Mannequins, Movies and Mice

One of the ladies from The Gathering invited me to be her guest at a meeting of the local chapter of the American Sewing Guild. We’d been taking about needing inspiration and, she said, that was the place to get it. She wasn’t kidding. The ASG, according to their pamphlet, “was founded in 1978 for the purpose of preserving and promoting the sewing arts through sewing education and activities for sewing enthusiasts of all ages and skill levels.” The night I went the speaker talked about the benefits of making your own duct tape mannequin. Yes, duct tape. I used to sew my own clothing starting back in high school and the two decades that followed---even took tailoring classes in college---but I never had my own mannequin. A google search will find tutorials and photos galore of duct tape mannequins. I never knew it was a popular trend! Oh my gosh, if I still sewed clothing for myself I would have signed up for one of the classes that, by the end of the day, would have you walking out with a duct tape version of your own body type---flaws and all. The speaker had a wonderful sense of humor and had us laughing frequently. 

After Mannequin Lady finished and snacks were serviced there was a show-and-tell which was also punctuated with laughter as women told the kind of stories all sewers can relate to---happy and sad accidents and one-of-a-kind treasures. One woman made a wonderful suit but discovered after making both pieces that the fabric dye lots for the top and bottom are noticeably different. She’d bought part of the fabric online and the other part locally and no way could she wear the two pieces together. It was clear there was a lot of talent and creativity in the room of fifty women and a few men. Some wore their show-and-tell and others did a “Vanda White” as they displayed an assortment of bags and purses, showing off techniques they’d learned at a recent retreat. One quilt top blew me away with its unusual color scheme and 1920s art deco vibe, a project started by a mother years ago and a daughter took on to finish.

As much fun as I had that night, I’m not sure if I’m going to join the guild. I was hoping there would be more handcrafts but that was probably my misunderstanding of the ASG and I’m thinking a quilters bee or knitters club would fit my area of crafting interests more at this point in my life. I can barely keep my computer, printer, and other tech stuff running without pulling my hair out, I can’t imagine adding the stress of keeping stitch tensions on a sewing machine operating smoothly. It also wouldn’t be as much fun to sew for my old woman, pudgy body as it was to make A-lines dresses to go with my go-go boots back in my clubbing days. But all the ladies at the guild were friendly and excited about what’s going on in their world and I could see my younger self in their enthusiasm. It was time well spent.

The next day the son-I-wish-had came over to work on the Mouse Project. For the last three winters I’ve had mice in the basement and I wanted to see if we could figure out how they’re getting in and plug up their entrance point. It won’t be too many more years before I’ll get too old to go downstairs every few days to bait them and it wouldn’t take long for them to breed their way upstairs. (I killed nine last winter.) I had a pretty good idea where to start looking and sure enough we found two places to block with a foam sealant by Great Stuff, PESTBLOCK, especially made to block yucky things including mice. We also replaced a twelve foot section of insulation where we found signs of nesting and vacuumed up the mice droppings so we can tell if they come back. I shouldn’t say “we” because he’ll have to check since I don’t do ladders and this area is at the top of the basement wall where it meets with my sun-porch. Next I’m getting some mothballs to throw under the porch. He swears by mothballs for keeping mice out of boats and cars in storage and Google confirmed it. I have latticework around the porch so no animals will get the mothballs, but they will melt if they get too wet. Worth a try anyway. If they last through the fall, the mice will have already found homes somewhere else before the snow flies.

Yesterday my Movie and Lunch Club saw the new Tom Hanks movie, Sully, which was about the 2009 water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 dubbed the ‘Miracle on the Hudson.’ The film focused mostly on the aftermath that was not made public at the time---the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation while Sully was being treated like a hero in public. The board was pushing the narrative that Sully needlessly endangered his 155 passengers and crew when he didn’t turn the plane back to the airport. Eventually, Sully was cleared of any wrong doing and a lot was riding on that decision: large insurance claims involving the airline and manufacturer, not to mention Sully’s pilot license and pension rights. We all walked out of the theater feeling good about our movie experience. It was an engaging story, well told. ©

Spontaneity and the Playboy Club

I’m set in my ways. If it’s morning I’m on the computer, in the afternoon I’m out and about. If it’s evening I’m either being self-indulgent, catching up on paperwork, giving Levi my Might Schnauzer his face-to-face time or other stuff too boring to write about. Enter the computer search for how to be more spontaneous.

One of the suggestions I found in an article on learning how to be spontaneous said you need to take ‘no’ out of your vocabulary. Isn’t that just fine and dandy! I haven’t said ‘no’ to someone asking me to a social event, party or outing since the turn of the century. Thankfully, no one has asked me to help them rob a bank on the way home from the senior hall, but the same article also says to always act in your own best interest, so at least I’d have an out should I not want to spend the rest of my life in a prison cell with someone who wants to make me her bitch. The example they used in the article was if someone asks you to get drunk, don’t say ‘yes.’ I haven’t been drunk since the 1970s and don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. 

I wasn’t always ‘spontaneity challenged’ and sometimes I wonder how I could have ever been as footloose and fancy free as I was the year I met my husband. It was in 1970 and that summer, for example, we were standing in a long line to see the blockbuster movie, Catch-22, with another couple when one of the guys said, “If we left right now, we could make last call at the Playboy Club in Chicago.” The Windy City is 185 miles away and under ideal conditions it takes the better part of three hours to drive but five minutes later we were all racing to our respective houses to pack an overnight bag and within an hour we were on the road that skirts along the bottom of Lake Michigan. We made it just in time to see the 11:00 Bunny Piano Dance. The guys had so much fun they each bought a Playboy Membership that, back in those days, included an actual key you had to show to get in.

One of my fellow cohorts that night recently posted a photo of the four of us at the Playboy Club on her Facebook page, saying that she still can’t drink a Pina Colada without it taking her right back to that time and place. Like me, she still has their souvenir mugs from that night in Chicago. And it’s a wonder we didn’t bring home cockroaches too. After leaving the Playboy Club we couldn’t find a hotel to stay overnight without it costing a month’s pay and someone suggested we try the YMCA. They had an “adjoining suite” on the 19^th floor with a lovely view of a brick wall and for a whopping $20.00 we took it. The door between the two rooms was made out of thin plywood and locked with screen door-type hook and eye and you had to walk through one room to get to the bathroom. By morning the toilet quit flushing and we found a dead cockroach in the sink. While we were sleeping it apparently got stressed out trying to crawl up the porcelain. In the morning we needed to catch a taxi to the parking garage where we’d left Don’s pride and joy, a yellow 1968 Chevy convertible but our friend was embarrassed to be picked up while standing in front of the YMCA so we went around the corner and walked down a block before hailing a cab---like the cab driver was going tip off our local newspaper. 

When my friend (who lives in Georgia now) posted the photo on Facebook and we wrote back and forth about that night, one of her other friends chimed in that she couldn’t believe that the feminist she knew had been to the Playboy Club and neither can I believe it about myself. Nor can I believe that Don talked me in to going a second time. It was to the closing of the very last Playboy Club in America in 1988. We took the motor home because Don wanted to take the dog with us. He was crazy about Jason, called our motor home The Rolling Dog House because he rarely wanted to leave Jason home alone even for an afternoon. And can you believe it, he talked one of the bunnies into letting him bring the dog inside to pose with her for a photograph. Don had that photo blown up to poster size and I was shocked last summer when someone actually paid decent money for it when I put it in a local auction. I still have Don’s membership key. I’m not ready to part with that yet and maybe that’s because it represents an era in my life when being spontaneous was the rule rather than the exception in our lives. These days, the most spontaneous thing I do is put my right sock on first instead of my left. ©

PHOTO NOTE: That's Don and me on the right. Even after seeing the photo, I still can't remember that silly beard he had going on. I remember every detail of the outfit I was wearing, though---red, white and blue with gold chains and a pleated skirt. I called it my Sgt. Peppers outfit. The Beatles influenced a lot of my clothing choices back in those days.

If it’s Thursday This Must be Book Club

Tuesday I got up, showered and dressed in my finest Red Hat Society clothing. Our new meeting place was throwing us a complimentary welcome luncheon and I didn’t want to be late. It’s a brand new place for senior citizens---one of those progressive places that starts you out with an independent living apartment then they move you along to enhanced living, assisted living and ending with memory care as we age our way down the rabbit hole on the way to the grave. We were supposed to sit down for lunch at 12:00 and at 12:05 the young chef came out to the pub where I sat all alone, wondering if the other fifteen ladies had shown up yet. Long story short, we figured out that his events planner had written down, Tuesday the 7^th instead of Wednesday the 7^th and I just showed up on the wrong day---I thought it was Wednesday! That earned me another punch in my Old Person Card; twenty punches and they'll haul me off to a memory care unit. At least I didn’t prepare and set up the entire luncheon a day too early. I told the chef, “I won’t tell if you won’t tell.” He laughed and replied. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I didn’t keep my word though because I never miss an opportunity to laugh at myself and I thought our sister in charge of reservations should confirm the dates for our future meetings there.

Following our lunch and meeting we were given a tour of the place. They have many amenities and services for hire including a pet wrangler, fitness club, beauty shop, shuttle service, happy hour music, a pub and restaurant. The cheapest one bedroom independent living apartment was tiny---the kitchen and living room would fit into my current bedroom---and its monthly rent was $2,700 to $3,000 depending on if it had a patio, balcony or neither one. Even though the rent includes one chef cooked meal a day, linen service and a twice a month cleaning service that’s more than I could afford and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to live there. I hated the long halls and the only apartments that had decent views were the ones reserved for memory care residents at the back of the building that overlooks a woods. The rest overlook an expressway exchange and the kinds of businesses that grow up around them.

This was my second tour of a senior place that steps up in care levels, if needed. The other place I called Stepfordville because all the residents looked so perfect in their little tennis and golf outfits, like gray-haired models hired to walk around. Their public rooms had walnut paneled walls that reminded me of lawyers and old-time bankers. With that place, you had to buy in for a nonrefundable fee of $300,000 and still pay a monthly fee of nearly $3,000 and then you die (or move) your family doesn’t have the right to sell your unit. I’m going on a third senior living tour next month. It seems to be a popular marketing tool to offer free lunch and a cultural event to groups willing to do a tour. Stepfordville paid for my senior hall group to go to the zoo and next month’s senior living place is paying for our tickets at the sculpture garden. Between the free meals from places like this and from the investment/estate planning people who fill up your mailbox with dinner seminar invitations, old people could eat well at least once a week. File that tidbit away in your brain in case you get to the point where you can’t stretch your grocery budget far enough.

Rounding out my social calendar this week was a meeting of my new book club where we discussed Brown Girl Dreaming. The inside cover sums up the book like this: “In vivid free verse, award-winning author Jacqueline Woodson shares what it was like to grow up in the 1960s and 1970s in both the North and South.” I was impressed that someone could write an entire memoir in free verse and we had a lively discussion about growing up in an ordinary black family. We're all white, so what the heck do we know about that topic! Still, we had a lot to say about a book we all enjoyed. Near the end of the novel Ms. Woodson wrote the following words about the Civil Rights Movement and it's the passage from Brown Girl Dreaming that chose I save to savor. 

“When I hear the word

revolution

I think of the carousel with

all those beautiful horses

going around as though they’ll never stop and me

choosing the purple one each time, climbing up onto it

and reaching for the golden ring, as soft music plays.

The revolution is always going to be happening.

I want to write this down, that the revolution is like

a merry-go-round, history always being made

somewhere. And maybe for a short time,

we’re a part of that history. And then the ride stops

and our turn is over.”

I love the line about history always being made somewhere and that we’re all a part of it. I wrote something similar back last May but Ms. Woodson did it with a rich efficiency of language that I'll never achieve.  ©