and paint on our Glamour magazine faces. Maria would always be dressed to the nines, and one time insisted on wearing her brand-new 7-inch platform shoes to school, even though we had just had a snowstorm. I don’t know if we had ever laughed harder in our lives walking to school that day! She must’ve fallen at least ten times, and we’re very lucky that osteoporosis and leaky bladders were not an issue back then.

Fast forward a few years to high school, and we are now best friends who are dating best friends from another town. These boys were our first loves, and also our first real companions as we experienced all of the experimental wonders of young adulthood; cutting classes, hangovers and…well…you know the deal. I would drive to her house to pick her up for school, and after sitting in her kitchen having a cup of tea, we would decide that it would be much more fun to go to our boyfriends’ school. We were actually so smooth that we could sit in some of their classes without even being noticed!

Our boyfriends were very funny and aside from some crazy pizza parlor antics and silly nicknames, they had a secret code that they would use with each other, which Maria and I tried desperately to understand: If something cost $7.00, they would say, “Reenee Bond”. It took us three years and all of us breaking up to find out that “Reenee Bond” was a woman in the back of a porno magazine that sold her “used” underwear for $7.00 a pair! To this day, if Maria and I are out shopping or in a restaurant, if the price of something is $7.00, we have to say that it costs “Reenee Bond”…and what’s sillier is that we still laugh every time we say it, 25 years later!

She had broken up with her boyfriend about two months before my boyfriend broke up with me and left me for someone else at the beginning of the summer of 1983. I admit; I wasn’t as strong as Maria, and I was so distraught from the breakup that my weight plummeted to 89 lbs. My mother was worried sick, and when she heard that Maria was down in Florida visiting one of her brothers, she called her mother to ask if she could send me down there, too.

Chalk this one up to another experience that was just priceless. Maria’s brother lived on the Gulf of Mexico. Every night, we would go outside on the beach with a huge glass of red wine and watch the sunset. We’d talk about our ex-boyfriends, our futures, and letting go of the past. We’d take wineglass in hand, raise it, and clink it to a great, big “SCREW EVERYTHING!!”, then take a nice, soothing sip. That would become our signature salute every time we drank together from that trip forward, and it would always evoke a sense of “everything’s gonna be alright”, no matter what our circumstances.

Eventually, Maria and I both became dental assistants, although we never had the opportunity to work with each other. She definitely worked at the better office; her clients included Rodney Dangerfield, Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley (and for those of you who ever wondered…Maria swears that those are her real teeth, and that she never wore a stitch of makeup when she came in—and she was still amazingly beautiful)! She also worked part time in another office, and was responsible for closing up. Sometimes I would meet her there after work and we’d have a little “nitrous” party with one of the other assistants in the office! Dear God, were we stupid. But we did have fun…

Maria and I had the same, silly sense of humor and the same emotional response to sappy movies. We can recite just about every line from the movie “Arthur”, and we actually went to see “Flashdance” in the theater about 11 times. We were so inspired by the latter movie that we used to dance in the aisles when it was over! But as unimportant as both of those movies may have been to filmmaking history, they contained lines that would be ingrained in our vocabularies forever. Dudley Moore’s character of Arthur insisted that “fun” was “the best thing to have!”, and we have confirmed this sentiment in our best British accents every time we’ve gone out together for the last 25 years. And in Flashdance, the mantra was, “…If you give up your dreams, you die.” Very powerful words for such a fluffy movie…but ones that we’ve lived by and reminded each other of in various ways for over two decades.


For the record, I do need to mention that Maria was married to my cousin for about 5 minutes. They say blood is thicker than water, but my friendship with Maria is bonded by spiritual steel, and needless to say, I haven’t spoken to my cousin since their divorce over 20 years ago. I married shortly thereafter and had two children, a girl and a boy; she married again about 9 years later and had two children, a girl and a boy. Coincidentally, both of our girls are very outgoing and personable; both of our sons have learning disabilities (my son was diagnosed with ADHD, primarily inattentive type, in the first grade; her son was diagnosed with higher-end autism at age 3). Although having children did not stop us from enjoying our occasional glass of wine, our toast definitely needed a politically correct, child-proof overhaul. We decided to shorten “Screw Everything” to “S.E.”, for the sake of not only our children, but those around us who may have assumed upon hearing those two words that we might either be slightly unstable or very promiscuous.

Life goes on, and my marriage started to hit the rocks. My husband had supposedly bought me a Mercedes convertible for Mother’s Day; however, he was the only one who ever got to use it, usually by himself on his day off when he said that he was “cruising around to clear his head”…and I believed him. One Friday night, when he once again didn’t come home from work and was not able to be reached on his cell phone, Maria and I decided to go to a bar and then go to the movies. When she got to my house, she said, “Why don’t we take your Mercedes?”
“NO,” I told her. “He’ll kill me.”
“But isn’t it YOUR Mercedes?”
“Um, yeah…supposedly.”
“So screw him!! It’s YOUR Mercedes!”
I felt so disobedient taking out that car, but damn, if it wasn’t so much fun feeling the wind in our hair as we drove to the bar! Once inside, we were being ogled by several drunken men. I told Maria that I was so glad that we didn’t have to worry about dating anymore. We left the bar and went to the movies to see “The First Wives Club”. That night would turn out to be one of the most ironic of my life. The next night, my husband told me that he didn’t want to be married anymore. When I shared this with Maria, she cried with me and told me she felt as if it were happening to her as well. She supported me through all of the ups and downs of my divorce, and always found a way to make me smile, whether it was in the form of a beautiful card or calling me up to say she was pouring herself a glass of wine and just wanted to say, “S.E.”.

To give you a glimpse of how in tune we still are, the other day we got to meet for breakfast at a diner for the first time in months. Maria affirmed that the Spanish omelet was indeed quite delicious, she was going to order it, and I should stop hesitating and order one for myself. When the waitress arrived at our booth, I asked her tell me what was in a Spanish omelet. Feeling a bit cocky, I guess, she replied, “…A Spaniard.” To which I retorted, “Well, as long as it’s Antonio Banderas, I’ll have that!” Maria slammed the table and shouted, “I was just gonna say that!!! The words were coming out of my mouth, and you said it for me!” Focusing on the waitress, she confirmed, “Do you realize that I know this woman for most of my life, and I know everything she’s gonna say before she says it?!?” As the waitress laughed, Maria added in, “…But I think I’ll take Andy Garcia in mine.” As we all bellowed with laughter, the woman seated by herself across from us shouted over (and I kid you not), “Can I have what they’re having?!?” At that point, they were one step away from calling a rescue squad to resuscitate us. As the men around us looked at us like we had just escaped Creedmore, we realized that this was genuinely one of those great moments that only women could appreciate!

In conclusion, the aforementioned ditties make up but a small fraction of my years of friendship with Maria. We can blend in with anyone, talk to everyone and we have so much fun when we’re together that it’s infectious! Her friendship is precious to me, and we couldn’t be closer if we were actually born from the same mother. Have we had “downtimes” over the years? You bet. But that’s what being a “seesta” is all about…understanding enough to know that we don’t wish anything bad on each other, caring enough to mend whatever is wrong, and having faith enough in each other to know that we will only grow closer as the years go by, no matter what crisis our friendship entails. I know that Maria always accepts me for the person that I am, warts and all, and would never dream of talking negatively behind my back about those warts to anyone else. And she knows that her warts are safe with me as well! That to me is what true friendship is all about.

So with my glass of Cabernet raised and my heart full of gratification, here’s to you, my Tortilla…and for all of those reading who understand and appreciate the value of having a sister, no matter how she came into your life…“S.E., BABY!!”

"A Comforter Is NOT A Bedspread!"

Okay, I know what you’re thinking…this is an awfully silly way to start a blog. But there is some significance. Let me delve into my past for a moment, and try to explain…

For those of you who are over age 40, you might recall playing and recording tapes on a cassette player/recorder that ran on batteries. Countless times, I would sit by the radio waiting for my new favorite song to come on so that I could press “record” and “play” at the same time and have a recording of a song that I could play over and over (and over and over) again, without having to spend money on a “45” (remember those?). The tape player also served another purpose besides pirating songs from the AM stations: my friends and I would have countless hours of fun recording “interviews” with each other, recording silly skits, and of course, recording our voices while singing along to our records (I have many hours of tape with my best friend Maria and I singing along to our “Donny and Marie” albums--she was Donny, I was Marie, and we always had our hairbrush microphones ready to go)!

One observation we made along the way was that everything would come out in “fast motion” when we placed new batteries in the tape player after making recordings while the batteries were dying. Although this was very annoying when recording music, it was absolutely hilarious when you were taping voices! Depending on how used up the batteries were, you could end up sounding like a munchkin from the Wizard of Oz, or undecipherable like a rodent squeaking.

Well, here’s my confession…when I was about 14 (yes, I admit, I still did silly things like this at that ripe, old age), I needed a new bedspread, as the years of my dog Daisy laying on it and clawing at it had rendered it a “hole-y” mess. However, I noticed from catalogs and advertisements that these new things (well, they were new to me, anyway) called “comforters” looked pretty cool, and I decided that I wanted one of those. Since my mom didn’t drive, we took the bus one day to a department store called Korvette’s that was in a town about 15 miles away. We purchased a pretty comforter, got back on the bus, and went home. I burst through the door, ran into my room and pulled it out of the bag. As I excitedly placed my new cover onto my bed, I realized that something was amiss. Why didn’t it look like the advertisements? Something didn’t seem right…hey, wait a minute! The ones in the catalogs had something on the bottom that covered up all of the junk under the bed. And hold on…what about those fancy pillow covers? What are they called…shams? Why didn’t I get those? Wow, this comforter thing really didn’t work without all of the extras.

At this realization, I alerted my mom to the fact that we would have to return to the store to get the missing pieces. Totally aggravated, she decided that she was just going to return the comforter altogether and exchange it for a bedspread, the cheaper option since it required no accessories to make it look “complete”. However, since she didn’t drive, we would have to wait until all the conditions were right and the planets aligned for her to take the bus again to that faraway town.

At fourteen, patience was not one of my better qualities (actually, is it anyone’s at that age?). I started to get on her case about returning the comforter, and I could see that I was just annoying her a little bit more every time I brought it up. One day, while I was talking on the phone to my friend and tooling around with my tape recorder (whose batteries just happened to be dying), we came up with this great idea to ask my mom just one more time when she would return the comforter…so we could get her voice on tape and listen to her yell like Alvin the Chipmunk. I turned on the recorder as my friend sat on the other end of the phone egging me on. “Just ask her. Ask her now!!” And then, I asked her the question that would prompt such a response out of her that it made family history.

“…When are you gonna go return it?” That’s it. One simple question. What followed had my friend laughing so hard on the other end, she almost wet her pants. I tried so hard to keep my composure, but I just couldn’t help to let out little bursts of laughter as my mother totally went nuts! The words uttered out of her mouth would become famous in our family, and brought up time and time again, no matter what the situation: “ I think you’re under the wrong impression…a comforter is NOT a bedspread…!” To this day, I have relatives who will jokingly barb me with these words for something as simple as me trying to decide on whether to get the chocolate-peanut butter bar or the coffee cake at Starbuck’s!

All’s well that ends well, and when I immediately played back the tape to my mother, even she laughed. We all got a kick out of that tape then, and it still makes us laugh now, almost 30 years later. And sometimes in life, a "comforter" just isn't a "bedspread", and vice-versa. And it's all good, anyway. No matter what, the bed will still be covered.

My mom has unfortunately passed on, but I knew somehow, someway, I would get her tape played to a larger audience…so here it is, Mom. I’m sure you’re resting in peace up in heaven on a beautiful, soft comf…oops, I mean bedspread!

(In order to hear this audio clip, please click on the September 4th post below)

The Infamous "Comforter is Not a Bedspread" Recording

**9/02/07** I realized yesterday, after trying to play this, that the host web site that published it seems to no longer exist. I will try to find another way to link it here ASAP!