I got to be a bridesmaid again just a few years ago. At the ripe old age of 39, plucked from my post of matronly mother to magically metamorphose into the role of sprightly ingenue.

this is definitely not the dress though

The thing is, middle-aged, of which, alas, I’ve become a card-carrying member, just doesn’t seem to cut it in some roles. I mean, you reach a certain point in life and you start to look stupid wearing long hair, for example. Or bleaching it blonde, for that matter. And eventually, if you wear a mini-skirt or a bikini, you’re likely to be accused of trying to be your teen-aged daughter. This is kind of how I feel about mid-life bridesmaids. It just doesn’t work. You gotta know when to call it quits.

Nevertheless, that’s where I found myself. In the whirl of pre-matrimonial frenzy, negotiating dress sizes with the brutally dictatorial bridal shop employees, mean women who insist you are lying to them about your dress size, and insist you’re doomed to be wedged like a sausage into a too-tight dress if you don’t follow their advice.

Did you know that bridesmaid dresses standardly measure about five sizes up from your rack size? I thought it was bad buying bathing suits, which invariably size far larger than your street clothes. I suspect this bridesmaid sizing is intended to make the bride feel that much more superior. Place her up on the pedestal, the only time she’s gonna get to enjoy this position. So the bride is sporting her size 4 clingy little number, while the bridesmaids are ordering their dresses in a size 20. No doubt created by my favorite designer, Omar the Tentmaker (see below).

When the day finally arrived that my bridesmaid outfit was delivered, I was shocked. My two-pieced strapless floor-length number in steel gray sateen was practically shiny enough to see my reflection in.

Then came the time I’d dreaded: trying on this flattering bit of haute (or should I say “not”) couture. The moment of truth was humiliating. All I needed was a trunk and a swishy little tail and I’d have been placed on the endangered species list because I was hunted for my ivory tusks. The words “husky” and matronly kept swimming through my head. Husky is fine, if you’re a blue-eyed sled dog, but not so flattering if you’re a blue-eyed mom, even if you are a beast of burden. And matronly, well that’s a word that evokes its own connotations, none of which are too great. Suffice it to say, a red hot mama, I was not.

The whale-bone support structure in the strapless top pushed my breasts up to chin-level,  preventing my arms from resting flat at my sides. I wondered how I was going to negotiate eating and drinking at the reception with my newly-endowed cleavage getting in the way of my wineglass. Perhaps I’d be able to just rest my dinner plate right on top of my boobs, doing away with the need for a table. The small mercy for which I was thankful was that the dirndl style of the skirt hid all sorts of figure flaws. Of course, by hiding them, this amplified my amplitude, if you know what I mean. Add 18 wheels and this baby could’ve rolled on down the highway, ten-four good buddy.

yeah, this is not the dress, either

How sad, in middle age, when I have finally come to accept my imperfections with something close to good grace, that I then have them flouted at me by my being forced to parade around alongside a bevy of young, slender beauties, the lone matronly bridesmaid. Here I was, fully prepared to attend this wedding dressed in an age-appropriate, somewhat elegant dress, and instead, I was relegated to laughingstock status—looking much like a dingy gray London sky, in my shiny sateen gown. The wedding guests sniggering as I sashay down the aisle, “Good lord, who on earth is that? She must be someone’s sister, poor thing.”

The good news, though, is I think I’m out of relatives of marrying age now. I’m pretty sure the next wedding I’m invited to, I’ll be able to dress as me. Only problem is if I end up picking some hideous looking garment, I won’t have the bride to blame it on—I’ll have to take all the credit myself. 

Last summer I attended a writing conference attended by a few thousand women. This is the third year I’ve attended this conference, which is professional in every way, shape and form. I always return home with reams of information, great ideas, and insight into the publishing industry.

No, this is not from the conference

But I arrived at the meeting with a level of perplexity about women and conferences. Now I come from a guy-centric background. Grew up with three brothers. The semaphore of my childhood was a series of grunts and groans. Even now, though I’ve got two girls, I notice with intent what my husband and son are like. Boiled down to their essence, men are simple, they’re basic. Women are complex. Now I’m not here to determine which is preferable (although I’d be a traitor to my sex if I said anything other than us!), but rather put out an interesting observation in relation to my conference.

You see, many weeks before the conference—no, really months before the conference—female attendees started chattering on various online writing venues. Discussing the finer details of the destination, scouting out restaurants, shopping, transportation options, and such. Fair enough.

As the conference drew closer, the level of obsession grew to disturbing details. No longer satisfied with spread sheets of local merchants and what pharmacies were nearby, women started dispensing sage coping advice.

“Drink plenty of orange juice in the weeks leading up to the conference so that you’re in good health,” one would say.  To this another would counter with advice on what cold-prevention methods are most effective. And then another would suggest the cheapest place at which to purchase it. In bulk. Echinacea, Airborne, Cold Eeze, you name it, someone knew which preventive measures were sure to beef up your auto-immune system to combat the dread Conference Physical Drain.

Soon we were being cautioned against even more fearsome doom. One author offered up helpfully, “I’ve pasted some exercises you can do to prevent the blood clots (Deep Vein Thrombosis or DVT) that can occur in some people from sitting long periods of time.”

Now that's my kind of exercising!

I just thought I was going off for a few days of fun and education! I didn’t know I could well keel over from a blood clot unless I downloaded her exercises to my iPod!

There was the great jacket debate, in which a good handful of women argued over the degree of warmth they’d need for their travels from their jacket of choice. Someone actually wrote “Define jacket” when another woman suggested she pack a jacket. Um, back in my day, a jacket was a jacket! We need to clarify this?

Some more “who’d have thunk it?” tidbits from well-meaning yet perhaps a bit anal retentive attendees: 

°DON’T drink from the glasses in the bathroom. Find yourself a plastic cup 

°To cut down on trash that doesn’t get recycled, a better idea might be to take a tiny container of your own dish detergent. I’ve been doing that for years, & it comes in handy for other stuff that needs washed or if you want to use a glass for one thing, then need it to be clean again later for something else

Maybe it’s the three brothers’ influence on me, I don’t know. But I can’t help but cringe each time these women map out these bizarre high maintenance upkeep plans for the conference. Don’t forget your sweaters for chilly air conditioning! What’s the weather going to be like? Why does it matter? You’ll be indoors for 99% of the time! How will I deal with my computer? The same as the other several thousand people milling about the hotel do. It’ll be easy! Will there be WiFi? I don’t think a hotel exists in a large city that doesn’t have it at least in the lobby!). 

Find me a man–any man–who honestly would think twice about anything more than what time the meeting is scheduled for and is he prepared for it. I don’t know if a guy really gives more than a split second’s thought to whether he’s packed enough underwear. Meh, you can get more when you get there if you don’t have it. 

But thanks to these ever-vigilant ladies, I would be able to find everything I could possibly need in a city of 3/4 of a million people, where, no doubt, the concierge would have provided the same information to me in a moment’s time, were I to need it

It’s as if they need to be handheld through this world of professionalism. Now this is a group of very talented women, many hugely successful writers, many having come from previous careers as doctors and lawyers and the like. 

But what is it about this group that there is this crazy-obsessive need to freak out on just about ever aspect imaginable for this thing?

I guess I should just chalk it up to the complexities of being female. After all, I’m the first one to complain when my son doesn’t change his boxers the entire week we’re on vacation. But maybe there’s a happy medium in there?

I’m killing off polar bears, and I’m torn up about it.

Being an author poses certain ethical dilemmas to one who doesn’t want to bear (excuse the pun) the blame for the demise of anything, let alone a cute little polar bear. The only thing I want to be responsible for losing in this world is a good 20 pounds! But because of my profession, my ecological footprint ranks up there in foot size with Sasquatch, thanks to the myriad trees that have died on my behalf.

 The mere act of wanting to be a published author to begin with made me culpable. Writers regularly submit ream upon ream of paper manuscripts when soliciting agents and editors. Much of this paper never even gets read, let alone used. In my rejection heyday, my returned manuscripts collected like huge mounds of dirty laundry, all useless, unwanted paper.

Once I landed a book deal, the paper waste diminished, with edits conducted electronically. Finally I wasn’t accountable for the end of civilization. But then my book debuted. This book I’d waited forever to hold in my hands. Three hundred pages worth of dead trees. Times however many tens of thousands of books were printed.

Okay, I’m environmentally-minded. But hey, this was my book! I was willing to sacrifice a little for the cause: me. I mean, I wanted to sell as many books as humanly possible. The industry’s funny like that: if you don’t sell tons of books, they’ll never publish you again. So part of me was rooting for more dead trees, and by extension, dead polar bears.

And then I realized an interesting thing. Readers, inevitably, are recyclers. They read a book they love, they pass it on to their friends. And it turns out that my book gets passed around. A lot. A quick Google of my book title will pull up blog after blog of readers who have enjoyed it enough to pass it on.

I’m thrilled that people love the book enough to share. It’s quite an honor. But herein lies the dilemma. The more my book is shared, the less my book is bought. The less my book is bought, the less likely I am to sell another book. The less books I sell, the more dead my career is. So instead of dead polar bears, I am dealing with the more immediate problem of a dead profession. I need people to buy my book, polar bears be damned!

I wish I saw a solution to the problem. Amazon’s electronic reader, the Kindle, might approximate something headed in that direction. But as a reader, I can’t afford to spend that sort of money (at least until I sell more books!), plus I like the feel of a book in my hands and it’ll take some getting used to giving that up.

In the meantime, I really love that readers are recycling my books rather than throwing them in the trash, which would be indicative of a lousy book. But a little part of me can’t help but wish each time I hear how someone passed it on to her mom or her sister or her best friend that maybe someone would go buy it a little more.

Sorry, polar bears. Survival of the fittest.

. 

 I’m recycling a piece I wrote a few years ago. The sentiment still holds

 My 12-year old daughter has become the object of lust. Grown women are clamoring for her; I’m starting to get a little edgy about it. You see, my daughter is now officially of babysitting age, and moms in my neighborhood are trying to sink their claws into her early and often and it’s making me feel quite proprietary.

I can still taste the babysitter lust I developed when my children were little. Finding a good sitter was akin to finding the secret to longevity. Once I got hold of one, there was no way to wrench the secret from my lips. To find an energetic, clever, creative, helpful, intelligent, and responsible girl to help tend to your brood so that you could get needed respite from the demands of mommydom was crucial. But tell me, how many kids out there actually fulfill the terms of those qualifications? Believe me, not many.

At one point we were so desperate for sitters we went to the local Catholic Church to cherry pick from their teen youth group. We figured good Catholic girls (as opposed to priests) would make ideal sitters. One of the girls we landed from that attempt was Patti. Tall, sweet, kind, very involved with her church. Even traveled all the way to the big Pope-a-thon when Pope John Paul held a youth powwow in Colorado. We were impressed, even though she did say, “Wow, cool, dude” a bit much.

She was nice to our kids, she rinsed the dishes after they ate. Had the kids to bed on time. No disasters, no broken bones on her watch, nothing. And then she showed up one night for a babysitting job reeking of pot. And I don’t mean the kind you plant seeds in. Rather, the kind that comes with seeds.

Boy was I bummed. We’d had fun plans to meet friends for dinner; I hadn’t been out, kid-free, in ages. I assured myself that I was imagining things. After all, how could our goody-two-shoes Pope-visiting youth-group-attending babysitter be anything but on the up and up? But then my husband came downstairs from getting dressed and walked over to me asking, “What’s with the reefer smell in here?” This from same person whose sense of smell is so bad he’d probably not notice a rotting cadaver at his feet if he had to rely solely upon his olfactory system. Well, that was the end of Patti the Pothead. We showed her the door and stayed home that night.

Our next great sitter was Amanda. Cute as a button, senior in high school. Older, responsible. She’d be a great keeper of my kids on occasion, I reasoned.

She came one day to watch the kids so that I could run errands in peace. When I returned home I chatted a bit with her as she helped me unload my groceries. Turned out her dad was a Fed. FBI. Hated by the right wing militia movement for his perceived involvement in the Ruby Ridge showdown. Amanda and her siblings were actually under an FBI watch, I learned, as they’d had death threats made against them. That would the same Amanda with whom my childrens’ lives were entrusted. In my house with all the big windows so that psychopaths who wanted to kill her could take good aim. I couldn’t get rid of her fast enough that afternoon. And later that night at dinner, our kids told us that she’d had a few male friends visit that afternoon and made the kids sit alone in their bedrooms. Yikes. And she seemed so nice!

One sitter my kids adored was Eliza. She was so young she played with the kids as if their peer. At nine years of age, I guess one would expect that. But she was an ideal little mother’s helper who played with the kids while I cleaned the house and such. And then I found out one day that Eliza’s drug-addicted 18-year old stepbrother had a court order against him and was forbidden from going with 100 feet of Eliza or her family. Well, I was none too comforted with that bit of bad news, and couldn’t see risking my kids’ welfare with her after that.

Another sitter we hired only once was the sister of my son’s friend. We figured she was a sure-thing. Till we came home and found out she’d hit my son, just as she would have hit her brother if he’d made her mad.

Then there was Maura. A fourth-string referral I found when desperately dialing for sitters one day in the hopes of going out to dinner to celebrate my birthday. I’d called someone who gave me the name of the most wanted sitter in the neighborhood. When I called her number, her mom, tired of fielding sitter calls, gave me the number of another sitter. Her mom gave me the number of another sitter, whose mom gave me the number of Maura. You’d think I would have wondered why she was still available when every other sitter had been scooped up.

Nevertheless, Maura seemed pretty nice. We came home after dinner to a clean house. The kids were safely tucked in bed. But as my eyes adjusted to the dimmed lights in the house I noticed something. My house wasn’t just clean. It was immaculate. Eerily so. Even the dog bowl had been scrubbed clean of that slimy dog-saliva build-up that most dog bowls get. Wow, I thought. She sure is a clean thing. Lucky me: sitter and maid all wrapped into one.

As my husband drove her home, I came across the note. Now, taken at face value, it was just a sweet note. But something about it was a bit stalker-ish to me. It read something to the affect of “Dear Jenny, I hope you had the best birthday dinner ever. You are the nicest person in the world, and I love your kids and your dog, and your family, and your house. I would love to babysit for you all of the time. Please call me ANYTIME and I’ll be sure to come whenever you need me. EVER.”

Well, that was right around the time that movie “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” was playing in theaters, and psycho-babysitters were a scary concept to me. Suffice it to say, we said “sayonara” to Maura.

I won’t bore you with the details of the lovely sitter who we subsequently found out was on several anti-psychotic drugs.

We eventually settled on a few sitters who were golden.  Dream teens who played with our kids, read them stories, fixed them snacks and cleaned up after their meals. Picked up the toys when the kids had gone to bed. Essentially done more than I would have had I been home with the kids myself.

And you know what? I wouldn’t have disclosed their names to anyone unless my life depended on it. They were my hard-fought find, and I was damned if I would allow another mom access to my perfect sitter.

So now I sit, with an energetic, clever, creative, helpful, intelligent, and responsible (if I may be so humble) daughter. And I understand the desperation in the voices of these moms calling at all hours to track her down. Willing to fudge the truth about their little darlings, claiming they’re sweet and cooperative when in truth they’re wild banshees willing to put my daughter in a pot of boiling oil if the spirit moves them.

Claiming they’ll be available all night while they’re out if there’s a problem, all the while leaving their cell phones securely nestled in the glove compartment of their cars, turned off. Promising they only need my child for a short while, yet not arriving home till hours after the 10:30 p.m. stipulation I’d placed on the babysitting deal. Or promising a “mother’s helper” job watching six kids for two hours, which actually was watching 14 kids for three hours. With no extra pay.

So now that I’m on the other side of the fence, my babysitter lust has turned to babysitter police. I’m out to protect my daughter from the vagaries of desperate moms, because now I realize that there are a lot of moms who will do practically anything to get hold of a good sitter. ©2004 Jenny Gardiner

This is the last GCC author visit till May–finishing up with a highly-acclaimed historical romance, Scandal, by Carolyn Jewel. Love the cover–where is that guy when you need him?

Welcome, Carolyn! Tell me a little about your book.

CJ: Scandal is the story of two people with a mutual past they might not be able to overcome. It’s Regency era England and Lord Banallt is determined to marry the now widowed Sophie Evans. He has a few things yet to learn about himself and the woman he loves, and there’s a very real possibility he might not win her heart.

JG:  What got you writing in the genre in which you write.

CJ:  Romance is a genre in which anything is possible. Terrible, heartbreaking, side-splittingly funny or horrifying events might happen in the course of a romance. In the end, a couple finds a happy ending with each other. I started writing romance because love is a powerful emotion and provides a vast, nearly limitless framework within which to explore what makes humans human.

JG:  Favorite thing about being a writer?

CJ:  Writing.

JG:  Least favorite thing about being a writer?

CJ:  Writing.

JG:  What is the most interesting thing that’s happened to you since becoming a published author?

CJ:  My life is now so glamorous and exciting that it’s hard to choose. Would it be the vacations in Maui or maybe the winters in Gstad? Flying to Paris just because? Or all the famous people (Brangelina!) who clamor to meet me? My life is sadly quite uninteresting. When I’m not at work or with family or writing, I am either sleeping or thinking about sleeping.

JG:  What’s your favorite type of pie?

CJ:  Pumpkin pie.

Learn more about Scandal here.

            Thank goodness real science is back in vogue. Not one week into the Obama administration, and already scientific discoveries as far-reaching in import as Darwin’s theory of evolution are making headlines. Yes, indeed, word is out about the best-excuse-for-what-ails-you in a long, long time. And this time, it’s something I can really sink my teeth into. Or would that be something that causes me to sink my teeth into things?

from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Go Steelers!)

            Yep, I’m talking about the fatso virus. In case you’ve been hiding in a cave this week and missed the screaming headlines on Fox news and such, I’ll fill you in. There’s actually at least one scientist out there who claims to have evidence that a derivation of a very common virus, which spreads just like the common cold, somehow mutates in the systems of an unlucky chunk of the population causing them—er, uh, us—to get fatter, minus the joy of even having gorged our way into the jumbo-wear department! The idea is this: the virus somehow causes fat cells to replicate wildly out of control. It’s like cancerous blubber. Or blubberous cancer. And it’s all out of our hands (and into our ample derrieres, evidently).

Who’d have thunk? I for one am mercifully relieved to know that a virus—a stinking virus!—is undoubtedly what keeps me from being a lean, mean bikini-donning machine. And while I can’t appreciate what the insidious AD-36 adenovirus clearly has wrought upon me, at least I can appreciate that now I’ve got something on which to blame it when I reach for that dessert tonight. “What the heck? It’s not gonna do me any good to not eat it. After all, that virus is making those fat cells multiply regardless!”

Of course fat in America is a relative thing, what with the Super Size servings so rampant in this country. Since when did a helping of pasta actually equate to an entire one-pound box of Barilla spaghetti? Even little old Italian grandmothers whose reputations ride on overfeeding their families won’t pile on a plate that high.

But at your average chain restaurant these days, that’s what you get: a whole lotta food. Last month we went to a Brazilian churrascurria for my in-laws’ 50^th anniversary dinner. For them it was a little trip down memory lane, as they spent several years living in Rio de Janeiro. For us, it was the express bus ride on the binge-eaters’ superhighway. I would hazard a guess that while residing in Rio—home of that tall and tan and young and lovely girl from Ipanema—the in-laws didn’t gorge themselves quite like we all did at that all-you-can-eat mutton palace.

While bands of waiters wielding meat-laden skewers milled about our private dining area, at the ready to drop large chunks of various meats on our plates, guests helped themselves to a McMansion-sized salad-and-sides bar that could easily have fed a refugee camp for a month. I was sufficiently repulsed by the toddler who grabbed a baseball-sized marinated mozzarella ball from a serving bowl. After squishing it in his germ-infested palm for a minute, he reconsidered and returned it to its rightful place, for the next sucker to place it on his or her plate (and possibly contract the fat virus). That was at least 150 calories that wouldn’t go my way. But I made up for it, and soon my plate over-floweth(ed).

Oink, oink

As we returned with plates a-groaning to the dining room, a sort of Vincent Price-esque Gothic room with rich, vermillion walls (alas, reminiscent of the carnage that probably occur in the kitchen, what with all the animals they must butcher each night), I suddenly noticed the mirrors. Now I realize from a decorator’s standpoint, mirrors are a great idea—they create an expansive feeling even in a small room. But this room was overrun with ceiling-to-floor mirrors, something that doesn’t exactly lend itself to shoveling food into your mouth, when you know every time you look across the table you’ll see none other than yours truly stuffing your own pie-hole. But this place had a clever little trick: the mirrors were all slimming, placed at a strategic angle so as to easily remove 15 pounds from one’s appearance. So even while we were committing gluttony to the point of nausea, we’d catch glimpses of ourselves—our unusually thin selves—and feel practically justified in going for that third helping of black beans and rice. Because hey, we look so darned good in the mirror!

Nature is a fickle mistress, isn’t she? First she throws a vengeful little fatso virus at us, so that no matter what we do, we pork out. Then she enables us to foolishly trust that we look fine, because the enormous mirrors suspended at a strategic angle tell us we do, even if a cursory check downward argues differently.

But I have faith that a skinny virus must be just around the corner, and I’ll go searching for it—maybe not even wiping the handles of the shopping carts with wet wipes, so as to encourage catching it. Keep watching for me, I’ll be the one hanging out near the skinny people, just waiting for them to sneeze in my direction.