Category: 3rd-person blogging

All About My Mother

Some “facts”* about Pamela Kay Madden neé Myers.

    • Her favorite flower is the daisy. The daisy? “It’s always been the daisy,” she told me recently. “It’s always been the daisy.”
      She was at one time in the 1980s the president of what was either called “the Ladies Auxiliary of the Herndon Jaycees” or, more regrettably, “the Jaycettes”.
      She read 100 books last year. She read 100 books last year!
      As a child she had a traumatic experience with a chicken or rooster and now we both hate birds.
      She’s a Leo. She’s a total Leo.
      The day after my 10th birthday when only one of my seven invited friends showed up for my party she wrote me a cheer-up rap that she performed over a breakfast of chocolate-chip pancakes.
      One time she was hit on by Joe Theisman neé /THEEZ-man/ and the whole time was having none of it.
      She took me to the J.C. Penney to buy royal blue sweats when I peed my jeans playing a really good game of Super Mario Bros. in the arcade of the Jefferson Mall in Washington, Pa.
      As a Jaycette, she got known for having a knack of taking popular songs and changing the lyrics to be more topically amusing. This led to our sheet-music copy of Johnny Marks’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” getting alternate words written in penciled cursive on the score—e.g. Nixon where Vixen was originally.
      She likes to attribute whatever music know-how I have to her private genes. (My dad to my knowledge can’t much carry a tune.)
      I don’t know the color of her eyes but I’d put if forced to my money on brown.
      She grew up in a room without a door.
      Once, after she graduated from California High, she ran off to upstate New York to live with relations, just to not have to be in Coal Center, Pa., anymore. Around that time, also in upstate New York, Max Yasgur let a bunch of hippie kids on his farm to throw a 3-day rock concert where Sha-Na-Na performed “At the Hop”. My mom was not there. “I don’t know,” she told me once when I protested this fact. “It never occurred to me to go.”
      She swears. Once on the phone she said, “Oh shit, Dave!” in anger when I got her good on April Fool’s Day 1997.
      She hates magic. She’s sort of angrily terrified-slash-dismissive of the whole artform.

    • I’ll end here. My favorite story to tell about my mother is this one: Once, way back when I and my two sisters were living at the Herndon house (possibly even my grandfather, too), we were all sitting down to dinner in the kitchen. It’s impossible to fit six people in this kitchen. This kitchen, for instance, was the size of several friends’ walk-in closets. And yet, here’s the memory: it’s a pasta dinner. Assuredly just plain-old spaghetti with tomato sauce. My mother (who, bless her heart, made few if none of my meals growing up) was wearing a white blouse, spelling for herself total danger given the slurpiness and slippery quality of any stringy pasta. She sat down last to the table. She grabbed from the wooden holder I made in shop class at the center of the table a single napkin. She tucked one napkin’s corner into her collar. None of us was eating at this point. Each of us was watching closely. With fine finesse and great, great care my mom spread with steady hands her napkin across her torso, assuring maximum coverage. Satisfied, she tucked in to dinner. We’re at this point all still watching her. To her mouth she brought her fork full of pasta. She took a bite, and the last bit of pasta-tail whipped toward her lips, flipping a light bead of sauce right at her shoulder. It landed millimeters away from the safe side of her napkin’s edge. My mom saw where the sauce drop landed. We all saw where the sauce drop landed. Each of us—Jenny, Shani, Dad, and I—exploded in laughter. My mom hung her head. It was the very best thing that could have happened.

    Such has been the fate of my mother, of all mothers maybe. She raised a brood of whipsmart kids ready to pounce. And she married one too, for better or worse. So now she receives from each of us so much jokey haw-haws because it’s the easiest way we’ve found to mitigate how much we love her, and how hard and heavy this helpless, unending love for her weighs on us every damn day.

    Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I’ll see you soon.

    —
    * Most facts assuredly misremembered. At least one was just plain made up.

    Brief Interview with Timothy Schaffert

    I’ve known Tim for several years now, ever since I moved to Nebraska and met him there, this onetime UNL undergrad who was then coming out with his second novel while also editing an Omaha alt-weekly.

    Now, his fourth novel has just been released from Unbridled Books. The Coffins of Little Hope is about a small Nebraska town with a mystery, a missing girl, a little newspaper, the pending final book in a series of young-adult novels involving the escapades of sisters Miranda and Desiree, and an octogenarian narrator who finds a way to hold it all together.

    Tim’s a great writer and a nice guy and agreed to answer some questions about his book and writing process.
    Continue reading Brief Interview with Timothy Schaffert

    Tim Pawlenty – Latest 2012 GOP Hopeful – Hates Gay Folks

    Today’s NY Times has a story about new-ish political blogs already getting a jump-start on the 2012 presidential elections. Turns out Tim Pawlenty, the conservative governor of Minnesota, has some dude trailing him daily with a Flip cam. It’s likely he’ll run in 2012 (or, well, run later this year for 2012, the way these things go).A recent New Hampshire straw poll has him beating Sarah Palin as a top presidential candidate.

    I’d never heard of the guy until yesterday, when I read that anti-gay Christian organization Family Research Council was named a “hate group” in December by the Southern Poverty Law Center. From the SLPC’s report:

    Headed since 2003 by former Louisiana State Rep. Tony Perkins, the FRC has been a font of anti-gay propaganda throughout its history. It relies on the work of Robert Knight […] along with that of FRC senior research fellows Tim Dailey (hired in 1999) and Peter Sprigg (2001). Both Dailey and Sprigg have pushed false accusations linking gay men to pedophilia: Sprigg has written that most men who engage in same-sex child molestation “identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual,” and Dailey and Sprigg devoted an entire chapter of their 2004 book Getting It Straight to similar material. The men claimed that “homosexuals are overrepresented in child sex offenses” and similarly asserted that “homosexuals are attracted in inordinate numbers to boys.”

    Angry at being called out as a “hate group” and not as an organization “advancing faith, family, and freedom,” the FRC published an ad which listed dozens of U.S. elected officials who supported the work they did to publish fabricated pseudo-science about gay people.

    Tim Pawlenty was one of three governors who pledged support. (The others were Huckabee and Jindal.)

    Pawlenty, it goes without saying, is against marriage equality for same-sex couples (as, still, is our current president). But did you know he’d also repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”?

    Not that any of this is a surprise. Anti-gay GOP candidates? Pawlenty, though, seems to be one of the most fervent. We’ll see, if he does run, whether his anti-gay rhetoric amps up or gets toned down. What does the Tea Party want?

    3rd-Person Blogging: Poohstrong

    dmaddanLike yours truly, David Andrew Maddan was the youngest of his siblings. Unlike same, he was an incredibly good swimmer, serving eventually as captain for the UC-Santa Barbara Gauchos swim team. At some point in this swimming tenure, someone gave him the Milnean nickname “Pooh.”

    In 2005 doctors found cancer in Pooh’s bones. They diagnosed him with osteosarcoma. In the coming year he lost most of his right leg and all of his right kneecap. Then he lost parts of his lungs. Another year passed and doctors diagnosed him with leukemia. He began another round of radiation and chemotherapy, with minimal results. He died in October 2008 at the age of 28.

    Pooh’s parents, Jack and Anna, have started a foundation in their son’s name, to assist in the medical treatments of other young cancer patients. Maybe you know someone in this situation, or maybe you’d like to help. You can read more about the David Andrew “Pooh” Maddan Foundation here.

    Third-Person Blogging – part one

    nazarioAmanda Nazario is a writer, DJ, dogwalker, and artist living in New York. She grew up there, right on the upper-west side, and as a native she’s somehow reached her thirties without ever learning to drive. With such public transportation, who would blame her?

    Now she’s going from never once driving a car to driving a van across the country, wireless Internet broadcasting equipment in tow, and bringing her radio show, Nazario Scenario on Washington Heights Free Radio, to the masses. Billed at WHFR.org as “your scene if you like singalongs, rollicking hilarity, sweetness and light, or general merriment,” NS is like that right sort of themeless eclectic mixtape your friend that knows more music than you do makes on a whim and sends to your mailbox one afternoon. You’ll hear Willie Nelson and ELO and Superchunk within a fifteen-minute interval—and it’ll sound exactly right.

    To raise the funds, Amanda’s signed up with fundraising Web site Kickstarter, which enables people to pledge money to the project without much risk. The Mobile Nazario Scenario needs $10,000 to happen, and it needs this money by October 15. If—heaven forbid—the money doesn’t get raised, everyone walks away as though nothing happened.

    But what if she got the money? What if you helped make the project happen?

    Here’s Amanda, to give you a sense of why you should head over to her project and donate whatever you can.
    interview with Amanda after the jump