Hey, Hey, They're the Monkees

June 6th was a good day. It had the potential to start off being a bad day- I started a migraine on the 3rd that I STILL have, but rapidly became better. My friends Susan & Linda and I had tickets to go see the Monkees Reunion concert at the Riverbend Pavilion in Cincinnati.

I was supposed to drive since the other girls had arranged for our tickets, but my vision was blurring and I wasn't sure I'd be able to. Susan said she didn't mind driving since she has a GPS, and Linda thought it would be easier to take her car since she has a handicapped plate, so we loaded up at 4:50 and off we went. We were supposed to leave at 4:30, but I got lost trying to find Susan's place. *eyeroll*

We got to the site with very little drama, other than cursing at the occasional moron drivers around us. Linda's plate scored us an excellent parking spot. We didn't stop for food on the way up because our tickets included a cook-out onsite. We should have stopped. What they had was your choice of soggy wieners, bratwurst, or mettwurst; served with potato chips, cole slaw, and/or limp looking macaroni salad. I choked down a bratwurst and chips, Susan & Linda were brave enough to try the salads with their dogs. Then we got to the kicker. The food was "free"...the drinks were not. $5.25 for a 20 oz Coke/Sprite and $5 for a 20 oz Dasani water. We forked out money for one drink apiece and spent half the show dying of thirst.

Anyway, once the show started, nothing else mattered. Peter, Mike, & Micky can still rock with the best of them. Much to my delight, Peter's song "Your Auntie Grizelda" was the second song they performed. It's a silly song, but I love it. They did most of the classics, and while they performed there was a giant video monitor behind them showing clips from the show & their movie HEAD, with Davy prominently featured. One of the last songs to be sung was Daydream Believer, with Micky singing lead in Davy's place...until he handed it over to the audience to sing. On the last repeat of the chorus, Peter screamed for us to sing louder so Davy could hear us and half the women in the audience (me included) started bawling while we sang.

We stopped at a Steak & Shake for dinner on the way home and half the place had been at the concert too. There was an adorable little boy in a Monkee Men suit (the superhero characters they used a few times in season 1)who was thrilled by the number of people who complimented him on his costume.

Anyway, I slept most of the ride home after dinner, and pretty much all day Saturday. The damned migraine is still with me, so I'm trying to get an appointment with my doctor to do something about it...

Weight loss and other pipe dreams...

So, my BFF Laura got brave the other day and made a post on her blog http://thecrossstitchcorner.blogspot.com/2013/03/weight-loss.html about her struggle with losing weight. I take my hat off to her, because she was brutally honest and that is something I've avoided over the course of my own posts. So, to show her that she is not alone, and to hopefully help get me back on track (I've gained back about 15 lbs of the weight I had succeeded in losing), I am going to be equally honest:

Hi. My name is Mickey and I am a big girl. I stand roughly 6'2 in my stocking feet and weigh 334 lbs. (as of Sunday morning) I suffer from myriad medical problems, including high blood pressure, diabetes, and asthma. Several of these condtions can be helped by my losing weight. I try, and make a concerted effort that results in great progress, but then get derailed, discouraged, and gain it all back.

Here's part of the problem- exercise. I HATE it. Part of it is psychological- I hear the jeers & laughter of my classmates in gym class in the back of my mind. I was a big child and totally uncoordinated and usually the last one picked for teams. Part of the problem is physical- due to arthritis & spinal degeneration, moving is often painful, which makes me want to do it even less. Logically I know that it will get better if i just DO IT, and I need to find a way to make that happen.


Part two- food. Total love/hate releationship here. I love food, and most of the foods I love are the things that I shouldn't eat as much of as I do. Like anything fried, especially pork chops. Portion control is something I need to work on. I've gotten better- two trips to the Chinese buffet as opposed to the 5-10 (seriously) that I used to make. A couple of slices of pizza instead of an entire large pizza. But when it comes to snacks, I have a harder time. If I open a large bag of chips, I will eat a large bag of chips.

There's more to come on this subject, but I want to wrap this inital foray up and get it posted. Buckle up, folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride, but we're going to go on it together!

Childhood Accidents

This post was inspired in a kind of roundabout way. Laura and I were chatting about childhood crushes and how we were both enchanted with Shaun Cassidy. (If you just said "Who?", please ignore me when I start sobbing quietly) I was too tall & fat  (and poor) to wear the bell bottom jeans emblazoned with Shaun's face, but I did have the bracelet. Laura had the jeans and was lamenting that they'd gotten torn when she tripped while running for a ride to school and she still had a scar on her knee from the fall.

This got me thinking about some of my more spectacular wipe-outs. I was never what you would call a graceful child. I wasn't even in graceful's neighborhood. My inability to walk in a straight line without tripping over my own feet (or air molcules, lines on the pavement, and pocket lint) comes from my equally klutzy mother. Here, in no particular order, are some of my greatest hits:

I still have a scar from a childhood merry-go-round incident. Yes, I managed to jack myself up on a carousel. It’s a talent. I was trying to jump on while the other kids on it were trying to slow it down/stop it. THEY knew I wasn't going to make it- I just wish I did. I wobbled on the edge, grabbed a rail, still fell halfway off and got dragged around the circle for 3 revolutions. The base of the carousel was concreted and of course that's what my knees scraped the whole way around. I also managed to fall off a see-saw in the same park when I was 6 feet in the air. No scars, but I saw stars for a week after landing on my head.

One of my better accidents was something out of a Tom & Jerry cartoon. I was about 12 and chasing one of the neighborhood brats through the woods behind our apartment complex. Now, I knew those woods like the back of my hand, but I was so mad and intent on committing mayhem that I forgot to pay attention to where I was going. Forgot to duck and ran right into a thick, low lying branch, chest first. My newly developing, somewhat painful chest, I might add. The friend that was following said I made this horrible “ooooof” sound, and then somehow managed to go OVER the branch headfirst and landing flat on my back. That was the last time I ran through the woods. Come to think of it, it may be the last time I ran, period.

Then there was the time my friend Jennifer and I were strolling through Roses Department/Discount Store in junior high. I stepped on something on the floor- we never found out exactly what it was- and sure enough, my feet went up, my head went down, and the resulting thud could be heard store-wide. Along with me screaming, "SHIT!"  (the standard accident call, based on the number of times my mom & I have screamed it)

I also tripped over my own feet while getting off the school bus in high school. (Yeah, lost any cool points I had that day) I had my walkman (forbidden at school) on, tumbled down the bus steps with my usual war-cry (see above) and landed at the feet of the assistant principal. He managed to keep a straight face while he helped me to my feet, ignored the walkman, and sent me on my way. I was about 6 feet away when I heard the muffled snort of laughter explode from him.

Bonus story: Poor Shawnte.

Shawnte was an on/off friend in junior & senior high school. She was a year behind me and lived a few buildings away in my complex. Poor girl was long limbed & almost painfully skinny, and the butt of a lot of jokes for her gangly appearance.

The apartment complex could never decide on an theme for the grounds, so they were constantly erecting and dismantling fences. The day in question, the fences were sort of down- there were stakes and ropes along the front border of the property to indicate where the next build should be. This is important.

The complex also could never decide where the school buses should pick us up. Some years it was at the front entrance of the complex, some years it was at the back. In retrospect, the back was a safer option- that entrance was in a residential area. The front entrance was on a busy street that fed into one of the busiest streets in Wilmington. That week, we were being picked up out front. It was busy, and in a rare moment of serendipity, the junior & senior high buses arrived at the same time.

Shawnte lived in a building at the end of the main drive into the complex. She'd missed the bus a lot that year and her mother was NOT happy about it. So when she stepped out of the building and saw BOTH buses at the end of the drive, she panicked and went into Road Runner mode, screaming "wait for me!" as she ran.

Most of us felt sorry for her (her mom had blasted her in front of most of us on more than one occasion) so we started calling to the driver to wait. He did, much the the consternation of the cars backing up in each direction, and they started leaning on their horns. Shawnte put her head down and ran even faster.

The problem? She wasn't aware of the 'fencing' the management had erected. And she was going so fast, with her head down, that she didn't see it. I was just about to get on my bus and had a clear view of what happened next:

Shawnte ran- well, attempted to run- through the rope. It didn't break, but it DID stretch and she got up to the third step onto the bus before it snapped back into place. Since it was at waist level on her, it flung her backward off the bus with her folded in half over it and launched her a good 20 feet backward. She landed flat on her back and didn't move.

*crickets* Everything stopped for a minute. Nobody was pounding on their horns, Nobody moved. Then, lord forgive us, everyone burst into laughter. I stopped laughing when I realized she hadn't moved and got off my bus to check on her. Jennifer got off their bus and came with me.  The bus drivers put the buses in park and joined us.  Luckily she wasn't seriously hurt, but it totally knocked the wind out of her. We got her up and onto the bus and life went on for another day...

Happy Halloween

                                                     

                                          Picture from google images, not my own work. Many thanks to the original source.

No review this week, just a couple of stories from my past for your amusement.

I am a classic chicken. Not that most people ever guess that from my bad-ass, take no prisoners attitude. But put a horror movie on and watch me lose my shit faster than a goose that's been given ex-lax.

Many of my friends love horror movies. I actually like the idea of them, it's the sounds & some of the over the top gory visuals that I have a problem with. I usually wind up watching them, giving my friends a good laugh at my reactions, and then having nightmares for the next 3 days that often result in me prowling through the house with my sword (What? Doesn't everybody have a sword for defense? Kept right beside the bed? No? Moving on...) and swinging at shadows.

So, going back a number of years, here are 2 stories featuring my former BFF Susan, from the Garth Brooks concert story.

1.  As I mentioned in Concert Tales 1, our birthdays were only a few days apart. One year, there was a new Friday the 13th movie (Jason Goes to Hell) out right around then. We were on the road with our wrestling buddies and in Charlotte NC. Sue really wanted to go see the movie, so we got a group together and went. Now Sue LOVED horror movies, and almost nothing fazed her. She was one of those people who could happily drink cherry soda and eat anything while watching the most gruesome of scenes.

I, on the other hand, cannot. We used to do weekend movie marathons at her house with her Mom, sister, and whatever friends/cousins were about. We usually started off with comedies or action flicks, but everyone knew what to do when it was time for the horror flicks. Move all drinks away from me, put the popcorn somewhere I couldn't knock it over, and hand me the cushion known as "Mickey's scream pillow." During the worst scenes, I'd bury my face in the pillow and have my fingers in my ears. Hearing the gross sound effects is actually worse for me than seeing heads go flying. The sounds linger in my imagination and then I start imagining things way worse than what was actually onscreen. This practice works well at home, not so good in public.

Anyway, we were at the theater and the guys had been warned that I would most likely wind up burrowing into someone's shoulder and shrieking like a loon. The movie (for those who may not have seen it) started with Jason being blown into a zillion pieces. Then, during the autopsy of the remains, his heart starts beating...the entranced doctor doctor picks it up...I realize what is about to happen and slide off my seat onto the floor. Around me, a theater full of people are shrieking/gagging "He ate the heart!" I look to my left and what do I see but SUSAN crouched on the floor beside me. We finally found something that was too gross even for her. I was less than sympathetic. "YOU wanted to see this movie, bitch, now get back up there and watch it!" I don't remember much after that. I do know that the guys ribbed us about that for months.

2. Weekend movie marathon at Sue's. (Her mom had cable & a VCR- Yes, I'm old- at the time & I didn't, which is why we always did these at their house. But I would cook for whoever was there and always brought snacks/drinks/desserts, and helped clean up afterward, so her mom was totally fine with it) One weekend it wound up just being the 2 of us. Her mom, little sister, and the gaggle of gigglers were going to a dance at the Community Center. My BF at the time said he might drop by later after he got off from work.

Well, this was the perfect night for anyone but me to watch horror movies. It was dark & stormy, and spooky as hell. Their place was at the end of a row with a slightly overgrown wooded area to the side & rear, so the branches of trees & bushes would sometimes scrape the house when the wind gusted. Sue, knowing that my nerves were on edge, took pity on me and we watched comedies most of the evening, until it was time for Tales From The Crypt. She was dying (heh) to see this episode for some reason because Morton Downey Jr  (bonus points if you remember him) was in it. If I remember correctly, he was a skeptical journalist investigating a haunted house. It was more suspenseful than gory, and even got me interested. As we neared the end of the show, the real life storm started getting REALLY bad, and just as all hell broke loose on the tv show, it broke loose at the house. There was a terrific flash of lightning (we found out later it had hit the transformer half a block down from us) and a horrendous clap of thunder and everything went black.

Naturally, we were a bit taken aback by this. Ok, really, we freaked the fuck out. We're both shrieking and then hear a pounding on the door. We are beyond rational thought at this point. Sue screamed something to the effect of "Oh shit, something's trying to get us, RUN!" And we did. Now it's too bad that nobody had a night vision camera there to film what happened next, because I'm sure it was comedy gold.

Still screaming, flailing around in the dark, we both tried to run for the back door. In the dark, in a small living room crowded with furniture. After falling over things several times, still screaming, with the pounding continuing, we made it to the hall by the kitchen, leading to the back door. With my usual grace, I tripped over an air molecule and went SPLAT, face down. Sue trampled me, still trying to get out. The problem here was that the backdoor had a deadbolt lock...and we didn't have the key.

The front door flew open with a resounding BANG. Sue screamed "Kill her first!" and began alternately throwing her weight against the back door and kicking/pushing me toward the hooded figures in the front door.

Any guesses? Yep. My boyfriend & her mom. Her little sister got sent back to the car when we started screaming, just in case something was going down. (other than me) Chris had gotten there just as the power blew- that was the first pounding we'd heard. Mama C joined him at the door, heard our screams, dropped the keys, and that's why he kept pounding. He was trying to alert the fictitious killer that help was at hand. They finally got the door open, pointed Chris's flashlight in, and once they realized we weren't actually being murdered, laughed their asses off at us. The laughter stopped for a minute or two when I went for Sue's throat for trying to sacrifice me to the potential killers, but they pulled us apart and it was pretty funny once everyone calmed down.