Author: Admin

Class Act

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The projector was always the last thing Skelly switched off before locking the doors to the Shangri-La, home of the most famous stripper in history, his eyes lingering on her graceful flickering image up there on the wall behind the stage where his girls did their thing on poles these days—she was a real class act.

She’d liked the idea of the show when he told her, just until her ankle healed of course, and then she herself would be back filling the place and mesmerizing the men.

But she only had eyes for him, and he for her.

He smiled and headed up the stairs to where she sat waiting for him, her long dead body propped up in her favorite chair.

Moments later, he’d retrieved the roll of bandages and sitting on the floor beside her chair, told her about his evening while he changed her dressing.

Leg Beards and Hairy Pits

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So, last night as I’m about to step around Jake into my bathtub, I glanced down. Holy Cow, the hair on my legs was long enough to plait!

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but it got me thinking about when women first started shaving their legs. And their pits. And their nether regions (I could’ve used the word pubes, but I like nether regions better). I also thought about the first time I saw a woman with full-on leg beards and hairy pits. It was in Laguna Beach—natch—and yes, she was a hippie.

I wasn’t that long off the boat from Africa and was totally fascinated. I was never inspired to try it myself, it just doesn’t appeal to me. But I’m not fond of shaving; it has ruined the skin on my legs. That’s because we had to use bits of tin to shave with in the wilds of Africa. Yes. I’m exaggerating again. Anyway, here’s the scoop.

originally posted by Mental Floss on August 13, 2009

Earlier this week, Ethan Trex taught us about the history of shaving. Several readers left comments inquiring about when women started shaving their legs and underarms, so we cracked open the mental_floss book In the Beginning: The Origins of Everything. Here’s what we learned:

Underarms
American women had no need to shave their underarms before about 1915 – after all, who ever saw them? Even the word “underarm” was considered scandalous, what with it being so near certain other interesting body parts. Then came the sleeveless dress. An ad in the fashion mag Harper’s Bazaar decreed that to wear it (and certainly to wear it while participating in “Modern Dancing”), women would need to first see to “the removal of objectionable hair.” They didn’t need much convincing, and by the early ’20s, hairy underarms were so last decade, at least in America.

Legs
The ’20s fashion was risqué on the bottom half, too, but most women of the era didn’t seem to feel the need to shave their legs, and when hemlines dropped again in the ’30s, the point became moot. The ’40s, however, brought even shorter skirts, sheerer stockings, and the rise of leggy pin-ups such as Betty Grable. “The removal of objectionable hair” suddenly applied to a lot more surface area.

Naughty Bits
Was it porn actresses who started this one? GIs concerned about disease? The Brazilians? Nah. For hundreds of years, the bikini wax has been a common practice among a group more often associated with extreme modesty: Muslim women. In much of the Middle East and North Africa, brides-to-be remove all their body hair before the wedding night. Yes, all of it. Frequently, they stick with the aesthetic after marriage – and some men do likewise.

You can pick up a copy of ‘In the Beginning’ in the mental_floss store.

 

Old Post Resurrection Hop–Silkies

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I’m re-posting this blog I wrote in December, 2011 as part of  Old Post Resurrection Hop:

Check out these chickens. They’re actually Silkie bantams: one of the oldest of the rare breeds of poultry. Marco Polo wrote about seeing them in the Orient in 1200 A.D.  I included the photo at the very bottom of this blog, just so you can see their fluffy little legs (and toes!), from a website run by a guy who raises them. It was his contention that Silkies are one of the most docile, sweet tempered chicken breeds he’s ever kept.

I’ll go along with that.  Not that I’ve ever raised any, I’ve just had the pleasure of seeing these two in the photo above float around the perimeter of this guy’s yard at the end of Llewellyn Drive even with my dogs and their kinetic energy around. All the Silkies do is stop for a moment, raise their magnificent little white feather-duster heads and stare down at the dogs. Their eyes are surprisingly large and dark and winsome, kinda like those of the Olsen twins. No, wait, I take that back, an Olsen stare has been called vacant and bored, the Silkies’ eyes are filled with curiosity. There’s no fence around them. And I’ve never seen them stray. Way too cool.  Don’t they just make you smile?

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Shoe Regrets

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Victor stumbled from the pied-a-terre, tripped over a pair of crystal-heeled Christian Louboutins he’d bought for her one month anniversary then remembering, swung around and stared at the sea of shoes she’d thrown from the second floor window before his arrival earlier that evening, all the shoes he’d bought for her when they rendezvoused.

She’d done it in anticipation of the Wizard of Oz ruby slippers she wanted; but instead of those heel-less, gnome-like monstrosities, he’d bought a pair of red strappy Stuart Weitzman’s, just as expensive, but with six-inch stilettos that gave him a hard-on imagining her tiny arches straining against the diamond-encrusted straps.

Why hadn’t he realized that even she would throw a fit; they always did. He just spoiled them too much. But this one had gone too far and so had he. In moments Hermann would arrive and it would be as if nothing had happened. But what about all these shoes?

Mad Hatter Day

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Today is Mad Hatter’s Day, the second word to be pronounced Hatta, in the English way if you really want to get into the spirit of it. According to Ari Rapkin, a blogger who posted the following in 1996, the date was chosen from illustrations by John Tenniel in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, wherein the Mad Hatter is always seen wearing a hat bearing a slip of paper with the notation “In this style 10/6”.

He goes on to say that we take this as inspiration to behave like the Mad Hatter on 10/6.  But the real spirit of Mad Hatter Day is turnabout: The nonsense we usually pretend is sane can be called madness for one day in the year; the superficially crazy things that really make sense can be called sane on Mad Hatter Day.

And so it made perfect sense to me those many years ago, when on October 6th, I got married for the first time at eighteen years old.

Milestone Plans

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Next May is a “big” birthday for me. Don’t ask. I want to do something special. My childhood friend Joan was born the same year, except her birthday is in June. When I visited her in tiny Morland in North Western England in April, after not seeing her since we were twenty-years old in our home country of Zambia, we made a pact to get together to celebrate this milestone. Of course this was in a pub (pronounced poob in that neck of the woods) after a couple glasses of wine. We talked about meeting in London.

But here’s the thing, she never mentioned that pact again and well, I don’t want to remind her. I mean after all we have all these starchy British/South African/German/French genes that preclude “pushing” oneself on another. Know what I mean? Plus, I started getting these brochures from The Sierra Club advertising hiking trips to The Great Wall of China, Ecuador, the Patagonia Circuit, Argentina and Chile.

And America. I’ve always wanted to explore the U. S. of A., ever since I was eleven years old, plotting my escape from Africa. But after thirty years in this country, I still have a lot of exploring to do. Not one for making as they say, a “bucket list,”–I hate cliches–I’m making a list nonetheless, just not calling it that.

Here’s my plan, rent or buy one of those little old teardrop caravans, which were popular from the early 30’s to the mid 70’s, hitch it up behind my nine-year-old Nissan Altima and tool around the country with my dogs. Maybe I’ll even hook up with “Sisters on The Fly” (We Have More Fun Than Anyone)—Caravans, Campfires, and Tales from the Road. What do you think?

High School Reunion Regrets

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There were a couple of class reunion celebrations down Canyon Acres this past week. Oh, how I yearned to have attended an American High School—American Graffiti, Pretty in Pink, and The Breakfast Club.

Instead, I went to Kitwe High School, with its strict, no-nonsense British teachers in the middle of the Zambian bush, where the boys dropped tomato and cheese sandwiches on your head from the second floor and the girls got “cuts” across the knuckles with a ruler, the boys across the seat of their pants for things like repeatedly forgetting to do homework, fighting in the yard, or punching someone’s arm while passing on the staircase—I was caught doing the latter.

And then the reunion where one could have an opportunity to see how everyone else turned out. A reunion would never be possible for me. Any trace of my high school life was obliterated after the country gained independence, amidst rioting, death and uncertainty. Everyone left, scattered across Africa, England, Australia and America. Lamentable as it was, and not the American one I’d always dreamed of, I wanted that reunion.

 

Old Post Resurrection Hop: The Things You Remember

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I’m re-posting this blog I wrote in March 12, 2012 as part of  Old Post Resurrection Hop.

My dad also wrote a book.  What I remember is a chaotic heap of papers, pockmarked with cigarette burns that seemed to grow every time we moved.  I never caught him at it.

The first time I saw this pile was when we moved to Rustenburg, frontier post of the Kalahari Desert and unpacked this one big old trunk that belonged to my dad’s parents. I was seven.  My dad was back doing shift work on the mines, platinum this time.  We’d just spent two years in Zimbabwe where he’d managed a sisal plantation (a species of aloe used to make rope and mats).  We might’ve stayed longer if there hadn’t been an African uprising over wages when I almost died from eating bread the rebels had laced with strychnine.  By then my dad’s stack of paper was as high as a small end table, ratty as hell and tied with string.

The thing is my dad had a lot to write about.  He would’ve made a good David Livingstone, that intrepid Scotsman who became the first European to explore the central and southern parts of Africa, famous for discovering the Victoria Falls.  By the time my dad married my mother, who at first refused his offer of marriage—he’d already been engaged three times—he’d traveled the length and breadth of South Africa at a time when it was mostly dirt roads and wild animals were still plentiful.  He even tried to make it up to the Congo by himself in a banged up 1930’s Model A Ford.  He didn’t make it.  No roads to speak of.

I bring this up now because I’m doing a final on my memoir, Loveyoubye, and it just hit me that he’d written a book.  How could I have forgotten that?  I can’t ask him or my mother what it was about.  They both on passed years ago.  I’ll never know.  It’s been quite the wild ride writing this memoir.

(Note: my memoir was completed a few months after I wrote this blog and is now being considered for publication.)

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All Creatures Great and Small Redacted

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I’ve always had this thing about animals, all of them, including birds, even insects, yeah, spiders too. I’m with Gandhi in his belief that the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. In honor of World Farm Animals Day, here’s one of my favorite essays on all animals. It’s by Henry Beston, writer and naturalist—1888-1968. (Some of my friends below from my visit to England in April).

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

The Lighthouse

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Today, instead of heading down Canyon Acres with Jake and Fergie to climb the big hill, I made a sharp right toward the beach, just like that. No plan. My inner self fed up with my whining about writer’s block had decided to shake things up by taking a different path. I’d consciously developed this habit when I worked in Newport Beach, when I felt desperate about my dead-end job or my insane marriage. Most of the time it was my trip to work I varied, all the way down the canyon to Coast Highway instead of taking the short cut along Cliff Drive, Jamboree instead of MacArthur, Camelback instead of Bison. Parked in front of the building instead of behind—even though it wasn’t allowed. Small changes but it made me feel adventurous and in control. And it always brought about a shift in perspective.

Halfway down to the beach, I found myself turning into that roped-off dirt parking lot next to the Art Affair grounds—the site of a yearly summer art festival—and heading up the barely visible goat pathway that skirts the lighthouse perched on the side of the hill behind the police station. The tower, about ten feet tall, isn’t really an old lighthouse, never was. It was built in 1935 as a vent for the flow of treated sewage, but no longer serves that purpose. Instead it’s a handy landmark for me and the dogs to head toward. And great for the tourists.Every time I take this route, I wonder if this is the day some cop notices us from below, especially since I let the pups off their leashes. We scrambled up quickly, with Fergie leading the way, kicking clods of dirt and stones down on me and Jake. At the top, we charged along the brush crowded path below houses big as hotels with fortified foundations dug into the side of the hill to an opening between two houses, onto Hilledge Drive. At the corner house, Jake and Fergie refreshed themselves from water pooled in the middle of that rock shaped like a beanbag before we snaked up Skyline then down Park Road to the beach.

Half an hour later, Jake charged across the sand toward the ocean dragging me and Fergie along behind. At the water’s edge, Fergie slammed on brakes—she’s still no surfer chick—and I let Jake’s leash go to prevent myself from being torn in two. I let him body surf for a couple of minutes until I spotted a lifeguard headed my way to remind me of the law. I leashed Jake and we made for home.

A straight shot this time. Fergie clomped upstairs to my bed for a nap, Jake settled in his leather chair. And then instead of heading for my computer to sit and agonize over what I wasn’t writing, I found myself following her upstairs. My conscience gave me a sharp prick, but I ignored it and slept for an hour. A record. I don’t allow myself naps. I awoke refreshed and encouraged. Something had shifted in me.