this is one monkey you gotta meet

To be honest, I haven't gotten quite so excited about someone else's life for a long time. When I first glanced over the press release for “The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments," I basically puh-shawed (verb usage?) And then I came to. (Press-releases send me into a 30 second stupor before I am able to resume normal brain function.) I read a few sentences. And then a few more. And then I couldn't stop! Which led to this beautifully written passage that now graces the editorial department's cutting room floor:

While reading his book, my work and my co-worker’s work suffered. I couldn’t stop compulsively reading, shrieking or quoting aloud passages as I delved deeper into the jungles of this man’s ridiculously adventured life, populated by the who’s who of the modern spiritual world against such backdrops as India, Brazil and Jerusalem.

Then I got to meet the guy. And he's so unassuming! He's not arrogant or prickish or loud or any of those things you may have come to fear in a writer, if, like me, you spend some time around writers (Or gurus for that matter. I'm not referring to YOU of course.)

Come to find out, he's spent over a year in our fine, charming, cosmopolitan town and has not yet met ANYBODY!! He has friends all over the globe and a lovely wife, etc. but he's been pretty much a hermit around these parts and so I graciously offered to help him step into the limelight of the South via the alternative weekly vehicle, Style Weekly! So anyhoo, read my article HERE. And come with me to hear him read at Chop Suey at 1317 West Cary Street on April 6 at 3pm. It'll be a swingin' good time.

Here's another little gem that got the axe:

But for all of his spiritual tomfoolery, the undercurrents of “99th Monkey” are serious, historical, and even monumental. Sobel’s moment with the Dalai Lama is transcendent; his homage to Auschwitz is sacred and his quest to understand the horror instilled in him as the child of a child of concentration camp victim is key. As a chaplain at a university hospital he helped people.

jesus' lap looks so full

Like every good Jewish girl, I love Easter.

Hunting for hollow chocolate bunnies in the bushes, rainbows of jelly beans buried in plastic eggs, flourescent yellow sugar chicks laying upon their beds of plastic grass. Just like what Jesus had at the last supper. So this Easter, we went to visit my mother-in-law (whom I love dearly. this is a disclaimer for anything that comes next.) Like all good Jewish girls, I married a Baptist boy, ensuring that our son would grow up to have just as big of an identity crisis as me. Sunday, after an anarchy filled egg hunt and a cartoon about the resurrection we took our boy to the nursery with his Baptist Grandma while we headed upstairs to catch the Sermon. Sadly, the sanctuary was already filled to capacity and we had to leave. Yes, we had to miss the 13 live baptisms on the docket for the day- unlike 2 years ago when my "Sex in the City" cellphone ring added a new dimension to one man's religious induction. We could have squeezed into the adult education room with the rest of the overflow and watched the service on video, as we were invited too, but we have standards. We are not McEaster nuggets. We walked up and down the streets of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood (wishing desperately that more Jewish people would move to the South and open some coffeeshops that weren't closed on Sundays) before returning to Church to wile away our time in the Bethany Room. There, Stan, who like all good reclusive-skater-intellectual-freaky types went to a Nazarene College in Boston, read to me some of the more interesting passages from one of the many Gideon Bibles, lining the shelves.

Such as this from the book of Judges:

But Ja'el, the wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple, till it went down into the ground, as he was lying fast asleep from weariness. So he died.

Hmph. Well. Yeah. Happy Passover ya'll!

exhaustion is a 4 letter word.

this is what the inside of my planner and the inside of my brain look like tonight at 10:58 pm:

deadlines

line edits

publications committee preschool silent auction

calendars out the wazooky

spring social scene-- a beast I tell you!!

gym (well, at least i walked in)

board meetings (wait a minute- am I a grown-up??)

taxes

law suits

collection agencies

playdates

easter eggs

birthday parties. for people who haven't reached their double digits. lots of them.

bed

laundry laundry laundry

dishes dishes dishes

life and death

returned phonecalls

all the unreturned phone calls

subsequent guilt

disturbing dreams

dead sleep

carb heavy sugar laden breakfasts

caffeine

coffee

caffeine

coffee

a lite lunch salad

parking garage

energy bar

god

please

prayer

please

17 cool kids

So I wrote the "16 under 16" piece for Style this year honoring 17 kids ((15 + twins) that have made an impact on the community. Tonight was the event and it was even more inspiring than most events with kids that are intended to be inspiring. Dr. Bill Bosher was the speaker. As a lifetime on and off resident of Henrico County I have heard this man's name and seen his big smiley white mustached, bow-tied head shot at least one million times since kinder garden. He SORT OF looks like a mix of Colonel Sanders and Santa but he was a lot funnier and friendlier and more laid back than I expected a man with that many credentials following his name to be. He said he'd known his wife since he was in seventh grade and she in sixth. He thought she was the prettiest girl in the school and she thought "this boy needs help!" = they were a perfect match.

And then came the kids. They were all so ADORABLE (not to be condescending!) and kind hearted and enormously smart and more accomplished than a lot of us much further along in our double digits. I'd had the pleasure of interviewing each of these seventeen in February and had already fallen in love with every one of them. It was neat to see them with their families, dressed up, in front of a podium, accepting their honors graciously, shyly, with pizazz, humility and just a tiny tad of tomfoolery. Their parents were teary, beaming, immensely proud and grateful to have their kids recognized and honored in this way (aren't moms and dads the wind beneath all those little wings?). I mean, we were at the Virignia Historical Soceity. CBS 6 Evening News was there. The publisher and a local news anchor (I'm sorry, never caught his name, can't remember who, but Mr. Personality) read the bios and gave the awards. It was cool to hear my words read from a stage. Maybe I'll become a speech writer. Then again, I probably won't.

And of course, during the program, I had to reflect on my own childhood and early teen years. The coulda woulda shoulda didn't oh wells what the hells. The i'm glad I did that-but not that and the if onlys and thank gods and might have beens. The fights with my mom and my defiance and sneaking out and experimentations with substances not legal for my age group and the bleached blonde hair and the occasional bad case of the F-its. And then I think about my three year old and where he'll be in those tender painful raw middle high school years fraught with potential and danger and possibility. What stages will he walk across or trip on or soar above? Will we applaud as he stands and catch him if he falls? Yes of course we will. But please God, don't let him be like me!

It's an astronaut....it's a playboy bunny....it's Dan Mathews!

He's hot. He's wild. He's gay. He's into animals. Did I mention he's hot? He's also hilarious as hell and he's coming to Barnes & Noble on St. Patrick's Day. He's best friends with Pamela Anderson and he likes to go to jail naked. He's been in a psychiatric institution in Paris, lectured at Harvard and covered himself in fake blood at KFC. "Committed: A Rabble Rouser's Memoir" is very funny, endearing, absurd and brave. I had the pleasure of speaking to Mr. Mathews on the phone for about 30 minutes last week, and not only did I laugh throughout our entire interview, I laughed after we hung up and I went to bed laughing. I woke up laughing. I laughed writing the article, and then later, reading it. THANK GOD I have a brilliant copy editor who caught the extra "T" I snuck into Mathews (altho, that's the first thing that hit me after I quit laughing). You might not think a guy who cares so much about ermines and bats and minks and rats and stuff would have such a sense of devil-may-care humour, but you'd be wrong. And the funny thing is, (IF YOU EVER FIND MY BLOG, DONT READ THIS PART, DAN) I still want to eat fried chicken and meatballs (not together) and I'm not throwing away my college friend Walker's grandfather's leather coat or my Danskos and yes, I'm one of those who would rather take a week's vacation at the IRS than look a slaughter house in the eye, but I will definitely THINK about it all differently. I will. Thanks for putting the funny back in the t00-disgusting-and-vile-to-consider, Dan. Maybe my kid will see the world differently too.

In any case, whatever side of the fur fence you sit on, you still gotta read my article in STYLE !

crusade

I have distributed posters before, for various and sundry open houses and festivals, but never with such finesse and panache as I managed today. I was a poster hanging genius! I channeled my super powers by way of my passion for the mission- the Style Weekly Fiction Contest!!! On previous poster hanging details I have been the messenger without much of a message. At least not a personal one, hitting so close to home. Now I deliver poster as if my near future depends on it- because it does. I will be reading the stories that these posters illicit and I want them to be good. I want them to be plentiful. I want my fiction cup to over-floweth.

Judging stories in the past has been a dubious pleasure. If ever YOU submitted a story, yours is not the I'm talking about. Yours was great! I'm talking about those others, the ones that made me want to peel my eyelids back, take my temperature, call the po-lice, push the button, prepare for armageddon, crawl back into the womb, play the record backwards and wait for Satan to speak.

Please, God of Posters, don't let my foray into Panera and Starbucks and the Book Room and Superstars (of course not Ukrops- it's Sunday, silly!) and Book People and BIG BOOK SALE and Barnes and Noble be for naught. Submit something; give me something good. And hear this Barnes & Noble: Even tho you're conveniently located and have a train table and make a good latte, I'm not just "some lady from Style," I am "the lady of style" and I hung my poster even tho you said I couldn't! In your face! Well, I sorta propped it up there inside of the Style rack. But still! Sock it to the man!

talk a story to me

I don't often blog about mother-son relationships (except on the HESH Files which is woefully far behind) but he and I are now in the early stages of an evolving oral tradition that is sure to live on in our family until everyone dies out, turns gay or the republicans start the apocolypse.

As a girl, my dad always tolds stories about gangs of silly monsters who took over our house while we were away and at bedtime he read Uncle Remus and Uncle Wiggily stories (are those 2 brothers or what?) My mother read me the Wizard of Oz, A Walk in Wolf Woods and other epic, mythologically relevant books but the only story I really remember her making up for me on the spot was: "Once upon a time there was girl named Dory who had a brother named Rory and a dog named Bory. The end." (any similiarities to people living or dead is not pure coincidence and should be taken as a sign ((change your name immediately))). (Bless my mom's heart. I'm sure she told me 8,564 imaginative stories and the only one I remember is the one with zero story line and rhyming sibling names. But that's the glory of momhood, eh?)

Anyway, story hour at the Haggard home begins with Henry saying "Mommy, talk a story to me" and I say "what about" and he says "about a blue baby bear named Henry Quinoa who falls out of a tree and lands on his back" and I say "oh god" (under my breath of course,) and then I begin. Henry Quinoa, our fair hero, is always a

bear/llama/lion/horse/squirrel/pig/cow/cat/dog/mammoth

of a different color, named after our first born son and his favorite pseudo-cereal, quinoa. He always has super-human-super-animal abilities, is completely anthropomorphic and can fly. He is 60 feet tall and likes to set out into the unknown without his Mommy or his Daddy (Joseph Campbell, you have nothing on us!). He likes to pack berries and cheese sticks in his backpack and help small children get to the top of the slide. He climbs to the top of the tree to trade a raisin with a bird for a white feather and then, right before he reaches the top, he falls down down down to the ground and that's when he learns how to fly.

the Big Ass Book of Crafts vs. Archeoastronomy.

Yes, these were my two features in Home Style for March.

"The Big Ass Book of Crafts," written by Mark Montano (a real life TLC celebrity!!) is totally rad. Mark is a designer on "While You Were Out" and hosts "10 Years Younger" (which I have watched in closed captioning while sweating on a cross-trainer in a perhaps futile attempt to never be one of Mark Montano's guests- at least not on that show.) ANYWAY, this is an awesome craft book, not in a Martha Stewart way, meaning you don't have to spend $400 just to think about a craft nor do you have to wear ironed jeans as you weild your glue gun. There are lots of wacko, fun, cheap ideas and the coolest thing is that Mark has done them all himself and is excited for you to do them too. Plus, he's cute, NOT TO MENTION he will be in Richmond on March 8 (THIS Saturday) at Tinker's furniture upholstery signing books from 2-4 pm. Read my article/blurb about it HERE. (Side note. Crafts are not really a super-great idea for me, personally. I have tried stained glass, basketweaving, pillow making, scrapbooking, crotcheting and collage. While these things are fun, the products i have produced are not so pretty and all of the supplies take up a looottt of closet space. Also, I have mainly done these things as a way to avoid writing, which is a bad, bad idea. But that's just me.)

Followed naturally by Sun Drawings & Archeoastronomy. This was one of the most interesting interviews/articles I've ever done because it really stretched the meagre fiber of my brain. We are talking science, physics, alchemy and ARCHEOASTRONOMY (a term I had never even heard before 2 months ago)!!! This is not my forte, but it was so interesting I couldn't turn back. I'm not going to try to recreate the explanations I managed to peice together in my article, because you can read them HERE, but let's just say this stuff is high-tech and beautiful. Janet Saad-Cook, whom I tracked down for an intuitive tarot reading (she is a very talented psychic- multi-task central!) has built her Sun Drawings all over the world. She has been hired by NASA. She works with astronomers. She acts like the sun is a good friend, and for her, it is. She has in a sense, lassoed the sun. At least she knows how to work with it and turn it into bright colors and make it dance. And that, my friends is pretty cool.

recycle my paper ridden soul

I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I feel my life is spinnnnnnning out of control. Like when there is not one clean spoon left in the house. Like when Style Weekly moves to 1313 East Main Street, Ste. 103, Richmond, VA 23219 and disconnects the phones and computers while I'm trying to write the calendar for 2008, when my husband keeps his 12 foot windsurfing pole in the bed and starts painting the living room on a Tuesday, when my cat walks across the printer, printing random HP test pages, when NONE of the tupperware lids fit the containers, when we are considering selling the house and renting an apartment in the fan, when I don't know what my purpose is or why I even need one, when my ex-boyfriend appears on the back of the Yellow Pages. (Listen to these existential bourgeois problems!! I should be so lucky!)

Anyway, the other day, I put a dent in the insanity by...........recycling. Ten bags of junk mail, rejected drafts, used envelopes, press releases, half finished never to be sent letters, receipts, scraps of things, grocery lists, remnants of my brain, feline HP test pages, I even recycled the aforementioned phone book. I admit, I am a paper whore. I am a stationery addict. I am a book-o-phile. And I can measure my level of serenity by how often I remember to beat the mean green recycling machine to my driveway at 6 am on a Thursday. And it's not often. But when I do, it's a major purge, like confession on the highest of holy days, the ultimate spring cleaning, a saging of the pulp ridden soul. And now the little recycle bin by my side looks so clean, so pure, so virginal. It won't last long.