National Pot Head Day

Last week I received a greeting card from my stepdaughter. It was a picture of a big old pot plant & said "Happy 4-20!" on the inside. I had no idea what it was about. I called to ask her. Apparently, for several years, April 20th has been designated as a day of cannabis consciousness. Those who indulge are encouraged to hide away from law enforcement & light up on this particular day.....a sort of Bongs Across America. I have been stewing ever since I opened that card. Why did I not know of this? Since the age of 16, I have wandered happily among the reefer subculture, lighting up with other devotees. It keeps me peppery. Wouldn't you think that this holiday would have come up at some point in at least one of those goofy THC-riddled conversations? I've called several people & they all seem to have known about it for years, why didn't I? How did this celebration, so vital to my own personal routine, elude me? The whole thing has left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm worried about what else I don't know.

Despite the fact that I had been to several weddings, I lived to be 18 years old before I found out that it was customary for the bridegroom & bride to smash the first cut of wedding cake on each other's faces. I found out about this social more the day after I turned 18, when I married another 18-year old who had the voice of Richard Burton & the face of Howdy Doody. We cut our modest little cake; he fed me a bite & then smeared it on my cheeks. I socked him in the eye. As our friends tried to explain the custom to me, I felt like a dweeb foreign exchange student who needed enlightenment. I ruined a Kodak moment & he never let me forget it for the entire 7 months we were married. At subsequent marriage celebrations I did it right & let the groom smash the cake on my bouche without assaulting him.

I didn't know about wedding cakes & I didn't know about 4-20. It makes me shudder to think what else is out there that everyone knows but me. The problem may be that I grew up in the Austrian Alps & it was a rather sheltered existence. I spent my days singing & twirling on the mountain tops. No..wait...that wasn't me, that was Maria von Trapp.

Roughy, Rats & a Sage

I am once again back at the home of my father, in rain-soaked Ohio, where the corn gets as high as an elephant's eye & I'll be even higher than that if I can track down earthmother/dealer & friend, NastyBarb.

It is always a trip, coming home to check on my father. There are disturbing little mysteries everywhere. The Caller ID (which my father claims he doesn't have) has spit up a few surprising names. The cat has a bald spot & is behaving rather antisocially, so I assume something ugly happened. Neither he nor my father are willing to discuss it yet. There is an entire freezer shelf of nothing but orange roughy fillets, yet my father has no idea how to cook them & seemed somewhat surprised they were there. The cat looked guilty & suspicious when I showed him a roughy, so maybe he's the one who procured the fish & scraped some hair off hoisting them into the freezer.

It would be so easy, during his golden years, to explain away my father's eccentric behavior with words like "senile dementia" & "senior moments", but the truth is that he has always been half a bubble off plumb. When I was little, I thought he was the funniest person in the world. As a teenager, I lived in fear that he would speak to any of my friends or do something nutty. (he confesses to having the same fears about me) I had a sleepover where we went out to the garage freezer to get a pizza & found, on top of that pizza, a partially dissected rat in a baggie. Needless to say, after that, no one ever clamored for a dinner invitation to my house. It was for his Anatomy class. When we had all stopped screaming, he pushed aside some beef roasts to show a fetal pig that was also doomed to be slashed up by his students. My father is an Educator (now retired), a teachers' rights Activist (semi-retired), a Unitarian-Universalist minister, & a Sage. Yes, a sage. Years ago a friend of his bought him a tee shirt that said, "A copy of what I have just said will be made available for distribution." When I was 8-12 yrs old, we constantly travelled to his speaking engagements or guest appearances at Unitarian churches. He editorialized, ranted & sermonized & it all bored me to death. I wouldn't appreciate his intellect & eloquence until much later in life. I liked him better when he was teaching me Harpo Marx's leg-in-the-hand routine. I may test him on that later, to see if he's still got his comedy chops.

I came home to find lots & lots of jewelry! Thank you, Pund, for the earrings & zipper pull in amethyst.....my favorite. And muchas gracias to Bahb for my Queen of Mardi Gras necklace & bracelet in the traditional Fat Tuesday colors of purple & gold. I have the bracelet around the top-notch on my head, it's very tiara-like. Whooooo's queen?

Woke up this morning...got yourself a gun...

Sunday evening I had a small Sopranos party. I gathered together some devoted fans who have been with the show from the very beginning. Before the show started, we found out that one of us had rented the DVD's of past seasons & had not actually been watching the show when it originally aired. He claimed he was "up to snuff" & dared us to quiz him, but we snatched the pomegranate martini out of his hand & threw his ass out, the charlatan. Eight seasons ago we started watching this incredible show on HBO & we were not in the mood for a Sopranos-come-lately interloper.

When I sit down to watch a new episode of The Sopranos, I get into a certain mindset. I block out all sensory information unrelated to the show & focus intently on the dialogue & action. It is almost an hypnotic state that is set in motion by the opening song. Woke Up This Morning. That song eases me right into Soprano-land & starts my one-hour journey to Jersey & into the minds of truly unreasonable characters. If I don't hear the song in its entirety, I rewind my recording & start over. I found out Sunday that I am not alone because, when the song began, the room fell quiet & people that had just been bouncing around & chattering, sat mesmerized.....some of them chicken-necking silently to the music.

Last season began, as viewers know, with Tony taking a bullet to the belly. This year I was surprised at how subtle & unsensational the first episode was. People like the ones perched in my living room, who know the show's patterns & predictables, will be watching for the usual events & conclusion. Circumstances happen that eventually make Tony kill someone & agonize over it. I think the writers are going to be less superficial than that for this last season. The opener was merely a family vacation, but the undertones in the dialogue & the seemingly innocuous behaviors of the characters were fascinating. Carmela & Janice exchanged harsh words in a rather benign dispute caused by surface tension. It was a tame scene....a tiff by the lake. The interesting part was the underlying reason for their tension. Tony had taken Janice's husband for a ride & they were afraid he was going to kill him. Neither of them voiced that concern, but you knew it was there because you, as a viewer, also felt it. Beneath all that was the realization that Tony Soprano's wife & sister are afraid of him.

I think it's going to be a cerebral season where the writers trust their audience to pick up the nuances they're throwing down. I'm sure there will be some bouncing boobs at the BadaBing & several bullets fired into foreheads, but I am hoping the series ends where it began...with Tony Soprano's introspective journey. We've seen him whack Uncle "not in the face" Pussy and chop up Joey Pants for torching his horse. We saw the tears in his eyes as he popped several caps into his own cousin, Steve Buscemi. Do I want to see him strive for some type of redemption by the last episode? Hell to the no. He is definitely beyond that. I want to see him struggling with the monster he knows he is. I will be very unhappy if this magnificent series ends with Tony getting hit by hundreds of bullets at a toll booth, or some sensationalized crap like that. I would like it to end with him at his shrink's office....still hashing it out with her.

You woke up this morning. All the love has gone.

Your Papa never told you about right and wrong.