EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

I couldn’t sleep last night and kept thinking  how my mom dreamed once that she was on the 50-yard line going eyeball to eyeball with the Princes of the Church.  (Freud called, I know: Maybe Mom dreamed that because she got divorced way WAY back when it was like worse than sacrificing small animals, and yet she continued to take Communion which was grounds for a few more times around the ol’ rotisserie-spit in Hell but hey I don’t blame her. Her husband left her so now she has to just sit in the pew like I was always doing because I’d made out with my boyfriend for more than five minutes and was in a state of Mortal Sin?)

I envied her that dream last night just because she was dreaming! Everyone was dreaming last night,  people’s pets, their houseplants, poor George Bush on House arrest for another 100 days or so…..

My man, who CLAIMS he never dreams, was at least snoring to beat the band and even sort of smiling – which made me want to shave his chest hair off – dry – and harvest those eyebrows too, just out of envy, because I lay there NOT sleeping hour after hour after hour….

I hung my head upside down off the bed which usually makes me have religious visions and then pass out. No dice. I though about that fox-faced Eckhart Tolle who says we are not our minds and we should turn the darn things off but I couldn’t. So finally at 2am I, who am trying to diet here, got up and poured me some hot milk. Then I added cream, then cocoa, then a fat slug of whiskey, then sugar, then whipped cream and drank it down grimly. I thought maybe the alcohol would help but it didn’t, of course it didn’t. I always forget that alcohol keeps the body working especially that giant gelatinous thing under your right ribs known as THE LIVER, which thank God we have one, y’ know? I used to eat cigarette ashes just to get the laugh and I suppose they’re still in my liver somewhere, along with the booze-soaked Belgian waffle-ful of calories in that creamy drink.

Anyway. I lay awake til 4:30, at which point I suddenly fell asleep and dreamed that the ceilings were all dripping rain and a young person I just met was here and my kids too and my kids were kids again and they were all busy talking with the new one and I thought  “Ah, my dear children living under this roof again, leaky or not…. “ – and then the alarm went off at and it was 5 and so I got up.

It’s raining still and I’m like 100,000 calories further away from thin but I was able to work and write and water the plants just now. And the ceilings AREN’T leaking after all and David seems to still have chest hair and I sure do miss Mom who lies in her grave these 20 years in her favorite little suit and I will never ever be sorry I took a picture of her in her casket even if the funeral directors did all scowl at me as I snapped it.

So here’s a shot of death, if you even believe in it. Me I don’t. I see Mom all the time out of the corner of my eye and I hear her voice, which was strong and full of fun. My idol Emily Dickinson wrote it to a friend: “There ARE no dead, Katy. The grave is but our moan for them.”   So there.

Today it’s raining though my column for this week evokes a sunny day. It’s raining and Wall Street is crumbling but I look around and see this:

1) People moving about and smiling at each other’s dogs just the same.

2) Acts of kindness: the liveried man outside the big hotel notes my troubled face when I find his lot full and takes my car for me and parks it smack in front and charges me just ten bucks though I am gone nearly three hours.

3) The chance always for a smile: The Gypsy Rose School of Pole Dancing is right there beside the fancy photographic studio where I am going to get my picture taken because the Girl Scouts have asked me to as a former Leading Woman. Ruth Bramson, the great new CEO of these Girl  Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, wants to activate all us former Leading Women; hang our portraits and get us back to mentoring those 55,000 young ladies, which is more than fine by me. Last year, when I offered a class for their Beyond Bars program I had so much fun my face hurt from smiling. (Beyond Bars brings Girl Scouts and Brownies into our two women’s correctional facilities so they can have their troop meetings with their mums.)

But I guess what I should say is that I saw these things rather than that I see them because it was yesterday really and the sun shone just as it did the day I wrote this column which you will also find at the top of my home page here.

So let’s have some pictures of that day now: The smokers referred to there, looking so calm and iconic you’d think they’d been there forever, like the hillside they sit on. 

    

May He – or She - watch over us all today, the dogs and the pigeons, the smokers and the drinkers, the pole dancers, the troop leaders and the elected officials especially in whom we have placed so much trust.

Ok this isn’t some women-only site where we’re talkin’ undewires and corsets all the time. Six months ago I was obsessed with penises.

Well, cat penises.

OK one cat penis  – and someone out there out trolling for penis references had this to say about it: “Jesus, lady, what kind of sicko laughs at an animal losing his penis, even if only for a moment? You should have let that poor animal DIE! “

But (a) how do you lose your penis for a moment, right?And (b) I WASN’T laughing, as anyone actually reading the post can see.

I mean poor little Abe! He had transfusions, catheterizations, they shaved his leg and gave him a lip wax. He lost so much weight he looked like someone’s old grey sweater slung onto a chair.

But really all I‘m saying is, THIS BLOG: NOT JUST ABOUT CHICKS, YO.

Having stated as much I can now return to what I really wanted to say:

Mary Tyler Moore at the Emmys: Wo.

Mary Tyler Moore! Dear Mary, America’s sweetheart, our own Mary with the once-plump cheeks!  That bared skin on her upper body looked like parchment pulled tight over chicken wire. Her arms are cruelly thin – and yet she still has the swags of extra flesh coming down just like we all do after a certain age. (Even Mick Jagger has them but hey – you don’t see him in an evening gown.) And then cute old Betty White toddled out all dimpled and plump in tasteful brocade and she looked awesome.

My kid told me this the other day, all sweet-like:

“Mum, no offense but when people get older they shouldn’t get too thin because then they look kind of ….well, scary.”

Now I see what she means.

And if I’ve run too much with the girl themes lately forgive me; my man’s been gone for one full week. He just got back today at what was for him 4 o’clock in the morning but already the house feels different. Abe the boycat just picked a fight with his sister and even the plants can tell that the  testosterone levels are risin’ now!

Note to Self Regarding Compression Garments: Avoid Like Plague.

What they TELL you is if you buy one of these longline get-ups you’ll have no bra line, no unsightly bulges on the side, back anywhere and will in fact look, LIKE YOU’RE NOT EVEN WEARING A BRA except for that nice perky uplift of course. The reality though? you can’t get into the things and you can’t get out of them. Since they have no hooks, zippers or loops they have to go on over you’re head and be pulled down -  or else over your hips and be pulled up but your shoulders are in the way in one direction and your hips in the other; and either way you eventually run into your breasts which are not a bit happy about being squeezed into something  as big around as a tube sock.

This is a picture of me holding my new longline super-elasticized Whatever-it-is,  snapped by my pal Kathy at the dentist’s office, which accounts for the crooked smile since if I didn’t have a head stuffed full of Novocain you can bet I wouldn’t be smiling.Why? Because unassisted you can’t GET this thing on or off. With the help of several ladies in waiting you can finally get it on but then you can’t breathe.It has NO give. It would be too tight on my thigh. This one’ i an Extra Large and I weigh what? 132? I mean you’d think it would fit! But I feel in it like a mouse in its last moments as the boa constrictor is doing ist final constrict.

To give you a better idea of how small it is I show it here with my cat Abraham for scale. I put it  on a small stack of toilet paper rolls and even items as small as these are screaming in their tiny voices “Aaaaaaargh! Don’t Squeeze the Charmin!”

Abe: ‘Get This Thing Away From Me – now!’

Rereading this last post underneath here makes me remember that I actually prayed that my family would move, because of this same kind of ‘exposure.” It was after my big sister Nan pulled down my pants in front the neighborhood boys. A few weeks before that, she’d told them I didn’t have a bellybutton and then tried to get me to prove I did by showing it. I wouldn’t though: everyone knew bellybuttons were sex organs and anyway of course I HAD a bellybutton. You just couldn’t SEE it, hidden in the folds of my fat little tummy, so yes I was also chubby but Nan was working with me on that too: “Here’s what people do to lose weight,” she told me: “Every day they peel down a stick of butter and eat the whole thing.”  And I was doing it – of course I was doing it.

Maybe these things seem mean on Nan’s part but were they no meaner than what I did to her a few years on, locking her out of the bathroom while she was trying to bleach her hair behind Mom’s back. With me locked in there she couldn’t get at the neutralizer ha HA! And her hair would be just crazy bad straw tomorrow I thought from my perch on the closed toilet and was all the while reading from her diary in loud mocking tones.

The diary was all about boys, natch. As was the bleaching. As was, for me, a whole high school career spent worrying that I was so homely the very walls at the CYO dance would have to look away when I showed up.

Well there’s more to be said about boys, and flesh and girdles but too, but right now it’s time for me to go to the hospital so that a needle can be sent into three places a hair’s breadth away from that crucial tube the spinal cord. My cervical vertebrae are gonna be starrin’ in their OWN little TV show in just about two hours so I’d best jump into my pantyhose and get on over there. If the procedure doesn’t kill me I’ll be back with even more deep insights – and maybe, if I’m feeling jaunty enough, the tale of the fancy foundations lady who told me I was a 32F, then sold me the bra to prove it.

“GAD!” as Mom used to say, “What’s next?”

 haha (this is not me by the way)

In my column last week which is also at the top here I wrote about the return of girdles and corsets, saying essentially “Sisters, no! GO BACK!!! Not only is it a trap it’s the same OLD trap!” etc… but some people took exception to my message, believe it or not, writing in to say girdles were GOOD things.

This one lady said she could not BEAR to see a young woman walking around with all those “muffin tops I think they call them,” the spillover of flesh above the waistband.

Me, I look at those girls and think “Good for you, honey.” Because I remember all too well the days when a girl would DIE before she would appear before the male gaze looking like what she was: a creature made curvy, with a landscape of rolling hills and valleys:  At one point when I was young waistbands were actually HIGHER than nature intended. They started just below the rib cage and that fabric covered you all the way to your toes and more, where they pooled in wide cuffs onto the floor  If a boy saw that we had flesh at all, never mind yeasty and abundant flesh around our hips and belly? Well: we’d just never be able to go to school at all! We’d have to move.

Remember the old 1890s Baltimore Catechism that some of us could once recite quicker than our multiplication table? It went like this:

 Q. Who created Heaven and earth and all things?

 A. God created Heaven and earth and all things.

 Q. Which are the chief creatures of God?

 A. The chief creatures of God are angels and men.

 Remember? Well, I came upon a different sort of catechism while hanging around Mass. General Hospital this past week where my doctors performed their usual funny parlor tricks, resting their tummies on my lap to peer into my nose and eyes and so on. There in the lobby they had a special booth on aneurysms with pamphlets on Defusing the Time Bomb In The Brain, a video running on a  small TV and, behind the tables, a team of kindly people to help you once you have scared the living bejesus out of yourself by stopping to read them. See if you don’t think THIS little rundown has the same matter-of-fact feeling as that primer, that Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Council of Baltimore:

Q. What Is A Brain Aneurysm?

A. An brain aneurysm is a bubble that forms on the side of the brain artery, very much like a balloon. There are two types of aneurysms, ruptured and unruptured.

Q. Are There Any Warning Signs?

A. The classic symptom of ruptured aneurysms is the worst headache of your life.

Q.  Can Aneurysms Be Prevented?

A. Unfortunately, no!  (exclamation point theirs, believe it or not.)

Q. What Are the Odds of Surviving a Rupture?

A.  50% die outright. Of those who survive, one-third recover with some deficit, one-third with substantial deficit, and the final third may require institutionalization.

So there you have it, kids, if you had any doubt at all: We sure DO we live on the slopes of Vesuvius and either sooner or later that nice old God of Baltimore and Surrounding Towns  has fixed it so that every last one of us from the littlest sweetie-pies to the biggest bigshots, will, like it or not, ALL be together in Heaven – and there’s a topic worth peering into for sure!

 

 

(No, this is NOT two gay guys sneaking into the Kama Sutra. It’s a picture of the first two cervical vertebrae, our friends C-1 and C-2, called Atlas and Axis by the folks who know ‘em, the atlas because he shoulders the world, get it? The atlas bears the weight of that big old HEAD we all have wobbling atop the broomstick. Anatomy baby! There’s nothing cooler!)

Three days ago the doctor explained my recent MRI to me. “The joint degeneration in your neck is much worse!” he said with a great big smile and sent me to have an X-Ray, where one of the jauntiest guys in the business was doing the honors. I explained to him what the deal was: “Next week this doctor’s going to inject stuff in there, then make me have these huge boring amounts of physical therapy. First, though, he wants to see if I can even bend my neck without having my head fall off. There’s trouble in there I guess.”

“Wo, I GUESS!” he exclaimed when he looked at the image of the vertebrae in question, that little pile of Pop Beads.

“Sucks to be me, huh?”

“What did you DO to this neck?”

I sighed. I thought about telling him I fell out of a tree like my cat did, leaving her with a limp like Walter Brennan as Stumpy the Cowhand but said nothing.

“Long story, huh?”

Later, when he had the pictures actually in front of him and let me peek at them real quick I tried to get him to SAY what HE thought looked so bad. Was it the bony growth that Osteoarthritis deposits, or was it the silly putty of the bulging discs squooshing out between the Tootsie-Roll segments of this uppermost part of my spinal column?

But darned if he would say. “We can’t say a WORD,” he told me, going all businesslike.

So I was disappointed but I’m still glad I’d made him so happy earlier. I had stood in the EXACT RIGHT WAY for the magic X-Ray eye to take a picture of Pop Beads One and Two, which can only be done by opening your mouth REALLY WIDE and holding your head at just the perfect angle because IF YOU DON’T, your lower teeth and jawbone or your occipital bone in back obscure the view by trying to get in the picture too.

But the shot he took of me? Perfect in every way. See?

♫♫ Oh it’s Cryin’ Time Again, You’re Gonna Squeeze Me ♫♫

Hello children and welcome To Two Good Tidbits Of Info Picked Up Yesterday At My Own Yearly Squeeze-Fest.

Tidbit One: Nobody Faints After 11 In The Morning. This according to the radiology person administering the exam . “I have to warn you, I’m a fainter,” I had just told the woman as she screwed the two icy plates of that Inquisition-style vise tighter together -  but really I said this only AFTER she asked like six times if I was OK was I OK was I OK – which of course began to make me feel that I wasn’t. “Breakfast is the key,” she pronounced. “People only faint if they haven’t had breakfast.”  ( Hmmmm I thought but is that true? Because I faint in extremes of pain as when the quacky old doc in my hometown tried to burn two tiny warts off my arm with something that looked like the hot red coil of his car’s cigarette lighter, leaving me with side-by-side twin scars the size of Cheerios. I also fainted in church religiously ha ha and was heard gurgling under the kneeler Sunday after Sunday and once in the necktie department of the Harvard Coop and they dragged me by the armpits back behind the counter so commerce could continue.)

Earlier, as we stood there before the session started, she fully clothed, I as naked from the waist up as the Venus De Milo, she asked if I did regular self exams, causing me to blurt out my own sad truth, that actually? truthfully? I almost never do which brought us to….

Tidbit Two: Nobody Does the Self Exams. “Nobody does ‘em” she said matter-of-factly and just left it at that. There was no tongue-lashing, no lecture not even a sigh of disappointment at how dumb humans are, choosing all kinds of bad possibilities just because they‘re too dopey to slide their hands around on their bare skin now and then. If I wanted to get sick it was fine with her; she was dead on her feet she said, goin’ since 7:30 this morning and now it was after 5.

“I guess it’s been a long day for you,”  I said and she said “yep” and that’s all she said so darn it all and isn’t that just my luck: looks like once again I’m stuck having to save my OWN life!

oh and Five bucks if you know at a glance why this guy should be mammography’s mascot

I came to DC for the AARP 50^th birthday bash and convention Thursday night because I knew I’d get the chance for a bargain-price Segway tour. That was my secret REAL reason coming here but then two things happened: (1) I found out that a tall athletic way-younger-than-me fellow columnist shattered her pelvis riding one and (2) I saw what dorks people look like traveling in them.

So thus far I’m grounded but I’m still having fun. There are thousands upon thousand of people here in the gargantuan Convention Center, and not that many with grey hair either since the organization starts romancing you the second you turn 50. I invited my friend Pat to come with me. Her registration fee was 30 bucks and mine was just $20, so never mind that they make it ridiculously easy for you to come to this annual wingding but you also get all kinds of deals on hotels, rental cars, insurance, airfare, etc. etc. 365 DAYS A YEAR. (I read recently that 40% of the population will be over 50 by something like 2011 and how frightening a thought is THAT, kids?)

The last time I was in DC it was to sleep 30 to a room with a bunch of teenagers who jumped over every parking meter they saw and kept chinning themselves on the ceiling rails of the subway, so the company is different this time but the spirit’s still great.They’ve got Martina Navratilova and Magic Johnson, Cal Ripken and the agelessly crinkly Shirley McClaine. The last two nights there were concerts by Natalie Cole and Chaka Khan and Chicago and tonight the big headliner is Paul Simon who I sometimes think is my cool older cousin so familiar is his every song to me.

Barack spoke to us by live feed this morning and 5,000 people were clapping and stamping their feet. And Maya Angelou and Quincy Jones who are having a little visit with us in the auditorium that seats like 500,000 are just plain bringin’ down the house.

I say ‘are’ because I’m in this auditorium as I write. ‘She’ just asked ‘him’ if he enjoyed doing Killer. He was up all night flying home from China so so didn’t quite catch the reference.

“Uh, Killer Joe?” he said.

“No NO!“ said Maya in that deep school teachery voice of hers. “I’m talking about that big album you did with Michael Jackson!”

When she realized her mistake she laughed harder than anyone and slapped her knee besides and I thought HERE’S a person that would NEVER worry about bring thought a dork and I’m just wondering now: is it too late to scare up that Segway tour before my flight home at tonight?