Posted on by jsmith

Skeered of Dracula

I think it’s way past time for me to give a bellowing shout-out to one of the greatest ’80s movies of all time.  Do you know it?  Do you love it?  (Of course you know it.  Of course you love it.)

I remember watching this movie in the theater when I was in the fifth grade, then coming home and singing “Now I gotta cut looose!” as I jumped off the back of my dad’s pickup, kicking up my white sneakered heels before landing on the ground in the prone position.  From here I’d roll directly into a driveway somersault and finish with my hands spread magnanimously to an imagined audience, a la Willard at the end of his triumphant learning-to-dance scene on the farm.

Do you remember it?  Do you love it?

A quick aside before I explain what Footloose has to do with Dracula: Many years after my front-yard dancing, I watched this movie on video and could not believe it had been such a tightly woven thread in the fabric of my ten-year old mind.  I would never let my kids watch it today.  Terrible language.  Terrible morals.  Tons of smoking and drinking.  Parents were idiots, religion was idiotic, teenagers knew best.  Bad messages, all.  But–I said it then and I’ll say it now–it was so geeood!  Who could resist?  Even a ten-year old girl appreciates Ren dragging on a cig by the side of his VW, frustrated by the aging imbeciles seeking to opress him.  I could fully relate:  my parents wouldn’t even let me quit my paper route.

Okay. So in one of the movie’s best scenes, Ren is hauling wheat (?) in the factory when Ariel walks up to him, bends her long cowboy-booted leg to rest on his stack of bags, and dares him to meet her boyfriend, Chuck, on “his daddy’s farm.”  In a fashion we’ve come to expect at this point in the film, Ren never loses his cool.

Ren:  “And what if I don’t show up?”

Ariel:  “People will know you’re skeered.”  This is how she pronounces it.  Skeered, not scared.  “Anyway, Chuck will find you.  You want that?”  She then whips around in her skinniest-of-all skinny jeans and struts away.  Oh, how I wanted to be Lori Singer! (Still do.) (I’ll bet she’s nice.)

So my sisters and I decided, roughly three decades ago, that skeered was the word we would use when we were super-duper-scared, not just light- or medium-scared.  It worked.  And it stuck.  Skeered has been and ever will be the Christensen Female’s all-purpose go-to word to enhance one’s expression of any extreme anxiety or terror.  (In my family, instead of expanding our vocabularies, we quote movies.  This saves us a lot of trouble.)  For example:

Age 11:  “I’m skeered to wear these gym clothes Mom sewed for me to PE!”  Turns out this fear was justified.  Middle schoolers are not known for showing mercy.

Age 14:  “I’m skeered that when Doug finds out I stole another one of his enormous, block-print sweaters from The Bon to wear over my stretch pants, he won’t drive us to the stake dance this weekend!”  For those of you unaware, Doug is my older brother by four years.  He was an eighteen year old boy, I was a fourteen year old girl and yes, I was stealing his winterwear.  The sweaters were baggy on him, so you can imagine how flattering they were on my prepubescent frame, especially over light-blue stretch pants and bunchy yellow socks.  (Where, for the love, was my mother??)

Age 2o:  “I’m skeered of my new roommate!  She: cooks stinky food/leaves gobs of hair in the tub/has a boyfriend from home who looks like “The Fly”/sleeps all day every day/swears that Beauty and the Beast (Disney version) is her favorite movie of all time!”  (Pick one.  I had them all.)

Age 27:  “I’m skeered to eat these mussels!”  One evening in our early married life I steamed fresh mussels and served them over linguini in an attempt to dignify yet another home-cooked meal.  It looked so elegant in the magazine.  I followed the recipe to a tee and watched in horror as the mussel shells opened up slowly…ever so slowly…hissing out angry steam along with the smell of a tuna-glazed gym sock.  Derrick, who was famously generous with his praise for me in the kitchen, stood quietly behind me and watched the unveiling.  He then rested his chin on my shoulder and softly whimpered in my ear…”I’m skeered!”  (Turns out this fear was justified, too.  They were Nast-O.)

Age 37:  “I’m skeered to finish Dracula!”  At the suggestion of a few friends, I am ringing in the Halloween season this fall by reading the greatest goth horror book of all time.  (Nice way to sidestep the darker side of the holiday, don’t you think?)  At first I looked forward to reading this novel, figuring it would be old and hoaky; scary “for its day.” At the very least, I thought, I’d finally get a glimpse of a genre I had heretofore avoided, and thus broaden my understanding of nineteenth century literature as a whole.  It would be an interesting little read, I thought.

Ha.

HA!

Seventy-five pages into it, and I am terrified.  Terrified.  It’s sitting over there in the living room right now, on the little table by the couch, the dark face on the cover staring up at me with those horrible red eyes.  I’ll admit that I’m curious–intrigued, even—by this book.  The writing is fabulous.  I want to know what happens next.  I want to know if he makes it out alive.  There’s just one problem:  I’m skeered!

Which is why I’m writing a blog about Footloose tonight instead of reading Dracula, like I’d planned to.  I don’t want to fall asleep and dream about the Count in the creepy castle.  I want to dream about Ren: kissing Ariel after she gives him the music box, beating up Chuck outside the dance hall, rendering the Reverend speechless at the town meetin’ when he quotes scripture to make his case for dancing.  (Don’t tell me this movie’s not deep.)

In fact, now that I’ve thought about it, Footloose is a classic in a genre all its own. (We’ll call it Crappy Trash that Molded the Young Minds of Generation X.)  So the way I see it, if I’ve studied this particular genre in all its varieties, why trouble myself with a genre that includes the likes of Dracula?  A genre’s a genre; that’s all I’m sayin’.  Brahm Stoker vs. Kevin Bacon?  We’ll call it sixes.  And at least Kevin won’t leave me skeered.

Posted on by jsmith

I love you, Cliff R.

That was the name of the tall, dark, devastatingly handsome young cashier who baptized me into the waters of couponing at Albertsons a mere four hours ago.  Any of my three faithful readers who may have known me when I was younger, thinner, and much cooler may be surprised to learn that, three kids and ten pounds later, it has indeed come to this:  I now not only clip and use coupons, I proudly use that word in the singular as a straight up verb.

A few weeks ago I attended a free “coupon class” in my neighborhood, wherein many of my good friends and I sat on couches and floors, mesmerized by the silky promises of a shiny young mother who spends roughly four dollars a week on groceries.   In spite of the thick index charts and multiple logarithms necessary to understand the process of saving money, we were all smitten by her presentation and gleefully subscribed to multitudes of Sunday papers, within whose deep, heavy folds the coveted coupon books hide.

And so began my neighborhood’s–and my personal–obsession with couponing.  It’s kindofbutnotreally easy, kindofbutnotreallyfun, and you get to feel smart and virtuous as you smugly scan your coupons while the poor shmuck behind you pays full price.  I’d say if I added up the hours I spent finding, organizing and shuffling coupons, then divided those hours by the money I saved, I’d come up with a personal salary of at least $2.50 an hour. Can’t you see why I do it?  That’s the highest income I’ve grossed in over eleven years.

Think of the ‘ole frog-in-the-boiling-water adage: the frog doesn’t know it’s boiling to death because the water’s heating up gradually.  So it’s been with my steady decline into Dorkiness.  It started with a young marriage to an engineer (social suicide, obviously), followed by a well-intentioned but sorely misguided haircut, which then led directly to three kids, a minivan, and moving back to my small (sworn off forever) hometown.  Add to that the heavy influence of local stay-at-home-mom friends/church friends/PTA friends/kids’ friends’ moms’ friends and all of my mother’s old friends, and you have the Perfect Storm of Geekiness brewing with no George Clooney to save me from myself.

The upside?
a) Saving a lot of money.  (I guess.)
b) Meeting men like Cliff R., whom I’ve decided is my (other) soulmate.  (I think we’re allowed at least two.)
c)  I now get to use words like freebies and doublers and coupon fraud. My husband laughed out loud the first time he heard me talk about Coupon Fraud.  I personally don’t see what’s so funny about Coupon Fraud.  It’s real.  It’s out there.  I’m telling you.

The downside?
a)  Logarithms.
b)  Feeling flustered and hurried in front of the other customers at the checkout line–people I used to feel quite attractive around by comparison.  (I shop at Wal-Mart.  Draw your own conclusions.)
c)  So far, I’ve mostly just amassed outrageous quantities of cold cereal, all of which are the kind I never used to buy for my kids (think 13 grams of sugar per serving.)  But I’m getting each box for a dollar, so the fact that we now have cereal for dinner four nights a week somehow makes sense.
d)  Our paper carrier, whoever he/she is, is incapable of delivering the Sunday papers to my home.  So far I have gotten one Sunday paper on a Monday, and one Tuesday paper on a Tuesday.  That’s it.  Whoever the carrier is, he/she simply cannot get it right.  I’ve called.  I’ve been polite.  I’ve made two trips to the downtown office to pick up the papers myself.  And still, this Sunday: no papers.  He. She. Cannot. Do. It.

Enough grumbling.  Let’s get back to Cliff R.

Oh, ladies, he was dreamy.  Think Jude Law in a grocer’s apron.  And so polite.  He kept saying, “Oh, I just need your Albies card again really quick.”  Albies–could you die with how adorable that is?  And I kept falling all over myself, apologizing for the fifteen “doublers” I was using, in addition to the twenty original coupons (I’m not kidding), and he just smiled suavely and said, “Oh, no problem–we just want to keep everyone happy.”  I’m pretty sure he winked at me when he said this.  And then he apologized profusely when he accidently overcharged me 50 cents on two boxes of pasta, but I just smiled prettily and said, “Oh, don’t worry about it…that will be my little tip to Albies for how patient you’ve been with me tonight.”  I batted my eyelashes and shrugged really cute-like when I said this, hoping he’d see how young these gestures made me look.  The height of the drama came when, because of his obviously powerful position, he pulled his own little gold key out of his apron pocket to unlock the register, not needing to call any managers over for the usual “coupon overriding” nonsense.  He just smiled confidently and worked that till like it was nobody’s business.  It was awesome

And here’s the kicker, my three faithfuls:  Albies was out of a few things because of the massive sale, so Cliff R. had to write down my name and number so he could call me directly when they got the products in.  I will then return to the store and meet him at a predetermined destination for our second rendezvous.  I’m considering it an official first date, and I think Derrick is really happy for me.  (I mean, I think he would be if he knew about it.)  And now the only thing I need is wardrobe advice from you all.  Would you go funky-casual or over-the-top glam?  And should I be embarrassed that the products I’ll be collecting from my beloved Cliff R. are toilet paper and Fruit Loops?

Posted on by jsmith

Segullah

Over a year ago I submitted a personal essay to a literary journal called Segullah.  It was about my family, and I was honored to have it selected as one of the winners to appear in the Winter ’09 issue of the magazine.  I’d never considered posting the essay on my blog because it just seemed a little too personal, but after spending a joyful Easter weekend with my family–and thinking a lot about what spending Easter with my family means–I’m in a get-personal-kind-of-mood.  I usually avoid getting too serious on my blog, but today I’m giving in.  Although the subject matter isn’t particularly about Easter, I’ve been thinking today that every subject–everything— is absolutely about Easter.  Especially everything having to do with families.  So it just feels right to share my little story here today.  Thanks for reading it.  I hope your Easter was as lovely, and love-filled, as my own.

From Afar