Once this happens, there are only a few options for ice ball removal.  One is a warm bath, but I don’t like to do that.  He’s already cold at this point.  It seems like a bad idea to get him wet.  The next option is the hair drier.  But Wensley is afraid of the hair drier, and I end up feeling like a prison guard at the Tower of London, torturing an informant.  The third and regrettably the simplest option, is to just let him romp around the apartment as the ice slowly melts into various puddles on my new wood floor.

I like to let his hair grow long in the winter to give him some defense against the cold, but I decided that this year I would try something different.  I took him to the groomer yesterday and asked if they would shave his legs but leave the rest as long as possible.  It’s counterintuitive, but  figured his legs are going to be cold in the snow no matter what.  Maybe if the hair is short he won’t get snow barnacles and he can warm up faster. 

I thought, “What I have been doing isn’t working; why not give something else a try?”

But I forgot about one thing.  Groomers.  If there is one thing about being the owner of a small dog that I find unbearably obnoxious, it is dealing with groomers.  I once had a conversation with a groomer who gave Wensley a disapproving look, which she then transferred to me before informing me, “Yorkshire terriers are supposed to have pointy ears.”  She said it with that tone of voice that you use when you tell someone, “You’re doing it wrong.”

“He came that way,” I replied.  But she kept giving me that look, as if that wasn’t a proper explanation.  As if I was supposed to get the dog in for some plastic surgery to correct his floppy bunny ears.

It isn’t the groomers’ fault, I suppose.  They are trained to do standard dog cuts like they do in dog shows.  And that’s what a lot of people expect.  Especially small dog people.

For instance: my sister’s mother-in-law has a Bischon Frise named Sugar who – every six weeks or so – gets carted on an 80 mile round trip car ride to the trained groomer to get his fancy show dog cut.  The standard Bischon cut makes the dog’s head look like a snow globe, presumably so that the dog and the standard Bischon owner can have matching old white-lady froes.

Here is a photo of one who obviously thinking, “Kill me, please.”

Somewhere in there is a dog who just wants to sniff an anus and take a nap.

Sugar is not a show dog.  Sugar rarely leaves the house, except for the occasional ride in the Lexus.  But it’s important to my sister’s in-laws that he matches the furniture and gets the “best” treatment possible.  And that’s fine.  Whatever works for them.

But unfortunately for me, these are the types of clients that groomers cater to.  I assume they have been abused by enough posh Bischon owners that they are terrified of botching another cut and catching hell for it.

Which is why I wasn’t able to get my dog’s legs shaved.

I dropped him off yesterday morning at a groomer in North Salt Lake, which is ridiculously far away from my apartment.  But I book him there when I travel for work because it is closer to the airport than the other places.  And they already have his medical records.  Besides, after his hair cut, they let him play with the other dogs instead of keeping him in a cage like some groomers do, so it works out for Wensley.  But when I went back after work (nine hours later), they brought him out and his hair hadn’t been cut.

The groomer handed him to me and said, “I gave him a bath and brushed it out, but this was the best I could do.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.  “He looks the same.”

“Well, yeah,” she said.  “You said to leave it as long as possible.”

“I know… I meant on his body.  I wanted you to give him a trim though.  And shave his legs…”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” she said.

“You can’t?” I asked, trying to imagine how this could be physically impossible.  “Why not?”

“Because.  He would look like a turtle.”

I didn’t respond.  I just collected my dog and paid for his “bath.”  And then I went home.  But here’s the thing.  He wouldn’t look like a turtle.  He would look like a dog, sleeping on a couch.

This is how he looked this morning, napping in the warm spot I just left in bed, right before I went to work.

And here is a photo of a Yorkshire terrier sporting a standard show cut, which I like to call “The Cousin It.”

I see this, and I want to round-up the whole show dog industry and kick it in the dick.

Wensley is not a show dog.  He is not an accessory.  He doesn’t have the patience to stay in a purse or sit on a satin pillow and match furniture.  And I don’t want him to.  I want him to be a dog and play in the snow.  I want him to romp with the twins and get dirty at the dog park.  But I would also like for him to stay warm while enjoying himself.

I should take him back and insist that they just do what I asked.  Or I could get an electric razor and try to do it myself.  Somehow I suspect that this will not be good for Wensley’s and my relationship, however.  But then there is a third – and regrettably a simpler – option.  I could always buy Wensley a set of these.  Maybe that’s what I should do.

But every couple of days or so, I’ll come in to work and it will look like this.

I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, I suppose.  But the obvious explanation is that my merman’s lopsided little boobies make the custodian uncomfortable.  So uncomfortable, in fact, that the merman isn’t allowed to watch while he empties my trash.

I’m a bit annoyed by it.  Not because someone is passing judgment on my sense of aesthetic.  Or even because I am a Virgo and I have an irrational attachment to my stuff, in particular the stuff that someone insists on dicking with.  But because if the guy is going to go out of his way to redecorate my cube, would it be so hard to dust while he’s up there?  I mean, c’mon.

I think I have developed a plan of attack.  I am going to find a thin tipped sharpie and give my merman a butt crack with ample cleavage.  And maybe some bum dimples.  Maybe that little surprise will startle the cleaning guy to just leave him facing forward next time.

My Favorite Things about 2011

Lit Bits (Short for Literary Bitches) book club, my writing coach AJ and the people I met through Bootcamp for Writers and the Writing retreat in Boulder Utah, Avenues Yoga and all of people I met at the Wolf Creek retreats, Zum Soap, Tazo Sweet Orange Tea, Atelier’s Orange Sanguine cologne, Francis (the Poor Yorick cat), hiking in the Pacific Northwest, introducing the twins to the Coral Pink Sand Dunes, the rainfall runoff in the canyons surrounding Torrey Utah, the late winter powder days at Solitude, long summer walks with Wensley, dinner parties at The Olive, happy hour at Oddfellows in Seattle, hot rock steak at Uchiko in Austin, chocolate mole at Adobo Grill in Indianapolis, Tulie’s bran muffins, pizza at Maxwell’s in Salt Lake City’s historic Boston Building, watching the Michael Franti concert at Red Butte from White Trash Hill, photographing the dogs at the farmer’s market, The Descendants, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas, seeing Ira Glass speak at Kingsbury, putting birds on things, knitting mittens, baking apple rhubarb pie, confidently throwing mugs (with handle help from Stef), live music in Sonya’s backyard, BBQ’s in Janice’s backyard, Christmas morning with the Takenakas, learning Espanol with Geordie et all, cooking with my sisters, tea parties in the sand box with the twins, and collaborating on creative work again (I had the opportunity to work on a children’s book with my sister and a short film with my old college chum and I participated in a lot of writing workshops.  It’s been such a long time; I had forgotten how satisfying creating work collaboratively can be) and finding my bliss.  It’s writing, by the way.  I don’t know why it took me so long to figure that out.

Things I am Looking Forward to in 2012

My new neicephew (gender still unknown) who is expected in the spring, my newly established writing group, knitting my first Aran sweater, buying a new SLR (hopefully this summer), seeing Mike Birbiglia perform at Kingsbury and Radiolab “In the Dark” at Capital Theatre, entering the world of smart phone users (yipe!), spending time with old friends, making new friends, and traveling to see distant friends as much as possible.  Bring on the adventures, 2012; I can’t wait.

I haven’t been to Manhattan often in the last several years.  But it seems like every time I visit, I bump into someone I knew from college as I am navigating around the city.  It happened once in a Target in Brooklyn, but most of the time in happens on the subway or in a subway station.  I am assured that this is a very typical Manhattan phenomenon which occurs when you put so many people on a small island. 

The first time it happened to me, I was in the city because one of my short plays was in a showcase presented by a small theatre company near Times Square.  I was there with my sister and a few friends from acting school, and someone we knew from our University days boarded our subway car.  We spoke briefly – there wasn’t much time to catch up before our stop – but I couldn’t stop thinking, “what are the odds?”  I’ve never lived in Manhattan and I know so few people in the city.  And in order for me to have bumped into this friend, it wasn’t enough for all of us to be traveling through the same section of the same crowded neighborhood via subway, all at once.  If he had stepped onto the car behind us, just one subway car ten feet away from where we were sitting, we would never have seen one another.  But he walked through the door of our car.  What was even more random was that we ended up bumping into that same friend the next day in a different subway station in another part of the city.  It was insane.

Which is why, I think, there was a part of me who was prepared to bump into Rachel Dratch.  Well, not Rachel Dratch, obviously.  But someone that I “knew.”  I was expecting it.  After all, as my friends say, “That’s New York for you; it happens all the time.”

It was back in 2009 and we had tickets to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Demetria, Budgie and I took the A line to a subway station on West 50^th street and got off the train.  We were walking up the stairs and exiting through the turnstile when I looked up and saw a woman coming down the stairs toward us.  I knew that I knew her, and even though I couldn’t quite place how, I threw my arms open toward her and inhaled deeply to call out to her.  She was only a few feet away from me and her eyes met mine and she smiled, waiting to see what I had to say.  But as my lungs reached capacity and I was about to yell, “holy cow, how ARE you?!” or something similarly inane, I realized with a chest-punching start, “Hey IDIOT! You don’t KNOW this person.  She is, in fact, FAMOUS.  Do not HUG her!”  That is to say: I knew her.  But she didn’t know me.

There was an awkward pause then.  We stood there looking at one another, me with my arms out-stretched for a hug, her waiting with a pleasant and decidedly not-yet-terrified look on her face.  Her arms even lifted slightly, absurdly opening to accept my embrace. 

What I should have said was, “I’m sorry – my mistake.  I thought you were a friend of mine.”  Or “I love your work!”  Or anything really.  I definitely should have said something.  But instead I dropped my arms and ran out of the subway station like a kooky simpleton, leaving Ms. Dratch to wonder if she should get a body guard.

The other morning, when this memory popped into my waking brain, I felt that nauseating pinch in my stomach, as if it had just happened.  I relived the moment in my head a couple of times in my head, playing the “what I should have said” game and wishing I weren’t such a dork.

The thing that makes it so embarrassing (other than the fact that I truly am a fan of hers and I missed an opportunity to meet her) is that I think the reason I thought she was someone I knew from my life and not TV is because Rachel Dratch is… Well… Not….  Beautiful.  She looks like a person.  Someone who might have taught a class I took, or sold me socks, or hit me up for a tampon in a lady’s room somewhere.  If she looked like Angelina Jolie – who I assume has Barbie girl parts and therefore never uses tampons – I wouldn’t have mistaken her for a friend.  And I wouldn’t have been as excited to see her.

Now I am insulting all of my friends, in addition to Rachel Dratch, by insinuating that that you are all a bunch of sock-buying tampon-users.  This is not my intention at all.  What I really want to say is that Angelina Jolie is a big-lipped giraffe, and I can’t wait until the next time the universe decides to spend a little magic on me by arranging for me to bump into a long lost friend in a Super Target in Brooklyn (which has also happened).  Because celebrities are everywhere.  You are bound to encounter one sooner or later.  But when someone you have known slips away from you and is carried away in the wind, only to be brought back by chance, that is nothing short of miraculous.

But if you are still insulted, I’ll be working on my “what I should have said” speech in advance so that when I do – with luck and delight – bump into you, I will be prepared.

Lady at TJ Maxx Cash Register: Next, please!

Me: Hello…

TJ Maxx Lady: Hi there.  Were you able to find everything okay?

Me: I was, thank you.

TJ Maxx Lady: Oh, this is a cute sweater!

Me: Thanks! I’m going to a conference and thought I could use some business casual sweaters.  Those conference halls are always so cold.

TJ Maxx Lady: Is the conference here?

Me: No; It’s in Indianapolis.

TJ Maxx Lady: Oooooh. Maybe you’ll meet someone? [wink / smile]

[My Inner-Brain Voice: What the… Do I have a neon sign on my forehead that says “single” that only women my mother’s age can see?  If so… how do I make it visible to actual men-folk?]

Me: Yeah… Maybe.  You never know.

But that was also the summer that my father was diagnosed and treated with cancer.  And it was also the summer when I first experienced the stress and pain of a lay-off in the coldest of corporate fashions (I learned I was being “downsized” from my crappy office job when I arrived at the farewell party for a co-worker and saw that both our names were on the cake). And as I mentioned, it was August of 2001 and everything was about to change forever.

But those are different stories.  This story is about St. Jayne’s.  The company was founded by a girl I knew from college, who I would describe as a frenemy of mine.  She was passionate and driven and was dying to produce good theatre.  But she could also be vain, obstinate, and a bit of a drama queen.  I was concerned when she asked me to be on her board of directors because I didn’t trust her leadership and I was worried the project would end badly.  But I wanted a summer project and there were a number of other people on the board whose work I respected; I thought there was a good chance we would pull it off.

I was wrong, though.  It didn’t end badly.  It started badly.  It got worse as it went along.  And then it ended in screaming, tears, hurtful accusations and terminated friendships.  What I hadn’t counted on - what I dodn’t realize at the time – was that I could also be vain, obstinate, and a bit of a drama queen.  And the two of us together, my frenemy and I, twisted our vain obstinate energy into a vortex of destruction unlike anything  that had been unleashed on Salt Lake City since the tornado of 1999.  But somewhere in the middle of all of that, we put on a play. 

I’m glad that I did it, because it was the first and last time I was able to work on a production with all of my best friends.  Jules directed, I was the assistant director and I took over managing the show after Jules returned to Manhattan, and Demetria and Budgie were both acting in the show.

The play was called SubUrbia, and there are two things that I remember most about that production.  Both require a little bit of explanation.  The first one is the sound wall.

We were doing the play outdoors in a weird little neighborhood with a music venue called Kilby Court.  It is in the center of a block in one of the more industrial areas of Salt Lake.  It worked because the play takes place in the parking lot of a Kwiky Mart-type convenience store.  But if a band was playing on the stage across the alley, it was too loud to hear the actors.  So the board decided that we would need to get a contract from the owner of Kilby Court that stated that we had exclusive performing rights on the nights of the show and we tasked the founder of the company, my afore described frenemy, to get the contract signed.

We didn’t find out until the weekend before the show opened that the owner of Kilby Court had booked bands in his other space for every single night we were performing.  I specifically remember having asked about the contract and my frenemy had responded by saying vaguely, “yeah yeah, it’s fine… it’s taken care of.”  In fact, she had approached the owner with the contract and he had refused to sign it because he couldn’t afford to lose the guaranteed profit from the bands and take the risk that we would be able to deliver a similar bottom line.  Which was smart.  We never drew in the same sized crowds as the bands.  And I understood where he was coming from.  But she was afraid to tell us what happened, so she just… didn’t.

That night we were sitting on the deck trying to figure out how we could possibly “go on with the show,” as they say.  And the next thing I knew – two hundred dollars, several dozen phone calls, quite a bit of concerted manual effort from the entire cast of the play, and twenty four inventive hours later – we stood in the alley of Kilby Court and looked up at our brand new, beautiful sound wall.  We rented two stories of scaffolding from a construction site, assembled it ourselves, and filled it with a ton of hay that we bought off a local farmer.  And it worked.  We went on with the show.  It was amazing.

The second thing I remember most about SubUrbia is the giant purple dildo. 

The main female character in SubUrbia is a twenty-something girl named Suze who is planning to move to New York to become a professional performance artist.  In her first scene on stage, Suze, who was played by another college friend named Stacey, presents the monologue that she has been developing for her New York stage debut.

The monologue is a fuming estrogen-angst filled rant that is desperate to be shocking, but comes off as a poor knock-off of Ani DiFranco lyrics from the early 90s. We wanted it to be a parody of everything people think about, when they bother to think about bad performance art.  We gave Stacey a trunk to keep props in.  We put her in a body suit that she could strip out of.  And best of all, Stacey got The Blue Boutique to donate a big purple double-sided dildo to the company in exchange for advertising in our program.  Every night, Stacey ended her monologue by swinging the dildo over her head and then letting it go, making it thwhack the brick wall behind her and fall down behind her feet with a thud.  It was cheap, but we got a good laugh every night. 

Thaaaaaat’s show business!  [Jazz hands!]

The only problem was that people actually lived at Kilby Court.  And there were a couple apartment windows that ran along the wall that we were using as our Kwiky Mart.  So we were really careful to choreograph Stacey’s dildo-throw to make sure that it always hit the bricks and never got close to the windows.

On closing night, I was at my wit’s end.  After a series of ugly arguments, my relationship with my frenemy had devolved to fit under the basic uncomplicated “enemy” category. We were a handful of livid phone calls away from never speaking to one another again.  The audience turn-out was a little less than half of what we had hoped for.  Everyone involved in the company was losing money.  And all I wanted was to get through the final performance.  Then all I had to do was single-handedly unload a ton of rain-sopped hay, disassemble two stories of scaffolding, return it to the construction company, and then I would be done with Saint Jayne’s and I would never have to do theatre again.

But as I was sitting in the audience, thinking through this task list, something went wrong with Stacey’s dildo-throw.  She’d never had a problem with it before, but for some reason, on closing night, the throw went wild and the dildo sailed through the air and disappeared through one of the darkened apartment windows with a slap and the tinkle of shattered glass.  The audience must have known that wasn’t the plan, because that was the only night we didn’t get a big laugh.  There was some laughter.  But it was mostly uncomfortable.

“Oh my God, ohmigod, ohmahGAWD!” I was thinking, as I snuck out of the audience through a gap in the hay.  “We’ve killed someone.  We’ve killed someone.  At the very least, we’ve killed a cat…”

In my head I pictured a leathery old man – recently homeless, reentering society through the devalued rental property of Kilby Court – sitting in a rocking chair and reading a tattered paperback copy of TS Elliot poems.  When suddenly, without warning, there was a crashing sound and… “wisht, wisht, wisht…” something long and purple spinning through the air, and then, “BAM!” right to the forehead, knocking him backward, over, and out of the rocking chair!  And then, SILENCE. Death by dildo.

I found one of the managers at Kilby – a really nice guy named Mike – and I told him what had happened.  He told me not to worry about it.  He said he knew the guy pretty well, and he would talk to him.  I snuck back into the theatre and watched the rest of the play, which unfolded without further incident.  But I was distracted.  We were going to be sued, I was sure of it.  I was twenty-four, unemployed, and done with theatre.  And, and that moment, I was quite certain that I was going to have to go into some sort of indentured servitude to pay for the ex-homeless man’s funeral and a new window for Kilby Court.  At that point in my life, I would have had to go into indentured servitude just to buy the man a new cat.

But after the show, I found Mike again to see what he found out and he told me the man wasn’t home.  “Whew.  That’s a relief,” I said.

“Trust me, it’s fine.  I’ll talk to him when he gets home.”

I expected to hear more, but I never did.  I wasn’t even contacted about paying for the new window, which I thought was the least that would happen.  About half of the cast showed up to help me return the scaffolding to the construction company, and a friend with a truck was kind enough to come and take all the hay out of Kilby.  I was done with the show and I promised myself that I would never use my degree in theatre again, and I have mostly kept that promise.

It is ten years later, and all of this has been on my mind for good reason.  I spent a weekend this fall at a writer’s retreat in southern Utah. I was one of six other writers staying on a small ranch outside the desert town of Torrey. We were all from Salt Lake City and we spent the days writing and the evenings talking, trying to find ways in which we connected and making one another laugh.

One of the writers was a musician named Jeremy Chatelain.  Jeremy has toured with a bunch of east coast bands over the years, but he has also been in a lot of bands here in Utah. Another writer remembered him from a band called Iceburn Collective and the two of them started talking about these old local Utah bands that I’ve never heard of. In fact, I was basically tuning out of the conversation until he mentioned that he had been in a bunch of bands with a guy named Gentry.

I interjected then and said, “Wait, Gentry Densley?”

And Jeremy said, “No way, you know Gentry?”

And I said, “No, not at all. But I remember that his band played at a fundraiser for the theatre company I worked for a decade ago called Saint Jayne’s. I don’t suppose you were there, were you?”

He wasn’t. But then ANOTHER one of the writers, a friend of Jeremy’s named Adam said, “I remember Saint Jayne’s.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “We were tiny.  And we only lasted one summer.”

“Oh no, I remember.  I was living in an apartment at Kilby Court that summer. And they were doing a play called Suburbia. And I remember that I came home from a late shift at the hospital one night to find broken glass everywhere and I giant purple dildo in my bed. And this guy, Mike, who was running things at Kilby, came running in and was like ‘oh dude, I was hoping to catch you before you got home… I wanted to try to explain…’ But I was like, ‘Dude!? How? How could you ever explain THIS?”

And I said, “Um…. Maybe I can explain it. I saw the whole thing. And I’ve spent the last ten years wanting to ask you if you were okay. I remember watching it go through the window and thinking, ‘oh Christ what have we done?’ So let me just finally officially say to you, I am very very sorry.”

We had a HUGE laugh over it. It was such a great moment. And I was relieved to find that he wasn’t angry. He was just disappointed that they didn’t let him keep the dildo.

“I was going to frame it and hang it on the wall so I could point to it when I told the story.”  Then he pointed at a random spot on the wall and said, in an old man voice, “And that thar is the very same dildo that came through my window that night…”

“I wonder,” I said.  “Where did it end up?  Because I would have let you keep it, for sure.”

We were telling the story to the rest of the writers at dinner the next evening and Adam said, “I’ve been telling that story for so long now, as an example of the texture of Kilby Court and what it was like to live there. Who knew I would come down to Boulder Utah and meet the person at the other end of that dildo?”

Because magpies are ass holes.

Phobia is the wrong word.  It’s less of a fear and more of a distrust which leads to complete avoidance. Mugs are tricky because you have to throw the cylinder and then attach the handles while they are still wet.  Too wet to trim, anyway.  The handles are wet, too.  So you pretty much have to defy gravity to shape them.   And then there is the whole proportion issue.  It’s a nightmare.

But I decided I want to conquer my ceramic nemesis and get comfortable with mugs.  Mostly because people love mugs and if you can do them well, you can sell them pretty easily.  I’m making six for the upcoming artisan’s bazaar at my yoga studio.  As you can see, I’m tailoring the designs to appeal to the yogis.  Because I am a whore.

A whore who isn’t afraid of mugs.