While visiting these past few days, my dad asked which part of Melrose Avenue the old 90s soap classic, 'Melrose Place' was supposed to be. I didn't know. I guessed somewhere more in West Hollywood than where I am. Once I we got home from our excursions, I did some digging. And while Melrose Place is obviously somewhere in Hollywood, the Greenwood, where they filmed the complex is in Los Feliz. The rest was filmed in studios. I loved this show so much when it first came out. Probably because I really felt like I was getting away with something by watching it. I mean, it was even more scandalous than Beverly Hills 90210, which I still have no idea how I convinced my mom to let me watch at age 9. I wanted to friends with all my cool neighbors. And wished I could ever pull off Josie Bissett as Jane's adorable pixie cut. Thinking about the show gave me a little urge to rewatch some old Melrose Place courtesy of Netflix. What a gas I actually laughed out loud several times during the pilot at how awful it is. I mean, just watch the original intro. To their credit, they changed it immediately after the pilot to the much catchier theme song and graphic look they'd keep for the rest of the show's run. But... man. Anyhow, there's your trip down memory lane to kick off your weekend. Here are the rest of your links. - I've been exploring Melrose from my house west lately. Blu Jam is my favorite breakfast place EVER. Crunchy french toast for every meal, please! - 6 Places You'll Recognize from the background of every movie ever - My favorite eye candy blog these days - Rejecting Oxbridge - I came thiiiiiis close to adopting Hazelnut here. But she was gone. :( - Advice to young writers from Jeffrey Eugenides - I still like MY review of Les Miserables, but this is my second favorite. Stay tuned! The next three days are my Best of 2012 lists-- albums, books, movies.
When I miss Scotland (always) I listen to NPR's wonderful Thistle & Shamrock. Hosted and produced by Fiona Ritchie, this long-running, much-awarded program celebrates Celtic music traditions. She also offeres the program as a free podcast, Thistlepod. It pairs perfectly on an extended washed-out weekend with an old comfort that makes me think of snuggling on the couch at Howe Street with Zaza: The Vicar of Dibley. For those unfamiliar, it's a bit of an institution in the UK (one of Richard Curtis's early successes): a playful comedy about a female vicar in a small and eccentric country parish. Of all British comedies, The Vicar of Dibley is matched/exceeded only by Monarch of the Glen in its warm-fuzziness. (Also, in hotties. The show eventually featured Johnny Depp and the smokin Richard Armitage.) Americans, you get Dawn French & Co in all their absurd and delightful Britishness here with The Vicar of Dibley's Immaculate Collection. Below, is the pilot for your viewing pleasure. Bundle up with either of these things, skip the coffee and go straight for the tea, and you'll have your rainy afternoon set.
One of the most effective literary devices is the employment of twins. Doubles. Twelfth Night. I Know This Much Is True. If you read any of my writing, you'll find an overwhelming presence of doubles, sidekicks and twins. I've always been drawn towards twins. A match to yourself. A set of aligned humans. My mom was a twin. I'm sort of genetically in line to have them myself. And, for a very formative time during my childhood, I had a kind of twin myself.
This confuses people. Technically, my parents had no other biological children with any of their many previous or subsequent partners. But both of them accumulated some step children along the way. Sometimes these people wanted me, sometimes these people did not. I've got stories for days about these people who were and then suddenly were not my family. But there is only one that ever took a punch for me. That I had a kind of strange psychic connection to-- probably because I don't really remember any part of my life before he had come into it.
From the time I was about four until ten, I was raised alongside a brother who I can pretty much only describe as my step-twin. My mom was sort of insistent about raising us that way. She was always trying a little too hard with it. Probably because of the contentious way she and Dax's dad had gotten together. That's his name: Dax.
She made us do everything together. Sometimes we resented it, but mostly, it was okay because we had started out as neighbors and friends anyhow. We were born only about a month apart, looked alike, and while our personalities were sort of yin and yang, we'd lock ourselves in tiny spaces and cackle with laughter for hours. We ran wild together. We terrorized the many many neighborhoods we occupied all over Northern California. We hid from my mom together. We used to ride in the trunk of my mom's car... I think by choice. WHAT?
Sometimes, you guys, when I recount, even to myself, the reality of the details of my childhood, I myself do not even believe it. I do not know how I made it out. I do not know what kind of planet I lived on then. Except that for most of the worst of it, (and the best, too) there was this boy who fought with me and for me and hugged me and stuck up for me and intentionally took my mom's focus and anger away from me and onto himself. For many years, he both literally and figuratively stepped in front of flying fists aimed at me. And when the soft part of the back of my head got slammed into the corner of the coffee table, he was there too, trying to help me. There is no way for me to repay him for this.
He got out sooner than I did. And when he was gone, suddenly, I had the courage to leave too.
The family I always talk about seeking-- it starts with him. And for twenty years, I've had no way of contacting him. I searched and searched for years, on every social media and google resource available to me short of hiring a private investigator. A part of me wondered if he would even want to hear from me. Perhaps, it would open something he didn't care to revisit. But then finally, recently, he appeared.
Just having pinpointed him. Knowing he is there. And where there is. To know he is doing well. To hear myself addressed as sister. And receive the pledge of a brother. "Whatever you need, sis." It's brought a lot of things to the surface.
I know that the bulk of the raw material of my life and life's-work was created during those years. That is the clay I am shaping and reshaping-- standing back to look at, evaluate-- going back in to work at again. You get your hands dirty every time. It is the work I will never stop doing. It is the crux of the balance between the heavy that I came from and the lightness I am always trying to laugh my way towards. To make the heavy go light. That's really something.
It gets easier. It gets harder. It gets more worth it. The really serious heavy lifting we all do to come to terms with the trauma we experience-- it is made worth it by knowing we did not go through it alone, that we helped each other by taking turns carrying the heavy, and that somewhere out there, if you just keep googling, you will find that twin again.
My heart is a little heavier today over the loss of one of my first career mentors: Nora Ephron. Nora always managed to capture the loneliness I identified with but never without providing a path out of it into a shared weird world with your weird soul mate. Her worlds were interior yet earthly detail-loving, filled with disappointments and also just enough humor to keep people moving. Both sunny and a little sad. I love all her work, but for me, You've Got Mail is not just a love letter to my favorite city-- it's the movie embodiment of my own personality. (And not just because I spend so much time online. Or because I love the 90s. Or because I used to work at Cafe Lalo.) I don't think anyone gives it enough credit for being, at the personal level, very well written. The butterfly scene. The elevator scene. When she talks about how much she misses her mom. Every description of New York. And when I think about the disappointments I've had in my own life-- both professional and personal-- I've wished for a man like Joe Fox (and, well, Tom Hanks) on the other side of that disappointment. A man who knew both not to be afraid of telling me like it is, but the harsher the reality, the more supportive and gentle the delivery need be. One who would tell me to go to the mattresses, who wouldn't be afraid to put me out of business if necessary, but also tell his father that I was the single human being who filled his heart with glee, that he wanted to turn his life upside down and marry me. A man who will make me feel like a Stevie Wonder song. Nora, of all the female writers I can think of, you're the one it hurts the most to lose. Your work ethic, prolific output, emotional intelligence, and sense of humor are still some of my greatest inspirations. You're the kind of modern-living philosopher I will always aspire to be. And it's no coincidence that, of all the quotes I love, the only one that made it to side of this little blog here is one of yours:
"Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void.So good night, dear void."
It's no secret how much I miss the 90s. Not that I felt at home in my own life then. Just that I was too raw and too green to know that I would always feel that way. And something about Lia Ices reminds me of every 90s lady singer I cried to in my mountain view, periwinkle-hand-print-painted bedroom. (With some Weepies Deb Talan for good measure. )
And if you want your mind to be messed with in an odd, dreamy, creatures-of-the-forest-fairy-tale kind of way, go read the bio/short story someone wrote about her life on her facebook page. Alien. So, she's obviously based in Brooklyn.
Her actual bio...where she's actually from...who knows. I was having a discussion about that this weekend. Bios. The Origin. Home. (I have this discussion frequently. Because people ask me where I'm from and I have a very difficult time answering.) We agreed, Erich and I, (that's who I was talking to) that we don't really feel like we're from anywhere. Up to and including this planet. No where is necessarily home. And no where necessarily isn't home. Just a couple of twentieth century nomads.
But I think it's an idea that is won in reverse, not by building, but by eroding. It's an idea that is, rather, nibbled away at, in sugar-cube sized increments, by eroding the need to control, by putting no parameters on a place, not asking it to fall in line, giving no time limits. The same as all important things: committing and being. Waiting and seeing.
O love is won when we are not bound by time O love is won when we don't need free to grow
