Articles

Tour De Farce

Don’t bring your kid! And other things parents should know when it’s time to visit college campuses.

by Sarah Bird

AS A TEXAS MOM, I always assumed that college would be a no-brainer. If you wanted your child to get a world-class education, you sent him to the University of Texas. If you wanted him to have unnatural congress with barnyard animals, it was off to Texas A&M. Something for everyone. But like so much else about parenthood, from potty training to the home tonsillectomy, it turned out to be vastly more complicated than I’d been led to believe.

Hard Knocks

In our house, “door” is a four-letter word.

by Sarah Bird

Doors are a marvelous invention that one doesn’t fully appreciate until they are removed from one’s home for several months. And held hostage. By Dog the Bounty Hunter. At least our door man looked like Dog: white-blond mullet, dried-riverbed complexion, wraparound shades. The kind of guy who can work the ear cuff, put his stink on a pair of leather wristbands. A guy who has stuff on his belt—useful, manly stuff.

Dog—the door man, not the bounty hunter—came to be in my employ thanks entirely to a freakish form of ESP that I possess that allows me to root out and hire the one person on earth guaranteed to bring maximum drama and minimum productivity to whatever job is at hand. It’s a gift. I didn’t ask for it. I never try to profit from it. I just have it. It’s how I found Missus Graciela, the house cleaner.

Sibling ribaldry

Where did I get my twisted sense of humor? Competitive wisecracking was my family’s favorite game—and survival mechanism.

by Sarah Bird

WOW, WAS I GRATEFUL, after irony was declared dead awhile back that I’d gotten through junior high before it went extinct. Irony, cheap humor, cynicism—how else does anyone survive adolescence? It was how, back in the mid-sixties, my family taught me to survive everything in general but junior high in particular.

Straight out of Catholic schools in San Antonio and Harlingen, I entered public school late in the ninth grade believing that plaid pleated skirts and a Kleenex bobby-pinned to your head were valid fashion statements. Given that the physical education programs back at Holy Name and St. Anthony’s had consisted entirely of genuflecting, my response to the novel experience of finding a spheroid object hurtling at great velocity toward my head was a sensible one: Cover face with both hands and drop to the earth, making sign of the cross and twitching optional.

Lactation nation

How Austin’s Mobile Mama made me a breast-feeding believer.

by Sarah Bird

Nothing can take the fun out of fun bags quite like breast-feeding. Putting the mommy in mommy muffins instantly transforms our hitherto fabulously recreational lady bumpers into no-nonsense, utilitarian dispensers of the Thin White Line, the last best hope for keeping our children from growing up with Joan Crawford intimacy issues and Bubble Boy immune systems.

I was always favorably disposed toward breast-feeding. For my mom, it was an opportunity to sit down with the newest of her six children, put her feet up, and suck down a Falstaff along with a Lucky Strike or two. I liked the idea of these little all-ages happy hours, everyone chilling and slurping down the beverage of his or her choice.

Fast-forward to my first La Leche League meeting, which I attended when I was five months pregnant.

In a Lather

I was hunting for a bargain. Instead, I found a shampoo magnate with animal magnetism.

by Sarah Bird

My relentless search for The Bargain has led me to some interesting places: Black Market Alley, in Naha, Okinawa; a $99 seat on a flight from Los Angeles to Reykjavík; a shop in Singapore that made paper BMWs and other luxury items to be burned at funerals. The venue I sought out recently, to cash in a $10-off coupon, wasn’t nearly as interesting—just an ordinary Petco at an ordinary strip mall in Austin. Which made it all the more surprising that, immediately upon pushing my cart into the store, I should spy a glamorous man swankily attired in an art-opening-ready black suit and T-shirt. I was almost certain I knew him.

It was the “almost” that gave me pause. I’d once been on a very slow elevator in a very tall building when a woman I was almost certain I knew came aboard.

This year’s model

Fruit of your loins didn’t turn out the way you intended? Time to get your own personal Mini-Me.

by Sarah Bird

American commerce is generally so good at matching product to aspirations. The happy car consumer, to name one fine example, can usually calibrate his message down to the subtlest nuance. You want to tell the world that you care about the environment and are just the tiniest bit morally superior? You buy a Prius. If your message is “I made partner,” there’s the Infiniti G35 in platinum graphite to herald your success. If you want to convey “Not only did I make partner but I’m having a midlife crisis and will probably divorce my wife if you, yeah, you over there in the baby tee and Juicy sweatpants, give me enough motivation,” you’re gonna go for that Porsche Targa 4S. In red.

Geezer nation

Give me your old, your arthritic, your wrinkled masses yearning to be in bed by eight.

by Sarah Bird

Texas attracted 6.8 percent of America’s migrant retirees in the 2005 data, up from 4.8 percent in 2000. Florida’s share is much higher but shrinking. It drew 16.6 percent of retirees in 2005, down from 19.1 percent in 2000... “If Texas ever devoted the right resources to selling itself as a retirement destination, the results would be enormous,” [consultant Gene] Warren said. —“Texas Leaps to No. 2 as Place to Retire,” Dallas Morning News, May 29, 2007

Welcome, newcomers! Just to make sure we’re in the right place, this is the Willie Nelson Memorial Complex, room 203. You all, or “y’all,” as the few remaining native Texans down here like to say—and, side note, if you do get the chance to meet one of these colorful individuals, by all means take it. My director of development spotted one the other day all done up in his native regalia.

Home Groan

I’m all for thinking globally and eating locally, but I draw the line at free-range squirrel pâté.

by Sarah Bird

Not since Homo erecti were bringing down woolly mammoths with atlatls has eating been such an exhausting activity. No longer is it enough to never eat anything with a face or a carbohydrate; now you’re supposed to consume only food that has been produced within a few hundred miles of your home. “Locavores,” as propagators of this philosophy are called (and not just because they know many tasty ways to prepare locusts), will give you lots of excellent arguments for going local: Your food will taste better; you’ll be keeping money in the local economy; you’ll know how your meat and poultry are raised. Chickens in giant factory farms, they tell us, have a particularly bleak time of it. They spend their lives crammed into tight enclosures. They never see the sun, walk on grass, or have sex.

Craigslust

The Birthday Boy had to have a motorcycle jacket. I wanted him to have one. So I arranged a noncasual encounter.

by Sarah Bird

I emerged from the vegetative coma I’d slumped into while finishing my last novel, stretched, looked around, and discovered that (a) our house looked as if the Collyer brothers—the notorious pack rats overcome by towers of their own junk—lived there and (b) our only child was turning eighteen the next day.

I had probably suppressed this last bit of knowledge, since buying presents had become such a fraught activity. In the early years, it was a breeze—a very cost-effective breeze. I would wrap up whatever I found lying around the house: pepper mill, stapler, bag of charcoal briquettes. The Birthday Boy would delight in shredding off the wrapping paper, toss the “gift” aside, crawl into the box, and have the “hours of fun” promised by commercials that actual toys failed to deliver (possibly because his mother had neglected to buy sixteen D batteries).

The triptych to bountiful

I saw nary a planarian—nor a single baking soda volcano—at this year’s state science fair. Instead, there was … inspiration.

by Sarah Bird

Can any two words strike more fear into a parent’s heart than these: “science fair”? First of all, what happened to truth in advertising? Fair? What’s fair about the science fair? If your dad is Mr. Wizard, it’s on to regionals. If not … hello, baking soda volcano!

Or so I thought. Apparently the fallback project for students cursed with a slacker parent—say, me—who can’t get it together enough to grow bean plants under colored lightbulbs is no longer the venerable volcano. The “new hotness,” as a surly lad out there in the blogosphere would have it, is Mentos and Diet Coke, a mixture capable of burping up a magnificent 34-foot geyser sure to thrill any boy who has ever built a potato gun or set hair spray on fire.

Hot wild

On my first-ever “hunt,” I had nothing to fear but feral itself.

by Sarah Bird

I’d been to a University of Texas football game (“Horn ’Em, Hookers!” January 2007). I’d learned how to play Hold ’Em (“Good-bye, Mrs. Chips,” March 2007). What other seminal Texas experience was left? I was wondering if a can of Skoal might be hovering in my future when I came across an article in the New Yorker about the debate over whether the Metropolitan Museum of Art should return some of its antiquities to their countries of origin. In the story, we discover that Carlos Picón, the curator of the Greek and Roman department at the Met, spent several years in San Antonio, where he “learned to shoot, in order to participate in weekend house parties dedicated to boar-hunting, a pastime that is to Texas billionaires what golf is to those in the Northeast.”

No ifs, abs or butts

So what if my aerobics instructor is a Flabbo Nazi? My capacious can is getting perkier.

by Sarah Bird

I WAS JUST SITTING THERE on my mat, stretching out the hamstrings, waiting for Ladies Strength Training to start, when the Ghost of Workouts Past bustled in.

“Hey, y’all, I’m Denise! I’ll be filling in for JoJo! She’s doing the Death Valley triathlon!”

Denise had it all: Richard Simmons—level peppiness, blinding white tennies, a leotard cut up to her waist, leg warmers, and a headband. She could not have been more perfect if she’d been Jane Fonda ordering us onto all fours to “go for the burn” with some fire hydrants.

“All right, ladies! Let’s get started!” Did I say that Denise couldn’t have been more perfect? She got more perfect: She put on the ur-aerobics song “Super Freak,” and as Rick James yowled, Denise ordered, “Give me a grapevine! Grapevine with a ham! Hustle up! And back! Whew! Come on, now!”

Lark of the covenant

So let me get this straight: Marriage is, like, forever?

by Sarah Bird

HUMAN PAPILLOMAVIRUS. The theory of evolution as a product of a rabbinical conspiracy. Faith-based prisons. Gay adoption. Our Legislature concerns itself with such intriguing topics. And why not? I mean, property taxes? Children’s health insurance? A functioning court system? Zzzzzz. What snorers.

I was looking forward to another sexy cheerleader law until I remembered that its author, Al Edwards, was booted out of his seat in last spring’s Democratic primary. So I was left to investigate what William “Bill” Zedler has cooking. Could the Republican state representative from Arlington top his 2003 bill proposing to regulate bars that employ someone “unclothed or in such attire, costume or clothing as to expose to view any portion of the female breast below the top of the areola or of any portion of the pubic hair, anus, cleft of the buttocks, vulva or genitals”?

The price is rite

In Collie Mac’s house, bargain hunting was a holy calling. It is in mine too.

by Sarah Bird

AT A PARTY LAST NIGHT I received two lovely compliments—one on a new pair of glasses, another on my raincoat. To the first I replied, breathless as Ron Popeil touting the Veg-O-Matic, “Can you believe I got these off the Internet?! With prescription lenses?! For $19.95?!” Upon hearing the second, I held out the water-repellent fabric, inviting inspection, and exclaimed with Ginsu-knife-level enthusiasm, “Fifteen dollars at Ross! On clearance!”

Is a simple, gracious “Thank you” out of the question? For me, apparently, it is. Issuing these annoying bargain bulletins seems hardwired into the Bird DNA. I believe our family crest features a blue light and the motto Nunquam persolvo plenus pretium (“Never pay retail”). When my siblings and I get together, it immediately turns into a reenactment of “The Rag Trade: The Early Years.” We finger one another’s new garments and nod at shoes and handbags and mutter, “Nice.

Good-bye, Mrs. Chips

What’s a nice girl like me doing at a Texas Hold ’Em table?

by Sarah Bird

SO MANY WAYS FOR A TEXAS girl to lose her virginity. My own deflowering was witnessed by 88,971 spectators at Memorial Stadium when I attended my first-ever University of Texas football game last fall. In the time-honored tradition of so many coeds, though, I chose to revirginize and lose it again. A whole world of Texas First Times still awaited. But which quintessential Lone Star experience had I missed? Visiting Boys Town? Swimming naked in a stock tank? Shooting my daughter’s cheerleader competition? Wrong sex, wrong body, bad aim. That left playing Texas Hold ’Em.

I had a problem with poker: I worried that too many Slim Jims, pork rinds, and Pabst Blue Ribbons would be required. That ritual anointings with Right Guard and Brut might be involved. That, in short, I wasn’t man enough. And then: poker with aromatherapy!

Horn ‘Em, Hookers

The hellish heat. The cold beer. The cheerleaders bouncing around like howler monkeys on PCP. Was I really ready for some football? Texas versus Iowa State versus me.

by Sarah Bird

Gosh, how I loved football games when I was a grad student at the University of Texas. I was the biggest football nut going. I lived for game day. I and the other supernerdettes residing in a co-op boarding house two blocks from campus counted the minutes until kickoff. Why? Because that’s when all the bellowing Burnt-Orange-heads would get the hell out of our neighborhood. Ah, bliss! For those few hours we could study, sing madrigals, and walk outside without being hailed by our football-loving frat neighbors with their signature greeting: “Hey, lesbo-dyke-whore!” (Seemed odd that the brothers would automatically assume that people of the same gender who all lived together and paddled one another and carried out secret nighttime rituals were homosexual. Yet they did. Oh, wait, I forgot. We didn’t do the paddling and the rituals.)

Snakes on a Brain

Now playing at a googolplex near you: nothing good, even if you slither from theater to theater.

by Sarah Bird

NETFLIX HAS RUINED me for the movies—at least old-school, get-out-of-your-pajamas-and-go-to-a- theater-filled-with-other-humans kinds of movies. Instead I multitask: I fold laundry, check e-mail, talk on the phone, watch Transamerica. Like a lot of women, the last time I left the house for a movie was Brokeback Mountain, since it offered the hope of seeing a genuinely openhearted love story, rather than one in which our young lovers are trying to slaughter each other à la Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Is Hollywood the problem, or is it me? This fall, I decided to investigate. My mission: to go to the nearest stadium-seating googolplex and sample every film being shown until I found one I could not leave. Preparation was all. Besides packing a parka and mukluks for the cryogenic-level AC, I needed an outfit that would render me invisible to teenage employees as I slithered from auditorium to auditorium.

Neck and neck

Nora Ephron knows almost as little about the joy of wrinkles as she does about the grit of Texas women.

by Sarah Bird

Growing up, the high points of my month were the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” feature in my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal and Nora Ephron’s column in my father’s Esquire. LHJ generally advised women to “make it work” at any cost—to hang on like a barnacle no matter what kind of low-life, cheating, bedroom-challenged, BO-ridden dog he was. Nora, on the other hand, pointed the way to a world so large, so filled with possibilities, that marriage might or might not even be part of it.

Which is why I was cheering when her new collection of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, hit number one on the New York Times best-seller list. I eagerly helped her out with my own purchase, even though, page for page, the slender volume was the most expensive book I’ve ever bought.

Extracted from: http://www.texasmonthly.com/authors/sarahbird.php