Author: the outside lane

My friend, Nancy*, said this, today, “You really have to be secure in yourself to reveal somewhat embarrassing stories to the general public, as you often do – I can’t help but admire that.”  I really appreciated that.

Last night, Thor and I were talking and he said, “I got really embarrassed today.”  I asked why and he said, “Snot flew out my nose and everyone laughed at me.  Then, I wiped it away and everyone said I was gross, and they laughed more.”  I commiserated then said, “You know what helps?  If you laugh, too.”

I gave him a fresh example, as I had fallen off a curb on my way to lunch, yesterday.  There were people standing on the sidewalk, and they laughed when I went down.  It was embarrassing, it was painful (my swollen ankle can attest), and I felt really clumsy, “But,” I told my son, “I got up quickly, I shrugged, and I laughed too.”

“Why?”

“Because it was funny.  If I had seen it, I might have laughed too.  I’m sure I looked pretty silly with my arms flailing all around.”  I demonstrated for him, “And my face like this!”

He laughed and I said, “See?  Funny.  So, the next time your friends start to laugh at you, you laugh.  Then, they can’t laugh at you.  Then, they are laughing with you.  If they are laughing to be mean, they will stop because it isn’t any fun to laugh at someone who is laughing with you.  If they are laughing just because it is funny, then you’ll all be happy.  They will think you are a really cool guy because you can laugh at yourself.”

He was still skeptical, but I suggested he just try it and see what happens.

Listen, I learned that lesson the long, hard way.  I used to break in half with embarrassment all the time.  I don’t know when I got this down pat, but here is the deal:  I find that when I tell on myself, it takes the sting out of the incident.  I did it.  Someone probably witnessed it.  I don’t need to try to hide it and be ashamed of it because we all make mistakes, and maybe my mistake can save someone else some embarrassment, and maybe my mistake can make someone’s day better.  I can’t tell you the number of times someone has confided something they have done, and I have been awash with gratitude because their mistake meant I wasn’t alone in my own perpetration of idiocy.

If me telling you about the time I asked out Mike Love by saying, “How would you like a girl to ask you out,” then repeating his answer back to him as saucily as I could manage, only to have him say, “Uh…I only like you as a friend,” saves you that embarrassment, then I have done a public service in the name of romance.  Romantic Comedy actresses get paid big money to do that!

I am secure in myself, but I do believe that a lot of that comes of sharing my failures as warning, or comedy.  That’s a chicken or egg thing, too.  Yes, I had to have a degree of self confidence to tell the story of screaming out lines from the Merchant of Venice at the top of my lungs in response to being bullied, but sharing that story was also the first big step toward actually healing those wounds, and when people laughed it bolstered my confidence to tell more.

Telling on myself keeps me honest, and I like to think it keeps me from being so hard on other people.  It’s really difficult to laugh at the people of Walmart when you are one of them.

*Nancy is the brilliant artist behind the official website for Yasmin Le Bon.  Whether or not you know who Yasmin Le Bon is, you should take a look at this site.  Nancy did all of it.  ALL of it.  It never ceases to amaze me that one person can put something like this together.  I’m doing good to change the format of the blog now and then.

I was doing my hair this morning and thinking over some of the atrocities I wore out in public in the late 90s, early 00s.  I could only think how angry my friends must have been with me to let me go out looking that way.  I had a mini-midlife-fashion-crisis in my late 20s/early 30s and tried to recapture my 18 year old figure by dressing my decade older body in things you really shouldn’t see on girls past their experimental teens.  I actually owned a half-shirt with the word PUNK written in red glitter, across the bust.  And I wore it.  Frequently.  It’s things like that shirt (and the godawful jeans I wore with it) that make me wonder why people ever ask for my style advice.*

What everyone needs, when it comes to fashion, is a really good, really honest friend, whose opinion can be delivered with love.  I happen to have married one of those.  Although, no matter how lovingly he might be delivering his message, his eyebrows telegraph his true horror when I am needing a second glance in the mirror. 

For instance, I bought a dress for the SAG Awards, then tried it on for B.  I watched his face as he worked it into something hopeful, but his eyebrows said, “How am I going to get out of this one?!”  He strung some words together that translated to, “It’s a pretty dress.  You’re a pretty woman.  The dress isn’t complimenting you.”  His eyebrows said, “She can’t go out looking like that.”

Thor was less concerned with my feelings and said, “That’s ugly.  You look like a giant Hershey’s Kiss.  But I like chocolate, so it’s okay.”

I returned the dress the next day and bought the suit you saw yesterday.  When I tried that one, both B’s eyebrows and face said, in that special way, “Ooooh, I don’t want to let her leave the house looking like that!”  And I knew that it was good. 

Thor said, “I like your jacket.  Can I play with your necklace?”

If you don’t have a friend like that, or a very honest child, here are a few rules of thumb that might help you avoid some of my past mistakes:

1. Take full length photos, front and back, before you go out.  You’d be surprised how high up the back of your thigh some skirt vents go. 
2. If it is satin, don’t wear it.  Satin always wrinkles and shines in weird places.  You will look 6 months pregnant, no matter how slim you are.
3. When in doubt, go the size up.  Especially if you’re going to be photographed.
4. Bend over and touch your toes.  Is anything exposed (top or bottom) that bothers you?  If so, rethink the outfit. 
5. Walk around the house in the shoes you intend to wear.  Wear them while doing dishes.  Are your feet killing you?  If yes, wear different shoes.

I kind of wish I still had a photograph of an outfit I wore to see Billy Idol, at the height of my fashion-crisis.  It was so terrible that it needs to be seen to be believed.  About ten minutes into the concert, I realized I wasn’t turning heads in the good way, but y’all, heads were turning all over the place.   I am sorry to tell you that I destroyed all the evidence.  Someone else might have a picture, though.  If I come across one, I’ll share.

*This was at the same time that I was chasing a guy who ran a karaoke show for a living–and the reason I wonder why people ask me for relationship advice.  We called him Fake Simon because he was basically the shortest Simon LeBon impersonator ever.  That is #2 on my list of most embarrassing boy related things, close behind #1 which is when I decided that God had told me to marry this guy and I made a total ass of myself over him.  I have a history of making an ass of myself over men.  #3 on the list is when, in a fit of drama, I wrote a breakup note to a guy I was dating, quoting song lyrics, and left it on his windshield.  Actually, that should be #1, since he read the note to all his friends.  That’s definitely #1.  Fake Simon is #2.

The first audition I ever did was in 1981.  We had just moved to Texas, and my teacher had heard that a kids television program was looking for talent.  She told my mother, and two weeks later we were in a production studio where I sang my little heart out to three casting directors, whose faces I couldn’t even see for the lights in my eyes.  I debuted on Kidzone a few months later, singing Tomorrow, from Annie.

Several really neat things happened because of that show.  First, we met Mary, who owned a fabric store.  Mary refitted and drew part of a pattern for my mother to work with, to make my costume.  I ended up babysitting her kids for over a decade, and volunteering in her husband’s Teen Jury program for the same length of time.

I also got to make my first studio recording, learned to sing along with a track, and learned to work with a live musician to create the sound I wanted.  Mom found a pianist at a nearby university, who brought me in with my sheet music and worked with me to sound less like Andrea McArdle, and more like Lane Morris.

And, of course there was the little thing of getting to be on television, doing something I loved to do.  Which was to stand perfectly still and belt out a song.  Zero stage presence with this one at that age.  I also learned about Blue Laws, which had prevented us from purchasing the requisite knee socks for my costume, on our way to the studio.  I wore bobby socks instead.

Four years, a considerable amount of stage and a tv series later, I would finally get an agent–who is still a family friend. 

It’s been 32 years and lord knows how many go-sees since that first audition.  I still love to sing.  I still have really awkward stage presence when I am singing.  But neither the shower tiles, nor my myriad of shampoo bottles have ever complained, and people still pay me to do it, now and then. 

Most memorable audition ever?  The one where I stepped in dog poop wearing cloth shoes as I was getting out of my car, couldn’t clean it off, and decided to walk into the audition with bare feet.  I might have been able to play it off as bohemian chic (since it was for a very boho production) and swung it, but as I walked swiftly toward what I thought was an open door, I caught sight of several NO!-faces just before I slammed, face first into a glass wall.  I did that audition with a bruise forming in the center of my forehead, no shoes, and a red face. 

I did not get the part.  I did learn another life lesson about holding your head high and doing your job no matter what you’ve stepped, or walked into.

See that red dot?  That’s right about where I want to be this minute.

We made that drive at least three times a year from 1981 to 1999, and I get just as homesick for the Vicksburg, Mississippi Welcome Center as I do for that house on Collins Drive.  They have good Cokes! 

That red dot is about where the Alabama stretch of the trip gets interesting to me, and about where Mom and I always got punchy from driving all night without stopping.  We’ve certainly had some unforgettable happenings.  Not the least of which being the time a tire blew out and sent us careening into a ravine outside of Jackson, Mississippi.

Our car flipped three times before wrapping around a tree.  I had been asleep, and woke up upside down with Mom calling my name from the backseat.  We walked away from that one, and Grandma and Boom came to pick us up.  We rode the rest of the way to Georgia in their Crown Vic, Boom driving, holding Mom’s hand, me in the backseat with my head on Grandma’s lap. 

Every trip after that, we’d watch for the spot where we had skinned the shoulder and taken down a few trees, and we always stopped at a gas station just above the hotel where we had waited for Grandma and Boom to arrive.

I really miss making that trip, but there’s no one Home now.  All my grandparents are gone, the houses are sold, and other people are building memories in the backyards where I grew up.  That’s good.  But, I still miss Home. 

I was born the daughter of the Deep South lands

I have tar on my heels and red clay on my hands

Carolina, Bama, Georgia are home to me

Cut me and I’ll bleed out the Chatahootchie

Are you tired of product recommendations yet?  Sorry!  I have a new one. 

I dislike a lot of foundation because, first, it is hard for me to find a good match, and I am extremely picky about how products feel on my face.  I want a nice, smooth look, but I don’t want it to feel like I’m wearing a mask.  In general, I stick to powder foundations that just even out color and oil, but now and then I want a real foundation. 

On a whim, I bought the lightest shade available of the Maybelline Dream Nude Airfoam foundation, and I really like it!  It goes on like a mousse, wears light and dry, but is heavy enough that I get real coverage.  The color wears pretty true to what is advertised, my skin feels soft without being tacky, or gritty to the touch.  I’m going to give it 4.75 out of 5 stars.  I’d still like it to be a shade lighter!

It’s acting awards season, and I worked at the SAG Awards viewing party in Dallas, last night.  So many pretty dresses.  You know what I like?  A really good acceptance speech.  Jennifer Lawrence is racking up points in that arena for me.  I want someone else to write Anne Hathaway’s for her, though. 

Of course the focus on Hollywood is timely to the book I am reading.  Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright is turning out to be equal parts interesting, uncomfortable, and horrifying.  Interesting because most religions are, and certainly a religion so recently founded that we have megatons of historic evidence both for and against makes this one, and its followers fascinting.  Uncomfortable because I recognize so much of my ease into indoctrinated zealotry in how so many of the subjects became Scientologists.  Horrifying because of the abuses heaped on the followers, especially the children of congregants.

There isn’t any such thing as a logical religion, so I do my best not to knock beliefs, whether they have to do with giant space clams, invisible patriarchs, or wood elves, and remind myself that people choose religions based on what is a salve to their souls.  What bothers me is when people are so cowed by indoctrination that they accept abuse as an integral part of the culture, and are willing to participate in it because it is what their god wants for them to teach them a lesson.

I have a lot of issues with the idea of gods using pain to teach lessons.  God is not Chris Brown, though a lot of faithful men and women seem to have battered wife syndrome.