Month: August 2012

Poem of the Week, by Laura Kasischke

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Bike Ride with Older Boys

     – Laura Kasischke

The one I didn’t go on.

I was thirteen,
and they were older.
I’d met them at the public pool. I must

have given them my number. I’m sure

I’d given them my number,
knowing the girl I was. . .

It was summer. My afternoons
were made of time and vinyl.
My mother worked,
but I had a bike. They wanted

to go for a ride.
Just me and them. I said
okay fine, I’d
meet them at the Stop-n-Go
at four o’clock.
And then I didn’t show.

I have been given a little gift—
something sweet
and inexpensive, something
I never worked or asked or said
thank you for, most
days not aware
of what I have been given, or what I missed—

because it’s that, too, isn’t it?
I never saw those boys again.
I’m not as dumb
as they think I am

but neither am I wise. Perhaps

it is the best
afternoon of my life. Two
cute and older boys
pedaling beside me—respectful, awed. When we

turn down my street, the other girls see me …

Everything as I imagined it would be.

Or, I am in a vacant field. When I
stand up again, there are bits of glass and gravel
ground into my knees.
I will never love myself again.
Who knew then
that someday I would be

thirty-seven, wiping
crumbs off the kitchen table with a sponge, remembering
them, thinking
of this—

those boys still waiting
outside the Stop-n-Go, smoking
cigarettes, growing older.


—
For more information on Laura Kasischke, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/laura-kasischke
—
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Day Twenty-Five, in which we fulfill a long-held dream.

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Today’s challenge: To develop a signature cocktail.

I’ve been trying to develop a signature cocktail for years now, or rather, I’ve been saying that I want to develop one without ever trying, unless you count the rhubarb margarita I concocted a couple of months ago, which tasted so horrible that I threw the whole thing out.

Old-school cocktails are so cool, aren’t they? The specific glasses they’re made in, the muddle this and swirl that, the various specific garnishes. Even the name “simple syrup” is elegant.

Because the still-fresh memory of that hideous rhubarb margarita was so galling, I decided, out of spite and/or stubbornness and/or stupidity, to create a signature cocktail with a rhubarb theme.

As with most of these challenges, I turned to my trusty friend Mr. Google, and after spending an hour or so perusing the many great ideas involving rhubarb and alcohol, I made a list and headed out to do some shopping. My list:

Bitters (another great name)

Gin (which I know virtually nothing about)

Tonic (can’t remember if I’ve ever actually bought it before)

Some kind of garnish (to be decided on last-minute in a zany moment of inspiration, and which ended up being a lime, which is neither zany nor inspired, but I like limes)

Hennepin-Lake Liquors, my neighborhood liquor store, which is cash-only and a little sketchy but cheap, had lots of gin. I wanted Boodles, because of the name alone, but it was too spendy. Basing my decision on name recognition within a mid-range price alone, I got Gordon’s.

There was a small but interesting selection of Bitters (again, what a great name!) and I picked the one that was made in New Orleans because I love New Orleans.

Tonic: Why is a big bottle $1.49 and a six-pack of tiny bottles $5.49? This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Back home. Straight to the rhubarb patch I went, armed with a big knife. This rhubarb patch began life as a clump that my mother dug up for me in upstate New York and which I carried onto an airplane, dirt and all, in a duffel a couple of years ago.

Like all rhubarb everywhere, it thrives no matter what I do or don’t do to it, here at the side of my house between some lilies that I planted from a bunch that someone had set out on the curb with a FREE sign and a rhododendron that was here when I moved in.

Chop chop chop, off with their heads!

Back into the kitchen. Chop chop chop some more, on the big wooden cutting board that began life as a twenty-five cent hunk of wood at someone’s garage sale and which I decided to call a cutting board.

Into a big pot with you, rhubarb, along with lots and lots of sugar.

After a long time I soaked the rhubarb, sugar and all, in some boiling-hot water, whereupon I strained it into a big bowl and tasted it. YUM. I boiled some of it with more sugar for a few minutes and tasted that. ALSO YUM.

The rhubarb was now transformed into a kind of rhubarb simple syrup, although that name lacks pizzazz.

Then I got out various accoutrements and lined them up on the counter so as to feel like a bartender, which is a secret dream job of mine despite the fact that I need a lot of alone time, barely drink, and until just now didn’t know the first thing about making a drink.

What I love about bartending is the way bartenders move behind the bar, tossing all those bottles around, dipping and scooping and filling clinking glasses with various combinations of ice and alcohol and talking and smiling the whole time. Beautiful to watch.

I used a little, non-regulation glass because I figured, given the haunting specter of the undrinkable rhubarb margarita, that it would take me a long time to create the signature cocktail.

But I figured wrong! One try, people, and it was so tasty that I quit while I was ahead.

Now I need to have a party.

Day Twenty-Four: Hermit crab envy

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I think of it as kayak syndrome. Not the kind of kayak that sits on a rack at the southern end of Lake of the Isles, but kayak.com syndrome. I don’t even want to think about how much time I spend on kayak.com, because then I’d be face to face with the true measure of my addiction.

There are tricks to traveling on the cheap, and I’m pretty sure I know 99% of them. Back in the day, airline clerks used to ask me for my IATA number, whatever that is, because they assumed I was a travel agent.

I get a panicky feeling when I look at a globe, because there are so few places, relatively speaking, that I’ve been. And how much time do I have left in which to get to all the places I haven’t been and want to go?

Maybe many years. Maybe a few days. Maybe that road trip to Montana and Wyoming, two weeks ago, was it.

Some mornings I wake up and want to crawl right out of my own skin, so restless and dissatisfied and fragmented do I feel. It’s a get me out of here feeling, with the “here” being this house, this city, this state, this country. This body. This mind.

You can see the problem. When the here you want to get out of is your own self, it’s not going to help to get on a plane to Bhutan.

But kayak syndrome sets in anyway. In one version of the site, you can plug in the dates you want to be gone and the cheapest fares to anywhere in the world will pop up all over a map of the world. Click. Click. Click.

My brother, who understands this need to travel because he has it too –although I’m not sure about the crawling out of your own skin part of it for him– sends me links to mind-boggling deals that you can take advantage of if you can get to the airport within, say, an hour. Or mind-boggling deals that you can take advantage of if you want to go somewhere that, apparently, no one else in the entire world wants to go.

Anyway, today was one of those get me out of here days. But I can’t go anywhere, at least today, so I decided to change my name instead.

You may now refer to me as A Long Chemise.

This name was first given to me by a bunch of graduating Vermont College MFA students who fed my real name through an anagram machine. They did the same thing for all the teachers, but I liked my anagram name best. The minute I heard it, I felt long and cool and summery, as if I was walking through an orchard wearing the kind of baglike dress that usually looks horrible on me, but somehow, on A Long Chemise, looked good.

If you can’t crawl out of your skin, you can rearrange the letters of your name and feel a little better, at least for a few minutes. It’s like word helium.

After walking around for a while as A Long Chemise, I decided that today’s never done before challenge would be to anagramize the names of my sisters and my brother and my youthful companions and my best friend.

I thought this would be a relatively easy task, given the existence of marvelous sites like this one.

But of course, once I actually started feeding names into the anagram machine, I got obsessed with the results. It’s a big responsibility, changing the names of those you love. Somehow the anagram name has to fit some essential quality of their personalities. This requires sifting through hundreds and hundreds of anagram names in order to hit upon the right one. It took me quite a while. Almost as long as I would have spent clicking fare after fare on kayak.com.

But the task is done, and I have to say it was a satisfying one.

My children, Nib Merino and Bulkier One and Nib Overdone, are all busy tonight. I think I’ll give my best friend Gentle Wiglets a call and see what she’s up to.

Day Twenty-Three: You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out.

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The hour was growing late and the never-done-before crowd-sourced dance mix challenge had yet to be completed, or even begun. The list of tunes, in exact order of receipt, had grown frighteningly long, and if the dancing did not commence immediately, it would end up spanning two days.

Nay, not only two days, but two months.

No matter that the only living beings in the house were me, the dog and the cat. Plus a bat or two, probably, but I prefer not to think about them. I cued up the Spotify playlist, thank you, friend who told me I could save a bunch of money by doing it that way, and laid out some provisions on the dining table.

As the evening wore on it became clear that the correct food/ouzo/water ratio was 1:.5:1, with one gulp of ouzo = half a glass of water + one chip loaded with guacamole. Follow this formula and you will not go wrong.

It was strangely relaxing not to have to think about any of the below selected songs, as I had nothing to do with any of them.

They were crowd-sourced, so I didn’t allow myself to insert a single song that I personally wanted, such as Hey Ya, which ordinarily would be #1 on any dance list I had anything to do with, even snuck in in the form of the wordless Booker T. version, and which every one of my friends is probably sick of listening to.

Nope, I stuck entirely to the mix that was handed to me, and I danced each song in the order in which it was received, and I managed to squeak in just under the wire, at 11:56 p.m. Here goes.

1. Johann Froberger’s harpsichord “Meditation sur ma mort future.” M.T. Anderson, this has got to be the worst dance tune ever. What were you thinking! Dancing to this song is impossible. It was like going on a date with a nap, as a friend would say. Honestly, it was all I could do remain upright during the entire 6+ minutes of this awfulness. (Sorry, Mr. Froberger.)

2. Rock Lobster, by the B-52s. Thank God that Rock Lobster followed MT’s awful meditation on a dead future, because this is a song I can get behind. I love this song so much that it was all I could do not to play it five or six times in a row. But there were lots of songs to go, so I exerted huge willpower and moved on.

3. I Don’t Feel Like Dancin, by the Scissor Sisters. Great tune! But Scissor Sisters, you do make me feel like dancin. (Dancing to this song is like fighting with yourself the whole time: “I don’t feel like dancing.” “But wait, I *do* feel like dancing!”)

4. Bad Romance, by Lady Gaga. Who can argue with Gaga? This one came via one of my sisters, who’s a late, very enthusiastic discoverer of Gaga. It’s a good song, and as I danced to it I took the opportunity to imagine how a meat dress would feel. Heavy. Damp. Bloody. Steak-like. Interesting.

5. You Are My Sunshine, a “popular song first recorded in 1939,” according to Wikipedia. My friend Absalom sent me this one, and he could only have meant it as a wicked joke, a la MT Anderson, but guess what, Absalom? I loved it. As I danced to it the images of my three youthful companions kept floating through my mind, and I imagined I was giving each one a hug: the 6’4″ boy in Chicago, the tall curly-haired girl working the late shift at Tilia, and the short blackhaired girl currently staying up all night comforting wee homesick campers in Wisconsin.

6. The Hokey Pokey. This one came in via my friend Kay, who, like Absalom, no doubt meant it as a subversive joke, but again, guess what, Kay? I plugged in an amazing version by The Puppies and I put my right foot in and my left out with abandon. Take that!

7. “Anything Motown,” which I chose to interpret as Super Freak, by Rick James. This is a fabulous song, and Rick James is a fabulous guy, but I have to admit that the whole time I was dancing to it, all I could picture was that little girl in that Little Miss Sunshine movie, crawling forward on her hands and knees. (I still love the song.)

8. Pick Up the Pieces, by the Average White Band. This one brought me right back to high school, and I completely enjoyed dancing to it.

9. Go Your Own Way, by Fleetwood Mac. This one, too, brought me back to high school, or maybe college (I stink with dates), and I had a hard time interpreting all the emotions that came along with it. As I danced to it I couldn’t make up my mind whether this particular song makes me feel happy or sad. A combination, maybe. Stevie Nicks, I salute your bring me your leather take from me my lace self.

10. I Will Survive, by Gloria G. This is one of those anthemic songs that make you feel strong and powerful and full of strength. Yes, I *will* survive. Thank you, Gloria Gaynor.

11. Truth Is, by Brother Ali. Whenever I hear a song by Brother Ali I picture him as I sometimes see him, making his way down Lyndale or Nicollet, one of his kids in tow, and at the same time I picture him on stage with his head thrown back, singing his heart out. I don’t know Brother Ali, but I feel as if I do. Truth Is!

12. The Time Warp, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yes! The Time Warp! This brought me right back to when Rocky Horror first came out: the toast, the squirt bottles, the raincoats. What a weird, fun, bizarrely sexy movie. I had to resist playing this one more than once too. Thank you, person who sent this one to me. Exclamation marks indicate happiness.

13. Boogie Shoes, by KC and the Sunshine Band. Oh, dear other sister who sent this one in, how happy you made me. First by sending it in like this, in your completely unabashed capital-letter+exclamation marks way –BOOGIE SHOES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!– and second because I got to dance to it. Who can resist such a song? Not you, and not me.

14. Last Dance, by Donna Summer. This one starts out so slow and sad. But then she jumps it into a real dance tune, and because of that, and because it reminds me of high school and college, and because she died recently, I danced this one with all my heart.

15. Lonely Boys, by the Black Keys. It’s the Black Keys! and they’re great! and so is this song, which is impossible not to dance to.

16. Brown-eyed Girl, by Van Morrison. This was a tough one, since to my mind, dancing to this song = dancing it with a boyfriend. No boyfriend present = figuring out how to dance to it alone. This could have made me sad, but I decided not to be sad, and it all went down pretty well.

17. “Come on Eileen” by Dexys Midnight Runners. Great tune! Brings me back to many a late-night party and much late-night fun. Thank you, person who sent it to me.

18. “You Spin Me Right Round” by Dead or Alive. When I first read the name of this song and the band who wrote it, I drew a blank. But the minute it spun up on the playlist I recognized it, and with great happiness. Love this song. Thank you, Jake.

19. Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, by Billy Joel. This one, like Brown-Eyed Girl, seems to require a slow-dancing partner in order to make the most of it. I did my best, but I admit to taking a few ouzo breaks as it spun itself out.

20. “I Like the Way You Move, by the Bodyrockers. Oh! How I love this song. Who couldn’t love this song? Someone once put it on a mix he made me for Valentine’s Day, and as I danced to this song, I can’t deny that the memory of that made me cry. But still, I wouldn’t trade it away.

21. Red Alert, Basement Jaxx. So I’m 99% sure I never heard this song before I listened to it on youtube, but wow, does it fit my personal definition of a Great Song, in that one-third of the way through it felt familiar, as if I already knew it. This is a fabulous tune! I would tell you that it took all my willpower not to play it through five times in a row, but that would be a lie, because I did, in fact, play it through five times in a row. This tune has instantly vaulted to my top 10 dance songs. Thank you, Nick.

22. Jump, by the Pointer Sisters. Another classic, wonderful tune. By this point I had turned out all the lights, so that my 88-year-old neighbor wouldn’t be freaked out by the sight of me leaping about my dining room late at night, and so I felt free to jump –JUMP!– as high as I wanted.

23. Love Shack, by the B-52s. Can you imagine my delight at another B-52s song? Two in one night. First Rock Lobster and now the Love Shack. My cup runneth over.

24. Lord Tanamo, Matty Rag. SKA! I wouldn’t even have thought of putting ska on my dance list, and I loved swaying around my living room to the gentle beat of Lord Tanamo. Thank you, Sandy.

25. And last but certainly not least, Salt Shaker, by the Ying Yang Twins. All I can say about this one is a) it’s a damn good thing I had all the lights off (it was near midnight at this point) so that my 88-year-old neighbor didn’t have to witness me mimicking the moves of the official video, and b) I kind of hate to admit how much I like this song.

I hereby proclaim Day Twenty-Three the most fun never-done-before challenge yet. Thanks, crowd-sourcerers.