Here We Go Again

(Please review my article on the college search in the Washingtonian. It will set you up for round two.)

The spring break college tour  for Client Number Two did not get off to an auspicious start. When my husband woke him up for our departure he said: “Are you looking forward to seeing some colleges?” and his reply was “No, but I don’t have any choice.”

We headed off to an easy start to spend the night with cousins in New Jersey. A nice visit before our first stop at nearby Drew University where we watched the snowfall during the orientation, followed by the tour through the snow. The client objected to the fact that the guide “wore braces and had a lisp.” His true feelings came out  during lunch with the cousins ,  where  he told them flat out that “I hated everything about it.” “And the students seemed strange.”

The View at Drew

 

St, Ignatius of Loyola and Himself at Fairfield
About to chest bump or kiss?

The next day we went to the Fairfield University campus which was modern and touts proximity to the beach and is in Connecticut, after all, the Europe of states. We were a large group- and herded into the auditorium. The orientation guy was lively and gave us a test on what the largest Jesuit college in the country is and he said hardly anyone gets it right. Indeed we all flunked, it was Springhill College in Alabama. He mean acreage not student body. But then he said something I thought I would  never hear—“and the good news is we have our first Jesuit Pope…yeeessses”  We have been calling Popeyes Chicken "Pope-Yes" for years but never dreamed of hearing any one use it in conversation. The tour guide was a flop, he was low energy and exhibited hardly any excitement in the school. A shame,  because he should have been able to  sell it. That’s the job, after all. Client deemed it "average."

Off to Saratoga Springs to see our older son who is a sophomore at Skidmore. Now we were in known territory and we left the bros together to take the private tour. The client told anyone who asked which college he had liked best,” Skidmore by far.”

Lovely Schenedectomy

From there to the former brother school of the sister Skidmore, Union College, in decidedly unattractive Schenectady. Union looked nice but by the time we got to the big beautiful Nott Memorial-the client said it smelled like vegetable dip.



The Nott Memorial at Union:"Smells Like Vegetable Dip"

Next to Bard, for the kooky individualist, I  just wanted to see where Steely Dan boys had gone to school and see the original Annandale Road. We were very early and spent an hour eating lunch in the Student Union which faced a dreary prison like block of dormitories. By the time the tour began, we only went on a couple of stops before we decided we had had enough. No curb appeal. Now I understand Steely Dan's line "And I'm never going back to my old school."

From there to Poughkeepsie.  Marist College was the destination and it was beautiful and had a very nice view of the Hudson River  but the client was asleep by this time and showed  no interest, so we just went to our home away from home, the Hampton Inn.  This time we hit the jackpot with a big suite and pay-per-view movies. So we rented Silver Linings Playbook, a light romp about bipolar disease.

Springwood--where FDR grew up, Hyde Park, NY

Drexel--Looks Good, Feels Bad

The next morning we let the client sleep in and did something for ourselves---took a tour of F.D.R.'s Springwood estate in Hyde Park. It was nice to enter an institution that cost $14 instead of $40,000.

We took Marist off the list and then headed for Philadelphia to the inner city business college of Drexel. There was a very main charming building but when we got to the admissions office it was chaos. Everyone was talking at once and seemed to be on Red Bull including our student rep who raced through the charms of Drexel,. When we walked down the stairs, the client said "I’m  stressed.  That guy was talking sooo fast. I can’t imagine myself having any 
sort of social life at all here.” 



Villanova--on Holy Grounds, the name of a college coffee ship

On to see dear friends who live in the suburbs of Philliy, which was a comfort visit. We got to dine at the country club and  then sit in their family room and watch the Arizona game in the NCAA playoffs.  Final stop next morning was Villanova where iwe had the place to ourselves thanks to Holy Weekend, with only a parking attendant to give us a self-guided tour map. We liked it because we got into the entirely deserted business school and we got on the famous basketball court in the empty gym. Even the client seemed engaged and interested and wanted to extend the tour. I was the tour guide since I had been there with my older son and the client wanted to know why I wasn’t walking backwards.

The entire trip was a bit like walking backwards, because although the client told  me decidedly that he wanted north and small colleges, he has since changed his mind to south and medium. 

 

 

 

 

 

Holy Book of Mormon!!



Worth the wait?

Ten a.m. on Wednesday, February 27^th was long circled on many a Washingtonian’s calendar. That was the moment that tickets to The Book of Mormon would be on sale exclusively to members of the Kennedy Center. I join the Kennedy Center for one reason and one only—to have this priority status when it comes to getting tickets. The minute the digital display read 10, I started calling Instant Charge. The line was busy. I had my cell phone and land line going at the same time, set on redials. My iPhone reports 81 attempts. My friend who was doing online research reported that the website had crashed.

So, since it was my day off, I decided to put on my holy underwear, say some prayers and hop in the car to go to the Kennedy Center box office. When I got there the parking lot was full and one man was carrying a large novel. Bad omens. When I got to the Box Office which seemed tame I had seen only the tip of the iceberg. I was directed to the end of the line. The Kennedy Center is an extremely large space—I had to go past the hundreds of people lined up in the Grand Foyer, hang a left at the Hall of Nations and then go to the back of the line.


The Grand Waiting Area

\The Beleaguered Hall of Nations



Finally getting ahead

 

You would have thought they were selling tickets to the Second Coming. There were at least 300 people there. So I stood in line patiently,  barely aware of the beautiful setting I was in because I, like everyone, had my chin to chest looking at my iPhone. Oh the suffering because of the website and phone crash! People who can afford $200 tickets having to spend a couple of hours in line in the gorgeous Kennedy Center stirring up hell on the Twittesphere. I am a twit at Twitter but I tried to Tweet that “tickets to Book of Mormon had resulted wholly in war” but I messed up at the @ sign or the hash tag or something. Well, at least I amused myself.  Along comes the girl with the cart full of concessions;  apologizing for the fact that there was no cafeteria open.  I had M and M peanuts for lunch.  Seeing the Kennedy Bust brought some sign of hope, I had gotten out of the League of Nations and into the long part of the L shaped line. Progress. Word filtered down that there was a limit of four tickets for customers. Total time there --two and a half hours; total victory, four seats in the orchestra.

We in Washington are always several months if not years behind  New York City whether it’s the five dollar cupcake craze, the Harlem Shake, or the hottest ticket on Broadway which will finally makes its way here after opening in April 2011. Clearly some of us are willing to wait.

Hawaii Six...Oh-Oh?



Colorful Fishes

I recently went to Hawaii on business. You know the scene--the weather is perfect, everything is in Technicolor, and everyone is there to do nothing but relax except the people on business.

I woke up quite early the first day and didn't see a newspaper outside my hotel room so I ventured to the Starbucks and found that they were providing free copies of The Honolulu Star Advertiser.  I am always up for a little local news, and if you can trudge your way through that newspaper, inside, like a toy in a box of Crackerjacks, you will find a USA Today.



Knotty Banyan Tree

In the February 7th issue of the Honolulu Star Advertiser on page A2, I found a column more colorful than any fishes, more knotted than any Banyan tree, (abridged for your reading enjoyment):

Whatever Happened To...

Investigation has no luck matching fingers to child

Question: Whatever happened to the police investigation into finding the child whose six fingers were found in a plastic bag in a Dumpsite near Alta Park in 2012?

Answer: The case is still active but without leads. Honolulu police investigators remain stumped (sic) by the discovery of the six child fingers and are still looking for leads identifying the child and how the six fingers got into a Dumpster in Kukui Gardens...

Police conducted a search of the Kukui Gardens area shortly after the fingers were reported to them but were unable to find the child or other body parts.

The fingers, coming from the upper tips of the knuckles were found in a plastic zip-close bag on Feb. 2 by a woman who was looking for bottle and cans to recycle.

The woman initially thought the fingers were dried ginger root, but upon further examination she saw fingernails.

Pam Cadiente, chief investigator for the Honolulu Medical Examiner's Office, said the fingers belonged to a girl younger than 10 years old and were probably separated by a hard force.

She said the fingers might have been cut from a living person or a cadaver or a cadaver of someone who died a long time ago.

"It remains unsolved...until we know the circumstances we cannot know if a crime was commited," Cadiente said.


I love the fact that  the fiingers were mistaken for ginger root. It seems so very regional. Had the fingers been found in the continental United States what might they be mistaken for? Fish sticks? I also love the investigator's supposition that the fingers were probably separated by "a hard force," her distinction between a cadaver or a really dead cadaver, and her conclusion that we cannot know if a crime was committed.

Maybe it was done in sport; as they say, everything's fun and games until someone gets hurt.

The story ends with a plea to call CrimeStoppers if you have any clues to this (my words) digital mystery.

Mr. Mullet sentenced for hair cutting attacks

Now here is a nomen est omen if you ever saw one. Saturday's New York Times reports that Samuel Mullet Sr, 67, was sentenced as the Amish Sect Leader who was behind the series of attacks in 2011 which spread fear through Amish communities in eastern Ohio. "Followers of Mr. Mullet broke into homes, restrained men and women, and forcibly sheared their victims, sometimes with tools used to clip horse manes."

Whatever happened to business in the front, party in the back, Mr. Mullet?

And don't all mullets require tools to clip horse manes?

The New Year of Fear and and Loathing

Most people greet the New Year with a sense of optimism and vigor; they see it as a chance to start over, break bad habits, build new ones.

But when you are the mother of a junior in high school who turns into a senior in the fall, the year is completely predictable, and there is nothing pretty about it. As you may have read in my Washingtonian article it is the year when you must sign up for a job that pays nothing, that requires extensive travel and expense, and whose end goal is something you don't really want..

Here's how it goes:

January--Enroll client in SAT prep class
February--First possible tour date--President's weekend
March--Client takes the SAT
April--Dedicate your spring break to schlepping around college campuses
May--Possible supplementary tutoring to improve client's SAT test scores
June--Client takes the SAT again plus the damn subject tests
July and August--Sacrifice part of your summer to more college trips and/or send child on impressive community service trip to add to the "resume."
September--Meet with the counselor for the dreaded "It's Time" meeting,show up with a list of 9 colleges, three reach, three targets, three safeties
October--Start harassing client to write common app essay
November--Some of the first application deadlines appear now, hammer the client to write the supplements, get the transcript office to send; much paperwork and spreadsheet activity.  If smart, apply for at least one school early action or the even more heavenly early decision.
December--Finish apps, most are due now if not in January. Worry and fret until April 1st.

Every day of the year, expect to experience stress and anxiety, push back and procrastination from the client.

Happy New Year Everyone! I will keep you posted month by month to let you know if it gets any easier the second time around. Like childbirth however, I bet it's much the same.

I think icon, I think icon, I think icon

Icons

Why is it now virtually impossible to get through a newspaper article or news broadcast without hearing the word iconic at least once, and often more than once?  When women were admitted to Augusta National Golf Club last summer a reporter gave us a double dose of iconic, referring to both the course and the green jackets as iconic. Who can forget that the Hostess Twinkie represented the death of an “iconic snack.”

I think of iconic as a word that describes things.  I have no objection to “the iconic Capitol Dome.” But in the same news report there was a reference to “the iconic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” Now even people are iconic. Naturally the first definition of iconic is “of, relating to or having the character of an icon.”  But the second definition says “Having a conventional formulaic style. Used of certain memorial statues and busts.” Were they referring to Hillary’s bust? The second definition in another dictionary also says ”Art. (of statues, portraits, etc.) executed according to a convention or tradition.”

Icon?

I find it ironic that now every person, place and thing is iconic. If everything is an icon, nothing is an icon. Yesterday I saw iconic modified in a story in the Washington Post:  “the climb up Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome is one of the national park’s most iconic hikes but fewer people are going to be able to scale the granite monolith.”  Can iconicer  and iconicest be far behind?

Iconic has become the “it word” of the millennium much like the “it girls” of the 1920’s.

To what do we attribute this surge in the adjective iconic?  Perhaps we can blame the geeks in Silicon Valley for the introduction of computer icons. All day long our eyes are barraged with the sight of icons. No wonder this is the first adjective that jumps into a writer’s head.

But please, it’s exhausted and exhausting. It almost makes me feel a certain fondness for “awesome” as the most abused adjective. Not really. The great Spaulding Gray once spat out on stage that he was going to wait to use the word awesome until something truly was awesome. Not a new pair of jeans, not a soccer goal. More like a solar eclipse or Venus transiting the sun for the only time in 150 years.



Iconic

Research and evidence (to prove this rant is not without foundation).

Even the Old Gray Lady commits this offence at least once a day, by a recent search.

·         …”Ted Williams Now?” about the iconic baseball player

·         …in the region, from the now iconic scenes captured by Abbas of the Iranian revolution in the 1970s to Nermine Hammam's candy-colored ..

·         ..The castle-like structure at Bellmansgatan 6, which dominates the island of Sodermalm in Stockholm, is an iconic image of the Swedish capital.

·         ..She told Nice-Matin she was now ready to bequeath her iconic status to Russia.

·         The work of Eric Drooker, “the artist behind some of the most iconic images of the East Village's era as a squatter's haven”

·         Craig Wedderspoon presented a unique assignment to him: draft a model for a statue of one of college football's iconic active coaches

·         “but also the debased, money-driven culture, with its desire for ’an iconic look-alike by a tiresomely familiar name’ that had come in its wake”

In the past 30 days, the New York Times used the word iconic no fewer than 2,480 times.

The Washington Post managed to use the word iconic 34 times in the past seven days. Must have been a most iconic news week.

The NBC website features 38 “iconic videos.” Jay Leno appears to be a heavy user of the adjective, as his extensive car collection features many iconic models.

The venerable NPR website turns up “about 2,498” iconics.

Let’s suggest that we as a nation turn to the inspirational lyrics from “The Little Engine Who Could,” and revise them slightly to “I think I con, I think I con and I think I have a plan, and I con do most anything…even stop using the word icon.”

 

TV Ranch with no TV's

 

The Tanque Verde Ranch

My BFF and I decided to celebrate our birthdays by spending the weekend at the Tanque Verde Ranch in Tucson last November, a fully self-sustaining environment where we would want for nothing.  The kind of place you can check in and not check out. To get to the ranch you have to take Speedway, voted the ugliest street in American by Life magazine in the 1960’s. It hasn’t changed much, only widened with age like many people. But if you drive to the very end of Speedway heading east, you find this beautiful guest ranch. It smacks right up to the Rincon Mountains; it has big desert skies featuring starry, starry nights with no light pollution, mountains within an arm’s reach, rich expanses of lawn, a spa and tennis courts, bridal parties and a corral full of bridled parties. More on that later.

The Entryway to our Casita

 Our casita was lovely and spacious but had a king bed in one room and a sleeper sofa in the other room, which was a hindrance to our sleep-over giggling parties. My friend called the first night to ask housekeeping to make up the sleeper sofa and they obliged. But on the second night when she asked for turn-down service she was turned down and told by the front desk that they were “a working ranch.” And the work, apparently, did not include accommodating such requests. Despite the obvious abbreviation of the TV Ranch, there were no TV’s in the rooms. I guess we were supposed to be enjoying nature unfettered by TV, but I have no trouble doing both. There is a TV outside of the main dining room and on Sunday morning we found it packed with men watching football.  It was a Redskins bye-week, as luck would have it, so I didn’t miss MY game.

The only thing that was slightly off was the weather, it was cooold for Tucson—in the 50’s and low 60’s instead of the expected 80’s. And our first scheduled activity, the Cowboy Cookout in the Cottonwood Grove was bone chilling.  We had to hover by the bonfires for warmth. After loading up our plates, we could only find seating at the table covered with S’more preparations. This was all right until little children started flailing around with sharp steel sticks.

The Bridaled Parties

“The horse is an animal weighing over a half ton and with a mind of its own. Its reactions are unpredictable. Even a small piece of paper or a sudden movement of your arms, hat, etc. may cause a horse to shy spontaneously and unpredictably”…from the TV Ranch Horseback Riding Rules.  Note that “unpredictable” is mentioned twice.

My friend and I are both afraid of horses but are interested in overcoming this. We felt that the 90 minute “Walking Ride,” would be just that, very easy and gentle and flat. There were a couple of early warning signs to the contrary.  The wrangler asked a man in our group how his wife was and we learned was that she was resting comfortably in her room on Percocet. We chose not to pursue the story until after the ride. But another red flag was raised during basic training when we were instructed how to control the horse when it goes up and down hills. We didn’t want hills; we wanted walking not climbing, no heights, thank you, and made that clear to the wrangler.  There were very rocky paths, narrow trails, and steep downhill challenges, and while the surroundings may have been beautiful, my primary focus was survival. My horse, whose name I forget, I guess you could say we never bonded, did nothing offensive or scary. But as the wrangler reported, I looked nervous and appeared to be gripping the saddle horn for dear life. I could not turn around to look at my friend because it would have taken the neck of the girl in the Exorcist to do so, so I ended up resorting to hand signals. When the wrangler said we had 20 minutes left and asked if we wanted to take another loop, I flung my arm out in the “cut” symbol, and my friend got it and spoke up and said no, no thank you, we have had enough, we are happy to forgo the rest of the ride.  And then it happened when we were returning to the corral—a rider in front of us got off of Goose, a huge Triple X-sized horse, who ran wild the minute he was free of a rider, whooshing past my friend in a terrifying fashion.  I guess we weren’t the only animals thrilled to be finished.

On land we were brave enough to ask what had happened to the other rider’s wife and learned that she had broken her arm yesterday at this very juncture when the horses were overcome with excitement. She had gotten bucked off.  I was confused by the wrangler’s rather casual inquiry about the injured woman, but later read this section of the horseback rules in all caps:  “ALL GUESTS RIDING AT TANQUE VERDE RANCH DO SO AT THEIR OWN RISK AND UNDER THE KNOWLEDTE (SIC) THAT AN ARIZONA EQUINE LIABILITY STATUTE APPLIES TO THEIR HORSEBACK RIDING ACTIVITIES WHILE AT TANQUE VERDE GUEST RANCH.”  Ah yes, what’s a broken arm when you’re covered by the “Arizona Equine Liability Statute?”

As Eleanor Roosevelt says:  “Do something every day that scares you.” Make that every few years for us.

Back to the feed bag (dining hall) for lunch and then the antidote to the ride—The "Off the Trail" 80 minute massage which was just perfect, and cancelled out all of the equestrian induced tension. We headed to the Doghouse Saloon for happy hour, equipped with an iPad so we could do a “dead or alive” check on some of the people we knew when we lived and worked together in Tucson.

Another fine dinner and sweet sleepover and it was time to bid adieu to the ranch reunion weekend.  At the airport I was comforted to see the soothing glow of several televisions, and was relieved to know my ride home would have wings instead of hooves.



Check in. You May not Want to Check out.