Creepy Bunny - meet CREEPY BARBIE

The really scary thing is this is the same doll that is in the other picture. All I did is redress her and brush her hair. (She's really Diva from Barbie and the Rockers - so perhaps she's mellowing after her stage career.)

Happy Birthday to you-know-who

Eleven years ago tonight, I was recovering from the birth of this 3 pound 15 ounce cutie five weeks shy of her scheduled arrival. Twenty-seven days in the SCN, and $78,000 in medical bills later, they sent her home weighing a whopping 4 pounds 8 ounces with a butt the size of a Barbie but the attitude of a pitt bull holding a steak.



Eleven years later, she's still got the attitude and a sister. (She's the one on the right - her sister the stand up comedian is the one on the left making the wiseass face.) Back then, she was happy with a pacifier made of a rolled up cloth diaper with a premie nipple taped to the end of it. Now it's "Dream Life", Tamagouchi, a billion Barbies, Inuyasha, and a whole lot more.

Happy Birthday, to the former Monster Baby (because she used to growl like a little monster, of course)!

OK Everybody - Tell me it's time to go to bed...

I hate these damn time changes. Last weekend, I got up refreshed and perky. A week later, I am a squirrel on speed. I can't sleep. I can't relax. I keep thinking it's an hour earlier than it is - because it really IS an hour earlier.

Hal - my mind is goinggggggggg............................................

What the hell time is it, anway?

The incredible farting dog and other tales of woe

On my birthday a few weeks ago, I was given a black tee shirt with a giant pictograph of a dog, with pictographic swirls and lines indicating the act of - er - passing wind, as they used to say if they said anything at all.

Just underneath are the words "The dog did it".

You have to live here to understand that one of our three dogs, Ginger, is a walking bag of wind.

Loud wind. Loud enough that there is never any question of the source.

She walks down the hall, and with each step, she farts. She lays down on the bed - and farts. Not a stealth, little dog fart. The sort of fart that unmarried uncles make when they play "pull my finger".

There is never any doubt that the dog did it. And to remove any doubts, she usually repeats the performance. Loudly and deadly.

When I go to sleep, I must make sure that the quieter end is facing me. She has actually been so loud that she has awakened me from a sound sleep. And hiding your face under the blankets is useless.

We have changed that poor dog's diet on the advice of everyone we could think of. Nothing helps. She's just born to fart.

You know you have a problem when you make a constant effort to be upwind of the dog. And notice that even the other dogs do it.

FWIT, you haven't experienced cerebral humor until you have walked around wearing a picture of a farting dog on your chest in the grocery store. Where, of course, you run into at least three parents of children in school with one of your kids. And, not until you have engaged the last one in conversation remembered what you are wearing.

Heck, my kids didn't need playdates, anyway!

Dark Shadows and Dan Curtis

I was just reading at another Blog that Dan Curtis, the TV producer, died last week. He was the force behind the TV soap opera about vampires, werewolves and a strange little town called Collinswood where the Collins family consisted of a group of inbred relatives of dubious mental state and their cursed ancestor, a vampire named Barnabas. Who sometimes was a vampire, sometimes wasn't, and was in love with a blond witch wannabe who looked just like his 17th century love named Angelique, who had been reincarnated as a rather bitchy woman now named Cassandra.

(I know there are a lot of thirty and forty somethings who wonder why they have those names. They can blame it on Dan Curtis)

The matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Collins, was played by former child actress Joan Bennett in sort of a haze of bad acting, further enhanced by years of plastic surgery and pancake makeup leaving her perpetually unable to move any muscle on her face. And the overall effect included jet black hair, forever tied in a bun to hid her facial wrinkles being pulled back with the old trick of taping back hunks of hair from the sides and forehead tightly - the effect was like having your facial skin pulled with rubber bands. She had one expression - puzzlement - because her eyebrows were somewhere in the middle of her forehead.

(I just looked up her credits and bio on IMDB - she was born in 1910, making her nearly 70 at the time I was watching her on Dark Shadows. And she started acting in the 1920's, as a child, with her big sister Constance. Yikes!)

There was a small rotating cast of mostly Canadian actors, who were always playing the 1700 version of their identical 1960's selves - to the point that everyone had two names. Everyone except Barnabas, of course. The 1700 version of him was the 1960's vampire version, too.

There was a man-made monster named Adam, and an Eve, and the cousin who was turned into a werewolf, and the caretaker who was forced to do Barnabas' daytime dirty work. There were pretty women that worked as nannys in the family castle on the sea cliffs, caring for what were supposed to be Joan Bennett's elementary school-aged children (I guess when your family is cursed by a vampire, menopause is the least of your worries). There was Quentin who was in loved with the oldest daughter. He even had his own theme music and later surfaced as the malignant landowner next door to Falconcrest where he plagued Jane Wyman instead of Joan Bennett. (Played by David Selby, of course, on that soap he managed to repeat his bad karma and pine for his true love when she drowned in the swimming pool after catching her engagement ring in the drain on the bottom).

Anyway:

Starting in middle school, my afternoons were ruled by the need to get home in time to see Dark Shadows, which started at 4:00 here in the New Yawk area, followed by the 4:30 Movie on channel 7, followed by Bill Beutel and Roger Grimsby on Eyewitness News at 6. There was Maggie and the Beautiful Machine on channel 13 - WNET - an exercise program led by a woman with waist length grey hair that I thought was soo cool back around 1968 or so (Now that I am a woman with long greying hair she seems even cooler) which started at 3:30 and ended at 4, perfect timing. My best friend Patti and I would talk on the phone, stretching the cord around the wall from the kitchen into the dining room and just barely into the living room where I could hold it at arms length and see the TV (B & W, of course). So when I think of Dark Shadows, I remember a lot of shouting of "OH MY GOD - ROGER, LOOK OUT - the Reverend is a VAMPIRE NOW!" to the telephone handset about a two feet from my face, as close as I could get it without pulling the phone off the wall...."

Dan Curtis went on from Dark Shadows to direct and produce a lot of really bad TV to better TV (at least a better budget) with "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance". And "Supertrain" - one of the most incredibly over-budgetted BAD TV shows and series of all time.

RIP, Dan - you made my teenage years an interesting place, filled with bad production values and imagination.