Today is the day every Jew feels like a stranger in a strange land. I don't care how assimilated they are, how they call it a Channukah Bush, or they've married outside of the faith, and they are accomodating a spouse. This is not our holiday.
But that's OK, too, you know? When I was growing up in that small South Florida town, my family used to drive around, looking at all the Christmas lights. It was charming. The little Mediteranean Revival cottages, the mid-century not so much modern as ranch-styles were all duded up for a holiday.

There was magic in the way the palm trees glowed. It made it feel like a holiday.

In our store we always decorated for Christmas. It was a Christian town. We were in business. Christmas was big business in a dry goods store. Still is, you might notice. Big business is good for a small mom and pop business. We loved Christmas.

Christmas meant hard work for all of us. Only my Grandmother was exempt during the season. Curling ribbons, straightening stock, wrapping packages, making sales... that was the ladder we grandchildren climbed. On Christmas Eve we closed the store as early as we could gently expell the truly last second shoppers. There was a party for the employees, and the men and women who weren't family might just as well have been. These people had been in the store almost as long as my parents. After the party, the family would head over to my Grandfather's house, just a block away on the St.Lucie River. We'd all drink a toast to Christmas. I'd love to say that we then all went out for Chinese food, but there wasn't much in the way of Chinese food in Stuart, and I don't remember going to Frances Langford's Outrigger.

All my friends thought that I had no Christmas, being Jewish, so I can't count the number of trees I trimmed as a child. My sistergirlfriendgirl's family had wonderful ornements, little hedgehogs from England, based on Beatrix Potter's illustrations. Another friend's family had old glass balls, the ones people kill to collect these days. Sigh. It's never stopped, either, this Christian sympathy as though I've missed out on something.

When I lived in New York, a pair of women friends thought I needed to experience tree buying in the snow. So their present to me was a trip to the tree lot in Greenwich Village, picking their tree, helping to schlep it through the falling and deep snow to their West Village apartment where I would get to decorate the tree with them. It was just as magical a time as they wanted me to have.

Frankly though, I've always been in it for the grub. Lawdy. The grub in a Southern home at Christmas is why God invented ham. Redeye gravy and grits with butter the next day. Homemade biscuits. Butter. Cream gravy. Did I mention the roast ham? Exotic food and I still swoon for a good slice of fried ham with redeye gravy. Haven't had one in years.

I think that I embrace Christmas as the secular holiday my friends all tell me it's become. I celebrate Christmas vicariously through my friends, but I still won't celebrate it in my home. I am a Jew. This is the dividing point between them and us. I respect Christian belief enough to abstain from celebrating Christian holidays. I am grateful when they chose to share one of mine with me, and love to open my Passover seders to my non-Jewish friends.

But make no mistake, I am treating them to my holiday, letting them in on the Jewishness of the night. I am not trying to convert them. I would ask the same of the Christian Right.

I keep reading about Christmas in Bagdad, and around and about Iraq, and how the soldiers are giving out candy canes. I was asked by a business to click on a link to send gifts to the soldiers and children. The soldiers could get books, an amazing array of titles mostly having to do with politics, anti-war politics mostly, and how to get a better job, or prepare yourself for leaving the military. I thought that was a little cold, a little too much propaganda for those guys over there who don't want to be there any more. I opted for a rag doll for an Iraqi child, but at the same time, I felt guilty. As though I were one of the Christians trying to force a religious holiday on someone of another faith. Hey, little Iraqi kid getting a rag doll for a holiday you don't celebrate: I don't celebrate it either. Take the presents and roll with it.

RJ and MJ have an agreement: he celebrates all the Jewish holidays, and she has to celebrate Christmas and St. Patrick's Day with him. I think this is a great deal for RJ and told her so. She gets all her holidays (and trust me when I say that they mostly involve food) and the only two of his he wants to celebrate require giving presents and drinking to excess.

Back in the dawn of time, when I was living in NYC, the Village Voice had a contest to name Fran Leibowitz's first collection of essays. I read Fran in the Voice and I loved her. So I entered the contest.
"Joyce Maynard Is A Drip & Other Tales of the New Jazz Age" was the title of my submission, and surprising to no one but me, didn't win.

I hated Joyce Maynard, although I never read her first book, nor any of her subsequent ones, either, to tell the truth, but I have read any number of her essays, and despised them all. Ms. Maynard's claim to fame in those days, and it's a toss up as to whether that or her current one is more offensive to me, was that she was the precocious daughter of Harvard professors, who got a publishing contract at an absurdly early age, to write her memoirs of growing up in the 60s.

As David Crosby once said, if you remember the 60s you really weren't there. Neither was I, and if that punk bitch could bullshit her way into a contract, I didn't see why I couldn't, seeing as how I was funnier, smarter, and seemed to have done more drugs.

I bring this up because today I'm pissed about another annoying "celebrity" who has a publishing contract for a "humorous" autobiography. Paris Hilton. I know she's a cheap shot, but that's the point exactly.

I'm smarter, funnier, and about an infinity less a skank. So how come I can't get a contract to be a paid smartasscommenter on the state of the universe? I need to send some samples to Jon Stewart.... or at least my manuscript to an agent....

Any suggestions?

To the marketing geniuses at Burger King:

How DARE you give out free hand cleaner with every order (even just coffee) that disolves nail polish? Are you people mad? Do you know how much a manicure costs?
And here in Miami, home of the shallow and the vain, do you know how much it means to keep your manicure maintained?

So, yesterday, while the RLA and I were running around doing errands, I noticed that I had puppy schmutz under my nails. Knowing that I had those free BK hand wipes in the car, I opened one up and used it.

What a surprise to discover that my two-day-old manicure had the top coat dissolved right off, leaving me with pitted, matte nails on a few, but not all fingers.

I was livid.

But not so livid that I was unable to make the following observations about the drivers and driving rules in Miami.

The far left lane is now the designated "slow" lane. Where in my youth, I was taught it was the fast lane or the passing lane, it now seems to be where you drive if you are lost, unsure, under the influence of drugs, or simply can't bear to go above 25MPH.

The word "merge" in the merge lane means that the people in the lane you are trying to merge into are trying to make you merge into the guard rail.

Holiday spirit has come to mean a viciousness and meaness of spirit only dreamed of by Mr. Scrooge. People are ugly, irritated and irrational to degrees heretofor unseen in city known for its crabiness and bad driving.

But I have a puppy, and that makes everything better.

It's been a long six months of waking the RLA up in the middle of the night to say "I want a PUPPY". Or, in the middle of a conversation about something, anything else, asking "Can I have a puppy?" Sometimes I've even chanted it, like Bart Simpson asking "Are we there yet?"
But the universe unfolds the way the universe will unfold, and so, on my birthday I received an e-mail from a breeder who had no puppies, but had found one up in Port St. Lucie that she thought was a good, sound little girl.

A couple of phone calls later and the force of nature that is your narrator had made arrangements with the breeder, and finally broken down the RLA's resistance.

I present to you the newest member of the Shoes family: Miss Josephine Baker, or as she has now figured out, and comes to: JoJo.

It's occured to me, as I sift through the detritus of my home studio, that I really don't have to go back to work as a corporate art hack. I could change careers. No, really, I could.
The question, of course, is what should I be now that I have ostensibly grown up.

On the one hand, I'd like to be paid to be a smart ass. That means either doing stand up, or comedy writing, or taking over as the new, female, emergency back up Dave Barry. (Which I fully feel capable of doing.) I could sell my manuscript (finally). I could try to parlay this blog into a money making enterprise.

On the other hand, I would just adore going back to school to become a chef. I would not adore the long hours and back breaking work involved to become the oldest sous-chef in the worst diner in Miami.

On still another hand, I really would love to lock myself away in my studio and just sew and bead and make things. I don't even mind selling the things I make. Unlike the RLA, by the time I finish a piece of artwork, I don't want to live with it, I want it out of the house, preferably forever.

On yet another hand, maybe I should just get a part-time job at a Starbucks or Borders... you know, something where I could go to work and never have to engage my brain at all. The only down side I can see to one of those jobs is dealing with the public, and I hate the public. I'm not even too keen on people.

So maybe I should go to work as a vetrinary assistant, and make minimum wage, and swab dog poop for a living. Or not.

I dunno. Maybe I'll just float along in an undecided fugue state until something falls in my lap.

I'm officially old today.

Or not.

My mother, who is eighty-six, insists, when asked, that she is maybe twenty-one. This gives creedence to the quote by the immortal Satchel Paige, who once said "How old would you be, if you didn't know how old you was?"
Tonight, somewhere around 8:32EST, the earth and I on it, will hit the point where fifty years ago, I made my entrance.

The RLA, the noble dog Nails, Ming the Merciless Siamese, and even the koi, have been doting on me all day. So far I've raked in some heavy-duty love and no small piles of gifts.

I am not one of those folks who, when presented with an opportunity for gifts, demures and says I need nothing, I want nothing. Not this bitch. No sir. When there are presents to be had, I, like the Shrub his ownself, says "Bring it on."

They are indeed being brung. I have new fuzzy bunny slippers. I have a pair of truly lovely pink yard flamingos. I am wearing an amazing new necklace featuring a carved bone mermaid and turquoise.

My girl cousin who sends me so many jokes and political satire, sent a set of Kate Spade martini glasses. (Said girl cousin does know your author, does she not?) My sisterfriendgirl made me the most beeyooteeful quilt in pinks and greens and blacks and I've already taken a nap under it, so there.

Nope. As much as I may joke and complain about turning fifty, it beats the fucking alternative, and I can give you a list without even having to think hard, of all my friends who never made it this far. Cancer and AIDS, primarily. Leapin' made it to 52, and then went down in chopper over the Gulf of Bahrain. Gary finally got a job with insurance, and so went to see about that bothersome hemorhoid, only to be told it was colon cancer, and he was gone six months later.

Me? I'm older than I ever expected to be, and still not quite grown up. The cocktail party the RLA is throwing for me has a mermaid theme. I'm off to string up crepe paper garlands, and rearrange the shells and fishnets. Don't wait up, but maybe there will be photos tomorrow.

Home is where... Or maybe, home is where?

Yesterday I brought my mother home to Miami, a place she's never lived. I put her in a private home that is also an Alzheimer's residence. As I've mentioned, it's only three blocks from my own home. That home being where I hang my hat, where my heart is, where the pets are, where my books and studio are.
In choosing things to bring to make my mother's room her home, I brought the id badge from the library, where she had been a volunteer for more than forty years, as well as the plaque they gave her last year when she finally had to stop.

I brought a cross-stitch she'd made of Newport, R.I., her home town. A framed photo of the store her father and she opened in 1936. Photos of her and my father, a pin cushion I'd made for her in her favorite color. I brought her favorite stuffed animal. I brought a lap blanket that she'd bought in Norway back in the 70s: it's shades of orange and rust and brown, and she used to nap under it on the living room couch.

I brought her close to me. Like so much else this crappy, crappy year, this has been so hard. So difficult to navigate emotionally.

Home is where I can bury myself under my own blankets, and not come out until 2005.

I received another check from the hospital yesterday. It seems that despite the conditions of the letter of separation, the hospital has cut the checks for my sick leave and vacation payouts already.

They were supposed to be cut after the last regular severance check, which would have put them into next year. Better for me to get that lump sum next year, when my employment status, and tax status is so tentative.

Better for the institution to pay the debt in this tax year.
So it's a win-win. They can screw my tax status by paying me, thereby inflicting yet another insult or injury, and at the same time, benefit their own bottom line.

Oh, please. I know it isn't personal. It is a global disdain for workers' well being.

On another note, I am stalling as hard as I can, because today is the day I go get my mother and install her in her new Alzheimer's home.

I've been having nightmares all week. I know this is the best, if not the only possible course of action, but that doesn't make it any easier.

Last night I dreamt that I had these red, crusty, ring-worm type sores on my ear lobe, and my shoulder. Only they weren't whole rings, they were horseshoe-shaped, and the center was black and sort of leathery. Truly disgusting.

I'm not suffering from suppressed guilt, am I?

Fuck.

As I was trying to wedge my little VW into half a parking space with the word COMPACT painted in it, I'm guessing that here in Miami it means anything smaller than the full-sized Hummer.
On my left, filling every inch of width between the yellow lines, was a full-sized Land Rover. It was suitably ostentatious, with a name plate on the back that indicated this was no run of the mill, ordinary Land Rover, but an exclusive, distinguished, limited edition Westminster, or Buckminster or some other la-di-da-minster varient.

I was really impressed, and did my best to impress the edge of my driver's side door into their passenger door.

On the other side, taking up two spaces, straddling that little yellow bumper with the words "Compact Only" was some flare-sided pick-em-up truck.

Once I squeezed out, and got into the book store, I had a short dialogue with the clerk, explaining why I didn't think that buying a discount card was any deal. He kept telling me that it would pay for itself in no time. I kept telling him that it was the principle of paying to get a discount that annoyed me, and I didn't care how fast it paid for itself, I wanted them to give me an incentive, not make me pay for it. He didn't get it, he just kept shaking his head and telling me it pays for itself.

No. It doesn't. I pay for it. Give it to me free, and then it'll be worth it.

The woman behind me was sighing in exasperation with my bull-headedness, so I slouched off, and tried to chip the paint on the Range Rover again as I crawled into my tiny, little, used, economical car.

I clearly don't belong here.

I don't need to read self-help books about tapping into my creativity by getting in touch with my inner child. I am so in touch with my inner child that I have to give her time-outs to go sit in the corner and just shut up.
What this period of unemployment is doing for me most, it would seem, is putting me in touch with my inner sloth.

Who knew? I mean,I have been imbued with the good old protestant work ethic since I was old enough to work. In my family, that meant being able to handle a pair of blunt-nosed scissors well enough to curl ribbon for the Christmas package wrappers. Or, failing that, being able to fold corners on cardboard shirt boxes.

By the end of summer, we were already stacking pre-made shirt boxes under the display tables. By Thanksgiving, my cousin and I were living in the back of the store, curling ribbon and making alternating patterns of green and red curls, neatly tucked into some of those same shirt boxes.

By the time we were old enough to see over the wrapping table, we were the package wrappers. Even today, nobody wants to wrap packages with either of us. Three pieces of tape and less than three minutes and we're done. With sharp folds on the paper, too.

Anyway, I seem to have digressed. I am getting in touch with my inner sloth these days, by not working. I am not working in so many different ways. I am taking afternoon naps. I am lounging around on the sofa reading historical novels. I am going to the gym during the day. I'm taking long baths.

I am not making quilts, or jewelry or any of the other things I promised myself I would devote my free time to. I am utterly, and deliciously unproductive. This has gone on for a month, now and I'm starting to make myself nervous. I may have to start making things, or get a seasonal job wrapping packages.

But for now, I'm going to the gym.

And gentle readers, keep an eye open for massive changes coming to Girlyshoes, as I work my way through the stack of computer books on my desk.

I give you me, in all my fabulousness.

During my daytime stint as mermaid, at the Raleigh Pool Party, I was without my glasses. Because, really, who ever heard of a mermaid in glasses?

Nevertheless, I was able to see well enough to notice that I was surrounded by stunning, gorgeous men. I will digress momentarily to tell a story about my mother.
Mummy did her part for the war effort (WWII) by dancing with the sailors and the soldiers at the local USO. She would go with her friend Millie, who was from Tennessee, or Georgia, or some other deep south state. When Mummy and her dance partner of the evening decided to head on off to another road house, Mummy would tell Millie to pick one and let's go. But Millie couldn't choose, and she would, without fail, say to my mother, "But Florence, I cain't choose. It's just like picking flowers. Each one is prettier than the next."

At these White Party week events, I always think of Millie because, just as she said back in the day, each one is prettier than the next. And since they are all gay, the allusion is even stronger. All I can do is smell them, and not even pick a little bittie bud.

Anyway, so there I am, sitting on the edge of the stage, flapping my tail and waving prettily at the pretty boys. Many of them asked to take their photos with me, and I was only too happy to oblige.

But there was one man who didn't ask. I watched him all afternoon, and kept thinking that there was one major hottie. "If he weren't gay," I kept saying to myself, "I would eat him with a spoon. Yum, yum fucking yum."

He was dark. Black hair in white-boy dreads, little twisty ones. Black five-o'clock shadow and it was barely past noon. Built just so. I'm telling you, he was just edible.

So when I was getting ready to pack it in, I asked one of the roving photographers if he would take a shot of me and this gorgeous thing. In fact, I was quite specific: That one, the guy that I just want to lick all over because he is just so gorgeous.

I'm sorry if I can't come up with another word other than gorgeous, but that's what he was.

The photographer went over and, I assume, passed along my assessment of his looks and request for pictures. He trotted right over and sat down on the edge of the stage with me. I flapped my tail, and blushed prettily, and batted my eyelashes, and twiddled my finger in his chest hair and we started to talk as the photographer snapped.

I learned that his name is George and he is the manager for several of our DJs. I also suspect that he is not at all gay. This made things very uncomfortable for me, since I'm married and by no means available. I couldn't ask right out. I couldn't do anything except maybe pull my fingers out of his chest hair and stop flapping and batting, and so I did.

Anyway, I felt and feel like an idiot, but in my own defense, you have never seen anything as hot as George.

I was a mermaid at White Party, and according to the buzz, I was "fabulous." The photos don't do me justice, probably because I photograph like an overweight, wrinkled old hag, whereas in real life (or at least in my mind and mirror, I am none of those things.
People, let me tell you, life is worth living when you are swimming in the warm seas of admiration from gorgeous men who tell you things like "you are so working it, girl".

Yas, yas.

I was wearing the most glamorous gown in the history of me. My sweetie, Paul Gallo, of the fabulous house of Gallofornia, made a silver lamé halter dress with a tail, and fringes of kelp in silver and white and seafoam. I had on yards of faux pearls (also known as Christmas tree garlands) and an Art Nouveau crown of beads and mylar sequins (also Christmas tree garland). There were fake eyelashes with glitter, and glitter all over my exposed parts. There was way too much eye shadow in silver and teal and teal with glitter eye liner.

Opera length gloves. Silver shoes. (Sensible flats, of course, because it is just exhausting being fabulous.) I perched (ha, fish joke) around on things and flapped my tail.

I had a million photos taken with a million beautiful men. I took a tumble down a flight of stairs (bump, bump, bump on my butt) and allowed as how it was only my dignity which was damaged, whereas I have a bruise the size of a grapefruit on my ass. Hokie smokes, Bullwinkle, it hurts like a booger.

And most fabulous of all, I got to meet, shake hands with, talk briefly to and be photographed with the most fabulous Miss Yoko Ono.

She is tiny, tiny, tiny. She was wearing this fantastic straw hat, which I would have bet money was a Phillip Treacy, but which she swore was not. Her skin is absolute egg-shell porcelain, and let me tell you, she has not had any work done. She is just that delicate and flawless.

I said hello, as part of the Board contingent, and couldn't help myself... I had to swing right around and go back and gush admiration, devotion and outright awe for her works, art and philanthropic and then told her it was an unexpected honor to meet her. She looked me in the eyes, said thank you and shook my hand, and didn't make me feel like Wayne before Alice Cooper, sobbing "I'm not worthy", but in my heart, I felt that stupid. Didn't matter, I do adore the woman, and had enough presence of mind not to say "I never believed you broke up the Beatles, it was that skank Linda."

Probably would have made more of an impression, I imagine. (Ha, John Lennon joke.)

I promise that I'll post photos as I find/get them. And more stories as I make them up remember them.

No, really, it hurts. A migraine woke me up today at six. It felt like there was a band halfway around my head, just at eyebrow level. It was squeezing tighter and tighter, and trying to pop the top of my skull off.
Three Motrin, several icebags, one dark room and many hours of restless sleep later, I am awake and tentative about the state of my brain. The ice bags were a particular help: I put them over my eyes until I could feel the entire eyeball cooling from the inside and that seemed to help my head.

Too much information?

Well then, how about this: I am thankful today for the many friends I have on this amazing thing called the internet.

When I finally got out of bed, and turned on my computer, there were messages of care and warmth from friends I've never met: a woman in England who shares with me a love of cats and quilting and baseball, a message from New York, and another from California, and yet others from around Florida.

The essay I was going to write, the one about the empty places in my heart and at my table this year, that essay fell away, replaced by the love that spilled out of the laptop's screen.

Thank you one and all. May we find our hearts desires in this coming year. And may the fucking Miami Dolphins find their way out of the football equivalent of the cellar.

I'll be out of pocket for the rest of the weekend, as White Party Week is upon us. Don't worry, though, there will be photos and stories when I get back.

Took the surrogate daughters to see Rent yesterday. What happened to American musical theater when I wasn't looking?
OK, so Broadway has been gentrified and Disneyfied and all that, and Lion King and Beauty and the Beast are hits... But so is/was The Producers, and that was original. Avenue Q... ditto.

But Rent? I mean, aside from the fact that it's a lame ass grunginization of La Boheme, the book itself was awful. Act One drones on and on and on in what must surely be real time as it tells the story of one fateful Christmas Eve in a New York City that is no more real than the Disney version of Times Square.

AIDS, trannies, lesbians. Whoo-hoo. Was I supposed to be shocked or tittilated, or even interested? And the performance art piece at the end of the first act... help me out here, someone. The way it was played yesterday was as a really bad attempt at art by someone who seemed like an art-school dropout from Scarsdale. I thought the character, by other descriptions in the play, should have been played like Courtney Love: a desperate train wreck, but talented.

Anyway, we had fun on the ride home, when I taught Daughter2 the anal game. That's where you put the word anal in front of the car model: Anal Discovery, Anal Probe, Anal Lancer.... If you really want to get into the game, then you have to say what that is: an Anal Discovery is when you get the x-rays back and it's a coke bottle....

Hey. It was the high point of the afternoon, OK?