HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR PUPPET MASTER TODAY?

My friend Amy (right) has three degrees but works with her hands. And sweats at her job. I envy that.

I think the world can be divided into people who shower before work and people who shower after. I'm the former (except when I'm running late, like today, and don't shower at all). The only time I ever break a sweat at work is when the air-conditioning coils on the roof get clogged up with cottonwood seeds. That happens once a year like clockwork (The state tree of Kansas is not the utilitarian cottonwood for nothing). The temperature soars to 85 degrees, and we all get a pat on the back for laboring in "hellish" conditions. Just once I'd like to finish my day with a genuine, well-earned need for a good scrubbing and a cold beer.

The other thing about Amy's job — puppetry — is that it's damn fun and it makes people laugh. How much better can it get? My job is damn stressful and it makes people cuss. Like this: Goddamn it! Or this: Son of a bitch!

I'm sure the world of puppetry gives rise to many a profanity, but I imagine it's delivered with a lot of panache. For instance, in Amy's green room (right) I heard a puppeteer say "Fuck! fuck! fuck!" while searching for a lost article of clothing. But it was sing-songy and airy, not guttural and homicidal.

I saw my first puppet show a week and a half ago, in Atlanta, at the Center for Puppetry Arts. It was amazing. I saw the show first from the audience — a sea of kids — which was awesome, and then from behind the stage, which was double awesome. Triple awesome. That fuzzy little monkey that seems to glide magically through the rain forest has as many as four people moving it — running with it, jumping with it — in a highly coordinated ballet. And to complicate the task further, the puppeteers are working in the dark, behind a burqa-style black hood (left), on a narrow ramp, with a minuscule margin for error.

This behind-the-scenes stuff taught me something about my imagination: It's lacking. Now I liked "Sesame Street" OK when I was a kid, but I was never a big fan of the Muppets, and I think it's because I couldn't really appreciate them at face value. They just seemed like stuffed animals who talked. And that seemed unremarkable. What I needed to see, to fire my imagination, was HOW they talked and HOW they moved — what went into them.

I had a similar deal with magicians. When they revealed how they did a magic trick, it always seemed MORE magical to me, not less. The magic was in the process, not the illusion.


Same thing with life on earth, if I may generalize a tad. How can the mechanics of evolution — the mystery, the eons, the intricacy — inspire anything but religious feelings? The notion that it's all emanating, instead, from some dude in the sky — a talking stuffed animal with nothing behind him — leaves me unimpressed.

But that's just me.

Anyway, another thing about puppeteers: They're like actors, but their vanity is different. They don't want to be seen. They're beautiful and talented. They can sing and dance and put on a show — just like any Broadway performer — but they don't want to be seen. And that — having no use for mirrors — strikes me as damn unique and wonderful, if slightly batty.

The Center for Puppetry Arts
Amy's blog

WU-TANG GEORGE AIN'T NUTHING TA FUCK WIT

Awesome. My pal George just revealed that he was in a Korean gang as a kid. I suspected he was a badass — I could tell by his penchant for iced coffee drinks and science fiction — and now my suspicions have been confirmed.

He claims the gang's main activity was breakdancing (see his blog), but don't let that fool you. That's just George being modest. You can be sure they were doing more than spinning around in matching $5 jackets. I'm sure there was a little extortion here and there, some cap peeling, a revenge killing or two. The usual.

I've known George just over a year. He came to Lawrence when Erin left for the bright lights of Newton. He had been on the East Coast and the West Coast — on gangsta business, no doubt — and now he was back in the middle, probably acting as a point man, under cover as a copy editor, in a coast-to-coast crime syndicate. When I called his former employer for a reference, she said two things: (1) Hire him NOW; and (2) Don't be surprised if he never talks to you.

Which I know now was code for ... something.

Well, we did hire him. And he did talk to me, eventually. I was just becoming acquainted with the shadowy details of his past when he up and moved to Oklahoma, where — get this — he's studying to become a badass nurse.

Or so he claims.

I'D DO ANYTHING TO BE YOUR EVERYTHING (OR ERIN, CIRCA 1991)

Most of us spent our adolescence being stupid for boys. My friend Erin spent hers being stupid for boys AND chronicling it in unflinching detail. That's what separates the Jane Austens from the Danielle Steeles.

I had heard tell of Erin's juvenilia on several occasions. The first was when this creepy guy murdered two of my elderly neighbors and Erin's husband called the newsroom to ask Erin: Isn't that the Damien I read about it in your diary, the one you had a crush on, the one who brought a gun to school, the one you had to tell on (thereby putting the social good above your own heart)?

I didn't know what was more shocking — her husband's casual familiarity with the contents of her diary or her casual familiarity with a crazed killer. Later I learned that Ben knew all her secrets and she knew lots of criminals, so neither turned out to be a big deal.

The diaries came up a few more times in conversation, and one day we decided to read them. She went to an upstairs closet in their 100-year-old bungalow and brought down a stack of well-cared-for journals of different sizes. She hadn't looked at them in years. Most were adorned with stickers and doodles. One doodle, a sign of her incipient feminism, said "Year of the Woman!" Another praised gun control. And next to a doodle praising gun control might be a brightly colored sticker of a unicorn or a shamrock or a word like "AWESOME!" or "SUPER!" She made some effort to match the color of her ink on any given day to the colors in her stickers. It's the kind of diary you could see a 12-year-old Martha Stewart having. You could see the child's love for school supplies — inks and papers and stickers and glue — that would translate to an adult love for crisp linens and coordinating sheets and well-ordered pantries.

All the pages were filled with neat, evenly spaced handwriting, a precision and control that belied the messy adolescent drama that was about to unfold.

The leitmotiv of the diaries is Erin's Quixotic quest for love: "I'm longing, yearning for love. My heart aches always. Love is one wish that will never come. I can't keep my mind off Mr. X."

But there's also social intrigue: "Carissa is acting real snotty lately. Worse than usual. She really blew up at Ellyn this morning. Me, Debi, Adam, Brandy, and Jami are getting revenge on her." (Stay tuned!)

And economic ups and downs: "Now I have 26 dollars."

And self-reflection: "I'll say that I am also a incredible bitch most of the time. I'm surprised my friends put up with me. I hear myself saying these snobby things and I want to kick myself. Even my dad says I have a rotten personality."

It's a microcosm of adult life: same worries, same obsessions, more honesty.

But mostly it's about boys.

She had told me that she was totally "boy crazy" when she was a kid, but by crazy I thought she meant crazy. I didn't know she meant CRAZY. Like Jane Austen boy crazy — where every thought and action, every reason to exist is all about the boy. Capturing the boy.

Here's a sample from the first entry: "I spent the night with Sara tonight. We blew it! We were at N. Dillons. We were at the gum machines when this adorable guy walked up. He started talking to us. Sara was in a daze. I thought he was a loony. It wasn't till he was gone that I realized that he was a absolute babe."

Two days later: "I'm developing a slight interest in Colby Whiteside. He is cute in a boyish way. I've seen him flirting with Ariel and it makes me mad. I want him to flirt with me."

One day later: "I think I can trust you now so I'll go ahead and tell you. I figure the best way is to just blurt it out. Damien Lewis and I were secretly going out. There it is. My deepest darkest secret. He would never admit it now but I swear to God it's true. I really think that I loved him."

FIVE MINUTES LATER: "I have so many infatuations. First there's Colby. I'm convinced that if he got to know me, he would like me as more than a friend. Then there is Steve. I used to believe what I tell people. That I don't like him but he's alright. Now I realize what a luscious babe he is."

Two days later: "Sara said it was just my period but I'm still looking for love and my period is over. Sara is being a brat lately."

This goes on for years. We sat on Erin's living room floor and read from her diaries all afternoon and evening. In one entry she was writing, with profound yearning, about the probability — the near certainty!— that she would get her first kiss the next day. She didn't. I asked, "When did you get it?" Her reply: "Four years later." I think the same thing happened to Jane Austen.

To see Erin's diary, the best thing on the whole damn Internet, go to Erin's blog

BONE CHINA BEN, PART ONE

An early post on this blog was going to be about Ben, my best friend's husband. If you recall, I credited his incessant prying into my life as the inspiration for this blog: He brought me out of my shell. It started to feel so natural (if sometimes acutely annoying) talking about my personal affairs with him, that talking about them to the general public seemed like not such a big deal. It was going to be the third post, I believe, but I got distracted with a vampire follow-up. Then Ben and I had a tiff, which he started, and that sidelined the plan an additional day or two. He said something tonight, though, that put me back on track. It was so quintessentially Ben that it got me thinking again about Ben's quintessence. What he said was this: "I'm small-boned, too."

For those of you who know him, I needn't say more. But while you're rolling around the floor in hysterics, I'll provide some context for those who don't.

Ben and Erin and I were sitting around my house shooting the breeze, and we started talking about someone who was small-boned.
I don't even remember whom now because the hilarity of what followed totally blotted out the memory. But I made some comment to the effect that Erin is also small-boned, and, Ben (left), perhaps feeling left out, said in a dainty voice, "I'm small-boned, too." The conversation continued a few seconds. Then Erin registered his remark and did a quick rewind. "You're not small-boned!" she said, and laughed in his giant face. "Your head alone is ENORMOUS!" I concurred with Erin. "Yeah, you're not small-boned!" Then we mercilessly ridiculed him off and on the rest of the evening for his warped self-perception, saying things like "Yeah, dude, you're just like a baby bird" and "Tiny, fragile, small-boned Ben." I thought about that King Missile song "Boy Made Out of Bone China."

It goes like this:

There was a boy made out of china, Bone China.
Very fragile boy.
It was stupid to make a boy out of bone china,
What do you expect? He's not going to be good at any sports.
One wild pitch and his head is going to break off, probably.
So he's a gentle good boy who stays inside a lot,
and he hates school because other kids are always trying to break him, it's very bad.

Bone China Ben was undaunted, as always. He towered over us in the kitchen —— all 250 pounds of him, give or take 20 —— and offered proof of his daintiness. "See how I have to use the SECOND button on my cuffs? It's because the bones in my wrists are so tiny."

The quintessence of Benjie. That's it, right there. He alternates between that —— absurd self-appraisal ("I look so damn sexy in this bow tie") —— and painfully honest self-knowledge, as when he admitted to being a control freak and described the personality trait in dead-on, unsparing detail. He knows himself, and he doesn't know himself. Like all of us. Only with Benjie it's more pronounced, more dramatic — because everything about him is more pronounced and more dramatic: the way he walks into a room, the way he kisses his wife, the way he laughs, the way he talks with strangers.

He reminds me of King Henry II in "The Lion in Winter." (I should start calling Erin "Erin of Acquitaine.") That scene where Eleanor is recalling their youth when she was "like the sun," the most prized woman in Medieval Europe, and silly, fearless Henry just walked right up and touched her. Ben is like that. He just walks right up to life and touches it. Nothing is not him. There are no boundaries. It's all life. It's all us.

In the first weeks I knew him he asked me these questions: How old are you? What is your real hair color? How much do you weigh? What's wrong with your eye? What is your sexuality? Do you miss your ex-husband? And my normal response —— dismay or evasion —— didn't seem right with him. Although annoyed by the intrusion, I could sense that his curiosity was genuine. He wouldn't be judgmental or like me less for an answer. He would like me more because there would be more to like. More knowledge, more familiarity, more depth. The more I indulged his questions, the more I saw that there was nothing to fear in facts; privacy was overrated — and often deadening. And the virtue in putting yourself out there for others to scrutinize was that it made you scrutinize yourself.

It was like looking into a mirror.

A FAREWELL TO REASON

The Kansas Legislature legalized concealed weapons yesterday.
As I was gleefully pondering what kind of gun (and matching thigh holster) I would purchase, a co-worker, Miguel Escudo, treated me to a story.

Miguel is a gentleman farmer, a native Kansan and man of the world. He knows how to milk a goat, how to roof a house, how to mix a cocktail and how to tell a story. He lives his life. He is exactly whom I'd want to be if I were a man of a certain age.

And he is the soul of this workplace. Someone told me that he had spent time in a Spanish prison, for reasons he won't divulge. He smokes Spanish cigarettes. He likes them because they "feel like someone's stepping on your chest." His beautiful wife is Spanish. He described her to me once as "a Spanish Socialist" and "an amazing cook." She looks half her age. He takes her ballroom dancing and buys her Chanel No. 5 and mock-complains that she's too opinionated, that he's always in the dog house for one reason or another. When I see them downtown they're holding hands like they've been married for three weeks, not 30 years. Sometimes something reminds him of a girl he once knew, when he was in the Navy or in college or in Europe or working a dead-end job somewhere in central Kansas. He laughs like he means it. And he doesn't dwell; tomorrow's a new day.

This is the story he told: Decades ago he and his wife were living in "a Wichita ghetto." He bought her "a little pistol" so she'd feel safer when he wasn't around. One day he was sitting at home watching some thugs out the window throw something into the neighboring lot — something that was on fire. So he ran outside to prevent what he thought might be an arson. But when he gets to the site he sees that it's just some punks lighting bags of cement on fire and throwing them down into the rain-soaked foundation "to see what would happen." They scatter when they see him. But all of the sudden, shots ring out! "Those little bastards are SHOOTING at me," he thinks and takes cover. After a moment he crawls back toward his house, and when he has the nerve to raise his head up a little, he sees his beautiful, opinionated, Spanish wife standing on the porch waving that little pistol above her head. When he asks what the hell she's doing, she explains that she saw him "go running out" and so naturally had to arm herself and watch his back. It turns out that in the frenzy to protect her Miguel she fired a few bullets INSIDE the house: one through the ceiling, one through a bookcase, one somewhere else. Miguel thinks of their 6-year-old daughter — and of his propensity to anger his wife, and of her bad aim — and decides the little pistol may contribute more harm than good to their happy little household. He puts it away.

Too bad he's only a gentleman farmer and not a gentleman lawmaker.

I FEEL NAKED WITH LIPSTICK

Rock-climbing Ricky says my blog needs some dog pictures. He has mentioned this twice now: once in writing ("I know what your blog needs: dog pictures.") and once in a follow-up conversation ("Did you post any dog pictures yet?").

I ignored him both times.

His deal is that my blog is too plain, too much of a template. I need an explanation of the blog's title at the top of the page, he says, and I need to customize it, add some pizazz, some lipstick, powder its nose, make it mine.

But I like things plain. My clothes, my house, my car, my life, my personality, my blog. The plainer the better. Plain as in "free from superficial embellishment." I'm not Amish or anything. Just very boring. And I don't like to dust around a bunch of knickknacks. And I don't like "accessories," like jewelry and scarves and belts and purses and such. The only accessorizing I do is occasionally I'll match my bra to my underwear, but only if I think someone might see them both at the same time.

I did try to put a picture of plain-spoken Benjie on this blog, from New Year's, but it kept crashing my computer. So I gave up. I wasn't doing it to dress up my blog really, but to watch Benjie look in the mirror, as it were. He would have said stuff like, "Why did you pick THAT picture? Oh my gosh, my hair was not cute AT ALL that day." or "My nostrils look like canyons." or "Do you think my eyes are more aqua or teal in this light?" or "God, I looked SO AWESOME that night." It's not that he's vainer than anyone else, he's just more honest; he's not vain about his own vanity. If he had a facelift, he'd proudly show off his puffy bruises and bandages and gloat about how handsome he was about to be — unlike a former co-worker who tried to explain away the black-and-blue and newfound tightness by saying she had some sort of "brain thing" and just woke up that way. But Benjie would never get a facelift. He's going to grow old gracefully with me (although I'll continue to dye my hair pink and lie about my age, and Benjie will continue to wear shoes made for 20-year-old lesbians). We'll have adjacent rooms in the Newton Nursing Home, where his wife, Erin, will come feed us twice a day and settle disputes over word pronunciation.

Ben and Erin, if you haven't gathered, are two of my main niggas. (I'm picking up some new vocabulary listening to Wu-Tang Clan. Including the phrase "Survey says: You dead," which is something you'd say to a nigga you're about to pop. It's an expression that relies — brilliantly — on "Family Feud" for its poetry).

So, anyway, there's the issue of I don't know how to post a picture.

Then there's the issue of I don't know whether Ricky was serious about the dog pictures. As I was looking at some dog pictures, it dawned on me that perhaps he was being facetious, as in "What this car really needs is a yellow magnetic ribbon that says 'Support our Troops.'"

So I really need to sort out what he was getting at, and then, if he was serious, maybe he could come over and show me how to post a picture of a dog.

I need a nickname for Ricky. The Last Marxist is perfect, except it's already taken, and Marx seems too conservative for my little rock rat. So I've settled upon The Last Feminist — with a nod to Katha Pollitt, of course. Or wait. Last Feminista. That's better. More revolutionary sounding. Like SANDINISTA! Or ZAPATISTA! Or FASHIONISTA! FEMINISTA! And it's so fitting. The man does not have a sexist bone in his body. I kid you not. I say and think more disparaging things about women in a single day than he has said or thought his whole life.

What I'd really like to do is get some mirrors for this blog. And sometimes they'd be there and sometimes they wouldn't.

ENTER THE WU-LIST

Later today, after I sleep five or six hours, I'm going to buy three or four CDs by former members of The Wu-Tang Clan. I don't know which ones yet.

But this will be a reminder to me to do that and to explain why.

Sorry. I expected a few more days to pass before my blog degenerated into a to-do list.

But why fight it?

Some other things I should do later:

Write Amy a thank-you note. Include a NASCAR metaphor. Apologize for the chocolate mishap.

Mail student loan check. Include a thinly veiled threat.

Wash the cat hair out of my clothes.

Pick up yard debris from that storm 10 days ago.

See whether Christy still wants to see CSA next Tuesday, or, if she's still furious at me about that work thing, whether the following week would work better.

Forward mail to she who shall not be named. Include a thinly veiled threat. Think better and unveil it.

Buy a $600 espresso machine so I can use my tiny new $2 cups when Erin comes.

Go through the cupboards with a black magic marker and cross out all the ingredient labels on my food, for Benjie's peace of mind.

Sort out whether Rick was serious about the dog pictures. Remind him that sarcasm is lost on me.

Point out that if he changed his middle name to Ignatius his initials would be R.I.P.

JOHN ALLEN WAKEFIELD'S DEAD (OR GAY IS BEAUTIFUL)

This is not a blog about vampires. I am not in to vampires. You could exterminate all the brutes tomorrow, and I wouldn't raise a finger in protest. My friend Rick, who understands that (and — wonderfully — the name of my blog), nevertheless says: "Let's have more on vampires."

I don't want to get into the habit of taking requests, especially from itinerant rock climbers, but it just so happens that I do have a couple more things to say about the undead.

(1) A bad vampire movie taught me that being gay is not only OK, but is kind of cool. I saw "The Hunger" in 1983, when I was 16. I had not seen many gay people on film, or in real life (that I was aware of), before then, and when I did they were always depicted negatively. Go figure.
Gay was not something you wanted to be. But that changed when I saw the ungodly glamorous Catherine Deneuve seduce Susan Sarandon in "The Hunger," against a backdrop of dim, rich rooms, piano music and fresh flowers. The wonderful thing was that Deneuve's character (Miriam Blaylock) didn't think about the gender of her victims —— blood is thicker than sexuality, apparently —— but the quality of their souls. And that's how I thought things should be. I simultaneously thought Gay is Beautiful and Gay Doesn't Matter, and that was an epiphany. Susan Sarandon's question —— "Are you making a pass at me, Mrs. Blaylock?" —— is like Dustin Hoffman's rhetorical query in "The Graduate": "Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Robinson?" It's a moment of dawning, of consciousness, of the world being bigger than you had imagined.

(2) The guy who built my house in the 19th century looks like a vampire. He bears a resemblance to Grandpa on "The Munsters." And that freaked me out when I first moved in, especially because there were bats in the house, which itself looked like the setting for a bad horror movie (as Rick once pointed out). It was easy for me to imagine the undead Col. Wakefield (right) peering up from under my bed or chilling the basement air with his frosty vampire breath. Sometimes at night I would dwell on the fact that he died here, most likely in what is now my dining room, which is a shade of green (below) that I'm sure would anger him, and I would get too scared to go to the bathroom. When I re-watched "The Hunger" shortly after moving here, I was struck by the opening music: "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus. After that, to reassure myself when the colonel started roaming my brain, I would sing myself a reminder: "John Allen Wakefield's Dead." It doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely, but it calms the nerves.

PLEASE PASS THE STAKE

My Okie friend Sharon, who has a quick wit, a checkered past, and an assortment of cats — and who hated me for the first year of our acquaintance (rightly so) — thought of some more abuse to heap on my vampire entry.

She says: "In the same vein, should we say that so far your blog sucks?"

Indeed.

Thank you, dear.

I AM SO INTERESTING

The handful of people I told about this blog seemed surprised that I even started a blog and that I wrote about what I did. One person, acting disappointed, said she expected it to be funny. The other comments I got were all along the lines of "interesting," which I take to be code for "Okaaaay then." My dear friend Sharon, playing on the vampire theme, said something like "Veddy, veddy interesting."

To which I say (also quoting Sharon): Bite me. If you want funny, go watch some Seinfeld reruns.

Just kidding. I can do funny.

I'll do funny sometime.

Having a blog is totally anathema to my personality. I am morbidly private. I feel like I violated my own space just admitting that. I credit my nosy friend Ben with bringing me out of my shell a little — through merciless honesty and relentless prying into every corner of my life — so maybe my next blog will be about him.

WALLS WITHOUT MIRRORS

When I was a kid I had a huge fear of vampires. I couldn't watch scary movies at all. I couldn't even watch an advertisement for a scary movie. When one would come on the TV in our family room — safe underground haven of green shag carpet and faux wood paneling, den of recliners and cheap encyclopedias (the only books in our house) — I would bury my head in my mom's lap and plug my ears, while my brother and sister exclaimed how they couldn't wait to see it. The worst ones were for vampire movies. They would haunt me for days. I would lie in my bed and imagine vampires everywhere. I would pull the covers up to my throat, even if it were scorching hot, and stare straight up at the ceiling. I was sure if I turned my head I would encounter a vampire — with cold eyes and blood-stained fangs — kneeling at the side of my bed. Sometimes I would call for my mom, moving nothing but my mouth, for fear of attracting the vampire's attention. And I know my mom would hear me and want to help, but it was always my stepdad who came to the door to sternly tell me to stop being ridiculous and go to sleep, that if he heard another peep out of me I'd be sorry.

My fear of vampires had something to do with their being humanlike and living forever. If I did fall asleep, which I usually did through the sheer exhaustion of squeezing my eyes shut in terror and denial, I would often have a nightmare about a vampire stalking me. It wasn't the actual bite that was so horrifying; it was the stalking, the dread, the horror of being alone and helpless and preyed upon — and never being able to die.

One night I had the worst nightmare of all. It was about a vampire who could withstand sunlight. This changed everything; now I was no longer safe even during the day. I would be playing in my room and would be seized with the horror that if I opened the closet or even just turned around there would be a vampire waiting. And there would be a split second — across the space between us — where he knew and I knew what would happen next. And that split second was like life revealed— the real core monstrosity of life laid bare. And I would make a beeline for my mom because the one sanctuary I had was the certainty that a vampire would not get me if I were with another person. In the sunlight nightmare, the vampire was dressed in a brown suit and was walking down the hallway of my house, which was very short but seemed very long. It ended with a full-length mirror right outside my door, where later as a young teenager I would primp and fog up the mirror with practice kisses. The vampire was carrying a suitcase, like he was coming to stay with me, and sunlight was streaming in the house. And the vampire, when he saw me said, "Kim, I'm here," and he smiled a little, enough for me to see the tips of his fangs, and the horror of the situation fell on me like a ton of rock. And it stayed with me a long time, the paralyzing fear, until I eventually outgrew it.

Or thought I did.

Then one day, a few years later — maybe I was 12 or so — I was walking down the hall and turned, just before going in my room, to vainly check myself out in the mirror. But instead of seeing my reflection I saw nothing. There was nothing where I should have been. It was like my gaze had gone straight through the white wall or had been bounced back into my own abyss. There were no boundaries. No surfaces. No definition. No moment in time. No reflection. I was a vampire. And it took me an eternal moment to realize that my mom had taken down the mirror to polish its frame. And since then, I have associated walls without mirrors with glimpses of my own self-conscious nothingness.