The late Mel Torme, back before he croaked, sang that there's a broken heart for every light on Broadway. As I will not be outdone by any one nicknamed “The Velvet Fog,” let me croon about my developing a headache for every broken light at my house.
Ooh, the colors of Hell ARE pretty … when lit.
The leaves have started changing colors all around us so that means the nuts have started falling out of the trees and into campaigns for elected office.
With so many prestigious titles up for grabs this year (governor, U.S. representative, most likely to get snarled in a sexting scandal), the voting public needs to fully understand just what the heck these would-be office-holders stand for. You'll hear or read a whole of mess of sound bites filled with buzzwords from candidates over the next few weeks, so I'm providing the following guide as a public service to help you understand exactly what these folks are saying out of both sides of their mouths:
Parents tread a thin line between success and failure at raising their children, and rare is the time when your own kid inks that line as clearly as our daughter Li’l Diva did.
This tale, like so many we were supposed to learn in school but cheated only ourselves by simply poring over the Cliff Notes, begins in medias res with a shocking discovery. Enter my wife -- concerned look, furrowed brow, a question tinged with accused failure on her lips.
"Have you ever had the drug talk with your daughter?" Note the girl is mine. Possession is nine-tenths the other parent's in troubled times.
You’ll have to read my newspaper column, “Color them red for Little League success,” to find out.
The clickity-tickity-tick of thousands of needles fighting unsuccessfully to stab through the shingled roof over my head woke me around six this morning.
Half-blinded by unfulfilled REMs while blinded the rest of the way by the nearsightedness I’ve been cursed with since childhood, I groped the nightstand for my glasses before stretching over to reach the window shade.
Even in my bleariness, I clearly recognize winter’s last big ”eff you.”
View from my living room 7 a.m.
The chief operating officer of Facebook a year ago gave us her "sort of feminist manifesto" for women to succeed in business: Don't worry about being liked, don't give in too soon, work hard, and assert yourself. She padded that out to 240 pages, charged $24.95 a pop and called it "Lean In," a rallying cry that instead lent itself to jokes about shattering glass ceilings with low-cut blouses.
You should expect many things if you plan to spend four hours and $250 a person on a dinner billed as a "farmer's feast." One of them isn't a post-meal craving for pizza.
Yet I was jonesing for a slice. Or five. So was my wife, and she had splurged an extra $150 on wine pairings.
These may or may not be sitting a on a toothpick.
“She looks great,” she said Monday.
These words periodically come from the lips of L’il Diva’s specialist, but almost always with a condition or clarification later.
This time would be no different.
Note: I wrote this last year when the girl turned 13 but I never hit publish. I don’t remember why. This week, she turned 14.
This dreaded day has come, Li’l Diva.
I’m not kidding myself. It’s the first of many scary moments in my future.
Your first date. Your first heartbreak.
Your first solo outing with the car. Your first prom.
Leaving for college. Moving out.
Marriage. Children of your own.
What happened to all the time in the world we had?
Then I stumbled upon “She is Love” by Oasis.
The tune, written and sung by Noel Gallagher during a break from bashing brother Liam about the head, popped up on my iTunes radio the other day and refused to leave my brain. In a good way.
So I did some Googling.
The annual Twitterfest of devising sayings no one would put on those chalky Necco candy hearts is always one of my favorites. (This year it is at #rejectedcandyhearts.)
To me, it’s a challenge to be funny in as few words as possible because, face it, no matter how hilarious a candy heart saying “Your real mother was a Vegas stripper named Juggs Aplentee” would be, that wouldn’t really fit on a heart. Even if you wrote on the edges.
So here are some that I came up with:
Ralph Kiner never met the dog I named after him. It probably wasn’t a loss for either of them but it saddens me.
Twice in my life, I crossed paths with the baseball Hall of Famer, who died yesterday at the age of 91.
Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t write this scene in the movie Almost Famous but this blog may never have been without him saying the words he spoke just to me:
If only Philip Seymour Hoffman, as brilliant of an actor and man as he was, had heeded the advice of Frances McDormand’s character in the same movie:
Good night forever, sad man who played Lester Bangs. Don’t let those swill merchants rewrite you.
(GIF source: http://fockingchick.tumblr.com/.../im-always-home-im-uncool)
It will seem silly to any of you in the northern half of the United States today that my biggest concern when I decided to write about sledding in Connecticut for my hometown magazine was that we’d be having a mild, flake-free winter in these parts.
But it’s true. Those are the things you worry about when you have to file copy eight weeks before the piece actual gets published.
I’m pretty certain I when I e-mailed my draft of “Snow Patrol” to my editor in early October that I was sitting on my back deck in shorts, fighting off the last of the summer mosquitos and mulling whether we had enough sweetened lime juice to mix up a celebratory gimlet.
I’d cry but the last thing I need is ice cubes.
Go. Read “Snow Patrol.” I hope it warms your funny bone.
I mocked the warning of the Woolly Bear caterpillars with narrow brown midsections. I laughed at the extra thick skins on the onions at the farmer's market. I never noticed the thinning crotch in my thermal undies.
Ignoring all the foreboding signs, I plowed ahead with my plan that this winter would be the one when we would remove all the snow off our driveway by hand.
Call me macho, call me masochistic or, like my mother did when leaving me the number of her plow guy, just call me stupid.
