Winter Work

As I make my way through my first winter as a gardener and not a student (or rather, as I make my way through the prospect of a winter with no income), and after no luck finding temporary work on my own, I turned to recruiters. Because it turns out that all my plans of catching up on educational reading in the off season are thwarted by an inability to sit still as long as I'm jobless. As one can imagine, my gardening pay did not provide for a substantial nest egg, which situation was amplified by unexpected dental work for both me and a cat to the tune of almost three thousand in unexpected bills. So any time not spent searching for jobs and sending out resumes was consumed with the preoccupation that I had to look for jobs and send out resumes.

Cue the recruiters.

Landing a good recruiter is tricky at my age, because many recruiters are staffed by people not long out of college who have about five minutes of work experience.  It's surreal to put on a suit and dress shoes and be evaluated by someone who can't make eye contact. As luck would have it, I connected with a recruiter close to my age with whom I could have a conversation undistracted by the anxiety that my evaluation was similar to that of a Tinder date.

(Sidenote: My history of online dating is a hot train wreck of Boschian carnage.) 

So I landed a gig that does not pay anywhere near what I'm worth (ah, temping), but will last for as long as I expect to be out of work, and the staff is nice. No busy phones, no unhappy people. Very little stress.

The best part: They tell me every day how smart I am, how happy they are that I'm there. I've told them I'm a gardener trying to make her way to Maine, and they tell me all the time how much they want to keep me. 

"I wish we could get someone like you," the woman I'm supporting tells me.

"Well, that's easy. Hire someone who's overqualified, pay them 50% more than you've budgeted for the position, and there you go."

I'm basically helping with the mess also known as their accounts payable. The backstory involves a former employee who let bills back up until a vendor's threat to cut service alerted the company that they had a situation.

To be fair, the issue is larger. For one, the accounting system is crap. Don't worry, I won't go into boring detail, but trust me it was not designed by accountants. Given that the basics of  accounting are unchanged since the days of Venetian seafaring merchants, and also given that accounting does not benefit from jazzy new approaches, there is no excuse for this. That I have to enter twelve invoices from one vendor as twenty-four separate transactions rather than as a single batch entry makes me want to hunt down the software provider and use Language.

Then there are the vendors who, rather than taking the time to put the correct PO on an invoice, slap a random or outdated PO number in the apparent assumption that we won't notice. I mentally craft communications where these vendors are notified that a $50 fee per incorrect number will be deducted to cover the additional administrative time.

(Thoughts like these make me realize how pointless modern life can be. The self-righteous indignation of the Purchase Order is the first sign of societal decay. You read it here.)

Another issue is that, despite being in a digital world, the processes at this office are heavily paper-oriented. One process goes something like this: a Purchase Order is generated and put into the accounting system, and an original paper version into a big binder. Incoming bills are then processed, during which they are stamped and  information found on the digitally-generated PO is handwritten on the front. (I've chosen to log this in purple marker as a statement about the triumph of art over bureaucracy.) The invoice is entered into the system against the PO number (which if you just type in creates an error message; you have to type the number and wait several seconds for the system to offer you a selection so that you can choose from the list. Which for a stack of twenty or so invoices is maddening.) Invoices are then created from these entries -- but these require two separate transactions. Of course. Then for each bill, one must go to the shelf of binders, find the PO printout, remove it from the 5-inch-wide binder, which entails hefting all the POs over the huge binder ring to get to the desired PO, and attach it to the bill so that the person approving it can see it. Once the bill is paid, the PO is re-inserted into the Unholy Cumbersome Binder.   

Wait, you ask. Can't the POs be scanned and saved to a network folder, where they can be easily reviewed by the approver?  Yessiree, Bub, they sure can. They can also be scanned into the accounting system for people like me who have to process bills that about half the time have incorrect POs on them.

But they aren't. Because change.

Most of what I know is from inference, because most communication starts with an assumption that you have had some prior informative conversation on the subject at hand with an extraterrestrial source.  

Take the office manager, who is one of the nicest women I've met, and one of my favorite people there. Unflappable, helpful. Also the worst communicator ever. A master of the seeming non sequitur, which is the result of spitting out the last sentence to a long internal conversation, or assuming that you live in her head.

"Did you get the things from the book?" she asked me on my fourth day.

"What 'things' exactly, and what book?" I asked.

"The PO Book."

"There's a PO book?"

"The ones in the room."

"Any particular room?"

Another time she said out of the blue, "I'll bet she took them from the folder before putting them into the other thing. Did she record them?"

I considered my many possible replies, and decided that "I don't know," was safest. I also consulted the Internet for symptoms of dementia.

It became my own personal pastime to decode her arcane statements. One day she asked, "What do you do when your printer has no words?"

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking the printer had run out of ink, and that's a good guess, so don't be too hard on yourself. What she meant was along the lines of, "When your printer has an error and has only icons and no display screen WITH WORDS, how do you know how to fix the problem?"

Then there is the filing. After looking in the umpteen places a document might be, I gave up.

"I've been looking for the Staples PO for this bill we got. I checked the books in the room and the new ones in A--'s office, but I can't find it. Do you know where else I might look?"

"Did you look under 'S'? A lot of people do that by mistake."

"I did actually, what with 'Staples' starting with -- you know. An S."

"It's a corporate charge account so it goes in the credit-card book."

You know how in school you and your friends whine about the dubious real-world utility of what you learn in a classroom? This is the first time I've had a working knowledge of the alphabet prove useless.

But I'm appreciated, it's an easy paycheck so far, they're going to put me in my own office to help with a special project, and things that would bother me if I were invested in the company as a permanent job are just things I'll be walking away from in a couple of months. 

If ever I am tempted to fall back on my mad office skills and get an office job where I'm not struggling financially, the rapidity with which my joints are seizing up is reminder enough that I do not want a desk job. It's frightening how quickly the aches and pains set in. It's fun to wear my cute blue boots and kicky skirts, sure, but I do miss my garden boots and mud gloves, and I feel naked without my pruners.

Pruners. Filed under P. Dammit.

Is that the Star of Bethlehem?

The news says that this year is the worst for the flu since the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009. Explains why the cold I caught a month ago has been about as ephemeral as a Cher farewell tour.

My Christmas present was a house to myself. My uncle, parents, and sister made their annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, also known as a casino in Connecticut, and the visiting relatives spent the day with their daughter and her family.

In our culture, the icon of loneliness is the person facing Christmas Day in solitude. To that I say: it's all about context. Besides, with  a house full of animals, I'm not exactly alone (ammiright, BabyJesusInAManger?)

I watched an on-demand movie ("Birdbox." Meh) and organized my bedroom, which included some tough love regarding clothing I'd bought while having a good day ("I can SO pull off a stretch zip-up magenta top with chartreuse spots!" "Black corduroy mini skirts are ME!") all the while thankful I thrift shop, so the experiments carried more chagrin than real financial regret.

I got my estate-planning documents in order and emailed copies to relevant people ("On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me..... a Durable Power of Attorneeeeeeeeey!")

I visited my 92-YO great-aunt ("Auntie, have you been naughty or nice?" "Naughty!" "THAT's my girl!"), and took a hike in a state park where, true to form, I spent a half-hour walking some really weird paths that seemed to just run behind houses, then through a cemetery, until I returned to the parking lot to realize the trail heads were ACROSS the street, so I walked there until the sun started to go down, which only made me more manic with desire to buy a house in Maine with some honest-to-God Nature right out my back door.

And I coughed. Constantly. Maybe because of my asthma, which in turn may be because of allergies or may be just another side-effect of the stupid B-list autoimmune disease I have that nobody ever heard of because nobody ever dies from it, they just get really, really annoying symptoms, or maybe because of the lingering Cher-cold, or all three.

Last night I coughed a nonstop cough so classically dry I was sure an olive would fly out of my mouth, which meant I could not keep my CPAP mask on, so it was a free-for-all to see whether the coughing, congestion, apnea, or the cats who thought it therapeutic to encircle me in a claustrophobic cartouche would deprive me of the most oxygen/sleep.

Before I go on to the next part, some background.

In my 30s I was sitting in the South End apartment of a friend, and, while she finished up some things, I passed the time by opening  a copy of Whitley Streiber's Communion. This was a big juicy book about his supposed experience with alien abduction. I figured it would be fluffy enough to pick up and put down with no regrets when it was time to leave. How deliciously, mindlessly sensational.

Twenty minutes into it I was in a pounding sweat. Whitley was describing in detail an event that had also happened to me when I was five.  Now, I have no memories of abduction, but I do have his memories of gray men in my room, of being touched on the forehead by a wand and being paralyzed, being terrified almost to the point of hysteria while these beings moved in and out of my line of vision, of feeling their touch (never intimate) without being able to move from it. Experiencing the kind of terror that, if you were dreaming, would cause you to wake up. Only I never did.

I have no recollection of being taken out of my room, but I do remember having this experience with minor variations several times in my childhood. I'd chalked it up to being a nightmare-prone kid, and forgot it as an adult. Until Whitley brought it all back down from the dusty mental attic, cold terror and all.

I'm not saying it was aliens, but how did he experience the exact same things? Is there some Jungian effect at work here? Some strange default the mind takes when our sleep paralysis doesn't quit?

I mention this episode because last night I managed to doze off, finally, but was woken abruptly by a low, very loud thrumming. The head of my bed is in a corner of the room, with a window directly to my left, and one at my feet to the right. We live by a wooded area.

I felt my whole body vibrate with the thrumming, and saw a blindingly bright light (like LED headlights) through both windows. And -- this is important -- the cats jerked to attention.

I could not move. I could move my eyes, but not my head or my limbs or open my mouth.

The first thought I had was, "They're back." This time I wasn't so much terrified as nervously curious, and hoped that if they were going to do anything particularly unpleasant to me they'd have the good manners to knock me out first. So, not unlike a visit to the endodontist.

And then the lights dimmed and suddenly it was morning and I was looking out not at a blinding light but at daylight with a very confused sense that something had just been erased like a badly edited film. If you've had surgery you know the feeling: "100, 99 98...hey, how'd I end up here and yes, I will have that ginger ale!"

What bothered me most? I still had the cough.  If they could manage interstellar travel, inflict paralysis at will, and erase memory, couldn't they have at least given me some advanced goddamn Space Robitussin?  Or would that have been the metaphorical butterfly wing-flap that tore the fabric of space and time?

Stupid aliens.

Don't break it down for me

I work with a  crew member whom I adore, and who also sometimes drives me nuts, and at one point had me considering looking for a new job. But I decided to make it work, figured out her hot buttons, and learned how to accommodate them. And practiced being less impatient. It helps that it's obvious that she cares and wants everyone to be happy, and is essentially a kind, generous soul.

Our communication styles are diametrically opposed. I'm direct, usually too much so; she is deferentially circuitous to the point of abstraction.  An example of how our styles contrast:

Me: "Those shastas look like crap; I'll cut them back."

She: "I'm thinking that we could offer our assistance to those poor shastas over there, which look a wee bit forlorn, so do you think that you could perhaps give them some attention so that they don't look so yucky?"

While she's giving instructions like this, I'm practically doing a jitterbug of impatience. She also has to hunt for words a lot, so her instructions are loaded with "uhs" and "ums," making it all the more  brutal. I've learned to just wait it out, breathing deliberately, because I get paid either way.

She also constantly forgets two key things about me:

1. I have no sense of direction. Unless the direction is for a location within a block of where I am, please just give me an address I can plug into my phone, or some really unique landmarks to guide my way. Even though I've been to a location a dozen times over the summer, I will not know how to get to it on my own. Do not tell me to go to Main street and take a right on 122 and then left on Wing, because I'm lost already. I've explained that it's like dyslexia, and just accept that I have a learning issue when it comes to directions.

"At any given point in our day," I explained to her, "I could not begin to tell you how I would drive home; I could not even tell you in what direction I'd head. I cannot visualize how the streets relate to one another. My brain forms no mental map as I travel."

After about three of these explanations, she still insists on giving me directions, so I treat it like her learning disability that she can't understand my disability, so, resisting the urge to Lindy Hop, I listen to her directions and say, "Great, thanks! And the address?"

 2. I'm having some serious bladder issues related to other conditions. I have no problem using the outdoor executive washroom, so I usually just give a heads up that I'm heading into the woods/behind a huge rhododendron/storage shed. I've become adept at sight lines and stealth squatting.

No matter how many times I've explained that when the urge hits, I have to answer it pretty quickly, she stops and delays me by offering stammering suggestions on the nearest coffee shops that I could use instead, or, when the location does require me to drive to a coffee shop, starts giving me directions (!!!) rather than let me use my phone.  One day our conversation went like this:

Me: "I'm heading to Dunks to use the restroom--"

She: "Oh! If you want, um, um, there's a coffee shop close by, um, about oh, two miles or so. There's one down by the um - the um --Panera on Route 3, you know that one? You um --go down the street--"

Me: "I've just peed myself."

She: "Oh! Oh, well I'll let you go."

Me: "Thanks; be right back."

Then there are the house descriptions. She avoids the most obvious clues, using streets once again fortheloveofGodMontresor.

She: "The big house at the end of the street."

Me: "Gonna need more."

She: "They have the two containers."

Me: "Still nothing."

She: "They have the little front porch with the tiny boxes."

Me: "You mean the house with the two German Shepherds?"

She: "Yes, that's the one."


Another time:

She: "The house on Main Street."

Me: "Not getting a visual."

She: You cut back all the amsonia."

Me:"You mean the Dead Rabbit house?"

She: "That's the one."

For me,  two big dogs who run up and slobber all over you, or discovering two dead (likely poisoned) rabbits in the bed you were weeding would be the lead. Not "The brown house on the corner."

I also have a much fouler mouth, and I hate maintaining day lilies. So the one day when I looked over to see her yell,  "FUCKING DAY LILIES!!" I knew we'd finally come to a meeting of the minds.

The Adventures of Plant Girl, Part I

[This is a draft I didn't publish at the time it was originally written, in the first part of 2018. I thought it might be interesting to document my experiences as an interior plant technician, and then decided you didn't need to hear about over-watered dracaenas and mealybug. You're welcome.]

Plant Girl is covering a new office today, because the plant girl previously assigned there got tired of being stalked by a partner of the firm whose apparent aspiration is to be the Justin Bateman character from Juno.

Plant Girl has promised her supervisor that she will not get into it with Stalker Man, but in her fantasies:

[STALKER MAN becomes highly agitated at the realization that his stalkee is gone for good. PLANT GIRL closes door to his office and faces him with a cool, level stare.]

PG: You're an attorney, aren't you?

SM: Yes...

PG [leaning on desk, crime-drama style]: So you'll understand when I say: Cease. And. Desist.

SM [leaning back, a cornered rat]: I- I don't know what your'e talking about! I was just sharing some music I thought she might be interested in! I was just being friendly! I-

PG  [silences him with a long stare]: I think we both know that's not true. So. Those pothos aren't going to water themselves. I'll be going.

[EXIT PLANT GIRL, victorious, watering can in hand, leaving STALKER MAN speechless and terrified]

Hire me. Oh, wait.

Not only is the frost on the pumpkin, the squirrels have eaten it beyond recognition. Winter is coming to New England, but thanks to a lot of rainy non-work days last month we are still out there, cutting back frozen day-lily leaves and stabbing winter greens into rock-hard planters.I have perfected my layering configuration, and keep a ready supply of hand warmers in my car.

Still, work days are numbered, so I've begun the ritual hunt for seasonal work. I live in an expensive state, a state which constantly boats a good economy, yet the job wages that are posted would not keep a teenager in school clothes. I am stunned (STUNNED) that whether I manned a cash register at a supermarket or supported an office of highly paid professional services staff, the difference in pay if any, would be minimal. I don't mind lower pay for a relatively easy job, but if you want to use all my mad skills, there is a price tag on that.

I was commiserating with a woman I know. She has an advanced degree, is an adjunct professor at a big-name college in Boston, has published a book, and she works part-time at a well-known clothier for $14 an hour to make ends meet. A clothier whose shirts routinely cost $100.

The other problem is that given my extensive job history I've become adept at decoding job postings, determining what exactly will make me hate the job, and how quickly. Some phrases that set me off:

"Bright, enthusiastic worker greeting people with a ready smile."  I kid you not. Guess which gender usually holds the kind of job this description is attached to? Translation: "Be a nice and non-confrontational girlfriend surrogate for a bunch of fragile egos." Since when is it my job to make you feel good? What ever happened to a courteous, professional demeanor?

"A sense of humor is a must." Translation: "You will routinely be involved in our version of the Caucasian Chalk Circle, with you in the role of the baby. Be prepared to be pulled in several directions at once by rude, inconsiderate colleagues with a grossly overdeveloped sense of importance, or one high-level manager with a reputation as a Grade-A douchebag who can't be fired because he owns the place/makes us a lot of money.  Also, you must make coffee and keep the break room stocked, brightly and enthusiastically, wearing a ready smile."

I will not make travel arrangements. This is for people either functionally illiterate in the online world, or who just can't be bothered, neither of  which inspires. I have a terrible poker face/body language when being asked to perform pointless tasks for lazy people.

I will not work for less competent/professional people who make more money than I. So if your web site has typos or has clearly not had its content reviewed by a professional, or if you think it's really important for the public to know which health club you belong to, move along.

Lest you think I'm lazy (well, I am when I'm not engaged), I do apply for jobs with a reasonable commute, good working conditions, and reasonable duties.

 But we haven't yet talked about age discrimination.

Age discrimination is the delusion that because I'm not under 35, I'm a doddering fool with no mental agility who thinks technology is proof that aliens exist.  The reality is that I've adapted many, many times to a world constantly changed by technology, I don't live on my phone, and I understand that you don't look at your phone while on the job, or while someone is talking to you. 

I read goddamned books. I READ.

I was encouraged by a posting by a well-known and respected nonprofit organization that operates fitness centers and residences, but while looking at the job description, a flag went up when I read a line about "enforcing policies even if disagreeing with them." Hmmm. Clearly this has been an issue, or why in the job posting?

Using my Old People Internet Skills, I found a copy of their Employee Handbook. They do not allow (among other things): "elaborate" hairstyles, visible tattoos, or facial piercings such as nose piercings.  It should have just said, "Nothing that scares suburban white people." Made me want to dye my hair blue, get a "Mama Tried" neck tattoo, and show up in a suit. But Hey! You do get a half-hour lunch break!

I went to another job site for a package-delivery company where I was told there was a hiring fair. I had been told there was a hiring fair because I'd started an online application and didn't complete it, but was nonetheless stalked by this company that behaved like a needy ex-boyfriend. Emails reminding me to complete my application were replaced by voicemails encouraging me to apply, finally telling me of this "hiring fair."

When I hear the words "hiring fair" I envision a clean, bright conference room in neutral tones,  tables staffed with smiling, overeager employers ready to win you over with logo-printed ballpoint pens and reusable shopping bags. Given the relentless pursuit by this company, I assumed they were desperate, and expected an enthusiastic welcome, a negotiable wage, maybe even free coffee and snacks (that's when you know you have them).

I went to the address given but found only a dingy distribution center with two haggard women in company sweatshirts manning the front desk. The younger one was too busy looking at her phone to acknowledge me (SEE??!!??) They had no idea about a hiring fair. Considering grimly that this was a sampling of my potential coworkers, I followed the older woman through swinging doors into the main warehouse, a place devoid of natural light and heat, barely illuminated by some weak, invisible fluorescents high overhead. (If you have seen the movie "Alien," I think I've discovered the inspiration for the Nostromo.) There were no balloons, no bright colors, no enthusiastic welcome.

No pens.

We turned left in the gloom, and I had to step over a conveyor belt to be led into the break room, where a guy named "Mitch" was supposed to meet me. The woman instructed me to wait, and left.  The room was a small, airless, cold place of laminate tables with attached benches and a vending machine in the corner. Two men looked at me curiously. My mind turned to unmarked graves.

"Is one of you Mitch?" I asked. I was told no, but he would be right back.

I turned my attention to a poster with, among other things, the company dress code. This company also had the heebie-jeebies about tattoos, ears with more than one earring (women), earrings in more than one ear (men). Mustaches were allowed, but no beards or goatees. Apparently HQ was in a warmer climate that did not understand the protective benefits of facial hair in winter, or that mustaches went out with the pedophile/70s Porn Star fashion craze.

As I read the list of style prohibitions, a scene from the movie "Moonstruck" came into my head, specifically the phrase, "A wolf with no foot."

I took out my cell phone, went back into the dim warehouse cavern, clambered back over the conveyor belt, and re-entered the service area. I explained I'd just gotten an emergency text that I had to address, but I'd be back. I hustled to my car, drove out of the chain-link-and-barbed-wire-enclosed parking lot, and headed home.

A wolf with all her feet.

1400 Christmas trees on the wall, 1400 trees...

My work at a garden center this fall ended with the usual end-of-year ritual of this business: the purveying of the holiday greens and Christmas trees.

In my blue-collar childhood, the erection of the Christmas tree was a delirium-inducing affair that heralded a season of anticipation and wonder, of huge snowfalls and piles of gifts covering the apartment's living-room floor. (My father used to work a side job for the now-defunct Parker Brothers toy company, so we were never at a loss for board games. Interestingly, he also worked part-time for a jail situated directly across the road from PB, which may have exacerbated his neuroses. He was not a hardened man, despite his marriage to my mother.)

Because we always had an artificial tree, I, with my child's egotism, assumed this was because artificial trees were superior to their ephemeral natural counterparts, and I pitied my friends who had to settle for fragrant, feathery boughs and disappointingly non-segmented trunks.

The first best part of the tree ritual was my mother telling my father it was time. This was said in a casual way, suggestive of a choice in the matter, but the sudden silence, the angry terror on my father's face revealed the truth: he was that tree's bitch, and we all knew it.

The tree resided in the cellar in a huge cardboard box that got more battered each year. It was comprised of a three-part central pole that screwed together and contained color-coded holes that matched -- once upon a time -- the paint on the wire ends of the tree "branches." These were heavy, twisted wire covered in some form of plastic blue-green bristles that endeavored to look coniferous. The overall effect was of an overly large broom handle sprouting green toilet brushes.

Over the years, the paint on the "branch" ends began to wear off, which led to the second part of the tree ritual: the arguing. We kids enjoyed this almost as much as the decorating. My father would try in vain to insert the branches correctly the first time so as to avoid my mother's editorializing, but we all knew this was a futile endeavor, and watched his progress with the combination of pity and glee usually reserved for kids who threw up in school.

After a period of criticizing by my mother, yelling by my father, and taunting laughter from us kids, my father had to string the lights. This was the '70s, so a broken strand would be fixed by unscrewing the large, offending bulb and replacing it. It was our job to find the bulb, which we did with gusto. After this, we all decorated the tree, a process that restored harmony as we happily dug out our favorite pieces and hung them, transforming a hideous monstrosity into something beautiful and bright.

If our family Christmas-tree ritual smacked of Tennessee Williams, the tree drama that played out in the garden center was a mix of Shakespearean melodrama and operatic tragedy.

We started with over 1,400 trees from Quebec province. Purchases began the day after Thanksgiving, with people concerned about the "freshness" of the trees, but demurring at the suggestion of a $3.49 bottle of preservative that would actually keep them fresh, sensing some kind of compensatory scam.

The Frasier Firs went first, because this is a clientele that believes in Better and Worse, and they want Better, always. The center indulges this by selling Frasiers that have been sheared in the last year for a denser, more traditional shape. The hoi polloi settle for balsam firs.

(I'd always gotten my trees from supermarket parking lots, and a pop-up lot manned by a gentle if embittered semi-alcoholic selling trees from a tiny trailer. My criteria had been size --small, please-- and price --also small, please).

Watching people inspect trees with all the intensity of affluent but barren couples in a Chinese orphanage was another new exposure to The Way Rich White People Think.

And then, a week before Christmas, we sold out. We bought several trees from local vendors also down to the dregs, but who kept the few remaining larger ones for their own customers. Stragglers hurried in, desperate and astonished, their faces masks of the dawning hysteria from forays to other tree yards that places were emptying, that they had waited too long. They looked in tattered shock at the few trees we had left.

"Are these all the trees you have?" they'd squeak in Puccinic dismay.

"Uh, yes. How many do you need?"

"Well, one, but.."

"Well, we have more than one."

But they wanted choice. They wanted to believe that the tree they bought was a special tree, a tree for them; picking from a cluster of five trees, albeit perfectly good ones, hinted at remainders, of other people's cast-offs, and that would not do.

When we were down to about four trees, an older man and and his wife arrived; he looked at the small selection in disdain and, shoulders back and three-quarters turned in a way that recalled nothing so much as Macbeth cheating to the audience as he cried Lay on Macduff! he announced to me across the tarmac, "I have been buying trees here for TWENTY-ONE years, and this is the first time I won't be buying my tree here!"

"We do have trees," I said, gesturing, courteous but unmoved by his existential crisis. "We did have over fourteen hundred, but they sold out."

Because people who make this such a fucking life-or-death event have the sense to not wait seven days from Christmas to shop for a tree.

"They aren't large enough!!!"

Ah, yes. The large tree. The one that will rise like Babel's Tower under the cathedral ceiling/in the atrium/next to the fireplace. The one designed to impress. There were at least two trees remaining that could honestly claim six feet, but no. No, they would not do. They lacked presence.

The man looked at his poor wife and announced balefully, "I guess we won't have a tree this year!"

From my cashier's window in the unheated shed where I'd spent four hours in thirty-degree weather, I smiled my broadest smile, leaned forward, and said,

"But you have each other."

Is it a musical if it's not..you know... musical?

A family friend supports an amateur theater group in a neighboring town. So far I've been able to rely on "conflicts" to avoid such things as "Nunsense." (My mother: "That Sister Amnesia was SO funny!") I smile, knowing I'd have hated it and its formulaic easy laughs.

Most things that my family finds entertaining I find cringeworthily awful. I'm not trying to be a snob (I went to a sing-along showing of Grease; I can have mindless fun as much as anybody). But they are the kind of people who think Olive Garden is Dining Out, and a weekend in a Connecticut casino is the pinnacle of a vacation experience. It doesn't make me happy that I dislike pretty much everything they enjoy; I feel churlish and unkind (remember Zooey sitting on the bathtub at the beginning of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey? Yeah; like that. Sometimes I see myself dead in the rain.)

So I decided to Make An Effort, and went with my uncle, mother, sister, and another family friend to this theater to see Jack The Ripper: The Whitechapel Musical.

The title had promise. It could either be incredibly dark or it could be hilarious.

Well, it turns out it wasn't dark, although it tried to be. And it was also hilarious, another result not even on nodding terms with the intent.

An actor gave the Turn Off Your Phones speech in character before the show, and inserted dramatic pauses wide enough to drive a freighter through. When the Turn Off Your Phones speech gets milked, it does not bode well.

My mental notes:

When you are cutting someone's throat, it's done quickly, because in real life people don't hold still while you sllllooooowwwlly drag your Eeeeeeeeviiiiiilll kniiiiffeeeee across their throat for overly dramatic effect.

When a character says things like "I'm so afraid!" or "Who will be next?!?" Don't have them sit casually on the line and sip their drink.

To be fair, this was an odd and difficult choice for amateur theater, primarily because 99% of the show was sung. As in, instead of saying lines, they were sung. Judging from what I saw, whomever wrote the music is overfond of Phillip Glass. Predominately minor notes and forced harmonies to the point I wanted to grab the knife myself and take the easy way out.

There were a couple of genuinely decent songs, but most of them were appallingly trite. I felt bad for the cast, except for when I wanted to beat them into picking up the godforsaken pace.

During intermission, after a first act that contained something like forty tortuous songs, my uncle turned to me and said, "the songs are a little harsh. A little..."

"I think the word you're looking for is 'awful,' I suggested. He smiled and nodded conspiratorially.

It didn't help that we were in the first row (NEVER the first row!) and I would be overcome by fits of laughter when The Ripper made his appearance. I hid behind my program and tried not to shake, lest I destroy any confidence.

My mother loved it.