My Life In Holidays - Come On Irene

Like graduations, hurricanes are infrequent opportunities for massive debauchery. Hurricanes blow into town with as much pomp and circumstance, elicit concerned phone calls of “Good luck,” and “Are you going to be okay,” and “Fill the bathtub with water,” and ultimately keep the real world at bay for another couple of days. At least, this was my experience of that trick Irene.

If you are anticipating a hipsters versus nature horror story, allow me to lower your expectations: Hurricane Irene expressed her wrath in Brooklyn solely through heavy rains. In patches. I remember some humidity was involved, and the wind blew a little bit. However, to atone for its embarrassing mishandling of the 2009-2010 blizzards, the city of New York shut down all the bridges, tunnels, and public transportation between the boroughs and advised massive evacuations to “higher ground.”

This meant two things: first, all of my professional obligations were canceled for TWO DAYS STRAIGHT. I was teaching at the time; my classes were called off. I worked as a fake barista at the time, my coffee shop closed. I was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the time and our TECH WEEKEND was postponed. Do you realize what that means?! Two solid days of mind-numbing twelve-hour rehearsals wiped off the face of the production calendar!

Second, Anna, Justin, and I made the executive decision to evacuate about 30 blocks north to a friend’s place. We demolished a 7/11, and along with the plentiful rations of beer and pasta and coffee we also stuffed bedding, movies, and art supplies into the trunk of my Yaris.

We spent the next forty hours in Fort Greene weathering the storm. I was drunk for at least 28 of those hours. Activities included cooking, drinking, eating, watching movies, drinking, playing Catch Phrase, making arts’n’crafts, drinking, wrestling on the air mattress dubbed ‘the bird’s nest’, drinking, and a rousing game of indoor hide-and-seek. Which I won, because Justin never even suspected I could fit behind the flat screen on the mantle!

After surviving day 1, I woke up around noon to a text from Mom, sent at 7:42am:

“Did the power go out? Are you in the eye of the storm, and the worst is yet to come? How is the car? Not safe to drive. Water still rising, I bet.”

To which I replied, as I am wont to do, “NO MOM”.

Oh, Irene. I remember you fondly. You showered us with a dilettante’s disaster, and heralded the mildest of winters. You allowed multitudes of 20-something Brooklynites to relive childhood without involving kickball, rompers, or nannying. If only every storm was perfect like you.

My Life In Holidays - July 4th

You don’t graduate from college every year, thank god. I don’t think I could stand that crucible of good will and utter anxiety more than once a decade. July 4th, however, retains its Birth of a Nation significance year after year, and grown-ups of New York celebrate accordingly.

Day-drinking, grilling out, and shooting fireworks occupy most of this great nation on Independence Day. But in New York most of these activities are conducted in public parks and on rooftops, or, in my fortunate case, on a sailboat in the Hudson. The fireworks show was exquisite and I could almost hear Beyonce’s live performance over the terrible techno blasting from a neighboring boat. I remember thinking, for the first in my life, that my Sperrys were actually appropriate outside of a sorority-laden state school in the southeast. Also, it was on or about July 4th that Anna and I stole a cat.

On our block lived the lovingest cat you’ve ever seen. He was gray and majestic, so we named him Grey Baby. On separate occasions, Grey Baby had flagged down both Anna and me (as loving cats are wont to do) and flung himself at our feet on the smoldering sidewalk. Also on separate occasions, different concerned neighbors had worriedly asked us, “Have you seen the sweet little old lady who’s always with this cat? You never see one without the other.”

Of course we hadn’t seen the sweet little old lady, and we assumed the worst. On the way home from some dedicated pregaming on Independence Eve, Grey Baby once again planted himself in our path. We scooped him up, traipsed up the stairs and unleashed him in our living room. Justin fretted about fleas and bedbugs while Anna brushed Grey Baby’s hair and I took glamour shots of him. (See above.)

I tried to make him sleep with me in my bed. But I woke up the next morning, July 4th, to a desperate scratching noise behind our couch. I was sweaty and hungover so I released Grey Baby back to the wilds of 15th Street.

I saw him a few more times after that. Often with a tinier grey cat who followed him around- I christened this little cutie Baby Grey Baby. I didn't try to adopt him, though. Rejection by a stray street cat was not something I wanted to experience twice.

I spent the rest of the day celebrating America, my bed bug-free apartment, and my TWO days off from teaching. The smothering humidity reminded me of home.

My Life In Holidays - Graduation

After twenty years of school, the habit of measuring time in semesters is a hard one to break. In December, for instance, I left my four jobs to visit home for Christmas break. Lately my grandparents keep asking me when I "get out for summer." Gradually, however, I'm learning to delineate the seasons and months by the occurrence of Major Holidays. Being a New Yorker, this takes more effort than one from a normal place might imagine. It goes without saying that Jews shoulder the largest possible burden of special dates, but I find that we secular, young adult heathens have plenty of our own calendar crosses to bear.

I moved to Brooklyn mid-May of last year, so I'll start there. College graduations present a monumental opportunity for reckless intergenerational merrymaking. Relatives smother the graduate with love and pride and deluded charges to go forth and Do Great. They ply you with tear-stained cash, but not enough to cover four years of higher learning. Definitely enough to dull your sense of your own "cost of living" for the first moth or so, though, for which I was terribly grateful.

I feared my graduation would be stressful because the date would have marked my parents' 30th wedding anniversary. Of course they were both in attendance (they love me more than anything in the world), along with legions of family from both sides (ditto). Including my aunt's new beau whom I had never heard of (I put it together real fast that, oh yeah, I hadn't seen Uncle David in ages).

It wasn't, though. Graduation was stressful because I went into my typical itinerary-planning Family Trip mode. Organized activities included me shepherding a caravan across the Verrazano Bridge to show everyone my new apartment, and scrambling to find family-friendly events in the embarrassing town of New Brunswick, NJ that would make the North seem a little less shitty. My parents managed to locate sweet tea vodka at the Buy-Rite, so then the turnpike sprawl didn't seem so bad.

Of course everything turned out fine. It meant a lot to my family that I graduated with the highest GPA in the theater department, and not for a minute did it occur to them that this indicated a gross academic shortchange in Conservatory World. They were still enthralled with my academic prowess even after I veered into this maximum security prison en route to the Newark airport.

Graduation made me excited for my new city and new house and new job, but mostly it made me excited to visit home a couple of weeks later to see Jaci graduate high school. Her version was pretty similar to mine, only with better food and prettier people. The graduates were shiny and hopeful and, for the most part, had finally lost all their baby fat. White zinfandel haze notwithstanding, for Jaci and me both, graduation was a treasured bit of ephemera surrounded by the ones who love us best.

Learner's Permit

Jaci turned 15 but for some reason her innate teenage desire to drive had not kicked in to gear*. She preferred to be driven. Driven to school, to cheer practice, to her friends' houses, to the mall, to McDonalds, to the pool down the block. While this might have thrilled a safety-conscious parent worried about the abundance of other 15-year-olds crowding the roads, our mom had had enough. Feeling bored one day and fed up with ferrying her around, Mom seized the opportunity to coerce Jaci into the driver's seat.

Jaci laughed in that "nothing's actually funny; you're just stupid," kind of way. Mom insisted; Jaci panicked. I panicked. I yelled, "I'm not riding in the car with her! She doesn't even have her learner's permit! Mama, she doesn't know her left from her right! We're all going to get arrested!"

"I'd like to see them try." Mom scowled. She hates the Travelers Rest highway patrol and generally feels like they owe her one, due to their bad attitudes whenever they write her a speeding ticket. She said to Jaci, "For heaven's sake, you're 15 YEARS OLD. Get in that car and DRIVE."

I was fit to be tied, but didn't want to miss anything. Also, I knew Jaci would need the wisdom of my experience gently guiding her through this, her first, time behind the wheel. Mom and I started shouting over one another:

MOM: The first thing you do is put the car in gear-
ME: NO. The first thing you do is BUCKLE UP-
MOM: In this car the best thing to do is to PUT IT INTO GEAR FIRST.

Mom sticks to her guns; I will give her that. Jaci looked glassy-eyed and flushed. We crept towards the end of the driveway where she slammed on the brakes.

I said something like "Jesus fucking Christ Almighty she's going to kill us. Mom, do you want us to DIE?!" Mom topped my expletives with such tender words of encouragement as "Get your left foot off the brake! Remember when your father had you drive the lawn mower when you were two? It's just like that!" Mom and I both meant well, but Jaci was flustered from all the yelling. Not to mention she was probably scarred, being a survivor of my own checkered driving history. Haltingly she made it to the stop sign at the end of the road. That's when we noticed droplets on the steering wheel, and on the inside of the windshield. They were projectile tears spurting from Jaci's red face like bullets. Her eyes had swollen shut like they do when she pets Pepper, our rabbit, or Pumpkin, our guinea pig.

Bless her heart.

It took the rest of the drive to TJ Maxx to decompress (Mom was back behind the wheel at this point and Jaci was lying down in the back seat so her wheezing would stop). After we ran in and picked up some bathing suits, a yoga mat, and some flavored olive oil we were all in good spirits and proud of the day's accomplishments. And Jaci went on to pass her driver's test on the first try, a feat neither our mother nor I can boast.

*As always, PUN INTENDED.

Surprise, It's Some Mennonites

Jaci graduated, and I left South Carolina the following morning at 3:00am. By the time I reached northern Pennsylvania I was caffeinated, stir-crazy, and freaking out at the warning signs flashing TRAFFIC AHEAD FOLLOW DETOUR. In a rare moment of direction-following I veered off I-78 and found myself in Grimville, a town unchanged since 1780.

Had I not been so bleary-eyed, such a detour would have been delightful. Lord knows I am a sucker for kitsch. Perhaps I would have stopped to photograph the green fields and red barns and white churches. Instead I tried to maintain the speed I'd been driving on the interstate, but felt compelled to slam on the breaks when I spotted a gaggle of Mennonite* children swarming around the front yard of an old farmhouse. The boys were each dragging pre-industrial farming apparatus and the girls were each dragging a toddler. The latter were swathed in bonnets and long-sleeve, grass-length dresses and aprons. It was 95 degrees outside. I was sweating in my air conditioned car, and I wasn't wearing hardly anything, comparatively speaking.

I drove on, resisting the urge to stop in the cured meats and Amish trinkets shop (an obligatory Foamhenge pilgrimage had put me behind schedule). I did, however, think it would be charming to have my picnic lunch of Cheeze-Its and and pound cake by a lush, winding brook, so I started to pull over when I found one. Only it was surrounded by a barbed wire electric fence. The nearest house was obscured by a yard full of deceased lawn mowers and a giant Don't Tread On Me flag. So were the surrounding houses for the next seven miles.

I was confused, because I associate defensive rural weirdness with the South. Sticking to the interstate on my drives northeast generally means the Dixie Outfitters is the last bastion of bigotry I encounter on the way out. Grimville proves, however, that these staunch us-vs.-them enclaves exist all over the country (roadtrippers of America may be pleased to know). For this and other reasons**, the Midwest scares the living daylights out of me.

I made it back to New York and unloaded the sets of dishes, the masterpiece gourd birdhouse***, and what was left of the pound cake my grandparents had sent up with me. Some manholes had exploded on my street but if toxic gasses wafted in through my open bedroom window they just made me sleep harder. I was glad to get back to the city, but I couldn't stop thinking about Grimville. I wished I had stopped at the cured meats and Amish trinkets shop. The kitchen in my apartment is mostly complete, but I'm still seeking a hand-made butter churn, and I bet those Amish would have had just the thing.

*This is an assumption on my part, based solely on the "YOU WILL MEET GOD -Mennonite Church" sign I'd just passed.

**Tornado Alley, Fargo, Michele Bachmann

***Gramma and Grampa grew a backyard full of gourds, and now they are bonafide gourd birdhouse artisans.

How To Land That Job and Also Get Everything Else You Want In Life

At 9:00pm on a recent Sunday evening, Anna and I set out to conduct some research on Fort Greene, a prospective new home for us. Never in a million years did I expect this on-site fieldwork to culminate in shagging* with a stranger in a Brooklyn dive bar. But that's what happens when you meet a fellow South Carolinian who happens to love whiskey as much as you do. At any rate, the following Monday morning I woke up with the spins and a 10:00am interview in Manhattan. I thought, Thank God I wore so much makeup last night that there's enough left on my face for today. I rolled into the tutoring company's headquarters reeking of whiskey, sweat, and hairspray, but I was on time.

Sandy the interviewer herded a few highly qualified, sober applicants and me into a conference room where the motion of the office swivel chairs nearly did me in. When asked, I managed to string together some words about the importance of individualized education. I hoped they'd all mistake my pauses and blurred focus for moments of inspiration. I held it together until Sandy handed out a test of high school-level English and math questions. The words and answer bubbles were swimming. My head was swimming. My stomach was swimming. I couldn't discern whether the first problem was a reading comprehension question or a calculation. I excused myself, vomited, returned, and tried to remember what the hell sine and cosine mean.

Sandy emailed me the next morning regarding my "delightful interview," and offered me the job!

Recently when I drove Anna to audition for Pan Desi, an Indian television network, I planned to wait in the lobby reading Bollywood magazines while she completed a screen test. But when we walked in and the intern said, "You're both here to audition?" I said, "Why, yes we are!" Soon enough I was doing a screen test of my own for Pan Desi's sure-fire hit new reality show, Princess Perfect. I was confused, because the CEO described Pan Desi as "the new BBC" and I couldn't see how anything called Princess Perfect could ever be categorized as remotely BBC-like. By the time I left he'd promised to write a role for me on Pan Desi's version of SNL.

Last summer I got a gig teaching a Shakespeare summer camp for which I was perfectly well-suited. I also managed to wrangle a position at the same organization (a science center, mind you) teaching geology! I dubbed the course Rock On! and in my telephone interview, I dredged up all the knowledge I'd gained as an avid childhood rock collector, throwing around terms like "geode," "volcano," and "clay beads." I emphasized the course title (Rock On!) and that all the campers would become Rock Stars by the end of the summer. And you know what? Puns pay off. I got the job. It was in Ashland, OR and my campers had a great time. Especially my little ginger vegan named Ocean.

You must be thinking, Breanna, how come you get all these jobs you're woefully underqualified for? Don't you feel bad for tricking people who think they are hiring someone who is sober, or good at math, or Indian, or a geologist?

Why no, I do not feel bad at all. I land these various and sundry positions based on the combined merits of my persistence and the ease with which bullshit rolls off my tongue. Here's what happened a few summers ago when I decided I should work at Publix for a month:

Steve the general manager interviewed me. He asked why I wanted to work at Publix. I said, "For my twelfth birthday, my mom ordered me a Publix cake decorated like a big old sunflower. She was running late to pick it up because my little sister had a doctor's appointment but Cathy at the bakery stayed open late just to give us the cake and also she gave my sister a cookie which cured her fever and also she gave me one too. And I thought that was just the nicest thing. And from that moment, I knew I could see myself working at Publix."

Did this episode really happen? Maybe, I can't remember. But Steve thought this was the best story ever, and he was clearly in agony because he couldn't hire me only for a month (that's how long I had in SC before I left for school). I did not say, "Oh, I understand. Thank you for your time, Steve. It was a pleasure meeting you." I sat patiently and didn't say anything until he finally handed me the mandatory employee drug test and a green Publix vest. Done and done!

Perhaps you've encountered this expression on a bookmark or magnet or some asinine optimist's Facebook profile: Aim for the moon, because even if you fall, you know you'll land among the stars. Now, this doesn't make any astronomical sense at all. Everyone knows the moon is a zillion times closer to Earth than "the stars," the closest of which is obviously the sun. So the aphorism's backwards. To reflect the actual physical makeup of the universe (assuming the earthliness of the speaker), it should read: Aim for the stars, because even if you fall, you know you'll land on a nice plushy surface made of cheese.

Remember this next time you find yourself in an interview. If you can speak in complete sentences and exhibit a reasonable degree of shamelessness and self-delusion, you stand a pretty good chance of getting the gig. How else do you think I got hired to drive teenagers around in that 15-passenger van that one time?

*It's the state dance of South Carolina, y'all.

A Valentines Sampler

In no particular order (except chronology):

February 14, 1994. In an oatmeal bath, wearing mittens so I couldn't scratch my chicken pox. Crying because my cat, Sweetie, had run away.

February 14, 1996. Making a Valentines piñata for the class Valentines party!!!!!

February 14, 1998. Disguising my handwriting to pen the note, "Do you like Brea? Please place your response underneath the class dictionary."

February 14, 2001. I don't know, wearing a ton of glitter probably.

February 14, 2005. Sharing a mug of weak tea at Spill The Beans with Emily. Also sharing one set of headphones so we could both listen to Ani DiFranco.

February 14, 2007. Authoring this love note: "Roses are red/ Grass is green/ Be my Valentine/ Or I'll stab you in the spleen."

February 14, 2009. Flowers, Natural History Museum, Yaffa Cafe, a one-act play festival, NJ Transit. This was a good one.

February 14, 2010. Day: curled up watching Dexter, eating chicken wings, missing America. Night: Ryanair flight to Berlin!

February 14, 2011. Three-way date with Anna and her boyfriend, James. Later enjoying the dozen roses and chocolate truffles our moms sent us.

Look forward to these brief but compelling holiday-themed posts in Hungry Lion's future: A Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Sampler, A Groundhog Day Sampler, A Palm Sunday Sampler, and A Guy Fawkes Day Sampler!