To the Faire

Yesterday Mommy Daughter Culture Day turned into Family Culture Day when Dad tagged along and we all went to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Irwindale.

Ok, let me say this to start with:

Going to a Renaissance Faire, seeing Queen Elizabeth traipsing around in her finery, and the knights in their armor, in the middle of the desert when it's 90 degrees and the sun is beating down on you - well, it's just weird (even if it is the oldest one in the country)

But Renaissance Faire's are, by their very nature, weird.

You get a bunch of creative types together, who are all geeky into various things that could be cataloged in the "Renaissance" drawer, throw some modern-bawdy-Shakespeare into the mix, and make someone Queen Elizabeth, and you've got a recipe for weirdness.

I spent the day being snarky and pointing out that dressing in RPG video game types of costumes wasn't Renaissance.  Someone was playing a harpsichord, and I had to point out that it wasn't actually invented in the Renaissance.

It seems kind of like the Renaissance Faire is a summer stand in for Halloween.  You dress up like a freak, you act goofy, and it's not supposed to actually be authentic.

But I'm a stickler for authenticity.  Which means that, as much as I love it, I will never actually be at home in a Renaissance Faire.  I pick on the accents (why is a Lady in Waiting speaking like she's from Truro?  Surely she would have lost that by now).  I pick on the clothes (I see zippers!).  I pick on the music (trying to Celtic-ize pop music and call it "Renaissance" does not work for me).

So why do I even go?

Maybe I wish I could be that carefree.  That blatantly disregarding of rules.  And just have that much fun without caring that I'm wearing zippers.  I mean, who cares, right?  Do I want Hannah to grow up being so rigid?  I hope I can let some of the German-ness out of me.  Going to Renaissance Faire's are a good practice for that.

Mommy Daughter Culture Day: Huntington Library

A few months ago I started doing regular Mommy Daughter Culture Days on Sundays with Hannah.  It was mid-December, I'd just figured out how to pump while driving (hands free bra and car adapter) and I was ready to stretch the pumping tether that had me staying close to home from the time Hannah had been born.  So we went to LACMA, where Hannah got a free kid's membership that entitles her to go to the museum free with an adult until she's 18 (yeah, I sniff out culture deals).

So that got us started on Mommy Daughter Culture Day.  It's a nice time for us to go do something special, it gives J a break at home, and it gives me a chance to go out and do stuff in my city that I wouldn't normally do.

Since that LACMA day in December she's been to the Norton Simon in Pasadena, the Getty, the California Heritage Museum in Santa Monica, the Riverside Art Museum, and some other places which I now forget.

We welcomed Spring with a trip to the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.  I've been wanting to go to the Huntington for ages - they have an amazing collection of old maps, and it seems like every time I look at a map in a history book, it's courtesy of the Huntington.

They have the most amazing gardens - 120 acres divided up into gardens from lots of different countries.  So there's a Shakespeare garden, an Australian garden, a Japanese garden (with a bamboo forest - amazing to hear the trees blowing in the wind), a Chinese garden, and a jungle garden.  Kind of reminded me of the first time I was ever at Longwood Gardens when I was about five or six, when we were walking around for what seemed like hours, and I thought I was going to die of thirst.

Anyway, that's just the grounds.  Then they have like three buildings full or art and old maps and other cool stuff.  I'm considering buying a membership so I can go more often - I can't imagine that I could ever get sick of that place.

A special highlight was that Hannah sat in grass for the first time ever.  Up here in the mountains we don't have much in the way of fresh grass, and anyway, it's been winter.  So she had a good time sitting in the grass, pulling on it, trying to eat it, etc.  And I had a good time trying to keep her from eating the grass, etc.

Secret Salon

A summer project I've been working on has been to organize all my digital pictures.  I've got nearly 10 years worth of unnamed files, that supposedly represent some of the greatest times in my life, but I've got them everywhere, in no order.  So every day I sort through a folder or two, and I can start to see a very faint light at the end of the clutter tunnel.

Today I found this picture.  It's somewhere near Hemet, down the 15 freeway, in some nowhere ghetto-fabulous strip mall.  I remember being there.  I think we were on a road trip and had to pee and this was the only place that looked promising.  I asked J, "why the hell did I take a picture of a ghetto strip mall?"

And he says, "because it's the trendiest salon in the world.  It's so trendy, it's got no door."

It's like a secret society.  You've gotta know the password, and they let you in through the quickie-mart.  I bet you go through a check-cashing place on your way, too.

But seriously.  I give you Trend Setters Salon.  It's so trendy, you can't get in.

The Music Wayback Machine: 1999

I've been playing around on Spotify, using the Billboard charts to make playlists of different years.  Here's one from one of my favorite years, 1999, when I was 23:  http://open.spotify.com/user/hteysko/playlist/46OKyZBEVMvR3fY2QtBWX0

Let me tell you about the coolness of my life at 23.

First off, in the spring of that year, I broke up with my longtime boyfriend Mark.  We wound up breaking up several times before it finally took.  He was a good guy, I'm sure he still is.  It's just that, you know, I was 23 and I'd known him since I was 19, and life is too short to not spend your 20's doing crazy stuff that will make your grandkids cringe someday.

So that summer I moved to LA and lived in Koreatown, at 426 S. New Hampshire Ave, in this cool art-deco building from the 20's.  It's where I spent the year before moving to London when I was 24, and that year will always be one of my favorites.  My apartment had a fold-in-the-wall murphy bed, big windows with bars on (I'd hang plants from them), and a tiny kitchen with a tall ceiling.  I was too broke to have a mattress when I first moved there, but after I found a job at a headhunting firm in LA, I saved up, and around October I had enough for a mattress.

On the day it was delivered, I woke up early and rode the bus (oh yeah, I didn't have a car) to the kmart on third (where The Grove is now) and bought a full bed set with a comforter, that I still sleep with to this day.  I waited in the lobby for the mattress because my building was so ghetto that none of the buzzers worked.  And once it was delivered, I walked to the Chinese place on the corner and got dinner, made up the bed, and spent the evening watching football and eating dinner in bed.  Life was blissful.

(Here's a funny story - in the summer of 2005, before I met J, I went on a blind date with a guy who lived in that same building.  It was too random for words.  There are thousands of apartment buildings in LA and I wind up on a blind date with a guy who lives in the one I lived in five years before?  Too strange.  It kind of creeped me out, but I still went upstairs to his apartment anyway because I just had to get inside the building and see whether they'd changed the carpet.  Plus he had a cute cat and I'm a sucker for cute cats.)

So anyway, there I am in my little studio apartment (which I really adored.  I've never had an apartment I loved as much as that place) with the fold in the wall bed, and a mini-refrigerator because the big one that came with the place didn't work, and the building management never fixed it.  Since I didn't have a car, I walked around with a fold-up grandma cart and took the bus to Trader Joe's, and I learned how to cook chicken.

There was an earthquake that fall that was strong enough to wake me up in the middle of the night.  I was dreaming that a monster was shaking the bars on my windows, and I was pissed off at him for that.  Then I woke up and realized it was an earthquake and ran to the doorway, but by then it was over.  I woke my parents in Pennsylvania up in the middle of the night, though, to tell them I was ok in case it was on the news or something.  They weren't impressed.

Blink 182 got popular with What's My Age Again, which coincidentally had lyrics in it about being 23, which I took as some kind of sign.  Of what, I'm not sure.



I went on a couple of Very Bad Dates.  With one guy, we had a good first date, and then he wanted me to come out and see him the next night, but it was late, and I was going to have to take, like, four buses to get to the Valley, and I was lazy and didn't care that much, so I wound up not going and falling asleep without calling him instead.  He freaked out and called the police, reporting me missing, and they came banging on my door at 4am.  Listen, I'm sorry I stood you up, whatever your name was, and I guess it was sweet of you to not want me to be dead somewhere, but had the thought not occurred to you that I was standing you up?  Really?

Speaking of dating, I was so bad at it, that when a guy didn't call me back after I'd left him like, five messages, I assumed that he must have lost my number and I called him at work to give it to him.  Seriously.  Such a bad move.  I'm glad that somewhere along the line I finally learned how to play it cool and not wear my heart on my sleeve.  So that six years later, when J and I were on our third or fourth date, he was talking to somebody else and referred to me as his girlfriend, and I completely ignored it.  And then a couple of hours later, at the end of the date, I quickly said, "I'm glad you called me your girlfriend," and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then walked out the door.  It was the smoothest move I've ever pulled off, and he said that it was one of the things that officially hooked him.

And now, just an hour ago, he burped in my ear.  I asked him why he did something so gross, and he said, "so your brain could smell my dinner."

We sure know how to be classy.