EvilJulie.com

My friend Kim sent a bunch of books up for the Youngest last Christmas. Some of them went to her grandma’s house this summer to read while she was at circus camp, some stayed at my house to read when she’s here. And some of them, I have to admit, stayed at my house because I loved them when I was a kid and wanted to re-read them.

Friday night, I finally had some time to devote to them. I whipped through Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and moved onto Superfudge. Now, partway through Superfudge, I thought I saw something a little off. Fudge tells everyone that he likes watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. I flipped to the front pages. Copyright 1980. I have a vague memory of Nickelodeon when I was small, but Cartoon Network was that old, too? I had no idea! Huh. Learn something new every day.

I read further, and when I read the part about Fudge forcing the entire family to write letters to Santa, I knew the gig was up. Peter asks for CDs, a laptop, and an MP3 player in his letter. Back the truck up, I’m stupid, but I’m not an idiot. I also clearly remember Peter asking for albums and a Walkman. Suddenly, I felt like a part of my childhood had been rewritten. Hey, if kids could figure out what the hell saddle shoes were (which they had to in Tales, because that part wasn’t updated)? They can bloody well ask mom and dad what a Walkman was. I am not down with my childhood being revised. What’s next, the poster of Richard Gere that hangs over Steph’s bed in Just as Long as We’re Together replaced with one of Orlando Bloom? Take it back, Judy Blume! Take it back! You wrote something that is now a documentation of history. Leave it that way!

So lately I’ve been TiVoing a show on BBC America called “How Clean Is Your House?”. I greatly enjoy my BBC America and have been sucked into it for hours at a time watching “Cash in the Attic,” “Hex,” “Robin Hood,” and “Changing Rooms,” among other things, but this show is different. Rather than making me want to lounge around on the couch in my jim-jams, “How Clean Is Your House?” makes me feel the need to clean. A lot.

See, the basic premise is that two women, Kim and Aggie, are called into clean houses that people have let go past the point of no return. We are talking years of grime and crap here. And before they clean, Aggie takes swabs of the whole house so you know exactly what kind of bacteria these people have been living with. I have learned more about bacteria since I started watching this, and frankly, it’s horrifying. Your skin just crawls. And then you look around your house and start to wonder what bacteria are living with you. And then you must clean. Or I must, at any rate.

My place is generally pretty clean. Yeah, the cats tear fur out of each other and so I have to vacuum up the fur tumbleweeds every week. But aside from the office, there isn’t a lot of clutter, mostly because I don’t like looking at it (and that explains why the office is cluttered, since it is out of sight.). But, do I dust? Um, not so much. I use my Swiffer wet jet on the kitchen and bathroom floors, but I know that’s not deep cleaning them because the floors are old and dirt gets trapped in the crevices. And so last night, I went on a cleaning tear. I vacuumed. I dusted and polished the coffee table and cleaned out all the things that have been collecting there. I dusted the end tables. I scrubbed the toilet and bathroom sink (Kim has given me nightmares about things that lurk under the rims of toilets and I couldn’t rest until I’d cleaned mine). I cleaned out the toaster oven. And then, the piece de resistance, I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the kitchen floor. With a brush and some OxiClean. I couldn’t let it soak for as long as the can recommended because Freddie was way too intrigued by the whole process and I was afraid he would play in the water and then lick it off of himself and get good and ill, but it still got a fair amount of grime up. And when I went to sleep, my muscles ached. And I had nightmares about the crusty stuff in the microwave that I hadn’t cleaned. Guess what I’ll be cleaning tonight?

And the Police were only edged out by Queen + Paul Rodgers because of my love of Queen…and Brian’s guitar playing. Andy Summers is a brilliant guitar player, but not quite the same as Brian May.

Fiction Plane opened up the show, and they are a damned good band – a little more towards the alternative style of rock than the Police, but high energy and really entertaining. I especially liked Joe Sumner’s repeated jumps off the speakers and the fact that he played to those of us sitting behind the stage. He sounded eerily like his dad at a couple of points, but on the whole he’s got his own style of bass playing and singing. He may be Sting’s son, but he’s his own musician.

There was a half hour turnaround between Fiction Plane and the Police, and then the Police took then stage at a little past 9. For the next two hours I was on my feet, dancing and singing. It was a greatest hits concert in the best sense – “Message in a Bottle,” “This Bed’s Too Big Without You,” “Wrapped Around Your Finger,” “So Lonely,” “Roxanne,” “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” “King of Pain,” “Next To You”…I think the only song that I was really dying to hear that they didn’t play was “Fallout,” but I was probably the only one who really wanted to hear that (I was surrounded by people who didn’t know the words to half the songs, with the notable exception of a group of four to my left and a drunk guy three rows down. And Mom. She knew the words to most of the songs.).

All told, the Police played for just about two hours, and I literally think I sat down for three minutes. I’ve got every song they ever recorded on CD (and thus on my iPod), but until you hear them live, you don’t realize how much of a groove there is, how based in reggae and ska a lot of their songs are. At one point, when everyone was on their feet and singing (I think it was during “Roxanne”), I could feel the ground moving under my feet.  Even Sting stopped doing a call-and-response with the audience to say “This stage moves. There is definitely a seismic reaction going on here.”

Long and short of it: when the three of them are on stage, you can tell one of them has been doing rock concerts and working out for the past twenty years and two of them havent. Sting hardly broke a sweat, he was playing to the entire audience, he looked just as fresh at the end of the concert as he did at the beginning. Andy’s playing is on, but a lot of the time he looked like he was focusing more inward than on the crowd around him. Stewart is on, but he has a vacant stare on his face and his jaw is hanging slack for the majority of the time, like he’s on something. He and Andy looked tired by the end of the show, although he recovered enough as they were leaving after the second encore to shout “Yeah!” at the crowd a couple of times. I think all three of them enjoyed the hell out of it, they just have different ways of playing now that they’ve been following different career paths for twenty years.

If I can get tickets for their Halloween show at the Garden, I am totally there.

I spent 10 hours in the park on Saturday for Samang’s blessing, another five in the park yesterday for the “let’s get rid of some more of this food” party, and Rick came over last night.  But I still managed to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by 11:30 last night.

So, so good.  I laughed, I shed copious amounts of tears, and in the end, I was right.  On one count, at least (and no, I’m not going to tell you which count, but if you know me, you can guess).  I think this is the best book of the seven, and Jo has done an amazing job at tying up all the loose ends in the series.  You have to stand in awe of the imagination of this woman.

I can’t wait until Samang is old enough for us to read these books to her!

Have I mentioned before that Ugly Betty is one of my favorite shows and that I’ve got it on Season Pass on the TiVo? No? Well, I do. I also have a couple of episodes on the iPod for subway/lunch hour viewing. It makes me happy.

One of the things I love best about the show is that it has definitely stayed true to its telenovela roots. (Yes, I have been known to watch telenovelas on Univision, Galavision, Telemundo, and whatever other channels air them, even though the amount of Spanish I have retained from high school is limited to “Que tal?”, “Hola,” and a wide variety of curses.) Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, the writers throw in a twist so incredibly bizarre that you sit in front of the TV slack-jawed, thinking “What the fuck just happened?” and you rewind the TiVo at least twice to try to wrap your mind around it.

Tonight I finally got around to watching last Thursday’s episode. If you saw it, you know precisely which five minutes I rewound multiple times. If you didn’t, and don’t normally watch this show, it’s about time you start. It’s just getting GOOD, people.

My Con Ed bill hit this morning. $155.51. I know that isn’t as bad as what some of you are getting hit with, but remember that I am one person living in a two room apartment. I do not have a whole house to cool down, I have two cats. However, I think my whole “set the a/c to 80* and put it on energy saver” theory worked – I’m pretty sure the bill would have been above $200 had I not done that.

But now, onto happier subjects, like snatches. Jordana and I went to a kickass show last night, Absinthe: Les Artistes de la Clique. It has been making the rounds of the festivals (including Edinburgh) and has been a tremendous hit wherever it plays. I can totally see why. It’s a cabaret/vaudeville/burleque performance involving a fair amount of acrobatics, a couple of arial acts, some cross-dressing, a lot of stripping, the occasional bubble blower, and of course, naked magic featuring snatches. Because no show would be complete without that.

The whole thing takes place in the Spiegeltent at South Street Seaport where the alcohol is flowing (courtesy of Heartland Brewery) and the atmosphere is rowdy. I could have done without the ballad singer (her second song was funny, but the first and last songs didn’t seem to go with the rest of the evening). The rest was brilliant. My favorites of the night were the drag queen who first tap danced in roller skates, then pogo’d in 7″ platform heels while juggling knives, the emcee who was also a sword swallower (well, table leg swallower), and the magic act.

The magic trick being performed wasn’t exceptional – it was the old “stuff a handkerchief into my hand and make it disappear” – but the execution…the magician (a woman) came out dressed in a somewhat severe suit. She did the handkerchief trick once, then removed her jacket to show she wasn’t hiding the handkerchief up her sleeves. She then pulled it out of her skirt, so the next time she did the trick, she removed that. And found the handkerchief in her bra. So she removed that. And then found it in her panties. So she removed them and did the trick completely naked. And then pulled the handkerchief from her snatch. Possibly the most entertaining magic trick I have ever seen, because how often do you witness magical snatches, live on stage in front of you, complete with bumps and grinds? Okay, let me rephrase that…how often does a non-perv who doesn’t hang out at the private booths witness a magical snatch, live on stage in front of you?

After the show is over, the Spiegeltent becomes a bar (there’s a bar in it throughout the performance, which is how Julie walked away with two pint glasses last night – ask Aimee, I have maybe one glass which I have not stolen from a bar) and they party into the night. Jordana and I were out of cash (despite the fact that we got in for free because she’s a producer), so we didn’t stay. I have to say, though, it was one of the most entertaining evenings I’ve had in a long time. And it made Jordana change her mind about going with me to see the freakshow at Coney Island, so it was doubly worth it. I loved this show.