Langer Loksh

Put the Gun Down and Nobody Gets Hurt!

Didn't mean to scare you with that gun over there. I'm taking part in a little blogging experiment called National Blog Posting Month. Blogebrity Mrs. Kennedy kicked it off just to get everybody's blog juices flowing. I have to post every day for the month of November. There are random prize drawings for the participants, but the point is to write more. I often don't post if I can't think of anything super brilliant, and that's really not the point of the blog, now, is it. So forgive me if I get deadly boring by day three.

I'm Drawing the Line at Bratz

The authors of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes presented a talk at the library as part of the Concord Festival of Authors. When I arrived, I saw some ruby-slipper sugar cookies left over from the previous day's Wizard of Oz party (where Gregory Maguire signed my old copy of Wicked and asked Summer, who was wearing her Dorothy costume, "Where did you ever find that dress?" She replied earnestly, "T.J. Maxx!"). I thought a fancy red high-heeled shoe was a weird cookie to have at a talk about the over-girly-girl-ization of our kids. I was wrong.

I went to the talk because, as you know if you read me regularly, I'm conflicted about the whole Disney Princess thing. I never played with dolls or watched any Disney movies when I was a kid--I thought they were cheesey. Now, the DPs are the most inescapable force on the planet, with the possible exception of Microsoft Internet Explorer, and there isn't a toy or kid-related hygiene product you can name that is not available with a smiling Belle, Sleeping Beauty, or Jasmine stamped on it. Summer loves every single one of them. We have plastic bowls, foaming hand soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, a swimsuit, a nightgown, Chap-Stick--and lets not even talk about the Pull-Ups. I never want the kids to have characters on their sneakers, jackets, or other big ticket items--though Jeff did bring home a DP bicycle from Wal-Mart. We watch the movies all the time and let me tell you, Cinderella is not the worst role model Summer could choose. But we know families who have banned the DPs from their houses. I wondered: is it so bad to have the DPs around? Why am I so ambivalent about them myself?

For Packaging Girlhood, the authors, two psychology professors, looked at toys, television shows and movies, magazines, music, and clothes targeted at girls from preschool to high school. They found a lot of pink and a lot of fake choice. Marketers pretend that being a girl is about choices, but the choices are not sports, goth culture, and aerospace engineering, the choices are, do you want these sneakers in pink or purple, or this lip gloss in strawberry or orange cream? The authors found that almost all the characters on cereal boxes are boys. In books and in movies, girls get makeovers while boys go on journeys. The sole exception: The Wizard of Oz. Bring on the sugar cookies! Even great characters like Dora the Explorer, who has a map and a backpack and goes on adventures, becomes just another hispanic domestic when her likeness is licensed--the toys are all plastic kitchens and hairdo sets. Since when does Dora cook or style her hair?

As for the DPs specifically, the profs (whose names are Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown) pointed out that the princesses have no mothers (true! Belle, Cinderella, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Ariel--where are the moms? Sleeping Beauty has a mom with no name. Only Mulan has a mom with a name.) or female friends. Women in Disney movies are only powerful if they are evil or sex themselves up or use magic. Lamb and Brown showedlots of slides, including one of Disney Princess Pez dispensers--the only Pez in history to have a bust instead of just a head. Can we get the Pez without the boobs, please?

But the writers don't advocate banning the DPs. (Phew!) They say it's OK to have them in the house; we just have to talk about it. I should be pointing out to Summer that the DPs are not like any real girls we know--girls with moms and girl friends. Girls who sing in the choir like Shaina. Girls who join the Peace Corps like Julia. Girls who dive off ships and study lobsters in a lab like Kerry, or who sailed an icebreaker to Antarctica like Alissa. Girls who climbed Mt. Monadnock when they were only four years old, like Summer. Let the Disney Princesses in, but let Summer know that there are a lot more ways to be a girl. The problem is not the Disney Princesses. The problem is the lack of any other image in the popular culture.

Well, there is another image, and it is the slut. Bratz dolls are Barbie's big competition these days, and they make blonde, big-breasted, high-heeled Barbie look like Mother Teresa. They dress like hookers and though they are more multi-cultural than Barbie, they will not be allowed in this house. Lamb and Brown say the same thing about Bratz that they did about the DPs--let her have the Bratz lunch box, but talk about how girls don't really look like that. Sorry. Just looking at a picture of a Bratz doll online makes me nervous that I'm going to be caught in an Internet child porn sting. There will be no Bratz here, oh no no no.

Here are a couple of sites to check out if you are concerned about the way corporate America is trying to turn your daughter into a shopping-crazed bimbo--or, for that matter,  your son into a violent misogynist: Campaign for a Commerical Free Childhood and Common Sense Media.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go book my tickets to Orlando.

Will One of You Please Move to California

so that I have someone to talk to on the phone when I am awake at 11:56 p.m., facing a pile of laundry up to my eyebrows?

Tell All Your Friends

Now it's even easier to read your favorite blog. My new, user-friendly Web address is longnoodle.com. The langerloksh address still works, too.

Multiple Personalities

When we got home from school, Charlie stood at the snack cabinet and pulled snacks out. I offered him bowls of the snacks--Clifford Crunch cereal, Buccaner Joe's Unburied Treasure (Trader Joe's Pirate Booty), Archer Farms Creme Fraiche and Green Onion waffle chips. Charlie just shook his head, stomped his feet, and screamed. Summer whined over everything. "I wanted to play in that area," she had said, referring to a strip of grass in the school parking lot. I explained, "We have to go home, Priscilla's coming to do speech with Charlie." I added, "We have grass and dry leaves in our yard." Not the right kind, apparently. "I don't want to be bored!" she cried, throwing in a bonus "I'm cold!"

Two hours later we were trick-or-treating in downtown Maynard. The cops blocked the streets and hundreds of small kids in costumes--really great costumes--collected candy from all the shop owners. "Trick or treat!" Summer called cheerfully to each adult holding a plastic cauldron of candy. "Thank you!" she said with a wave, and then skipped on to the next store, dropping a Tootsie Roll or mini Crunch bar into her own jack-o-lantern bucket. Charlie sat in the stroller, cheerfully sucking an orange lollipop from the bank. He didn't make a sound for an hour. "It's so weird!" I said to Jeff about the body-snatchers-like transformation from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. "It's like I have four children!" His reply: "That's OK, I've got two wives."

Not to mention four Dorothys--who all wore the aforementioned "ordinary" Target ruby shoes; sorry I didn't get them into the frame.

I Guess You Had to Be There

My copy of The Rejection Collection arrived from Amazon. I waited a few days until I had a good quiet moment to sit down and open it up. Charlie was napping and Summer was watching Peter Pan. I told myself that I would only read, say, five cartoons, to stretch out the pleasure, to savor the book much as I did with, for example, Garfield Makes it Big, in 1983.

This is how far I got: one cartoon. I looked at one cartoon. No caption, just a picture of a mom and son standing on a street. The mom has a lit cigarette in one hand at eye level with the son, and the son has an eye patch on.

Again with the laughing. Painful, painful laughing, with weepy eyes and abdominal strain worse than my yoga teacher's most evil Wednesday night fantasies. I don't know if it had anything to do with the fact that every day I enter a sumo contest with a toddler, an eye patch, and lots of surgical tape. I'm just sorry I don't have a magnet large enough to stick a hardcover book to my fridge.

I actually got two belly laughs today, because earlier this afternoon I was in a doctor's office where I read a Q&A with Tina Fey in an old Newsweek. Tina Fey recalled her favorite Alec Baldwin performance on SNL. In the sketch, Alec Baldwin played an actor on a hospital soap opera in which everyone mispronounced all the medical terms: "I'm glad to tell you, your tumor is benig." Which reminds me of the only scene in State and Main that made me laugh. Alec Baldwin flips a car, gets out, and says, "So that happened." See here I am laughing again. What is wrong with me? (I do realize, of course, that none of this sounds remotely funny in blog form.)

Halloween Preview

Summer wanted to be Dorothy for Halloween, and we found her a costume at T.J. Maxx. I decided Charlie would be one of the wicked witch's winged monkeys. I bought an organ-grinder monkey costume on eBay. Then I had another idea. Charlie could be a munchkin--but not a Wizard of Oz munchkin, a Dunkin' Donuts munchkin. I wonder how many people would get it? But it was too late; the monkey costume arrived. It is handmade and fabulous.

I bought some blue fairy wings at the toy store. "What are those wings for?" Summer asked. "Charlie's costume," I answered. "I don't know about that," said Summer. This was on a Friday morning. On Friday night Summer asked to speak privately with me in the kitchen. "I'm still not sure about those wings," she said. By Sunday night she was in tears. "He's going to persuade my beauty!" she complained in her made-up, drama-queen language. "No one's going to look at me!"

Here's a sneak peek:

The Rejection Collection

Back when I was a glamourous full-time magazine staffer, I shared a subscription to Esquire with another writer. A straight woman and a gay man, each too cheap to fork over an entire $11. This is certainly what the Esquire advertisers have in mind. One time they listed the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, in which I have competed more than once, in the magazine's calendar: "Boring and pretentious?"

That phrase might come to mind when you hear that a book of rejected New Yorker cartoons has been published. I saw some samples in the Globe and I laughed until I felt my stomach would surely explode and I could not breathe, could not croak out my husband's one-syllable name. Summer, who was sitting with me at the kitchen table, started laughing just because I was so out of control. Seeing the standard-looking cartoons with slightly naughtier captions was like overhearing Charlie Brown discussing Rogaine with Linus.

From the living room Jeff recognized the gasping from some time back in the Pleistocene era when we used to laugh that hard on a regular basis. Like the time he had a big long scab on his ankle from getting concrete in his work boots and I said it was green, and he said it wasn't, and then one day the scab fell off and he picked it up and looked at it and thought, "She was right, it is green," and he put it in his pocket to bring home and show me, but when he got home he couldn't find it.

Jeff read the cartoons too and laughed almost as hard as I did. Call us boring and pretentious, but a drawing of a hairy, half-naked waiter serving a "bottomless cup of coffee" is just the kind of thing we'd magnet onto our fridge.

Circle of Crooked Smiles

So This is Love

"If you're staying on Disney property, you can reserve a character meal three months in advance starting from the day you're supposed to arrive, and you can reserve it any time that week, but if you're not staying on Disney property, say you arrive on a Monday and you want to have dinner on Friday--" I can't even finish this quote because I can't remember what the hell my friend Maureen was trying to tell me. It sounded complicated.

According to the Planning Strategy Calculator for Disney Reservations, I was supposed to call six months prior to my trip if I wanted "Cindy's," which is what those adults who are, for some reason, really into Disney stuff, call Cinderella's Royal Table, clearly the "get" of the character meal universe. I was supposed to call at exactly 7:00 a.m. when the phones open, and speak in a secret code that only Summer and people like her would understand. I should have had Summer make the phone call, actually.

Without holding out much hope I dialed Disney Dining. I waited ten minutes on hold and got cut off, and then tried again, waited eight minutes, and, Jiminy Cricket, we've got a table for four at Cindy's on January 31. Cindy was right. The dream that you wish for really does come true.