On An Upswing

I just watched VH1's Behind the Music for Madonna. It was so much fun to track my own life through each of Madonna's transformations. I never sent in one of those "True Blue" video re-makes, nor did I ever wear rosaries as a belt, nor did I bleach out and spray up my hair, tie it up with a piece of lace, but I remember who I was at that point in my life. I also remember where I was, emotionally, when "Live to Tell" was a hit.

Ditto for "Lucky Star," "La Isla Bonita," "Like A Prayer," on and on and on through every hair style and new lens filter on every video. She is a timeline for my adolescence, my young adulthood, my life now. For much of it, I was one of the kids saying, in a rather snide tone of voice, "Well, I respect her as a very savvy bussinesswoman," with one eyebrow raised, you know, as if to tell you what I thought of her as an artist, a singer, a sex object.

I'm a lot less harsh on pop culture, in my own head, than I used to be. Maybe it's because I understand it a lot more, as I am finally letting go of a lot of the bullshit that made me so very Little Miss Adult-Like as a kid and through my teens. I wasn't a jerk about it, really, but I never really enjoyed the world ofpopular culture, never allowed myself to obsess, never collected anything except magazine pictures of A-Ha. I allowed myself A-Ha, and even then only because they were a Norwegian group that started out small, stayed small time, and were the pop underdogs that kids like me were meant to worship. Even then I'd be self-mocking about how much I loved them. I was too ready to admit they weren't really all that. I think now: All what?

Seeing Madonna's many different faces flash by on the screen left me with a bigger amount of respect than I thought I would have for her, despite the loving testimonials of her closest friends, her back-up singers, Harvey Weinstein. It was seeing her, in the face of so much scrutiny, coming to terms with herself, having a resonance, letting her life speak to her like a book, and now she's writing it.

I mean, she's always been writing her book, you know, but it's been by grabbing the pen out of someone else's hands and getting a few words in before the public drowns out the ink, smears it beyond recognition. Now she's writing and writing and writing, and the crowd is background noise. I would love to achieve that.

Perhaps if I ordered some yoga tapes, I'd be all set!

I forgot to tell you about the utter SCHMUCKOLA

that was two people in front of us in line the other night at the grocery store.

Scott and I go out to dinner at a nice Mexican place in Oak Park, as I mentioned before. We get back into town, and as the tail end of my cough makes a guest appearance on The Drive Home, I think perhaps maybe we should get some of those really fruity wholesome frozen fruit bars, you know, as a dessert thing.

So we grab some at the store, and we get in line, and it's the "15 items or less" line (and the Ann Moxie voice in my head says, "Fuck no! It's 15 items or FEWER!!!"), and it suddenly comes to a dead halt. A fresh-faced Wicker Park artist-punk-musician-trust-fund-kiddie asks for a pack of smokes from the checkout woman, who then calls over to the Osco (drugstore) section of the store to request said squares.

Fuck me, but the Osco section of the store? It's on the way OUT of the store, and he could have just paid for his crap right there, speeding up the quality of life for the rest of us, and then gone and gotten his damnable lung cookies his own damn self instead of making us wait for some underpaid poor Osco cigarette gopher to fetch 1 (one) pack of Marlboros for the man who is looking more and more like he knows that at least I, if not the rest of the line, wants to kill him. He remains impressively deadpan, and refuses to look up from the little ATM number pad/card-swiper thingy right in front of him.

This takes a good two or three minutes, while my ultra-wholesome fruity healthy fruit frozen bars are sitting on the sticky dirty checkout conveyer belt, getting a little sticky themselves.

The next guy? He doesn't even pull his cash out until a few seconds after she tells him the total. Did he think his stuff was going to be FREE or something?

Everybody gets all up in arms when I start to moan about the displacement of the poorer families around here, as the rents go up, the buildings get torn down, and ugly condominiums get put in their place. They don't understand that I don't have anything against real estate values, necessarily, or even against babies in designer strollers, with mommies sipping directly from their Starbucks teat (read: paper coffee cup). I have a problem with how this money can eventually turn some people completely stupid, and in very small but incremental ways, become thorns in my side, become less able to handle themselves in a responsible manner.