866-When It (feels like there's no one answering your phonecalls)

Today I don't know what Tushar Biyani is wearing but he wants to go into business with me.
He emailed me saying: "Greetings, I have come across your website and am quite impressed by the work
which has been done by your firm." In the email were some samples of what he can offer my "firm".
I may indeed consider outsourcing to this "small but passionate team" because, as you see, this smart samosa
has come up with some pretty spicy phone campaigns for the law firm R. Sebastian.
Mr. Biyani helped a clearly thriving US law firm land the much coveted phone number 866-When It.
i need to get in with this group and get myself a catchy phone number to drum up business.
maybe i can get 866-Are You (in need of an illustrator?).....or 866-How Can (you possibly function without my drawings?)
I wish i could've nailed 866-When It (feels like the whole world is getting you down and suing you, call R. Sebastion......"
Mine would've been more uplifting like 866-When It (feels like you can't take it anymore,
call nancy and she will draw what you are wearing and maybe make you not feel like suing someone today).

Find beauty where you can in 2008

Finals

8am via Verizon with spilling Mochas

remote control father: are you getting them to school?
in-house mother: they're there (you idiot)
remote control father: did you feed them?
in-house mother: of course not. they have coffee.
remote control father: are they in good shape?
in-house mother: yeah she studied AP statistics with Jamie till midnight then we discussed themes from Crime & Punishment on the way to school. we talked about boundaries and guilt and how you need laws because we all wanna kill somebody.
remote control father: and him? how did he do?
in-house mother: he's in good shape-- he studied for his Dumb Level Algebra final for ten minutes for which he lost the notes later that evening, then he played me a beautiful song he composed in honor of Heath Ledger's untimely death which has made us all really sad - he pointed out a riff in the song that was an homage to the Beatles and i commented on the song's spanish guitar influences as i paid late fees on my Bestbuy Same As Cash account with money i borrowed from a line of credit -- then he finished his Dragon Ball Z anime series and caught up on a VH1 three hour special on child actors and where they are now.

Express Mail

the doorbell just rang as i was telling one loving but hysterical jewish grandma (adam's mother) that she need not put Beverly Hills on orange alert over Maddy's broken nose. but i never had the chance to finish that conversation because the doorbell rang with a message from another concerned jewish grandma. there at the door was a sweet smiling Express Mail courier needing a signature which at first i assumed was for jonah who often orders up slash metal tee shirts on eBay. but it wasn't that. it was addressed to me. from bubbie. but it had nothing to do with maddy's nose. it was an apology for ratting me out last week to my dad that i had thrown away the subscription he gave me to Commentary. mom sent me an apology in the regular mail last week but i ignored it, i was so mad at her. i'm not sure, but i think i'm allowed to read what i want in my house. i didn't know that at 51 i had to check with my parents before i recycle. i think the act of doing this haunted and taunted her. she probably wants to throw out her copies too. but she's such a trouble maker pot stirrer double agent. i decided to ignore her snail mail apology last week and pretend i lived in NY or the valley. that i was out of town and not on the front lines, always ready willing and able to receive my parents chaos. i told my father they don't appreciate me enough and that i don't have time to read things i want much less make time to read Neo-Con propaganda. so i took my own draconian measures...i know what matters most to jewish grandparents. i cold heartedly withdrew their privileges to visit me for a week. yes..i withheld my own body and those of the grandchildren. desperate times call for desperate measures.

it obviously worked. because today, being thursday and her "normal" day to descend upon my house with corned beef and emotional blackmail...she clearly felt the need to take draconian measures herself. to her credit and her oversized heart....she felt the need to make right what she had wronged. my darling poor little scruffy double agent mother aka Bubbie broke thru the barracades of my recent attempt to 12 step her out for a week. the doorbell rang and it was an Express Mail package from Polly Plotkin. Bubbie certainly puts new spin on the term "express" mail.

and i'm happy to report she arrived a couple hours later on my doorstep with the most heartbreaking little pout on her face, requesting immunity and bearing two corned beef sandwiches WITH potato salad. she's cleared her name, earned back her privileges.

call me an enabler, but i say Co-Dependent No More has got nothing on the old testament and Juniors Deli.

Involuntary Rhinoplasty: yo baby, dek da halz

since it's every jewish girl's rite of passage to at least *consider* a nose job whether she needs it or not, we are pleased to report yet another benefit of sending kids to public school:  no elitist plastic surgeons to pay for and no waiting a year to get in to see them...just send your darling down the halls of Santa Monica High School carrying her bronze Marc Jacobs handbag repurposed as a book bag with a copy of the latest translation of Crime and Punishment....have her glance down to catch a text message at precisely the wrong moment insuring that she will obliviously walk straight into the scuffle of two 10th grade lunkheads pushing and shoving each other between 2nd and 3rd periods...and voila! before you can check your blackberry, your girl will have a clean smash to the face - and the cheapest nose job this side of Beverly Hills.  once again, all you friends and fellow parents out there who have been foolishly spending your hard earned or trust fund dollars on private school, eat your heart out. all we have to do now is file a police report and we'll have all expenses paid for our darling daughter's nose job. who cares that she didn't need one, it's free!  and she gets to be a victim too.  this is indeed a full bodied Jewish experience.  and think of it, we didn't pay for anesthesia either (no pain, no gain!) we just let her get decked in the halls of her overcrowded, unsupervised school on the same day she had to upload five college applications.
who says maddy's folks aren't looking after her properly in a sound, mature, financially responsible manner?  the way we're doing the math, with all the money we'll save suing the public school with her dad's free attorney from her celebrity grandpa's business office....we'll have that much more cash to steal from her zero coupon bond to buy our girl another Marc Jacobs book bag for college! and maybe some botox for me...you know, just to get rid of the sad worried frown lines i incurred when her face got smashed. now that's what i call Early Action.

sexy laundry

today nancy is fully dressed  in contrast to the people in her painting.  she is dressed and ready to finish her commission from yesterday for the play called Sexy Laundry. (well...that is, she's dressed after shooting the bifurcated family portrait in her Cosco bathrobe with a painted canvas sitting in for her daughter.) in the "reference" photo above she shows how despite possessing hips and wearing Madewell brown cords and a grey cropped cardigan, she can use a shot of her own butt to nail down the pose her client wants: that of an uptight balding squat man getting "goosed" (the director's term) by his wife as they humorously confront the lack of sexuality in their marriage. nancy's not sure if she finds any of this humorous - that marriage is so hard or that she's able to find physical similarities between her own butt and that of an aging hairy man.  

Family Portrait

Because we don't have enough college applications to fill out for maddy or juried art shows to enter to revive nancy's career, jonah decided he needed to jump in and apply to private school. now. this minute. this week. the thought of one more application to anything made nancy want to kill herself. and of course the tony, arty, industry school he thinks will answer his prayers needed a Family Picture.
so last night when adam came over to help fill out the application and basically save the children from what they referred to as "mom's instability"....aka mom wanted to go out to dinner last night with a male friend and ditch the whole thing, mom wanted to do anything but apply to a school of any kind, mom wanted to do anything but compete for money and status last night, mom wanted to do anything but measure, quantify and assess one more time her own or her kids' worthiness. if mom was into heroin, this is when she'd be shooting up. she even confessed to her older male friend that sometimes she truly wishes she could give her kids a drug to make it all go away. the chaos. the confusion. just give everyone a half a xanax to settle down.

but in lieu of sedating her kids, she wanted, simply, to go eat fried bananas at Versailles with someone older than her and talk about anything but AP classes and Megadeth....just for an hour. but no such luck--she hadn't procured a permission slip. her cell mates were blocking her furlough. But there was some progress made.
last night, mom actually went to sleep BEFORE her kids for the first time in months (since co-warden aka Dad swooped in and took a break from writing his Memoir to make a housecall). and while mom settled into bed, the remaining family did homework, filled out jonah's application and voted to take the Family Pic in the a.m. before school.
but in the harsh light of morning with two tests today in AP Government, AP Stats and a quiz in AP Psych...maddy bailed on the photoshoot because she didn't have time to put on her make up and do her hair. i remember feeling that way. wanting to look good. now i'm lucky if i'm dressed in the morning. and note: i'm not dressed in the picture. but it's a new white robe from Cosco bought a year ago by Bubbie and Zaida and given to me just two weeks ago at news years as some kind of weird party favor (they brought 10 of them...and about 97 pieces of shrimp that Zaida feared would be eaten up by jonah's friends..he feared it so much he asked nancy to disinvite jonah and his friends. to which nancy said: Jonah lives here. nancy's friend Kieran visiting from NY backed her up, said he felt she had a "compelling argument". But Zaida wasn't buying it so we had to deputize guests at the party to "police the shrimp" as my father put it..but that's another story)

bottom line is: here's our happy family photo which ends up telling volumes about our family. adam and jonah and nancy. holding a portrait of maddy since the she-wolf wouldn't get out of bed to join us without her black eyeliner. and ironically we think this is a really impressive photo for jonah to send to the snobby school: it shows his mom's a painter, his parents are divorced but still friends (or as Melissa says, dad just drives to his bedroom)...and Jonah poses, as usual, with his best What Me Worry? smile.

as one learns in art school, happy accidents (spilled paint, divorced parents, last minute school applications and vicious overworked daughters) can net out interesting and positive results. and even if he doesn't get accepted to Crossroads, we now have a cute life affirming pic for the family album.

Hillarita: I have emotion

Today Jonah is drawing: Pinuskstan

Jonah's history class was asked to draw a map of a new country. He "came up" with Pinuskastan. As one enlightened branding executive from the east coast (who also happens to be Jonah's Life Coach) asserts: "It should be pointed out that the pinus was indeed a weapon developed during Balkan conflict delivering a chemical liquid payload. Looking at it now, it does coincidentally seem to resemble a penis."

And that wasn't lost on Mr. Gow, Jonah's history teacher--though he couldn't be quite so genealogically and genitally generous. He had to protect his job in the litigious environment of today's public schools. Therefore, a day after Jonah presented the "map" in class, Mr Gow presented me with the goldenrod copy of Jonah's discipline form. On the form there were lots of little teeny tiny boxes to check off for such transgressions as Possessing a Firearm, Dress Code Violation, and Cutting Class. Since there was no box to check off for Drawing a Penis as a Country, Mr. Gow dutifully filled out the Behavior Description as follows: Jonah Nimoy along with five other boys drew a penis as part of a group poster which they presented to the class. The group also made lewd comments as they were presenting. I kept the entire group after class and spoke with them. I also called Jonah's mother and spoke with her. The entire group apologized to the class and agreed to two days of detention.

I signed my copy and sent it back to school to be filed with the canary copy which goes into the Discipline File.

In summation, though Jonah clearly suffers from genetic boundary issues, this Jewish mother is happy to see he has a good moral compass. And despite the many thousands of dollars spent on his Bar Mitzvah buying crazy hats and light up necklaces, the lessons of his torah portion and responsiblity to the Jewish people is not lost on him. #1. Pinuskastan clearly lives in harmony with Israel in what is otherwise a hostile and anti-semitic region--note the powerful and fluid placement of jewish stars. no oppressive self-hating jew stuff for this kid. #2. the penis is large and circumcised and sensitively rendered which displays excellent self esteem, empowerment and fine motor skills. #3. If we can get Jonah through 10th grade without too much more detention - and if the writer's strike gets resolved - perhaps he can actually find gainful employment as a story board artist for Sasha Baron Cohen which is way more than his mother can pull off.

today barack is wearing

a dark slender suit, a white shirt with no tie, dark brown leather shoes like my father wore many years ago, coffee colored skin, intelligent compassionate eyes, an authentic smile, a surplus of character he most likely was born with and the ability to use meaningful multisyllabic words.
today on Erev New Hampshire, the worst thing anyone can say about Barack Obama is that he speaks too well. and offers too much hope. to which he responded and i paraphrase: "I don't recall JFK saying 'We'd like to put a man on the moon but don't get your hopes up'"
ok. enough hope for one day. now i must go consolidate my debt...but thank you barack for giving me the audacity of hope that maybe i (and ther rest of this wounded country) will climb out of the hole this year. financially and spiritually.
(Photo credit: Maddy and Nancy @ Obama rally 4 weeks ago)