Lost and Found

After seeing a “Found Dog” poster today, Cole said, “You know what’s sad? There are ‘Lost’ posters, and there are ‘Found’ posters. But they’re never the same dog.”

The Beat Goes On

And so it begins …

Cole, 7, bought his first magazine today. Tiger Beat. He sat down and devoured it cover to cover. Justin Bieber is his Donny Osmond.

Happy Birthday Cole!

Tomorrow (March 10) is the seven-year anniversary of the day that Cole was pushed and pulled out of my body, with no great ease — I still haven’t worked up the nerve to watch the video. With Bud out of town (worst possible timing, as it turned out), I’ve been playing single mom. Or as Cole said to me yesterday, “You’re double mom.”

“What’s double mom?”

“You’re lonely, but you’re doing the work and just as good as two moms.”

He was worth every stitch of episiotomy. Happy birthday Cole!

Introducing Cherry Bomb

As Barack Obama recently demonstrated, the standard bribe for getting small children to move across country is to promise a pet. This is how we got Otis, the best little dog in the universe, when Bud moved his daughters to live with me in New York 11 years ago. Now, Cole has Cherry Bomb.

Our second day in LA, we got no bed, clothes hangers, corkscrew, trash cans, or other needed items. We got Cole a red-striped corn snake. He named it after one of his favorite songs.

Check out the videos, assignments for my MA program, shot with the Flip Camera USC has loaned me. The task was to shoot an interview, and to shoot and edit a video using five specific shots in order (hands, face, wide shot, over the shoulder, and one other angle). Since we were kind of house bound this weekend, Cole was my subject for both. And Cherry.

The Interview:

The Shots:

Cole and a Little Pandemic

The media hysteria over H1N1 has been disconcerting and unhelpful. The initial furor was so clearly reactionary and unthinking that it’s hard to know how seriously to take the threat of infection now that it’s evident that apocalypse is not imminent — yet the disease does continue to spread. These thoughts all came home to roost Friday when Cole came down with swine flu.

Fortunately, we knew as soon as he started getting hot what it was: His best friend Eli, with whom he had spent the day at Lego Land two days earlier, tested positive for swine flu Friday morning. We were able to get Cole on Tamiflu right away, and by Sunday morning, his fever was already gone. Shwew.

And to think Bud and I thought we had cleared all the hurdles on our marathon odyssey life change. As if moving across country on a wing and a prayer weren’t enough, we had to get a little pandemic thrown in. What next? I haven’t even blogged yet about almost getting struck by lightning in July (I’ll post that one soon).

What I have learned from this: Take all those hand sanitizer admonishments to heart, especially if you’re at an amusement park (my friend Shelley recently caught chicken pox at Disnewy Worl). And if you have a child or are at high risk, make sure to get Tamiflu. Our doctor was reluctant to prescribe it, but we pushed, and are glad we did. Fortunately, even though we didn’t get any for ourselves, Bud and I have remained symptom-free.

To view Cole just before he began passing out with fever, check out the next post, my first online videos!

Bela Lugosi's Dead

I was driving around with Cole the other day, enjoying being together after being separated for 13 days. He said, “By the way, I’m going goth.” I had to ask him a couple times to make sure I heard him right. He’s only 6, remember. Yes, apparently he’s decided to start wearing black clothes and ghostly makeup. I asked him where he got this idea from: school? His sister? TV? Finally, he admitted: He got it from me.

Not Just Anybody

(Originally published on MOLI 7/10/8)

Many moons ago, I was in a band. My friend Michelle played bass, my boyfriend Jeff played guitars and sang, my roommate Paige drummed, and I played guitar and sang. We only had one gig, a going-away party for Michelle and me, who were embarking on a two-month road trip around the States; shortly after our return, we moved from Providence to Minneapolis and New York respectively. The, er, smoke has clouded my memory of the few songs we played – I think there was a cover of “Why Don’t You Smile Now,” a song by a pre-Velvets Lee Reed band – but I do remember our name: the Fiendish Thingees.

Pop trivia question: Where’d that name come from?

Bingo Ringo: A “fiendish thingy” is what George Harrison called an explosive device that was curled at the Beatles in the classic Richard Lester movie Help!

Paige and I were obsessed with this deadpan, madcap adventure – probably had something to do with that aforementioned smoke. Recently, I got to revisit my love for the flick that, along with the earlier Lester-Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night, is widely considered the antecedent of music video (“Show me the blood test!” says Lester in the documentary disc that accompanies the DVD). As I’ve mentioned before, I rented it for my five-year-old son, and now, he’s a Beatlemaniac.

It is one of the deepest pleasures of my adult life to hear my son singing in his wee little earnest voice, “Help! I need somebody/ Help, not just anybody.”

The Beatles were one of the first groups I got obsessed with as a kid myself (there was also the Jackson Five). They were already broken up even back then, but it didn’t matter: There was something timeless about those million-dollar melodies and their cheeky, appealing personalities. In the liner notes for the Help! DVD, Martin Scorcese quotes the critic Geoffrey O’Brien saying that “the Beatles’ music possessed a beauty so singular it might almost be called underrated.” As the filmmaker notes, it’s absurd to call the most-acclaimed group in history underrated, and yet, so it is. I’ve heard these songs a million times – and admittedly, for years, even decades, I hadn’t bothered to play a Beatles disc. But rehearing them now with Cole, the sheer number of perfect compositions is overwhelming. Even a five-year-old can tell.

I know it’s not very blogoteric new-discovery coolhuntery to write, in 2008, about the Beatles. But I believe that, as in literature, it’s always important to go back to the classics, and pop music simply does not get any better than “Ticket to Ride” (that syncopation!), “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (most beautiful sad song ever?), “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” (those harmonies), [your favorite Beatles song here].

It was Ringo’s birthday earlier this week, and he had a wish: for everyone to make the peace sign and say, “Peace and love.” Very ‘60s, but also, very today.