Nickname Games

"Mama, what's my nickname?" Janet asked this morning.

"Your nickname, or your last name?" I said.

"My nickname".

I had to think about it. I have several pet names for her - Janet-bo-Banet, Bunnyrabbit, L'il J, Baby Girl - none of which she responds to all that well. Her dad calls her "Zsa Zsa" sometimes. While I could not explain it to her at this point, I do see many common features between her and Zsa Zsa Gabor . . .

I go through the list.

"I don't like those nicknames," she laments. She is seriously close to tears as a result of my erroneous answers. It's 7:30 in the morning and we have breakfast to make, clothes to put on and schools and jobs waiting for us. We have less than an hour. A crying fit will make us all late. I smile and and ask her exactly what she would like to be called. I know it's coming - the "P" word.

"Uncle Mel calls me 'Princess'. I really like that."

I cringe inside, but outwardly, with that flight attendant perkiness I have perfected over the years, I smile at her. It's not that I don't want her treated like royalty - I want people to treat her well - it's just that I fear this growing sense of entitlement.

"Okay", I say. "Princess it is".

As she bounds out of bed, I start thinking about nicknames and my nasty habit of assigning nicknames to people, secretly. I don't know why I do it - I rarely share the nicknames with others and it's really pretty bitchy, but what the heck? Now, don't worry. I do not secretly assign nicknames to my friends or co-workers - I just give them to those who are relative strangers and who make what I consider to be a major social faux pas. Over the years, there have been many, but one in particular makes for a good story.

I was out with a friend one evening in a local restaurant. We were pretty well alone there, when a semi-rotund man walked in. I would not have noticed him, had he not waved to my friend and then confidently made his way over to our table. My friend did introductions, which he took to be an invitation to join us. Again, I called upon my inner flight attendant and smiled.

He sat down and started talking - about himself. It turned out, he was very important. He had a job and an office with a really big desk and everything, and he knew really important people. Wow. I couldn't believe my good luck in meeting this person.

My food arrived - tiramisu. I took a bite and tried to remember his name, which had, only moments before, been disclosed to me.

After ensuring that I knew just how important and indispensible he was, he proceeded to tell my friend that he was approached by a good female friend whose biological clock was ticking. She was at a loss, the poor bunny, as to what she could do to leave something of herself on this Earth. She apparently had no partner but wanted desperately to have a child. Would He please consider donating sperm so she could have a baby? (Remember, I had never met him before).

I had visions of porn magazines, a bathroom and a turkey baster. It was momentarily horrifying. I grew concerned about the prospect of choking on the bite of dessert that I had just taken.

Fortunately, that's when his new name popped into my head: The Sperminator. The horror subsided and was replaced by internal laughter, hidden securely by a polite facade. In fact, I was even able to nod approvingly at his ability to shake off social mores.

I have since gotten to know his name. Nevertheless, whenever I see him, the name his parents gave him is most definitely not what pops into my head.

Mother of the Year

A couple of weeks ago, it occured to me that I am rather negligent in exposing my children to anything other than "popular" culture. For example, when Daniel was a wee little guy, I tried hard to play classical music for him on the stereo, but inevitably replaced the Mozart with Nina Simone, Miles Davis or even some bluegrass, like Allison Krause. It made both Daniel and I quite happy. Janet and Daniel are also huge fans of The Clash, the Stones, the Beatles and The Who.

Nevertheless, I couldn't help but think that maybe I should be exposing them to something a little more "high brow". But alas, Name of Town Witheld has limited options - it's not a matter of purchasing tickets for the "Lord of the Dance", the National Ballet, the symphony or the opera. Rather, it's matter of heading out to what might be available. So, I kept my eye out for something on the "cultural" side that the kids might enjoy. Lo and behold, along came Juan Martin, a flamenco guitarist, with his compatriots Rosa and"El Tigre", the dancer.

The big night was Saturday. I invited Megan and Michael (not surprisingly, Daniel was willing to come only if Michael was there, too). For me, it was wildly entertaining. I love flamenco guitar music and really enjoy learning about different genres. I found Mr. Martin and his entourage to be quite wonderful entertainers.

Judging by the kids' reaction to it, however, I will not be nominated for "Mother of the Year" by any of them, anytime soon.

I think that this compared only to lentil soup in terms of "kid torture". Daniel and Michael were troopers and, at least, seemed to enjoy the dancer. Janet, on the other hand, declared (loudly) about ten seconds into the show that, "I don't like this, Mommy". When told to sit down and be quiet, she glared at me and in her ever-so-dramatic style, stuck her fingers in her ears. I'm sure that those sitting around us wondered what the heck I was doing there.

At one point, Janet noticed that the singer was wearing a particularly pained expression.

"Why is her face like that?" she demanded (again, loudly).

Again, I told her that she had to be quiet.

During the second act, Janet fell asleep.

The boys just sighed and asked, repeatedly, when we could go.

I felt bad. The kids were miserable. It was not entertaining for them. They're young and they like to make their own fun. While I think that exposing our kids to culture of many kinds is important, I've learned a lesson about respecting the need for kids to just have fun and not have "culture" foisted upon them.

Birthday Wishes

A good friend wrote today and, among other things, asked me what I did to celebrate my birthday this year. It made me pause and think about the ways I have celebrated over the last few years.

When I was a kid, I always wanted a pool party. Unfortunately, we did not live in California where everyone had pools (I was inspired by various 1970s television shows depicting tanned little bodies eating cake and floating around a pool on air mattresses). Alas, we did not have a pool, I did not have a tan and at the time, municipal pools did not offer such luxuries. By the time I was 18, I had kissed the dream of the pool party firmly good-bye and moved on to accept dinner, or possibly the more upscale dinner theatre, as the standard fare.


As I got older, I decided that birthdays are largely overrated. If, after the age of 12, you depend on someone else to make them special, you are bound to be bitterly disappointed. In many ways, they are second only to that most absurd of occasions, Valentine's Day. In addition to being honest with key present buyers about what it is that I truly want for a present, I made a commitment to buy a present for myself each year. It is rare that I am unhappy with the results. When I turned 30, I took myself to a Rolling Stones concert to mark the occasion. At 32, I went to Las Vegas. This year, I went to see Ian Tyson at the East Longview Hall (it was utterly awesome, by the way).

Although I don't really have expectations of anyone else, I always appreciate gestures and gifts of any kind, particularly, "Barbie" cakes (another childhood fantasy) and the small surprise dinner party held at my own home, to mark the day when I turned 36. This, in fact, surprised me completely ("Honey, why is Sandy standing in our driveway with a plate of sushi?" "Why is Cayley at the door with a cake?") I also look forward to the greetings I get, now primarily by electronic mail, from old friends, and the time that my family takes to tell me that they're thinking of me. Belated wishes and gifts are also gratefully accepted - why not celebrate for two weeks?

I never got around to the fantasy pool party, and even though I was getting to the stage in life where talking about it was somewhat embarrassing (if not entirely inappropriate) it remained on my life's "to do" list. Imagine, then, my utter delight when the opportunity for my very own pool party, complete with water slides, pizza, little kids and cake, arose on the weekend of my 40th birthday.


It didn't start out as a birthday celebration. My goal was to wean Janet and, given that there has never been much room to negotiate with her, even as a baby, I had to leave town to do it. I took Daniel with me so that her dad could have the temper tantrums that were bound to ensue all to himself. It just so happened that the weaning fell on the weekend of my 40th birthday. My sister suggested that we head to a pool in Calgary, in the name of family fun. Daniel and I spent the day screaming down water slides and afterwards, gobbled down pizza. Still, the fact that it was my 40th birthday had slipped my mind. I kept thinking about poor Janet, missing her mommy.

Then Daniel, the sweetest little guy in the whole world, wished me a happy birthday asked me if I liked my "party". It was at that moment that I realized I had finally had my pool party.

What more could you want? Water, thrills, pizza and a guy who (at least at the time) worships the ground upon which you walk. It was perfect.

More Cover Stories

This weekend I am returning to the prairies to see Ian Tyson's annual concert in Longview, Alberta. I recall the days when I was 5 or 6, listening to Great Speckled Bird, played regularly downstairs on dad's stereo and I so wanted my mother to grow out her hair and look just like Sylvia!

I can hardly wait. Ian Tyson is an icon. A prolific songwriter, his songs are the sound of the prairies and the anthems of the ranchers and farmers who are the backbone of southern Alberta. Just have a listen to Cowboyology, and you'll see what I mean. His earlier work, like Four Strong Winds and You Were on my Mind are timeless and familiar. In me, they evoke that feeling of young adulthood that all is possible: adventure, love and your very life spreads itself out in front of you and really starts to happen to you. As cliche as it may be, there is no song that I love more than Someday Soon. It's a song about young love and old wisdom and it's been covered very beautifully by a number of artists. One of favourites, though, besides Ian's own versions of it, is the cover that Judy Collins did. In many ways, it became "her" song and here she is performing it in 1969. Enjoy.

In Praise of the Screw Top

Although my home furnishings and second vehicle may suggest otherwise, I am in many respects, a snob. Not a snob like someone who comes from money (I do not), but a typical bourgeoise snob.

I am snobby about wine or, more particularly, the way it is packaged. I have strong beliefs about it. Good wine comes in glass bottle, as opposed to a shiny silver bag inside a box with a plastic "tap". Good wine does not come in a "magnum" bottle and, barring that which comes from a certain region in France, does not contain millions of tiny bubbles. People over the age of nineteen do not drink wine that bears a striking resemblance to cream soda in both colour and taste, and certainly, they do not drink anything that is, for lack of a better word, brewed, by Andres. Wines with a German name are to be approached with caution. Without doubt, however, the most notorious sign of what is, at best, a mediocre wine is the screw top.

Or is it?

Once reserved for fine vintages like "Eagle Ridge" ($2.50 for a litre bottle and guaranteed to stain your lips indigo blue for at least two weeks) and that "impress-your-guy-with-your-sophistication" college favourite, Kressman's, the screw top now found atop decent wines in liquor stores all over this great nation. As little as three years ago, I would have thought that just considering wine in a screw top bottle to be a strong indication that I had not done very well in life. Fast forward to 2007 and my attitude has changed completely- the screw top is finally legitimate and I am most definitely a convert.

Since first experiencing a good screw top wine (Oyster Bay Chardonnay, from New Zealand), I've enjoyed a number of other wines packaged this way. Through it all, I've learned that the screw top offers many advantages over the traditional cork top. For one thing, there's no need to dig around in your over-stuffed utensil drawer for a corkscrew and cut your fingers on a paring knife. There are no broken corks, and consequently, no need to drink the whole bottle of wine "so it doesn't go bad". There are no leaking corks. There is no risk that the cork will crumble into the wine, thereby eliminating the need to strain your guests' wine through a flour sifter or, alternatively, warn them that they should clench their teeth to strain out the bits. Perhaps most notably, the screw top is much easier to open, especially if you've already had a few.

Sure, there is still lots of bad wine that is packaged this way. But based on the great wine I've had lately, I must say, "long live the screw top!"

Innocence Lost

On a bright winter morning in 1982, my hometown, then a place of about 4000 people, lost its innocence. A 16-year old girl had gone missing the night before, from the convenience store where she worked on Saturday evenings. It was suspicious. Her purse and coat were left there, the front door was unlocked and the back door, too.

Everyone waited nervously that morning for any news of Laurie. I know that we all expected the worst, but no one could say it. We couldn’t bear to let ourselves think that it was anything but some bizarre misunderstanding. Yet, we all knew that earlier that winter, a woman had gone missing from the highway, about a mile from another small town in the area. Her car was found out of gas, her purse on the seat with the wallet full of money and untouched. They found her body a few days later in a farmer’s field.

The news came later that morning. The radio announcer said that they found Laurie. She was on a lonely gravel road, dead. In the restaurant where I worked, where I had served coffee and toast to Laurie the morning before, and where, unknown to me at the time, I now served breakfast to her two killers and their wives and children, my friends and I cried. And then our town panicked.

The change in our attitude towards each other and our surroundings manifested itself immediately. People suspected their friends and neighbours. Lights in our rearview mirror at night on country roads became threats, rather than a potential meeting with friends. Locks were installed and used on doors that had not ever been locked. We called people at our intended destinations before we went out, and followed the curfews imposed by our parents religiously. Strangers were not welcomed, but rather, viewed with great suspicion. We were guarded and defensive and most definitely hypervigilant.

It wasn’t long before the killers were caught, tried and sent off to prison. Everyone knew them and while they were grubby and bit odd, we would not have considered them capable of murder in a million years. Despite this, my town never reclaimed its innocence and I never regained the sense of security that I had felt right up to the moment when it was reported that Laurie had been found. The sense of relief that came when the police solved the case and made the arrests was overshadowed by the knowledge that the unthinkable had happened in our little prairie town, and that the two murders had been planned and committed by people that we all knew and, to a certain extent, trusted. Worse, we now had to acknowledge that these kinds of things horrors could happen again, in our town, where we lived, to us. . . We had entered the big city leagues, where personal safety is something that you might have to work at, and where you think twice about trusting neighbours and, most certainly, even the best-intentioned strangers.

Monsters Beware! Confidence has been "Inspired"

Although it is reported that the monster continues to lurk in our basement, there was a recent breakthrough of confidence by the troops, thanks to the generosity of a local proprietor who read about our plight and armed the troops with a secret weapon: Fear Fighter Spray.

It works rather well and I must say that I am a bit envious, having had to endure so many years fighting my fear of vampires with no arsenal at all. Daniel, Michael, Janet and sometimes Shiri, will now enter the basement, albeit carefully and after some planning, and spend time there, gathering what they need (usually toys). They feel safe so long as they have the spray. They need not take the walkie-talkies on each jaunt and usually do not require the Tiki. I have no idea how anyone could have survived childhood without this amazing product!

Moreover, the spray seems to have inspired Daniel and Michael to come up with new strategies and weapons for repelling the monster. With McGyver-like ingenuity, the boys have fashioned some sort of protector/shield from a knitted blanket, string, tin cans and that old standard, duct tape. I'm not sure how it works, but it, too, seems to keep that monster at bay. I gather that the the blanket operates like some type of shield, while the attached cans rattle on the floor and warn the monster to stay out of the boys' territory. Sometimes they take it downstairs, wearing it like a superhero cape. Other times, they drop it over the railing, so it hits the bottom of the basement stairs with a loud bang. They then proceed into the room or rooms in the basement that they need to enter, confident that the monster will not bother them.


I am hopeful that in time, the monster will just get bored and move away to scare some other children. In the meantime, I must say that I am thankful for the imaginations of children and those who come up with ways to harness the good parts.

Cover Stories

There's a Sunday morning show on our local CBC radio that I love. Among other things, just before 9:00 a.m., the host has a game. He plays the cover of a song and contestants have to call in and tell him the name of the song and the artist who first recorded it. If you're lucky and you have fast dialing fingers, you can win a prize.

Some covers have become such classics themselves that it's hard to believe they were ever recorded by anyone else, like George Thorogood's version of Bad to the Bone. Others, like Nina Simone's version of Here Comes the Sun or the Dixie Chicks' cover of Landslide, are so well done that they earn the same appreciation that the original artist warranted, or maybe more.

There are, however, some songs that just shouldn't be covered and similarly, there are artists who just shouldn't cover certain songs. Take Madonna's cover of American Pie, for example. She is a great entertainer and very talented, but she's not the salt-of-the-Earth folk artist that Don MacLean is, and so it sounded a bit disingenuous coming from her. I also heard a cover recently of Carly Simon's You're so Vain. I wondered, how can she sing "You're so vain. I bet you think this song is about you . . ."? Despite the endless speculations, no one but Carly and some guy that bought the privilege of knowing who the song is about at a charity auction, and, possibly, Mick Jagger, who sang backup vocals on the original recording, knows who this intensely vain person is.

What really got me thinking about covers, though, was this video, which was also posted on Megan's blog. Apparently, she and I share a love of all things "Fleetwood Mac" and I finally "get" why she calls her blog "Reflections in the Snow-Covered Hills. The video is Carrie Underwood, past American Idol winner, performing Go Your Own Way at the "Fashion Awards" (that, in and of itself, could be the subject of another rant).

I have no objection to a cover of this classic tune (one of my favourite songs, by the way), and I think that Carrie Underwood has a great voice and significant talent. That said, Lindsey Buckingham (who, at 58-years of age as of yesterday, is old enough to be Carrie's grandfather) wrote it for Stevie Nicks, and that's part of what makes it great. It's a love song and it's between them. So, what on Earth is he doing on stage with Carrie Underwood? Moreover, how could she, at 24-years of age, be going anywhere but her own way?

Carrie, Lindsey: This is just plain poor judgment. Smarten up.

Self Help for those who Strive to be Deferential

There were women in law school who drove me nuts because of the personality change that they underwent whenever they were in the presence of males. They didn't go from grunge rocker to sex kitten, or anything like that. They simply got dumb. Yes, dumb.

One of the things that I have a habit of doing, just for my own benefit, of course, is nicknaming people. I nicknamed these women the "Deferential Babes". When I say they got dumb, I mean it. They could go from an intense debate about tort liability for environmental catastrophes to a valley-girl-esque giggle-fest in ten seconds flat. In conversations with the men, they never argued (even though we were in law school and, well, debate is a big part of it). On the contrary, they typically complimented the men ("That's a really good point, Skippy, I never thought of that") while smiling brightly and laughing lightly, in a vacuous sort of way. In fact, it seemed that they steered pretty clear of controversial (ie. unladylike) topics altogether when in the presence of the stronger, smarter sex.

The irony is that these gals did all right. Some are still practicing, and most of them married well. They married the smart, strong guys who became partners in big, strong firms. They drive nice luxury cars and for many, work is optional. In a way, I envy them. Struggle as I did, I never could seem to master that key mix of intellect and twittiness, so I guess I could never really be part of their world. Then, in my early forties, this fabulous instructional video came out. If only I had known the secret back then. . .