Seagull nation

My precious mother died young in 1983 at the age of 56, but before she left, she lived a life that was an embarassment of riches, literally. She grew up in the recently Old South — the New Orleans of the first half of the 20th Century — with footmen, chaffeurs, cooks, maids, summer homes, winter homes, private planes, the works. Her family money came first from cotton, then from steel, and her family’s business was finally and permanently laid to rest by her brother’s steadfast refusal to unionize in the 1970s and ’80s. She died with relatively little, yet her interest and dividends still covered her mortgage, and she never held a paying job.

Don’t hate her because she was privileged. She was my greatest teacher.

A friend is someone who votes for you

My earlier essay, An open letter to all my self-proclaimed “conservative” friends, got a few people asking, “Will I still have any friends if I repost THAT?”

I want to be really, really clear. In An open letter…, I was asking my friends who frequently quote the most extreme of the conservative pundits (Beck, Limbaugh, and Palin) and the recent Republican contenders (Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Perry, Paul, and Romney) whether they do so because they think those people are funny or because they agree with their positions. And if it’s the latter, do they agree with just one or two of their positions or their entire philosophy? And I said I was asking because those same friends’ behavior belies the sorts of negative characteristics those oft-quoted pundits lead with. All I wanted to know was who my friends authentically are and what they authentically believe.

An open letter to all my self-proclaimed “conservative” friends

Specifically anybody who by today’s standards considers themselves any combination of ultra-conservative, Tea Party, far right-wing, neocon, fundamentalist, religious right, and also my friend. I’m writing to you.

I’m confused. Are you what you say or what you do?

You aren’t a racist. I know that because you have friends and colleagues of other races and I’ve seen you be loving and charming and delightful to them.

You don’t support profit for profit’s sake and you’re not an anti-environmentalist. I know that because you’re appalled by the BP oil leak nightmare in the Gulf and what it is doing to the places where you and your family love to vacation and have made so many memories.

12 steps to health, harmony & prosperity

If you don’t want to be happy, warning: This essay is not for you.

A year ago, I was dead broke. I’d lost everything but my clothes and furniture to real estate investments and a brokerage that went belly-up after a 100-year hurricane washed it all away. No home, no car, no 401K, no money. I was a real estate agent, but with nothing in escrow, I was effectively unemployed. I had no resources, no apparent possibilities, and no way to pay the rent that was due two weeks later. I was about to turn 53 and I’d been fighting this losing battle for two and a half years. I was plum tuckered out.

Then one day in one of my countless brainstorming sessions with myself, I realized there wasn’t anything there to keep me, and certainly nothing there to support me. So I moved. I sold stuff, gave away stuff, and moved a thousand miles away, found a job, rented a much smaller house, and began the journey back to “normal” (whatever that is). I am happier today than I have probably ever been in my life, and it’s because I have found what a spiritual practice I once studied calls “health, harmony and prosperity,” that is, financial independence, emotional well-being, a home, and a community. Or as it’s also known: Happiness.

You can’t vote Republican if you love thy gay neighbor

This is the part where I have to get blunt.

Not including the Westboro Baptist gang and their sadly misguided ilk, who I’m fairly certain wouldn’t be reading my blog anyway, is there anyone in the U.S. today who doesn’t know and love at least one gay person — friend, colleague, parent, child, cousin, neighbor? Do you?

Please hold that person close in your heart and mind as you read this short essay.

All of the current Republican candidates — and to be clear, that’s Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul — have stated categorically that they will turn back the clock on human and civil rights for gay people. They will to varying degrees reinstate DADT, abolish marriage equality through a Constitutional Amendment, delegitimize gay people as a minority class, possibly even make it illegal to be gay. In short, they will rebuild the proverbial closet and shove us all back in.

If you are thinking, even hypothetically, of voting for any of those candidates, please consider what doing so will mean to the life of that person you say you love. (Keep picturing them.)

Cyber-squeaking = not helpful

I moved from Galveston to Atlanta last February. I love my island and quickly adopted the habit of reading the Galveston Daily News online a couple of times a week to appease my homesickness.

It didn’t take long for me to notice a pattern in the online comments about a few apparently salacious subjects: the democratically elected yet unpaid Mayor & City Council, who should live on the island and who should pick them (seriously?), East End-West End relations, Houston area collaboration, progress in general… okay, change of any kind. The public remarks were and are consistently negative, critical, angry, bitter, regressive, and completely not helpful. It made me sad to think the island that showed so much promise and was given seemingly endless opportunity to improve after Hurricane Ike was instead in the radical free-fall that the comments implied.

Shareholders only, please

Note: There are truly stupid people of all stripes in this country. This essay calls out certain classes of them. If you are not one of them, then I am not talking about you. If you feel singled out, then maybe you should call somebody.

__________________________________________

I haven’t written in nearly four months because I got a job, then I got another one, and that getting up early and going to an office and coming home late thing is simply not conducive to creativity. At least the time it leaves isn’t. That’s not a complaint, it’s a logistics observation. It’s hard to follow your bliss when you’re working all the time, and it’s impossible to follow your bliss when you’re looking for a job (and are probably depressed).

So who gets to follow their bliss? People who don’t need much to live on, who are independently wealthy or supported or retired. I guess if the rest of us want to follow our bliss, we should be working toward a lifestyle that doesn’t take as much to support so we won’t have to work as hard to make as much money which should leave us more time off to follow our bliss?

Do I sound like that cocaine commercial from the ’80s?

People who can follow their bliss because they have alternate means of support are very lucky. I woke up this morning hoping they know that. My mother always said that she thought everybody should live in New York City for at least a year before they settle down. I think everybody should be flat broke with no safety net (mom & dad) in New York City for at least a year before settling down. Hell, before being allowed to vote.

(How’d you like that segue?)

How to get a job in 8 (kinda) easy steps

I uprooted my whole life in March because I could no longer make a living in real estate in Galveston, Texas. I spent my first three months in Atlanta unpacking and getting settled, being homesick and depressed and wondering what I was going to do next.

But self-pity isn’t a strategy. What I needed was a plan. So I sat myself down and gave myself a good talking to, ran some ideas past myself, and plotted my next steps. Once I started working my plan, I got a good job offer in three weeks… and four more in the month that followed!

I can’t promise my plan will work for you in the same timeframe — I don’t know your industry or market — but I am sure it will help you focus and move you toward your goal. Stay positive, and good luck!

1. Pick a lane.

When I got to Atlanta, I met with a few people, got a couple of tiny clients, taught a class, put up a website & Facebook page, took them down. I was all over the place — ready and willing to do anything for a buck, and hoping the universe would just drop an opportunity I couldn’t refuse in my lap. But the scatter-shot approach doesn’t work — ever. First of all, if you can’t answer the question, “What do you want to do?” with an excited three-minute elevator pitch, loaded with specificity about your skills, talents, experience, contributions, and goals, you’re not even ready to interview. People want to hire an expert who is passionate and single-minded about what they do.

The more things you try to do at once, the more you do poorly. If you want to do something well, including job-hunting, focus on just one thing. Pick a job role you want (and that you’re realistically qualified for), make sure your resume says it, and learn your elevator pitch so you can recite it anytime, anywhere. If you can’t sell yourself, how can you expect someone else to? And if you try to be all things to all people, you will be nothing to anybody.

Don’t quit your day job

I took a sabbatical from the real world in 2006. I called it a “real estate career.”

The last time I was in the real world.

I was bored with my corporate job, burned out and tired of the travel. Surely there was a more exciting way to live life and make a living, too?

I planned my exit well. Having been in the same industry and with the same employer for the better part of fifteen years, I saved my money, maxed out my 401(k) employer match, invested in a couple of idiot-proof pieces of property, got my real estate license, moved to the beach, took a voluntary layoff package from my employer, became a “top producer,” acquired a failing real estate franchise, became a broker, board member, trainer, and real estate consultant to the media and local community leadership.

The Fox in the Box Case

Marcia Brushingham

The Casey Anthony verdict is shocking, but not unique.

I knew an actress named Marcia Brushingham, 47, murdered by her brother David, 64, who stuffed her body in a plywood box he built and dropped at a bus stop at Lincoln Center in NYC in 1990. In the media, the case was known as “The Fox in the Box Case.”

David’s life had been colored by tragedy for over twenty years. His 5-month old son mysteriously suffocated in his crib. His business colleague died while they were out on the town together, and David married his young widow a few weeks later. His 5-year old daughter drowned in the ocean near his home while in his custody. His 35-year old stepson vanished without a trace the night before he was set to testify against him. His wife died shortly after leaving him. His elderly landlady died of sepsis, leaving everything she had to her tenant in a handwritten will. His best friend died under mysterious circumstances and David found the body.

Freedom’s just another word

We’re all free in this country — every one of us. We’re free to get up every morning and go to (or look for) the job of our choice in a field we alone select. We’re free to partake of a multitude of educational and training opportunities, eat as much of our favorite food as we like, visit with friends no matter what persuasion, and live wherever and with whomever we choose this side of prison bars. We can opt to be solitary, slovenly, communal, or activist. We can complain, teach, change, and create. We can regurgitate the drivel of whatever radio nimrod we enjoy listening to and wear t-shirts emblazoned with any idiotic slogan we pick. Freedom is not an issue for us in this country.

But independence… ahhhh, there’s a concept for you.

This economic downturn we’re riding, coupled with whatever karmic episodes are individually coincidental to it, has been a trip for some of us. We’ve experienced what it’s like to lose control of our world because money drives absolutely everything in it, and the concept of individual responsibility, which is beyond reproach on its face, tends to feed a negative community or social judgment about people in need, making matters worse. Trite but true: Money doesn’t buy happiness, but poverty absolutely buys misery.

Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! Just because things have always been so doesn’t mean they always will be.

Introducing my new food blog

I confess. My mother was a food star. She’s the one who taught me that life’s greatest pleasure is found in good wine, good food, and good conversation — that everything else is just filler until the next meal.

My mother, Kaki, was the love child of Edith Bunker & Scarlett O’Hara, with a little Lucy Ricardo thrown in for time and place. When she died, she left a room full of recipe cards compiled from her time growing up in New Orleans, studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and borrowing from Cajun family and classic Southern friends.

My food blog is dedicated to Kaki’s food legacy. I commit to at least one recipe a week, more when the spirit moves me. Tell your foodie friends and let’s get something started here. (P.S. You MUST sign up for an email subscription if you want to be notified when a new recipe is added. I won’t be writing you every time. ;c)

We’re starting with my riff on Arnaud’s Remoulade Sauce, which is one of my favorite things on Earth. And yes, done properly, it does make me cry when I eat it.

So tell me: What dish makes your eyes roll back in your head?

If words could kill…

What shall I write about? I asked. The smell of rain. Thirty minutes in your journal, someone said. Haven’t journaled in a long, long time, I thought. Not since I accidentally on purpose left my diary in my mother’s room and she read it and got her feelings hurt, which was predictable because I was really mad at her at the time and wrote about that, but I wasn’t really mad at her, just frustrated because I was twenty-four and trying to get her to tell me about who my birthmother was and she was taking that all personally and poor-poor pitiful me, plus I had my first girlfriend and really wanted to tell my mother, but had no clue how to do that, and when I wrote down my feelings, it all sounded a lot like me being mad at her, especially since I accidentally on purpose left it for her to find, I guess. And she read it all. And then she died, so I decided it was the journal’s fault – that it had killed my young fifty-six year old mother sure as taking a sledgehammer to her heart and breaking it in a million bits. I wrote my last secret words in 1982 because secret words kill people.

The rain smells a lot like that.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” – e.e.cummings

P.S. Never put in writing anything you don’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times.

I am not my FICO score

When I started buying real estate in 2003, I developed an unusual compulsion. I was a FICOmaniac. I joined one of those services that keeps track of your credit scores from the three major bureaus, and checked it nearly daily. I charted the ups and downs like a stock broker, kept spreadsheets, and analyzed every tick. Yes, not unlike today’s fascination with Facebook, I was addicted to FICOisGod.com and happily paid $6.95 a month for the privilege.

Here’s why: “They” had me convinced that those services held my hopes in their cold little computerized hands. If just one of the bureaus recorded the tiniest error, which they do with ridiculous regularity, it could lose me my dream home or get me a non-competitive rate that could cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the long-haul (and I do mean competitive. “What rate did you get? Really? I got an eighteenth percent less. Too bad for you.”) For a time, they had me convinced that my credit score was the single most important number in my life, that it revealed my value as a human being… because I believed that home ownership was the single most important success measure any of us could aspire to.

Then in September 2008, a dream-killing hurricane roared ashore in Galveston, where I lived, followed in short order by Lehman Bros. filing Chapter whatever and the subsequent market collapse, and those events changed everything for me and millions of others just like me — literally and figuratively — overnight.

The First Amendment says nothing about the right to be published

I’m really struggling with this one. Here’s the question:

Should newspapers publish every letter to the editor and every comment on every letter online, no matter how vile, insensitive, ignorant, petulant, or mean?”

I was the victim of this editor-less trend twice in the last couple of years: Once when I suggested privately that Karl Rove was possibly not the best choice of keynote speaker for a real estate convention (and someone leaked it to the press), and another when I was speaking out against the repeal of a local indoor smoking ban. The unmoderated online vitriol that followed got so bad that friends began asking me about my security system. I was called a commie, anti-American, self-centered, narcissistic, domineering, do-gooder, self-righteous, shmenah (?), creep, perverted, a-hole, nagging nanny, tyrannical, omnipotent moral busy-body, tormentor, arrogant jerk, rich social elitist, and [mother of] lawn apes. When it was revealed that I was a real estate agent, they added histrionic, radical, greedy, two-faced, unethical, con artist, and puke in the mouth.

Job Search 2.0.11

If you haven’t looked for a job in a while, I’ve got news for you: The process has changed.

Gone are the days of calling your dad’s best friend, the CEO, and asking for a job, any job, and having one the next morning.

Gone are the days of mailing in your resume, then following up with a phone call and actually reaching someone of consequence.

Gone are the days of sitting with a potential employer and walking through your job history, explaining the gaps and emphasizing the good stuff, asking what they want and saying, “I can do THAT!”

Gone are the days of simple job titles and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Gone, just gone.

Of tornadoes & hurricanes & the uniquely qualified

Just last weekend, many of us recognized Easter and Passover, and meditated on the blessings of cleansing, renewal, and rebirth or freedom from the past, both literal and metaphoric. Some of us considered the practical application in our modern lives, and the idea that sometimes we make deliberate choices to separate from what has gone before, and sometimes those choices are foisted upon us.

In the days that followed those holiest of remembrances, tornadoes unexpectedly ravished the Southeast — leveling towns and neighborhoods and taking over three hundred lives. I was riveted to the television and computer, much as I had been thirty-one months ago as the sun came up on what had been my home in Galveston, Texas, the morning after Hurricane Ike roared ashore.

Bolivar Peninsula after Ike - Sept. 2008

Tuscaloosa after the tornado - April 2011

Those of us who found our lives upended by that 100-year storm struggled to understand why the eyes of the world were seemingly blind to our plight. It felt like no one cared, no one came (except the carpetbaggers), and certainly no one understood. If we weren’t suffering from collective post traumatic stress, it was something close. Everyone of us said the same thing: “Why me? Why us?”

And the answer came back over and over again: There can be only one reason to survive tragedy — to learn. To learn something, somehow, through the pain — through the effort not only to survive, but to recover and then thrive — to learn something that we can offer the next wounded person. It’s our responsibility, I had to believe, to remember how it felt and what we needed so that when it happened to someone else, and it certainly would, we would know how to help. We would be uniquely qualified to step in and ease someone’s pain. We have to, we must, pay it forward.

Memories of Alabama, The Royals, and Alternative Weaponry

All-girl production of "Oliver," Birmingham, Spring '75

Dateline: Birmingham, Alabama, 1975. The all-girl production of Oliver closed as scheduled after a half-dozen sold-out performances. I had understudied Nancy and played the Strawberry Seller and Noah Claypole nightly while standing at the ready in case the star couldn’t go on. With just six performances, I knew the opportunity was scant, and I really didn’t care. I was in love with my life. Junior year was ending with huge opportunities looming for seniorhood — editor of this and performer of that — but first, one last summer at Camp Seafarer, a sailing camp in the coastal town of Arapahoe, North Carolina, where I’d been summering since I was twelve. This year I’d be a counselor, a privilege I would happily have met for free, but which nonetheless paid $135 gross for the twelve weeks I would spend away from home — more than enough to cover the round trip in my 1966 Mercedes 200D at 36 cents a gallon.

Fantasy U.S.A.: The Right-Brain Version

A friend wrote me a long (about 2,500 words), thoughtful email today outlining the demise of the U.S. from an economic perspective. I tried to read it, but you know how it is — he’s left-brained and I’m right-brained — so I got a couple of paragraphs into it and started thinking about whether braised pork shoulder would be good for dinner tonight.

When I came back, I realized that while my friend is studying the innards of the pig, I’m hoping it looks good on the plate and tastes delicious.

And in crafting my response to him, I found myself getting pretty specific about what I believe. I asked myself, “What does the perfect fantasy country look like to your right-brained self?” I don’t know if you can get there from here, but this is how America would look if my dreams came true:

We pay a price to follow our call

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. — Edmund Burke

“Who inspires you?” she asked. “Courageous people,” I said. “To me, courage is what we uniquely bring to the party as an authentic expression of our heart, soul, and spirit. Courage is what raises us up. And it’s about the hardest thing there is to be true to in this life.”

I surprised myself with that answer, and had to think about why. Not too long ago, I got a written and verbal lashing from a group of people who happened to think differently about a subject than I did. Their response was not to call and visit with me about our respective views, or to write a thoughtful treatise on their position to seek understanding and compromise, but was to disparage me in the press and online with accusatory fabrications of their own imaginations of who and what a terrible person I must be to hold the opinions they attributed to me. In so doing, they frightened me. Their ill-considered words threatened me, and things got bad enough that my friends suggested I beef up my home security system.

Curiously, I reacted to all that negative attention with a total flight response. I couldn’t get away from the fight fast enough. It scared me, angered me, confused me, and I wanted nothing to do with it. And in that fear, I met my inner cowardice. Maybe the issue wasn’t important enough to me to pay the price of courage. But some things are.

Coming of age, embracing change

A couple of years ago, I had dinner with a group of friends that included a 77-year old and her 25-year old grandson. The conversation turned to the relative merits of Facebook versus MySpace, and listening to the two generations talk in terms of acronyms and modern hieroglyphics (like smiley face icons), I found myself time-traveling back thirty years to a series of unforeseeable events — those that would notably shape the first half of my adult life.

Straight out of high school, I went to the University of Georgia and declared a journalism major. After my first semester, I sat down with my academic advisor, who said, “Alice, your work is good, your professors like you, everything’s fine. I just want you to know that there are no jobs for women in journalism.”

Visiting the inner circle of Hell — by subpoena

The Mother of the Bride walks into The Main Attorney’s office and says, “I’ve been wronged and I need help.”

“Come in,” says The Main Attorney, “and tell me your story.”

“Well,” she says, “Last year, my daughter was getting married and I needed a Mother of the Bride hat for the wedding. I went to the local hat shop, and there was a delivery of new hats just arriving. As The Hat Delivery Driver was unloading the hats, right away I spotted one that would be perfect with my Mother of the Bride dress, but it lacked the pink pearls it needed. I told The Hat Saleslady that I needed a hat that could have pink pearls added, and she assured me that would be no problem. As the hat was quite expensive for my budget, I called my Long-time Seamstress and asked her to come over and look at the hat before I bought it. She said right away that the hat could not be beaded because of something to do with the material of the hat. I don’t know about those things, so, of course, I have to rely on the experts.

“After my Long-time Seamstress left, The Hat Saleslady said, ‘I know a Great Beader and I’m sure he can do it.’ He came over and said, ‘Sure, I can do it. No problem.’ So I bought the hat and The Great Beader took it away to add the pink pearls. The day before my daughter’s wedding, I got a message from The Great Beader that said, ‘I’m sorry, I cannot bead your hat. It is made of the wrong material.’ I had no pink pearls on my hat for my daughter’s wedding! It was very expensive and very embarrassing. I’ve been suffering over it ever since and finally decided to do something about it, which is why I’ve come to you. I think there was a conspiracy to make me buy that hat because everyone wanted to make a sale that day.”

NEXT!

Most of us weren’t born to live and die in the same spot, doing the same thing day in and day out, following the tail of the tiger in front of us until we churn to butter under a tree.

But sometimes we get comfortable in our lives, in our boxes, in our cages. Sometimes we become convinced that how things are is how they must always be. And sometimes the Universe jumps out from behind that tree and hollers, “NEXT!”

In some languages, that sounds remarkably like, “Gotcha!”

And some of us say, “Great! Bring it on!” and others say, “Do I have to?” And sometimes people say, “No, I won’t.” That’s when it gets messy.

It’s not my fault

The reality is, we need to talk about it.

When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot a few days ago, fingers started wagging and defenses went up. At first, the conversation (is that the right word?) was about the use and misuse of language, especially by people in power (i.e., those who should know better), and as a writer and professional strategic communicator, I absolutely salute the dominion of words and recognize their deliberate incendiary choice when I hear them. And, yes, shame on all you public influencers who misuse the privilege of language.

What has struck me today is that now that we all pretty much agree that the shooter wasn’t politically affiliated, folks are trying to repackage that early outrage so the “other side” doesn’t use it against them. But I think the reason everybody jumped so quickly on the condemnation of the crosshairs bandwagon is that we’ve all been bothered, at least subconsciously, by the angry and violent rhetoric (“the art or study of using language effectively and persuasively”) of recent years, and nobody’s had the nerve to talk about it until now. As Freud would say (in so many words), it’s been bubbling just under the surface and needed to come out.

So let’s not abandon this conversation. It’s valid, important, and its time has come. We have a chance now to agree to hold each other accountable to our words, to our messages, and to our intent, and that’s a giant step toward the next level of civility (because believe it or not, given our treatment of the poor, elderly, young, infirmed, and disenfranchised, we’re not a very civil country).

And she was grateful

A storm was coming, but it passed, and she was grateful.

A second storm was coming, but it too passed, and she was grateful still.

A third storm was coming and she thought, it won’t come here. But it did, and she had fallen ill and was sorry to be a burden and grateful to have good friends to help her evacuate and offer her shelter at the last minute.

The office.

The storm came, and her office was among its first reported casualties, including all the computers and desks and files, and she was grateful that all her team had been out of the building when the waves took it.

She began to write and to send messages to her friends and neighbors so that they might share news as it emerged, and her messages went viral. And she was grateful to have the outlet.

My dream home is high above the ground, she said, where the storm surge can’t reach it. When I return, I will provide shelter and a meeting place for those who lost their homes. And she was grateful to have bought her dream home so that she could offer this safe place.

But enough about me. What do you think of my…?

I put out a call for subject matter last night. I was looking for one good worm to go fishing with this morning. Within minutes, I caught some really big rocks: follow your bliss, friendship, and the meaning of life.

Well, I did ask.

But before I had time to clip on my caribiner and start chiseling at one of them, I got a message from a (younger than me) friend saying she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, and suddenly that begged all three questions in one. I remembered what Rose Nyland said when she found herself telling two St. Olaf stories at once, “I’d like to see if I can handle it!” So cover me, kids. I’m going in…

Katherine Alice Thoman, NYC 1980

On Sunday I closed in a play that was my first full production in thirty-one years. I had performed and studied and auditioned and teched and all that fun stuff for about ten years, well into my twenties, but no full production start to finish with ticket sales and a run lasting more than one performance since 1979. By the mid-‘80s, I had met someone, gotten a job, and let my theatrical wheels go off in a ditch. I rationalized it as “growing up.” This is the follow your bliss part of the story because today I feel like I’ve turned back the clock on my dreams. I’ve been granted, and have accepted, a second chance at my first love. If anyone ever tells you it’s too late to do something you can’t stop thinking about, show them the door out of your life. Doing the business of your dreams is as life-affirming a pursuit as there is in this world. If you haven’t started yet, right now would be the very best time. You can finish reading this essay later. (Clue: It’s not about the money.)

I never danced for my mother

Dear Mother,

I’m writing to you now because it’s Thanksgiving Eve, and for all the things that are good in my life today (and there are many), I have you to thank.

Katherine Alice Ross c. 1945

A belle born in the New Orleans of 1927, you were a product of your environment and your time: fiscally and socially conservative, but eccentric and open-minded in that odd way that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil taught us Southern ladies of your ilk could be. A Roman Catholic escapee, you raised me in the Episcopal Church and even attended with me whenever I asked you to. You did the same when I asked to visit a Jewish synagogue and a Buddhist temple and a Baptist church and a Pentecostal revival meeting. You debated Richard Wright, Emerson, Lionel Trilling, William F. Buckley, servitude, socialism, Vietnam, segregation, and the Junior League with me, and sometimes you even won. You took me to every theater production, every ballet, every art opening, you made me try every food once, you sent me on trips hither and yon, you bought me every book you could find and instructed me to never, ever get rid of them. You encouraged me to live in New York City just once before I “settled down.” You showed me in your behavior, if not in your words, that the desire to understand, or at least embrace, human complexity and diversity was the hallmark of an interesting person. Interesting was a trait to aspire to. Boring was failure.

You used to be so nice. What happened?

My deeply Southern mother, the love-child of Edith Bunker and Scarlett O’Hara, with a little Lucy Ricardo thrown in for time and place, taught me that the worst adjectives anybody could ever use to describe a person were cute and nice. As a result, I have lived a life surrounded by interesting people, rarely cute and occasionally nice.

What nice in the venacular doesn’t require, though, is polite. And polite is something we all are, being from the South, even when casting the darkest aspersions. You know what I mean, “She eats with a fork even though she’s from The North, bless her heart…” or “Sure he reads! He takes the same newspapers as Sarah Palin, bless his heart.”

What if…?

What if everything that’s important to you today had never happened?

Because you were forbidden by law to marry your spouse. So you never had your community, family or church’s endorsement of your union. And you never had a marital home or a family of in-laws.

Your children were never born.

What if everything in your life was temporary because society said it didn’t need to be permanent? And what if even though you never had a wedding, a pregnancy, or an extended family, even though you have nobody to take care of you when you’re sick, nobody to grow old with, no next of kin of your choosing — not legally — even though you are so alone in the universe while everyone else is united in the eyes of the world, what if you pulled up your big kid panties anyway and dealt with it all the best you could, chin up, patiently accepting of reality?

And what if your friends said, “Why are you still talking about being gay when everybody you know loves you anyway?”

What if one day in November 2010, an election was held and, around the country, judges and legislators were targeted for removal because they believed you should be able to marry the person you loved and set up a marital home and family like every single other demographic in the whole world…?

And still your friends said, “What’s the big deal? It’s just politics?”

How would you feel?

But enough about you.

What if I were your child?

The business of foreclosures… Say what?

February 19, 2009, I wrote a piece called Face it, Galveston’s been Raped about my friend Alex’s Ike experience. It was awful — he lost his business and ultimately his home because the lender wouldn’t defer three months of payments during the Ike months, and wouldn’t restructure the loan because Alex was self-employed in a business that didn’t bounce right back. In March 2009, the bank foreclosed and Alex lost his dream home.

He moved on and found a new place and made peace with the fact that he’d probably be a renter for a long time, if not forever.

Today the Texas Attorney General called for a moratorium on foreclosures and sales of foreclosed properties, so Alex looked up his loft to see if it had closed yet. Turns out it closed a month ago.

Here’s the kicker. Alex owed $307,000 on the loft, and was happy to continue paying on it at that price, but the lender refused all attempts at compromise. But a month ago they sold it for $92,500.

If anybody has any insight into what’s fair, smart, or even decent business about that, please comment below.

Meanwhile, Alex is throwing up in the bathroom and asked me to send his apologies.

Rolling over in their untimely graves

I was adopted when I was four days old by two of the smartest, coolest, funniest, did I say smartest?, people on Earth. In almost every way.

I still miss them all the time.

My father died in 1977 at the age of 56. I was 19. My mother died in 1983 at the age of 56. I was 25.

For good

It’s not an affair; it’s a relationship. September 13th is our 2-year anniversary, and we’re in it for the long-haul. We were instantly and irrevocably enmeshed the moment we met. He swept into my life unannounced and immediately changed its course. I dropped absolutely everything for him. He touched me emotionally, psychologically, financially, socially, and physically. All my senses were aroused, and for most of the past two years, I’ve thought of him almost constantly. Because of him, I have felt my highest highs and my lowest lows. He has changed the way my friends see me and the choices I make about how I spend my time and who I spend it with. I have altered my job, moved my home, taken on new activities, rewritten my future, given him all my money and time. Some people have said I spend too much time on the things he’s introduced me to, but I don’t have a choice. In fact, he has in many ways shown me who my real friends are. He has put his handprint on my life and changed me… for good. I’m grateful to him, and in spite of it all and whatever happens, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Happy Anniversary, Ike. You sonofabitch.

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Copyright © 2010 Alice Melott

Jury duty! Can’t we all just get along?

I heard this story today.

In 1215 A.D., King John signed the Magna Carta, decreeing that no man is above the law, not even the king. Law shall be determined by the little people.

The little people of Galveston have decreed that nobody shall harbor (i.e., own or keep around) more than four dogs, four cats, or a four-course combination platter of the two. Animal lovers might find this discriminatory. Animal haters might find it excessive.

And therein lies a lawsuit.

I was a Lasker Home Girl

As published in the August 2010 issue of The Islander Magazine.
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My name is Rebekah Boyle. I was born March 3, 1918, and my family moved to Galveston, Texas, when I was just five years old. My father left us soon after, and my mother found work as an upstairs maid for a prominent Galveston family. As it seemed she would be quite busy with her duties, it was arranged for me and my younger brother, Jamie, to stay at the Lasker Home for Homeless Children. My older half-brother, George, went to live with his father’s grandparents. I never saw him again and have always wondered what became of him.

The Lasker Home, 1019 16th St. (photo courtesy of Texas Historical Commission)

Jamie and I were picked up from our mother and brought to the Lasker Home by a stern but kindly lady named Mrs. Frenkel and a strange looking gentleman with a long beard, funny hat, dressed all in black called Rabbi Cohen. It was Thanksgiving Day in 1923, and before we could even unpack our small grips, the home became the scene of a wonderful dinner with turkey and all the trimmings, the likes of which Jamie and I had never seen. The meal was followed by a musical fairy playlet that betokened much thought and care and was played with great charm by the children, who seemed happy, and who we would come to know as our friends and siblings. The costumes, made of paper in the pastel and autumn shades, were unusually beautiful. They were designed by the matron, and made by the older girls. There were about a hundred people present that night, all having a festive spirit about them and treating us children like members of an especially large family, and I did think that maybe this place would not be at all an unpleasant place to be for a while.

Crisis averted. I love my friends.

I can tell how balanced my life is by looking at the diverse responses my closest friends give me in a crisis.

Me: A horrible thing has happened to me.
T: That happened to me once and this is how I handled it.
D: Yea! Another opportunity to balance some karma!
F: Can you write them a check?
J: That’s not fair. You have to just tell them that’s not fair!
C1: Fair, schmair. What are you going to DO about it?
C2: No worries. We have people for that.

Crisis averted. I love my friends.

What’s in a name?

Today a Facebook friend wrote, “How come women use multiple last names?”

What a sweet way to say, “Alice, what the heck is up with all your names????” Funny thing, if Facebook didn’t have length restrictions, it would’ve been longer. But since they do, my profile name is Alice Thoman Melott Robertson.

So just between us friends, the answer to the multiple names question is — Witness Protection Program.

Six strategies for staying safe (and private) on Facebook

I keep hearing people recount horror stories that a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s dentist read in Paranoid Online Weekly (mailed to you for privacy purposes) saying that being on Facebook is tantamount to handing your keys, Social Security number, credit cards, safe deposit key, bank PIN, stock certificates, bearer bonds, G spot, blood type, and personal diary over to all the thieves of the world, then thanking them for the opportunity.

If you have ever left a key under your mat, this one’s for you.

Now that was REALLY boring!

The kinda fun, sorta perplexing, and occasionally annoying thing about being a blog writer is that you never know who’s reading unless they’re part of that two percent who chime in regularly. Sometimes that means you forget there are other people out there… well, not really forget, but write like nobody’s reading… and it’s not until you get the smack up the side of the head that I got this week that you remember: You. Are. Not. Alone. (Insert eerie music here.)

After a couple of semi-incendiary essays last week (this one and that one, for those of you who fell behind a couple of installments), I decided to write about the fabulous, colorful, gotta-have-it-and-never-wanna-lose-it theater, my heart and soul, my reason for being, the very air that I breathe. I had been to a play the night before, had inhaled some greasepaint, and was reminded by the empty opening night seats how desperate local venues can become during difficult economic times, and thought it might be a good idea to pen something supportive and encouraging to help fill some seats. I expected to hear back from my actor friends about their local show dilemmas, from my political friends about cutbacks in all things artistic and/or non-profit, and from my family asking, “So when are you going to be in a play?”

An interview with Ida Smith Austin

As published in the July 2010 issue of The Islander Magazine.

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The Austin House (Oak Lawn) c. 1936

Sitting stately for the past century and a half on the corner of Market and 15th streets, The Austin House, with its double galleries and dual entries, pays homage to the at-one-time-equally important thoroughfares it faces. It is one of those iconic structures where tourists and residents alike stop to point and shoot every day. The home was already over 30 years old when Ida Smith Austin came to live in it and became its loving steward through the turn of the century and the Great Depression.

The Islander: Good afternoon Mrs. Austin. Thank you so much for meeting with me today. I’d like to start by asking you about your background. How did you come to Galveston?

Ida Smith Austin: I was born in 1858 in Lexington, Virginia, and educated at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton. At thirty-three, I came to Texas and began teaching Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church. Four years later, I married Valery E. Austin, a prominent real estate dealer and city commissioner.

Why Florida?

It’s a rude awakening. You get invited to an adult party and with those adults you ride a bus to the places that you frequent for lunch and whatnot during the day, but as you navigate the tight nighttime crowd, you hear snippets of high-pitched conversation and brush up against unblemished shoulders and look into the cloudless eyes of babes, and you realize that through no fault of your own, and no matter how much you might want to commune with these delightful striplings, you’ve simply crossed over, that the cool kids are still ten years older than you are, and that makes them 60-something, and those clear-skinned droids filling the evening venues are, as a generation, completely abstract to you (and/or you to them), and for the first horrifying time, you realize why Florida exists.

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Copyright © 2010 Alice Melott

Blue is the new red (it’s not what you think)

Blue is the new red.

When it comes to toenails, blue is the new red.

Here’s my thinking: There’s nothing any more natural or unnatural about nails being painted blue (or green or purple) than being the traditional red (or pink or orange). It’s paint. There’s nothing natural about it. We’re just used to red.

But I recognize that this is a generational fashion statement, and like white shoes after Labor Day and blonde hair after 60, it might take some getting used to for some people. I had this lightbulb moment while spending time with a woman of my mother’s generation, 80-ish, who looked at my purple toenails and remarked, “My, your nails are purple!” I don’t think that meant she liked them; only that she had noticed.

The Hatfields and the McBOIs

When I moved to Galveston in 2003, I learned to my amusement that there was a feud of sorts — certainly a rivalry — between residents of the East End and residents of the West End of the island. I stress the word “island” because that’s what this little spit of sandbar is — a barrier island. Its two distinct social/cultural ends — where people on the West won’t go (10-15 miles) “to town” and people on the East have never been past the end of the Seawall — is the stuff of Garrison Keillor’s ”Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” I wonder if he means the East side or the West side of the lake…

Top 5 ways to avoid bad real estate agent karma

I was a typical first-time homebuyer. I looked at everything in town – all price ranges, all styles and sizes, all neighborhoods. Usually I used the same agent for all this, but sometimes I would call the listing agent directly or call on FSBOs (For Sale by Owner). I actually looked for about two years and had contracts on five different properties before I made my final commitment. In the end, I got mad and fired that agent who had showed me no fewer than two hundred homes, and closed without her.

Boy, have I got bad real estate agent karma.

Face it, Galveston’s been raped

First published on February 19, 2009, five months after Hurricane Ike.

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It’s taken me a while to figure out how to talk about this. I didn’t want to distract from the impact of the actual event…but now that the storm is pretty much behind us, we all need to face a really big problem that it uncovered. There are as many stories as there are people on the island, but I’ve picked one to serve as metaphor for all of us. Once you hear it, I trust you’ll share your own here. If we put in a little effort, maybe we can make some changes for the next victims.

Hurricane planning: What not to do

This piece originally ran as a New Year’s story 100 days after Ike, but on the occasion of the First Day of Hurricane Season 2010 (625 days after Ike) as we all begin commiserating over evacuation plans, it seems worth a rerun. It’s good to have a plan.

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December 28, 2008

I haven’t told this story before.

My loft the week before Ike

On Wednesday, September 10, 2008, I decided to cash in my birthday massage coupon – it being six months old already and all – and since we thought the third storm in a month was headed south of Galveston, I thought what the heck? And if it decided to come closer to us, we still had ‘til Friday to get out. We’re well rehearsed at this stuff, and I deserved an afternoon off.

About twenty minutes into some pretty intense deep tissue acupressure on my neck – a luxury strangely akin to putting your head in a meat press, I’m guessing – the room started spinning. I mean SPINNING like I was a pencil let loose beneath a twisted rubber band. I stopped my guy and truly thought I was having a stroke. He kept working on me gently for another half hour or so, but the room kept going and before long, it was clear I was sicker than I had ever been in my life, and in no condition to transport myself to the bathroom, let alone home.

Everything in its own time

My headshot c. 1980

“You are a character actor trapped in the body of an ingénue. You won’t be ready to work in this business for thirty years.”

With those words, my acting teacher, Elizabeth Dillon, whom I adored, dropped the curtain on my dream. It was an ordinary Tuesday night in the windowless basement room that we called rehearsal space in HB Studios on Bank Street in Manhattan’s West Village. It was March 1980, I’d been acting for seven years, and I had just turned twenty-two.

Then she turned to the whole class and said, “If there is anything else in the world that you are interested in, please do it. To be an actor, you must be obsessed. You mustn’t be able to think of anything else. It is too hard to do if you aren’t completely focused. Totally, completely focused.”

The Great Test of 1915

I just unearthed this article I wrote with Frank Billingsley for The Islander Magazine in 2006. I think it’s a vivid reminder of how much modern building codes and technology (and a kick-@ss seawall) have done to protect us.

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Indianola is a ghost town on Matagorda Bay. But in 1875, it was a major port and the county seat of Calhoun County. In September that year, a big storm struck, killing between one hundred-fifty and three hundred of its five thousand residents, practically decimating the town. Its plucky citizens rebuilt it.

By the turn of the Century, nearly thirty-eight thousand people called Galveston home. It was the second richest urban area per capita in the country. Mansions adorned 25th Street and Broadway, punctuated by amenities befitting the first Texas city to use telephones and electricity.

A ghetto of our own making?

In most relatively evolved places — Houston and Galveston among them — being gay simply isn’t a good reason to whine anymore. Acceptance has replaced tolerance in most social situations. We still have tentativeness in some of our places of worship and privately-owned workplaces, and we still need to tackle that marriage thing (which is tied back to those other two), but there are some “next steps” that we can start working on while those things are being sorted out. Because, make no mistake, we are on the cusp of monumental change.

Yin-yang, thank you, Ma’am

Brooke got up Wednesday morning in a particularly good mood. She was going to show property all day to a couple who had just three weeks to buy, which meant they were serious and would probably make a quick decision. She had emailed them listings to consider in advance, and they had told her which ones they wanted to see. She had a List B, just in case none of those worked out.

The deafening silence of friends

Once upon a time on the planet Myrth, in the proud State of Secksas, the largest and loudest of all the States of The Union, the freest country on Myrth, in the city of Bootson, the third largest city in The Union and the home of many of the leaders of all of Myrth, there was born and raised a girl whose deepest desire was to serve God as an ordained priest of the church that nurtured her. Her name was Humility.