just humor

I felt a little bit bad for New York on Friday.

When I arrived for the weekend,  I was all set for a Sex in the City moment and instead got more of an NYPD Blue. Remember, those cops were in their jammies and in bed by 10.

My niece, Lauren and I met in our hotel bar, where she bought me a glass of wine (You know you're a real grownup when you pay your aunt's bar tab. Bravo, Lauren.) We were making signs of ordering another, when the barmaid suggested we check out the rooftop bar. "It's really cool up there," she said. "You can see the Empire State Building." She even took the liberty of arranging our elevator ride up there with the hotel security guy, James Bond. We were closing out our tab when he came up behind us, all black suit and hair gel. He had a curly cord behind his ear that I last saw on Michelle Obama's secret service agents. Also Clint Eastwood.

He walked us to the special elevator where Moneypenny, with her own curly ear cord, took us to the roof. Bond let Lauren leave her suitcase at the entrance. "It'll be fine," he told her. "The only people up here are our guys." Your guys? Where were we? And is it possible to die of having a night that is so drastically different from your normal life of band boosters and stain removal?

"This way, ladies."

I'll never know. The rooftop bar was all glassed in and the skyline view at night was stunning. I not only pictured Lauren and I hanging out by the window with a glass of Chardonnay, but I had written half the script and planned a costume change.

"The bar closed at 12," the bartender told us.

Lauren looked at her watch. "OK, it's 12:05."

"Yeah."

"Sorry, ladies," one of the bartender/secret agent/manager/hair product models said.

"Well, we can at least go back to the bar downstairs and get another drink down there," Lauren said.

"Mmmm," Bond looked at his secret rescue weapon, cleverly disguised as a watch. "She might have just called last call."

"Isn't this the city that never sleeps?" I asked.

"Well, some places sleep," he said.

Not when I'm visiting from suburbia, they shouldn't.  I don't think New York realizes that I'm about as lame as it gets in the nightlife department. I'm in my 50s, I'm from Ohio, and I'm working on a couple different kinds of arthritis. If I still want a drink, I think you should still be serving drinks.

Fortunately the rest of the weekend came through with more of what I expected. On Saturday, we saw a show, shopped at a vintage clothing store that had virtually nothing priced under three figures not even a puny little scarf, went to Justin Timberlake's bar with a guy who works for Def Jam Records (no, I don't know him, I was just part of a group, but still), and almost got knocked down when our cabbie backed up just as I was starting to get into the cab.

So nice to see that New York hasn't turned into anyone's hometown yet.

I was walking around Sephora a couple nights ago, part of the shopping marathon that has started with a bang, now that my mother-in-law is here and we’ve all stopped coughing long enough to park the car at the mall. I mistakenly sprayed on some perfume. It was pretty much downhill from there.

I’m not really qualified to wear a scent. I’ve had some bad experiences with how my perfume affects those around me. Okay, I’ve had one bad experience with someone complaining about my perfume. But for most of my adulthood, I’ve struggled with perfume: Should I wear it? Should I not wear it? How much should I spend? What does my perfume say about me? Should I just be happy with the overly scented soaps and shampoos and fabric softeners that are able to mask BO and the old man smell that I fear?

So I don’t know what possessed me to squirt on some Pure Grace, the pink one of the Grace perfumes. Yuck. My dog Grace - the reason I suspect I picked up the bottle to begin with - smelled better. And she used to roll in her own poop.

Instead of spritzing out, it came out like a fire hose. Instead of wiping it off, I used my other wrist to soak up the excess. I smelled like a 13-year-old that rolled in her own cotton candy.

That’s my problem with perfume: It makes you smell like something else, whether it’s someone younger and ditzier than you, or older and with better taste, or a vanilla cupcake. I know I’m not going to change anyone’s opinion of me by the way I smell, but they could draw some conclusions about me on a first impression, so I’m torn about what to do about my smell. Because I pretty much want to be seen and smelled as the 52-year-old middle class white woman that I am, and I’m not sure there’s a perfume for that.

I looked anyway.

Hearts and Daggers . . . Fracas . . . Alien . . . Earthworm . . . Solar Donkey Power . . . Funeral Home . . . Delicious Closet Queen . . . Nope.

I think I’ll stick with what I’ve been wearing - Cheez-It Breath and Just Minced Some Garlic.

Early in his career, Justin Timberlake couldn't afford the good shampoo.

I came freakishly close to spending $39 on a bottle of shampoo yesterday. It would have been a crazy source of angst for me and was likely to cause me some serious stomach upset. I can’t believe how close I came.

It all started when I visited my sister Kathy in Cleveland a couple of weekends ago. I never realized how dry her family’s hair is until I got in her shower and started reading the shampoo bottles. She had a dozen or more bottles of shampoo, conditioner and other hair products in the corner shower shelf and every one of them promised to hydrate, moisturize and nourish my hair. Kathy’s family had perfectly nice, moist hair, as far as I could tell. I had no idea. I had a dickens of a time picking a shampoo, but I settled on a beautiful lavender bottle of Pureology.

Pureology promised  to penetrate my hair fibers so deeply, that my hair would be moisturized from within, which seems almost wizardly. It also would nourish my hair with soy, oat and wheat proteins, which sounded delicious. While it was at it, it would guarantee that my hair color would not fade and would be protected from the sun’s harmful UVA and UVB rays. (Possibly UVC, too, but I’m not 100 percent sure about that.) It would do all that without using harsh, color-stripping sulfates. It is also salt free. And it added rose, peppermint and green tea just for fun.

How could I not pick Pureology out of the smorgasbord of hair care products in my sister’s shower? So I squirted some in my hand and applied. I lathered. I rinsed. I did not repeat. And it’s a good thing, because I now know I used up about $4.90 worth of shampoo in that little squirt.

I must admit, it was about the loveliest shampoo I had ever used. I even went whole hog and used the Pureology Hydrate conditioner and I don’t even want to know how much that cost.

For three mornings, I used a rich person’s hair products with the wild abandon of a recent lottery winner. I felt like a million bucks. My hair looked great, smelled even better, and even though I don’t have a problem with dry hair, I’m certain my hair was in no danger of getting dried out, brittle or flaky.

“It’s really expensive,” my sister said when I casually mentioned how much I loved her shampoo and that I was thinking of getting some of my own.

I thought she meant it was more than the $1.79 Suave in the "family value size" bottle that has been my speed for years.

When we got back home, my daughter was going into CVS and asked me if I needed anything.

“Yeah, check out the price on that Pureology shampoo. If it’s not too much, get me a bottle.”  I told her if she was in doubt about what was too expensive and what I’d be OK with, to call me.

“The Pureology shampoo was $39,” she told me when she got home. “I figured you wouldn’t want it.”

She figured right. Who says daughters can’t read their mothers’ minds by 18? There is no way in hell I’d pay $39 for 10.1 ounces of shampoo, even if it does make me feel like the Breck girl.

It must just be me. I went online to find someone else who is appalled at the price of this shampoo and could only find rave reviews. One site pointed out that “it’s 100 percent vegan.” Another site identified the smell that I loved so much is a signature scent of ylang ylang, bergamot, anise and patchouli. And, what, ground up diamonds? Shredded pages from an original Guttenberg Bible?

I’d like to publicly apologize to my sister for using up so much of her pricey shampoo. To even the score, when she visits me next, I’ll have to take her to The Breakers for Sunday brunch. Because in our guest room shower, there’s nothing but Suave.

I just heard that Mike, a college friend of mine, was called to jury duty. I also notice that he didn’t whine like a little girl and pretend to hate reporting to jury duty. We tend to complain about jury duty, despite the fact that it gets us out of our regular jobs and humdrum lives and adds intrigue, mystery, badass behavior and lawyers to our otherwise boring weekdays. And, you know, you get paid to serve on a jury, don’t you? And your pay can’t be docked for time off work. So quit pretending that you’ve got adult life down pat enough to think of jury duty will mess up your important schedule and get excited! Haven’t any of you seen Perry Mason?

The summer after my freshman year of college, when I was a waitress at Howard Johnson’s, I got called to jury duty and it was most definitely the most exciting thing that happened to me that summer.

When I got the summons, it said I was being called to a “petit” jury and I took that to mean a small, insignificant jury. Maybe for people who had done just tiny little crimes. How could “petit” mean something so different from “petite?”

So imagine my surprise when I got to the courthouse and found that I was being seated on the jury of a murder trial. And a grisly one, at that; full of abuse stories, racial motivations, and lots of sleaze (although at that time of my life, anyone who carried a handgun into a bar was relatively sleazy).

It was in Warren, Ohio, and it was 1978. A quiet black man stopped at a neighborhood bar on his way home from work, and a large angry white man with issues stopped at the same bar on his way from getting his gun at his house. After a few drinks, the white man shot the black man dead, without saying a word to him or even knowing who he was. Thus the need for a jury.

My boss, Mr. Hurley at Howard Johnson’s, told me to try to get out of it, because he needed me on the schedule. He reminded me that because I was being paid almost entirely in tips, I would be earning virtually nothing while I served on jury duty at $10 a day.

“Tell them you’re prejudiced,” Mr. Hurley actually said.

I hadn’t worked there long, but I already knew to ignore the majority of what Mr. Hurley said, other than any changes in the schedule or table stations that directly affected me.

I thought that being on a jury would be super exciting, especially compared to serving brownie sundaes and tuna melts all day. And guess what? It was.

We got to go on a bus with a police escort to the scene of the murder, wearing pancake-sized badges that said JUROR and implied that if anyone tried to talk to us or slip us a note, one of our cop bodyguards would bust some heads. Photographers snapped pictures of us getting out of the bus and going into the bar.

The jurors all went to lunch together, where one guy drank two martinis every single day. He’ll never got picked as jury foreman at this rate, I thought.

The defense attorney was very dramatic, portraying the defendant as being the world’s biggest loser. His mother took the stand and said he was abused and neglected from an early age. She even admitted to doing horrible things to him. I guess a mother does that to save her son from life in prison. The defendant blasted sad-puppy eyes at us for a solid week, like slow, fat laser beams. We got to hear about what made him snap, which apparently was his uncle being beaten to death by a group of black men in Youngstown about a year earlier. That and the drinks he had at the bar, and all the childhood abuse.

No one took exception to the portrait of the victim as being a standup guy, hard working man, loyal husband and father, who occasionally liked to stop for one drink on his way home from work.

A major issue was the fact that the defendant walked around with a gun in his pants. The prosecution argued that he had the gun with him because he intended to shoot someone that night. The defense claimed that this guy was of the ilk that carries a gun around with him like you and I carry Tic Tacs.

This is just like Perry Mason, I kept thinking.

“Objection!” the prosecutor would occasionally yell out, jumping up. Oh yeah, this is just like Perry Mason.

The only thing that could have made it more exciting was if we had been sequestered. Instead, during our deliberations, we were taken to dinner with our police bodyguards, wearing our pancake JUROR badges. And we were escorted to our cars with individual police guards, which hardly ever happens to a Hubbard girl.

I took the whole thing pretty seriously. I actually had nightmares about sleeping in and being late and being thrown in jail for contempt of court. Then I’d be shooting my own sad puppy eyes at people, trying to drum up a pity party. My mom was cutting out the stories about the trial from our Vindicator but I could tell by the size and placement of the hole that this was kind of a big deal.

By the time the whole thing was over - almost 2 weeks - I was near tears with the stress and responsibility of sending an angry, messed up white man to jail for 15-to-life. It wasn’t that I was unsure of our decision, but just the opposite. I had mentally and emotionally drained myself being so sure of it, so that when it was over, I wanted to smash something.

As we left the courtroom after it was over, the prosecutor walked up to me and Jenny, a fellow juror who I had befriended, and said, “OK, so do either of you want to talk about this?” I snapped, “No” and walked away. I was really upset that the whole court staff wasn’t as affected as I was. Why weren’t they having a big group hug and crying over this? How could they be so la-dee-da about it? It was like they did this every day.

The next day, Jenny called me and told me that the prosecutor asked her out. She went on a couple of dates with him, but it didn’t last long. I think he was kind of a dork. What kind of a prosecutor hits on a juror? Hamilton Burger would never have done that, not even with Della Street and she was a hottie.

When Floridians go north

I’ve been back and forth between Florida (home) and up north (the location formerly know as home) multiple times since the onset of cold weather.

My daughter seems to think that she might be capable of going to college in a state where it can snow in three seasons. Eighteen-year-olds are so funny sometimes.

Seven schools to visit, some multiple times, and only one in a climate equal to or hotter than where we live. This required me to dig into the bin of sweaters and coats, which I packed away three years ago. When we moved to Florida, I really never thought I’d see that stuff again. Ever. So I delved into it and it was like a reunion on Christmas morning.

I had forgotten about the red and white striped cotton knit, the blue V-neck, and the gray cashmere sweaters I bought in Lexington. Also had forgotten that the nubby brown sweater with the zipper can drive you to afternoon binge-drinking with its tiny scratchy threads at the neck. I had some fun wearing some of my old favorite sweaters, especially the ones I bought in Ireland five years ago.

Ireland has a way of making you feel like the whole world is cold and there’s a fireplace and a hot toddy in your near future. So you buy big woolly sweaters, hats, coats, scarves. Nobody goes to Ireland and buys a souvenir tank top. We were there in the summer and I bought sweaters and a wool cape. Not long after, I moved to Florida and all signs of my Ireland trip went into a bin on the top shelf of my closet.

So, I brought them out of retirement and traveled to North Carolina in a winter cold spell, Indiana right after an ice storm, and Cleveland during an ice-snow-rain-apalooza. In a few weeks, I’ll go to New York, just in time for one of their infamous March blizzards, I’m guessing.

The back and forth is surreal. Last weekend I woke up to a rental car encased in a half-inch of ice. Almost dislocated my shoulder trying to get a door open. Drove to the airport with my emergency flashers on through snow and ice. (I wanted to tape on a sign that said FLORIDA DRIVER. NOT USED TO DRIVING IN THIS. CUT SOME SLACK, but nothing would stick to the carsicle.) Got on a plane and when I walked off 2 1/2 hours later, I was in 80 degrees and sunshine. Surreal.

We’ll soon be making lists of pros and cons of each of these seven schools (and knowing my daughter’s parents, there probably will be some charts and pie graphs involved). You can bet the weather conditions will play at least a supporting role in the decision. Visiting her in the winter and having to drive in hazardous conditions is definitely in the negative column. But getting to wear my cape again is a plus.

I spent a couple of days last week unable to talk. I had a cold and a sore throat for a couple of days, then one night I started to sound like a goat doing a Clint Eastwood impersonation. The next morning I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

It was an awkward couple of days.

Because I’m one of those people who considers all silences to be awkward silences. If there is a break in a conversation that last more than one complete breath in and out, I’m likely to fill it. Sometimes what I fill it with is just a long string of English language words that aren’t connected in any way. But at least someone’s talking.

I know that this makes me kind of annoying. I volunteer at a community center for mostly Spanish speaking immigrants and whenever I am driving anyone who doesn’t speak English, the drive is the longest most uncomfortable minutes of my year. It just seems rude to not comment on the weather or say something about a billboard or heavy traffic or light traffic or the new restaurant in that plaza.

How do you say “So, what else is going on with you guys?” in Spanish?

I know from past experience with laryngitis that the only cure is not talking for a long stretch of time. When I had chronic laryngitis in college I was prescribed a silent weekend, which is a bitter pill, let me tell you.

I tried to remember the rules of the Silent Weekend during this latest bout with laryngitis, but as it turns out, there is only one rule and its: Don’t Talk.

That is ridiculously hard. I visited my sister in Cleveland and when we arrived, she was in another part of the house. “I thought it was you, but then I didn’t hear you talking, so I figured it must be someone else.”

You never realize how obnoxious you are until you’re forced to act like a normal person and the difference is staggering.

Very few questions can be answered with a simple yes (nod of head), no (shake of head), I’m not sure (puzzled look with squinted eye), kind of (make small sideways figure 8 with face while looking straight up.) Almost everything requires words.

I somehow managed to get through it and my voice is coming back slowly. Right now I’m at the Angie Harmon stage and if I’m lucky I’ll be at Suzanne Pluchette from my college days, in a week or so.

Point us in the direction of the white love seat, please.

I love to read my friend Jackie’s Facebook posts, because she has two little girls and they are ruling the roost. Thanks to the magic of social networking, I can watch those two kids take over a household inch by inch. Today Jackie said: “I’ve decided that the only way to keep my house clean is to not let my kids play with anything - ever.” It’s pretty entertaining. For a bystander.

My kids aren’t little anymore but I can remember being overwhelmed with tempera paint stains on the carpet, a toy box held together with duct tape that was one of the nicer things in our family room, and homework answers carved into our kitchen tabletop. And once someone brought the bubble mower in the house and nothing was ever the same again, until we moved.

I wanted a nice place to live, but I didn’t want to be one of those moms who had rules like “No Play-Doh in the House” or “Leave Your Shoes at the Front Door Like the Japanese Do” and who never let their kids play with anything - ever.

Although now that I think of it, I knew a lot of moms who were very much like that and their kids ended up turning out just fine. It’s not fair, really, when they got to have white carpet in their living rooms, highly breakable urns, and lots of No Touching zones and their kids didn’t turn out to be mental because of it. At the least, their kids should have required some expensive therapy to put us all on even footing and the same quality furniture now.

I think I was as laid back as I was because I had good role models. My own mom was pretty messy and she didn’t let dust and dirt keep her from putting on another pot of coffee, lighting up a Chesterfield and doing a crossword puzzle.  I once painted a large appliance box pink in our back yard. Neighbor kids kept coming by, so I’d run inside, take off my paint clothes, put on a regular outfit, play for a while; back home, put on the paint clothes, paint some more; another kid would come by . . .  The first time I didn’t bother to put my paint clothes back on I got pink paint all over a nice play outfit. My mom said, “Oh, Diane” and put on a pot of coffee.

When I got my own home and my sisters came to visit, I had to make sure things weren’t too clean or they would make fun of me. I loved their visits. I didn’t have to prepare at all.

And one time the Carpet Emergency Hotline Lady brought me back to reality after I flipped out over green paint on the family room rug.

I was crying when I called her. Crying. MY KIDS SPILLED GREEN PAINT ON MY CARPET! OH MY GOD! WHAT AM I GOING TO DO? IT’S EVERYWHERE. (It was everywhere. It had gotten tracked in and there were green smudged footprints leading from the huge blog of paint right across the middle of the carpet.

She calmed me down and assured me it would come out.

And then I said, “I’m never going to let my kids paint in the house again.”

“Now don’t you say that,” the Carpet Emergency Hotline Lady said. “You should be proud to be the kind of mom who lets her kids paint in the house. You let them paint and we’ll get out this stain.”

And we did. And I did.

Sometimes we’d host a playgroup and if a new family came, the mom would sometimes say, “Kids! In the basement! No kids upstairs!” And I would say, “No, in my house, the kids can play right here. With their shoes on.” I was revered by all the kids and the psycho-moms thought I was stupid. But the shoes were actually necessary. You could break a toe on the toys that were lying everywhere.

I miss those kinds of messes. Now, if my house is messy, I don’t have anyone to blame it on.