thelma & louise

Independence Day: Take-No-Crap Day for Women Everywhere

2008-07-02T12:02:00.030-05:00

Bangbangbang! That's the sound of your give-a-hooter exploding. This Independence Day, Thelma and Louise promote ending abusive relationships.

There's nothing you can do/Nothing you can say
I've crossed that bridge/Now I can't take another day/I gave you all I have/Gave myself away/And now I can't get it back no matter how long I might stay...

from "Love Never Dies, It Just Gives Up" by Trish Murphy

I shoulda run away I said/But I just didn't care
You get so used to feeling fear/That you don't know it's there...
from "Thelma and Louise" by Trish Murphy

WOMEN CAN STOP THE FIREWORKS ON INDEPENDENCE DAY:
Psychotherapist Offers Tips for Women in Abusive Relationships

This article published on http://www.foxbusiness.com/, http://www.forbes.com/ and other high profile fancy-do blogs - including a blog near you- on July 1, 2008.

DALLAS, Texas, July 1, 2008 –

This Fourth of July can be a show-stopping fireworks display, or for some women, a show of independence from crippling hurtful spousal abuse. Dallas psychotherapist and founder of Lifeworks Counseling Associates, Melanie Wells, believes in the importance of educating women about the signs and dangers of abusive relationships.

“Not all abuse is physical,” said Wells. “Abuse is often hard to spot and includes a wide spectrum of behaviors.”

Wells offers four warning signs to women who believe they could be involved in an abusive relationship. “Confusion is often the first sign,” says Wells. “If you’re frequently confused by your partner’s behavior and find yourself saying, ‘It’s like he’s two different people,’ then pay attention to how you feel when you’re with this man.”

According to Wells, abusive relationships are characterized by feelings of fear, guilt and shame. “Abused women are always trying to ‘fix’ themselves rather than paying attention to how they’re being treated. Eventually, they become overwhelmed with self-doubt.”

Another sign is that unhealthy behaviors often go unnoticed because they have become normal to those involved. “Tension is such a constant in abusive marriages that women in these situations often don’t notice the fear they feel. Emotions in these households are contagious. If Dad is mad, everyone else in the family feels tense and afraid.”

Wells also points to “loss of self" as a marker of abusive relationships: “When women spend more time trying to figure out how he feels, what he’s done and why – rather than asking themselves, ‘How is this affecting me and what am I going to do about it on my own behalf?,” they’ve lost who they are.”

Finally, Wells contends that the most difficult sign to spot is when women blur the lines between acceptable vs. abusive behavior. When this happens they have become abuse-able and are actually participating in the abuse by tolerating it or lying to themselves about it.

“If your daughter were in a relationship that looked like yours, what would you tell her?” says Wells. “If you’d tell her to ‘get out now,’ then that should be your response, too. While July 4th is a reminder, don’t wait until a benchmark holiday to address abuse in your relationship. Declare your independence now.”

For information regarding abuse and other relational difficulties, visit Lifeworks’ Web site at http://www.wefixbrains.com/. Along with being a licensed therapist, Wells also is author of a series of fictional psychological thrillers, “When the Day of Evil Comes,” “The Soul Hunter,” and “My Soul to Keep.” All books incorporate her experience as a psychotherapist and are available at bookstores and online retailers. Visit http://www.melaniewells.com/ for information.

For more information about Melanie Wells, please visit www.MelanieWellsNews.com. To arrange an interview with Wells please contact Vicki Morgan at 972.267.1111 or via e-mail at Vicki@alarryross.com.

Note to selves: We recommend (nay, demand) that all women read Gavin De Becker's book, The Gift of Fear, right now, this minute. Before you go on one more date or spend one more evening with that man of yours.

Question of the day: Why is it that so many of us spend more time picking out a melon than we do picking out a life partner? Just wondering...

The Five People You Meet in Hell - Part II

2008-06-26T18:10:00.005-05:00

A Dueling Pens Posting by Thelma and Louise

Benchwarmer #2: The Poacher

This is the cheating, lying bum who ignores all the "Posted" signs on your barbed wire fence and hunts on your land. The poacher is a lazy thief. This guy is personable, easy to get along with, charming. He can take the room. He's a little cocky, but not too obnoxious or no one would trust him at all. (Keep your eyes peeled for this one - he's hard to spot.) And his ethics are abominable. He's happy to take anything you have. Your friends. Your staff. Your credibility. Your money. Whatever he can lift off you that will make his life easier. I actually had someone try to poach my business phone number one time. I've always thought there's a special place in hell for such people. And now I know what bench he'll be sitting on and who he'll be sharing his days with.

The important thing to know about the Poacher is that he is reptilian. He has no conscience. For him it's "just business." The part of his brain which controls conscience and ethics never developed at all. He's running on basic brain stem activity, like a 14 year old on drugs. (Here's your 14 year old. Here's your 14-year old on drugs. You've been there. You've heard the popping grease and smelled the frying egg. Eew.) The Poacher really should have been a character on the Godfather. Like that scene at the very end where Tessio asks Tom Hagen for a break, "for old time's sake." Tom (Robert Duvall) takes a step backward and holds up his hands like Pontius Pilate. "Sorry," he says. "It's not personal. It's just business."

The Poacher should hang with the Corleones. Or the Sopranos. They are his tribe. He'd cut your throat in a minute if he thought it would do him a bit of good.

Coming Soon: Part III: The User

The Five People You Meet in Hell - Part I

2008-06-26T18:06:00.003-05:00

A Dueling Pens Posting by Thelma and Louise

I don't know how much money that dude who wrote "The Five People you Meet in Heaven" made for that book, but I can say without hesitation that I resent every dime of it. Does he think there will only be five people? He's number six? Is this the theory? And why isn't Elvis one of them? (Obviously, I have not read the book. Please don't email me about how this book has changed your life).

BUT, I'm sitting in the lobby of this snazzy hotel in Jackson Hole, Wyoming a few months ago and they have this roaring fire in the lobby. Actually two roaring fires, on opposite sides of the room, but that's not the point. The point is that there are these young, strapping men whose job it is to keep these fires burning (reason enough to check out this hotel...). The strapping young man in charge of the fire where I'm sitting notices the flames are waning, so he makes the trek outside to get more wood while I order another toddy for the body. It's cold. I'm tired. Fire good. Strapping young man good. Toddy for the body good.

So he comes back in and throws this thing on the fire:

My writer's imagination begins to run wild. It looks just like a bench at a bus stop in hell! (Perhaps one too many toddies....) I start to think about the five people you meet in hell. Now THIS is a useful concept. First, if you end up blowing your turn with the buzzer and your spin of the eternal destiny wheel lands on "bankrupt" and you find yourself in need of an extinguisher and a supply of bottled water (you're already in hell, so what do you care if people know you ruin the environment by drinking bottled water?), you'll be prepared. You'll know what to expect. You can have your questions, confrontations and, in appropriate cases, heavy blunt objects at the ready. And secondly - and this is waaaaaaay more important - perhaps you can avoid these people in real life so you don't have to share a bench with them ever. Anywhere. And they can go straight to hell without you. So to speak.

Benchwarmer #1: The Underminer (you know who you are)

Now, I have never personally seen a reality show. I stopped watching televison years ago (don't ask). But key to undersanding the Underminer is to understand that, for her, life is one long episode of Survivor. The tricky part is that no one else knows they're on the show! This is the genius of the underminer. With this exclusive vantage point, imagine the chaos, the destruction, the utter wasteland of devastation the Underminer can leave in her wake! Imagine how easy it is to run a bowling ball right through a group of co-workers, friends, or an entire family. This person is the Casius who whispers in your ear about an employee (see also: Gossip, below). It will sound something like this: "I hate to mention this, but I saw Sara rifling your desk the other day. I know you trust her and everything, and she really does seem so genuine. I'd hate to think that she'd do anything like that. But I thought you should know."

Your response, of course, is gratitude. Toward the Underminer. This is because her identity has not yet been revealed. You trust her. In fact, you value her loyalty. You decide to keep an eye on Sara.

Over the course of the next months, however, the Underminer will slowly erode your confidence in Sara. Until eventually, all you see when you look at Sara is an unlikeable, dishonest loser. So eventually you fire her. Boom. Sara's off the island.

The art here is in the backstory. See, the Underminer has been doing the same thing to YOU the entire time! Whispering into Sara's ear about you and about how you're starting to turn against her and that you're really capricious and moody and not to be trusted. Ever.

And then... guess what? You show up at a party a month later and who are BFF's? Yep, the Underminer and Sara. If you are naaive (as I once was, and as I'm still prone to be) your loyalty to people can blind you to this scam. Before you know it, they're all gone. Except you. Standing on your desert island wishing you had Wilson to talk to - that volleyball that Tom Hanks talks to in the movie. Everyone else is on the new island, which is populated entirely by people loyal to the Underminer and suspicious of you. She is now the star of the show.

Coming Soon: Part 2: The Poacher

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

2008-04-25T00:39:00.006-05:00

Well, we certainly proved ourselves to be exactly that at our little wingding last Thursday. Thanks to everyone who came out and listened to us tell our lies, read aloud from our books of lies, and sing about things that never really happened at all.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

It's Thelma, y'all. And I'm hear to tell you a thing or two about lies. And the lying liars who tell them.

See, we're all equipped with a B.S. meter. Ask any little baby you come across, or just watch them when they're still too little to worry where mom is. If she hands them off to someone they don't feel right about, they'll start wailing.

You were just like that when you were smaller. Some of us manage to stay that way, which is very lucky. Others get acculturated and domesticated, and probably told a few too many times that it's rude to not believe people's lies, or smacked around for questioning things they dang well know are lies. And it starts to get complicated and confusing. Eventually you sort of give up, and your gut instincts get ill. And gut + ill = guilt. Heh. I'm gonna copyright that formula.

I don't know if there's any way to fix this about myself, so I've just started thinking backwards. I figure any time I feel guilty for not buying someone's load of crap, it's my gut instincts in disguise, wearing a chicken suit and squawking to get my attention.

Donald Passman wrote this book that's pretty much the bible of the music industry for artists. It's called All You Need To Know About the Music Business.

It could also be called "All You Need To Know About Navigating Human Nature," but I guess that overreaches. Still, Passman makes a great point about how to know whether you can trust people when you're having to make decisions that could spell life or death for your career in the big-time. He tells you to trust your gut. Now, how are you supposed to do that when your gut is dressed in a chicken suit and impossible to take seriously?

There's something about creative people, or maybe the act of taking the leap of faith, that involves this boiling-oil situation of learning to be loyal to your instincts. Even if you tank from it in your career, know this: You'll still have to master it in your daily life no matter what. If you're pursuing a creative goal, you likely aren't buffered by the safety nets most people take for granted -- a regular paycheck, someone else paying for your health insurance, maternity leave. As if that didn't suck enough, you also have little to no budget for dishonesty or bad faith in your life, from yourself or from anyone else. You are going to pay the price for it, directly and dearly, and it has less to do with being "creative" than it does with being the person who's assuming all the risk. Welcome to You, Inc.

I've started thinking about the idea of emotional incorporation -- some way to protect your emotional investment so that, if it all comes crashing down tomorrow, you won't crash with it. I'm beginning to conclude that having healthy instincts, and the courage to respond to them appropriately, is something well worth cultivating. It's a good argument for maintaining your childlike state as a creative person. And not that you care, but it earns you respect.

My Voice: The Lost Years

2008-04-15T18:57:00.005-05:00

As published on the Skyrocket blog

People who've been following my career for a while, or even as Trish and Darin back in the day, might already know that singing (to say nothing of songwriting) has never come easily for me. Somebody somewhere out there has sat through a performance when I was so hoarse I could hardly get through the show, or even showed up only to find that I couldn't sing at all and had to cancel (this only happened once, in 1999 at the Mucky Duck in Houston, and I was still there to sign CDs and have a CD-release "party.") Those days are pretty much over, except for November and April bouts with allergy-driven pharyngitis, and if you were in Houston last weekend you heard it for yourself.

I have my time with Skyrocket! to thank, though, for a lot of my rehab. From the time I was a tiny kid I've had kind of a rasp to my voice, and by the eighth grade things got pretty dire. I'd go to a slumber party and be mute the next day. Singing was limited to about one hour's worth, and after that forget it. Finally I was diagnosed with vocal nodules, which are basically hard callouses that form on your vocal chords and cut off some of the air that needs to pass through them to make a clear sound. Surgery followed in 10th grade, and months of speech therapy to correct some of the habits I'd developed in the attempt to make my voice audible -- to push sound out through those two tense, worn-out little reeds of muscle.

I didn't know then that it would take a lifetime, really, for my voice to heal. Nobody knows what causes the musculature to tense up in your throat, tongue, jaw, neck and head, but that's what happens when you're using an impaired voice. "Raising my pitch" to eliminate "tongue tension" became a daily practice in therapy, and it seemed so stupid and annoying to hear the fake, babyish pitch I had to use instead of my 'real' one, which was low and throaty and pressed down on my pipes in a way I could feel. The new voice was surprisingly free of effort, heady and relaxed, but I thought I sounded like a dork. I never got the hang of it.

My range was limited to maybe an octave by that time. I limped through high school, in choir and theater, faking it as a second soprano and praying I wouldn't poop out when I got cast as Babe in "The Pajama Game." I can't even count how many speech tournaments I bombed when my voice would buckle under the pressure in final rounds. Sometimes we'd win anyway, but I never felt good about it. It seemed like whenever the stakes were high, my voice would always give me away.

Fast forward to the Trish Murphy years, when major-label showcases, South by Southwest, and the relentless grind of sleep deprivation and industry scrutiny caught up with me from time to time. By then I'd regained some of my footing and earned some confidence, but the high-stakes climate of career decisions and competition would still take its toll. I'd have nightmares where I would need to scream but no sound would come out. Or someone in the dream would make me fly into a hoarse, impotent rage.

By the time I joined Skyrocket, in 2004, I was ready for things to get easier. I'd just put out a new record that I'd financed and then promoted independently, including radio and European tours, and the stress of it was getting to me. I had also begun to realize, the hard way, that not speaking up for yourself to command what you need, want and deserve in life (or in a career) isn't a good thing. Eventually as I started to reverse that habit, the weirdest thing happened. The stakes somehow didn't seem so high any more. I started to relax. And my voice came back.

A few weeks ago my mom was in the audience and saw Skyrocket rip out a full-tilt version of "Crazy on You," complete with the little acoustic-guitar intro. She couldn't believe I actually sang it. I don't have one of those golden throats, but what I do have is hard-won, and I hope the sound that comes out is honest. The material doesn't matter to me. My own songs are written as a confession, and the singing is an afterthought although the melody is usually scrupulous. Singing other people's songs is strangely liberating. The stakes are lower. And I probably need the relief.

The picture, by the way, is of me and my eighth grade best pals Kay and Ellie, who knew me when. We're still figuring out our voices, and how to use them.

Nosh and Dish at the Garden Cafe with Thelma and Louise (and Brad Pitt and the gasoline truck guy?)

2008-04-15T09:48:00.006-05:00

Party On at the Garden Café in Dallas, TX
This Thursday, April 17, from 6-8 PM, the Garden Café is hosting “A Strictly-For-Fun Gathering of Smart-Mouthed Fiction Writers and One Lucky Guitar, Trading Stories, and Songs. Writers in the Round: On Fiction, Truth, and Three Chords.”
Translated: a wine and cheese reception with Austin singer/songwriter Trish Murphy, Dallas-based authors Will Clarke, Harry Hunsicker, and Melanie Wells.
from D Magazine.com - Posted on April 14th, 2008 2:03pm by Nancy Nichols Filed under Events, Restaurant News

(Will and Harry are waaaaaaaaaay more fun than this photo suggests...) - mw

The Creative Disease

2008-04-09T08:54:00.003-05:00

This is a painting by a woman who, as a 53-year-old scientist, experienced onset of a rare brain disease that decimated her scientific memory and abilities while triggering a torrent of creative activity.

She later adapted Ravel's Bolero into a series of visual works, and oddly enough it turns out the composer had suffered from the same disease.

I've known for some time, from my own pathetic experience, that linear and creative thinking compete for air time in my head, and that linear thinking usually wins. The creative part is way harder to boot up and keep online, but it's every bit as legitimate and lucid once it takes hold. What's going on in our brains? Does anybody out there know?

Me, Melissa, and MLK

2008-04-04T12:20:00.005-05:00

I should take a moment to thank the academy... (and shoot whoever fixed my hair for this photograph).

I love my birthday. I think birthdays should be national holidays. I never work on my birthday. Ever. So I have taken the day off (sort of - I've already balanced four checkbooks and done a bunch of blechy desk work), but as usual, I've forgotten to schedule a play date with anyone. So I will take myself shopping ALONE. What a loser. You'd think by now, I'd learn.

Okay, back to the Melanie/Melissa thing. My mom - aka The Dot - wanted a little blonde-haired blue-eyed girl. The Dot has dark hair, olive skin, brown eyes. She looked like Cher when I was growing up. I'm not kidding. With hot pants and everything. My dad is blonde and blue-eyed. So they hedged their bets and went with Melissa if my hair was blonde and Melanie if my hair was black like my mother's. (Melanie means dark and mysterious. Clearly NOT a fit.) My grandmother took one look at me and said, "She looks like a little Mexican baby." It is my understanding that she did not mean this as a compliment. Classy, huh? This was the '60s, you realize. She wasn't terribly evolved, even though she made incredible fried chicken.

Anyway, I did look like a little Mexican baby, but as you can see, that did not last. Here's a picture of me sitting with Daddy-O at my fourth birthday party. I look smashing in my white dress and knee socks, don't you think? Shortly after this photo was taken, we found out Martin Luther King had been assassinated earlier that evening. I didn't get to eat my cake that year. It was a very sad day.

Daddy-O is 65 and still has no gray. The Dot, however, was gray by the time she was 25. As a result of Daddy-O's good genes, and despite the fact that my name is not Melissa, I remain the only woman in the entire state of Texas who does not color her hair.

Jesus was smiling on me on April 4, 1964. If only he'd let MLK off the hook four years later. I wonder where we'd be today?

Happy Birthday Louise

2008-04-04T00:26:00.003-05:00

That's right, it's Melanie's birthday on Friday. I look forward to it every year because I'm so grateful she was born. I feel like calling her mom up to thank her. Did you know that her mom named her Melanie because she was born with dark hair? She'd picked out "Melissa" for a blonde-haired baby. Heh.

We always give each other lots of birthday presents -- mostly inexpensive, useful things like kitchen gear, lip gloss, and the dress, pair of shoes, bikini, jacket or whatever that the other one wouldn't splurge on for herself. We make a big deal out of wrapping everything, even stupid stuff that doesn't really wrap. And we re-use all the same boxes over and over again. They keep passing back and forth like a cold.

But I read somewhere recently that one of the best things a friend can say to you is, "I will if you will." And I can say that probably nothing would have happened in my life (well, nothing GOOD anyway) in the last seven years if Melanie hadn't said that to me at least ninety six times. That's only once a month. So I bet it's more times than that.

Happy birthday, true-blue friend. Thanks for challenging me to believe in myself against all appreciable odds, to kick my own butt when appropriate, and for never kicking mine even if I deserved it. I can see at least twice as far in the fog with you around, and true north is a little easier to hang onto.

We Cowgirls Rope some Writers

2008-04-01T12:23:00.003-05:00

Well, we finally got ourselves a gig. Who says a bunch of writers can't sit around swapping stories like songwriters do? Oh, it's me Thelma.

On Thursday April 17 we'll be at the Garden Cafe, Louise and me, with Dallas based authors Will Clarke and Harry Hunsicker, to trade lies and be general smart-asses, on an actual stage. In case you're unsure of just how smart-assed it's likely to get, have a look at Will's book trailer, which I found on his web site. I don't think he wants us to know too much about him, so his general enigmatic nature alone would be enough to get me out to the Garden Cafe busting with curiosity. I met Harry Hunsicker at one of Melanie's recent book signings, and he was WAY cooler than I thought he would be. I'm convinced he actually plays guitar but so far he won't cop to it. Hell, every guy I know can at least play 'Smoke on the Water' on one string. Maybe we can talk him into it at the April 17 gig.

It's a free show, so we don't plan on taking it overly seriously. Wine will be involved, maybe even champagne since Will just got married in Mexico like, yesterday. I'll be playing songs, mostly, and if I drink enough champagne I might recite one of those sonnets nobody knows I've written. I know. Sonnets? Why???

And Louise IS bringing her fiddle.

Photo Foodie

2008-03-29T13:56:00.003-05:00

Thelma here.

There's a girl in California taking amazing Polaroids and discovering food. And she likes meatloaf and cupcakes. You can see some of her pictures in the slide show I just posted at the bottom of the page (I liked them all so much that I couldn't pick just a few). I'm sharing some recipes in her honor, and Louise no doubt will chime in soon claiming that her meatloaf recipe is better than mine. Tough beans. Mine is my MOM's recipe. Y'all be the judges.

HALLIE'S MEATLOAF

1 lb. ground chuck or ground turkey - mixed white/dark
1/2 of a large white onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup finely crushed saltines
1 egg
1/4 cup canned evaporated milk (*not sweetened condensed)
pepper and salt
1 can Cambpell's tomato soup, undiluted

Preheat the oven to 400F. Grease a loaf pan and set it aside. In a large mixing bowl or standing mixer, combine all but the last ingredient -- the tomato soup -- using your hands or the mixer on lowest setting. Add half of the undiluted soup from the can and mix it in well. Turn the mixture into the prepared pan, top with the rest of the soup, and bake for 1 hour. You can cover it with foil and uncover for the last half hour of baking time if you like. Serves 4-5 hungry people.

TWANGY LEMONADE CUPCAKES
2 dozen

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, room temperature
 2 cups sugar 
2 eggs 
1/2 tsp salt 
2-1/2 tsp baking powder
 3 cups all-purpose flour 
3/4 cup buttermilk 
3/4 cup frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed 
1/4 cup frozen lemondade concentrate, set aside
 zest of 1 lemon 
1 tsp. almond extract   

1. Preheat the oven to 350F. Place cupcake liners into two muffin pans. 
 2. Beat the butter briefly to soften it. Add the sugar and beat until fluffy, about 3  minutes. Add the eggs one at a time and beat well. Combine the dry ingredients; in a  separate mixing bowl combine the liquids and almond extract. Alternate flour and liquid  into the batter on low speed or by hand until well combined.  
3. Spoon batter into cups and fill them 2/3 full. Bake 20-25 minutes or until cupcakes  spring back in the middle when touched lightly. Cool for 10 minutes in pan. Brush  reserved lemonade concentrate over tops of warm cupcakes. Cool completely before frosting.  

LEMON BUTTERCREAM FROSTING
 1/2 cup butter, room temperature 
3 to 4 cups confectioner's sugar 
1/4 cup frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed 
1 tsp. vanilla 
24 lemon drops (optional) 
small mint leaves for garnish  

Beat together the butter and 1-1/2 cups of the sugar. Add the lemonade and vanilla. Continue to  add remaining sugar just until frosting is of desired spreading consistency (you may use  more or less sugar). Tint the frosting if desired. Frost cooled cupcakes and garnish each  with a lemon drop and a mint leaf.

Greetings from the Trenches

2008-03-07T00:14:00.009-06:00

It's Thelma.

One of these guys is my brother.

The other isn't.

He's not Louise's brother, either.

He's Dwight Baker, my songwriting partner for the week. And he's a handful.

He's been making fun of me for 3 days. "You're so passive-aggressive! You hated my idea and you just gave me that 'uh-huh' face."
Guilty as charged.

See, co-writing is really hard. You have to do all these things I'm notoriously bad at. Like keep your mouth shut while you try out somebody else's (usually bad) ideas. Then try to shut your brain up while you try out your own. You basically pull teeth out of each other's heads for, like, 7 hours straight. Then you go home, drink a beer, and try NOT to think about the song for a few hours (which is impossible). So you go back and mess around with the lyrics while the other person isn't around. As big of a pain as it is (and just look at Dwight, what a smartass) I'm actually having a blast. I'm sort of relieved to be writing; as many of you know I'm notoriously neurotic about it and always convinced I've written the very last song I will ever write, ever.

Anyway, I've known Dwight for a pretty long time. He used to play drums in my band, way back before I even made my first record. He got to where he'd just say "thanks" when people would tell him it was good to see me and Darin working together again.

Everything Dwight touches turns to gold. When I met him he was playing in a band and running a small record label that he subsequently sold for way more money than I'd ever made. After that he built a studio and started producing records. Oh, and writing songs for the bands he produced. Not much really happened with the songwriting until this past year, when four of them ended up on a record that sold 2 million copies. Now he's getting calls for country songs, which is a problem because he doesn't really write those. That's where I come in. We've written two songs in the past three days, so technically we're one song behind. Two days to go. We'll see how it shakes out.

Oh yeah, and I had a great cooking class last night. Here's one of the recipes: Take some strawberries, puree them in the blender and put a few glugs of Grand Marnier in. And some vanilla. Then scoop some vanilla ice cream into a champagne glass and pour some of the strawberry stuff in. Then pour champagne on top of that. Put some whipped cream on the top. Celebrate something you just created....

Bum Phillips, Snickerdoodles, and Manure

2008-02-26T22:02:00.027-06:00

Louise here.
Bum Phillips (former Houston Oilers coach, and more importantly, former football coach at my alma mater, Amarillo High School) said Amarillo, Texas was the coldest place he ever lived. As you know from Trish's previous post, this is where we met. Where the ghost of Bum Phillips walks. Where the land is brown eight months of the year and flatter than a penny left on a train track. Where the sky goes on forever and the road never ends. Where the wind goes howling down the plain. Where the leaves swirl, the blast of cold air from the north can knock you over (think fire hose), and where there is none of that annoying scenery to worry about.

So I'm up there in the land of barbed wire last weekend for my book signing. And it happens that my high school buddy Jimmy Gleason is the community relations manager at the Barnes & Noble where my event is. He played the French horn in high school and used to empty his spit valve on me. I pay him back now by invading his store once a year and bringing my own cookies. More on that later.
Here's Jimmy and me:

Note that I am leaning down. This is another way I repay Jimmy for all that spit. I am now, like, forever tall. He should never have watered me. My brother gave me that sweatshirt for Christmas, by the way, on the theory that it is not possible to have too many big, grey sweatshirts. It says, "Careful, or you'll end up in my novel."

So. Here's what happened in Amarillo. First of all, Trish wasn't there. So that was a big fat drag, because we always have a grand time when we go to the panhandle together. Plus, she's a great tour manager/roadie. But she was unavailable, tragically. Lucky for me, though, my best friend from childhood, Karen Stewart Grantham (Stewey to me) was there to pick up the slack. We met in Brownies in 2nd grade. She went all the way through Girl Scouts to whatever the highest thing is. The Eagle Scout of Girl Scouts. I got kicked out in 5th grade for beating up another little Girl Scout. But that's another post. Anyway, Stewey still lives in Amarillo, four blocks from the house I grew up in. Her little girl looks JUST LIKE ME! Which is why I insist on calling her "Little Mel." She has adopted this as her identity, even though her real name is Jennifer. Here are the two Mels:

I spent much of the evening (when I was not signing books) teaching Little Mel the proper use of the phrase tough beans. By the end of the evening, the whole crowd was into it. Someone would say something like, "What happened to all the cookies? I asked you to save me one!" And we'd all cue Little Mel and she'd say, Tough beans! with all the authority of a veteran. I did explain carefully, though, that this is a phrase you never, ever say to your parents, especially your father. There are times and places for things.

I had asked Stewey if she'd order some snickerdoodles (those of you who have read my latest book, My Soul to Keep, will understand the significance of my cookie choice) from Belmar Bakery. Belmar Bakery is the bomb. Everything they make is delicious. I have a particular fondness for their chocolate/cinnamon cake, which I just found out you can order and have shipped to you. I will be availing myself of this service forthwith. I called Stew when I arrived to see if she got the cookies (as though she was the one who needed managing) and she said, "I got 'em, but I thought they were a little bit hard. I know some people like 'em that way, but I don't, really, and I don't think many people do, so I sliced up some apples and put them in a container with the snickerdoodles. They'll be soft by the time the book signing starts." This is Stew. This is Amarillo. People up there know how to soften the cookies. Plus, they bother to think that sort of thing in the first place.

By the way, the reason there are no pictures of Stewey in this post is that she, of course, was the one who was taking the pictures. She's hyper-competent. Otherwise, I probably would never have made it out of childhood alive.

Throughout the evening, I greeted friends I'd known since I was a kid. Some who are friends of my parents:

(I did not break this man's nose, by the way. I hung up my gloves in fifth grade. Someone else is responsible for this). And some who were friends of mine since the days when I used to judge how cold my hands were by checking the color of my mood ring. We all ate snickerdoodles, helped Little Mel hone her tough beans timing, and laughed and visited for three hours. A two hour book signing (7-9) ended at almost 11:00 when the store was about to close. We had a ball. Plus, I sold a ton of books. And not just to my friends. Lots of people had come in response to an article in the paper that morning.

Which is what you hope for if you're a writer. Strangers who want to read your words.

I'm a Dallas girl now. I admit it. I have the Uptown office, a couple of expensive handbags. Lots of shoes with three inch heels.

Years ago, I was driving down LBJ Freeway in Dallas on a fine spring day with the top down on my car when I was suddenly overcome by a stunning wave of homesickness for Amarillo. It came out of nowhere. My parents had moved away years before. At that point (this was before I was writing books), it had probably been 10 years since I'd been up there. But there I was, longing for my hometown. My very brown, flat, windy hometown. What was triggering this madness? A song on the radio? The breeze swirling through the convertible? I pondered for a while before I realized what it was. I was following a cattle truck. It was the smell of manure.

And now that I'm old enough, I understand why. Bum Phillips was wrong. The air up there is cold. No denying that. But nothing else is.

At heart, I am and always will be from corn-fed panhandle stock. Amarillo is softened snickerdoodles and uncomplicated friendships and the sheer simplicity of being loved, thoroughly and forever, by people who have known you since before you were anything. People who will not dump you just because you get kicked out of Girl Scouts. People who are not in competition with you. Who will not undermine you. Who will not lie, cheat or steal. And who can make an entire evening of fun out of teaching a six year old when to say tough beans.

Amarillo by Suppertime

2008-02-21T09:35:00.010-06:00

Melanie (she's Louise, the decisive one with the gun) has a book signing this weekend in Amarillo. Amarillo, Texas. Reportedly now one of the top 5 places to live and work, according to some smartass friend of mine who is, of course, from Amarillo and who of course doesn't live there, although he of course has bought some property there anyway.

Melly and I met in Amarillo, when we were juniors at Amarillo High School. I was the new girl with the super-long hair. She played violin in the orchestra and had lots of cute guy friends, including the gay guys. (I know - gay in Amarillo - they all live elsewhere now though there was a super-cool gay bar there, Mary's.) We didn't have a class together until senior year, though, when we both were assigned to Mr. Huber's AP English class, which forthwith changed both of our lives. Mr. Huber, it turns out, was the kind of "o captain my captain" teacher who could engage you in reading things you were too young to understand by tapping things in your brain that HE could understand. Several of us in that class were on the verge of teenage implosion, on a daily basis, and he helped us by treating us like adults. Most of us ended up as writers - probably because we already were that in his class, in some proto-intellectual form. Heh.

He'd already have given me a B minus on this entry for bad grammar, but he might have bonused me for some of the bigger words. He also taught vocabulary. I'm now editing my erroneous commas. &%$@!

Anyway Melly and I became pals in that class. My first memory is of her snapping her pencil in two and throwing it across the room in Mr. Huber's class. He took it well, and I was impressed with her pluck. I was too much of a rule-follower and people-pleaser to do anything like that. That's why I get to be Thelma.

We weren't in touch after graduation much. My family moved away (again), we went off to our separate in-state colleges and maybe saw each other at the lame 5-year reunion at somebody's apartment complex in Arlington. Years after that we finally reconnected - at a concert. I was the low act on the totem pole at a Colorado festival billing Julian Lennon and Soul Asylum. I'm up there in my Tommy Hilfiger swag, trying to rock at 4 pm, and I hear this "Trishy-baby!" from somewhere up front. I look out. "It's swell Mel Wells!" I hoot from the microphone.

Somehow somebody with some sense hauled her backstage afterward (which was a large asphalt parking lot), and we sat on the floor between the bunks of my rented tour bus and caught up. She was married, had finished a novel and was looking for a publisher. I was married, had finished my second record and was happily surviving the chaos of constant touring. A week later I had a copy of her first manuscript, and a week after THAT we'd booked our first writers' trip. "Don't come up here to goof off," she'd warned me. "This is WORK."

After that, the story takes some pretty providential turns. If you're in Amarillo this Saturday and you happen to wander in to Barnes and Noble, you can catch the latest chapter from Melanie herself, live and in person. By the way, I love the word "suppertime." I learned it from Melly. She never says "dinner."

Melanie Wells My Soul to Keep Book Signing

Barnes & Noble

Westgate Mall

2415 Soncy Road

Amarillo, TX

(806)352-2300

Saturday, February 23, 2008

7:00 p.m.

Thelma and Louise increase their famosity

2008-02-17T23:39:00.004-06:00

One of the very grand things about the Pulpwood Queen Girlfriend Weekend is that we got to meet lots of cool, interesting people. The Galleycat, for instance. A man of mystery and influence. And Will Clarke, THE dude with a clue. I've been two weeks behind Will on book tour three years in a row. Check him out at www.willclarke.com (note that he provided some of the video in our previous post). And the Galleycat (aka Ron Hogan), it turns out, gets around, as most cool cats do. Check us out at www.beatrice.com - a little encouragement for you writers out there.

And remember... Don't take any crap from anyone today. Especially yourself.

Rock on! T&L

Day 2: Of Hairspray and Loaded Weapons

2008-02-11T21:53:00.017-06:00

Thelma: We retire -- though not from our writing/music careers -- to the McKay House. Melanie reports that the ghost is nigh.

Louise: So here's that creepy story: We walk in our room and there's a long white cotton nightgown, like from Little House on the Prairie, hanging on the wardrobe. There's other stuff there, too. A coat, some old shoes, a few old hats. I took one look at the nightgown and said, "That thing has to go." Trish looks at me like I'm nuts, but I'm used to that, so I don't mind. I stick the gown in the closet. The entire night, I can just feel something lurking. Next morning, I'm talking to our B&B owner and ask him if anyone's ever seen ghosts in the place. He said, "Well, there's the one lady... she wears a white gown. People see her a lot." I look down my nose at Trish in a superior way. I KNEW it!!

Thelma: Melanie's got a radar for that sort of thing. I'm a little envious of her gift for the supernatural, but she assures me it's a big fat pain in the ass. Apparently ghosts are like roaches, or rodents, maybe. They look for chinks in your constitutional armor, then they get in there and set up a base camp. Melanie's insomnia, for example, is probably a chink. I sleep like Norma Jean on pills, so I guess I'm less available to the spirits who might want to stop by. I'm also less sensitive in a lot of ways than Louise is. Less trigger-happy, you might say, but therefore easily caught unarmed. And as the song says, I wear my gun wrong anyway. I get myself into scrapes that she sees coming a mile off and has the right buckshot for, and I just stand there whimpering. So her chinks do have their advantages. She can stomp the roaches. I can't.

Louise: She's right about the chinks and that the radar thing is a big fat drag. But it did get me a book contract, so there IS that. She is also correct that I'm fully armed at all times. Locked and loaded. You can't tell by looking at me, though. I seem like such a nice girl...

Thelma: Anyway after a night's sleep we're back in the saddle, and we lucky-out on breakfast even though we weren't up in time. Darla saves us some egg casserole, which is so good that even Louise eats it, and she hates eggs. We meet Atticus, the resident toddler named after every character AND actor in the famed movie, and he's unimpressed with us. Clearly the B&B life has lost its luster for Atticus, so he trots upstairs with his mother following him, clutching a plastic violin. We're due to present on a panel of Texas writers, so we high-tail it to the high school after breakfast.

Louise: We were last in line on our panel, so we got the leftover time, which wasn't much. But that turned out great, because 1) we didn't have that much to say; and 2) there was no way we could overstay our welcome. So I visit with the audience for a bit about writing and what a drag it is (year-long brain constipation...) and that our consolation prize for being writers is that we get to share the misery with one another. We talk about our writing trips. I talk about my books for a second (When the Day of Evil Comes; The Soul Hunter; My Soul to Keep - just out from Waterbrook/Multnomah, which is a division of Random House -- woo hoo!) And then I read and Trishy does a snippet of one of her songs:

Louise: I thought we were a hit, didn't you?

Thelma: As much of a hit as you can be at 5:00 on Saturday when everyone's itching to get their beehive on for the Ball of Hair.

Louise: So while we were packing up, we got to meet some really terrific folks. Ron Hogan of www.galleycat.com, who is the BOMB in the publishing world. And I finally got to meet Will Clarke, who lives here in Dallas, and who is always two weeks in front of me on book tour. Check him out at www.willclarke.com. And River Jordan. We got to be on her radio show, Backstory on the Radio (www.backstoryontheradio.com).

Thelma: We have the Galleycat to thank for recording our panel session.

Louise: And the very gracious Will Clarke to thank for the pitches below:

Louise: So, aside from the fact that we both could have used some lipstick and a little fluff in our hair at that piont, I thought the weekend was a smashing success.

Thelma: And loads of fun. We're going back next year. You should come, readers. Bring your Final Net.

Of hairspray and literature - a weekend with the Pulpwood Queens

2008-01-28T08:55:00.000-06:00

Thelma and Louise embarked on yet another road trip last weekend. We hurled ourselves into Trish's Jeep and barrelled (unsuspecting) down I-20 toward a quaint but haunted town called Jefferson, TX, near the Louisiana border. (Who knows what happens near the Texas/Louisiana border? Shadows of the Caddos and all manner of spirits populate the air out there.)

We were headed for Girlfriend Weekend, a book fair hosted by a woman who can blow your hair back with her megawatt personality and then blow it out into a 'do that would make That Girl proud. Kathy Patrick, the megawatt in question, is the owner of Beauty and the Book, a combination beauty salon/ bookstore (we're not kidding) in Jefferson. Girlfriend Weekend - an annual event for her book club (now with chapters all over the world) the Pulpwood Queens - brings women from around the country to tiny Jefferson, where they meet and greet authors, listen to their stories, and then fancy themselves up into confections of fuchsia, leopard print and tiaras, then dance themselves silly at the Ball of Hair (formerly known as the Hair Ball.) Can't you just smell the Final Net?

Notes from the road:

Louise: Okay, I started the weekend having burnt the Pancho Villa candle at both ends. I admit that. I was grouchy. Pouty. Whiny. I needed a glass of wine, a pair of flannel jammies and a long visit with my best friend, Trish. All three of which I got, and in spite of the haunts at our B&B (the woman in the white gown, in particular), we both got a good night's sleep. Up the next day (the last two to arrive at breakfast, of course), and we were off to the Methodist church for our first taste of Girlfriend Weekend. We walked in, Kathy Patrick (wearing a fuchsia t-shirt and a tiara) turns to the woman next to her and says, "I guarantee you, these are the two girls from Austin." Then to us, "I could tell as soon as I saw you walking across the parking lot." Which we took as a compliment. Even though I'm from Dallas.

Check out this video of Kathy Patrick talking about us:

Thelma:

At first I thought we'd missed an exit and somehow ended up at the Iowa caucuses. We walk up to this church classroom, fully expecting to have to register and jump through a bunch of fuschia hula hoops before anybody would even give us the time of day. But here she is, Kathy Patrick herself, flinging the door open for us and shooing us in out of the snow flurries. And there they are, the donuts, coffee and bottled water sent over by the Boy Scout troop. We get name-tagged, to be sure, take a folding chair with the rest of the women gathered there. This, apparently, is It then -- a very intimate gathering of early arrivers. An author takes the podium, and it's Denise Rodriguez, who's written a controversial New York Times best-seller called Kabul Beauty School about her expat life in Afghanistan. She's got long, flame-glo colored hair. She looks a little out of place in a church classroom. We all do, I guess. So does Lynette Shirk, the snarky cookbook author, dressed in a t-shirt, white crinoline and wild shoes. Louise elbows me in the kidney. "Hey! I think that's the supermodel over there in the leopard print shawl." I scan the room. There are seven leopard print shawls, but only one of them wraps around a brunette who could easily pass for Audrey Hepburn or Sophia Loren circa 1979. She is in fact Paulina Porizkova, the Face of the Eighties, married to a rock star, and sitting in a church classroom in Jefferson Texas promoting her new novel. She looks like someone who'd feel awkward taking herself too seriously. We decide we like her. Louise buys her book. We decide to splurge on an early, boozy supper before the evening programs start. We just can't wait to be entertained.

Louise:
Okay, our publicist didn't show up. She'd just gotten back from a trip to New York, during which she'd seen lots of terrific theater, eaten fabulous meals, walked miles in that amazing city, and caught a cold. All we got out of that was the cold part. She called in sick at the last minute (we forgive you, Lisa), so we were on our own. Which is generally not a good thing. Sort of like my Aunt Jewel and my great-grandmother Ruth. I knew them when they were in their 80s and lived in a little speck of a town called Shamrock, TX. Grandmother Ruth was afraid to drive and Aunt Jewel was blind. You get the picture. The whole town knew to avoid their mint green Lincoln Town Car. So Trish and I find out, through a series of unfortunate events, that we (the two singers from Austin, even though I don't sing and I am from Dallas) are the post-event entertainment that night. Um...

Thelma:
Suddenly I'm apoplectic. This news galvanizes me into my scary alter-ego, Thelma the Neurotic Fatalistic Tour Manager. We ditch our plans for an early supper and drive around until we find the Bull Durham Playhouse, to advance our gig. What if there are no microphones? No cables? No speakers? I've brought the absolute wrong guitar, the kind that doesn't plug in because it's too nice to drill a hole in for the electronics. I dig a microphone out of the Jeep, one I never use because it's too hard to EQ, figuring it may have to do. My career is over at this point anyway, in my psychotic mind. Louise didn't bring a fiddle at all. She's a writer from Dallas, not an Austin musician. We've never even played together, unless you count "Come On Eileen" at a loud bar with six other guys backing us up. Or those Christmas carols we butchered last month after a little too much champagne. Oh well. We decide to punt and hope for the best.

The guys at the theater couldn't be nicer. They cobble some gear together and then take us over to Charlie Clampitt's hand-made instrument shop, where they're sure Louise can get outfitted. I start to begin to try to relax. I'm fixin' to. Any minute.

Louise: Well, the fellas were nice. She's got that right, for sure. In fact, every single person we met in Jefferson, including the ghost, was polite, literate, interesting and unfailingly helpful and friendly. So Trish sort of started to relax after quite an impressive meltdown and then I got wound up because I realized were on in half an hour and I didn't know the songs. Note that I look slightly dazed:

But we got through it and almost no one knew how many clams we were dropping. At least they said they didn't.

Then we went back to our B&B and cracked open our bottle of wine, which we should have done in the first place...

Stay tuned for more from Girlfriend Weekend with the Pulpwood Queens

Climb every mountain

2007-10-23T23:42:00.000-05:00

Louise here.
I met a sci-fi author recently named Paul Black. He's got a series of novels (starting with The Tels) which are receiving lots of acclaim. He's a real writer. Has won several awards. Just like my friend Harry Hunsicker. He writes a cool detective series whose lead character is named Lee Henry Oswald. Clever, huh? And my friend K.L. Cook (who I know as Kenny-baby, since we went to high school together). He just won the Willa Cather award for fiction for his novel The Girl from Charnelle. He won the Prairie Schooner prize for his first collection of short stories. The man is a ROCK STAR!

You know what writers talk about when we gather? The publishing industry.

How are your books selling? Is your agent taking good care of you? Does he fight with the publisher on your behalf or abandon you after the deal's done? Is your publisher supportive? Are they putting any money behind your books? How are your marketing your books? How are the book signings going? Did you hire your own publicist? How's that working out? Is it worth the money?

You know what we never talk about? Writing.

Can you picture the Inklings (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and friends) sitting around the pub enjoying a pint and discussing their agents? Or their publicists? I guess they might have -- maybe it's inevitable. Maybe it's a tragic symptom of Post-Traumatic Writer's Syndrome. Part of the disease. But my guess is that they had more important things on their minds. Like ideas. And character markers. And plot and theme and the rhythm of language.

This is not just another rant about the publishing industry and how Barnes & Noble has ruined it for us all. The demise of The Shop Around the Corner. But it IS another rant about how hard it is to scratch your way up the hill out there. It's not just a hill anymore. It's a gravel hill. Covered with broken beer bottles and barbed wire and smelly, rotting bodies of those who have given up before you. It's like climbing Everest except that the bodies aren't preserved by the cold. And stationed along the path are people whose entire job is to shout you down by doing everything possible to get your work off their desk. Immediately. And shipped back to you with a cryptic, arrogant rejection letter. (I have about a hundred of these in my files.)

Happily, I made it up that particular hill. I have a contract. And an agent (Lee Hough, who does, by the way, act as my advocate with my publisher and who did not abandon me as soon as the contract was signed). And a publicist. (Lisa Taylor, without whom I would have jumped off a cliff by now and who IS, most decidedly, worth the money).

But here's the thing: once you make it up Everest (and make it down alive), then you have to climb K-2. And it doesn't get any easier. See, this is what no one tells you.

Which is why good writers give up every day. It's not roofing houses or mining coal or anything -- there are harder ways to make a living, of course. But it is damn discouraging - especially when you're on that initial climb and all you can see is the blinding flurry of rejection letters whipping around in the bitter wind.

A reasonably kind agent once said to me (in her rejection letter): "Don't give up. A good book will always find a home." So here's a plea. Focus on the writing. Tell the story. Hang out with your characters. And perhaps most crucial of all - never, ever climb without a buddy.

And don't forget your oxygen bottle. The ones left on the mountain are all empty.

Barefoot in the Garden of Good and Evil

2007-09-30T13:33:00.000-05:00

It's Thelma, y'all.

Difficult childhoods are often the point of departure (to god only knows where) for creative writers. I have a friend, for example, a prize-winning author of literary fiction, whom I've known since high school. Aside from being a bright, friendly, genuine guy learning his chops in AP English, he also possessed a wildly unfortunate home life. Not until years later, at a class reunion, did I learn that his mother had been married eleven times -- twice to the same man, his biological father. There were other classmates among us, now gone on to their own careers as musicians, songwriters or whatever, who won leadership awards at school and ran interference between their philandering parents at home. You might conclude that a crummy home life is actually a great training ground for creativity and fantasy. While all those other kids are happily eating their after-school snacks and consulting Dad on their science projects, the not-so-happy kids are in their rooms, or up a tree in the back yard, maybe, waiting for the domestic dust to settle and praying somebody might drop by to break up the tension. Those kids are wishing really hard they were someplace else, and they're highly motivated to imagine it in delicious detail. All that vigilance and detail-noticing pays off, too, because it sticks around as potent memory. You can conjure up a scene like it happened yesterday, if you want to. Or make it up entirely and still make it convincingly real.

Then there were the kinds of difficulties, the Level II Problems, let's call them, that arose from inhabiting that fantasy world without the proper gear. Like shoes.

My brother and sister and I were feral kids. We lived in a house too small to stay cooped up in, so we spent most of our leisure time outside in the yard, or in someone else's yard. Every yard was a different fantasy zone, and our own morphed daily into whatever vessel it needed to be. It had a ditch near the street which doubled as a castle moat, the Mississippi, and a frog kingdom. The back yard frequently had sheets hanging on the line, which divided it into a place where, as the John Prine song goes, we had "the key to escape reality." We lost complete track of time running those creative scams on ourselves. If it rained, we played in it. If it got dark it was time to go home, and if we were late my dad whistled for us like you'd summon livestock. Mostly we ran around barefooted because nobody bugged us to put on shoes. We'd start out every spring hopping around gingerly until we finally had our feet broken in in time for summer -- tough leathery soles like little dog paws. Then there was no stopping us.

But the difficulty with running around barefooted is the inevitable trauma to the feet. Stepping on thumbtacks and jacks around the house seemed like an everyday occurrence, at least until my mom finally stepped on a jack and took them all away from us. The outdoor injuries, though, were more epic and memorable. My sister, for one, suffered chronically from a parasite called pinworm. We were told they were caused by running around barefooted, or by playing with diseased cats, or by sloshing around in ditch water, all three of which we did regularly. They'd give her this bubblegum-pink medicine to take and the worms would clear up, but the following summer they'd be back. Strangely my little brother and I never caught them.

But we got our share of the pestilence. My brother's constant plague were these ingrown toenails. When he was still little enough to get his feet into his mouth, he developed a nervous habit of biting his toenails. He spent at least a third of his childhood in front of the TV with an ingrown big toenail and a basin of epsom salts. Mom would get the water screaming-like-Aerosmith hot and try to soak the infection out. Me:"Hey, what are you doing?" Him: "Soaking my toe and watching Electric Company." I'm not sure how old he was when the problem finally went away, but it persisted well beyond the point where he quit going barefoot. I think he finally had outpatient surgery during his freshman year of college. Maybe that cleared it up.

As for me, I'm convinced I nearly lost my leg one summer, in a freak barefoot incident that somehow went unnoticed by my parents. I was playing a hide-and-seek game, trying not to get caught, hauling ass through the back yard. It was a blazing hot day, and the grass was up over my ankles since it hadn't been mowed in a couple of weeks. Suddenly I felt something go "pop" under my foot. I stopped and looked back, and to my staggering horror it was a jar. One of those little jelly jars that pimiento cheese (my favorite) used to come in. Thick glass that a 45-pound slip of a girl couldn't break, but my guts told me it had probably shattered because of the heat. I guess it cut my foot a little, right in the center of the instep, but it didn't seem bad enough to take me out for the day so I'm sure I stuck a Band-aid on it and went about my business.

The problem was that it wouldn't heal. I complained about it some but kept thinking it was just a dumb little cut, and I'd seen way worse. Later, maybe a couple of weeks later, my dad noticed a red streak running up the back of my leg. At that point the Band-aid was stripped off and the wound examined. It looked like a red star, with rays heading out in every direction from an angry little pock in the center. Hot water was drawn. Epsom salt was applied. Drugs were probably ordered. It got better, but there's still a tiny star-shaped scar on the sole of my right foot. It's a little medal, you might say, from a leathery, scrappy childhood full of worthwhile difficulties.

Honey, I Smothered the Kids: A Case for an Uncompromised Life

2007-09-30T12:57:00.000-05:00

So this week's NY Times Magazine is dubbed "the college issue," wherein different articles take a look at everything from the admissions process to how campus life and postmodern 'studenthood' have changed, to the encroachment of capitalism and competition on higher education at the expense of, well, higher education.

There's this one story about two or three kids applying to colleges, some needing full tuition to go at all, and some just hoping to clang the bell with their academic sledgehammers and get in to a good school. At any rate, college admission has become a full-time moonlighting gig for all of them, piled up on top of the day job of AP classes, perfect SAT scores, and oh yeah, working on that novel they started at Interlochen two summers ago. As you'd imagine, the climaxes are Olympic. The agony of rejection from Princeton; the thrill of a seemingly random Dartmouth victory when some other girl with better test scores gets turned away.

Quarterbacking the whole Herculean tournament is the hyperconscientious parent. The suppertime consultations start in 10th grade ("raise your hand once a day in that class, sweetie, so you can hit the teacher up next year for a recommendation") and give way to a veritable war room by the start of senior year. Dining-room tables disappear under stacks of file folders. Application sessions drag on until 3 a.m., with parents handling all of the project management from deadline reminders to daily task lists (like completing the nth application with time to spare before dawn to work on the prize-winning Halloween costume).

Sure, applying to college has become a morass. In the ugly struggle among schools to manipulate their rankings, a lot rides on trawling for more and more applicants to reject. Students are the dazed victims here, even as they covet campuses with flashy 'curb appeal' and concierge desks designed (and paid for with all that sky-high tuition) to attract them in the first place. It's hard to read about people killing themselves to play along with the seemingly impossible game. It's not unlike the insanity of finding and keeping decent health insurance. I'm always hoping the insanity will give way any second to full-scale consumer mutiny, and I'm in. Got my poison pen and canned goods ready.

Meanwhile, where are these parents finding all this time? As if the 24-hour suicide watch on toddlers weren't enough, parenting has now become a full-blown cottage industry with endless job assignments, the Parent/Agent/Manager/Scout/Publicist/Decorator/Life Coach. Grooming kids on the farm team to get to the show, coaching them on all the plays so they get a shot at a first-round draft pick. Then what?

And I'm not talking about the kids. They're going off to college to get on with their overachieving lives, or to overturn them maybe, and they'll either come out ahead or have their parents to blame if they tank. And what are these parents going to do with themselves? The big yucky question nobody wants to answer. I guess you could argue that some parents are fairly well-developed in the important personal and interpersonal ways, and that they'll snap back into their original selves once the kids are out of the house, and find something compelling to do. But what I see more of is a sort of self-abnegating focus on kids' lives as the most important element of the family, at the expense of vibrant marriages and, probably, happy kids. If there's a way they could turn all those acquired fussing skills into something marketable, though, I'm buying. At my stage of life now, with the stakes higher than ever, what I really want more than anything is a set of parents like that to help me out. But as a kid....there's at least five kinds of sick about your mother getting more upset than you do over your rejection letters. Or your parents doing all your strategizing for you while they also run the household, cart you around town and clean up after you. And you people out there ghost-writing those admissions essays, you know who you are. You're all busted.

Maybe I'm just jealous and resentful because I had the kind of parents who refused to sign up for the overparenting trap. They saddled us with housework, made us do our own lunch and laundry and figure out our own rides to theater practice and speech tournaments. If we weren't prepared at school or left our lunch at home, we took the hit and self-corrected pretty quickly. We made our own Halloween costumes out of posterboard and clothes we found in the attics of rent houses we lived in. My parents rarely interfered with Real Life on our behalf, which pretty much kept them out of our business too. With no one to take the fall we had to decide what kind of people we intended to be. In the meantime, they included us in who they were -- working parents who had their own dreams, friends, interests and problems, and who sometimes weren't available to us because of those. So with more deliberation than I give them credit for, they raised me to be independent, not comfortable. They taught us to manage by not doing it for us, and to my knowledge they suffered no guilt. Inadvertently maybe, they supplied us with enough deprivation to cultivate things in us like gratitude, respect, stamina and mindfulness. Oh, and creative problem solving. They taught us to survive; the achievement part was largely up to us, and though we didn't do as well as we might have with more "help," at least we knew the credit was entirely ours. I like to think the survival skills gave me the audacity to pursue an uncompromised life that interests me. It takes more guts, I confess, than I'd really planned on. Did we all turn out just perfectly and beautiful and Hollywood? God, no. But we've had an adventure. Everyone got a turn to shine. We all have interesting stories to tell. It was never dull.

So go ahead, slack off. Drink beer and play canasta once in a while and let your kids figure it out on their own. Sure they'll resent you later -- for having more fun than they did, not for micromanaging their time. Make those little rascals responsible for their own happiness. My parents were fond of a card game they called Three-Toed Jesus. Doesn't that sound like a party waiting to happen?

At Princeton they have some advice for concerned parents at freshman orientation. Don't call here, they warn, worrying about whether your children are doing OK or not. If they aren't smart enough to solve their own problems, they don't belong here.

Canasta, anyone?

Posted by Thelma, a frequent parent stunt double

Peter Terry, Mega Music Mogul

2007-09-26T22:03:00.000-05:00

It's Thelma, and my friend is pissed off. Not Louise, some other friend.

We see each other about once a year, when he comes off the road and goes back into his studio to write his own songs. When he's got the time, we get together and co-write something. Sometimes the sessions go really well, we get into a nice productive zone and lyrics generally fall where they need to. Other times it's tougher, but we'll spitball something together, a couple of verses and maybe a chorus, then force ourselves to finish it later before we move on to something else.

We're both pissed, actually.

The first thing we do, usually, is catch up for half an hour or so, then make some coffee and get to work. Co-writing is like turning yourself into one of those squishy plants that sucks water out of thin air. You sit there with nothing and get something out of it. Don't ask me how it works. I really do not know. In general one of us tosses out a line as a starting point, then we improvise around it and make up what it means. He's better at it than I am, but I'm trying to give myself a chance to improve over time. Normally I don't write like that, at least not anything good, but I envy people who do. It seems so much easier than waiting around to be inspired and then being precious about your big fat great idea. Which I mostly do.

But anyway, we're pissed today. And we start talking about it.

I'm listening to my friend describe his life over the last several months. From the outside he seems just like every other talented musician with a covetable career: An astounding natural gift that he dedicates his energy and attention to, the respect and awe of his fellow players and fans, loads of fantastic career opportunities, diverse streams of income like ace-level recording session work, a publishing deal, and private-jet tours with bands you can't not have heard of. But on the inside he's twisting around in the wind just as baffled as I am about The Way Things Work. The Way Things Really Are in the Music Business. How Hard it Is to Be One of Those Artists Trying to Write Well.

He says that nothing is really about the songs any more, no matter what people say. We all want to vomit when we listen to mainstream country radio (well, I sort of like some of the songs, but I doubt if they'll be featured on the Country Gold Hour 35 years from now with Conway Twitty and Merle Haggard and Crystal Gayle). People in the industry wouldn't know a good song from the butts they chase at the after-parties. Blah, blah, blah. And it does seem like the game ramps up and changes every few years, and that artists have shorter and shorter windows for doing their best work before they slide into 5-minutes-ago obscurity, and it does seem like things happen to them psychologically, emotionally, that the rest of us can't really understand or imagine, no matter how good things seem to go. It WILL kill you, my friend informs me. It's only a matter of time. I can't decide which It he means --fame, or failure, or the partying, or the conceit of success, or the weird plight of artists in general, in which some fail appallingly upward and others languish in megatalented obscurity. Or the dealing-down, the weird inverse relationship between the quality of music and its ubiquity, the McMusic Business, you might say. Maybe all of it.

He says the same thing I've heard my producer friends say, after they've played at the major-label big money craps table until they can't stand it any more. "I just want to work on something that means something to me." I'm listening to all of this, and I'm realizing two things. Thing One: I'm relieved that it isn't just me, and his confessions make my general sense of alienation seem less of an aberration. Thing Two: Although I'm angry, it doesn't consume me any more like it used to. And I think my friend's going to do OK, too. His self-awareness is going to keep him out of the jaws of hell, the ones that clamp down on you periodically so that your wounds never heal. I suppose you could say that our sensitivity makes us vulnerable to such things in the first place, unlike less reflective types. Statisticians and claims agents, maybe. I think it's more a matter of how bad things have to get before you order yourself to acquire perspective. Hard-won perspective that demands just as much energy and attention as your art. It becomes your art. Because you can't give in. You do whatever it takes to heal. And you keep writing. Not everyone makes it out. And my friend is right -- It, whatever It is, will kill you if you don't.

So we wrote this song about how impossible it is to dodge all those bullets like Indiana Jones. And how hard it is to care about the here and now when you're strung out on tomorrow and yesterday and getting the crap kicked out of you. It's not finished yet, but I think it'll be good.