Being a Carny

When I was nineteen, my sister Kathy got me a job as a carnival worker in Ye Olde Tyme Photo Booth. My job was really strange. I was supposed to dress the women.

The outfits were incredibly hard to get on, with all of the ties and straps in the back, out of sight of the camera. From the front, the old timey clothes looked authentic. From the back, they were sort of like a hospital gown. It was my job to tie the ladies into them.

It was weird because the people who came never really knew why I was there, and often looked at me like some sort of creepy gal who liked to watch women undress. I learned right away that I needed a sort of speech to tell every client, or I was going to get punched in the face. I figured it out, and things started getting rolling pretty well, except that I couldn't help but stare at most of the naked ladies, because of their tattoos.

This was the early nineties, when it was still a little bit unusual for women to have tattoos. The kind of women who came the Ye Olde Tyme Photo Booth were different, though, and they all had tattoos. Some of the tattoos were so beautiful, I just couldn't take my eyes off of them. Full back body art was very common. The ladies would look at me like I was a pervert, and then I would say,

"That is just the most gorgeous tattoo I have ever seen..." and they would immediately soften, tell me all about it, and I would get in trouble because I was just supposed to move them through, hustle hustle hustle!

This went on for I can't remember how long, but not longer than six weeks. We had a set with a whiskey bottle as a prop, and one day, someone knocked over the whiskey bottle. I reached out to catch it and it shattered on my hand. My finger was gushing blood everywhere. Everyone in Ye Old Tyme Photo Booth (which was actually a trailer) was horrified and speechless, until finally my coworker said,

"That was seven year old tea in that bottle! If anything gets infected, it'll be your finger! You have to go to the hospital right now!"

They magically procured my boss, whom I had never before met. He was shortish and brownish and nefarious. He drove me to the hospital, where they fixed me up in a hurry. (I actually don't remember that part at all. But I do remember the next bit...) Then he put me into a cab, shoved a gigantic wad of twenty dollar bills into my hands, and told me it was,

"Cab money. You don't need to come back! Season's over! Thanks!" and he ran away.

I took the cab home. In my room I had only two mattresses, laid out over the entire floor, so it was only soft. A friend of mine was waiting in my room. I was late coming home. I showed the friend the bandage over my right ring finger and the wad of cash. We lay on our backs and I threw the money up into the air, so that the twenty dollar bills fell down on us like green snowflakes. I gathered them up and did it again. Eventually, the money was counted, and it turned out to be $500.

I still have a little scar on my right ring finger. It never got infected.

New Topic for August

Making money.

Bands

The Decemberists
Wolf Parade
Cold War Kids
Fleet Foxes
Mumford & Sons
Local Natives
The Avett Brothers
Pearl and the Beard
The National
Arcade Fire
Vampire Weekend ....

I am having a hard enough time keeping up with all of the new bands I like to remember which ones I wish were still around. In fact, I am frustrated right now. I am so busy and overwhelmed with all of the million things that I have to do right now that I can't keep up on all of the new music I love. I drive past Lake Kegonsa everyday and I always think of this song:

More Mainstream

I'm much more mainstream than I thought I was. Here you are all listing these great bands I have never even heard of, and I'm about to bust out with stuff like Gin Blossoms and Counting Crows.

Counting Crows is one of my all time favorite bands, and I miss their music. My favorite song by them is called "Raining in Baltimore" from their August and Everything After album. I love the emotion and feeling Adam (the lead singer) puts in the songs. You can feel the heartache or happiness depending on the song he's singing. I also like the lyrics. Counting Crows was the first concert I ever went to. The Wallflowers opened up for them and the concert was really good. I was hoping they would perform this song, but then Adam announced that they took it out of their tour. Everyone was bummed, but then after a few minutes Adam just walked over to the piano, a single spotlight shone on him, and he soulfully began to sing the song. It was awesome. Afterwards he said he wasn't going to sing it but felt like he needed to that night. Here's the song from the CD:

Mother Love Bone

I miss Mother Love Bone. They were a Seattle band on the edge of the beginning of grunge. Their lead singer overdosed on heroin right after their first album came out. Two of the members of Mother Love Bone went on to form Pearl Jam. Mother Love Bone had quite a few influences...and you can hear it when you listen to the entire album. I'm going to share my favourite song:

Spooky Tooth

It's hard for me to pick just one. At the top of that list is the obscure, barely-successful late 60s/early 70s band by the name of Spooky Tooth. The band roster reads like a Who's Who of B-List 70s music, including Gary Wright (aka "Dreamweaver"), Ariel Bender (aka Luther Grosvenor during the Spooky Tooth years) from Steeler's Wheel and Mott the Hoople (another band I wish was still around!).

So why is it that I want these quasi-celebrities to still be crankin' out the jams? Because this perfect storm of lackluster stardom produced one of my all time favorite records from that era. I was raised by music-loving hippie parents. My mom was all about the 70s and disco. Dad was all about the drug-fueled, peace loving, psychedelic hippe music... the man's hero remains to this day David Crosy. 'Nuff said. Step-dad was all about the hard-rockin' music, Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf, Jethro Tull. Between them, I received a first rate music history education. Still, and not surprisingly, Spooky Tooth went under the radar. The produced a number of records, one of which stands out as an achievement in my mind. Spooky Two is one of those rare albums where every song can stand alone as a hit. To this day, that is still difficult for a lot of bands. The guitar riffs and bass lines have the same vibe as T. Rex, Cream, and Jethro Tull. The organ is solid and not overbearing. Considering who's playing those instruments, this is one hell of an album.

You can listen to a preview here. Or just go buy the damn thing through iTunes.

The Carbon Yard

This is the band that nobody ever heard of, but they invented grunge. They were the originals. If any band deserved to make it, they did. Unfortunately, they didn't make it, and they broke up. I think it was because

a. They were before their time. They played grunge in the late '80's,

b. They were in Berkeley, and grunge finally emerged in Seattle.

c. They were unlucky.


They have a myspace where you can listen here.

Resuscitation

I am declaring a new topic: bands you wish were still together.

Mine is Cibo Matto!

I will be here asap

So sorry

I think maybe it has died. It's sort of lame. So sorry. Topics are open for discussion- i.e., if you have a topic, declare a new topic and write about it! Maybe it can be revived. I'm not sure.

I think we need a new topic.

12 days and no entries???? Has this blog died? Is anyone paying attention?

New Topic for August

Our next topic is: Performance Art.

The Trials of Buying a Bathing Suit

I swim laps three times (thrice?) weekly, and it's really hard to find a bathing suit these days that is suitable for actual swimming, while simultaneously NOT looking like something your grandmother would wear. The problems can be narrowed down to three problematic trends.
Problem trend #1: The Tankini
The tankini is a great idea in theory. A two-piece swimsuit where the top comes all the way to the bottom, like a tank top? Perfect. No tummy showing, and you can buy a black bottom and several different tops, so it's like getting all these different suits. The problem here becomes obvious after you begin swimming laps in them: they have a tendency to float up around the waist, and eventually end up near your breasts anyway, so you may as well be wearing a bikini for all the coverage you end up with.
Problem trend #2: One-pieces for grannies
A friend of mine recently told me that she was shopping for a swimsuit and wanted a one-piece. She's got a fantastic figure and would look great in a bikini, but she is not that type of girl at all. The problem was that all of the one-piece bathing suits she found in the stores looked like something a 60-year-old would wear on the chaise lounge beside the pool. She originally thought it was something a 40-year-old would wear, and then she realized that 40 is just around the corner and she still wouldn't wear that hideous thing.
Problem trend #2: Lack of breast support
Let's face it- my boobs are big. Huge, actually. And while water does have certain gravity-defying properties, it's still not good to have a lack of support. Something has to keep the great, pendulous things in their proper place. I recently purchased a bathing suit through mail order (see Problem trends #1 and #2 for why I resorted to mail order) and I had been in the pool for half a lap when I realized my right breast was floating free of its fabric-y bonds. I was mortified, until I realized that no one was looking. Then, I was even more mortified. Needless to say, that suit was returned to sender post haste.

The Starving Student Bikini

My college was paid for, on the condition that I did not get a job until I finished college. It was very nice, except that I was definitely on a budget. I didn't really have a bathing suit for a long time, so when I saw a bikini bottom at K-Mart one day for 75 cents, I bought it gladly and felt like I'd gotten a good deal.

There were two minor problems with the bikini bathing suit:

1. It had no top, and this was Colorado, not Sweden.

2. I've never really had what you would call, "a bikini figure."

Neither thing stopped me from wearing it. For the first issue, I just wore an old grey sports bra instead of a bikini top. It looked okay, by my nonexistent standards. For the second issue, I did nothing, and it looked okay, by my nonexistent standards.

I went to Navajo Lake with friends, and wore my bikini. I hung out in a toddler pool outside the dorm on hot days, and wore my bikini. You know. It was just my bathing suit.

And it started. I had girls come up to me, overweight girls who didn't even like me, and say things like,

"I just really like what you're doing for us. Wearing a bikini like that. I've never seen a girl with your figure wear a bikini."

They thought I was making a statement for womanhood. These serious girls. These girls with body issues. It was so nice. I didn't have the heart to say that I was just a cheapskate who never gave a thought to fashion.

New Topic for the End of July

Bathing Suits.

Playing in the dirt

I grew up in desert places. We lived in North Las Vegas Nevada for a while and then moved to the high desert in Southern California to a place called Apple Valley (no apples, no valley, just dirt). It was hot and dry and hot. There were plenty of places to play, but they all involved dirt. I, like Gina, did a lot of playing house in the dirt. We had a big open field in the back of one of the places I lived and for some reason there were a lot of holes in the ground that were just deep enough for us to carve stairs out of and walk into. There were several of these grouped together, so we made a bunch of different rooms for the house and spent most of our time out there.

Another place I lived we had a trampoline and we spent hours and hours jumping and trying to see who could bounce the highest. We spent so many nights out there sleeping on the trampoline. We would all start in our separate places at the beginning of the night, but by morning we were one big pile of arms and legs all on top of each other in the middle. It was awesome. We jumped on that trampoline as often as we could, and I can't tell you how many times I fell off that thing. One time I landed on my neighbors old wooden fence and slid down, palms facing the wood, to the ground. The fence was about six feet high and as a result the splinters were the entire length of my hands. That one hurt. Another time I was bounced by my brother and flew so high up into the air I actually said, "I can see my house from here!" even though I was in the backyard. I landed on the ground over an old fallen tree with my eyes closed. I didn't want to that log to be the last thing I saw before I died, because I was sure I was going to die. I laid there for a couple of minutes until I realized I could hear my brothers asking if I was alright, and I could hear my own heart beating. I opened my eyes and was so surprised that I lived (and that nothing was broken) that I jumped up and screamed "I'M ALIVE!!" at the top of my lungs. I jumped right back on and kept playing. Some of my brothers could easily do flips in the air on the trampoline and I so desperately wanted to do one too. When I finally braved up the courage to try to do one, I chickened out half way into it and landed on my foot wrong. I ended up breaking my pinkie toe and I think it was one of the most painful things in my life.

My brothers were always coming up with new tricks on the trampoline. They invented something called the Shredder. They would jump up two or three times, then jump on their knees, fall back onto their back, and flip around 180 degrees onto their stomach and jump right back up again. It was awesome to see it in action, and when someone mastered it, it was a big deal. We loved doing the Shredder on the trampoline. Whenever we went to the trampoline my mom would make us take my younger sister who was only two or three at the time. We hated having to take her with us because it meant that we couldn't jump as high, or do any Shredders or flips. So we invented a signal that we could do back and forth to each other to tell them we wanted to go and jump on the trampoline. We would take our first two fingers and move them up and down as if they were legs jumping in the air. All we had to do was call the persons' name, make the sign, and we'd each go out different doors and meet up at the trampoline. To this day most of my brothers remember the signal and then the reminiscing begins. We had that trampoline for a while, until my youngest brother (who is twenty years younger than me) fell off of it one day and broke his leg. After that my mom took it down and gave it away. It was a sad day for all of us, except for my mom of course. She was quite happy.

How we used to play, 1930's

The Farm of Dangerous Delights

I grew up next to a dairy farm in Wisconsin. My best friend lived on it and we did everything: bareback horse riding, haymow jumping, motor bike riding, letting calves suck on our hands, you name it we did it.

Looking back my friend and I wonder how the hell we lived. Once we held Mercury in our hands. Another time we "swam" in the grain silos, and we ate peas fresh out of the pesticide fields. It was always sort of a dare and no one was afraid of anything.

Books and Trees

When I was a kid there was no place I wanted to be more than curled up with a book in the big squishy chair in the living room. That was fine with my mom...in the winter, she was always urging me to go outside and play when the weather was nice.  She would bug me, until she got me outside.  The thing is...as soon as she was busy doing something I would sneak back into the house, grab my book and then go back outside.

If I "had" to be outside, I wanted to be up the crab apple tree in our front yard...so, I perfected the art of climbing a tree with a paperback book in my teeth.  It solved my problem and hers quite well. I was still reading, and I was outside.  In all those years I only fell out of the crab apple tree once! ;) 

The Bushes

We lived in a condo, so there wasn't really a yard to play in, but there was a schoolyard across the street and a park in the back of the complex that butted up against the freeway. Of course I played in the schoolyard every day, but most of my playtime memories involve the park. Since it was right next to the freeway, it was bordered by a 10 foot high chain link fence that was covered in oleander bushes. They would get pinkish red blooms in the summertime that didn't smell at all. But the bushes themselves were more interesting than the flowers. They were higher than the fence, and it was easy for us kids to play inside them. The branches formed "rooms" and we would spend lots of time playing "house" in the bushes, making mud pies and having our friends over to pretend we were having tea, and the like.
Sometimes my mom would let me go to the park without an adult when I got a little older, as long as I had another kid with me. Usually this was my cousin Shelly, whose mom was my uncle Jerry's third or fourth wife and who wasn't actually related to me at all except through marriage. Shelly was a couple of years older than me- she was 12 and I was 10- and she always bossed me around, treated me like a baby and generally behaved as though she was far superior to me. I couldn't stand her, but I tolerated her because she was the only one I had to play with, since my brother was only 2 years old.
Once, we went to the park and were playing house in the bushes and I realized I had to pee. I was going to run to my Mema (grandmother) and Papa (grandfather)'s house, which was right by the park, to use their restroom, but Shelly said, "This is our house. Why don't you use the bathroom here in the bushes?"
"I don't want to. I'm going to Mema and Papa's."
"No," she whined, "I'm not allowed to play out here alone, and I don't want to go with you. Just go in the bushes. No one will see."
I had to pee so bad, and I knew that Shelly would argue with me until I peed my pants, so I actually did it- I found a closely wooded spot, did my business, and then went back to playing.
Later than evening we went back home and Shelly walked right up to my mom and said, "Gina peed in the bushes at the park," then she smiled and went upstairs to her apartment and left me there alone.
"WHAT?" my mom shouted. "Gina LOUISE, you do NOT use the bushes to pee! There are perverts everywhere! Something terrible could have happened!!"
"Shelly told me to," I said meekly, realizing that it was a feeble excuse but having no other defense.
"I don't care," my mom said. "I raised you to know better than that. You have to think for yourself. You're grounded. You can't go to the park for a week, and you're not allowed to play with Shelly anymore unless Mema or Papa or some other adult is around. Now, go to your room."
I wasn't happy to be grounded, or to have the park off limits, but I have to say, I wasn't terribly broken up about not being allowed to play with Shelly anymore. She was always much nicer to me when parents were around. And I still think that it was a really shitty thing she did, to coax me into peeing in the bushes and then tell my mom about it.