Minty fresh fix-o-mysteries

Caught a few segments of NPR's Crime in the City series interviewing mystery authors and the cities they know and love. Authors have laid claim to a huge range of locations, occupations, and avocations to reel in niche mystery readers: caterers, car-poolers, PTA moms, crossword puzzle addicts, genealogists, sled dog mushers, cat lovers, English teachers...

I've yet to see the beautiful dental hygienist (and amateur sleuth) with her latex gloves, sharp tools, and sharper wit, Floss Dailey, solve perilous periodontic puzzles. With a ghost writer and some technical advisors, I think we could milk this for twenty titles at least:

• Root Canal in which Floss discovers the naughty inspiration for her husband's tooth whitening overdose.
• Can You Feel This? Still numb from the divorce, Floss meets a cute neurologist and dreams of comfortable shoes.
• Baby Teeth Floss's duplex neighbors have teething triplets.
• Bite Down Please A "Shark Week" on cable t.v. inspires Floss to decorate the ceiling of her exam room with National Geographic shark pictures.
• Keep Wiggling Floss's boss, The Great Gummy Bear, a rotund dental softy, finds his personal cause, founding No Baby Tooth Left Behind, to provide cute plastic containers for low income kids whose teeth fall out at school.
• Canines & Molars Floss's ex, "The Glare," nicknamed for his serious overdose on tooth whitener and blazing inability to pay child support on time, gets a pit bull.
• Brush Three Times Floss wins a hygienist's convention door prize, a vacation to Las Vegas to see Tony Orlando and Dawn.
• Grit Your Teeth Floss accompanies her boss, The Great Gummy Bear to a dentists' convention in Atlanta.
• Swish & Spit Floss becomes friends with a gay novacaine sales rep.
• Overbite Floss starts selling her original line of hygienist scrubs on her website--in TRex, Arctic Wolf, Crocodile, Chained Pit Bull, Amazon Piranha, Shark, and Ankle-biter Toddler print fabrics, but finds she has no time left for her children.
• No Cavities Floss's precocious preschool daughter becomes the star of a rainbow sparkle gel toothpaste ad campaign.
• Panoramic X-Rays Floss cleans Tony Hillerman's teeth while taking a well-earned vacation across the American Southwest.
• Waiting Room Fish Floss finds dentures buried in the aquarium gravel.
• No Candy "The Glare" begs Floss to get back together so a sweet someone will pick up his suits from the dry cleaners.
• A Little Sensitive Floss's best friend from high school, a sculptress working in conceptual orthodontic wire, is arrested in a gallery murder case.
• Deep Pits Floss meets a mysterious informant when she calls the PayPal tech support 1-800 help number.
• Gingivitis Floss's ex remarries, but not to Mary Ann.
• Receding Gumshoes Floss cleans the teeth of a former police detective now suffering from Alzheimers.
• Plaque Fights Back Receiving an award from the National Dental Fashion League starts Floss on a race to prevent copycat designs from flooding the scrub market.
• Partial Plates Cleaning the teeth of a geologist leads to a seismic weekend in California with an underscoring tectonic romance. Carole King has signed to write the "I Feel the Earth Move Under My Teeth."
• The Fluoride Treatment Floss has to deal with an unethical, scandal-mongering tv station when she solves her latest mystery.
• Impacted Wisdom Floss communicates by a system of nods and blinks to help an elderly stroke victim solve a dental mystery.
• Caps & Crowns Floss's sullen adolescent son graduates from high school.
• Drilling for Gold Floss learns her ancestors filled cavities in the California Gold Rush and Texas Wildcat oil fields.
• See You In Six Months Soon to be a major motion picture with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
• I'll Love You for Efferdent A made-for-tv movie about high-school sweethearts who meet sixty years later in their dentist's waiting room.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Shelving mystery series

Grafton's got the alphabet, and Evanovich has the numbers. Nevada Barr can write her way through the entire National Park System if she tries hard. What sequence is still unclaimed? Maybe I could kill off frat boys and sorority chicks with the Greek alphabet:

• Pi in the Sky With Diamonds
• I Tau Whodunnit
• Chuck Upsilon the Carpet
• Iota Bookie

No, that won't work unless I do my research as a Greek housemother on a campus at a major Midwestern party school...

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Make My Day

Winnowings gave me this award last January, and I'm glad to pass it on to a blogger who has made my day several times lately. Bentley Christie's Red Worm Composting blog is practical and down-to-earth on several levels, as I've learned while starting worm bins for school and home. Even better, Bentley actually answers my email worm questions quickly, and in terms I can understand. His enthusiasm for the subject is contagious, and his sense of humor shows up in his various worm experiments--

• Dear Abby digs in the dirt with Mother Nature.
• Al Gore goes backpacking with Willie Nelson.
• The Lorax eats hummus with the Cat In The Hat.
• Charles Darwin goes to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival.

My thanks to both Christine and Bentley for making my days and encouraging my pursuits!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

MaxWorm House vermicomposting?

I don't know if this will work, but I've got a surplus of red wigglers volunteering to colonize new worlds. As teachers learn, it's all in how you phrase the question:

"I need someone really brave and strong for this job... "

The little kids are so desperate to be chosen that they use their left hand to support their waving right arm. Same with worms.

With the current success of our school wormbin, we are considering setting up bins for families, possibly as a school fundraiser. I'm wondering about the family that isn't really ready to commit to a regular bin due to space concerns or squeamishness. Could we hook them with an small introductory worm chalet, then reel them in for the big bin?

I understand parents who can handle the goldfish bowl, but don't want to walk the German shepherd or empty the kitty litter box. Heck, I've always been one of them. Worms have a lot going for them in the mini-pet competition:

• Worms do not run in a squeaky exercise wheel all night like hamsters.
• Worms do not die the second day like the residents of an Uncle Wiggly ant farm.
• Worms do not molt.
• Worms do not shed on your nice black slacks.
• Worms never need a bigger shell like a hermit crab.
• Worms don't require shoebox burials and backyard funerals.
• Worms DO NOT STINK.
• Worms are really very quiet.
• Worms are perfectly happy to be neglected while you are on vacation.
• Worms do not bite, scratch, or sting.
• Worms are easy-going about being picked up the wrong way.
• Worms do not need special accomodations to breed.
• Worms are pleased to participate in all non-malicious amateur experiments.
• Worms eat your sensitive double agent spy documents.

And so my intrepid volunteers are going to try living in a coffee can mini habitat, complete with handy handle, on the bathroom countertop. I drilled four holes in the lid, three in the bottom, and eight on the sides of the coffee can.

For this outpost, I've torn up half the lid of an egg carton and one tp tube. I shredded one each incredibly difficult Sudoku and NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle, and one credit card offer. I added a scoop of dirt, a dead petunia, and four leaves from last autumn, and sprinkled in maybe two tablespoons of water. You know those plates you always hoped your grown children would take to their first apartment, but they shopped at IKEA instead? I set the MaxWorm House on one of those plates.

Tomorrow, after they complete the rigorous selection process and written essay, I will add the best and brightest two dozen red wigglers. Thursday, I will give them a soggy strawberry. Maybe after that I'll teach them to write blog posts in their off hours, but they don't have the keyboarding skills of Archy the cockroach.





© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Story-starters, fagot-finders, and flame-broiled whoppers

"Did you attach the key onto the outside of the Buick with a Band-Aid?," I asked the Woolly Mammoth. It wasn't a good start to the morning. He had left the car at the train station for his brother in the wee hours by my standard--after eight p.m. The three of us are sharing one working vehicle, one non-working vehicle, and a mass-transit system that leaves something to be desired for these few summer weeks. Our jobs and schedules are not yet braiding together in seamless harmony like the warf and woop of the cosmos, but the candle of hope flickers still.

In the evening, waiting for the charcoal to reach the perfect degree of orange and gray to cook the marinaded chicken, I drift into a Camp Fire Girl reverie:

Burn fire burn
Burn fire burn
Flicker flicker flicker flicker flame

My baby Weber is still six briquettes short of a flame-broiled whopper. Should I feed it tinder or kindling? Should I paint the heads of wooden matches with nail polish, and store them in a metal Band-Aid box? That was one of the survival skills I learned in Camp Fire Girls in the mid-1960s. So far, I've never needed a waterproofed match to survive, although I did fantasize once or twice about painting my spouse's head with nail polish and then stuffing him in a metal box.

I have a fondness for vintage metal boxes, Band-Aid and other. It's funny what sticks, and what doesn't. What sinews bind us to things and to people?

At one a.m. I fret. Did my son collect the Buick at the train station? To ward off worry I try to remember the girls in my Camp Fire Girl group so many years ago. The names sound so old-timey compared to my students' names:

Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, Prissy, Julie, Julie, Judy, Jody, Wendy, Wendy, Hilde, Debbie, Laurie, Donna, Janice, Dee-Dee, Linda, Susan, Margaret, Pam...

Margaret's mother taught us the "Burn Fire Burn" song:

BURN, FIRE, BURN!

(Adante moderato)
Burn, fire, burn! burn, fire, burn!
Burn, flicker, flame!
Whose hand above this blaze is lifted
Shall be with magic touch engifted,
To warm the hearts of lonely mortals
Who stand without their open portals.
The torch shall draw them to the fire,
Higher, higher, higher, By desire.
Who so shall stand by this hearthstone, flame-fanned,
Shall never stand alone;
Whose house is dark and bare and cold,
Whose house is dark and cold;
This is his own!
Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker, flame!

Such tiny diversity within our group! One girl with a divorced mother, one girl living in an apartment, one Jewish girl, one Unitarian... Five daughters of engineers, two daughters of doctors plus one veterinarian, one daughter of a minister, at least five daughters of university professors. All of us save two walked home from school for lunch with our moms everyday, and then walked back for the afternoon class. When school dismissed at 3:15 we walked together to our Camp Fire meeting at one of our homes.

Camp Fire Girls worked their way up from Wood Gatherers to Fire Makers and Torch Bearers. The way was perilous, hidden under tinder and kindling, fraught with fagot-finders, and mired in the classic contest between wiggly loose front teeth and homemade popcorn balls.

WOOD GATHERER's DESIRE (1914) (spoken)

As fagots are brought from the forest
["Fagot" here means "a bundle of sticks tied together."]
Firmly held by the sinews which bind them,
So cleave to these others, your sisters,
Wherever, whenever you find them.
Be strong as the fagots are sturdy,
Be pure in your deepest desire;
Be true to the truth that is in you;
And--follow the Law of the Fire.


The five year olds are beginning to write stories. They choose a photo from the box of story starters, then make two to four sentences about the picture. Usually they write who is in the photo, what they are doing, and where. Sometimes they tell when, but rarely why. I keep trying to get them to spice up their stories.

Surprise me. Tell me something I don't already know. Tell me something exciting. Make me laugh. What did the flamingos play?

WE BIRDS
PLAY NOW
FLUTE AND CELLO?

And no, the Woolly Mammoth did not use the Band-Aid to stick the key on the Buick. The Band-Aid wrapper was left on the car seat because he cut his finger while hiding the key.


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Irresistible force meets immovable alphabet?

"Could we play the rhyming game again? Can we make pig wig?," the preK student asks.

"Absolutely! That would be fun," I say, impressed that she considers our recent word-building endeavor a game. "What do we need?"

"The at bat hat book and the immobile alphabet," she says, and scurries off to find them.

There's a funny mental image. It must be wheelchair day at the double A baseball game! I'm putting on my rally cap for this at bat.

Her "immobile alphabet" is really the classic teaching movable alphabet. Maybe writer's block is just a bad case of immobilized alphabet...
"Can I play, too? I played yesterday!," a second girl asks. She's a bit older, and can think of sat fat rat. Of course she may join us.

Speaking of fat rats and immobile alphabets, my Cingular cellphone service recently changed to "AT&T Mobility". What a silly name! The word mobility doesn't inspire thoughts of untethered phoning freedom. It instantly conjures its opposite, immobility. Oh, great. I've got a cellphone that needs a ramp, and I'm paying how much a month?!

Back with the rhyming preK girls, we play the "game" with at, it, ox, ig, og, ug. I'm delighted when they put their consonant heads together to figure out twig. Sure, they have some ideas that don't make words. The best is vog. "You know, Ms. Nancy, vog, when you can't see anything!" That vould be a Transylvanian fog.


Why am I wearing my at bat hat rally cap on this voggy day? CollageMama is celebrating in the dugout on the twenty-first birthday of her youngest son. Pour that nice ice lime rhyme cooler of Gatorade on her head!

Put the rhyme in the coconut, shake it all up. Put the rhyme in the coconut, call the doctor, wake him up.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

IQSC Opening

They're putting the finishing touches on the new International Quilt Study Center and Museum this week, and moving the collection. The new facility opens Sunday, March 30th.

My visit to Nebraska didn't coincide with the grand opening, but I did watch some of the installation work on the sculpture in front of the museum. I hope to get back to Lincoln before the Nancy Crow: Cloth, Culture, Context exhibit ends in August.

Until then, I'll be checking for informative stories about the new museum in the Lincoln Journal Star online by Kent Wolgamott. I wish more arts writers were as motivated to communicate clearly and to educate, instead of showing off their arcane knowledge in a certain big city newspaper.








© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

DN is nigh

Ms. Nancy, how do you spell DN?

DN?

Yes. How do you spell it?

DN?

DN!

Do you mean 'the end'?

No. DN. Like at the end of a story, you know.

Okay. You spell it:

T H E

E N D


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Bob the Bird's Bad Day

Bob the Bird is an uncooperative patient. Bob is an impatient photo subject. He doesn't want photos taken of his broken leg in its cast. Bob had an unfortunate encounter with a mesh laundry hamper. Further details are classified.

Bob the Bird broke his leg.
He was not in his cage.
His leg was in a net.
Bob was a sad pet.
Bob went to the vet.

The vet set Bob's leg.
The vet made a cast.
He used tape.
The vet used bits of kabob skewers.
The skewers kept Bob the Bird's leg straight.
Bob's leg had to get better, but
Bob did not like the cast.

Bob is a sad pet.
Bob pecks and pecks.
Bob pecks all week.
Will Bob eat the tape?
Will Bob get sick?

Bob the Bird went back to the vet.
The vet made a new cast.
Bob likes it better.
But Bob's leg is not all better yet.

I bet Bob the Bird would get better if I put on the Hartz Canary Training Record. A big herd of birds would sing to Bob. They would sing with polkas, mazurkas, waltzes, marches, hat dances, and the Star Spangled Banner.

It is hard to write a beginning reader book! Hats off to Dr. Seuss.


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Act your age!

This blog is over four years old now. While it may not always remember to chew with its mouth closed, it ought to remember to flush and wash hands.

Sometimes writing a blog is like having a special bunny and a security blanket. The habit of writing has helped me as my sons graduated from high school, and then from an assortment of universities. It's seen me through the end of my soccer mom identity and into my 93.3333% empty nest.

I've written through the illness and death of my mother, and about the process of grieving. I've tried to distill the daily phone calls with my dad into homemade savory beef vegetable soups with barley.

Blogging has anchored me through the end of a job and the embracing of a new challenge. It's been good for reconnecting with phases in my life that I'd put on the shelf or brushed under the rug.

Blogging has nurtured me and demanded that I take care of myself when other responsibilities or the nurturing of others began to overwhelm me. It has been an essentially no-money-out-of-pocket therapy. Compared to Aetna, Blogger is a real preventive health care bargain!

Sometimes blogging nudges my creativity. Other times it feels great to freely share creative art and teaching ideas with a worldwide anonymous audience. It always helps me sort out my reactions and thoughts to experiences. I've heard there are people who know what they think and feel about events instantly. I'm not in that club. My ex used to ask me if I only experienced life as "pretty colors floating around." Not exactly. I just need time to run the sands through an hourglass of writing or making art to articulate my reaction to an experience.

Don't know when I became convinced that I couldn't verbalize my thoughts to my peers. If the thoughts were piggy-backed with loaded emotions, I was almost paralyzed. It became safer to write, so I had time to self-edit my ideas.

Four year-olds are responsible for their own bodies, their own actions, and the consequences of those actions. They are increasingly aware that they belong to family, a preschool class, and a community, and that they have a responsibility to contribute to those groups in a positive way. Four year-olds recognize and understand routines and sequences. Four year-olds still believe that if they ignore a mess or mistake it will be invisible to others. They love to demand others follow rules, but (like attorneys) don't always believe rules apply to them.

I hope that I have taken responsibility for the consequences of my writing, contributed to my community in a positive way, and cleaned up my own messes. Blogging tells me immediately if i have literary toilet paper stuck to my shoe!

Four year-olds crave attention, but are learning to express that need in ways that do not have a negative impact on others. I still crave comments to my posts, but write for my own enjoyment and improvement.

Four year-olds begin to understand that learning, effort, and becoming acceptable to a community have intrinsic rewards. Thank you and thank you! And all the little people who made it possible!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Easter thoughts

The empty nest isn't filled with plastic Easter grass. I've been limiting myself to one foil-wrapped chocolate egg or Hershey's Miniature a day. Each time I open the candy, I remember a short story I read forty years ago. I believe it was part of a teen writing competition in Seventeen magazine. The details are very hazy, but the story involved a girl saving bits of colored foil and other shiny wrappings to create an Orthodox Christian icon for some very selfless purpose.

By junior high I was already saving papers and magazine images. I loved special boxes and folded art like the triptych in the story. After reading it, I wondered each time I opened a stick of Wrigley's gum if I should save the foil. If I created an art work out of Juicy Fruit wrappers and Hershey bar foil, would I find spiritual answers like the girl in the story?

In a funny way, I did slowly discover spiritual answers from saving paper, although I never created a folding foil gum wrapper triptych. Creating art is a channel to spirituality. Protecting nature by recycling is another. Being mindful in choosing what I save and what I discard are components of both channels. In some ways the discipline of maintaining and adding to this blog is another channel. I have a great feeling of peace whenever I manage to take my saved memories and my mindful observations to create a story someone may appreciate.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Dear Blogger.com

I love "labels" for blogs. I love that they bring in new readers. It's great that assigning labels is helping me understand the nature of my pontifications. My dad refers to my posts as "pontifications". I prefer to give them a rose-colored title of "ponderings". Thanks to my brother, I've been terrified of ending a sentence with a prepostition for, oh, so many years. "Helping me understand the nature of my pontifications," is just a way of writing, "figuring out what I blog about." Is there such a thing as prepositiphobia?

But really, dear Blogger.com, couldn't you create an easier way for folks with hefty blogs to edit past posts and add labels? I'm working on over one thousand posts. It takes way too long to navigate through my pontifications using <<Newest < Newer 101-150 of 1026 Older > Oldest>>

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Playground games, blogging games

Playgrounds and writing are on my mind this week. I've become the Playground Lady from my favorite comic strip, Rick Detorie's "One Big Happy", although I will always identify with Ruthie's storytime Library Lady. Watching the recess dynamics at my second job stirs up all sorts of irritating memories. They sit there nagging for attention like pea gravel inside my old Buster Brown anklets and saddle shoes.

If you missed Susan Stamberg's interview with short story writer Karen Russell on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday morning, you can hear it online. The title of Russell's story collection is St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. After Russell reads an excerpt from the title story, Stamberg says, "You have such a vivid imagination. Is this something you cultivated from childhood and channeled into your writing?"

Russell replied instantly, "I directly credit being terrible at sports. If I'd had even an ounce of skill at kickball I'd have been out on the field with the other kids...It was safer to be sitting in a corner imagining things than dodging a ball." Ooooh, baby, do I know what she means! Can you say "Red Rover, Red Rover, send Nancy Lou right over"??

My blog was "tagged" by Prairie Bluestem on the cyber-playground today, so I'm It. Normally, I'd decline to participate in this game, as I declined to participate in many sports activities over the decades. My thinking is along this line: If a business has a company softball game at the annual picnic, I won't apply for a job there. This isn't particularly healthy, I admit.

This cyber-game of tag is similar to a chain letter, but it doesn't promise that I'll receive a picture postcard with a printed recipe from every state in the Union. Been waiting for those to arrive since 1966. I thought "blog tag" had to do with subject classifications, so I'm already feeling insecure!

We are all shaped as much by our perceived inadequacies as we are by our strengths. Because I've always felt inadequate speaking to people, writing a letter to clearly express my thoughts became my modus operandi. I believed I could not think on my feet or say what I meant. This belief probably dates from the time my grandfather phoned me long distance to wish me a happy birthday while my birthday party with classmates and friends was in progress. "Happy birthday," he said. "And happy birthday to you, too," I said, immediately realizing it wasn't his birthday and turning bright red.

I began writing letters so I wouldn't ever repeat that moment, I guess. People expressed appreciation for my letters, so I wrote more. Positive feedback is lots more satisfying than repeatedly failing to break through the line in Red Rover. Plus, I loved the luxurious feeling of note paper and pretty stationery! Sealing wax and postage stamps enhanced the letter-writing experience.

This blog, and my Anchorwoman blog are extensions from that birthday phone call. Part of the reason for writing blogs is to clarify and express my thoughts so I don't blurt out something dumb and have to be teased about it later. Another part is to entertain my parents and friends particularly through illnesses. A little part is to work out the same sort of childhood experiences as Red Rover, a bit of inexpensive bloggotherapy. I write posts, too, for the pure joy of playing with words, and for the discipline and craft of improving each entry. Some people go bowling, some go bar-hopping, others sing in the choir. I blog. Writing about the beautiful and funny aspects of the human experience reinforce those positive observations and improve my outlook on life.

I send paper copies of my entries to my parents, now just my dad. It's reassuring to me that a physical copy of my effort exists. Maybe someone will appreciate it in the future the same way I appreciate the cursive handwritten autobiography of my great-great-grandfather homesteading in Nebraska. My sons don't read my blog unless I send them a link to a particular post. It is too soon. At twenty I didn't have any idea that learning continues through life, questions persist, experiences bring wisdom, and grown-ups feel sadness...

I'm not quite willing to participate in this game of tag. If you would like to copy the following questions, go for it. If you would like to send me a picture postcard of your state capitol building with your favorite recipe, please write a comment!

1. Are you happy/satisfied with your blog's content and look?
2. Does your family know about your blog?
3. Do you feel embarrassed to let your friends know about your blog? Do you consider it a private thing?
4. Did blogging cause positive changes in your thoughts?
5. Do you only open the blogs of those who comment on your blog or do you love to go and discover more by yourself?
6. What does a visitor counter mean to you? Do you like having one on your blog?
7. Did you try to imagine your fellow bloggers and give them real pictures?
8. Do you think there is any real benefit in blogging?
9. Do you think that blogger's society is isolated from the real world or interaction with events?
10. Does criticism annoy you or do you feel it's a normal thing?
11. Do you fear some political blogs and avoid them?
12. Were you shocked by the arrest of some bloggers?
13. What do you think will happen to your blog after you die?
14. What do you like to hear? What song would you like to link to on your blog?
15. Five bloggers to be the next "victims"?

Real authors wear boots

I may never be a real author, and I'm sure I'll never play one on tv. Still, I'm interested in the lives and secrets of success for writers. Naturally I was thrilled to hear in the news recently about the DaVinci Code author's website. What advice would Dan Brown have for this blogger?

Give us three "Good to Know" facts about you. Be creative. Tell us about your first job, the inspiration for your writing, any fun details that would enliven your page. If I'm not at my desk by 4:00 A.M., I feel like I'm missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hour glass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do pushups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood (and ideas) flowing. I'm also a big fan of gravity boots. Hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.
From Dan Brown's official website.

Okay, Dan, let me rephrase the question. Give us three "Good to Know" facts about you that won't make us gag. Gravity boots are just so, so, so 1980's, Dan! I expect to see dark wood paneling, red shag carpet, and avocado green crockpots full of melted Velveeta, RoTel tomatoes, and Old El Paso refried beans in those photos of basement rec rooms with a gravity boot inversion table. I checked the claims about Spyder Gravity Boots:

Spyder Gravity Boots Used by professional athletes, personal sport trainers, medical doctors, physical therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists.

As yet it doesn't mention Dan Brown, although one might think the inversion fitness folks would want to jump on the DaVinci Code bandwagon with everyone else. I don't think Dan's advice will be much help to me. I can't afford an inversion table, but I did pick up an inversion poodle for $1.99 at World Market today. I'm going to set my chicken kitchen timer for one hour, then do some (3) push-ups and some (7) sit-ups. I'll hang up my inversion poodle to get the ideas flowing. I might have to make some of that last millennium bean dip, though.

Imagine you are a playwright

It is easier for me to imagine being a crocodile or a green anole lizard for a day than to imagine being a playwright for even an hour. After I blogged the possibility about Dad's breakfast dreams yesterday, a friend introduced me to a stranger as, "This is Nancy. She's a playwright." What a daunting concept. What a joke. Ah, but what a dare.

My students have been making lizard art after listening to Joanne Ryder's fine book, Lizard In the Sunabout becoming an anole for a day. Since I moved with my sons into these condos nine years ago I've been a dedicated watcher of the anoles who also call the condominium complex home. The anoles have presented me with a this Power Point program to change my life at absolutely no charge:

It's often wise to blend into your surroundings

Sometimes you have to stand your ground against intruders and those making impositions on your time and space

Other times you just have to soak up the sun, breathe, and do a few push-ups

Once in awhile there's nothing for it but to shed your skin and start over

It's good to sport your pink neck flap and be proud of who you are and what you have accomplished

Watching the lizards is a slow-down meditation for me, a time to connect with nature and spirit. Planning breakfast is my dad's daily devotion, although it is unlikely he would put it in those religious terms. Dreaming of planning breakfast is the night version of "praying incessantly" in J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey:

• Planning breakfast is embracing life as it is, not life as you expected.
• Planning breakfast is gratitude for Mother Earth's bounty and variety.
• Planning breakfast is starting each day with a disciplined, well-armed force aligned against the marauding guerillas of loneliness and grief.
• Planning breakfast is acknowledging the dominion of Father Time by synchronizing humble efforts to ready sausage, eggs, and toast so as to savor their perfection together.
• Planning breakfast is respecting the life's work of my mother to coordinate, nurture, nourish, and ease all our lives with great skill, responsibility, love, and patience every morning.
• Planning breakfast is honoring the generations before us by savoring the smells and flavors of remembered percolated coffee and dishwashing detergent in olden sunlit kitchens, the tastes of foods from across oceans, and the ancestral pang of doing without in depressions, droughts, journeys, and wars.
• Planning breakfast cherishes the rituals that made our family life a tapestry of coffee cakes, waffles, Betty Comden and Adoph Green songs, pop-overs, and Cheerios with the milk poured just right.

• Planning breakfast accepts the presence of chaos and confusion in life and pledges eternal vigilence against their powers
• Planning breakfast is an act of gratitude recognizing the circle of supportive friends who send love and courage in jars of jams and preserves
• Planning breakfast ensures a supportive and vigilant guardian with the bald eagle wings of an old plaid bathrobe is watching the neighborhood children board their school bus and parents drive off down the icy street to work.
  
  I have no idea how to write these ideas into a play. I do have new ideas of how to pray incessantly while enjoying some Little Smokies.

Only you can prevent

....werewolf expository writing. My youngest writes home after the first week of second semester:

It turns out that every Expository Writing prof. has a different
theme for their class, which I didn't know when I registered. My class was
all about werewolves, so I dropped it. We would have had to read four books
about werewolves. Some of the other classes looked really cool, so I'll take
it some other time.

This is my favorite method of teaching and learning, but I can understand his not wanting to read four books about werewolves. I love getting students to examine a subject from every dimension and in every medium.

Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy album has the classic howling "Werewolves in London"

I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's... his hair was perfect...

How cool! A global Wikipedia-style critique of tiki bars! Critiki I have only one Trader Vic's on my life list. When I went to the King Tut exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute in the summer of 1977, I had a pina colada at the Trader Vic's in the Palmer House.

Sent my middle son a "Mike's Pirate School" t-shirt to wear on his European wanderings. Texas Tech's Red Raider football coach, Mike Leach, is totally into pirates, and relates that interest to coaching. Oh, my gosh. I get recharged thinking about a Pirate School style of teaching!

New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2005
Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep
By MICHAEL LEWIS

''Your body is your sword. Swing your sword.''

Each off-season, Leach picks something he is curious about and learns as much as he can about it: Geronimo, Daniel Boone, whales, chimpanzees, grizzly bears, Jackson Pollock. The list goes on, and if you can find the common thread, you are a step ahead of his football players. One year, he studied pirates. When he learned that a pirate ship was a functional democracy; that pirates disciplined themselves; that, loathed by others, they nevertheless found ways to work together, the pirate ship became a metaphor for his football team. Last year, after a loss to Texas A.&M. in overtime, Leach hauled the team into the conference room on Sunday morning and delivered a three-hour lecture on the history of pirates. Leach read from his favorite pirate history, ''Under the Black Flag,'' by David Cordingly (the passages about homosexuality on pirate ships had been crossed out). The analogy to football held up for a few minutes, but after a bit, it was clear that Coach Leach was just . . . talking about pirates. The quarterback Cody Hodges says of his coach: ''You learn not to ask questions. If you ask questions, it just goes on longer.''
Hodges knows -- the players all do -- that their coach is a walking parenthesis, without a companion to bracket his stray thoughts. They suspect, but aren't certain, that his wide-ranging curiosity benefits their offense. Of all the things motivating Texas Tech to beat Texas A.&M. this night, however, the keenest may have been the desire to avoid another lecture about pirates. Even now, their beloved coach had his left arm in the air, wielding his imaginary sword.

''SWING --YOUR -- SWORD!''


NPR's Bailey White coaches much younger students--first graders--to read with the bait of the Titanic disaster. She writes about it in the "Maritime Disasters" chapter of Mama Makes Up Her Mind.

Learning is about seizing the imagination and challenging students to push themselves up to the next level. Two of my sons had a wonderful first grade teacher pushing them to read so they could move up to "Hank the Cowdog"! Wherever Miss Sacone is now, I send her my thanks!


lycanthropy
1584, from Gk. lykanthropia, from lykos "wolf" + anthropos "man." Originally a form of madness (described by ancient writers) in which the afflicted thought he was a wolf; applied to actual transformations of persons (esp. witches) into wolves since 1830 (see werewolf).

werewolf
late O.E. werewulf "person with the power to turn into a wolf," from wer "man" + wulf (see wolf; also see here for a short discussion of the mythology). The first element probably is from PIE *uiHro "freeman" (cf. Skt. vira-, Lith. vyras, L. vir, O.Ir. fer, Goth. wair). Cf. M.Du. weerwolf, O.H.G. werwolf, Swed. varulf. In the ancient Persian calendar, the eighth month (October-November) was Varkazana-, lit. "(Month of the) Wolf-Men."


Department of English Language and Literature
English 220.006 Expository Writing

MWF 1200-1250
MH 217
Admundson
Legends of the Wer Wolf
Why have wolves and werewolves fascinated many cultures throughout history? Why does the myth about lycanthropes fascinate the human culture still? What is it about the symbol of the wolf, both as a symbol of evil, war, and lust and as a symbol of dawn, light, and protection that attracts people continuously throughout the ages?

We will trace humankind's belief in the werewolf through selections of such ancient and modern myths and texts as: the Greek myth that Zeus turned King Lycaon of Arcadia into a wolf, thus originating the term Lycantrhope; Shakespeare's contemporary John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, depicting lycanthropy as a pathological condition of melancholia and delirium; the Franciscan text, Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) used during the Inquisition; Blackfeet, Pawnee, and Cheyenne wolf stories, which depict the ability to shape-shift into a wolf as a powerful responsibility; and 1933 Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris-- the counterpart to Bram Stoker's Dracula; the 2005 illustrated novel Cry Wolf by Douglas Crill; and much more.
This will be a writing intensive course. We will write journal entries every week to help us explore how to write about the function of werewolf outsider narratives in different cultures. We will write a creative narrative about our own perceptions or experiences with marginalization. We will write four short essays critiquing the cultural constructions of the symbolic wolf-man as the outsider or “other.” In these shorter essays we will learn how to incorporate secondary critical texts with our own ideas and arguments, thereby expanding our knowledge of writing research papers. We will learn how to analyze and argue with and against the grain in our primary and secondary texts. We will engage in the draft writing process, revising and expanding our four shorter essays into four longer ones in order to master the rules and structure of the closed form, academic essay.

Performing Your Requests

My Wednesday afternoon preschoolers begged me to "read" the Blue Dog book to them again today. The book is actually Blue Dog Man, by George Rodrigue. I don't really read the book. I show the pictures, the paintings of Blue Dog sitting in different locations or against different backdrops, most often alone, sometimes wearing a necktie. We all brainstorm stories about what's on the mind of Rodrigue's mysterious canine icon. We laugh hysterically at our stories.

I paid full price for Blue Dog Man five years ago, and the book has more than paid me back every year. Three year olds love it. Learning difference elementary students love it. Pre-adolescents with emotional problems relate to Blue Dog, open up, and give me great insights into how they understand the world. I mention this because you can find copies used or at bargain prices now.


The big hits in today's "reading" were paintings with swirling backgrounds. Students told me Blue Dog was beside a weather map, or in a hurricane. They don't know that Blue Dog was "born" in New Orleans, where Rodrigue has lived for sixteen years. Rodrigue has a special Blue Dog silkscreen print, "We Will Rise Again", to benefit the Southeast Louisiana Chapter of the American Red Cross. Check it out.

Imagine Blue Dog, wearing a suit and tie, sitting at the keyboard of a piano bar. The cocktail waitresses whisper the patrons' requests in his ear, and slip a buck or two into the glass on the piano. Imagine Blue Dog being asked to play "Born Free" and "Impossible Dream".

In August of '68 our family went to Estes Park, Colorado, on vacation. This is my neatly written cursive account of a memorable evening at a favorite fancy restaurant:

We left McCook about ten. About twelve we stopped at a rest stop and saw a tiny lizard. [My sister] wanted to take it home...Later we had lunch at the Chicken Inn in Ft. Morgan. CRUMBY! It rained all the way from Loveland to Estes, going up the Big Thompson canyon. It was kind of spooky. We checked in to room 5 (same as last time). After awhile we went to the Coach House. [My brother] had some problems what with the trout and candlelight. Later in the evening Donna Lee from Laurence, Nebraska played for us. She was "juz dalighted" to play Born Free, Love Is Blue, and The Impossible Dream for us. Then we skipped rockes [sic] at Lake Estes.

A year or so earlier I wrote about our first visit to the restaurant, and noted that "we even got buckaroos", the Estes equivalent of a "Shirley Temple" or "Roy Rogers". Apparently my sister was so impressed she, "announced that when she grew up she was going to be a cocktail waitress."

My brother had a notoriously uneasy stomach when we were kids. In '68 he stared at the flickering candlelit eye of the trout reclining on its plate next to the jumbo foil-wrapped baked potato with sour cream. The trout stared back.

The trout and my brother should have sat up to the piano bar and had a few buckaroos. Blue Dog would have played their requests.

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go....

Born free, as free as the wind blows
As free as the grass grows
Born free to follow your heart...

Blue, blue, my world is blue,
blue is my world now I'm without you

Feeding the artist

The art students were comparing notes on feeding the dolphins at Sea World during our popcorn break. Maybe that was what started it. Or maybe it was all the descriptions of devastated hospitals without food. My dreams are water-logged, and I realize that my inner artist has been without the foods on its specialized diet for too long.

My hospital kitchen job ($1.65/hr.) during high school and college involved making some special diets, as well as dishing up jello, mashed potatoes, cream of wheat, and beef consumee. We high school kids horsed around and socialized a lot, but we worked hard, and knew that our labor was important. Once during a big blizzard in '72 or '73 we were snowed in after our supper shift. Snow kept coming down and the wind chill kept going down. Parents couldn't come pick us up, and probably wouldn't be able to get the breakfast workers to the hospital.

It must have been Christmas time, because there were no students in the nursing school dorm across the parking lot. The head dietician asked us to stay in the dorm overnight so we could work the six a.m. shift. The patients would have to have breakfast.

After work, we plunged through the drifts and blasting wind over to the dorm, where we played basketball in the gym. Mostly, we stared out through the ice crystals forming fantastic designs on the windows at the drifts swelling in the parking lot.

None of this begins to compare with the dedication and ordeals of hospital workers in the Katrina disaster area. It might explain why I dreamed last night about one of the girls I worked with at Bryan Memorial thirty years ago, though.

My artist diet requires higher than normal visual roughage, time to read and to write, opportunities to see art, and to make art. I can get along on a regular diet of tater tots and folding laundry for the short term, but it's obvious when I need a nutritional supplement!


Besides visiting the DMA and listening to Glenn Gould playing Haydn's piano sonatas, I watched two opera videos this weekend.

A Gift for Coach

At the end of each season there's a tiny panic about giving an appreciation gift to the coach. I've been a soccer mom for a ridiculously long time now, pretty much since the Neanderthals first played the Sapiens. I know that people don't volunteer to coach youth recreational soccer or other sports in expectation of receiving an appreciation gift. True, some of them get roped into it the same way I got roped into being a Tiger Cub leader back in Edmond, Oklahoma. Usually they find they get at least as much out of the coaching experience as they put in. Hanging out with young children will supply a coach with whimsical comments and blooper moments to last a lifetime.

Encourage children to write a letter to their coach at the end of the season. You can prompt your child with questions. What was your favorite drill? What was your greatest moment of the season? What new skill did you learn? What new rule did you learn? What was the funniest thing your coach did?

Parents can write a letter to the coach, too. Thank the coach for keeping the emphasis on learning skills, being good sports, working as a team, and having fun. Enclose reprints of all the photos you took, even the ones of children picking dandelions, picking noses, getting entangled in the goal net, staring up at hot air balloons, or wearing their socks all the way up under their shorts.

While you are at it, be sure to thank the refs at your child's games. Model respect for rules and good sportsmanship for your young player.

An artist needs three things

On this day in 1930, William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying was published. Faulkner said that of all his books, he liked As I Lay Dying the best. He also said, "A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others."

My email from The Writer's Almanac supplied that quote. I'm always teaching kids about these three things, things remembered, things seen, and things imagined. We play with different combinations of the three in all our creations. The elementary art class that has been the most involved in creating our treehouse installation made sketches of that installation today. They were making drawings of what they saw, which was something they had imagined and brainstormed and created. By sketching the treehouse they were enhancing their memory of the creative process and of the creative product. I sincerely hope they were envisioning future creations!

Do you remember learning to braid? The writer or artist is braiding experience, observation, and imagination at all times. Did Neanderthals know how to braid? When did Homo Sapiens learn? Learning to braid is a braid! What leap in thinking led a person to cross the reeds or hair just so to make a braid? Did that person already have a spoken language? How did that person visualize this advance? Did the next generation imagine how to make rope? Did the next imagine spinning wool? Knitting? Crochet? Good grief. Did a Neanderthal macrame a plant hanger for her apartment/cave? Did her mate observe spiderwebs before creating the first fishing net or hammock?

What about the storytellers? When did they begin to braid the retelling of the day's mammoth hunt with comparisons to other remembered hunts,or embellish it with remembered sounds and inflections, and imagined powerful nature spirits?