Lords a-leapin' in the rain

Only three here, not ten, but the green anole lizards leaping around the plants on the patio look like courtly lords in fine green hosiery and velvet breeches. They are very excited, in a reserved and elegant way, that it is sprinkling. We have been without rain for a long time, and the lizards, like fishermen, know this will be a good time to catch lunch.

I rescued the gecko collage box from the patio before the rain. Sprayed another coat of clear acrylic finish on it early this morning. With the addition of the gray plastic mesh window screening, it is complete. Photos and details of the piece in progress are posted on MamaCollages.



The expression, "leaping lizards," seems to come from the old comic strip my dad called Little Orphink Annie . On Sundays when visiting grandparents in Pierce, or McCook, Dad could sometimes be persuaded to read and interpret the comics in the Omaha Weird Herald. Little Orphan Annie, Bringing Up Father, Katzenjammer Kids, Prince Valiant, Pogo, Dick Tracy, and Li'l Abner didn't speak to me in 1960. The main impacts of these sessions were:

1. Learning the days of the week was easier when only the Sunday comics had colored ink.

2. "Bringing Up Father" was really known as "Maggie and Jiggs." Jiggs helped me learn about spats. I suspected that Jiggs sat in my grandma's rocking chair with his foot up on her hassock sometimes and talked on her telephone. Grandma sat that way "with her phlebitis," and Jiggs sat that way "with his gout." For all I knew Gout and Phlebitis could have been the names of invisible lapdogs. And, in fact, if I ever have three pomeranians, I will name them Spats, Gout, and Phlebitis.


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Throwing rice NOT

That's exactly how I feel about weddings! I'm a MOBO, so I won't have much say when Cupid shoots with accuracy. I'm sending copies of Dan Piraro's cartoon to my sons with this note: It's the marriage that matters, not the princess-for-a-day-wedding!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Cam Phone Spam Scram Gravy Ain't Wavy

Here in Plano voter interest in the municipal election is up one mild eyebrow twitch above the usual total apathy. We have a, gasp, openly gay candidate for city council. We have a $490 million school bond proposal when many families are cutting their driving and eating lots more beans.

Speaking of gas, the candidates have ALL figured out how to use automated annoying phone calls. I was home this afternoon because of school conference day, and the phone rang every five minutes with a robo-candidate urging me to vote.

Somehow, I got off the campaign track into a discussion about gravy. Growing up, it was a given that during any meal served with gravy someone would remark, "Scram gravy ain't wavy." What did it mean?

Googling "scram gravy" I learned that the expression probably derived from an old-timey newspaper comic about a fireman called "Smokey Stover". If you happen to remember anything from "Smokey Stover" about Molly freezing on the trolley*, PLEASE leave a comment! Dad and I have been as far up and down the sidewalk of Memory Lane as he can go pushing his walker, and I barely remember the comic in the Omaha Weird Herald.

As a kid in the Sixties, I believed that "scram gravy ain't wavy" was a jab at our neighbors who made lumpy gravy with flour and milk instead of using the inherently superior smooth cornstarch recipe seasoned with brown sauce. I have to laugh, but we kids must have had playground taunts like, "my mom's gravy is smoother than your mom's gravy!" It was an era of Meat and Potatoes.

Fritzi's Gravy

Yield: 2 cups


2 Tbsp fat drippings
2 cups hot water drained off the boiled potatoes you are going to mash
2 Tbsp Argo® Corn Starch
1/4 cup cold water
1 tsp Gravy Master or other brown sauce
Salt and pepper to taste

Remove all but 2 tablespoons fat drippings from roasting pan. Stir in hot water. Cook over medium heat, stirring to loosen browned bits. Remove from heat.


Put corn starch and water in a small jar with a tight lid, then shake until smooth; stir into pan. Add seasonings. Stirring constantly, bring to a boil over medium heat and boil 1 minute.

*Dad is probably thinking of Walt Kelly's Christmas classic:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley
Swaller dollar cauliflower Alleygaroo!
Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola Boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Zits Pierce Caterpillar

My world is small. My students are small. Our discoveries and surprises are pretty big, especially with a digital macro camera setting. It's amazing how much life is going on inside the fence of a little preschool playground.

This caterpillar reminds me of Pierce, the much-punctured friend of Jeremy in the comic strip Zits. I don't know if it is an adolescent version of the stinging puss/asp/southern flannel moth caterpillar we found last fall. Pretty sure "Stinging Flannel Moths" would be a good name for a garage band, though.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Hoopoe

Privilege and responsibility are the dual characteristics of citizenship. We lucky American citizens have the privilege of voting for our officials, and the responsibility to be informed voters. On this day of the Texas primary election, I had a heavy burden and great joy besides attending the post-election precinct convention. More on that note later. For now I'm talking about the hotly contested goat and troll auditions for the spring music festival.

My little sister, the choral director, will never believe it. I evaluated music auditions! She used to stand beside me in the pew of the United Church of Christ (not the same congregation as Senator Obama), and suggest tactfully that I didn't need to sing the hymn "if I didn't want to". I could "just read the words silently", she advised in a whisper. My little brother would support her suggestions with his most forceful aspect, and it is mighty tough to exert influence wearing a pale blue polyester suit with wide lapels and a navy and orange floral necktie.

We won't even discuss how I went to CVS to buy a new toothbrush, and the Bee Gees' "Stayin Alive" was playing on the piped-in Muzak. The Bee Gees sang higher than any of the preschool kids trying out for the Wee Billy Goat. An old married couple, okay, over fifty, was rocking out in the greeting card aisle.

Feel the city breakin' and ev'rybody shakin'and we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ooh, hoo, hoo, hoop, Stayin' Alive.

"Did you ever hear of a hoopoe?," my lead teacher asked. We are talking about birds, not bad disco haircuts. The hoopoe is actually an Old World bird with a bad disco haircut; cute in it's own way, but probably not critical for Texas preschoolers to learn. It says its name, oop-oop-ooping along.

The music festival troll has a big nose and a club. This is all starting to sound familiar. Few children are brave enough to even audition for the part. I want to reach across the divide between my inflated imperial status as auditioner to their young hearts as auditionees to tell them THE TROLL IS THE ROLE TO GO FOR! Few moments in my own childhood were as deliciously nasty and satisfying as playing Cinderella's stepmom in a neighborhood basement production. Well, maybe that time when I was two years old and went totally berserko running up and down the aisles of Leon's Food Mart with my exasperated very pregnant mom in slow pursuit.

Trolls and goats and hoopoes, oh my! Bad disco suits and grocery store hoots... My little brother's very first LP was the Snoopy vs. The Red Baron album of the Royal Guardsmen. The strange comedy cover album by a sextet from Florida included the song that haunted my afternoon. The "Alley Oop" words and music are by Dallas Frazier, 1960, based on the comic strip.

There's a man in the funny papers we all know

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

He lived way back a long time ago

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

Well he don't eat nothin' but bearcat stew

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

Oh well this cat's name is a-Alley Oop

Alley Oop Oop, Oop Oop Oop

Now I will listen to some election news, oop oop!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

The Green Night Heron, masked superhero

The eight year old boy didn't really want to enlarge his sketch of the gray-green bird for the painting project, but it was his best bird sketch in the little drawing pad. He had caught the bird's posture so well in his initial analysis. This bird wasn't brightly colored, and it wasn't going to be quick and simple. We looked at the 8x10" magazine photo together.

"You know what I like about this bird?," I asked him. "He's wearing a mask. He's carefully watching and waiting, noticing everything. See that piercing stare? He's standing totally still, but he can catch his prey in a flash! When I lived in Oklahoma, I used to see these little herons around the creek by my house. They weren't big, but they were so disciplined, like a karate master. They stood so still and were so camouflaged they could surprise any enemy. I had to be really alert to notice them on my walks. Look at the way his wing feathers make that zigzag diamond pattern. How cool is that!? I know you like to draw superheroes. Man! Doesn't The Green Night Heron sound like a cool name for a crime-fighter? You could make a whole comic book of drawings about The Green Night Heron's adventures after you learn how to make the bird look strong and smart."

I'm not bragging. I'm more relieved. My student took the bait and did some of his best work ever. Feel free to use any part of this motivational speech. Before this decade is out, The Green Night Heron will go to the moon. Ask not what The Green Night Heron can do for you...

True, I had my bird names confused. The bird in the magazine photo was probably a yellow-crowned night heron, not a green heron or a black-crowned night heron. It's neck was too short to be a little brown heron. There's no such thing as a green night heron in my bird book, because, of course, a super-observant crime-fighter must keep his identity a secret, sort of like Dick Cheney in his bat cave.

[I really did love espying herons and egrets on walks near Bankside Drive in Edmond, OK, back in 1988.]

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Single dips and double jugheads

It isn't easy learning to draw and cut Valentine hearts. I'm surprised I don't remember learning it as a kid. I have such vivid memories of learning to draw houses and people, to zip my jacket, to swallow pills, to stop a nosebleed, to avoid brussel sprouts, to climb a tree, and to spell y-o-u, l-o-o-k, and r-e-d.

My lead teacher makes Valentine hearts using the Department of Motor Vehicles method. Imagine finding your one true love in the line to renew your drivers license. Some enchanted afternoon in a crowded civic buildng smelling of dried roaches, repressed cigarette smokers, and mildewed corrugated cardboard you would have plenty of time to get acquainted, and possibly create little Yugos. It's the inspirational stuff of Rogers and Hammerstein!

m + v = heart

Somewhere in the last couple decades I began teaching kids the Baskin Robbins method of drawing and cutting out Valentine hearts. A heart is really just a cheap date for teenagers too young to barhop. They are sharing two dips of strawberry ice cream in sugar waffle cones. This is the best method for drawing along a fold of colored paper before cutting.

(cone + dip) x 2 = heart



My tulips are thine.

Puns are an essential part of any school Valentine celebration. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that zing!

Two ears are better than two lips for drawing hearts. An amphora is a two-handled Greek vase, generally with a swollen belly, narrow neck, and a large mouth. Sometimes the vase had a pointed bottom.


Jughead is a recurring character in the Archie comic books about Riverdale High School. Girls didn't seem as interested in comic books as boys when I was a pre-adolescent. I bought my Archie and Millie the Model comic books in the sunshiny front window of the Rex-All drugstore in Pierce, Nebraska. In those days of Twiggy and Yardley, I learned to draw Valentine hearts inspired by Jughead's ears.



© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Condo Collapse Disorder

Maybe, just maybe, beehives are condominiums. Living in the close quarters of a hive can be stressful. If I could just fly on out of this condo association, I would.

First we learned that frogs are early indicators of Global Doom. Frogs don't live in condos. They are single-family dwellers. Some frogs have McMansions and drive convertibles. The coolest frogs live in tropical rainforests and appear on "Dancing with the Stars."

Now we are learning that another early indicator has taken a ride and never come back. The media is abuzz about honeybee disappearances. The cellphone as culprit theory is fading. Bee rapture is another theory. I will refrain from bad puns about the Second Humming. The tribble/trouble with this hypothesis is its disregard for Scotty's bee me up ability.

The "Over the Hedge" comic strip suggests that the honeybees are living it up in Las Vegas. Maybe Firesign Theatre and Elmore Leonard have been trapped in an apian cable t.v. poker championship. Maybe we have an Animal Planet reality show to piggyback on Meerkat Manor!

In the middle of the night, stuck in my thermostatically-challenged middle age insomnia, I've added the honeybees to my worry list. They join the missing Anasazi, the vanished colony of Roanoke, and the lost civilization of Atlantis buzzing in my mental honeycomb.

Bluetooth technology has made it desirably mainstream to walk around in public gesturing and talking to the air like the marginal members of society in the previous millennium. I'm becoming more sure that we are all bozos on this bus:

“Sure, living in today's complex world of The Future
is a little like having bees live in your head --
But... there they are."

Belonging to a condominium association is a lot like having bees live in your head. My elderly neighbor, Wild Willy, resembles an aging meerkat. Wild Willy has two cars, each with lots of VFW stickers and some parts held on with duct tape. Wild Willy wears his PJs all the time, except when he puts on a too-large vintage suit and a threadbare shirt with cuff links (no undershirt) for the condo association meetings. Everytime I meet him outside, he tells me how he flew bombing missions in WWII, and how he's licensed to carry concealed. I respect our Greatest Generation vets, but I don't want them shooting my visiting sons and friends. Since a recent burglary in the complex Willy has taken to walking to the mail kiosk with a loaded gun in his PJs pocket.

Another neighbor exhibiting symptoms of condo collapse disorder dug out all the landscaping outside her unit today. She wants to plant purdy widdle flowers. This would be so hunky-dunky, except that she has confused condo-ownership with single-family-dwelling-ownership. The main reason people buy condominiums is their wish to escape lawn chores. That's why condo associations own and maintain the common areas outside the units. Oops. She has basically removed an asset belonging to all members of the condominium association.

Having received notice of a significant monthly condo fee increase, I'm a tad annoyed about the gun-toters and shrub-whackers. If I could just buzz away and leave my condo obligations, I would.

Clearly the honeybees have been listening to Springsteen:

Got a wife and kids in Baltimore jack
I went out for a ride and I never went back
Like a river that dont know where its flowing
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Glueygators vs. the Governator

The naked elf worked into the wee hours of the morning gluing together the pieces of felt and ribbon laid out the night before by the poor, tired art teacher. The elf added olive green spangles for eyes, beads for nostrils, and strapped each felt alligator to a glue stick like a fat Hells Angel on a Harley. The elf knew the children would be happy to see the Glueygators at their winter holiday school party, and he whistled "Born To Be Wild" while he worked. The elf never suspected that come morning he would not receive the customary suit of teeny-tiny tie-dyed clothes created by the grateful art teacher. Neither did he guess he would be the breakfast for Stephan Pastis' Zeeba Zeeba Eata fraternity members.



Inspiration is a crockpot, I always say. You chop up everything, throw it in the pot, add liquid, and let it simmer until needed--years if necessary. As long as it is still slow-cooking, you don't have to wash the dishes.

Weeding out boxes in my closet, I found a bonanza of elfin green felt. Then NPR had a segment about Schwarzenegger, aka the Governator, going enviro-friendly green. I had visions of Arnold morphing into Lou Ferrigno, (The Incredible Hulk), who just celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday in November. For heaven's sake, a new Hulk movie will be released in 2008, with a cryogenically frozen Bill Bixby!

Pearls Before Swine doesn't always pump me up when I read the daily newspaper comics at 6:30 a.m. I'm about as fond of Rat and Pig as I am of having bitewing x-rays taken at the dentist. Stephan Pastis' clueless crocodiles* are the strip's best characters. I doubt his Fraternity of Crocodiles inspire all that many perky, G-rated Christmas craft projects. If you know anyone crocheting a sequined zebra toilet paper cover, please let me know!

Nature Girl isn't Carl Hiaasen's best, but it does have some gator-wrestling. It doesn't have my favorite character, Skink, the former governor of Florida living on roadkill. Still, it was nice, light reading over Thanksgiving.

*Proud members of Zeeba Zeeba Eata, a fraternity dedicated to the destruction of Zebra and other prey, the crocodiles are Zebra’s next-door neighbors. Stupid, slow and barely articulate, these particular crocodiles are a disgrace to their species.

And that, my slow-cooked friends, is how the Glueygators were born.

World Fruit Cocktail Cup

(Cue the Museum Impossible theme song.)

If you know your docent from your dachsund, Get Fuzzy has been particularly entertaining this month. First we had the joy of Bucky Katt's birthplace museum (beginning 5/29/06).

Bucky traded Rob's iPod for a Craig 212 tape recorder to provide the audio tours of his museum. The Craig 212 is the kind we owned in the Jetson/Flintstone Era. More recently, Rob and Bucky have been contestants on Satchel's game show, disputing the existence of England.




Somewhere on this comic timeline I got a major craving for toasted English muffins with warm creamy peanut butter. As college students thirty years ago we used to eat this gourmet delight at any hour of the day or night. Just the toasty kitchen aroma can clear your mind after a keg social, and the protein will get you back on the scholarly track, thanks to George Washington Carver.

A clear head is good for keeping up with the yellow cards in the group round of the World Cup. I'm not sure which of these match-ups are real, but I hope they all have colorful face paint and warning labels on yellow recipe cards:

English Muffins v. Swiss Steak
Hungarian Goulash v. Chop Suey
Freedom Fries v. Power Tools

Don't forget that FIFA stands for Feline International Food Arrogance, or les attempts futile vs. egomaniacal feline irritation. (Don't quote me. No matter how many years of foreign language you suffer through, you will never speak conversational cat.)

Homegrown tech support

A geek in the house is worth two in India.
Confucius,
or maybe Aesop


My 2006 New Year's wishes for all of you are simple:

• May your computer only crash or "get laggy" when your twenty-ish children are home for the holidays. Call it a scheduled meltdown with help at the ready (drinking IBC root beer and leaving oil spots* on the driveway). Call it deliverance from dueling antivirus programs.
  
  
• May you never have to watch "Dukes of Hazzard" reruns down at the Firestone while your tire is being fixed.

The oil spot probably won't be sold on eBay. It does look a bit like Huey Freeman in the Boondocks comic strip.

Missing the smell of red rubber bands

What's black and white, and read all over? OR is your newspaper too red state? Feeling blue? I'm frustrated, too.

I am so close to ending my delivery of the Dallas Morning News! Not because of its political bias, poor proofreading, new format, or delayed deliveries. It's the information to recycling ratio that is bugging me. Newspapers need advertising. That is the nature of the game. Still, I'm beginning to think subscribing to paperless news sources is more earth-friendly.

I already get the New York Times headlines online every morning. I pay a small fee to see the full text of Maureen Dowd, and to have access to the wonderful video slideshows about art exhibits. What if I paid the $34.95 annual fee to get the NYTimes crossword puzzle online?

The newspaper experience has deteriorated across most of the senses over the past thirty years. Editors and art directors have been messing with the format of our newspapers for so long that I have to squint at my memories to see the glorious black and white parade of narrow columns on the stiff, slightly yellow newsprint that crackled just so when you turned the page.

I equated our newspaper's lack of color with a Joe Friday consciousness--Just the facts, ma'am.
What is it I really want from a local morning newspaper?

• The chance to sit in bed from 6:15-6:45 a.m. wrapped in a quilt, drinking coffee and turning pages.
• The NYTimes crossword puzzle
• Doonesbury
• Zits
• One Big Happy
• Bizarro
• Get Fuzzy
• Dilbert
• Scott Burns' financial columns
• Scott Cantrell's arts reviews
• The weekly Guide to events, performances, exhibits, and restaurants

How much is the quilt/hot coffee experience worth in pounds carried to the recycing cart?

What a fun month this has been!

Deep Throat revealed, and now Deep Impact. At about one a.m. CDT today NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully released its impactor into the path of the pickle-shaped comet Tempel 1. That was just about the time the tiles on the wall surrounding the upstairs bathtub fell off. When I did the major clean of the bathroom Friday, I noticed that the tiles were pulling away from the wall, so it was probably all damp behind them. Swell. That tile wall has been a source of periodic headaches starting when the ceramic soap/washcloth holder fell off three summers ago.

I would like to hurl an 820 lb. washing machine at the tile wall, but it probably wouldn't tell us much about the origin of the solar system. According to NASA's website, the Deep Impact spacecraft is about the size of a VW Beetle. The impactor has been described as the size of a washing machine, or a coffee table. With an impact velocity of 23,000 m.p.h., it could take out a lot of bathroom tile. Scientists expect the crater caused by the impact will be the size of a football field.



In case you think this is the work of Bill Watterson's "Spaceman Spiff", there's really a lot of valuable information to be gained by this mission. David Grinspoon, planetary scientist and author of "Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life," has written a helpful op-ed in today's New York Times:

We stand to learn a lot about impact cratering - one of the major forces that has shaped all the worlds of our solar system. We will also have the chance to peer into the newly formed crater and observe the ice and vapor blasted back into space, thereby learning what lies within this frigid little world. .. Deep Impact will simply make one more small hole in an object that, like all planets large and small, has been repeatedly dinged by colliding space debris since our solar system's origin 4.6 billion years ago. ..It is those dusky beginnings that this experiment can illuminate. Beneath the dirty ice crust of a comet like Tempel 1 is material that has been in deep freeze since the birth of our solar system. Mixed into this timeless frozen treat are organic molecules like those that seeded the young Earth with raw materials for making life. This ice may hold some buried chapters of the story of our origin.

And maybe, just maybe, scientists will discover a material to keep the tiles stuck on the bathroom wall. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Tonight, just as fireworks displays are in full bloom in Dallas, the VW Beetle will be at its closest approach to the pickle.

http://deepimpact.jpl.nasa.gov/press/050703jpl.html

The Days Were Just Packed

Life just hasn't been the same without Calvin and Hobbes. Sure, I have comic strips I follow, but there are so many days when I could use a trip in the transmogrifier, or a laser battle with Spaceman Spiff.

My weekend was just packed by my standards. I am accustomed to a max of one notation per day in my DayTimer. Preferably, that notation is for an event before noon, so I can check it off my list and take my shoes off ASAP. So it was strangely peculiar, as my old friend, Papenfuss, used to say, that I would flip through "The Guide" in Friday's Dallas Morning News, and rush to buy a ticket for the Dallas Theater Center's production of "The Importance of Being Earnest".

Deep down I must have known I needed quality laugh therapy. You just can't beat cucumber sandwiches for handling that appetite. My oldest son once played Algernon in a middle school production of "Earnest". Nowadays he is Bunburying in grad school at Indiana-Bloomington. I am remembering his director, Laith M. Radif, a wonderful teacher, muse, and friend lost to AIDS in December 1997.

The last time I went to the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Kalita Humphries Theater I had just finished kindergarten. Now I am forty-nine and a half. I wondered if I would have a sense of deja vu all over again. As I took the cramped stairway down to the restrooms it all flashed before my eyes. The red tile in the bathrooms, the feeling of being inside a nautilus, even the rain outside seemed the same.

The weekend was also packed with soccer, volunteering at a Whiz Quiz tournament, and taking photos of the homecoming couple. It was a great, packed weekend. I just need an empty one to catch up now.

Old fat guys in Speedos shouldn't throw stones

Every Sunday I swim laps with my exercise partner. We get to the aquatic center ten minutes before it opens so we can grab a lane.

Two Sundays in a row we have been joined in our lap by a young Asian mommy who swims without wetting her hair, doing a really wimpy breaststroke. Last week we accomodated her, trying to "swim circles" with her, or at least X's around her.

Today it seemed dang pushy for her to disrupt our routine again. After all, we get there early, swim our half hour, and leave. Can she not wait the ten minutes until we are finished? We would do the same for her. Why our lane? Could she butt in on somebody else this time?

Enter stage right the old fat guy in the Speedo and the blue swim cap, looking straight out of "Sherman's Lagoon". He is in the next lane over, and he feels morally righteous in pulling us aside to explain that we need to "swim circles" so nobody gets hurt. Right. The woman swims at a different speed. She always picks the All Girl lane to butt in. I tell the old fat guy in the Speedo that he is welcome to invite her over to his lane to "swim circles", but otherwise it's not his deal. He swims off. He is a guy. Guys don't swim circles with wimpy breaststroke mommies. Eat my dust, he seems to flutter kick.

His lane partner finishes. The wimpy mommy could have waited for this spot, of course. But, no. I duck under the lane divider to share the lane with the old fat guy in the Speedo while my buddy shares with the wimpy mommy (1) and an additional wimpy mommy (2). I swim the hardest and fastest I've done in at least ten years, leaving the old fat guy choking on my wake. I'm not sorry when I accidentally kick him during a frogkick lap.

Old fat guys in Speedos should not mess with menopausal women. I'm thinking Ursula the Sea Witch could be my next role model.

Please review the instructions for Walrus Anger Management!

Rabble Rouser

I'm so darn proud of my mom! She called up the Lincoln Journal Star and gave them holy hell for refusing to print last Friday's Doonesbury strip. I wish I had been there in the dining room near the rotary dial phone for that moment. I would give her an atta-girl.