How was your day, Dan?

LADY GAGA

Let's discuss Lady Gaga.

1) Drink up "Bad Romance."

Loves. It.

When I am committed to the insane asylum in which I most assuredly belong, I hope they force feed me martinis until I cry.  And then I will light everyone ablaze while wearing bearskin gowns, with the heads still attached thank you.

2) The Gaga can shoot over our heads at times, but you need to be patient with these things.  People with something to say aren't tailoring their message to just what you want to hear.  Listen to the whole message, and take what applies to you.

3) People were turned off by her MTV Video Music Awards performance, where she ran around bleeding all over the stage.  But that was homage to her video for Paparazzi, which is one of the greats.  Not the best song, in my opinion, but the video is beautiful.  If you saw the video, the Awards performance made sense.  If not, then, it was gross. 

4) Is she releasing all these songs too fast?  Or is this the way things are now, with the internet ruining any chances of control over your own work? 

SLEEPLESS

This past weekend was Miami Sleepless Night, an all-night festival of performance art and music spread across South Beach.  "Performance art" and "performing arts" are not necessarily the same idea; performance art includes the conceptual stuff, like modern dancers and people who turn themselves into sculptures and art that otherwise moves around to make a statement.  It can be odd.  But you need to be patient sometimes, and let people take risks. 

There was also lots of visual art on display, but no one cares about staying up until 3 a.m. to look at a painting; we were there to see stuff happen.  So we bounced from stages set up on the beach to theaters to galleries in the hopes of seeing the unusual.

What am I, an employee of the festival?  I'll cease from writing an advertisement.

To go along with the "sleepless" theme, they sponsored a "pajama fun run," where you ran the course in whatever you sleep in.  The idea was to get people in crazy outfits to run through the city.  I, as most people do, sleep just in my skivvies, but showing up in a pair of tighty-whities would be vulgar.  Kids would undoubtedly show up for this event.  And underwear is no different from the apparel worn in Boston's Santa Speedo Run, but there it's a communal effort.  For this race, I didn't want to be the only one standing on the street in my underpants.  I mean, I did a little, but maybe next year.

So we donned PJs and t-shirts and what-not, drove the 8 blocks to the starting point of the race, and proceeded to circle the block for 10 minutes trying to find a parking space even though we passed several that were one extra block away but we didn't want to walk that far. 

When we showed up for the run—a one-mile course down the beach and up Ocean Drive, very short—everyone was dressed in pajamas and a robe or two. (No underwear.)  Everyone looked cute and fun; but when we tried to chat with people, they just looked at us like we were interrupting the running experience.

Runners are such a serious bunch.  The whole point was to run around and raise hell in the streets, but these people were stretching out and they had their game faces on.  Come on.  I've tried to go to running clubs or the like and see what the people are like—you do run in groups, there's no reason not to chat with your neighbor—but no, must pace yourself.  So I just took off, ran and got it over with.

I need a more social sport.  Or maybe I will start swimming, so I have the excuse to wear the little outfits like I really want to.

NOTES

The boat captain lessons continue: I worked as crew on a day charter celebrating a lovely couple's recent marital engagement, as well as the groom's-to-be birthday.  We sailed down to a sandbar near Key Biscayne, where the guests all disembarked and drank champagne whilst floating in the ocean blue.  It was nice.  I took photos with my phone, but they came out somewhat wonky; perhaps I've dropped my phone too many times.

On the voyage home they played 80's tunes, and we all danced around on the deck.  Although I engaged in a scrappy altercation with the unwise fellow who played "Like a Prayer," but tried to play something else in the middle of the song.  You can't turn of Madonna without a fight.

~~~

Is it already time to contemplate Christmas plans?  Holidays are so stressful, deciding where to go and what to do.  Staying in Miami would be emotional suicide, no one stays in town.  Even people who have families here leave and go on a Christmas vacation.  What to do, what to do?...Married people with kids stress about having so much to do, single people stress about not having enough.

On the list is a trip to Los Angeles, to see the new Pee Wee Herman show, and pay a visit to my wasband (a.k.a. my ex-husband), but we'll see how that works out.  People complain about the vapid lifestyle of L.A., but it's really the only place I've lived where I still talk to my friends.

MOVIE CLUB: 'INTO THE WILD'

Let's discuss "Into the Wild."  I'm talking about the movie, not the book.  Haven't read the book yet.  I may never accomplish that, after seeing the movie.

1) Sean Penn did a bang-up job directing.

2) It seems like Chris getting lost/trapped in the woods was a symptom of how he was lost inside his own head. He went all the way out there because wanted to be happy on his own, but he didn't know how to do it--both figuratively, and also literally.  He didn't know how to take care of himself, inside or out.

3) The same thing goes for all the people he dumped out of his life: his family, the people he met on his travels...he would create attachments with these people, but then leave them, without regard to what he was doing to them. But you can't be expected to nurture relationships with other people when you can't take care of yourself.  It's partially selfish, but also self-destructive.

4) Sometimes people need to be rescued from themselves.

5) The end, when they showed the real photo he took of himself, seemed like his statement of "Look at me, I'm really doing it!..." as if he was really succeeding in this trial he set up for himself.  But who was he taking the photo for?  Perhaps he needed to prove it to himself.  That photo was really what got me, so sad to see him smiling for his own photo.

HILLARY CLINTON IS THE BEST

I was driving to work today when I heard the story about Hillary Clinton giving Pakistan the beat-down over harboring Taliban fugitives, and choosing to not do anything about it.  LOVE her.  I was so wrapped up in listening to the story on NPR, I drove to Boca Raton before I realized where I was.  My office is in Fort Lauderdale.  Boca Raton is about 30 minutes north. 

I should apply for a job as a pilot for Northwest Airlines.  I understand how these things happen.

What NPR said: Pakistan is harboring Taliban officials they think are "good Taliban," the leaders who can take the cult party in a positive direction.   So basically, Pakistan is letting the U.S. launch attacks on the Taliban from Pakistani bases, but is also funding the Taliban to stay alive, and they are in turn using that support to fight against those U.S. attacks.  Needless to say, Hills is NOT having it anymore.

That President Obama is a feisty one: he is so calm and collected and diplomatic, but he surrounds himself with these big-mouths like Biden and Clinton, to do his dirty work for him.  And that means the dirty work gets done.  You can tell strong people turn him on...i.e., his wife.  And SHE is my favoritest of the favorites but that's another story for another time.

I'm going to be Hillary Clinton for Halloween, perhaps. And I'll scream at everyone.

THE COLOR PURPLE

I need to chat with someone who has read The Color Purple, and remembers the relatively-major details of the story.  I only saw the movie, which is not the same thing in this situation.

Tonight I saw the touring production--pretty good--and there are a few issues I'm not sure were in the original story.

THE IN/OUT LIST

In: "The Rachel Zoe Project"
Out: "Project Runway"
Never Was: "The Fashion Show with Isaac Mizrahi"
Forever: The Janice Dickinson years of "America's Next Top Model"

~~~

In: "Top Chef"
Out: anything Rachel Ray 
Never Was: "The Naughty Kitchen"
Forever: Julia Child

~~~

In: Dubrovnik
Out: Moscow
Never Was: Brussels!
Forever: Paris

~~~

In: The new cnn.com layout
Out: Facebook's increasing glitches
Never Was: Windows Vista...and Windows ME...and most Windows platforms...
Forever: My mother finally learned how to send text messages

~~~

In: "The Real Housewives of Atlanta"
Out: "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"
Never Was: "Miami Social"
Forever: Secretly sending in your application for "The Amazing Race" again

~~~

In: The Jolie/Pitt menagerie
Out: "Jon & Kate Plus 8"
Never Was: The Octo-Mom
Forever: "Eight is Enough," a lesson for life AND a 70's TV show

~~~

In: "I'm sorry."
Out: "Why do you make me act like this?"
Never was: "But I had a difficult childhood."
Forever: Apology sex

~~~

In: Women's gloves are back—because a facelift can't hide aging hands
Out: Low-waisted jeans—hide those thong straps and hold in the muffin tops!
Never Was: Lisa Rinna's Juvaderm
Forever: "I have laugh lines because happy people laugh a lot."

~~~

In: The upcoming Jodie Sweetin memoir
Out: The upcoming Sarah Palin memoir
Never Was: Screech's memoir
Forever: Edmund White's memoirs, and if you haven't read Edmund White you should

~~~

In: SHE by Sheree
Out: Ed Hardy
Never Was: The multiple Christian Siriano fashion lines promised to America
Forever: Get it all at TJ Maxx

~~~

In: Al Franken, Senatorial Bad-Ass
Out: George Le Mieux, Senatorial Lame-Duck Dead Weight
Never Was: Tom DeLay, Senatorial Congressional "Dancing With The Stars" Douchebag
Forever: Ted Kennedy, Senatorial Icon

~~~

In: Posh Spice as judge
Out: Ellen Degeneres as judge
Never Was: That boring Kara DioGuardi as judge
Forever: Paula Abdul as anything

~~~

In: "Mad Men" dinner jackets
Out: Flannel is back, thanks to "Twilight" :(
Never Was: Harem pants fad
Forever: H&M jeans

~~~

In: Lychee Martinis
Out: Cosmopolitans
Never Was: Red Bull Martinis
Forever: Dean Martin

~~~

In: Joel McHale
Out: Ryan Seacrest
Never Was: Jimmy Kimmel
Forever: Jon Stewart for President!

~~~

In: "The September Issue"
Out: "Ugly Betty"
Never Was: The "Coco Chanel" Lifetime TV Movie
Forever: "The Devil Wears Prada"

~~~

In: The Vita-Mix blender juicer magic machine
Out: Jack Lallane juicer, which takes out all the fiber
Never Was: Those huge jugs of Tropicana orange juice, filled with juice made from cheap oranges, that loses all its vitamins after a couple of days and turns into sugar water of no purpose
Forever: The juicy butt on Rafael Nadal

MALTA

After the dismal failure of Tunis, it was on to happier locales.  And this was the happiest of them all. Malta!

Love it.

Malta is a tiny collection of islands south of Sicily and north of Tunisia.  We had no idea it was even there, until our cruise itinerary said we were stopping for a visit.  My knowledge of Malta up to that point was that presumably Maltese dogs were from there.  Ironically, they're really not, but that's another post for another time.

HISTORY OF MALTA (feel free to skip if you care not): Malta has a wild, complicated past of invasions and enslavements and all sorts of drama.  One important bit: in the 1500's, the Grand Masters—a group of knights charged with protecting Jerusalem to make a safe passage for Christian pilgrims—were attacked by the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and expelled from the Holy Land.  I'm not sure what else the Grand Masters were about, but they were a big deal.  Anyway—so the King of Spain came to the rescue, and gave them the islands of Malta, in exchange for a yearly rent of one Maltese falcon.  The Knights moved in and, because they were Catholic leaders, they built cathedrals all around the island. And they loved their new home, which was very safe due to the fact that the islands are mostly cliffs—which made it hard to invade.

Why am I saying all this?  To explain the fact that Malta is very pretty.

 

TUNISIA

Cruise photos?  There's more!  I know you're excited, I'm just dying to show them to you.

After Spain, our ship landed in Tunis, Tunisia-

(pause)

-which was such a boring dump, I'm not going to bother posting photos.  Tunis is an entirely Westernized city, not in a particularly nice way, and the people were generally RUDE, rude rude rude.  Keep in mind I love going to Paris, and I live in Miami—two of the rudest populations of people on Earth—yet I find the locals in each place to be warm and delightful.  So I have a high threshold for bad manners.  And Tunis...fuck Tunis, it was the worst.

For instance, allow me to illustrate a scene: T.L. and I are standing on the sidewalk.  A person dressed in some sort of military-ish uniform walks by.  We are not particularly blocking the sidewalk; this person, as he walks by, PUSHES T.L. to the side and keeps going.  As in, plants a hand on him and pushes, T.L. takes a step to catch himself.  This is in broad daylight, on a regular street.

Sales people at the stores? One actually said "I hate Americans," in French, to us.  And the other two people shopping there laughed, and sneered.  It was like a bad propaganda film, created to terrorize Americans with images of evil Arabs who are secretly plotting the downfall of our country.  Or something off of Fox News.  Same thing.

Of course most people were fine, reasonably polite; but there was a minority who were awful, and the rest seemed to tolerate it as a daily occurrence.

We went to Tunis to see the souks, a.k.a. stores, in the historic center of the city.  We had visions of the central market looking like something out Aladdin, with people selling spices and beaded clothes and whatnot.  But it was just booth after booth of the same junk: leather bags made in China (all the same in every booth), ash trays that said "I Love Tunisia," and very dull gold jewelry.  No one bought a thing.

Huge letdown.

COUPONS

1) Go to www.restaurant.com

2) enter the zip code of your choice

3) find a restaurant you want to visit, and click "add to cart," to purchase a gift certificate.

BUT THERE'S MORE.

4) After you click "add to cart," you are brought to a screen where you can enter a promotional code.  Type in "pumpkin."  This gives you 70% off the purchase price.  I.e., a $25 gift certificate now costs, like, $3.

Just be sure to read the rules.  Most restaurants are easy, but sometimes they have odd requirements.

My friends and I use these coupons every day now.  So awesome.

AMUSEMENT PARK

I am in Kansas City. Actually, I'm staying in Overland Park, Ks., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.  The whole one-metro-area-in-two-states thing has people flabberghasted, but it's really not a big deal.  Go down State Line Rd.: on the east side of the yellow line, you're in Missouri, the west side you're in Kansas.  Neighbors just stare at each other all day, from separate states.  AND SOMETIMES THEY EVEN CROSS THE LINE.  How exotic.

Anyway--

So I'm in Kansas City, visiting my family.  Today we went to Worlds of Fun, an old-skool amusement park rife with roller coasters and funnel cake stands.  It's the end of the season, the air is a little chilly, and whipping around on roller coasters at 60 mph turns the "chill" into "wind chill factor" and you freeze off your face.  So there aren't too many people at the park.  And that means no lines.

My 9-year-old niece, P, is a soldier and dragged us to every scary roller coaster, where she screamed her head off from the initial drop to the final lurch into the boarding zone.  She couldn't make much noise; she had lost much of her voice after screaming at the Miley Cyrus concert the night before.  It was a big weekend for P, lots of excitement.  She actually didn't play her Nintendo DS all day, I was honored to have kept her attention for so long.

But back to the amusement park.  I was fine, roller coastering away, until I went on the coaster that GOES BACKWARDS.  And it has a corkscrew move at one point in the track, which was too much.  I started to gag.  And I thought, if I vomit, I am going backwards so it will hit the people in front of me.  That would be worse than hitting myself.  So I kept my eyes, and mouth, shut tight the rest of the ride, staggered off, and moved from bench to bench sitting and burping for the next hour. 

"Please, P," I said.  "Let me sit."

The condescending looks oozed from her eyes.  "Maybe you should go ride the carousel, that won't make you sick."

Oh, snap.

After being humiliated by this little girl, I felt like less of a man, so I grew another pair of balls and got back on the coasters again.  I wanted to tell her we should take a break and see the song-and-dance show--cast entirely with local high school students!--but I feared her reaction. 

I'm still queasy.

BOAT LESSONS

My boat captain lessons continue: yesterday I was assigned to work on a boat, rented by a group of friends for the day.  Very exciting!  Where would we go?  What wonders of the open ocean lay in store for us?  I dreamed of the adventures we would encounter, discovering uncharted islands and perhaps searching for sunken treasure. But then it turned out the friends just wanted to float around, get tan and drink.  Ah.

I worked on a 68-foot Azimut*, a lovely boat with four bedrooms and satellite TV.  It was bigger than my apartment.  Although that doesn't say much.

When I arrived I thought I was acting sufficiently tough amongst the rest of the crew, pretending I belonged in the Salty Sea Club, until I asked the captain if there was any sunblock on board.  He looked at me and said "........(big pause)...........nnnnnnnnno.  Why?"  If I had asked for a Hello Kitty life vest, he wouldn't have been more disgusted with my weakness.  But I care not.  I went on another boat and stole SPF 15 to apply in secret.

It was a rocky start—after 30 seconds of holding a rope, shrieking "I don't know how to tie knots!", the rest of the crew just yelled at me and made me feel bad about myself.  But then I went into the galley and found the secret stash of Reese's peanut butter cups and suddenly my confidence was restored, and had a grand time running around the deck.

When you're working on a boat, you don't really sit; so standing for 6, 7, 8 hours on a moving boat is like standing on a Power Plate.  I couldn't get out of bed this morning without lifting up my legs with my hands, and propping myself up like I was on stilts.  Ouch.

* That's not the exact boat I was on but it's close.  Fancy.  Ignore the mountains in the background, there are no mountains in Miami.

NOBEL

Dear America,

Please remember President Obama is shutting down the Guantanamo Bay prison, has vehemently denounced America's practice of torture, and has made great strides with the Muslim world.

So before we jump on the bandwagon of the Republican Party, who will criticize anything he does just to win Congressional seats in 2010, let's remember that there is more to life than creating a public health care system and allowing gay people to serve in the military.

Congratulations to him on the Nobel Prize.

That's all.

CRUISE, SPAIN DAY 2

After spending the day in northern Spain, we zipped around the Iberian Penninsula and docked at Malaga.

Warning: I forgot to tell you something.  If you take a European cruise, be warned about that trip from France to Spain.  The Bay of Biscay is the roughest water in the Atlantic.  I was fine, but some of my fellow cruisemates took a trip to Barf City.

Regardless—it was a lovely day when we arrived in Malaga.

THE ZOE

I have decided I am going to revive my television career so I can be on "The Rachel Zoe Project."

- I want to invent my own entire dialect based on pre-teen slang that makes no sense, so everything is considered to be a compliment.  That is bananas.  You are out of control.  You are shutting it down.

- I want to handle all work crises and at the exact moment my makeup artist is applying my eyeliner.  And I must be holding a scalding cup of Starbucks while doing so, because that's what Anna Wintour drinks.

- I want to film AN ENTIRE SEGMENT on whether or not I should purchase a vintage trenchcoat.

- I want two assistants, so I can wildly favor one at the expense of the other.  Just because he knows how to suck up. 

- I want to work in a world where if my assistant forgets the panty liners or the breast tape, s/he should be fired.

- I want protruding clavicles so severe, you can see them vibrate when I speak.

- I want the nerve to tell Karl Lagerfeld I will use his handmade couture gown, if he cuts off a sleeve the way I want it.

- I want vintage clothing stores to have the power to induce bone-rattling orgasms every time I walk in the door.

- I want to be invited to Coco Chanel's home, so I can put my feet up on the couch without taking off my shoes.

- I want to insist on wearing bowties with every outfit, even though it usually makes me look like I am searching for the rest of my barbershop quartet.

- I want to go to all the shows in Paris Fashion Week so I can say every single dress would be perfect for Eva Mendez.

- I want to bring seventeen Louis Vuitton trunks full of clothes everywhere I go.  And I want my husband to carry them all for me.

- I want to live in a world where fashion is so important, so spiritual, that the sight of a nice dress takes one's cosmic existence to "another level."

- I want a husband as patient as a saint I can drag through everything and still give me kisses at the end of the day.