It's All About Customer Experience

Maybe I'm just a narcissist but if I frequent your business and you recognize me when I walk in the door I'll keep coming back, even if you charge a little more. And if you remember my name...well, I'm yours for life.
Mostly. I mean, you have to back that up with a good product or service, but it generally follows that businesses who consider their customers important enough to remember will provide excellence all around.
I went to my dry cleaner the other day, a business I've frequented for six or seven years. The lady who owns it knows my name and does a great job (although I hate that she staples the plastic bag closed at the bottom). She's not a smiler (some people just aren't) and she's never been the friendliest person but no problem, I'm not looking for a new best friend. That day I just had a question for her, wanted to see if there was a way to fix a small rip in a silk blouse.
Picture this: there's a quarter wall behind the counter and it has a small pass-through and she sits behind that wall and sews and talks on the phone and watches her little tv. When I came in she got up and poked her head around the wall and said, "Yes?"
Okay, first of all, don't you come up to the counter to greet your customer? Wouldn't you assume I have some dry cleaning?

Guess not.
"I just have a question," I said.
"Yes?" Still from behind the wall.
I asked my question.
She said, "Bring in. I see."
I said, "Yes, I will but I don't have time right now, I just wanted to see if it's possible."
"I have to see. Bring in."
"Okay. But are there ways to fix something like that?"
"I have to see."
Well excuse me, but fuck you. Can't you come to the counter? Can't you imagine a small tear in a blouse and spend two and a half minutes discussing the options? So sorry I interrupted your tv program.
My friend Jeannie Walters is a Customer Experience expert (I stole the image from her website!) and there's always great info on her website, like this one: Customer Expectations, Promises and Regret. She helps business engage with their customers, and isn't that what it's all about?
If you're in business your customers want to be engaged. And they have expectations. I don't think mine are unreasonable, dry cleaning lady (are they?), and if I'm loyal to you the least you can do is act as if you have time for me.
So I found a new dry cleaner. She cleaned my dress in one day and...she fixed my blouse quickly and easily and didn't charge me. Oh, and she smiled.
I don't expect her to remember me next time I walk in, after only two visits, but if she does I'm hers!

Chapter One of My New Novel

Have you read the first chapter of my new novel yet? Well, here's a slightly revised version of chapter one from The Ones You Left Behind.

When Jack wasn’t back from his run in time to go to Mollie’s piano recital I wasn’t surprised. Just pissed, for Mollie’s sake and she, of course, was beside herself.
“No,” she said, “we can’t leave without Daddy.”
“We have to, honey, or we’ll be late,” I said, and packed her and her black velvet dress into the car, her tears smudging the light coat of mascara she’d talked me into. “I’m sure he’ll be there before you begin.” Ever hopeful, she nodded solemnly, stopped crying, pulled down the visor and worked at the blackness under her eyes, spitting on a finger and wiping.
Schmuck, I thought, but of course I kept that to myself. You don’t say that to your thirteen year-old daughter about her beloved father.
You wait until she’s at least fifteen.
I was used to Jack going out for a quick jog through the forest preserve and not coming back for hours. Sometimes many hours. Jack often got caught up in nature, examining every rock as if it were from Stonehenge, looking at every twig and flower. He was a botanist, after all. When we were young we’d go to the Indiana Dunes and he could see the changes from one year to the next while I’d walk impatiently behind him tapping my fingers against my leg while he pointed out a newly formed dune or some new thistle. I think he really thought I was interested and I didn’t let on that I wasn’t. Well, not intentionally. But one time he caught me rolling my eyes and he took my hands in his and looked at me earnestly and said, “I know this isn’t as fascinating to you as it is to me but if you pretend to be interested I’ll pretend to be interested in your knitting and then we’ll both be happy.” I was knitting that year as if my life depended on it; not just sweaters and scarves and socks but afghans and coats and toaster covers. Jack joked that I was going to knit us a house one of these days.
“And sometimes if you pretend long enough it’ll happen,” he’d said. “Maybe nature will grow on you – pun intended – and maybe I’ll take up knitting.” That made us both laugh. And that’s when I knew what our marriage was going to be about; give and take, yin and yang, compromise, respect and laughter, and since we shared so many other things it seemed that feigning the occasional interest was a simple price to pay.
Jack’s never veered from his love of nature but I bounced from knitting to beading to children to throwing pottery to computers to water color…and he feigned interest in them all. And he did it well. Probably better than I, but I tried. And I know he appreciated my effort.
* * *
I didn’t save a seat for Jack at Mollie’s performance. I guess I wanted to punish him a little. I didn’t want him to think it was okay, that I’d always save his ass. But my punishment was for naught since he didn’t show up.
Mollie looked beautiful on stage. She never ceased to amaze me, this lovely, self-possessed child, our not-so-little “surprise” when I was forty-two years old. Whew, that had been a shocker. Of course there had been alcohol involved.
Clara was sixteen and Spencer about to go into junior high and there I was, pregnant. They were both very grossed out by this turn of events. And I had been horrified at first. Jack and I had been so ready to have some freedom again, to do more traveling, see more movies, maybe go dancing once in a while (we loved to Tango). But I warmed quickly to the idea of this tiny, new, dependent person who would love me unconditionally. Jack not so much. He didn’t have the benefit of those hormones. They do incredible things to your brain.
“We don’t have to do this,” he had said.
“What do you mean, we don’t have to do this?” I wasn’t stupid, I just couldn’t believe he’d suggest it.
“We have choices, Hannah. We didn’t make this decision but we can alter the outcome.” This from nature-man, the man who loved all things ecological and biological and environmental; the man who planted dune grasses in our Midwestern yard and cultivated wild flowers. “We’re almost at a point where we’ll have our lives back, when we can do all the things we didn’t get to do when we were young. We can go live in Bolivia if we want to, join Habitat for Humanities and build houses in Egypt,” he said.
I’d looked at him, his pleading eyes, the fine lines that were appearing around his mouth, the gray at his temples.
“You want to kill our child?” I said.
He’d flinched. “Jesus, Hannah,” he said, and dragged his hand over his face, pinched the bridge of his nose. I walked away from him and we never discussed it again, ever, and when our Mollie was born I was forty-two and Jack was forty-four, prime ages to have grandchildren.
Jack fell in love with Mollie the minute he saw her of course, and they have an even stronger connection than he has with the other kids, but it’s been tough on him all these years, having to postpone his dreams again. I know that.

Mollie sat down at the piano looking poised and confident, her mind only on her music now. For such a small girl she had a big presence, a natural appeal. I don’t know where that came from, certainly not me, but it puffed me up with pride. She played with energy and passion but her performance was unexceptional. It didn’t matter to the audience though, they clapped and cheered as if she were Billy Joel, taken with her bright, appreciative smile, her mass of red curls.
When I met her backstage the first thing she said was, “Did Daddy come?”
“No, honey, he didn’t. And he’s going to be sorry. It was a great performance. You were amazing.”
“I was not,” she said. “He didn’t miss anything. I messed up three times.”
“I’m sure no one noticed,” I said, “I know I didn’t.”
“Well you wouldn’t, you don’t know the music.” I held my tongue but it took everything I had. Of course I knew the music. I’d heard the mistakes. I’d only listened to her practice it about 6800 times in the last month.
She said, “Daddy would have noticed. I was awful.”
“Sweetheart, you were not.”
“Whatever,” Mollie said. “Let’s just go.”
When we got home the house was dark and I thought Jack had probably fallen asleep after his run. I’ll kill him, I thought. “Jack?” I called as I turned lights on and walked into the kitchen. “Jack!” I called again, louder this time, hoping to wake him. Not bad enough he doesn’t show up for his daughter’s recital but does he have to make it so apparent that it was so unimportant he could sleep through it?
“I’ll find him,” Mollie said, kicking off her shoes and shrugging out of her coat, leaving it on a stool at the breakfast bar. I started to suggest she hang it in the closet, but resisted the urge.
“Why don’t you go change and I’ll find him,” I said but she was already on her way upstairs. I was cloaked in sadness and frustration as I stared after her narrow, straight back. I had always been very protective of Mollie. Which she hated, of course. Well, she didn’t hate it so much when she was four or five or six, but at thirteen she found it invasive and insulting. She thought of herself as very grown-up and truth was, she was. But she was still my baby.
* * * *
I was cutting up a chicken for paprikash when Mollie came back into the kitchen, transformed into teenage self in torn jeans and T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail.
“He’s not here,” she said.
I stopped trimming and looked at her, knife in the air. “What do you mean he’s not here?”
“I mean I looked in your bedroom, in the den, in his workout room and all the bathrooms, and he’s not here.”
“Did you look in the garage?”
“Well, duh…we drove into the garage.” This gave me a glimpse of a future Mollie as an antagonistic teenager. I prayed she wasn’t going to go through that my-mother’s-useless stage like Clara had. That was so unpleasant. Why don’t they hate their fathers too? It’s so unfair.
I put the knife down and got my phone and called Jack’s cell. I didn’t hear it ringing anywhere in the house so I knew he had it with him but it went into voice mail.
“Jack,” I said, “where are you? Call me as soon as you get this.” Now my mind was going a mile a minute. What time did he leave? Was he dressed in running clothes? Had he told me he was going somewhere this evening? Had I reminded him about Mollie’s recital?
But I still wasn’t worried. Jack got distracted easily, he always had, and it took me probably the first ten years of our marriage to get used to it, but after thirty years you go with the flow.
I went up to our bedroom and looked in his closet. The floor was a jumble of shoes but his running shoes weren’t among them. Clothes hung haphazardly; pants in with the shirts, short sleeves and long all mixed together, sweaters hanging out of drawers. I shut the door in disgust. The thing that probably saved our marriage was the double closets in our bedroom. That and the fact that Jack did his own laundry.
His wallet was on the dresser along with his wedding ring and a pinky ring he wears, some slips of paper from his pockets; Post-It notes and small, ragged, lined sheets torn from a spiral notebook. I read the phone numbers, names and to-do kinds of things in Jack’s messy scrawl but nothing meant anything to me.
I went back downstairs and checked the pockets of his jacket and found his gloves and car keys. So it looked like he was still out running. But how long had he been out there? Three hours? Four? Was he training for a marathon that I forgot about?
Okay, so he obviously forgot about Mollie’s recital and was probably with his running buddy, Ted, and they went out for a beer afterwards. “We’re replenishing our carbs,” Jack always said when I pointed out the incompatibility of running and beer drinking. Beer or not, there was an explanation, I was sure. Nothing I would be happy with, nothing that would make Mollie feel better, but something rational and benign. And that’s what I told Mollie when she asked, “So where is he?”
“I don’t know. But you know your dad. You know how he gets involved in things and forgets about the world and everything in it. He’ll feel terrible when he realizes he missed your recital.”
“Whatever,” Mollie said.
So I finished making the paprikash and Mollie made a salad with arugula and pears and dried cranberries (delicious!), and then we ate and pretended we didn’t notice that Jack wasn’t there to eat with us. It was kind of a lonely meal but the paprikash was delicious, if I do say so myself.
Later, when Mollie was texting her BFFs, thumbs flying all over the minuscule keyboard, I called Jack’s cell again but still it went to voice mail. By now there was a little bubble of something like anxiety (but could have been heartburn) simmering in my stomach.
Why doesn’t he call me?
Still, I wasn’t going to get into the trap of working myself into a frenzy only to have him stroll in at midnight saying, “Oh Hannah, what are you so upset about? You knew Ted and I were going out tonight. It’s his birthday,” making him look like the injured party.
In times like these I let my mind go back to the night before our wedding, our rehearsal dinner where thrity people and I waited for an hour and a half for Jack to show up. After forty minutes I was a blubbering mass, sure he’d run off with Carley Vaughn, his lab partner in college, Carley Vaughn of the long, perfect legs. My mother was talking me down from sawing at my wrists with a butter knife when Jack came rushing in full of apologies and sweetness, kissing my face and lips and hair, wiping my tears with the sleeve of his shirt, swearing he’d never to do it again. He’d just lost track of time, he said, but said I meant more to him than his own life and that of his Golden Lab and that of his grandmother. I meant more to him than his Corvette. He pushed my hair behind my ears and looked into my eyes and said, “Can you ever forgive me for being such an asshole?” Of course I could, and did. And he showed up for the wedding on time and so in my innocence I believed the night before was an anomaly.
Hah! Little did I know.
So after Mollie went to bed I paged through an In Style magazine and watched TV for a while and fell asleep on the couch. And then I was awakened at 3:10 in the morning by my own snoring and there was still no sign of Jack and that’s when the back of my neck started to throb.

The Meaning of Life

Do you ever think about how amazing life is? Sometimes (often) I lay awake at night in my estrogen-deprived stupor, waiting for sleep to return, and I think about how we're all so unique in who we are, how we look, what we think, the choices we make. But it's the thinking part that never ceases to amaze me - all those thoughts going around in our heads...how do we do that? Do other species have thoughts?
Problem with me is I can't stop those thoughts from ping-ponging around in my mind. Can you? Meditation is completely and utterly beyond me. Sometimes at night I try this trick of counting backwards from 300 to get back to sleep (doesn't work). You're supposedly concentrating so much on the numbers that it drives any other thoughts from your head. Hah! Not from mine. I'm an excellent multi-tasker. I can count backwards and still plan the next day's menu or ruminate over a conversation I had or figure out where to hang a picture or come up with my next blog post, all at the same time.
That said, it's all incredible to me and I love being alive. Even when life is sad, like when you lose the one you thought you'd grow old with, it's all part of the experience. So if life doesn't turn out the way you expect (does it for anyone?) it's still amazing and interesting and baffling and extraordinary.
What's the purpose? I don't know. Do I care? Not really - I just want to relish it, and the people in it, for as long as I can.

More Condo Board Shit

(FEEL FREE TO IGNORE THIS)
Last year I wasted precious real estate on my blog (that should be devoted to vital things like movies and plays and food) to write about all the angst of the condo association in my building.
And then we elected a new board and things seemed to settle down. Unless you went to a board meeting and were subjected to the shouting matches caused by board member Brian Connolly. Brian was actually on the board some years ago and got kicked off in 2002 (not an easy feat) and somehow here he is back again, like a bad penny. Brian can be very persuasive, which would be a great attribute if he played well with others. He doesn't.
So now there's a movement to remove him again and this is long overdue.
My only agenda for our board of directors is that they be able to work together toward the goal of keeping our building financially solvent, running smoothly, maintained aesthetically and preserving our investment.
I’m all for dissenting opinions, that’s how you judge the merits of an issue - by addressing the pros and cons, listening to other opinions and talking through disagreements. Conflict on a board is inevitable, and reaching consensus is how you arrive at the strongest solution.
And let me say that as a person Brian Connolly can be very friendly and charming. As a board member he is neither. He is not fit to be on the board. His dissenting opinions might have validity but it doesn’t matter because he presents them in an incendiary, argumentative way that’s counter-productive. He’s accusatory, quarrelsome and unreasonable, and you only need to attend a board meeting to substantiate this.
If you don't live in my building you've undoubtedly stopped reading long before now, and if you do you will receive a special proxy in your email or via hard copy. This is just my opinion but I encourage you to vote FOR REMOVAL of Brian Connolly from the Association’s Board of Directors and FOR amending the Association’s Bylaws…
We need people on the board who are willing to work toward the common good. Enough of this bullshit.

Movie Review: The Help

However great the book The Help is, that's how good the movie is. It's rare for a movie to be as good as the book it's based on, but a special treat when that happens. The trailer for The Help makes it look like a comedy, which made me not want to see it, but fortunately I saw it anyway. It's not a comedy, altho there are some funny parts, but it holds true to the elemental story of the book - race relations in the 60s.

Watching the atrocities that were visited on black people in those days will bring tears to your eyes, especially if you were alive then and know how factual it is. It's hard to imagine that it's possible, but it is.
Viola Davis is brilliant. She's such a subtle actor, letting her face tell the story. Octavia Spencer is really good as Minnie - all of the performances are wonderful; Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard...
It's a moving story and a faithful adaptation of an amazing book. Read the book and then see the movie, or vice versa, it doesn't really matter, but you should do both.
Four and a half out of five stars for The Help.

On To The Next...

I just sent off the revisions of my novel (formerly titled Mr. Right-Enough, now called What More Could You Want) to my editor. Yay! The publication date is Spring 2012, right around the corner. I'm so excited!
So now it's time to get back to my second book, The Ones You Left Behind. I hadn't looked at it for a few months as I worked on the revision so I sat down and read it last night and I thought, "This is good! Did I write this?" Hah! What a nice feeling.
Okay, so now that I set you up, here's the first chapter. Let me know what you think (all comments welcome, even if you don't agree with my completely unbiased opinion!).

CHAPTER ONE
I was used to Jack going out for a quick jog through the forest preserve and not coming back for hours. Sometimes many hours. Jack often got caught up in nature, examining every rock as if it were from Stonehenge, looking at every twig and flower. He was a botanist, after all. When we were young we’d go to the Indiana Dunes and he could see the changes from one year to the next while I’d walk impatiently behind him tapping my fingers against my leg while he pointed out a newly formed dune or some new thistle. I think he really thought I was interested and I didn’t let on that I wasn’t. Well, not intentionally. But one time he caught me rolling my eyes and he took my hands in his and looked at me earnestly and said, “I know this isn’t as fascinating to you as it is to me but if you pretend to be interested I’ll pretend to be interested in your knitting and then we’ll both be happy.” I was knitting that year as if my life depended on it; not just sweaters and scarves and socks but afghans and coats and toaster covers. Jack joked that I was going to knit us a house one of these days.
“And sometimes if you pretend long enough it’ll happen,” he’d said. “Maybe nature will grow on you – pun intended – and maybe I’ll take up knitting.” That made us both laugh. And that’s when I knew what our marriage was going to be about; give and take, yin and yang, compromise, respect and laughter, and since we shared so many other things it seemed that feigning the occasional interest was a simple price to pay.
Jack’s never veered from his love of nature but I bounced from knitting to beading to children to throwing pottery to computers to water color…and he feigned interest in them all. And he did it well. Probably better than I, but I tried. And I know he appreciated my effort.
Anyway, so when he wasn’t back from his run in time to go to Mollie’s piano recital I wasn’t surprised. Just pissed, for Mollie’s sake and she, of course, was beside herself.
“No,” she said, “we can’t leave without Daddy.”
“We have to go, honey,” I said, “or we’ll be late.” And I packed her and her black velvet dress into the car, her tears smudging the light coat of mascara she’d talked me into.
“I’m sure he’ll be there before you begin,” I told her and, ever hopeful, she nodded solemnly, stopped crying, pulled down the visor and worked at the blackness under her eyes, spitting on a finger and wiping.
Schmuck, I thought, but of course I kept that to myself. You don’t say that to your thirteen year-old daughter about her beloved father.
You wait until she’s at least fifteen.
* * *
I didn’t save a seat for Jack at Mollie’s performance. I guess I wanted to punish him a little. I didn’t want him to think it was okay, that I’d always save his ass. But my punishment was for naught since he didn’t show up.
Mollie looked beautiful on stage. She never ceased to amaze me, this lovely, self-possessed child, our not-so-little “surprise” when I was forty-two years old. Whew, that had been a shocker. Of course there had been alcohol involved.
Clara was sixteen and Spencer about to go into junior high and there I was, pregnant. They were both very grossed out by this turn of events. And I had been horrified at first. Jack and I had been so ready to have some freedom again, to do more traveling, see more movies, maybe go dancing once in a while (we loved to Tango). But I warmed quickly to the idea of this tiny, new, dependent person who would love me unconditionally. Jack not so much. He didn’t have the benefit of those hormones. They do incredible things to your brain.
“We don’t have to do this,” he had said.
“What do you mean, we don’t have to do this?” I wasn’t stupid, I just couldn’t believe he’d suggest it.
“We have choices, Hannah. We didn’t make this decision but we can alter the outcome.” This from nature-man, the man who loved all things ecological and biological and environmental; the man who planted dune grasses in our Midwestern yard and cultivated wild flowers. “We’re almost at a point where we’ll have our lives back, when we can do all the things we didn’t get to do when we were young. We can go live in Bolivia if we want to, join Habitat for Humanities and build houses in Egypt,” he said.
I’d looked at him, his pleading eyes, the fine lines that were appearing around his mouth, the gray at his temples.
“You want to kill our child?” I said.
He’d flinched. “Jesus, Hannah,” he said, and dragged his hand over his face, pinched the bridge of his nose. I walked away from him and we never discussed it again, ever, and when our Mollie was born I was forty-two and Jack was forty-four, prime ages to have grandchildren.
Jack fell in love with Mollie the minute he saw her of course, and they have an even stronger connection than he has with the other kids, but it’s been tough on him all these years, having to postpone his dreams again. I know that.

Mollie sat down at the piano looking poised and confident, her mind only on her music now. For such a small girl she had a big presence, a natural appeal. I don’t know where that came from, certainly not me, but it puffed me up with pride. She played with energy and passion but her performance was unexceptional. It didn’t matter to the audience though, they clapped and cheered as if she were Billy Joel, taken with her bright, appreciative smile, her mass of red curls.
When I met her backstage the first thing she said was, “Did Daddy come?”
“No, honey, he didn’t. And he’s going to be sorry. It was a great performance. You were amazing.”
“I was not,” she said. “He didn’t miss anything. I messed up three times.”
“I’m sure no one noticed,” I said, “I know I didn’t.”
“Well you wouldn’t, you don’t know the music.” I held my tongue but it took everything I had. Of course I knew the music. I’d heard the mistakes. I’d only listened to her practice it about 6800 times in the last month.
She said, “Daddy would have noticed. I was awful.”
“Sweetheart, you were not.”
“Whatever,” Mollie said. “Let’s just go.”
When we got home the house was dark and I thought Jack had probably fallen asleep after his run. I’ll kill him, I thought. “Jack?” I called as I turned lights on and walked into the kitchen. “Jack!” I called again, louder this time, hoping to wake him. Not bad enough he doesn’t show up for his daughter’s recital but does he have to make it so apparent that it was so unimportant he could sleep through it?
“I’ll find him,” Mollie said, kicking off her shoes and shrugging out of her coat, leaving it on a stool at the breakfast bar. I started to suggest she hang it in the closet, but resisted the urge.
“Why don’t you go change and I’ll find him,” I said but she was already on her way upstairs. I was cloaked in sadness and frustration as I stared after her narrow, straight back. I had always been very protective of Mollie. Which she hated, of course. Well, she didn’t hate it so much when she was four or five or six, but at thirteen she found it invasive and insulting. She thought of herself as very grown-up and truth was, she was. But she was still my baby.
* * * *
I was cutting up a chicken for paprikash when Mollie came back into the kitchen, transformed into teenage self in torn jeans and T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail.
“He’s not here,” she said.
I stopped trimming and looked at her, knife in the air. “What do you mean he’s not here?”
“I mean I looked in your bedroom, in the den, in his workout room and all the bathrooms, and he’s not here.”
“Did you look in the garage?”
“Well, duh…we drove into the garage.” This gave me a glimpse of a future Mollie as an antagonistic teenager. I prayed she wasn’t going to go through that my-mother’s-useless stage like Clara had. That was so unpleasant. Why don’t they hate their fathers too? It’s so unfair.
I put the knife down and got my phone and called Jack’s cell. I didn’t hear it ringing anywhere in the house so I knew he had it with him but it went into voice mail.
“Jack,” I said, “where are you? Call me as soon as you get this.” Now my mind was going a mile a minute. What time did he leave? Was he dressed in running clothes? Had he told me he was going somewhere this evening? Had I reminded him about Mollie’s recital?
But I still wasn’t worried. Jack got distracted easily, he always had, and it took me probably the first ten years of our marriage to get used to it, but after thirty years you go with the flow.
I went up to our bedroom and looked in his closet. The floor was a jumble of shoes but his running shoes weren’t among them. Clothes hung haphazardly; pants in with the shirts, short sleeves and long all mixed together, sweaters hanging out of drawers. I shut the door in disgust. The thing that probably saved our marriage was the double closets in our bedroom. That and the fact that Jack did his own laundry.
His wallet was on the dresser along with his wedding ring and a pinky ring he wears, some slips of paper from his pockets; Post-It notes and small, ragged, lined sheets torn from a spiral notebook. I read the phone numbers, names and to-do kinds of things in Jack’s messy scrawl but nothing meant anything to me.
I went back downstairs and checked the pockets of his jacket and found his gloves and car keys. So it looked like he was still out running. But how long had he been out there? Three hours? Four? Was he training for a marathon that I forgot about?
Okay, so he obviously forgot about Mollie’s recital and was probably with his running buddy, Ted, and they went out for a beer afterwards. “We’re replenishing our carbs,” Jack always said when I pointed out the incompatibility of running and beer drinking. Beer or not, there was an explanation, I was sure. Nothing I would be happy with, nothing that would make Mollie feel better, but something rational and benign. And that’s what I told Mollie when she asked, “So where is he?”
“I don’t know. But you know your dad. You know how he gets involved in things and forgets about the world and everything in it. He’ll feel terrible when he realizes he missed your recital.”
“Whatever,” Mollie said.
So I finished making the paprikash and Mollie made a salad with arugula and pears and dried cranberries (delicious!), and then we ate and pretended we didn’t notice that Jack wasn’t there to eat with us. It was kind of a lonely meal but the paprikash was delicious, if I do say so myself.
Later, when Mollie was texting her BFFs, thumbs flying all over the minuscule keyboard, I called Jack’s cell again but still it went to voice mail. By now there was a little bubble of something like anxiety (but could have been heartburn) simmering in my stomach.
Why doesn’t he call me?
Still, I wasn’t going to get into the trap of working myself into a frenzy only to have him stroll in at midnight saying, “Oh Hannah, what are you so upset about? You knew Ted and I were going out tonight. It’s his birthday,” making him look like the injured party.
In times like these I let my mind go back to the night before our wedding, our rehearsal dinner where thrity people and I waited for an hour and a half for Jack to show up. After forty minutes I was a blubbering mass, sure he’d run off with Carley Vaughn, his lab partner in college, Carley Vaughn of the long, perfect legs. My mother was talking me down from sawing at my wrists with a butter knife when Jack came rushing in full of apologies and sweetness, kissing my face and lips and hair, wiping my tears with the sleeve of his shirt, swearing he’d never to do it again. He’d just lost track of time, he said, but said I meant more to him than his own life and that of his Golden Lab and that of his grandmother. I meant more to him than his Corvette. He pushed my hair behind my ears and looked into my eyes and said, “Can you ever forgive me for being such an asshole?” Of course I could, and did. And he showed up for the wedding on time and so in my innocence I believed the night before was an anomaly.
Hah! Little did I know.
So after Mollie went to bed I paged through an In Style magazine and watched TV for a while and fell asleep on the couch. And then I was awakened at 3:10 in the morning by my own snoring and there was still no sign of Jack and that’s when the back of my neck started to throb.
 

The Best Summer Meal Ever!

Okay, I know I said I was only going to eat gazpacho and ceviche until summer was over but variety is the spice of life. Right?
So here's another summertime option. This corn salad is OH MY GOD delicious. Serve it with salmon for an easy, impressive meal.

Roasted Corn Salad
Serves 4

• 4 ears of corn, cut off the cob (I used Mirai from Twin Garden Farms - the BEST corn in the world).
• 4 teaspoons unsalted butter, melted
• salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 red onion, sliced
• 2 tablespoons diced roasted red bell pepper (store-bought is fine)
• 1 tablespoon slivered green olives
• 2 scallions, white and tender green parts, thinly sliced
• 1 avocado, chopped into pieces and sprinkled with lime juice
• 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil
• 1 tablespoon sherry vinegar
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
Heat large cast iron skillet on high heat till smoking hot. Add corn to dry skillet and roast and char kernels till they begin to pop.

Add in butter and red onion and mix. Cook for about 3 minutes, stirring.
Add remaining ingredients.
Season and serve warm or cold.
I served it (to myself - and myself loved it) with salmon, drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with s&p and sauteed in an iron skillet to medium-rare.
Yum!

Movie Review: Friends With Benefits

Cute movie, some funny lines, some stupidity. Nothing all that new, but all in all, not a bad way to spend two hours in air-conditioned comfort when it's 150 degrees outside.
It's that ever-popular theme of sex without attachment. Don't we love exploring that concept? There are lots of movies about it these days, some better than others, but don't they always turn out the same? No matter. If it's done well we can still enjoy it and this is done pretty well.
If you've ever seen Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live you know how funny he is - he can do anything, play any part, and he's so unselfconscious about it. I really love that about him. And I've liked him in most of his films. He's cute in this but there are times he seems not quite comfortable in this part.
Mila Kunis is very appealing on screen (they're cute together) and altho the part's written a little too glib for me she's fun to watch.
The flash mob scenes don't work and the magician kid is pointless but you have to have some gimmicks, I guess. It's a good cast but Jenna Elfman is wasted here (although she looks great), Woody Harrelson is a caricature and Patricia Clarkson is a reprise of her role on Six Feet Under (but with dark hair), but the best supporting role is from the reliable Richard Jenkins, a brilliant actor with the world's most expressive face. If you haven't seen The Visitor rent it now. It's my favorite performance of his and a great film.
Back to the concept of Friends With Benefits, I was watching a Sex and the City Episode the other day and Carrie says, "According to certain scientists, when a woman has sex her body produces a chemical that causes her to emotionally attach. This chemical may account for the series of questions that involuntarily pop into our minds. Like,
1. Does he like me?
2. Will he call again?
3. Where is this going?
Do you think sex without attachment is possible? Does it ever work for anyone?
Three stars out of five for Friends With Benefits

Broadway in Chicago

West Side Story is one of my all-time favorites, both as a musical and as a movie. I know every word to every song, every line of dialogue for every character. I could slip right into the role of Maria seamlessly. Well, okay, maybe Maria's mother. Anyway, I saw it seven times at the theater when I was a kid, and countless times since (really, I can't count them), and I've seen the stage production at least six times. It's been a while tho, so I just saw the new touring version that's here in Chicago for a limited run.
Can you see something you love too many times?
Maybe.
I settled in for two hours of bliss and imagine my surprise when I realized I wasn't loving it.
So sad. Oh, it wasn't that I hated it, or even that I disliked it, that's not possible, it just wasn't the same. Not necessarily a bad thing.
But mainly my problem was with the two leads who left me longing for Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer. Ali Ewoldt played Maria, delivering her lines as if she were auditioning for a high school production, and her voice was screechy on the high notes. Not pleasant. Tony was played by understudy Cary Tedder and while I liked his acting he seemed to be searching for notes half the time. This is a problem when you're talking about the key characters.
The other change is that the Sharks speak Spanish a fair amount. Interesting. And not a problem for me, I could have translated the lines since I know the script, but a loss for people who don't, and who don't speak Spanish.
All in all, it was fine. I was happy to see it again - I got my fix. But I don't know if I'll be so quick to search out another stage production. But no worries, I've got the video.
Three and a half stars out of five for this traveling version of West Side Story.

Alternative Energy Source

If I harnessed the energy from my hot flashes I could power the world. Cell phone out of juice? Plug me in. Need your laptop on a plane but your battery's low? For the price of a ticket you can take me along and boot up at will.
I've heard that by 2050 one-third of the world's energy will need to come from some renewable resource. Plan ahead...I'm your girl and I have a seemingly endless supply.
I have girlfriends my age who've never had the pleasure of experiencing a hot flash. If there was a god he'd spread them around, don't you think? I have way more than my share and I have to say, enough, already. You made your point.
So all you husbands out there...want to experience a hot flash? Just to see what it's like? Take one of mine. I have plenty to go around and they're free.
There's no cure for these damn things, except being EVEN OLDER than I am now and that just doesn't seem fair. Where's the upside in that?
Wouldn't you think they could just zap a little segment in my brain and end this madness? Well, until that happens my remedy is to drink copious amounts of wine. It doesn't stop my hot flashes but then I just don't give a shit.