From Cameron Crowe’s film “Almost Famous”:

Russell Hammond: [Russell grabs phone away from William] Hey, mom! It’s Russell Hammond. I play guitar in Stillwater. Hey, how does it feel to be the mother of the greatest rock journalist we’ve met? Hello? Hello…? Look, you’ve got a really great kid here. There’s nothing to worry about. We’re taking good care of him, and you should come to the show sometime – join the circus…

Elaine Miller: Hey, hey, listen to me, mister. You’re charm doesn’t work on me – I’m on to you. Of course you like him…

Russell Hammond: Well, yeah…

Elaine Miller: He worships you people. And that’s fine by you as long as he helps make you rich.

Russell Hammond: Rich? I don’t think so…

Elaine Miller: Listen to me. He’s a smart, good-hearted fifteen-year-old kid with infinite potential.

Russell Hammond: [Russell is stunned]

Elaine Miller: This is not some ignorant mother you’re speaking to – I know all about your decadence and I should not have let him go. He’s not ready for your world of compromised values and diminished brain cells that you throw away like confetti. Am I speaking to you clearly?

Russell Hammond: Yes – yes, ma’am…

Elaine Miller: If you break his spirit, harm him in any way, keep him from his chosen profession which is law – something you may not value, but I do – you will meet the voice on the other end of this telephone and it will not be pretty. Do we understand each other?

Russell Hammond: Uh, yes, ma’am…

Elaine Miller: I didn’t ask for this role, but I’ll play it. Now go do your best. Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid. Goethe said that. It’s not too late for you to become a person of substance, Russell. Please get my son home safely. You know, I’m glad we spoke.

[Elaine hangs up]

Russell Hammond: [Russell stands holding phone in stunned silence]

“I do not want the peace which passeth understanding,
I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”
— Helen Keller

“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”
— Buddha

1. I can’t bear being seen naked. I’m not exactly a tiny woman. When Sophia Loren is naked, this is a lot of nakedness.

2. I still like me, inside and out. Not in a vain way— I just feel good in my skin.

3. It is very important for an actor or actress to look around at everything and everyone and never forget about real life.

4. I’ve never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

5. I am against all war.

6. When I was a child, fear was common to my life— fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.

7. To prepare for the part I opened the sluices of my memory, letting the bombing raids, the nights in the tunnel, the killings, the rapes and starvation and inhumanity wash back over me. I particularly concentrated on my mother as I remembered her during the war, her fears, connivances and sacrifices, and especially the way she fiercely protected us against the scourges of the war. (On her role in “Two Women”)

8. I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself.

9. You have to be born a sex symbol. You don’t become one. If you’re born with it, you’ll have it even when you’re 100 years old.

10. For me, it is good to be vulnerable. It makes me nice… weak sometimes, but in a good way, not a tragic way.

11. Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

12. Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.

13. After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It’s better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

(and two bonus quotes:)

* If you haven’t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful.

* When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.

(Do you love the Thursday Thirteen? I do.)

“Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds.” -Laura Ingalls Wilder, author (1867-1957)

Do you live in Portland? Would you like to sign a petition in favor of renaming Interstate Ave. “Chavez Boulevard”? If so, sign here. (more…)

“Do I look like a motherfucking role model?”
— “Gangsta Gangsta,” NWA

It has been brought to my attention that my husband and I are now pillars of the community. The press has been calling. Sometimes several times a day. One of us may have given testimony at a school board meeting while the other was home tending to a sick kid and his overly-rambunctious sister.

And it has been further brought to my attention that I offended someone (eh, probably more than one person, but just one bothered to e-mail) last week with this post. My usage of the word “fuck” and “the reference to watermelons,” specifically.

Watermelon seems like an innocent enough word but really, it is not. I am aware of this and thought I made my point rather succinctly. I was merely describing the first time I figured out that white people think they are “bonding” with African-Americans when they talk loudly and state, “I, too, adore watermelon, much like your people do!”

This is not cool. You do not want to get that started.

“It ain’t that kind of party.”
Leon Dudley, former principal of Jefferson High School, North Portland, Ore.

So. You were offended. I don’t know what to tell you. “Stop reading this blog” comes to mind, but that seems so… final, to send a reader away like that. I like readers! They pay the bills! Oh, wait, no they don’t, the advertisers do. Go click on my Google ads, readers. Anyway, words are tricky. Ask Cynthia Harris about that one.

Nonetheless, I would like to stand by my reference to watermelon. And I’d like to stand by quoting the girl from my grade school who told one of the other students: Boy, you are fucking with my nerves. I cannot rewrite my own history, people, as much as I would like to sometimes. I did play mumblety peg and pitch pennies in grade school. I was excellent at both sports and won a fair amount of money.

I did begin drinking at age 10 and smoking cigarettes at age 11. And after hearing the girl say that to the guy — and he listened to her — this, too, was new in my world — a guy listening to a girl… wow. Well, at that point yes, I did learn that “sometimes black girls can be mean, but they totally fucking rock. Fuck yeah.” (To quote myself.) (Because, why not?)

I suggest that you crib from this list and substitute the following words whenever I start cussing and you get nervous:

1) Oh my heck! for Oh my GAWD!

2) Owie! for Goddammit shit motherfucker (my daughter: “Mom, you teach Sunday school now. You hafta stop cussing like that!” Me, crossing my fingers behind my back: “I’ll try.”)

3) Cheese and rice for Jesus Christ

4) Jeebus for Jesus

5) Well, you can just forget about that, buster! for screw that

and…

6) Dagnabit! for Why don’t you stick it in my eye and then I’ll be able to see that you’re fucking me? (No, I did not make that up, I swear to you — that’s how the moms talk in my neighborhood. Could I possibly invent that expression? No, I am not that creative. Dagnabit, I wish I was.)

“How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward.”
– Spanish proverb

My little tiny son started kindergarten today. I am crying.

wm

Inside
by Rumi

Inside a lover’s heart
there is another world,
and yet another.

“Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.”

— Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), [The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906]

from the Travel Files:

8 o’clock p.m., Sunday Aug. 5th:

We’re still in Twin Falls, Idaho. We drove out to Shoshone Falls this afternoon, after swimming and hot-tubbing at the hotel. Yeah, this vacation is pretty rough so far… Kidding! I’m loving this.

The falls are called “The Western Niagra” — only taller, and with more water. It’s the site of “Evil Knivel’s ill-fated attempt to jump the river on a rocket bike.” Wow! We took lots of pix, ran around after the kids, and I spent a lot of time sucking in my breath because damn — don’t look down! My son insisted we pick him up and hold him up high so he could see the view. Wacky Boy: “#!$@! railings!” That was a little nerve-wracking, but we were careful not to go anywhere near the edge of the platforms. At one of the landings, a newer one, you could see where the old landing used to be before part of the cliff crumbled away. Yikes.

Afterward we went by Winco to get some TV dinners for the kids, and I overheard this conversation:

One guy to the other: “So, where are you now, anyway?”
Other guy, who’s wearing an Amish-style hat and has his arm in a sling: “I’m working for the City of Ketchum. I quit cowboying a couple of years ago.”

A real-life cowboy, right there in the soup aisle! I almost took his picture to post on Flickr but you know. Then they would have figured out I was a tourist.

All for now,

WM

“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the ‘still small voice’ within me.”

— Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)