Hair Raising Idea

Sometimes your heart just says, "no." I thought writing my Christmas memories would be a fun task and a nice archive later to return to, but it simply hurts too much. Revisiting them is just upsetting so I am abandoning this blog assignment to replace it with my usual rambles. 

First up: CANCER!

Wit on Broadway

Cynthia Nixon is bringing Vivian Bearing to the Great White Way. I couldn't be more thrilled. I didn't see Judith Light do it downtown, but I did see Emma Thompson in the HBO version. I'm still recovering. The cancer aside what put me into action to blog was this picture of a bald Ms. Nixon. (click link above) What is it about a bald woman that is so jarring? I don't feel the same way about bald men. Capt. Picard rocks it as does Michael Jordon, I don't think twice. Am I just conditioned to think a woman is "naked" without her hair. As if it's taboo or wrong to be caught without your locks? Or it immediately triggers "sickness" and that face of "are you ok?" I don't know, but I don't like it. Bald should be beautiful for both sexes. My sister shaved her head a number of years ago because she was just fed up with it. The up keep, the way men treated her because of it. She worked a jaunty scarf to the horror of everyone around her.....(by the way this was pre-Britney Spears meltdown). She looked great and it was an amazing and liberating experiment for her. I've always said I would do it at 50, but I am thinking of moving that date up a decade or so....to baldly go where women fear to go!

Christmas Memory #2

There's a picture of me somewhere under the tree in pink footie pj's. When I say "under" the tree I mean as if I was a mechanic checking it for oil. I would spend hours looking up through the limbs at the lights and ornaments. It was a parallel imaginary universe where sugar plum fairies danced in my head and sometimes before my eyes. I swear they moved but maybe I had too much "adult" egg nog by mistake.

Creating fanciful story lines for the inanimate treasures we collected over the years and wishing deep down that I could join them amongst the needles. Or maybe I was just really into "The Littles" at that time, but they lived in the walls of the house and not in a tree....I digress.

Christmas is about escaping into the warmth of childhood. Getting as close as I could to the tree made the magic of it spring into my tiny little brain. Clearly it took root and has grown into my memory. Kind of like that conifer tree that grew in that guy's lung on Grey's Anatomy only less gross & deadly.

Christmas Memory #1

I decided to try and recall a Christmas memory for everyday of December up until the 25th. A peeping advent calendar of the holiday through the morass that is my grey matter. They will be in no particular order, just what springs forth from my cerebral clouds.

We had a live tree every year until we moved to Florida. The family would bundle up and jump in the car and head off towards the nearest forest. Dad would brandish his hack saw after Mom picked the perfect sized spruce and we'd cut it from the earth, load it on the roof and trundle home. Sometimes if the wind is right in Central Park on a blustery winter day I can smell the freshness of the pine & recall the snap of sap on my fingers.

Later on after we moved to Florida we bought a plastic tree from Sears. It never felt the same as when we hunted down our own Tannenbaum.  

Wie treu sind deine Blätter!