Ann Leary, author of The Good House
Author of The Good House
I’m in Boston with Devin and her friend Ellen, looking at colleges, while Denis is shooting the last episodes of Rescue Me, helping donate fire simulating/training equipment to the NYFD, and preparing to leave for a comedy tour.
Also, I’m giving a talk at Emerson College with author Alice Hoffman tomorrow.
We’re a little busy. Actually, I’m a little busy. Denis is REALLY busy.
I dreamed about babies and awoke in tears. We’ll be driving around New England for a few days, looking at schools for my baby. Found this poem by Tom Lux, who taught me at Emerson. A wonderful teacher and poet.
A Little Tooth
by Thomas Lux
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all
over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.
Okay, 3 posts in a day. A personal record. I was searching YouTube for an old Geritol commercial to show Ylenia. I was looking for those really condescending 70s commercials where the husband says all these things about how amazing his wife is, then says, “well, she eats right, exercises and she takes Geritol. My wife, I think, I’ll keep her!”
I couldn’t find that ad but found this doozy. Enjoy!
Then I found a site that has all these 60s TV clips. This commercial is a riot. These two swingers come out of the TV to invite a bored husband to join them in some kind of crazy, sexy, menthol smoking threesome. All the fun’s over when the killjoy wife appears.
I’m sorry to keep posting these but I keep coming across them. This one was on 7th Avenue. FX is really doing a great job promoting the coming season. I love the way this shot makes it look like he’s kind of hanging over the buildings.
He looks good, huh? Well, he eats right, gets plenty of exercise, and he takes Geritol. If you’re old enough to recall that ad, you should be taking Geritol too.
This entry is not about animals, but about one of my dearest friends, Juliana Nash. We were roommates for a short time in Boston in the 80s. We each thought the other was the funniest person we had ever met. We talked in exactly the same cadence – super fast – and nobody could understand us, but us. She was in this very cool band called Talking to Animals. I came across this video of her on YouTube this morning and watching it made me realize how much I miss her. We make plans constantly and then are forced to change them. She has kids now but is playing gigs again in NY and I hope to catch one soon. Love her.
So, I was driving around our neighborhood in NY, looking for a parking space and something caught my eye. Can you see it?
Here’s a better shot:
They always put these signs and billboards close to where we live for some reason. When Denis first became famous, he did this GAP ad – they were doing a campaign with all these celebs – Spike Lee, Denis, Cindy Crawford I think. Anyway, they put the poster of Denis on the bus stop right in front of our building. So when we waited for the bus, we had a giant mug shot of Denis looming behind us. I have a photo of the kids posing in front of it in their double stroller. Some day I’ll figure out how to scan it.
We have returned from our delightful vacation and I’m still nestled up with my Kindle. Some more things in its favor: It doesn’t tell you what page you are on. I suppose this is because the screen reveals less than a printed page. Instead, at the bottom of the screen, it tells you how much of the book you have read. I have read 22% of the Cheever biography. I know that it’s almost 800 pages long, so I suppose I’ve read ….oh, you do the math.
So, a very helpful customer service rep from Amazon told me how to reboot my Kindle and it works again.
I love my Kindle so much it hurts! How could I have been so unforgiving, so impatient, so hasty with my cruel condemnation of my dear, dear Kindle. I have three books going at once. When I leave one book, and then return to it later, it returns to the page on which I left off! This afternoon, I looked over at Denis trying to read his newspaper on the beach and my heart swelled with pity. “Why not just lug an engraved stone slab down here?” I said, flipping through the same newspaper electronically, with one dainty finger. He said something, but I couldn’t hear him because the wind had blown the paper over his face.
Please disregard my last post about Kindles. They suck.
Denis and I bought each other Kindles for Christmas, and because they were back-ordered, they just arrived a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t use them until we brought them on vacation with us, but we weren’t that into the idea of them, to be honest. You see, we would like to write more books and our wish is that people will want to buy them. We have no idea how much either of us makes off the electronic rights to our books (though we both know that he makes about a gazillion dollars more than I do) but it can’t be as much as the actual print royalties. Also, we like to hold real books when we read them. Likewise – newspapers and magazines.
