Marrying George Clooney

… love. kindness. goodness. hugs and kisses.

peace. (of mind. of heart. of home.)

harmony. within. without.

joy. everywhere.

abundance (emotionally, physically, financially.)

creativity. happiness. fulfillment.

friendship. companionship. partnership. a shoulder. a hand. a box of kleenex. a good laugh. a good cry. a common thread.

wishing you what you wish for yourself. good health. good friends. warmth. work. equality. stability. serenity.

good will – GREAT WILL – toward all men & women, boys & girls… & pets.

i wish you romance, music, magic, MIRACLES, hopes, and dreams. BIG DREAMS. HUGE DREAMS.

MERRY!!!!!!!

HAPPY!!!!!

xoxox

sometimes i feel like it’s only me. i know, i know, holy narcissism. i know it’s not ALL ABOUT ME, but sometimes it just sorta feels that way.

let me take you on my 3 AM middle-of-the-night-fiasco-excursion journey.
it all started with a pain shooting straight down from the top of my neck, down to the pelvic, and then back up again. i thought, hmmm… “could be MS” or “could be, maybe, possibly fibromyalgia,” or could be another disease i don’t know how to pronounce. and of course, of course… could be nothing. but that’s not me, that’s not where i go. i go straight to bad.

it was sharp, it was weird, and it gave me that ever so thrilling opportunity to google: NECK PAIN SHOOTING DOWN NECK TO PELVIC AREA AND BACK UP TO ARM. for the first time i realize that even google can get a bit baffled, confused, so i limit the words: “nerve pain neck shoulder arm” and after scrolling a bit more, i come to a website and they recommend an anti-inflammatory analgesic cream that is in my drawer. the tube is in my drawer. i am ecstatic. i have the remedy. wow. and with that excitement, i get up out of bed, and squeeze open the tube, and i rub a “quarter size” dollop (which they recommend on the website), and i rub it all over my neck shoulder area in an “even coat.” and then i wash my hands thoroughly (they recommend that!) and from the time it took to wash my hands, dry my hands, get back into bed … my skin was sizzling like a cheap piece of steak on a george foreman grill. i was literally burning to a fucking crisp. i grab the analgesic cream and there, right there on the label it reads in BOLD: “if you experience a penetrating burning sensation for longer than a minute, please, read the box it came in.” OMFGWTF????? i have news for you, that box, along with a gazillion other boxes, is probably in a landfill somewhere turning into chicken parts. the heat, the burning – coming off my neck and shoulder – is unbearable. i decide the best thing to do is jump into the shower – fully clothed. I take a freezing COLD shower – shivering, shaking, lips turning blue – nada. nothing. i rip off my wet pajamas and throw on a tee shirt and sweat pants and proceed to machete and bludgeon our “one and only” aloe plant – squeezing the last bits of aloe juice out of it. i rub that it onto my blistered skin and when that doesn’t work – when that doesn’t produce an aloe vera miracle, i do what i swore i wouldn’t do, i wake ken (yet) one more time from a deep, happy, joyful, content sleep.
my ken, my sweet ken, wearing his eye-mask and ear plugs, blocking out any and all light, and all noise.
ken, who is in a deep joyous sleep.
i wake him.
i shake him.
he flips up his mask, looks at me and says, “hey, what’s up? i was sleepin’.”
“yeah, well, i’m a burn victim and i need you to hose me down.”
hose you down?
well, isn’t that what they say at the fire house, hose me down?
i wouldn’t know amy. I was in the film business, we only get burned psychologically and creatively.
ken, please, please… get up, i need you to hose me down. i am on fire.
now i just wanna say, i believe there was a slight twinkle in his eyes when i said i was on fire… ken is filled with great hope.
okay…
short of pushing him, i make him get out of bed, he thinks fast on his feet, heads for the kitchen, and comes back with what looks like a dickey soaked in milk.
ughhhhhhhh.
wear it, he says, wear it around your neck.
wear it, i ask?
yeah, it’ll get the burn out, the sting out.
how long do i wear it?
until it curdles.
wow.
until it curdles.
and with that, he hands me a bag of frozen shrimp, and says, ‘you’re gonna need an ice pack.’
shrimp? i ask. where’s our ice pack? the nice blue one, the one I got a rite aid? I like that ice pack.
i don’t know where it is. i’m going back to bed.
and that was it.

so…

at a little past 4:00 in the morning, i am wearing a milk dickey around my neck – the milk dripping from the paper towel onto… yes, the bag of quick thawing frozen shrimp (the 26 to 40 jumbo shrimp pack) which is right there on my shoulder and chest where the aloe is getting all gooey, and sticky, and sticks to everything. everything.

the milk is curdling.
the shrimp is thawing.
the aloe is sticking.

i have become a bad, bad mexican meal.
and you know, a bad mexican meals never, ever gets the guy, never. ever. especially in the morning, like say, around 8:30 AM.

“oh my god, amy, what’s that smell, it’s coming from you?”

“i’m a taco, ken.”

There are five words – five – when strung together form a sentence, and I was hoping, praying, chanting, lighting candles, smudging incense, dancing naked in the moonlight (and in parking lots) that I WOULD NEVER EVER NEVER say these words, this sentence, in this lifetime:

I HAVE BECOME MY MOTHER.

I have.
It happened fast and furious.
I went to bed me, and I woke up her.
There are things about my mother, that yes, i liked.
I liked her humor, her sexiness, her laugh. Her shoes. The way she wore make-up, the way she dressed, her style. Man, did she have style.
And yes, I know, I KNOW… good god, I know, those are all superficial qualities.

But the things about my mother that I didn’t like, that scared me, that made me cringe, that made me wanna crawl into a ball and roll down a hill… that made me pray and chant, light candles and smudge incense that she become, turn into… emma goldman or better yet… bella abzug. or, at the very least, elizabeth montgomery.

Those things.

Her moods, her impatience, her righteousness, her lack of compassion especially toward her husband, her lip-liner not matching her lipstick, her harboring resentment, her wearing arrogance as if it were an accessory, her mix-matched emotions, her fears and doubts and worries, her tears and laughter (both like floods), her shame and guilt, her personal “i am so much fucking better than you” high holy days, her silence.

these are qualities that i see now. in me.
ken points them out. “oh, look who’s here, bea…”
he does, he says it with both a little tilted smile and great, great fear.
as in: “hey look who’s here, but… let’s not invite her in.”

but the real clincher for me, the moment that sealed it, when i knew, when i saw it with my own two eyes:
ken and I were having words yesterday over something so minor, so small, that yes, of course, i had to turn a molehill into a fucking massive mountain. i had to. i took something small, trivial and went right for the heart, and i witnessed my two calm sweet playful cats look at each other as only cats can do, and they both got up off the floor in perfect unison, and they went into the closet, where they hid, huddled together. And when i found them, curled up, holding onto each other with dear life … their fur standing up on end, they looked at me with their big cat eyes… that, “please don’t come closer” look in their eyes.

and honest to god, in that moment i saw me as a little girl… the sacred little girl cowering. and instead of going into the closet and getting on all fours… i did something my mother would have never ever done ever.

i let them be.
and i waited and waited and waited… and waited…
… for them to forgive me on their time.

(which ironically coincided with dinner and treats)

and once again i am reminded that change begins with one tiny little step in a different direction.

my mother, my teacher.

Marrying George Clooney

Please raise your hand if you have ever had a fantasy of marrying George Clooney.

I have taken a poll among my many curiously deranged, off-balance girlfriends who very often find themselves dancing, or in some cases, swaying, to the beat of their own iPod in the middle of the night.

Each one, honest to god, has a similar fantasy. Mine goes like this.

Tossing and turning, more tossing and … turning, more tossing and turning.

You slip out of bed, and find yourself standing in front of the bathroom vanity mirror: the puffy droopy eyelids, along with the ever-so-slightly sag in the jowls – and you understand on a cellular level how Faye Dunaway was able to turn herself into a radioactive trout. First it was the eyes. Let’s pull and tuck them tightly (with adding the glamour of scotch tape) so that they appear to no longer be in the center of the face. Let’s take the nose, which at one time was so perfect and straight, and now expand the nostrils so they can hide canned goods incase of a nuclear meltdown. And now the lips, it’s always such a tragedy when the mouth starts to take on the form and shape of a six-lane freeway. Why oh why do we women do this to ourselves? Really, what is the point? Because we want to get hired as the ingénue, the sexy hot babe. Hey, I’ve got news for you – we are sexy hot women, but we’re all botoxing ourselves into non-expression frenzy mode. I mean really – what is so sexy about a shiny forehead that only seems to move when you jerk your arm?

Back to my fantasy.

I go into a bar. There are a few scattered customers. Mostly drunk out of their gourd, mumbling, wobbling, and peeing in their pants. I order a cosmo, straight up, which really means cranberry juice with a twist of lime. I get up from my bar stool and saunter over to the jukebox. I play Laura Nyro and Ricky Lee Jones. I, for one, want to hear women sing about rejection and pain and unrequited love and abortion and guys named Chuck-e who yes, are in love.

And then he walks in.

Makes himself comfortable at the end of the bar. Orders a beer. Fiddles with his brand new sleek black sexy iPhone. He looks at me. I look at him. He looks at me again. I mouth, “Hey… want my number?” in perfect Italian. He looks at me in his Clooney kind of way, eyebrows tilting up, eyes looking down…a smirk…he nods. Then he slides the iPhone ever so gracefully – landing right in front of me. I punch in my ten-digit number and add a smiley face with a wink, sliding it right back to him.

“Hey,” he says, “You have Three 7’s in your number, that’s lucky.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. That’s me, Ms. Very, Very Lucky.”

Nine months to the day I give birth to our first child, whom we name Dolores Claiborne Clooney. She dies three days later under mysterious circumstances. Then I fall into a coma. And stay in a vegetative state for eight years. The only people who seem to visit me on a regular basis are Robert and Mary Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s parents, who petition to adopt me. I vaguely remember hearing someone – possibly a nurse, or an attendant – saying that George thanked me at an Oscar ceremony. He didn’t mention me by name, but did refer to me as ‘his coma girl.’

Boy George releases a single that same year, “Coma, Coma, Coma, Coma Girl” and experiences a huge comeback post jail.

I end up on the cover of Time Magazine, as “Vegetative Person of the Year.”

I wake up from my coma; George and I inevitably divorce. Amicably. I open a fast-food Vegan Restaurant, called Vegetative Taste, with a drive-through for Hybrids only. It becomes a franchise, and I am awarded the Nobel Prize.

I am jarred by the sound of an alarm clock.
My husband, Ken, upon waking, turns to me, “What’s with the scotch-tape?”

He cannot relate at all to my fantasy life with George.

(please, help a menopausal woman get to Broadway… you can donate here)

Marrying George Clooney, The Play

Okay, so here goes.

I hate asking for money. i hate asking people who owe me money to give me the money they owe me.
i hate asking for change.
It’s up there with wearing orange.
i’m not an orange kind o’ gal. fashion-wise.

today i had lunch with a gorgeous, amazing TALENTED (oh, so very talented) friend of mine, and after catching up on you know, all the mundane “life stuff” like… pensions, and social security, and the state of the country – we got to talking about these KICKSTARTER campaigns, the one I’m doing, and the one her daughter is doing, and how hard & difficult & painful it is.
Excruciating.
Yes, truly, it is.
It is so hard.
So frickin’ hard.
It’s so very hard to write/blog about it. And I’m supposed to be blogging about it every day.

And let me tell you why, and no, no… this is not going where you think it’s going.

i’t's all about generosity of spirit.
generosity. of. spirit.

do you know how hard it is to ask YOUR FRIENDS & FAMILY & acquaintances & PEOPLE slash STRANGERS for one dollar, five dollars, ten dollars over & over & over again knowing that they are not contributing? And won’t contribute. Ever. Never.

A buck. A five. Seven bucks, the cost of a pack of cigarettes.
It is so difficult.
Oh my god, how difficult?
i need a shingles shot.

Because, I don’t wanna know that folks in my life don’t have that generosity bone. I don’t wanna know that. I don’t wanna believe for one second that they won’t donate five dollars to my dream.

It makes me so sad.
A bit angry.
Internally bitter (and trust me, god knows, bitter Amy is not sexy!)
A tad confused.
It makes me check my caller ID on a minute to minute basis.
It makes me think, huh, but I donated to their cause, dream, organization, weekly haircut, their rent, their mortgage payment, their vacation in the South of France. I donated. I opened my wallet. I wrote the check. I gave.
I gave.
I gave.
I gave.

OMFG, you wanna know how this makes me feel: It makes me feel so fucking resentful, and god knows, that is not how I want to feel or be.

I don’t wanna live in ResentVille. A virtual community filled with bitter, angry people, who have no fashion sense what so ever, all throwing their virtual eggs at each other.

okay, fine, getting off the dead horse that I’m somehow beating to death all over again.

What I really want to say is this:

Support your friends.
Support their dreams.
Support their hearts desire.
Root them on.
Cheer them on.
Give them a standing ovation.
Make them feel good.
Give them hope.
Then give them more hope.
Shine a light on them.
Give them courage.
Don’t be stingy.
Don’t withhold.
Champion their causes.
Wish them well.
Wish them happy.
Wish them great luck.
Kick jealousy and resentment and snarky to the fucking curb.

When you donate a dollar, a five, ten bucks…
you know what you’re giving them – the belief that they matter.

you’re also giving them the opportunity to thank you with great enthusiasm and much appreciation at the Academy Awards, the Tony Awards, the Emmy’s, the Addy’s, the Cleo’s.

And on… and on…

The gift of giving.