This one's for you, Sarah Brown.

It was Miss Sarah Brown who first introduced me (and much of the Internets) to the concept of Bershon. Here she is, describing it with her usual excellence:

"The spirit of bershon is pretty much how you feel when you’re 13 and your parents make you wear a Christmas sweatshirt and then pose for a family picture, and you could not possibly summon one more ounce of disgust, but you’re also way too cool to really even DEAL with it, so you just make this face like you smelled something bad and sort of roll your eyes and seethe in a put-out manner."

When I read this my mind rocketed back to the eighties, when I was so consumed with distaste for everything and everyone I was forced to live with or near that I could not wipe that look off my face, no matter how I tried. I think I even slept with it on. My parents would tiptoe into my room, thinking, sure, she's a raging harpy when she's awake, but maybe we can love her again if we get a glimpse of her angelic sleeping baby cutie face and they'd peer at me in the darkness and run from the room, hissing oh dear God she's still doing it!

Without further ado, if you have the stomach for it: The Bershon Queen of Locust Valley High School.

Ugh, gack, are you, like, taking a picture of me? Can't you see I'm writing? And trying not to notice that I'm at like a picnic or whatever? GOD.

Here I am forced to consume cake:

Fine, cake, sure, but the hat is so super-lame it's not even funny. Am I wearing the same oversized white shirt here? I think I am. God, I'm a dork. And so are all of you. I HATE THIS FAMILY.

The Bershon started young, for me:

Fine, I'm sitting, I got the barrette in my hair. Are you HAPPY? Will you just take the picture, already? I have to go dream of the eighties, when I'll wear oversized white shirts.

Bershon seems to run in the family. Here I am with my sister Liz:

I totally look older and cool like my cool big sister, because I'm making this face. See? I am so freaking sophisticated. But why am I dressed like I'm in Little House on the Prairie?

And my brother James:

"I have no teeth. I can't Bershon it up when I'm lacking teeth."

"God, she's a dork. Why am I sitting on her lap? GOD."

Is it the future already?

Well! Where were we?

Hello, there! Hey! It’s been two weeks since my last post, but 2007 will be all about me not apologizing for everything, so here I am, not apologizing. Je ne regrette rien. I’m like Edith Piaf, except in the countless number of ways I am nothing like Edith Piaf.

Coincidentally, this is the first day Henry has returned to school since the 20th, which was the last time I wrote anything more than a sentence fragment. A lovely break it was, for all concerned. I won’t deny that I had my moments when I longed for delicious freedom, and maybe a minute or two of tasty silence, but all in all my kid has been excellent company. I shall keep him, after all.

As we always do, we celebrated Christmas with my family. (It really comes in handy around the holidays to have a Jewish spouse. I recommend it.) Before the holidays each member of my family called to grill me on Henry’s deepest, most intense desires for Christmas. I told my sister that about some educational, worthy items he would doubtless enjoy in the coming months. There was silence on the other end. “Yeah, we don’t give a crap about that,” she said. “Dominick [my brother-in-law] just wants to get him the one gift that’s going to make him flip out.” Then my mom called to announce that she also wished to work my son up into a hysterical froth. The competition was on.

In the end, he was pretty even-keeled about all the gifts; the light sabers (TWO OF THEM. And they light up!) from my sister and brother-in-law were met with more enthusiasm than my Human Body Encyclopedia, but guess what he spent the week reading? Not the light sabers! He was too busy running around outside whacking trees with those! He received a pocket watch from my mom, which he has enjoyed far more than I believed possible. (Ask him what time it is, and he’ll pull the watch from his pocket, peer into it, and announce, “It’s 20.” Leave it to him to announce the one time that it never is.) And oh my word, the Transformers. So many Transformers. Transformers that I have to transform while Henry lovingly thwaps my skull with his dual light sabers.

Maybe all the head trauma is why it required more brain power than I alone possessed to write my last Wonderland post of 2006. I enlisted Eden’s help, because she’s funny and smart and good, and also because I was so out of practice stringing words together, I needed someone else nudging me along. Reminding me to add punctuation, and so forth.

What else? New Year’s was spent with our best friends, whom we conned into leaving the city and staying over at our place. Suckers! We made linguine with clam sauce and then spent the evening geeking out on YouTube. Watching things like "Saints Row Bugs: The Musical." We are a thrilling group. At least we managed to stay awake until midnight. That’s something, isn’t it? Hello?

And now here I am. It’s 2007, and I’m still not living on Mars. This future is nothing like I thought it would be, and yet it’s so much better.

Twenty-three skiddoo!

When Maggie first told me about her book, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog, I thought, that’s going to be a great resource--for someone else. For the lame-o who can’t come up with a single topic to post about. Not to put those losers down! But such a book—wonderful as it would undoubtedly be—would nonetheless not be of use to myself, the greatest creative mind of the 21st century.

As in most things, I have been proven wrong. It’s a goldmine of inspiration even for the veteran blogger who thinks she knows her way around these parts. In fact it may be even more useful for such a person, who might be feeling a tad blocked these days, who may be thinking, “I’ve been writing this damn thing for two and a half years and I’ve covered every topic under the sun. I DESERVE TO TELL THEM ABOUT MY LUNCH.”

(Leftover shepherd’s pie and a Fun-Sized Twix bar. See? Haven’t you gained something from knowing that?)

The topic I’ve chosen from Maggie’s book is #14, “Watch Your Language,” in which I am to list some archaic words or phrases I wish would come back into popular use. I have many of these, as I find living in the present highly distasteful. Here are a few:

Vo- dee-oh-do. Sometimes “Vo-dee-oh-do-do.” Either way, it’s a winner. This was used to great effect in the Little Rascals to describe some colorful and suspicious individuals. “They were a couple of vo-dee-oh-dos.” According to Google it was also used in "Laverne and Shirley" as a euphemism for sex, but no one wants to imagine either Laverne or Shirley in that way, so let’s go with the former useage.

Jackanapes and cock of the walk. Preferably used together. “He thinks he’s a real cock of the walk, but I say he’s nothing but a jackanapes.”

Conniptions. No one talks about anyone having conniptions anymore. That’s a shame. I myself make it a habit of having a conniption at least once a day, just to give someone the opportunity to use this glorious word.

…see? I believe everyone should end every statement with “see?” It’ll make you sound like a character in Double Indemnity. At the very least, you’ll sound like my Grandpa. Either way I will love you.

What olde-timey words or phrases would you like to come back? Place your requests here!

BALLOONS.

He's balloons-on-his-feet nuts!
Originally uploaded by finslippy.

A few years ago, Scott and I went with our friend Mike to see a couple of our other friends in a play. It was in one of those theatres that are so far Off-Broadway they’re practically in the East River. We were late, so we ran in, not even stopping to grab programs, and sat down in the audience. The lights went down. And then they went up.

On the stage were several foppish dandies mincing about. “What’s this play about, again?” I asked Scott, who shrugged. They were wearing satin knickers and powdered wigs. We were led to understand that one of them was Benjamin Franklin. “Where are our friends?” I hissed at Scott, who looked as baffled as I was. The people on the stage were in France, which we knew because they said things like “Here we are in France.”* One of them spoke of the Montgolfier brothers, or maybe one of them was a Montgolfier? “The hot-air balloon,” he declared, scratching at his hosiery, “will be the invention of this century! Nay, of any century!”* It went on like this for some time. None of our friends were on the stage. I looked around us at the five or six other people in the audience. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. Then I caught sight of someone’s program. On the cover was the word “BALLOON.”

I can’t remember the name of the play our friends were in, but it was not “BALLOON.”

“Oh my god,” I told my husband, “we’re in the wrong theater.”

“Oh no,” he said. “Oh no oh no.” He whispered to Mike. Mike put his head in his hands. We looked at each other. We knew we couldn't laugh. There were only eight of us in the audience. The poor actors would see us laughing, and the poor actors did not deserve that.

Unfortunately, the one Monty Python sketch I know is “The Montgolfier Brothers in Love”, and in fact this is the only sketch whose lines Mike and I have recited to each other lo these many years (“Every time you sing a song, it is in some way obliquely connected with balloons ... everything you eat has to have ‘balloon’ incorporated in the title ... your dogs are all called ‘balloon-o’ ... you tie balloons to your ankles in the evenings”), and there we were in this tiny theater with the Montgolfier brothers right in front of us, preening as Benjamin Franklin held forth on the fall of Versailles. It was torture. Every time one of them boomed, "BALLOON!" I was sure I would lose it. We couldn’t just walk out (think of those poor actors!). And we didn’t know if there was an intermission.**

None of this is in any way related to the party our friends had for us last weekend, except that there were many balloons, although not the hot-air kind. We worried that Henry wouldn’t be entertained enough at the party, but the brilliant Emily, party co-organizer and the best babysitter/girlfriend Henry will ever have, borrowed Star Wars guys from a friend and then stuffed her home with helium balloons. Henry loved the Star Wars guys, natch, but then someone tied balloons to his ankles and all at once he was beside himself with joy. He was hopping and twirling and laughing maniacally as balloons bopped him in the face.

I felt kind of the same way, except without the balloons.

We could not have better friends.

(*Dialogue invented for illustrative purposes.)
(**There was. And we made a run for it.)