EXIT ONLY by TERRY MAROTTA

Here’s the latest Believe It or Not: I found a bunch of bathing suits that come with the ladies already in them! And OK yes they’re made of see-through plastic and are missing their insides and their arms and their whole back half but still they have the important stuff, meaning,  ahem, bweasts, that fill out the suit very nicely.

“Wo they’re selling ladies! “ I cried when I came upon them in the bathing suit bin at my local BJ’s. Four other shoppers whipped their heads around to stare at me, but I couldn’t help it: they reminded me so much of the Visible Woman I got for my ninth birthday and oh the fun I had painting her little pancreas and tiny colon!

She had breasts too, which were highly interesting to us kids since our mother was so modest she practically hid in the cellar to change. As a result Nan and I grew up in ignorance. What were breasts anyway? WE sure didn’t know and we were girls! We called them ‘lumps.’ “When will WE get lumps?” we asked each other.

And now here were all these bathing suits that came with them! I picked one up. A two-piece, nice. Little black shorts and a kind of overblouse, cute. Made by Jantzen, a reputable house.

I grabbed one and brought it right home; put a fright wig on its stem of a neck and propped it up on the bed next to Dave who said “DO NOT take a picture! OK DO NOT put that picture on your blog!”

So I took her into the study and propped her up against the window so you could see her.

She’s amazing , right?  She even has a bellybutton!  I love her.

She goes with my skeleton, the next best thing I bought in the last six months.

Now all I need is a bag of innards and there’s my kit: Visible Woman ‘09 here I come!

A four-year-old of mine came home once with head lice. It happens. It’s no big deal. But the case was so bad even the doctor was amazed. “I’ve never actually SEEN so many of the actual creatures”  he mused, fascinated.

The lice look like this:

Not really but what a cute picture huh?

And the hatched eggs, also called ‘nits’, look like this:

For the most part the nits are what you’ll see, mostly hangin ‘out behind the ears or at the nape of the neck where the temperature is toastiest. They’re white and elliptical in shape and they stick like glue, which is why you have to go get the hellish steel comb to drag along each affected strand of hair.

Head lice are of course different from pubic lice, also known as “crabs.” If you’re partnered and you come home with a case of crabs wellllll… you might just have some susplainin’ to do as Ricky used to say to his bride Lucy.

But let us look up rather than down here. We could quote Robert Burns’s  “To a Louse” but it’s such unintelligible old Scottish not even Mel Gibson could understand it. We could quote John Donne’s “The Flea” in which the smitten narrator grows jealous of the little critter he assumes has just trundled from his own person to the person of his still-chaste beloved. “It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee!” he gushes and gimme a break I know but what can we say? The man was an innocent, and head over heels to boot.

Well lice are innocents too and only doing what God intended them to do, so if they come to your house for heaven’s sake take it in stride. As the Kids Health website says, “Don’t panic; this ISN’T a major drama.”

Think of how animals look when they groom one another. Pretty mellow, right? So just use the special shampoo, surrender your scalp to your closest pal and pretend you’re both monkeys. Better than a day spa, yo, and at a fraction of the cost!

Today as Terry Marotta I’m having a big birthday but before the summer I turned 21 I was someone called Terry Sheehy. Before the Witness Protection Act left me married with a name change.

I needed the new identity because Terry Sheehy was such a sad little worrier: would there be Heaven for ME? How could I know which bus to take if I was too scared to ask the other people at the bus stop? Anyone who went to Camp Fernwood in the 60s saw how this little worrier blossomed into a full-blown workaholic. I ruined two summers the two years I was Captain of the Gold Team by staying up all night and skipping meals to get ready for the two “Team Parties” that were held one in July, one in August and talk about clueless: I decided that one of them had to be in honor of Shakespeare’s 300th birthday and the campers would have to come dressed as various characters from his plays. The campers! What did a ten-year-old know about who Othello was? How in the world she dress up like Oberon King of the Fairies? Like Bottom with his ass’s head? So I had to assign each kid his character THEN enclose a paragraph about who the person was and how he might dress, THEN nestle all this into my special hand-calligraphed, hand-colored ‘invitations,’ all cut in the shape of the stage at the Globe Theatre. And all that was over summer vacation! You don’t want to know what I was like during the school year. Let’s just say that you certainly can have a raging case of the measles and still get yourself to school for your History test, IF you borrow the thickest makeup your mother has and smear it smear it everywhere that shows.

Well Jesus Himself would get bored hearing how being a workaholic as a teen played out in my adult life so let’s skip all that and end on this high note. I just now Googled my old name and darned if MySpace hasn’t revealed a new ‘me’ in the person of a handsome Irish lad, check it out:

hay my name is terry sheehy and im 17 years old and im going out with susan browne for and wats 9mounts and i love u so much i like ot play basketball .football i also like to watch UFC and figthing sports.. thanks to my fab sis! whoohooo and just want to say befor i go to bed amm just leve a coment and ill comment u back. i like action films and films that kinda do with shit that im interested in such as.. coach carter, like mike.. etc… i also like comedy.. GO ON TOMMY TIERAN!!!!!and going to the cinama with susan

So yeah! Go on Tommy Tieran is right, whoever he is! The Terry Sheehy born in ’49 says hello and good luck to the one born in 1990 and don’t worry, we can work on your spelling abd vocabulary. You obviously have all the important stuff DOWN!

the new terry sheehy

So here’s the cutest email I’ve had in a while:

“Dear Sir/Madam: Thank for you see this introduce! Our factory named Runyuan Electric Equipment HuZhou factory is in China and specializing in the manufacture and our company export power juicer and blender of our factory.”

On one level you feel like ‘Where’s my red pen?’  right? But then on the other level it just seems so sweet. And it goes on:

For more than ten years, our factory has completed R&D and production for international famous brands and becoming excellent cooperative partner of global household electric appliance manufacturers.”

Ok kind of a run-on sentence but still it just … well it speaks to me in a big way. I want to know this guy. My whole married life I have wanted an excellent cooperative partner!

Then there’s this:

“Our product description i will show you attach to annex, please see it,” which is like the best part of all because hey this is a business letter; its language is SUPPOSED to obfuscate! – and when I actually clicked on the link I felt my love double in size:

“Fashion and Delicacy as well as focus on life creation is our designing ideology,” it says and if that isn’t me all over!

I mean, Fashion? You should see me in my long sleeved tee cleverly slit up the sides for extra ‘breathing room’! (See below)

Life creation? HOW many babies did I have? A lot, right?

Delicacy? Even my cats say it: I’m really delicate! So delicate I could’ve been a geisha girl AND a diplomat!

The guy even gives his personal email address here and I swear if this newspaper business I’m involved with hemorrhages much more I am going to China myself and join the copy-writing team at good old Runyuan Electric Equipment HuZhou factory, I mean it.

For starters though let me sit down here and order me a juicer. Could be I need to focus just a TINY bit more on the old fruits and veggies anyway because I mean how many more times can I let out my clothes?

breathing room for the muffin-top

Seen at left : the busted pane

On Valentines Day, I left two guys here for an hour while I went out to buy a special little supper for One of Them.

I was at the store when the One called.

“You may want to come  home now,” he said in his best this-is-no-big-deal-so-don’t-over-react voice. “The cat broke a window in the study and you need to decide if you can work in a different room for the next six or eight weeks.” (“Wait, the cat?” I thought. “Wait, the STUDY? The room I spend all my time in, in every single day of my life?!”

The Second Guy was our carpenter friend Mel who was here fixing one of our old curved windows, whose upper and lower sashes don’t even meet anymore never mind lock, thanks to the Funhouse-style dip the whole house took at some point in its long life. He’s been spending six or seven hours per window around here lately, fitting precisely carved shims of wood into the frames to TRY making rectangles out of parallelograms.

And on this day he was in my study with one pane of glass out and leaning against the bookcase. But when he turned on his electrical drill, it startled our sleeping cat Abe so much he leapt a foot in the air and shot toward the door, knocking some books off the sofa arm and propelling them bang! like a couple of missiles straight into it.

I felt sad because it was such a great window with its wiggly glass that made the whole outside world look moist, and trembling – new-made almost.

I don’t know if Dave felt sad. He didn’t say he did but I recall how sad he was the time our three-year-old put a similar crack in one of these old windows just as was working so patiently to re-glaze it. He had to sit in a chair and stare into space for an hour to get past it. And I remember too how ten years later when we finally had enough money to replace that curved pane of glass it took eight long weeks for a new one to be made.

At least it was warm then.

It isn’t warm now. It’s freezing in here as I write her, and the noise of the street is drifting up through this hole-in-the-side-of-the-house where a window used to be – in spite of the plastic sheeting Mel taped over it:

The whole thing kinda took the shine off Valentines Day I think because in the end David didn’t want to drink wine with me and ate my nice little supper standing up at the kitchen counter.

I guess it didn’t matter. It was just a bunch of stuff from the Prepared Foods Aisle. And all I really wanted to do was go to bed and look up at the moon.  “It’s a new day tomorrow!” I told myself.

And when the new day arrived and I put on a coat and came into this room I found it so filled with the smell of the outdoors that I could tell right away: with the snow melting pretty fast now something very nice is starting to happen with the soil: it’s coming back to life.

So I’m content really – and heck I still I have two other windows to look out of.

Jeeze, never have a facelift. Remember how Demi Moore used to look? Even in the over-40 years she was lovely but not lovely enough it seems.

Never MIND that she now has as set of giant fake chompers, she also must’ve wanted the plumper cheeks of youth back or something because it looks to me like she had the skin on her face picked up and filled with foam or something. Plus she’s had her nose carved down so it looks like the nose of a witchy old lady and I mean come ON: Mother Nature does this for us so why would anyone ASK medicine to do it?

I’ve always marveled at the change in the face of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda in the all-too-short years of her public life before mental troubles landed in her in the ‘home’ where she burned to death, leaving a single ballet behind.(Ballet became her obsession in her late 20s, though she was years too old to take it up.) She once had that same plump look. Then all of a sudden she looked well, hatched-faced.

This all began occurring to me when I was talking here about Linda Evans and saying how for years I had a hair-style like hers. (You can see it by clicking here. I call it Dave and His Cheeseball Wife.)

But here’s how Linda once looked.

Darling, right? Natural, approachable – basically gorgeous, right?

Well here’s how she looks now with her old rival Joan Collins:

Goin’ for that rounder young face, see. Goin’ for God-knows-what in the lips department. She looks like she put her mouth on the exhaust pipe of a Harley after a long hot ride.

Now I’ll admit it: I used to look in the mirror and think Man, if I could just find the money to have those docs hike up THIS old face! Just untack the carpeting, give it a good stretch, nail it down again and boom, there I’d be again, little Terry Sheehy just as she looked singin’ in the Special Chorus at Lowell High School.

Instead I look like Zelda myself these days and now after that incident at Christmas my family has taken away all my matchbooks. (click here for that one.)

But what are you gonna do hey? We’ve lived through what we’ve lived through and our faces just mark the journey.

Home Again Jiggity Jig (sigh)

Back to reality today and feeling just a little bit smug because with all the vice freely available on a cruise-ship I managed to indulge only in Sloth and Gluttony – and all right yes they are two of the Seven Deadly Sins, but look at all I DIDN’T do. I didn’t:

(1) Smoke, though smokers were everywhere.

(2) Drink – much. In fact the two of us ended up with a pretty tiny bar bill, especially compared to the one we  racked up a cruise we took 15 years ago with my sister and cousin and our six kids where we found out at voyage’s end that we had drunk the equivalent of a whole other passenger. This was MAYBE because we were younger and wilder ourselves but it was also because the kids were teens and that cruise line’s rules were lax and well how could WE know they were downing these tasty red drinks and charging them to their staterooms every night after Taps?

(3) Set so much as one foot in the brightly-throbbing casino.

We’re just not gamblers, the two of us. We’re a couple of scholarship kids who just can’t bring ourselves to bet, though I do seem to remember that back when I met him in college Dave did gamble a bit. Mathy little guy that he was, he could count the cards almost a good as Rainman.

So what DID I do? Read. Napped. Spent hours on our stateroom balcony just looking, mesmerized, as that big old ship plunged tirelessly through the blue, blue water.

And oh yeah and I got me a haircut, done by Christopher Marks of Dundee Scotland and the Vidal Sassoon Academy in London:

so that now, instead of having out of style Linda-Evans-in-Dynasty hair:

Or my recent fave. the Fake-Hair-from-the-Mall-for-Weddings-and-Other-Special Occasions-Updo:

I now have whatever THIS is…

and am hoping that its short and sporty feel, together with a the fresh, cruise-induced determination to have more fun generally will bring a matching jauntiness to my whole life..

And NOW! To the foodstore for celery sticks and rice cakes!

No this is NOT me standing in the food – but it easily could have been!

Diary of a Cruise Days Five and Six:

The food is so abundant on this ship I think I just might have stopped hoarding for the first time in my life.

This is billed as an International Cruise and anyway the food is sure international. This morning FOR BREAKFAST I had Miso Soup and a Papadam, Roti, Curried Eggplant and some Naan – all before I even hit the bacon and eggs.

To counteract any guilt I might be feeling over all this abundance I’ve been rereading Dream’s From My Father, our new president’s first book and whoops looks like there’s no avoiding your conscience because what do I come upon midway through it but the author’s only slightly satirical remark that the food thrown away on your average cruise ship in one day would feed the whole population of Haiti for a week. And we were just IN Haiti. Well, in Fake Haiti, anyway the cruise- line-owned island just off the shore.

Later at the Spa where I went to get my bangs cut I put it to Christopher, my young stylist from Scotland. “DO they throw away all that food we don’t eat?” I wanted to know.

“Nah, they feed it to US!” he said with a big smile, meaning the 1600-plus crew members who spend their days catering to the whims of all 4,000 of us cruisin’ fools.

The other thing young Christopher did was raise in my mind the question of whether it might be time for me to try something new with this handful of over processed straw I call my hair and so in a minute here I’m going back up to Deck 12 to let him cut it shorter than I have worn it since old LBJ himself sat in the Oval Office.

“It’ll be MUCH better, TRUST me,” said Christopher and I sure hope so because lately it’s been lookin’ a lot like Heath Ledger’s hair in The Dark Knight . Also I know myself: the second I get home it’ll be back to my regular life of worry and over-work, diets and self-denial and falling asleep ten minutes into the movie I’ve waited a month to  see.

So out with old and in with the new then! Streaks of dark brown in the front and hair shorter in the back than a poodle’s underpants! Then buffet-time again and the cruise is almost over so welllll, maybe just a COUPLE of muffins stuffed in the old carry-on bag.

Day One: Wind so fierce that to walk on the deck is to get sandblasted, only by water from Deck 11’s three swimming pools, all swirling gigantically as in ad for toilet bowl cleaner. Too cold for this pale northerners to sit out!

Day Two: Discover that all virtue has its limits. At home I eat salads, fruits, raw veggies. I juice, meaning I make healthful cocktails of carrots, cukes, apples, what have you while casting scornful glances at David as he drinks Doritos straight from the bag. At home there is no living with me I’m so virtuous. Here on board however, I find I am drawn to the white breads and the rices of every description and have not gone NEAR the salads. I look at them all and think “Eh!” then get myself chin-dip in mashed potatoes and gravy. The Lesson: keep an eye on the virtuous. They can turn in a minute.

Day Three: Warm at last! Much undraping all around by fellow cruisers, highlighting the difference in genders when it comes to aging. Aside from the hair dye on the ladies and the beer guts on the men, the men on the whole look younger. We women wizen; why IS that when the men still look rosy and apple-cheeked? DAMN!

Day Four This Very Day: Decide to take my problem hair to the Day Spa as all beauty salons seem to be called these days. Need my bangs cut. Sick of looking like a cross between Karen Carpenter and a My Little Pony.., steeling self for today’s Funtime Cruisin’ Special: Analysis of What’s Wrong with YOUR Hair (and How We can Help!)

More later. The Drifters sing to us tonight and MAYBE we can stay awake long enough to hear them. David on his fifth nap in 36 hours, me flying high on third soft-serve ice cream of the day, available 24/7 at “Sprinkles,” Deck 11.

There’s this guy I love to fight with because while MY politics are based on rationality and the highest impulses ha-ha, his are based on fear and hysteria. One time when he got all worked up talking to me about the environment he shouted “But it’s ALL fake don’t you see? There IS no Wobal Glorming!”

Well you’d best believe there sure as heck IS ‘Wobal Glorming’ with these extremes of weather we’ve been having and if I didn’t see that the other night when the outside came IN I sure know it now: One columnist friend from Arkansas has been without power and telephone for six days and another from Kentucky has been living in his car for a week, both on account of outages due to the bitter cold. Even in South Beach FLORIDA where I was on Saturday, temps were just in the low 40s with a 20 mile-an-hour wind. (It was amazing! Finely turned-out young men were blowing clear over! High school girls in belly shirts were screaming and clutching at their hairdos!  I sat on the cozy bed of a hotel room hanging just above Ocean Street and watched it all.)

Then at 3:00 that same day I boarded a cruise ship.

They have that special drill at the start of any cruise where you have to assemble at your Muster Station by the lifeboat that will carry you to safety should the worst occur. Dozens of us were crushing together by the exit when without looking, a big lady in front if me THREW her arm back, lassoed the long belt of MY lifejacket and bucked it tightly to her own.

When she turned and saw what she’d done she burst out laughing.

“If you jump I jump!” I said, channeling Leonardo and Kate Winslett from the ever-compelling Titanic.

“We’re all goin’ down together!” she said – and if that isn’t THE metaphor for our times I don’t know what is.

But oops I gotta run now. They got them Frozen Mojitos on Deck Five and after that there are some deck chairs that need rearranging.