We All Fall Down

RIP, Mr. Gandolfini

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 01:57:00 +0000

Happy Fathers' Day

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 02:51:00 +0000

For me, the apostrophe is after the "s" and the gratitude goes out to three different wonderful men: To dear Randy, who is the best father my girls could possibly have; to my Uncle Phil, for all the years he cared for me; and to my father, whose love for me is the strongest and surest memory I have of him.

Randy and the girls and me in Mexico, May 2013, for the wedding of my niece and the girls' cousin Maggie.

Phil's laugh was booming, but his giggles squeezed out of him in a high pitched rasp that you couldn't help but fall into.

My dad, Ronald Fey, Sr., with a Super 8 camera in his lap and tired little me at some sort of Old Wild West Town family outing. Either summer, 1967, when I'm two and a half, or 1968, the last summer we had together.

Fitzcardboardaldo and the Corrugation of Dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:57:00 +0000

This is so good. Just what you have been waiting for.

The cardboard animated version of the Werner Herzog film about the dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle with money from rubber trees only accessible by portaging a 320-ton steamship between two rivers. By going over a mountain. Without modern equipment.

AND the cardboard animated version of the documentary by filmmaker Les Blank (who just died in April) about the making of the film about the dream of building an opera house in the Peruvian jungle... etc. etc.

Little cardboard Werner's misery becomes even more poetic so many layers removed from the original experience thirty years ago. "Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess...the birds are in misery. They don't sing, they just screech in pain..."

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Wed, 29 May 2013 19:27:00 +0000

Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stunning. Six amazing short stories, each a jewel.

"Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade."

The above is from "Afterworld," a story folding over itself in time as an eighty year old Jewish survivor of Nazi Hamburg sees visions of her orphanage friends who wait in a lonely netherworld for her to join them and move to a "whole city of golden tents glowing down there beneath the mist."

Stories take place in a doomed riverside village in China, the plains of Wyoming, the demilitarized zone between the Koreas, rural Lithuania, all rendered with compassion and understanding. An otherworldliness lives in the first and last story, however, and elevates them to unforgettable. In "Memory Wall," a white well-off former realtor in suburban Cape Town struggles with Alzheimer's as a dying homeless boy and his employer steal her memories and her long-time housekeeper anticipates the loss of his livelihood. The narrative trails of past and present, hope and despair cross and curve into an unsentimental yet moving resolution.

View all my reviews

On Otherness and the Work of Remembrance

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Mon, 20 May 2013 04:05:00 +0000

Our newest read for the From Left to Write book club is Anthony's Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a powerful first novel set in Chechnya during the beleaguered country's two civil wars of the 1990s. These conflicts, after centuries of invasions by foreign forces, destroyed much of the country and pitted neighbors against neighbor, father against son.

A brilliant and cold surgeon, the last remaining doctor at a nearly deserted city hospital, mourns the disappearance of her beautiful younger sister. Two men of a rural village, once as close as brothers, eye each other with distrust and fear. One has turned informant; the other hides and protects the eight year old daughter of a missing friend the informant has named. The seventy-year old father of the informant, a survivor of World War II and the brutal Russian expulsion of the entire Chechnya population in 1944, struggles with writing and revising his epic history of the Chechnyan people and with his tangled feelings over his son's betrayal of their ancestral village.

The plot skips back and forth in time to reveal the winding paths of the characters as they move through history. An omniscient narrator also offers glimpses into the past and future of minor to minuscule players, such as this comment about the lid of an industrial ice machine for sale in the city bazaar, "Three half brothers, now sixteen, eleven and eight, had been conceived on that steel lid, none yet aware of the others' existence." We read no more about the half brothers. Some of these tiny sub-stories are hopeful, showing young lives continuing for another century, some devastating, such as the page-and-a-half long sentence about two teenaged brothers, buried years apart, but only "an arm's length of dirt" away from each other in the same unmarked grave.

Sound like a challenging read? Obscure? Sad? Sure, all of those, but so worth the work, emotional and intellectual. Marra based the title of his book on a metaphorical description in a medical dictionary of life itself. Experiences of life's essential qualities, not only those that distinguish it from stone, the "organization, irritability, movement," but those that give it intensity: hope and grief, cruelty and compassion, are written here with great understanding, especially from a writer so young.

I read the pages of Constellation describing compound grief and massive loss, loss of sister, brother, father, mother, home, city, country, civilized society and homeland with a sense of gratitude for the words I found for some of my own experiences. The twinges of familiarity are a kind of comfort to me. My loss of family is a story not unusual for a war torn country, but strange in this peaceful suburban landscape where my children are growing up safe and sound.

I've blogged here before about the feeling of otherness that overtakes me at times. I called it my strange landscape. I called it the long loneliness. I wonder how anyone can understand and I cherish those dear friends brave enough to try.

My new family, my husband and my two daughters, bring me joy, peace and purpose. They know Mommy is different, though, and their healing love will not stop my occasional feelings of being on the outside looking in, nor stay the moment of introspection during the toasts at a wedding, nor prevent the wince inside while I smile at a friend's story of spending time with her sister or brother.

In Marra's book, the work of remembrance is essential and good and saving for those left behind. Akhmed, the worst doctor in the village but its only doctor and so also its best, paints portraits of friends and neighbors taken away in the dead of night and hangs the paintings in the streets, on fences, in the forest.

For those missing that he never knew, he draws portraits from the descriptions of their families. His adopted daughter keeps souvenirs of the refugees who stay in her bedroom before traveling on to an uncertain future. Before the doctor's sister disappears, she draws the view of a city from memory on the boards that cover a bombed out window.

This work is done out of enduring love; this work is done from reverence. This work is a kind of communication known to be one-way, but sent nonetheless.

This spring I choose the commemorative trees, the tallest elm I could find for my parents, a white redbud for my brother and sister, that will be planted in the park across the street from the yellow brick house where we lived together in LaGrange, Illinois. I composed the words for the bronze plaques. "In loving memory."

Ronald James Fey, Sr.
July 18, 1931 - March 23, 1969

Bernadette Marie Fey
December 19, 1933 - March 23, 1969

Christopher Edgar Fey
January 31, 1962 - August 6, 1976

Nancy Margaret Fey
September 26, 1966 - August 6, 1976

You can read more responses to Marra's book at From Left to Write. Click here for an NPR interview with Anthony Marra where he reads an excerpt from his book. The bloggers receive an advance copy of the book with no obligation.

But It Looked So Good In My Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Sun, 12 May 2013 05:09:00 +0000

Storm Large is my idol. (Or one! One! of my idols! Please don't feel usurped DollyJoniRickyLeePattySmith!) And this video has the feel of how great I feel on a good karaoke night, like a couple of weeks ago at The Rock House when our mom group and the employees were the last ones in the house at 9:30 and "House of the Rising Sun" just rolled out of throat like pouring honey.

The fun was only made better by Karen Holmberg's hilarious story of her middle school dance troop making up an original routine to the Animals' original.

"You didn't know it was about a brothel?" I asked, laughing.

"We wore matching t-shirts with suns on them."

Imagination and optimism are powerful things. I've seen and heard the video evidence to the contrary, but my songs always look so good in my head that I can't stop trying.

He Stopped Loving Her Today

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 01:10:00 +0000

I've wept to this song so many times, one more time today for good ol' George who gave me my first sip of the intoxicating cocktail of old time country's pathos and cornpone that always makes my belly shake with laughing and sobbing in equal measure.

Oh, that tale of unrepentant endless love. Oh, that midpoint spoken soliliquy over the sweet coos of the background singers. And George's endless stare -- was it a result of all those bottles, all those pills, all those divorces, all those years missing Tammy?

Spring Fever

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:24:00 +0000

That warmish, shivery, frenzied, discombobulated fever that the cruelest month gives you.

When you need to console yourself in the face of senatorial lunacy by believing that we will write AND PASS even better, stronger gun control legislation next time without the giant loophole of excluding background checks for sales to "friends."

When your neighbor's giant piles of black trashbags next to the curb remind you to peek down the basement stairs to see if water seeped in during the epic storm, then close the door slowly and back away.

When we feel celebratory over a bloody capture.

When taking solace in entertainment leaves you sitting on the couch mesmerized and terrified by the brutality of Top of the Lake, Jane Campion's spooky crime mini-series that is Twin Peaks meets Deliverance in breathtaking New Zealand.

When you get only a tiny laugh out of realizing Valley Girl, Say Anything and The Graduate are all the same movie. Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy goes to extremes to win back Girl, Boy and Girl sit side by side in the movie's final shot, lost in their own thoughts, traveling into an unsure future.

What I Loved About My First McKenzie Variety Show

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:33:00 +0000

Certainly not the week of withdrawal afterward, when you go back to the real world and catch up on sleep and try to scrub the makeup stains out of your washcloths and laugh at all the videos and photos posted by your castmates and really miss all the fun we had.

Winning the Newbie award, of course, was a sky high point. Nicole Boomgaarden, who won last year, wrote me a poem and passed on the prize, a purloined little leprechaun statue (coincidence! OR WAS IT?) and the Thursday night crowd at Red Tomato cheered me on until I had to yell at them to shut up or they'd make me even more of a ham. Then George Rafeedie, my skit partner in crime and fellow backstage troublemaker, got the guy's Newbie! And then Greg Mayer, sweetest guy ever, gets a Special Newbie award just for being so great, for walking around backstage with a meat and cheese tray, for squeaking a hilarious leprechaun accent, for nailing a killer "What I Like About You" harmonica solo. Every. Single. Show.

There was the sweetest compliment from Scott Radke, who also played a puppy in Carrie Dolan's "Every Dog is Wishing For His Best Friend" from "Everybody's Working for the Weekend," (oh, admit it, you loved that Loverboy song when it was on the radio by the hour in 1981.) Anyway, what Scott said (in the nicest possible way) was, "You're not regular," and it may sound weird but I so appreciated it.

And Anne Edmondson as Lady Gaga calling out, "I shoulda worn my meat dress!" during "I'm A Rock Star"/"Rockin' the Casbah." Anne was a hoot in the dressing room too, keeping us laughing as we were frantically changing costumes or just killing time.

And the sweet retro pleasure of smiling tap dancers in pink raincoats swaying to "Pennies From Heaven."

And the perfectly less-is-more choreography of "1, 2, 3, 4, I Wish Math Was Not a Bore," a great song turned into something even better and more memorable than the original (sorry, Feist! Love you!)

And singing to a live band! The Fairy Godfathers of Soul brought it and you couldn't help feeling like a rock star, even dressed in jammies and warbling "I'm scared of monsters in the closet!" to the tune of Maroon 5's "Payphone."

And my Mia saying that she was a little mad that I waited until her fourth and last year at McKenzie to do the show.

Of course there were the screaming cheers at the end of every show and the soothing bath of hot stage lights from above and at the cast party, the crazy dancing and bad karaoke and OMG, CRAVE BARS.

But the best moment, really, was when the tiny boy, half the height of my little Nora, walked up to me during the after-show autograph signing and said, "I liked the part when you were funny."

Oh my heart just melted out of my chest and dripped into a big puddle of mushy love on the floor. I get all verklempt right now, just thinking about it.

Variety Is The Spice of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:53:00 +0000

Clifford the Big Red Dog gives me a doggie nose before our big song and dance number.

Busy, busy, too busy to write, exhausted when the kids wake me at what feels like three in the morning but is really almost time for school only five minutes to make their lunches and hustle them into coathatbootsgloves and out the door, yelling after them, "Be kind! Take the high road! Make me proud" before I collapse back in bed for half an hour of swirling mind overflowing with To Dos and costume details and key changes and tricky harmonic intervals and the Girl Scout events that I refused to reschedule into a less crazy time of March just because I will not say Can't even though I barely Can.

The overcast days are hard but when the stage lights go on, I'm finally warm. Two dance and sing numbers in the elementary school Variety Show, plus the all-cast opener and closer plus three scenes of a goofy skit where I mug shamelessly and do great violence to the Irish dialect.

I'm in a musical! My favorite art form, where imagination takes artifice as plausible and bright happy illusions are accepted as true for a few brief bars of music.

All This Joy I Have Found

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 05:14:00 +0000

"The only cure for sadness is happiness," says one of the young widows in Becky Aikman's memoir Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives.

Five summers after my sister and brother died, I lay on a fallen tree in the sun beside a cold Colorado stream. The tree's bark had fallen away and the wood was smooth and sun-warmed under my back. I was sixteen years old, traveling with a group of Girl Scouts from around the country, new friends on a four day back-packing trip. We had stopped to snack and rest after a morning of heavy hiking. The stream ran through a shallow valley in the woods. With the blue sky overhead and the heavy tree-shade all around us, it felt like we were at the bottom of a peaceful bowl. We took off our heavy boots to soak our tired feet in the icy water and took off our shirts to bathe in the sun. We laughed at our daring to lounge around in bras and shorts, but we hadn't seen another group of hikers since a pair of trail workers with their pack llama surprised us yesterday morning.

I lay in the sun, in the quiet and the heat, the endorphins flowing from the miles we had covered and I recognized a new but familiar feeling. It was a special kind of quiet ecstasy that I noticed only a couple of times before this. Once, next to a Pizza Hut, of all places, late afternoon, in the early spring, when a warm buffeting wind and warm smells and the setting sun and purple shadows across a field filled my heart. And once next to my friend Tamar as we watched the film Christ Stopped At Eboli, during a long traveling shot of bare trees against a white winter sky.

I knew losing myself in laughter with friends, I knew the thrill of being in the spotlight and winning awards. This was different: singular, interior, fleeting but unforgettable.

I had used the word Epiphany only as a Catholic "feast" day (the church I grew up with seemed to have a pretty skimpy sense of feast); only later, when I was out of my teens, would I come across the Joycean use of the word - as in a moment of spiritual enlightenment - and adopt it to describe imperfectly these special moments when my senses were heightened by the gorgeousness of the moment and everything was right and joy came to me as intense as pain.

There was no sense of how far I had come that summer day with the Girl Scouts. I didn't think about a journey from dark grief and loss; I didn't dwell on the work of recovering the strength in my leg. I did not think that way then. There was only the Now and the anguish of five years prior was an eternity away.

Since becoming a parent, those shots of intense joy I found here and there in my adolescence have become a daily dose of contentment and abundance. Today Mia pulled me aside after school to show me the chocolate rose a boy gave her. I listened to the girls making music on the violin and piano. We bought Valentine balloons and a leprechaun costume. It's a different ecstasy, this grown-up happiness. It knows the loss, acutely. The loss lives inside. And yet it goes on. Even when the longing overcomes me, my heart's default is joy.

"All this joy, all this sorrow, so much promise, so much pain/Such is life, such is being, such is spirit, such is love" says the singer from Colorado.

You can read more responses to Aikman's book at From Left to Write. The bloggers received a copy of the book with no obligation.

The Pain of Maturity

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 07:00:00 +0000

The nurse hands us our tiny child. At the miraculous sight, the memories of the arduous journey to reach this point fade away. We gasp at the tiny fingernails, we are filled with the sweet sensation of the baby's smell, we marvel at the skin, the softest thing we've ever felt. We become parents and in that instant, we transform.

Suddenly, every child's cry alerts our ears, every other parent's pain strikes us in the heart. We have not only opened our individual selves into a family, but we have opened our hearts and minds to the entire world with new understanding and empathy. To paraphrase Elizabeth Stone, we walk around with our hearts outside our bodies. We grow up.

And so the time comes, as Scripture says, to "put away childish things."

America is going through a painful transformation of its own. Some Americans cling to the status quo, to the faulty belief that any and all firearms in civilian hands keep us safer. They howl complaints about rights violations as if the Second Amendment delineated their sole right in the entire Constitution, as if the liberty to own an arsenal of military assault weapons was more important than a child's right to his six year old life.

Our country's lack of adequate gun control, the proliferation of dangerous weapons, our inability to protect Americans from gun violence and the hysterical and irrational arguments against sensible gun control show us that our country is not only historically young, but emotionally and morally immature as well. It is time for us to grow up. Gun control is not only crucial to save American lives, it is vital to our identity as a mature nation.

What are the signs of a national maturity?

When we become mature parents, we take responsibility for the lives of our children, we study the best ways to keep them safe, we advocate for their well-being, and we sometimes need to exercise our greatest patience and tolerate their occasional and temporary insanity. So it must go with America.

We need to take responsibility for the unacceptable daily death toll of Americans from guns. The National Vital Statistics report from the Center for Disease Control reveals that in 2011, the U.S. saw 11,101 firearm homicides, 851 accidental shooting deaths, and 19,766 gun suicides.

The cynical gun control opponents try to argue that these suicide deaths are inevitable. Yet the Harvard School of Public Health has found access to firearms not only increases the risk of suicide, but ensures most attempts will not fail. "About 85% of attempts with a firearm are fatal: that’s a much higher case fatality rate than for nearly every other method. Many of the most widely used suicide attempt methods have case fatality rates below 5%."

American has more guns per capita than any nation in the world, over 75 weapons for every 100 citizens. Our gun murder rate, over 35 people killed per day, is higher than any developed nation that is not embroiled in a drug war. At the January 26 Peaceful Gun Control Rally and Candlelight Vigil at the Chicago Temple, the names were read of eighty-nine Chicago schoolchildren killed since the beginning of the school year. Easy access to guns has resulted in thousands of preventable American deaths.

We need to study the best ways to keep Americans safe.

If the NRA has committed a more malevolent act than claiming that the mental illness system is broken while working to get guns back in the hands of the involuntarily committed, it must be its suppression of scientific research into gun injuries.

In 1996, the National Rifle Association used Arkansas Republican Representative Jay Dickey, the self-proclaimed "point-person" for the gun organization, to sponsor legislation that halted funding for gun research by the CDC. There was no attempt to disguise the law as as a cost-saving measure; the NRA wrote language added to the bill: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

Research can dispel myths that surround the gun violence controversy, like the idea put forth in this week's Senate hearing by Gayle Trotter that guns protect women. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center found that states with more guns have more female violent deaths. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health determined that access to firearms increases the risk of intimate partner homicide five times more than in instances where there are no weapons.

Abolishing myths takes time, however. The fight for sensible gun control in this country will require great patience on the long road.

We need to exercise firm patience when faced with the rants, tangled logic and brutality of gun control opponents. Mature adults were horrified when the father of a child killed at Sandy Hook was interrupted by pro-gun shouting during his testimony before the Connecticut legislature. We in Chicagoland are no strangers to such incivility; at a recent panel discussion in Glenview, "Guns and Public Safety," the shouts and boos of the gun supporters often drowned out the speakers, including Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins whose pregnant sister and brother-in-law were shot and killed in Winnetka in 1990.

The gun control opponents may be critical, cruel and corrosive, they may offer few constructive ideas, but they are Americans, many of them are law-abiding and they are not going away. Not all gun owners are in line with the NRA leadership, which is sponsored and supported by the gun manufacturers.

Hunters can be responsible and safety-conscious. They can cull over-populated animals, put healthy food on their families' tables, avoid buying feed-lot beef or factory fowl and fight the over-development that threatens the woodlands and wetlands where they hunt.

By working to understand and respect an American tradition, gun control advocates and responsible gun owners can find some common ground.

Much work is ahead. Patient, responsible and well-informed Americans need to step up to change both our laws and our violence-tolerant culture.

On December 14, one or more of the bullets fired in a first grade classroom, a place where no gun should ever be, destroyed the tiny left hand of Noah Pozner, the youngest of the twenty children killed at Sandy Hook that day. As a nation, we must examine the idea of that mangled hand, as so many of us have examined the beautiful hands of our own children the first time we saw them. We must look at the damage that bullets wrought and we must be resolved and transformed.

A Few of My Favorite Things

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 18:42:00 +0000

Udupi Palace makes both vegetarians and the gluten-averse very happy! (Pretty hand to show the scale of enormous lentil-rice crepe)

My birthday today and so far, forty-eight is great! A long wonderful dinner with Christina last night, who surprised me with a story collection by Anthony Doerr and some sweet-smelling Etsy soap; another surprise at Virginia's, whose chocolate cake with butter icing made us swoon and whose candy-fetching cat made us laugh. We talked long and hard about Bergman and Michael Mann movies, about why people choose the work they do, about the limits and myths of psychotherapy and the weird power of the mind-body connection.

Today I woke to tiny hand drawn cards tucked into my bedroom door, got treated to some extra sleep and second breakfast in bed, more funny cards, flowers and warm wishes on Facebook. Time for a workout and some scribbling, a train ride down to the One Million Moms for Gun Control Peace Rally and dinner with Randy, followed by The Book of Mormon will round out a gorgeous day! Very grateful.

Here are some gifts for you, dear Readers, some of my favorite things to celebrate with me!

I loved this show!

Salt of the earth Boston carpenters helping build the new Partners in Health-funded hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti.

Dear husband on Corporate Wig Day at Optimus.

Join Us

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:01:00 +0000

Candlelight Vigil & Peaceful Gun Control Rally

Sat., January 26,

4:45 - 5:45 pm

WHERE: N. Clark St. & W. Washington St.,

Chicago 60602

One Million Moms for Gun Control (1MM4GC), along with the IL Council Against Handgun Violence & Chicago's Citizens for Change, will host a rally in downtown Chicago with speakers from the metro area, including Toni Preckwinkle (Cook County Board President). We need you there, to launch this strong movement of concerned parents, united in unwavering support of common-sense gun laws. We demand a safer world for our children -- please join us. Prominent public officials and clergy will participate. We invite all compassionate, supporting citizens to attend in peace and unity.

Meet inside at the Chicago Temple Building (a.k.a. First United Methodist). Moms, Dads, Grandparents, students, parents and non-parents, all are welcome.

I'll see you there!

The Expats: Visiting the World of Large "T" Thrills

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 03:35:00 +0000

The Expats, the newest book we're discussing at the From Left to Write bookclub is a thriller from first time novelist Chris Pavone.

Protagonist Kate Moore has left the dangerous CIA job she hid from her husband Dexter to move with him and their two young boys to Luxembourg. After years of international travel and thrilling casework, Kate finds adjusting to a new culture less work than staying engaged with being a full-time mom. A sudden friendship with another expat American couple brings up the threat of revealed secrets from Kate's past, and worse.

Reading Pavone's book offered the pleasures of working a literary Rubik's cube. The story jumps back and forth in time, each switch offering a new revelation from what the reader knew before. Suspicions and sympathies are confirmed, swapped, rearranged. I loved the journeys through the European countryside and capitals and through the workings of Kate's analytic mind.

Our bookclub usually discusses how the literature touches our own lives but Kate reminded me more of a jet-setting mom like Angelina Jolie than myself. The closest connection came when I was reading about Kate's family ski trip to the mountains above Geneva, Switzerland while Randy and the girls and I were enjoying New Year's in the Colorado Rockies. But Kate's slopes were black diamonds, while mine were bunnies and greens. Her fears were of treachery, assassination, betrayal; mine were of landing on my bum.

In many ways, it was the perfect book to tuck into my carry-on bag. Next to an adrenaline-filled week of performing on stage in our grade school Variety Show in March, Colorado will be, I am nearly certain, one of the biggest adventures of my year. And that is fine for me right now. Kate Moore's story added a little extra vicarious zing to an experience I wanted to leave with intact knees and memories of thrills with small "t"s.

We saw my brother in Fort Collins before we headed for the slopes. Mia is only a few months older than he was when we lost our parents. "Right now your job is staying alive," he told me, and I nodded with complete understanding. For the two of us, that is normal conversation.

If Kate's story of international manhunts and cyber-crime touched me at this point in my life, it was through a realization about safety.

It's not news that stories like Kate's reinvention of her life appeal to women like me for whom routine, stability and safety are precious gifts we want to sustain. Nor is it any surprise that fantasy is our means to temporarily sink into an alternate reality. We giggle through Magic Mike and then go home to take a shower and wash off the temporary sweaty indulgence. We watch Downton Abby and commiserate with the British noblewoman or man of our choice. Girls makes us feel again young, hungry, searching and clueless in our twenties before we feel again old enough to be glad we will never go through such hell again.

Kate brings risk and intrigue back into her world by the end of the book; it's lovely to watch another woman make that choice.

Read more posts about The Expats at From Left to Write. I received a copy of the book with no obligation.

A New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:08:00 +0000

"It's dark. Who are you?" was the almost eight year old's contribution to our New Year's Eve dinner game of Jokes and Riddles We Make Up.

"That's scary," said her big sister.

"That's deep," said her mom, who approved the question on this most reflective of long nights.

My own products of that reflection (Life is various and wonderful, constantly new and ever-ending; 2012 was both the year I turned 47 and apparently the last time I will be able to fool the mirror into believing otherwise; no matter -- when I don't like what I see, I smile and it improves the view; this clean and quiet time in deep winter may be the perfect season for the year to begin again as well as to end....) will need to wait for another post to be compiled, (or not, since this living business takes up so much of my time these days.)

But I really do want to tell you another of the homemade jokes from the last night of the year that we spent together at the fancy mountaintop restaurant where I was working it as Camp Counselor Mom ("Let's play Jeopardy! First category, Beetlejuice!") to stave off the electronics option that was keeping our neighboring table quietly engrossed in their laps.

This joke takes some effort; say it outloud for the full effect.

Here's the original, a family favorite from dear friend Brent:

Two monkeys are sitting in a tree and one asks the other, (jut your lower jaw forward as far as it will go) "Do you ever get water in your mouth when it rains?"

(Now pull your jaw back and give yourself an enormous overbite to be the other monkey) "No, why do you ask?"

Mia's variation: Two bats are hanging from a tree and one asks, (do the underbite again) "Do you ever get water in your mouth when it rains?

(Pull the overbite and say) "Oh yeah, all the time! And you?

Third variation:

Two camels are walking through the desert and one asks... Etc.

The second one says, "We live in the desert. It never rains here."

Here's hoping you have some silliness and shared laughter of your own this 2013.

Happy Holidays!

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 01:39:00 +0000

Sandy Hook

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 06:13:00 +0000

Last Saturday I took the girls to the Evanston Ecology Center to make nature Christmas tree ornaments, one of the ecology center's No Child Left Inside programs. Nora's initial reluctance was blown away by the first sight to greet us as we came in the room: a tortoise, the size of an inverted punchbowl, lumbering around the room. "Look out! He's chasing us down!" I said and feigned a cartoony slow-motion escape. The girls petted a huge black rabbit and comparison-shopped a degu's double decker cage for his cousin, our Little Prince.

Our program guide Tim took us on a walk through the Ladd Arboretum where we collected leaves and pine needles, dried flowers and pine cones. Back in the warm program room, glitter flew, paint splashed and melted wax dripped until we had an egg carton fill of wet and wonderful ornaments for the tree (and our winter coats were dappled with yellow acrylic.)

On Sunday, Nora had a birthday party, Mia played hide-n-seek with our neighbor girl and both practiced their instruments and sporadically helped Mommy with my afternoon of cookie baking. Peppermint bark, Martha Stewart's pistachio-almond-apricot-dried cherry confections and sugar cookies that we decorated later in the week, ~~once I figure out how to make royal icing~~, once I figured out that melted white chocolate makes an awesome icing.

"The Year With a Santa Claus" wrapped up our weekend, but somewhere between the innocence and the sweetness, beyond the drifts of glitter and sparkling sugar, there had to be The Talk. I picked Saturday night dinner at the new little steak house in town. We were comfy in our seats under a giant wreath, we were together, we were eating bread and butter and I asked the girls if they had heard anything at school on Friday.

"No."

Telling the girls an abbreviated version of what happened in Connecticut felt wrong enough - words that no parent should need to say. Yet rushing to tell them next that what happened was very far away from us seemed even more wrong: an imperfect way to reassure them of their safety. I would rather nurture their belief that we are one world and the children of another town, another state, another country are our neighbors and our friends. But this moment I was flying by the seat of my pants and on advice I'd found online.

"Was he drunk?" asked little Nora.

"How did he...?" asked Mia and I had to say, "He had a gun." My voice wavered. I rushed to add, "But the good thing is that now we are going to change laws so that people can't get guns to hurt kids."

Nora was ready to move back to the Dav Pilkey books she had brought along, but Mia sat limp in her chair, lost. I moved to her side and we hugged. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, honey, but we knew people would be talking about this at school and we wanted you to know you are safe and loved."

A horrible conversation. And I had thought Columbine was the worst we would ever see.

Something happened to me two Fridays ago. I was on the phone, in the middle of a sentence when I saw the headline "28 dead" and I stopped short, my throat closed, sick, unable to speak to the oblivious woman on the other end.

Every morning since then, I wake up to the awful reality again.

My sister and brother did not die from an act of violence, only a sad, sad error, but the reports of twenty tiny coffins brings back the acute agony of the year they died and the lingering pain of every year after. They were gone and realizing this fact again every morning was a plunge down a slope of jagged rocks. The world was wrong. The world was gone wrong. The pain was many and various. The regrets of not caring for them enough in the short time we had together. The horror of imaging their last moments. The soul-sucking loneliness of their absence. The terrible ache of seeing the future holidays and normal days and special days and every day without them. My heart goes out to the Sandy Hook families. I have tasted a sip of their grief.

There was a horrific perfection to the numbers (20 children, 1st grade, 6 and 7 years old, 11 days before Christmas) and the place (the sacred ground of an elementary school) that crystallized and made absolute the gun-control necessity in my belief system. The numbers and their names and faces cut through the haze of defense mechanism ambiguity with which I had viewed previous shootings. These were the ugly lies I told myself before December 14: They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That child should not have been in a midnight movie. A grad of Columbine once told me "something was wrong with that school," that it was a place full of bullies. Lies I told myself to make the deaths tolerable. I am sorry, I am so so sorry for my blindness, for my lack of compassion and connection.

Yesterday we took the girls to see War Horse on stage at the Cadillac Theater and what I had half expected did happen: Mia was enthralled with the show while Nora felt better out in the lobby with me during the second act. The surprise I felt was not that the older girl would appreciate the show and the younger would need a break, but rather at my revulsion to a show I had read much about and had been looking forward to for weeks.

I knew the stories of the naively honorable and foolishly brave World War One cavalries decimated by the tanks; I expected the pathos of a vulnerable animal in danger and an unlikely reunion between the boy and his horse. Still, the character of Billy, the cousin of the War Horse's young owner, convulsing in panic and fear before a charge into the machine guns shook me out of engagement with the story. I hated this play. I wanted to leave.

It was a perfect story for this moment in America: innocents destroyed by weapons beyond the control of those who unleashed them upon the world. We are engaged in a cold war all over again, only this time, the opponents are ourselves. Weapons of mass destruction are pointed at our children and our only solution to the threat is disarmament.

Please use this link to donate to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Please write the President and Vice-President to show your support for gun control, and to your Senators and Representatives at the state and federal level to urge them to vote for reasonable and rationale firearms policy. Keep writing them.

Please call your money person if you have one and tell him or her to transfer your savings to socially responsible funds that do not invest in gun manufacturers.

Please refuse to give in to cynicism and hopelessness. Our president, on the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, told us, "Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice...."

To Be Jolly!

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 02:07:00 +0000

Tim Gearan's "Winter Wonderland." Enjoy!

'Tis The Season

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 04:07:00 +0000

For some sweet Swedish harmonies and yogurt cup percussion! Enjoy.

A Month of Gratitude

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 20:26:00 +0000

November has never been my best month. A rough season with bare trees and dying light. A gray screen over the world that leaves me feeling heavy and shredded.

But this time round, there has been this little writing project to keep me both grounded and uplifted. A goal to remember something to be grateful for every day. Because, as the wise Interwebs tells us, Gratitude turns what we have into enough.

This month, I am grateful for the proverb of the fighting wolves. One wolf is your anger, envy, sorrow, regret, guilt, resentment. In my mind, his eyes are dreadful red. The other is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, kindness, compassion, empathy, and truth. This wolf glows blue within you. The punchline? The winner of their battle is the one that you feed.

Actually, I'm grateful for the whole theme of wolves in general -- picturing the blue wolf curled beside me helps me sleep at night; the bumper sticker "I Was Raised by Wolves" makes me laugh out loud. Weren't we all?

I'm grateful for the darkly funny tweets of Joyce Carol Oats. "The difference between magic & politics: magic is tricking people with the intention of delighting them." "Cessation of pain is the new happiness. Abrupt cessation, the greatest high."

And for Beautiful Ruins, an immensely readable and satisfying novel by Jess Walter about Hollywood old and new, a tiny coastal village near the Cinque Terra of Italy, betrayal, hope, love, pitching bad ideas, Liz and Dick, and busking the Edinburgh Fringe Fest.

For David Guetta. I've never heard his voice, but his music stirs my blood.

For friends who are like family and for family who are also friends.

For sweets! Apple pie with cardamon, clove, fennel seed, ginger and cinnamon; Moonstruck chocolates, eggnog sandwich cookies from Whole Foods next to mushroom and apple shaped sugar cookies from Foodstuffs; candied ginger; molasses and honey pumpkin pie; flourless chocolate cake with raspberries and powdered sugar stencil.

For dear friends who walk 60 miles for breast cancer research! I wish I could walk with them, but I can't. (Won't? Couldn't? Mightn't? Wouldn't? The three miles I walked the day after Thanksgiving gave me blisters and knocked me out for the afternoon.)

Rickie Lee Jones at Space in Evanston. For her continued control and command of that unforgettably expressive voice. The night was both a reunion and a meditation on the passing years; this woman has earned the right to her emotive cover of "Sympathy for the Devil." "Young Blood" was joyous and I called out with her line "in the back row! Hold on tight!" because that's where Virginia and I were standing. "A Tree on Allenford" was a relevation. Not all was as joyous as my last time seeing her live, in Boston, 1992, however, when I scalped tickets with a brand-new friend and Rickie encored with her Grammy-nominated "Autumn Leaves." Accompanied by an unobtrusive cellist and bassist/keyboard guy, many of the songs were played with so delicate a touch as to try the patience of the drunk women sitting in front of us. And tunes like "Living It Up" brought me back to some hard times when I listened in pain. But there were funny stories of Rickie going to Cubs games with her dad and a gorgeous sing-along to "Horses" and the guy who shared his table with V. and me chimed in with me on the chorus and made a pretty harmony.

Winter Inspiration at Chalet

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I knew our local garden center Chalet was a source of gorgeous gifts, flowers, plants and trees and also as a fun place to take the kids for their special weekend family events (scarecrow stuffing! live reindeer!), but did you know they also have an education center with lectures and workshops?!

Chalet hosted a group of bloggers yesterday for their Winter Container Garden workshop, led by the ever-knowledgeble, enthusiastic and so adorable Jennifer Brennan and I learned all sorts of tips about creating gorgeous outdoor winter arrangements to prettify our porch and welcome winter visitors.

Fresh spruce tips, like the cute baby tree in the center with tiny pinecones, can be unfolded and shaped like so many pipe cleaners.

Noble Fir (the spiky uprights on either side of the center tree) has a bright green color on one side of its branches and a silvery-green underneath. And it makes one of the best Christmas trees for its wonderful scent and high needle retention.

White Pine will drape beautifully over the edges of your container like a skirt.

And Incense Cedar has tiny yellow pollen clusters that pop on their gorgeous arching branches. Other color accents are the Blueberry Juniper berries and Winterberry stems.

You too, can make a beautiful pot like the one above, all for the costs of materials and a registration fee. Workshops this week are Thursday evening from 6:30- 8:00, Friday from 1:00 to 2:30 and Saturday from 10 - 11:30. Pre-registration is required. Follow this link for more info.

Thanks, Chalet! It's inspiring to make something so beautiful and for that, I am so grateful!

More Gratitude

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 06:10:00 +0000

For small town parades, more people walking than cheering on the sidelines, it seemed. A mile or so of brick street that we covered in what felt like moments, although our Brownie troop had time for at least half a dozen "This Land is Your Lands," several "Brownie Smiles" and a couple "The Other Day I Saw A Bears."

For the restorative powers of the Chicago Botanical Garden on a mild and sunny November afternoon with haze softening the horizon. Mia and Nora searched for prairie grasses and late season berries to fill our Nature Bingo cards, but urns and strangely, squirrels escaped our eyes until the way home when I took a quick detour off Green Bay Road to show Randy the Ravine Bluffs development. A cluster of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, a bridge designed by the master and decorated with one of his signature URNS! With a squirrel on top!

I am so grateful for my big brother Ron whose fifty-third birthday is tomorrow. Dear Brother, I'm sorry I couldn't get you that oil-rich cattle ranch you wanted, but perhaps we can come see you this Christmas season and bring you a little something-something to make up for it.

For director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner (working from the source material of Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln) who have made the most inspiring and moving film I saw this year. A familiar figure seen anew and his world so fully realized that you understand his adoration by his contemporaries and you loathe to leave him at the end. Steven, why not reemploy your talented band of actors and your costume "agers," as the credits called them, and make us a few more hours of company with the gentle-smiling and parable-telling man?

I am grateful for the sight and sound of two little girls jiving to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O" first thing in the morning.

For recipes for Squash with Chili Lime Vinaigrette and Pineapple Cranberry Salsa to liven our Thursday table.

For playdates that entertain my children while I plan the menu and maybe, maybe, hopefully, stretch their good socializing skills.

For the sweet anticipation of Volo Bog and the little patches of prairie and oak savanna at the Grant Wood Forest Preserve in Ingleside where we'll hike after the gluttony.

I am grateful for The Mindy Project because it's really funny.

And I am grateful for each invisible circle of inhale and exhale that fuels my days and soothes my nights. When I stop to notice them, I remember each is a perfect moment that I am happy to have.

In Gratitude on Veterans Day

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 02:32:00 +0000

My father, Ronald James Fey, Sr., enlisted in the United States Air Force in October of 1951, when he was twenty years old. He trained at bases in San Antonio, Denver and Tucson and served out of Okinawa, Japan as a navigator on reconnaissance flights over the Russian coastline. He achieved the rank of second lieutenant and was honorably discharged on August 2, 1956. For the next three years he served as a captain of the Air Force Active Reserve.

For his service and that of all our veterans, I am ever grateful.

So Much For Which To Be Grateful

noreply@blogger.com (Cindy Fey) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:11:00 +0000

For my dear girls who break and heal the heart simultaneously.

For dear, dear Randy, who lets me drive him as crazy as he does me, then reaches for my hand and squeezes it before we even open our eyes in the morning to let me know we are going to be okay.

For dear Aunt Ruth, who, at eighty-eight, with macular degeneration and shifty hearing, still rallies in her red state to place her vote for good. And for her dear daughter Jeanne, who takes her to the polls, makes her laugh, keeps Ruth company and keeps Ruth independent.

For this lovely community where friends and friendly neighbors are steps away.

For our crossing guard, Tom, who takes his job of getting us across busy Lake Street as seriously as it deserves.

For dear friends gathering for the upcoming feast.

For my Kindle, a gift from Randy, which is saving me shipping and shelf space.

For our little Brownie troop, full of sass and cuteness, eager to pick up trash and do good deeds, sing silly songs and act out the Girl Scout laws of fairness and honesty, kindness and strength. And for a wise and funny partner to help me wrangle them.

For the good sense, faith and courage of this country that reelected our hardworking and sensible President. I say with great love, we deserve him.

For the patience of my friends and family as I fall apart in this dark season and try again every morning to pick up the jagged pieces and put them back together again.