Reduce, Reuse, Redbox

A couple months ago, a friend came to my apartment for dinner, along with her husband and one-year-old daughter. We had a nice meal and then lounged in the living room, while the little girl toddled around.

As I don't have kids, I don't have a stockpile of toys, and I also don't have anything baby-proofed. But I really don't care what any visiting children play with, as long as there's no danger they'll get hurt. Read: I'm fine with broken stuff -- just don't stick anything in a light socket. Or drop one of my 5lb. free weights on your tiny foot. But that's another story.

So this little tyke, just getting her sea legs, motored around my whole place like a wobbly whirling dervish. Then she threw up on the couch. Then we laughed and her mom cleaned it up, and they left, and I went about the rest of my evening.

When I went to watch one of the DVDs I'd rented earlier in the day, it was nowhere to be found. My search of the apartment turned up only a couple of the kid's toys she'd forgotten. Figuring the movie had gotten mixed up in toddler stuff, I assumed it was probably mistakenly hitching a ride home with my friends.

I texted them, saying they could feel free to watch and return it after they unpacked. My friend immediately replied, "Check your recycling."

I wandered into the kitchen, where I keep a brown paper bag on the floor. Sure enough, crammed in between flattened boxes and soup cans was the DVD. I'm not sure if the little girl deposited it there on accident or as a judgment on the quality of the film, but I do know this: Parents are amazing.

Pinheads

I worked at a drugstore in my hometown for about 10 years -- after school and on the weekends while I was a teenager, and every summer during college. I did everything from cleaning and restocking to delivering prescription medications, but mainly I worked the till.

This could get slightly boring on your average Thursday night, and we invented myriad ways to keep ourselves entertained. I won't go into detail, but suffice it to say I lost several "who has the lowest blood pressure" competitions and know exactly how much my arm weighs according to the Russell Stover bulk candy scale.

One day, when I "had time to lean, so I had time to clean," I found a small action figure, maybe three inches tall, on the floor. It was a little plastic man wearing a shirt, jeans, and a turban. Since we didn't have an official lost and found, I set him on a shelf behind the front counter. Weeks passed with no claim. I named him Raoul.

At some point, on a particularly dead evening, one of my coworkers and I decided to have some fun with Raoul and the key-making machine. I think we sawed his arm off. I'm not proud of it, but that's what happened. Then my coworker suggested we glue a pin back on him. That also happened. I wore him to the company Christmas party that year on my lapel as my date.

Several more weeks passed, and Raoul became a fixture of sorts at the service counter. Until a little boy pointed up and cried, "Hey! That's mine!"

No kidding. After verifying that it was, indeed, his long-lost toy, I reluctantly handed it over.

"Here you go. His name's Raoul now," I said, awkwardly. "He's missing an arm. Sorry about that."

The kid frowned but took him anyway. As he exited the store, I remembered something critical.

"Oh! He's a . . . pin now!" I yelled after him. "So . . . be careful with that, I guess!"

And that's the story of Raoul, who came into my life for a brief but meaningful time, suffered some indignities due to teenage boredom, and then likely went on to injure an innocent child. So it goes.

Where's the Teeth?

I share an online calendar with a friend of mine. He works three jobs, and I try to stay social with my peeps, so it's just easiest to do a quick schedule check when we want to make plans like buying tickets to a show.

Last week I was sitting in the waiting area of my dentist's office when I got a text message. Here's what it said:

"You'll love this: I went in to my dentist appointment today at 2pm, only to discover that the appointment on my calendar was YOUR dentist appointment."

We were in separate offices across the city, but due to a misreading of a poorly color-coded time slot, only one of us was actually supposed to be there. 

He got hearty chuckles from the receptionist. I got my teeth cleaned. 

Diamonds in the Rough

At some point in our lives, we've all worked at jobs that were, politely put, less than stellar. When I first moved to the TC, I worked retail at a boutique gift store. It was intended as a short-term gig, a place to land while I got my bearings in a new city. Six months, I reckoned, would do the trick.

Over a year later I was still there. I worked weird hours and could barely pay my rent, but I'd met such wonderful people. My coworkers were so bright and funny that they occasionally made me forget my aching back and the last customer who'd treated me like dirt.

There was a guy in a band who would write little songs, such as his ballad about the Loomis truck driver called "Armored Car of Love." There was a woman who would twirl rolls of wrapping paper like batons, tossing them up in the air with a flourish. There was a girl who would work late nights during the Christmas rush, and we'd dance outrageously to a techno version of Bing Crosby after the store closed.

But the story that makes me laugh without fail involves another girl who was (and is) utterly delightful. We'll call her Heidi.  Because that's her name.  For a few months, we were selling personalized bracelets. You could buy a simple leather band and choose individual "diamond"-encrusted letters to thread on in any combination that suited your taste. 

On one particularly slow afternoon, Heidi decided to do a little shopping. She announced that she was going to make a bracelet for her sister, and proceeded to carefully pluck sparkly pieces out of the trays. She finally turned, quite seriously, to display her creation.

"Do you think she'll like it?"

I'd expected her sister's name, perhaps, or initials, or an inspirational word that held special meaning for them both.  What I saw instead, spelled out in glittery diamond letters, was "POOP."

It was ridiculous. And genius. And still one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

I eventually left that job, partly due to a poor change of management, and partly because having to call 911 after skateboarders threw lit firecrackers into the store didn't seem worth $8 an hour. I was too young and dumb to realize that you shouldn't burn bridges, because I frickin' dynamited that one. But I was lucky enough to know a few real gems, and that's worth a lot.

Drink. Click.

Over the holidays, I went home to South Dakota and spent a week eating my weight in goodies and generally trying to return to my natural vegetative/hibernating state. 

One night I heard my dad shout that he was watching slides in the basement. I roused myself from beneath a heated blanket and made my way down, where I found him clicking through a tray of my parents' wedding pictures from 1974.

I was well acquainted with all the images, since I'd painstakingly scanned, edited, and archived them several years before. But I'd never had the accompanying commentary from a happily buzzed father. 

"Look at that. Look at your mom. She looks like a freakin' movie star!" 

Drink. Click. 

"I never really noticed how pretty that dress was. With the lace on the sleeves and neck ..."

Drink. Click. 

"Whoah! Someone put a lot of work into those streamers."

Long pause while it slowly dawned on him after 40 years. 

"You know, I bet when all of us guys left and went out to the bar, the girls stayed behind and decorated!"

At that moment my mom arrived to confirm, with an amused smirk, that he was correct. Then she joined him on the couch to fill in the rest of the blanks, and they both looked back on each other as if for the first time. 

Drink. Click. 

Minority Retort

I just read an article about the 2003 film "The Last Samurai," and I was reminded of a story one of my good friends told me.

If you're unfamiliar with the plot of this movie, Tom Cruise plays an American military officer who is training Japanese soldiers in the 1870s and eventually embraces the samurai culture. It's basically Dances With Wolves, but with katanas instead of tatonkas. 

Anyhoo, my friend went to this movie in the theatre. During the first scene in which our hero dons traditional samurai garb, there was a startled outburst from several rows back. 

"What the -- I didn't know Tom Cruise was Chinese!"

Secret Service With a Smile

I went to see a play the other night at a local theatre. My friend and I arrived quite early, and there were very few people around. So when one of the ushers offered to take us to our seat level in the elevator, we agreed.

It was just the three of us on the way down, and we started joking that it felt like such special treatment, as if the usher were escorting us to safety. When I remarked that he even had an earpiece like a secret service agent, he joined in the game mock-seriously.

ME: "Do I have a code name?"

HIM: (totally straight-faced)  "I'm not allowed to reveal that information."

ME: "Why not?"

HIM: "It's a liability issue.  In case I have to take extreme measures for your protection."

ME:  "Ah. Plausible deniability."

HIM: "Exactly."

When the elevator reached the main floor, he insisted on going out first to check the hallway, then led us to our seats.  I, however, decided that a pre-show trip to the restroom might be advisable. As I re-entered the theatre, my bodyguard happened to be standing outside the door.

"It's all clear," he whispered conspiratorially. 

After an excellent show, my friend and I lounged quite awhile at the theatre bar . . . long enough that a couple staff members joined us after their shifts. One of them was the secret service usher.

HIM: "I see you made it out safely."

ME: "Yes, thanks for your excellent protection."

There was a long silence, during which we all sipped our drinks.  Then he added, "Your code name was Hootenanny, by the way."

Aging Like a Fine Whine

I was unintentionally rude the other day. I was standing in the liquor store, pondering which bottle of wine to buy, when I suddenly became aware that someone was speaking to me. I looked up to see a woman standing at a small table, evidently handing out samples of some promotional cocktail. And evidently, she had said the same thing to me several times:

"I see you don't yet have a drink in your hand, young lady."

It wasn't that I didn't want to sample the signature cocktail. It was just that hearing the words "young lady" automatically made me assume she couldn't possibly be talking to me.

You see, I have officially accepted that I'm well out of "young lady" range and deep into "ma'am" territory. It's not ideal, but it's certainly a vast improvement on "sir," which I was called at the grocery store immediately following the liquor store incident.

The woman brandishing booze was likely using the phrase to sweeten her pitch. However, I will take even insincere flattery with the same delight as when I get carded. Any time a server asks to see my ID, I simply think, "You're adorable."

Or perhaps she was being super ironic, like calling a fat guy "Slim," or a tall guy "Shorty," or a woman on the wrong side of 30 "young lady." I don't know! I didn't detect any sarcasm, just the faint whiff of alcohol and ginger ale.

I turned her down as politely as I could, and then made my wine selection. The guy working the register was not fooled. I didn't even get carded.