Blob of Woe, Wonder

My mom recently rented out the bottom floor of her house to a friend of hers from work, a wonderful woman who regales my grandmother (also--well, mostly--known as Garper) with hilarious tales of her totally Wisconsin family. For instance, her grandfather was apparently the Digit Bandit of Milwaukee, so named for the clever ruse wherein he would point his finger through his pocket at various clerks and say, "This is a robbery." Seriously. When I met my family for dinner today, my grandma couldn't wait to tell me the latest of her new roommate's stories. It was a good one, something about a trip to a fancy restaurant and one family member's attempt at stealing flatware that ended with the clatter of silver falling through pant legs and an embarrassed apology to the waitstaff. But it was Garper's lead-in that had me rolling.

"Jessie," she said, "I have a new subject for your blob."

I knew exactly what she meant, but I feigned ignorance as I laughed. "My what?"

"Your blob. You know, on the computer. Isn't that what you--yeah, your blob."

The Moon and the Wannabe Stars

I learned a very special lesson tonight. There has been talk, you may have noticed, about a lunar eclipse this evening. This talk had indicated that the event would probably reach its climactic state of "no moon" around 8:30. The windows in my living room afforded a good view of the rapidly waning Moon when I checked on it at around 8:00. I don't know; for something that was supposed to be all red-tinted and disappearing before my eyes, it just looked like a bunch of white Moon in the sky.

So I watched some American Idol. And okay, I'll admit it: I totally agree with Simon most of the time. I mean, the contestants this year have been very cruise-shippy, and--wait, wasn't I doing something else? What was it? Anyway, this competition is about star quality, and when you're talking about--wait. Star quality. Stars...stars...moon....Moon! Holy crap! I forgot to check on the Moon.

It was 8:45, and as I shuffled quickly to the front of my apartment, I had the odd experience of hoping the Moon, that old dependable rock in the sky, wouldn't be there when I got to the living room window. I looked up, and...nothing, just black sky.

"Hey," I said to myself, "lunar eclipse."

But then I realized that I just had a bad angle. I had to take one more step forward to make my eye line clear the building next door.

I took my step, and... "Nope, there it is." Stupid Moon.

Sure, it was a little smokier than it usually appears, but, well, I could see it, and that's sort of the way it usually is with me and the Moon; nothing particularly special about this Wednesday night.

I think Simon would say the Moon's performance tonight was forgettable. It was pretty much what you'd expect of the Moon, and American audiences are looking for something with more of a modern edge, something exciting and new. And maybe he'd be right. But you know what? I learned something from my experience. There's probably an element of the downfall of modern society, you know, where reality TV and over-orchestrated multimedia platforms for quasi-stardom trump the act of gazing at real stars. Whatever. Here's the more specific lesson and what I'll really take away from my Wednesday night: if you approach a living room window expecting to see a lunar eclipse, you might just mistake an empty part of the sky for a celestial event.

This Just In: Writer's Strike Ends!

Well, it's been rough, gentle reader, but I was finally able to reach an agreement with myself that will allow me to go back to work writing for Blog of Woe, Wonder. This writer's strike has ended!

Believe me, all these weeks I've spent not writing or thinking about writing have been very difficult. You probably thought that I was just sitting at home, drinking cosmos in the middle of the day and giving myself pedicures, but I assure you, it has not been a vacation. I had a creative vision for this year of entries on Blog of Woe, Wonder. There was an intricate story arc in place; it was all mapped out, and it was AWESOME. There was going to be intrigue and romance and adventure and a monkey! But sometimes you just have to take a stand and say, "No, I will not compromise my principles. I will not write!" So I didn't. And, you know, I really feel like I made my point.

But now I'm just ready to get back to work! You know, the work is what's most important.

So...

What's new? Yeah, I got nothing. I had a thought: I look at what people my age had accomplished, oh, say, a hundred years ago, and I think that maybe all these advances in medicine that have prolonged our lives have done ambition a disservice. Just like that paper assigned on the first day of class that's not due until the end of the semester, there's no sense of urgency anymore. "You know, I probably won't die in childbirth. I'll write that novel later." "TB? Oh, they've totally got a shot for that. I'll travel to a distant continent when I'm 40." Of course, the joke continues to be on we mortals, because there are still buses to run us over and things to fall onto our heads from great heights and totally batshit insane people holding a grudge and a gun. I guess we should all, like, seize the day or something.

I'm going to go on writing these entries as if someone is reading them, even though I know I've probably alienated most of my audience with the prolonged strike. Just remember: my long silence was political, not personal. Solidarity!

Ghost of Christmas Stop Telling Me I Look Like Your Dead Relative, Because it Really Freaks Me Out

I am the ghost that haunts the Midwest. I apparently look like a lot of people, as their relatives tend to tell me. Maybe my blank stare is a blank slate onto which they can easily project the images of their loved ones, many of them dead. Maybe I'm just sort of generically Eastern European in my build and gait. Sometimes I think I was engineered for the bearing of children and the digging up of potatoes.

Anyway, I walked through the doors of this building today, shuddering from the cold and stomping the snow off my feet and generally making enough of a commotion to drown out the majority of what a woman said to me as she sat in a wheelchair in the entryway. All I caught was, "Sister."

At first I thought she was expressing some sort of kindred womanly greeting. I'd already pulled open one of the second set of glass doors and was halfway through. "I'm sorry, what?" I said.

"You look just like my sister," the woman replied. She was waiting for her ride, with her chair angled to look out the glass doors. As she spoke, I noticed the gaping spaces where most of her teeth had been in her youth. Now she sat hunched in her chair, her elbows propped up on the armrests and her hands clenched together and held tight to her chest.

I wasn't sure how to take this as I imagined how much younger and more attractive her sister could possibly be, and I was just about to say, "Oh, that's nice." But I only got as far as, "Oh," before she continued.

"She died from leukemia when she was 39."

"That's--"

"You look just like her when she was young."

I was somewhat at a loss and finally said, "Oh...well, I'm sorry."

Then this hunched and toothless woman turned her face from the ghost of her long-dead sister and stared out the door into the winter damp. As I continued through the door, she quietly ended our awkward little talk. "Sorry to have to tell you."

Snowsabers

(I'd turn down the sound before playing the video. It's significantly less magical with the roaring motors and me shouting.)

When I was a little girl, these things seriously scared me. Seriously. Mattress sales and grand openings of grocery stores were a constant threat as my hometown expanded. I still remember the pit in my stomach when Food 4 Less opened in Kenosha, WI. Thriller was on the radio, the lights were in the sky, and I was huddled in the backseat with my eyes shut tight. "Shut tight against what?" you ask? The aliens, of course. I don't know why, but of all the things to be afraid of, aliens were my thing. My fear was twofold: first, that the beams of the searchlight would actually find something in the sky, namely something saucer-shaped and flown by beings intent on brain-sucking world domination...or, at the very least, hiding in the attic that opened into my bedroom. And if intelligent beings had come millions of light years to squat in my attic, I certainly didn't want some giant, swinging beam of light to advertise my location.
We'll call it a mark of maturity, then, that rather than shutting my eyes and screaming when I caught sight of this searchlight on Saturday, I Jessica Fletchered the source of the light and drove right up to it. My courage was rewarded with a quietly stunning display of glittering snow in fast-moving beams of hypnotically swinging light.

Reflections on Metal

Two full years ago, I made a sort of rash decision to get braces. While my friends get married and have kids, move to far-flung cities, get masters degrees, start careers, my two years of having a mouth full of metal is the longest running consequence of a decision in my adult life. And tomorrow, they’re coming off.

I had braces once before when I was a kid. When they came off, I was left with a permanent retainer that ended up doing more harm than good. By the time 2005 rolled around, I had a pretty gnarly snaggletooth right in the front of my mouth. Now, I never measured with a protractor, but I’d say it jutted out of my mouth at a degree roughly parallel to the ground. This had the effect of giving the usually wrong impression that I was snarling, as my upper lip would sometimes hang out on my tooth ledge. Couple that with the faraway gaze that is my standard facial expression, and I’m surprised anyone ever talked to this apparently bored and snarling girl.

As my teeth have been slowly moving in my skull, I’ve been casually observing a dental trend that I find quite shocking: whitening. I spent years smiling with my lips closed, demurely covering my mouth with my hand so as not to alarm anyone who, by virtue of engaging me in conversation, might find themselves staring down the barrel of my snaggletooth. Meanwhile, public figures (and more and more private ones, it seems) have no qualms about exposing others to what has to be a harmful degree of UV light shining off their whitened teeth. Around the time I had my first set of braces, a local Milwaukee weatherman, John Malan, came to my elementary school to terrify me with pictures of tornado-producing clouds that were, to my untrained eye, exactly like the ones in the sky outside the classroom window. But I also remember him talking about something called albedo, which is apparently the degree to which light reflects off stuff. In John Malan’s example, it was snow. He talked about snow’s albedo being great enough to cause momentary blindness when you look right at it. You can now experience the same phenomenon by accidentally looking directly at the teeth of your favorite celebrity or politician or hairdresser. I’m always grossed out by this unnatural whiteness, and, further cementing my place in the ranks of ueber-nerds, will sometimes throw my hand up as the local news anchors smile at me from the TV or from billboards along the freeway, shouting, “Albedo! Ahhh…ahhh….ah-ah.”

I know other people are put off by this trend, because they flat-out say it when they ask about my braces. “Your teeth look fine,” they’ll say. “Why did you think you needed to get braces? Everybody thinks they have to have perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth these days.” And I have to stop myself from saying, “Oh, yeah? You don’t know how lucky you are right now. You could be locking eyes with Ol’ Snaggle right now. And believe me, he’s trying to get at you. You’d better be glad these metal bars are keepin’ him back, ‘cause he’s got your scent now.” I may have just cross a line by giving my tooth eyes and a nose, but watch me soldier on, because I have a point.

See, as much as I have been dreaming of this day—well, the day that comes after this one, Friday, the day I get my braces off—the looming event has created a bit of very deep anxiety about my identity. When I got these dental shackles, I was two years less removed from college and that phase of your life when you’re supposed to be finding yourself. Now I’m in that part of my 20s that can’t even be rounded down to “mid.” And for these two years, I’ve had a very physically apparent cue that I’m a “work in progress.” There’s been a freakin’ scaffold on my face. At some level, I could always laugh off an awkward social encounter, my inability to cook, my hundreds of dollars in parking tickets; I could just dust off my ass after literally falling down, smile a broad, metallic smile, shrug and say, “Still under construction.” But when the scaffolding comes off tomorrow, for all anyone knows, I’m done. This is the way I intend to be.

And I’m reminded of a very modern-looking church just built near where I went to high school. They were working on it for months, and it was another few months before anyone realized it was actually done, that all those different colored walls were meant to be that way. It was January when I realized the scaffolding was down and it was a finished building. There was a thick blanket of snow on the field around the church, and I had just flung my hand up and was about to shout, “Albedo!” when I noticed parishioners walking into the fully functioning church. I slowly lowered my hand and squinted through the light reflecting off the snow. “Huh. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, I guess.” I squinted a little bit harder at the church’s red and brown and gray and white walls and its odd angles and small windows, and I thought, “Seriously?”

Okay, I get it!

I am attracting some bad, bad enviro-mojo with my shitty car. I took it in for an oil change the other day, something I had been putting off for a while because my car's "check submarine" light has come on again, and I really didn't want to know the reason this time. Turns out, it's the same old reason: the catalytic converter isn't converting anything, certainly not horrible pollutants to less-harmful ones. The last project I did at work today was about alternative energy, so Mother Earth was already on my mind. Plus, the leaves are all multicolored and falling and swirling, and I was all, "Whoa, beautiful Nature, with a capital N."

And then Mother Nature screamed at me, "Oh, you like nature, do you? That's rich!" And she fucking threw someone's recycle bins at my car! A gentle breeze hypnotically swirled these many-colored leaves before my eyes, and then, just when I was lulled into a dreamy complacency (hey, my eyes were still on the road), that breeze suddenly turned into a gust of admonishing wind and smashed these two blue recycle bins into the driver's side door.

Jeesh. Get a grip, Nature.

Aha!

If you were to venture to Oprah.com, you could find a collection of celebrity accounts of their “aha moments.” Invariably, they are tales of experiences wherein your favorite female star realized she's not as eco-conscious as she could be (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), that she hasn’t properly introduced her deceased mother to her children (Oprah’s BFF, Gayle King), or that she is both black and beautiful (Alfre Woodard).

This one’s for you, Oprah.

This past weekend, I had a real-life “aha” moment. I felt the universe tugging on my skirt (yeah, I was wearing a skirt), all, “Psst. Jess. Hey. Psst.” I was occupying my place as the third leg in the generational relay race through time that had gathered around my mother’s kitchen counter. My grandmother and I had just returned from the dedication ceremony for my friends’ new baby. I had told my mom about all the delicious food my friend had made for the lunch reception afterwards and was just about to marvel at the vast differences between my life and my friend’s when I remembered to ask what she had done all day. Turns out, she was pretty exhausted, what with all the burning of the Bibles.

“Psst. Jess.”

“Shut up, Universe! Mom, you did what?”

When I left that morning, I knew my mother would probably spend the day cleaning, as she’s preparing to sell her home. In a house where six people once lived and various people have stayed over the last ten years, it’s now down to her, my grandma, my little brother, and all the shit we deserters left behind. And so the task of gutting the house has largely fallen to my mom. Sure, she makes piles for Goodwill and “do you want this?” stacks for me to look at when I visit, but lately, it would seem, she’s taken to burning stuff she doesn’t want to take with her when she moves.

“How many Bibles did you burn?” I asked, a little astonished.

“I don’t know. Maybe five.”

“You found five Bibles here? Whose were they?”

She couldn’t say for sure.

“What else do you burn?”

“Oh, just shit I find. You know, some papers, a big map, some clothes.”

Some Bibles.

No wonder I’d been nervous about going to church to see my friends’ baby dedicated. I’ve always felt a little silly sitting in congregations where I clearly do not belong…which is to say, all of them. When I do find myself in church for the inevitable procession of marriages of friends and baptisms of their babies that comes with being 20-something, I’m usually able to sit quietly, sing inaudibly, and maybe even give the impression of deep understanding with my patented faraway, could-be-thoughtful gaze.

My grandma had met these friends of mine at the wedding that was my left knee’s undoing. She’d developed quite a crush on their little family, and so when I got the invitation to the dedication of their third child, I thought it was the perfect chance for her to ogle my friend’s husband (only peripherally, thanks to macular degeneration) and coo over their truly lovely and ever-growing family.

And so I sat with my grandma in church on a Sunday morning for the first time I can remember. The congregation was very young and friendly, with people constantly catching my eye and smiling right at me. They were different from my usual crowd, but I managed to smile back after a few initial suspicious glances proved to be pretty clearly not the appropriate response. People shook my hand and welcomed me; their hearts seemed warmed by the sight of me in my skirt, leading my mostly blind grandma to the restroom.

I was almost out. With a few nods to people I recognized from the service and a loud declaration to my grandma that, “it really was a thought-provoking sermon,” we were in the parking lot and the home stretch. There was only one church member between my slow-moving grandma and our parked car. It was an older gentleman with a gray beard and a large motorcycle. He was putting on a leather vest that was truly riddled with various buttons along the alternating themes of patriotism, motorcycles, and Jesus.

And then something fluttered in the corner of my grandma’s eye. Universe! Why did it have to be the corner? That’s the only part where she can see!

There were two flags waving on the back of his motorcycle: one was the stars and stripes; the other was black with the POW/MIA insignia. The man told us a touching story of how the Lord had returned his POW/MIA flag when it had been dislodged by enemy wind on his way home one night. He hadn’t realized it was gone until he got home, but just as he was vowing to never give up on his missing flag, his wife pulled into the driveway and held it out to him, saying, “You missing something?”

Come on! But I kept my mouth shut. I smiled and said, “That’s amazing. Well, have a great ride home.” And I turned to continue toward the car. As soon as my grandma spoke, I knew.

“Well, you better watch out with your American flag,” my grandmother said to this very patriotic man. She pointed vaguely to where she knew I stood. “She’ll run right over it if you give her the chance.”

He was a large man, and he turned like a bear to face me. Somewhere in the cackling, nervous laughter, I managed to form the words “Canada,” “motorcycle,” “flag,” and “it was an accident.” The bear seemed placated, if not wholly amused. I held out my hand to my grandma and politely begged her to come along. She was shouting over her shoulder, “And it was on the Fourth of July,” when we finally reached the car.

“Well, that was a nice service,” she said from the passenger’s seat.

At my friends’ house, my grandma found a woman roughly her own age to talk to, the grandmother of my friend’s husband. They shared family stories over plates of cheesy potatoes and meatballs. Collected in the house were four generations of this particular family, with this woman’s great-grandchildren shouting playfully in the other room and her daughter sitting with us, sharing doting observations of the little ones.

I told my grandma her best chance at great-grandchildren was probably my younger brother, but even that chance seemed slim at the moment. “You should have taken this woman’s lead,” I joked, with a big gesture so she could see I was indicating her new friend. “You should have just had more kids to begin with and increased your chances.”

We all chuckled.

“Oh, I think I had enough.” My grandmother laughed.

We all laughed.

“And I think I’m safe now,” she said with a nudge of camaraderie to her new friend.

I laughed a little nervously.

“You’re safe, aren’t you?” she asked the woman.

“Oh, yes, I should think so,” the woman replied with a laugh.

“G—“ I started.

“Well, you never know,” she continued. “Just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn't fire in the furnace.”

Later, in my mother’s kitchen, the Universe tugs at my costume of a skirt. “Pst. Hey.”

How could my friend and I—roughly the same age, having grown up in the same area, gone to the same college—lead such vastly different lives now? I’d seen members of all the generations of her family earlier that day, and here were all three generations of mine, all sharing what we’d done that day.

“Psst.”

Aha! And I realized that probably at the same moment my grandmother had been joking about postmenopausal sexuality, my mother had been poking at a pile of burning Bibles, smiling through the smoke with a real sense of accomplishment.

Pony Up

Like that creative writing teacher in high school, Blog Action Day has provided me with a prompt today: “The environment. You have till midnight, the end of Blog Action Day. Go!"

It is with pangs of guilt that I write about the environment. Not only am I currently driving by myself to and from work every day, but I am doing it in a car that is more liberally spewing pollutants into the air than other cars on the road. I am, in fact, a hypocritical ass.

I recently made a huge life decision: that I would get rid of my car and try to, like, save the Earth and stuff by personally accounting for less pollution than I usually do. As soon as the idea entered my mind, it just felt right. Not only would it help out the aforementioned Earth, but it would make me feel better about myself, and that’s really what ultimately matters.

My plan hit a snag, however, when a little light depicting a submarine and the word “check” flashed on my car’s dashboard. I took the car to a mechanic, who informed me that there was in fact no submarine to check and also that the drawing was of an automobile engine. After checking the engine, he told me that the catalytic converter in my car was no good.

The mechanic now put my two options before me. One: I could fix the catalytic converter for an absolutely obscene amount of money and dismiss all hope of even breaking even on the sale of this car. Two: I could just have him turn off the submarine light, because Minnesota doesn’t have emissions standards. With what I’m assuming would be a flick of his wrist, he could make my little submarine problem disappear.

I looked up the catalytic converter and its function when I got home. If I’m understanding the internet diagrams correctly, the catalytic converter is like a magical pony attached to your car’s undercarriage whose favorite food is pollutants. She could eat that stuff all day. Sure, some gets by her, but she eats what she can, and the air is better for it.

Oh, Universe! Why do you got to make shit so difficult? The price of a new pony was truly atrocious, and, so very soon after making my resolve to get rid of my car and be less of an asshole to the planet, the Universe was like, “Hey, asshole, why don’t you just go home and watch some TV instead?”

So, sadly, that’s what I did. What difference would it make anyway? I’m just one person with one car, and it looks like I’ll be keeping it for now.

If I believed in fate, I’d think it was a sign that "The Day After Tomorrow" was on television the day I decided to sell my car and take up the carless lifestyle. In this film, mankind has puffed so much pollution into the air that the weather gets apocalyptic and ushers in a new ice age. Cities are laid to waste by massive tornadoes, and golf-cart sized hail squishes unsuspecting Asian people. The entire Northern hemisphere is plunged into frozen chaos, all resulting in poor, lovely Jake Gyllenhaal being trapped in the New York Public Library with a killer superstorm fast approaching. That is how bad shit can get, people.

And if I had any hope that there was a deus to ex-machina our asses out of the trouble mankind is in, none of this stuff would seem scary. But the cards are stacked against hope for children of the ‘80s. Ours was one of the first generations to be sat down and told in firm tones by reliable authority figures that the environment was in trouble. Furry creatures were endangered. Exxon was a dirty word. There was a hole—a giant freakin’ hole—in the protective ozone barrier between us and the careening asteroids. Had we been allowed to swear, our collective cry would have been, “Holy fucking shit!”

And the world seems to have stalled in that moment, if pop culture—which is really the only culture, if you ask me—is any indicator. All the end-of-the world references have me scared out of my mind. According to my exhaustive research, mankind’s destruction by global war, pandemic zombie infection, asteroid collision or robot uprising seems a foregone conclusion. Sometime after that “holy shit” moment in middle school and all these glimpses into the dismal, dismal future, me and many of my generation seem to have lost all hope that we as a species might actually pull this one out of the fire.

But wait; it gets worse. Having gathered a great deal of evidence in watching a great many of these scenarios unfold on TV and in movies, I must conclude that I’m not pretty enough to survive the apocalypse. While I enjoy the stories of the ragtag group of survivors eking out an existence after the decimation of their cultures by war or by superstorms or asteroids or cylons, I know that were it to come to that now, I’d be among those cautionary tales the good-looking ragtag survivors would tell.

“You’ve got to pull yourself together, Chloe! Sure, food is scarce, human skeletons are lying everywhere, and all the wild animals that were in zoos are now roaming the deserted streets of ruined cities with enormous chips on each of their four furry shoulders, but you’re a survivor. You don’t want to end up like those people who gathered their most precious seasons of TV on DVD and wandered around for weeks, finally succumbing to the ravages of hunger and disease on the plains of South Dakota? Do you? Huh?” Man, if the apocalypse hits, I just know I’m going to end up in South Dakota.

The problem seems too big. What we need, children of the ‘80s, is a sledgehammer of hope to break it down! South Dakota looms large, but it seems the first step, the only step we can take is to believe that what we do makes a difference. In my case, that will allow for possible future steps: a new pony for my car, carpooling, getting rid of my car altogether. Who knows? It’s easier on my conscience and my wallet to ignore the submarine light, but Jake Gyllenhaal is counting on me not to be a jerk to the environment. Just say no to superstorms!

So while my point is vague at best, as if seen through a veil of smog (See? It's an intentionally hazy blog entry.), and I don’t seem to be taking any immediate action myself, damned if my blog can’t be active on Blog Action Day. Just you wait. On Crotchety Girl Action Day, I’ll be all kinds of motivated and specific. It’ll be sweet.

Take Back the Knight: How Baby Got Back in the Saddle

I have lived in the shadow of defeat for the past year. Sure, I’ve gone to work, socialized with friends, even made a few new ones. I’ve laughed and joked and gone about my life, but it has all been under the pall of tainted honor. For one year ago, I met a knight who proved my better. I fell to the swift sword of his infectious beat. One year ago, I fell to the notorious Sir Mix-A-Lot.

I won’t soon forget the challenge Mix-A-Lot issued to the assembled revelers at my good friends’ wedding reception. Sure, I had a couple chocolate martinis in me…and some rum from a thermos a friend had spirited into the building, but I felt ready to meet Sir Mix-A-Lot on the level ground of the makeshift dance floor covering the marble of the Minnesota Historical Society. His words said all the wrong things, objectifying women, reducing their worth to the circumference of their backsides; but the beat of the song said something else. The rhythm pounding through the rented sound system said, “I dare you not to dance to this.”

Well, this knight had picked the wrong day to make assumptions about my reluctance to dance due to moral and political reservations about a song’s lyrics. As a woman who sometimes forgets to brush her hair, I was feeling special in my plum-colored bridesmaid dress, neatly curled hair, and professionally applied makeup. And I had an advantage over Mix-A-Lot: he didn’t know of my family’s wedding dancing legacy. He couldn’t know that my father is none other than “The Dancing Machine” of southeastern Wisconsin.

Ah, but as fate would have it, my father’s legacy is a cruelly ironic one. For as I bore the mantle of The Dancing Machine, little did I know that my knees were quaking under the weight of it. I had inherited my father’s weak knees, and they were about to prove my very public undoing.

Just as I was answering Mix-A-Lot’s call to shake it, shake it, shake that healthy butt, there was an ear-splitting POP, and I found myself flat on the very moneymaker I’d been shaking mere moments before. At first, I was at a loss as to what had happened. My mind raced for the answer, quickly weighing the little evidence I had. There was the loud POP and the fact that I was on the floor. “Am I shot?” I wondered. But before I could remember if Sir Mix-A-Lot was from the East or West Coast, I caught sight of a foot to my left. It was wearing my shoe and appeared to be attached to a leg in my skirt, but the angle was all wrong; it couldn’t be attached to me.

As my friends formed a supportive circle of laughter around me, I was horrified to discover that the foot and the awkwardly bent leg were indeed mine. Unable to stand on my own and finding all my friends’ hands occupied in the act of pointing at me, I exited the dance floor by the only means left to me: this baby scooted backwards out of the flashing lights and into the darkness of a shame that has haunted me for a year.

The scooting may have managed to jostle my wayward joint back into place, but I limped through the world for a good two months. And when the swelling in my knee and foot finally went down, I carried the scars of my encounter with Sir Mix-A-Lot on the inside. My confidence was shaken; my ability to continue my family’s proud wedding dancing legacy was in doubt. I thought about Mix-A-Lot often, thought of a rematch. I knew how to find him; he had brazenly shouted his number, 1-900-MIX-ALOT, as I struggled to remove my fancy shoe from my rapidly swelling foot. But I couldn’t bring myself to meet him again…

…That is, not until a wedding I attended last weekend. It was in a small town in Wisconsin, and there were far more people at the bar than on the dance floor. This was my comeback dance, and I had eased back into it with the twist and some flailing to Love Shack. Along with the bride, I was one of about six women on the dance floor when the DJ announced a special request from one local man to another. The bride and her local friends froze as the DJ continued, “I don’t really want to know what this is all about, but here we go.”

“We got to get out of here,” the bride said as she joined the exodus from the dance floor. I was almost back to my table when I heard that unmistakable beat and that whiny woman’s voice urging Becky to look at another woman’s impossibly big butt, and I knew in an instant why everyone had run. This whiny woman is but the herald to the dark knight who commands feet and legs to dance and, yes, knees to bend unnaturally before him. As the local women scattered, I couldn’t blame them for their fear. The last time I’d faced Sir Mix-A-Lot, I’d ended up missing two days of work and riding the electric shopping cart at Target.

“I like big butts, and I cannot lie,” came his voice through the darkened dance hall. I spun on my heels and looked back at the deserted dance floor. Lights flickered on empty parquet flooring. Not a soul, it seemed, was brave enough to face Mix-A-Lot in that arena. I looked to my friend Sarah, who had been witness (pointing, laughing witness) to my fall one year ago. She looked to the dance floor and back at me then nodded slowly; I knew would not face him alone. I persuaded the bride to come back to the dance floor with us, and several women reluctantly followed her.

Our little mass of flailing femininity moved toward the dance floor, and I steeled myself with quiet resolve: I would not kneel before Sir Mix-A-Lot…mostly because I can’t really kneel anymore without shooting pains in my leg. But as I took those first tentative steps back into the flickering lights, that familiar beat pounding through the autumn air, I was surrounded by women shaking their butts in solidarity, and I knew I had already won.