Princess Audrey of Pawdry

I love the lighting in this photo of Alice. 

You know I'm gearing up for an epic blog post when I post filler photos of my cats. If you didn't know that...now you do. Stay tuned.  

You're about as easy as a nuclear war...

If "terrorists" (presumably of the generic Islamic/Middle Eastern variety) are the boogeymen of today, Russians or "Commies" (they were interchangeable) were the scary evil villains of my eighties childhood. Cold War paranoia was everywhere in the eighties. It showed up in films like WarGames, Red Dawn, White Nights, Rocky IV, and Invasion USA; made for TV movies like The Day After and Testament (I saw that last one as a kid and it scared the holy hell out of me), and especially pop music. Some of the more famous examples of this are Nena's "99 Luftballoons," Sting's "Russians," Prince's "1999," Weird Al's (awesome) "Christmas At Ground Zero," Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Two Tribes," The Smith's "Ask," Duran Duran's "Planet Earth," "Generals and Majors" by XTC, and this classic by Ultravox:

Some of the awesomeness in this video:

00:33 -- This fellow can only muster mild disappointment at the prospect of a nuclear meltdown. "Oh bollocks, I'll miss EastEnders!"

01:19 -- Newsflash: Nuclear Explosion Imminent (on an ATM screen?)

01:36 -- FUCK!!!!

01:57 -- What's with the framed American flag in Midge Ure's apartment? Dude, you're British! (Is he a Yankophile? Is there such a thing?)

02:12 -- Wall-mounted turntable?

02:29 -- Aw, come on. Just when things couldn't get more tragic, they gotta throw in a cute kid!

02:40 -- Might as well get it on while we still can. (You randy Brits!)

03:25 -- Did they escape or get neutralized?

03:40 -- "Daaaaaaaancin....in Cosby sweaters!"

03:50 -- Those sweaters! They make my eyes all hurty.

04:15 -- Okay, the fried egg/melted filmstrip effect? Pretty cool.

Dude, I just hope the Russians love their children too.

God, how could I not love this video? It's adorable, sweet, and chock full of cats! Purring cats, growling cats, meowing cats, cats whizzing their tits off on catnip. I can even overlook the horrid '90s fashions and awful hairstyles because, well, CATS!



Also? I reject the term "cat lady." It's often prefaced by "crazy" and generally used in a mocking and derogatory way, with queasy misogynistic undertones. Fuck that. I am not a "cat lady."

I am a catwoman. Hear me ROAR.

SPAM-A-LOT!

Ever since I've made commenting available on Praxis, I've been getting the most delightful, cracked-out spam messages ever. Naturally, they are marked as undesirable and quickly dispatched to the great spam folder in the sky. But I did make a point to salvage a few of the more amusing ones before sending them off into the ether and I've submitted today for your approval, along with my comments. 

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Well, that's nice. Constructive feedback is always helpful. I'll try to slow down the pace of my posts for the novices in my audience, but I can't promise anything. To paraphrase the esteemed philosopher Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. Try to keep up, chumps."

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"Skin allergies"? What article were you reading, exactly? And while we're on the "topic," 
what in the holy hell do you suppose they put in Ivory soap that makes my skin break out in disgusting itchy hives? I'm serious. Ivory soap is some evil shit!

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I want to have tea with Lisa Gail Allred!

This video has been making the rounds on the internets today, and it's so awesomely bad that I knew I had to post it. I can't help but like Lisa Gail. She can't sing to save her ass (I never thought I'd say this, but PLEASE woman--AUTOTUNE!) but hey, neither can Dylan and he's still awesome. I give her +10 for enthusiasm and for having so much fun cavorting with the cowboys while rocking that turquoise jewelry. Especially for the turquoise jewelry. Seriously, it takes a special kind of person to do justice to turquoise, and I applaud her for it.  

I also hope that she has a good sense of humor about all the crap she's going to get for this. And I hope she has a loving and supportive husband/significant other who appreciates her and who--ahem--observes her three-second rule.

Echo Beach, far away in time.... 

Lately I've discovered (and rediscovered) a lot of  songs that I love from back in the day, and I'd like to start posting some of the more obscure/weird/awesome videos here on my beloved bloggy thing. I will try my best to make this a regular feature...for as long as I remember to, anyway. How's that for vague promises?  

I'll start with Martha and the Muffins, because I absolutely love this song. 

This video is from Top of the Pops, my favorite repository of long-forgotten British hits. "Echo Beach" failed to make the Hot 100 here in the States, but it climbed to #10 on the UK charts and peaked in the band's native Canada at #5.

Visually, the band is almost avant-garde in their frumpiness. Lead singer Martha Johnson looks as if she really did just punch out of her "very boring" office clerk job. But I love her deadpan delivery, the pensive lyrics, and of course the kick-ass synthesizer riff. The saxophone solo I can do without, but saxophone solos were hard to avoid back then.

With this new maybe-regular feature, I will try my best to post more than just obscure eighties new wave, but I can't promise anything.

What can I say? I'm a new wave freak.

Having my own magazine is awesome. Not only has it enabled me to discover some truly talented up-and-coming writers, it's given me the perfect excuse to talk to famous creative types whom I admire. So far I've had the pleasure of interviewing musician Joshua Path, The Room's Juliette Danielle, and writers like Dan Kennedy, Mary Jo Pehl, Clane Hayward, Jonathan Bernstein, and now Ned Vizzini.

Vizzini is the author of Teen Angst? Nah...., Be More Chill, It's Kind of a Funny Story (which was adapted into a hit movie starring Zach Galifianakis) and The Other Normals, scheduled for release later this year. He's also collaborating with a big-name Hollywood director on a new series of Young Adult novels, which already creating quite a buzz around Tinseltown. So yeah, Ned Vizzini is pretty much a literary rock star.

And you can read my interview with him here.

**************
TTWF UPDATE: I found something fun on Amazon. Turns out that you can now buy a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of my book. The creators of the shirt are actually referencing the song, but it's still pretty awesome. Maybe we can team up for a product tie-in? In the meantime, here's my book.

QR...it means "Qool Read!" Really, it does.

Coincidentally, I just happen to have two QR codes for my book...

This one is for Kindle (or any Kindle app, of course. You're savvy. You know the deal.)

And this one is for any and every other sort of eReader... i.e. Nook, Kobo, Sony, iPad, LilyPad, even a plain ol' laptop. Yes, you can download and read my book right on your lap-(or desktop) computer doo-hickey! Just download it as a .pdf and you're good to go.

(This one is bigger, but size doesn't matter.)

The other thing about Thanks, That Was Fun is that it's only $1.99. Below is a partial list of things that are more expensive than my book.

• A gallon of milk. The price of cow's milk in 2012 (according to the internet, who never lies) is $3.50 to $3.99. Of course, organic milk is about $4.00 a gallon, and fancy pants veggie types like me pay an average of $4.19 for just a half-gallon of soy milk.

Chock full o' protein, but it will give you gas. My book won't. And it's cheaper!

• Two pounds of large strawberries. At Winn-Dixie, anyway.

Cover them with chocolate and the price goes up.

• One gross (144) of latex balloons.

At this price -- $5.75 -- you could buy two and a half copies of my book.

• Stapler ..... this one costs $6.99 at--where else?--Staples. But holy crap, six dollars and ninety-nine cents? That's more than three copies of my book!

Yep, $6.99. And it's not even RED!

$$$$$$$$$$

And finally, something that's cheaper than my book.....

• Hannah Montana kite. Price? $1.90.

Cheaper than my book, but only by nine cents.

$$$$$$$$$$

Face it, you'd rather buy my book.

Buffy, "aspirin," Mr. Yuk, and Just Say No

Buffy, the little sister on Family Affair, was the first person I'd ever heard of who took drugs and died. I was about four or five and I was fond of watching reruns of Family Affair and The Brady Bunch in the afternoons with my sister when she came home from school. I remember my mother telling me--quite matter-of-factly--that Buffy was actually a teenager and that she had recently died from "taking drugs." This blew my mind because I couldn't quite wrap my head around the notion that a). the pig-tailed little girl on TV who talked to her doll wasn't really a little girl anymore (the concept of "reruns" was a bit advanced for me); b.) that she had taken something called "drugs" (or "pills" I think my mom had said--which in my head translated to "aspirin,"--the only pills I knew of); and c.) she was dead. That last realization was particularly weird: the idea that someone could be alive on TV and dead in real life was freaky! I was confused but morbidly intrigued by the whole thing and enthusiastically repeated this information to my little neighborhood friends, all of whom were familiar with Buffy and Family Affair. They seemed equally fascinated and perplexed by the whole thing as I was.

When I was in first grade, a policeman came to talk to my class about all the dangerous things in our homes; like the bleach under the kitchen sink and the paint thinner in the garage and the polish our mothers used to make the living room furniture shiny. We were sent home with a whole shitload of Mr. Yuk stickers to plaster on anything that could be ingested by ignorant little kids (or curious older ones), like the Windex in the bathroom that resembled blue Kool-Aid.

I never got that far with the Mr. Yuk stickers; my mom neatly affixed one Mr. Yuk sticker to the kitchen phone--it had the number of the national Poison Control Center on it--but confiscated the rest of them after I thought it would be funny to stick Mr. Yuk faces on every toilet in the house. (My mother, who had to scrub off the stickers with lighter fluid, was not amused. I'm sure I got grounded for that one.)

I also remember an anti-drug talk of sorts by my first grade teacher, Mrs. Baker, following some ancient filmstrip about safety in the household. She told us that, although our parents might have bottles of aspirin and other pills around the house that looked like candy, we were never ever ever EVER to eat them, no matter how tasty they appeared. I was like, DUH, everyone knows you'll die if you take medicine when you're not really sick. That's how my parents explained it to me anyway, and it just seemed like common sense. And I was already well aware that aspirin most definitely did NOT taste like candy, because I had to take chewable children's aspirin whenever I got sick, and they tasted like the inside of a dog's butt (or how I imagined one would taste, anyway).

Those ain't Mentos, kids.

But then Mrs. Baker told us something odd: she said that if any "older kids" ever told us that sniffing glue would make us "feel good" to never do it because--you guessed it--it would also make us get sick and die. This was new information to me. I knew what glue smelled like, we had the real stuff at home--Elmer's Glue--not that weak paste they made you use at school that wouldn't even stick to itself. I was surprised that I'd managed to inadvertently inhale glue dozens of times at home while doing construction paper crafts, and I had yet to get sick and die. I realize now Mrs. Baker was talking about the heavier industrial model airplane type of glue, stuff that I wouldn't have had at home anyway. But--as insane as it sounds--the exaggerated danger of what I assumed was Elmer's Glue may have sown the first seeds of doubt that drugs and other chemicals wouldn't really make me get sick and die. That it was just something people said to scare you.

Not that I had any interest in experimenting at the time. When I was around eight years old, I remember watching a TV documentary about the 1960's with my mom while she braided my hair. They were showing clips of some hippie woman singing in a rough, raspy voice, all bluesy and intense and shaking. "That's Janis Joplin," my mom told me. "She was a famous singer when I was younger." I frowned at the bell-bottomed figure on the screen who was flailing around and contorting her face like she was having some sort of embarrassing fit. "What's wrong with her?" I asked. "Oh, she got into drugs," my mom replied. I tsked, shaking my head. "She looks dumb enough to do them." I'm pretty sure at this time that I still thought "drugs" = "pills", and although I had figured out by then that there were stronger pills around than just aspirin, I still thought you had to be an absolute moron to take them. How could taking "pills" do anything more than make you well when you were sick? And what was so great about them that people--not just kids, I mean, some actual grown-ups--would take them? Seriously, how could you NOT know you weren't supposed to do that, dummies?

Ahh, childhood. When everything is either smart or dumb, good or bad, black or white. If only life really were that simple.

Rainbows, unicorns, butterflies, and sunshine.

Then suddenly it was 1983, and Nancy Reagan did a guest appearance on Diff'rent Strokes to speak to the youth of America about the dangers of drugs and to tell us all to "Just Say No!" Yep, that really happened, and I saw it when it aired. And yeah, it was as lame as it sounds now.

The most fucked up thing about this picture?

The old people are still alive, the young ones are dead.

So in fourth grade a group of high school kids visited my class to perform some anti-drug skits and hand out green "Just Say NO!" stickers for us to put on our book bags and Trapper Keepers. The high school kids--some of whom had actually (holy shit) tried drugs, back when they didn't know any better, of course---told us about marijuana joints, which were like cigarettes only much worse because you'd get addicted to them and die. We learned about a white powder called cocaine that people laid out in lines and snorted up their noses (why would anyone do that? Snorting stuff up your nose hurts! My mom had to pretty much tie me down to get nose drops in me whenever I had a cold). And we learned about this stuff called heroin, which made me almost puke because you did it by tying a belt around your arm to make your veins bulge out (EWWWW!!!) then sticking a needle into your arm and injecting it into your bloodstream. I was appalled. What kind of sick shit was that? You REALLY had to be stupid to want to give yourself shots, as far as I was concerned. But, the high school kids assured us, one day some of us--maybe even someone right there in that classroom--might be tempted through peer pressure into smoking, snorting, or shooting one of the very drugs they talked about that day and we needed to be prepared. That was A-okay: you didn't need to tell me twice not to stick myself with needles. I got it. Just Say NO!

Oh Nancy. You would have been

so proud of the fourth grade Me.

Of course, now it seems ironic. If my childhood self knew what sort of trouble I'd be getting into in my adult years, she'd be appalled. I can imagine her lecturing me:

Smoking? Ewww, cigarettes are nasty! Everyone knows those things kill you.

Drinking? That's icky. Beer tastes gross and wine smells like farts.

And pills? Really? That's the first thing you learn NOT to do. Don't you remember what happened to Buffy?

For those of you who don't know, I've been in recovery for several months. I've given up my two favorite things: pills and booze. I no longer abuse prescription drugs (Xanax and Percocet were my favorites, with an occasional Ambien thrown in for good measure) and I've quit drinking. It's taken me a few tries to get it right, but I can truthfully say now that I am sober for the first time in a long, long time.

I just hope I've made the old me proud. She's a bit naive, but her heart's in the right place.

Oh Jon Stewart, you complete me.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

This Just In: Disgusting Misogynist is a Disgusting Misogynist!

I bought the above bumper sticker at the GLBT emporium Heffalumps of St. Louis sometime in the mid-nineties while on one of my many trips to visit my dear high school friend Angela (an SLU student at the time). Angela lived in the Central West End (the coolest neighborhood in St. Louis---besides U-City) and Heffalumps was right around the corner from her apartment. The sticker in the photo is one I pulled from the web, since the one I have is gathering dust in a box somewhere. In hindsight (pun intended), I’m glad I kept it in a box instead of affixing it to the bumper of my beloved little ’88 Corolla (same size as a clown car, so cute, so me, but dead as a doornail since 1999), not for fear that I would’ve offended anyone, but fear that either myself and/or my Corolla would have gotten the crap kicked/keyed out of me/it for sporting an anti-Limbaugh sentiment while doing time at the corporate hellholes where I slaved in the Clinton-hating Indianapolis suburbs.

But enough nostalgia for one day. What I really came here to do is to simply ask everyone—Liberals, Conservatives, Tea-baggers, Libertarians, all y’all—-can we please stop acting like Rush Limbaugh is someone to whom we should be paying attention? And can we please, please, pretty-please-with-OxyContin-on-top quit pretending that he is something other than just another bloated, miserable, misogynistic Republican closet case? That way, when he does something completely predictable like call Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute, we can all just laugh and say “Hahahaha, remember when that asshole had a talk show? And the same five mouth-breathing dildos would call him up daily just to snicker like Beavis and agree with whatever small-minded, racist, misogynistic comment he’d just made? Thank God those days are over.”

Seriously people, it’s not that far-fetched. Not at all. We can send Rush off his long overdue retirement with a suitcase of hillbilly heroin, Cuban cigars, and enough forged-prescription Viagara to keep some Dominican rentboy employed for a long, long time. It’s a win/win situation: we’d be helping to boost the economy of a third-world country and we’d never ever have to hear anything from this gross fat fuck ever again. So write, email, call, and harangue the few remaining sponsors of his imbecilic show and tell them to pull their heads out of his fat ass—along with their ads—and nudge this has-been closer toward sweet oblivion.

"Get me some Oxy, fool!"

Let’s make it happen.

Thoughts on Whitney Houston

Whitney Houston’s death is incredibly sad, and it has an added shock value for us oldsters. This point has been driven home for me in the weeks since her passing, particularly when talking about Whitney with my younger friends. Most people under the age of 30 seem to only know Whitney as the tabloid “crack is wack” train wreck she became in the last decade, which is ironic considering the cheesy, churchy, “America’s Sweetheart” Whitney of the 1980’s. In a decade marked by decadence, the harshest chemical Whitney Houston was publicly known to ingest back in the day was Diet Coke.

Sheesh. It doesn't get more eighties than this.

I confess that I was never much of a fan, especially in her early days. In fact, when Whitney Houston burst onto the music scene in the summer of 1985, I didn’t pay her much notice. Between her first single You Give Good Love and the cover of her debut album, where she’s made up to look like Sade (a “lite jazz” singer from that era whose voice and musical arrangements put me right to sleep), Whitney Houston didn’t have a lot to offer a girl like me. She seemed way too adult contemporary and—even at the age of twelve—I was well on my way to becoming a new wave freak, obsessed with bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, a-ha, Blondie, and pretty much anyone else I read about in Star Hits magazine (my Bible).

Then about six months later, Whitney’s single “How Will I Know” exploded, she won like 80 Grammy awards, and suddenly there was no escaping her. Seriously, the woman was EVERYWHERE. My opinion of Whitney and her music went from mild indifference to outright revulsion. Her scream-singing on “How Will I Know” drove me up the damn wall and MTV played the song’s cutesy, annoying video every twenty minutes. And then—to add insult to injury—her next single, a ridiculously corny, faux-inspirational turd called “The Greatest Love of All” was even more loathsome and ubiquitous. When those two songs hit it big, Whitney’s record company appeared to ease up on the adult contemporary angle and began heavily marketing her to girls aged twelve and up…which happened to be my demographic.

To be a middle-schooler from 1986 to 1988 meant that I was surrounded by girls who were absolutely crazy about Whitney Houston. She particularly struck a chord with the kind of girls who did well in school and were active in their church youth groups, the same girls who swooned over Richard Marx ballads, grooved to Debbie Gibson, and insisted that George Michael was “way too cute” to be gay (!). Basically, Whitney Houston was for girls who were Not Me. She was a squeaky-clean, All-American pop princess who was apparently too pure to even go on a date. I remember reading a quote from her in a magazine where she said something about not needing a boyfriend because she had Jesus, or some such horseshit. That was exactly the kind of crap that made me roll my eyes, plug into my Walkman, and retreat even further behind the tattered copies of Star Hits I kept hidden inside my textbooks. I stared at pin-ups of Morrissey, willing him to deliver me from the icky sugar-coated mainstream American drivel that threatened to suffocate me.

Of course, at that tender age I was too naïve to realize that Whitney Houston’s goody-goody persona was a painstakingly constructed image; one that was manufactured by her record company and maintained by her publicists, her manager, and everyone else who had a stake in her music career. I was also blind to the notion that many of the artists I worshipped—Duran Duran, Deborah Harry, Echo and the Bunnymen, et al—also had a team of people who made sure they looked and sounded in a way that appealed to their core audience (i.e. kids like me). While I don’t think the acts that I adored were as tightly controlled by their people as Whitney was by hers, at the end of the day the record industry is just another business with a product to sell; a product that is deliberately packaged to attract the sort of people who will buy it.

At any rate, Whitney Houston’s virtuous façade seemed to work for her. Her second and third albums—released in 1987 and 1990 respectively—were multi-platinum sellers. She collected Grammys hand over fist and even made the national anthem a Top 20 hit when she belted it out at the 1991 Super Bowl, further cementing her status as America’s Sweetheart. Of course, I still couldn’t be arsed to care about Whitney. She was still inescapable all throughout my high school years, but she became easier for me to ignore—especially since by then I had made some friends who shared and respected my taste in music—a pretty major accomplishment when you’re in high school. I even hit pay dirt my senior year when I found a cool boyfriend who was into Depeche Mode and New Order.

In 1992—the same year I graduated high school—Whitney made her film debut opposite Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Despite Whitney’s involvement, I found myself intrigued by the film’s premise and surprised my New Order-loving boyfriend (and myself) by dragging him to the Cineplex to see it. We both ended up loving it; I’m a sucker for movies about impossible love affairs stamped with a fixed expiration date (see also: Before Sunrise, Harold and Maude, etc.). I also was impressed with Whitney’s acting chops. She was no Meryl Streep, but she wasn’t bad. I also liked that her character was a radical departure from her goody-goody image; she played a temperamental diva who drank, smoked, had sex and even said “fuck” (that last bit was particularly jarring—this wasn’t the same girl who once claimed to have a boyfriend in Jesus). I even dug her version of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” from the film’s soundtrack. It wasn’t enough to make me a bona fide Whitney fan, but she’d definitely gone up a few notches in my estimation.

Fast forward ten years. Whitney had starred in a few movies and scored a few more hit singles, but her personal life had seriously gone down the crapper, fueled by rumors of a hardcore drug habit and her shitshow of a marriage to Bobby Brown. The capper was that bizarre Diane Sawyer interview in 2002, which seriously screwed with my head. I mean, I was glad to see that Whitney (and/or her PR team) had long since dropped the Goody-Goody Jesus’s Girlfriend shtick, but it was sad and a bit shocking to see how far she’d actually fallen.

To put it in perspective, I’ll try to craft an analogy that makes sense in modern day terms: Imagine a twitchy, coke-eyed Taylor Swift acquiescing to a prime time sit-down with Diane Sawyer. And Diane Sawyer—in her best “concerned journalist” tone—gently pressing Taylor Swift to address the drug rumors that have plagued her, particularly ones concerning her alleged crack addiction. And Taylor Swift blurting out, “First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Crack is cheap. I make too much money to ever smoke crack. Crack is wack.”

And Taylor Swift’s husband, which…hmm…who would be the modern Bobby Brown equivalent? Let’s see…abusive, petulant man-child with a string of mediocre R&B hits under his belt—Chris Brown, perhaps?—(the shared surname is a creepy coincidence when you think about it) fidgets next to Taylor Swift and first denies, then admits that he smokes weed, although “it’s not an every day thing. Um, it’s maybe every other day.” But, he assures Diane, he only does it to keep his bi-polar disorder “at a level.”

And if you can conjure up that freakish scenario in your mind, then you have some idea how surreal it was for aging Gen-Xers like me to watch Whitney “I-believe-the-children-are-our-future” Houston sidestep questions about a crack habit while Bobby “Humping Around” Brown lied his face off about his own drug use and his well-documented abusive tendencies.



The whole thing is hard to watch, from Whitney’s nervous non-answers about her addictions to the way she instinctively hugs herself and leans away from her husband when he sits down next to her. But what bugged me the most was the crap-a-doodle-doo spewing forth from one Bobby Brown. He’s not only an abusive, drug-addled douchebag, he’s a piss-poor liar. Seriously, this an actual exchange:

Diane Sawyer: “Have you ever hit her?”
Bobby Brown: “No no no no no no no.”
Whitney Houston (quietly): “What’s ‘hitting’ mean?” (like ‘hitting’ is some abstract concept that could be interpreted a number of ways).
Bobby Brown (trotting out an old standby): “I have four sisters, four aunts, a mother, two daughters.” (Oh yeah, that’s right. Men who have female family members don’t abuse women.) He then piles it on even higher: “I love…I love the beauty of woman.” (?) Then, apropos of nothing, he grabs Whitney’s leg and says, “This is mine.”

Ugh.

Of course, we all know what happened next. While Whitney finally divorced Bobby in 2007 and went to rehab in 2009, her freedom was short lived. In the end, she was done in by her addictions.

R.I.P. Whitney. She wasn’t perfect, she wasn’t horrible. She was just human.

*********
Edited to add: Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. but over the years I’ve warmed a bit to Whitney Houston’s music—a few select songs, anyway. Although I love the goofy girlie-ness of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” (and if you’ve never heard David Byrne’s AWESOME version of it, you must do so now), I'm more inclined towards her later stuff, when she laid off the scream-singing in favor of more subtle vocals and melodies. My favorites are these two from the “Waiting To Exhale” soundtrack (a movie that, for the record, I also liked).

Essentially, it's a break-up song....

This is Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies with a solo acoustic version of "Thanks, That Was Fun," the song that inspired my book's title.*

*Now available on iBooks, by the way!
(and Kindle and every other e-reading device, thanks to Smashwords.)

So I've been super busy lately....promoting, marketing, and talking up my book, and I've gotten A LOT of questions in the process. I've decided to start addressing the queries here on the old blog. Below are the first two in what will probably be a lengthy (but entertaining!) series of FAQ&A's.

Here I go.

FAQ's: Thanks, That Was Fun

Q: How did you come up with the title Thanks, That Was Fun?

A: The title of my book comes from a song of the same name by the Barenaked Ladies. It’s a rather obscure track; a B-side of sorts (if you were born after 1990, ask an older person about B-sides. Don’t worry, it’s nothing dirty). It’s available on iTunes and also as a “previously unreleased” track on BNL’s greatest hits album, titled—appropriately—All Their Greatest Hits.

Thanks, That Was Fun (the book) wasn’t always called "Thanks, That Was Fun." The working title was actually Some Fantastic, another BNL song. This was mainly because I started writing my novel in late 1999, and I was obsessed with the Ladies’ seminal 1998 album Stunt.



Stunt was the perfect soundtrack for the book--funny, sad, dark, lovelorn, snarky, boozy—there’s even a song on the album called “Alcohol”—that track alone provided a great deal of inspiration. I listened to Stunt constantly and I was convinced that the title of the book had to come from one of the songs. For a while I called it “Light Up My Room” (track #3), but the more I wrote, the more I thought “Some Fantastic” (track #12) sounded a lot cooler. For those who aren’t familiar, “Some Fantastic” is probably the weirdest song on what is already a weird album. To give you a taste, here are some sample lyrics:

One day I’ll construct a satellite/And I’ll name it after you/Cause you were the greatest friend of all/Except for when you split my lip in two

What the hell did those lyrics have to do with my novel? I have no earthly idea. It was like having an unexplainable crush on someone. I didn’t know why I liked “Some Fantastic,” I just did. And once I settled on it as a title, I was very attached. It was smart and intriguing and catchy; in short, everything I thought a debut novel should be. That title stuck to my novel for years, from 2000 to 2009, to be precise.

My editor Scott was the one who got me to call it "Thanks, That Was Fun." Trust me, I needed a little convincing. I was all but married to Some Fantastic. I mean, Some Fantastic and I had been through a lot together at this point. Did I mention that it took me a long time to write this book? Well it did. It took me a frustratingly long time. Some Fantastic had stayed with me through six moves, five significant relationships, two presidential administrations…we had a history, and that title was a part of me, dammit! But Scott (talented, wise, patient, funny, straight-talking Scott, more about him later) thought that “Some Fantastic” was way too vague and that I needed a title that was more descriptive, one that fit the story. He’d been at me for a while to change it and one day he told me over the phone to do a little brainstorming and come up with some alternate names before our next meeting. Reluctantly, I sat down at my desk and typed up a short list of song titles and some random phrases, then emailed it to Scott. When I met with him a week later, he had printed out the list I’d sent—there were about a dozen names—and he’d put big X’s through all of them but one: “Thanks, That Was Fun.” He presented me with the paper and said “Here’s the new title of your book. It’s funny, it’s descriptive, it’s sarcastic, it’s teasing, and it fits your novel to a T.” Seeing it there in print, I got his point. Scott was right. It worked.

Q: Your name isn’t really Andie Nash. Why did you change your name?

A: Again, it comes back to an album, although my mom was the one to first suggest that I use a pen name. I believe her actual words were “This novel of yours….you’re not publishing this under your real name, are you?” I had in fact been planning to use my real name; I didn’t see anything wrong with it. But my mom begged to differ, citing privacy and a bunch of other parental concerns and issues I hadn’t yet considered. So I told her I’d think about it, and left it at that.

It was around this time that I received an awesome gift from my writer’s group friend Becca: her old record player. I was super excited--not only to have a real excuse to shop for vinyl--but now I had a real turntable on which to spin it! Woo hoo! Never one to do things in half measures, I hit up every thrift store, used record shop and garage sale within a 30 mile radius searching for new (well, old) vinyl and bought up everything I came across. One of my purchases was a Crosby Stills Nash album, the one where they’re all hanging out on a ratty couch on some porch.

You know, this one. I believe it’s actually called Hanging Out on a Ratty Couch on Some Porch.

So I got the album home and put it on the turntable and I was sitting there staring at the cover while it played. I’ll just go ahead and say that this was before I got sober and I was a bit anesthetized, probably on something herbal. And my mind was wandering, and I started thinking about possible pen names. I wanted to keep Andie, because it’s really my first name. Okay, it’s really my nickname, but everyone calls me Andie, and I like it that way. But what to do about a surname? So I studied the CSN album and thought, Andie Crosby? No. Andie Stills? Lame. Andie Nash? Hmmm.

Yes, Andie NASH. Now that was cool. And pretty badass. (And Graham Nash is hands-down my favorite member of CSN. I’ve always loved “Our House.”) Anyway, I made a mental note and filed “Andie Nash” away, just in case I decided to use a nom de plume when my book came out.

Then, Simon Reid happened.

Chances are, if you Googled the name “Andie Nash” and/or “Simon Reid”, one of the links brought you here. So if that’s how you found this blog I’ll go ahead and say that, yes, I’m THAT Andie Nash, the American woman who blew the whistle on her conman ex-boyfriend and blah blah blah, you probably have a little background on the story already. If you’re looking for more, you can read my first Simon Reid tirade here, a 2010 update here, and a post about my March 2011 appearance on the Today Show here (and yes, the last part was a blast. Getting an all-expense paid trip to NYC, appearing on national TV, and hanging out with Jo, Laura, and Nicola made the initial Reid drama worth it in the end.)

So I started thinking about using the name “Nash” just before I went on the Today Show. Since I was going on TV to air my dirty laundry to all and sundry, my mom was worrying—-again (I love my mom)--about privacy and internet searches and all the weirdness that you have to worry about when you’re a parent to a screwball like me. So in the end, that’s what convinced me to take the name Andie Nash, for both public and literary purposes. And there you have it.

Next time...I dish some dirt and answer more FAQs!

Birds do it. Bees do it. And so do chickens, apparently.

I think I must have been about 4 years old when I asked The Question. My family was living in Greensburg, Indiana (this was before we made our big move to "The City" - Indianapolis) and Stuart, my buddy next door, was about to become a big brother. Stuart's mother was the first pregnant lady I'd encountered and, as the months went by and she grew steadily larger and wider, I must have been curious. I'm guessing that's what prompted The Question. I don't actually remember asking it, but I do remember The Answer, and it came in the form of a real doozy of a book: How Babies Are Made.



My mom, naturally, was the one to proffer the book and broach this delicate subject with me. She was the typical 1970's earth mother, quite different than the conservative mothers of my friends, and definitely more "with it" than the small-town mothers of Greensburg, so it makes sense that she would have used How Babies Are Made, a Time-Life book first published in 1968. Apparently it's quite famous (Judy Blume even mentions it in Superfudge) and pretty much the go-to book for forward-thinking parents of the era who wanted to teach their kids about the birds and the bees. The images in the book--crafted entirely from construction paper--have a sweet, touchy-feely quality, but at the same time are rather explicit (check out the equipment on the dog, for starters). I don't remember the details of "the talk" but--as the cliche goes--a picture is worth a thousand words. And this book had a lot of pictures.

Here are a few highlights....


Here we have the artist's rendering of a bee pollinating a flower, but I can't even pay attention to what's going on inside that flower because, seriously, that bee is AWESOME! And it's made completely out of construction paper.


A mommy chicken and a daddy chicken doing...well...The Funky Chicken.
But wait...there's more! Turns out that dogs do it too. (YOU probably thought I was going to make a joke about doing it doggie-style, didn't you? Well, ha! I resisted the urge, so there.)



Look, it's Angelina Jolie's wet dream! (Sorry, I had to.)


And here are the babies, all grown up! I was mistaken, that's not Angie's brood. Clearly it's (clockwise from upper left) Zac Efron, Jessica Simpson, Barack Obama, Adam Brody, and John Cho (sporting an unfortunate haircut and a seriously groovy shirt)!


This is how humans do it. Under the covers, missionary-style. End of story.
Note: I like that the woman seems to be enjoying herself; that's a sure sign that this book was crafted in the late 1960's. In the 1950's such a notion would have been soundly mocked and quickly dismissed. Women enjoying sex? Hahahahaha! Surely you jest!


After the mommy and the daddy get nekkid and lay in bed and kiss for a while, a baby comes out!


Awwwwww! I can't even make fun of this picture, it's too sweet. I'm gonna go call my mom now.

While searching for images from this book I came across other people who had blogged about it. Check 'em out:

One of a Kind Wisconsin -- I really loved this post and the writer's commentary!

Teri has a highly entertaining blog and a great story about how she discovered this book.

Jennifer blogged about this a few years back. Check out her recollections of How Babies Are Made. (Her current blog, btw, is here.)

Do you have memories of this book? How did you find out about the birds and the bees? Tell me about it in the comments.

And speaking of books, here's mine.

Happy New Year 2012!

Wishing you and yours peace, abundance and much love in the new year.

Have a Holly Jolly Christmas!

Popping in to remind my dear readers and anyone and everyone everywhere on this great Google earth that my novel is available on Kindle! Yes it is, yes it is, oh yes it is. (Sorry, I love that song.) And if you have some other new-fangled gadgetry besides Kindle, you probably know that Kindle apps are easily downloaded to iPhone and iPad.

Also....

You can download it to a Nook, Kobo, and pretty much anything else that you can plug into an outlet and read (including a humble old-fashioned laptop...or even a desktop! WOW!) if you get it via Smashwords. It's so so so easy and ridiculously cheap and totally worth it. Just go here.

Wintertime is reading time, so get down on it.

No language, just sound--

that's all we need know,

to synchronize love

to the beat of the show...

Check it out, a near shot-for-shot recreation of Joy Division's appearance on Tony Wilson's "So It Goes" using Playmobil figures (see the fictionalized version, from the excellent Ian Curtis biopic Control here).

Turns out there is a plethora of Playmobil videos on YouTube, and I love them all. I love the idea of recreating classic film clips using Playmobil figures. Maybe it's because I grew up in the era of the herky-jerky Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer kids' shows, but I love bizarro stop-motion animation. It makes me scared and happy at the same time. Come to think of it, that's kind of how I feel about Joy Division, too.

This clip is dedicated to Mancunian man Brooko--who comes from Salford--a very important distinction.

UPDATE 12/7/2011

Seems that KIEM (pussies) blocked the original YouTube footage, but I found another clip with basically the same report. Betsy Lambert and KIEM can suck it.

"I'd like to point out to anybody watching that this is really bunk journalism."

Thank you, red fleece man. I couldn't have said it better myself. So I've watched this clip several times now, and--although at first I found it terribly amusing--it's starting to really get under my skin. I'm thankful that it exists, and that it will live on through the magic of YouTube. It is a perfect illustration of the clueless corporate media outlets; how COMPLETELY they miss the point--particularly in the case of the Occupy Wall Street protests--and how they will eschew a REAL story in an attempt to sensationalize the inane ("Poop and pee, you guys! Look at these dirty hippie protesters and their poop and peeeee!").

And I'm going to pick on this hack in the ugly sweater some more, for being both smug and stupid.

Her TOP 3 Moments of Stupid

1. After hounding the protesters ("Answer my question! Who pooped and peed on the bank?") she turns to the camera and says under her breath "I'll get this." Like she's Bob fucking Woodward. Yes, ugly sweater lady, we're all waiting with baited breath. You must sniff out the truth! THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT POOP AND PEE!
2. "The police have pictures!" she nasals to the red fleece guy. Then let the police sort it out. Also, what does she expect? Someone to come forward and say, "Aw, my bad. I pooped and peed on the bank. I was determined not to say anything, but my resolve was shattered by your ace interrogation skills." Poop and pee, indeed.
3. She harasses the tent guy, he shoves the camera, she shrieks and then stomps away, yanking the camera guy behind her by the cord. She then bitches to the protesters, "You guys WANT us to do news on you. We're doing news." Yeah. News about poop and pee. Much more fascinating than the actual reasons for Occupy Wall Street, or anything else the protesters have to say. What a dick.

Cheers to you, ugly sweater lady, for shining a light on the moronic news outlet that tries to pass off this kind of shit (pun intended) as news.

ETA: Someone named Andrew Goff recorded an ode to Poopinpee-gate and intrepid reporter Betsy Lambert. It's all kinds of wrong and totally hilarious. Listen to it here (and good luck getting it out of your head. Seriously, I was singing it in the shower this morning).

And once again: OCCUPY!

OCCUPY, BITCHES!

Also, who pooped and peed on the bank? Is anyone listening to me???? Who pooped and peed on the bank?

Yes, my Beavis and Butthead laugh got a workout on this one.

Uh huh huh huh hehehehuheheheheh huh huh huh huh.

As any twelve-year-old knows, nothing is funnier than poop and pee. Except for maybe this--ahem--'journalist' at Occupy Eureka (northern California logging town...heh heh, "logging") stomping around the occupation demanding to know "who pooped and peed on the bank?"

My favorite things about this clip:

1. She says "poop and pee" roughly 800 times.
2. At one point she switches to "feces" instead of poop, trying to class up her reporting (too late honey!)
3. Her Contempo Casuals sweater from the 1989 holiday collection.
4. Two words: Stretch pants! (Two more: Oy vey!)
5. The stoned guy in the black T-shirt and '80s skater 'do totally cracking up at her questions.
6. The fact that she is obviously serious with this crap (pun intended).
7. The camera guy (unintentionally?) zooming in on her fat rolls after she harangues the tent dude.
8. Unintentional or not, the camera guy clearly hates her.
9. She storms off at the end of the clip, yanking the camera guy behind her by the mic cord (?) like a pissy kid taking his ball and going home.
10. It's even funny with the sound off.

That said, I totally support the Occupy movement.

Uh huh huh huh heh heheheheheheh huh huh huh huh.

"Movement."