That woman that you see in the grocery store and immediately duck down a different aisle. I have a few of those in my life. People that I knew when the beach urchins were in school that, well, I don’t know exactly what it is like to look at life through their eyes but all I can imagine is a sort of haze. Like walking around at about 100, as a friend of mine says, and the beach urchins used to get all insulted whenever I said it. Even though I wasn’t usually referring to a *particular* person and was expressing my opinion in the privacy of my own home. LOL!

Anyway. Norma. Trophy wife of a rich lawyer (and no, not all lawyers are rich, I know that, but her guy is rich and a lawyer). Tall and beautiful and ALWAYS NICE(!) and dumb as a dern doorknob. I bumbled into the line behind her at the Plum today. She was struggling (gracefully, as always) with the cards and the swiper. She has been shopping at the Plum as long as I have (I know that because I see her there from time to time) and she still can’t just walk up there and swipe her card? Jeebus Mackinaw Kee-reist!

I first encountered her during my Mouse’s sojourn at middle school. My worst memory of her is the time she signed her kid up for a YAG theatre production. A great big umpteen-bazillion-kid production down at the Lydia Mendelssohn. The kid (8 years old) OBVIOUSLY wasn’t into the program. Mom was not *with* the program. I think the first time I just about lost it with Norma was when she asked me if “everyone” on the rehearsal schedule meant that her little snowflake needed to be there. Um, everyone? I patiently explained to her beautiful smiling face that YES! Jeebus Mackinaw Kee-reist!

Not that the YAG schedules were ever easy to follow. I have always wondered if *we* would have continued participating if the first couple of plays *we* were in didn’t happen at Haisley. I mean, it’s right behind the Landfill. If you walked over there to a rehearsal and it was CANCELED or it turned out you weren’t needed, you just said, “Oh, well” and walked home again. As it turned out, we got HEAVILY into YAG and I tried my darndest to FIX the rehearsal schedule problem both by frequent paper communications to parents and DRAGGING YAG onto the internet. This was around 1999 or so when the internet was still in the wild west stage. Some people were ecstatic that YAG was on the web. Other people were crabby bitches about it and no they weren’t very charming. I don’t have the internet, yada yada. Like, would you rather drive all the way across town only to find a paper sign on the door saying that the rehearsal is canceled? Or moved to some obscure location? Really? Come on, get on the dern internet.

So Norma couldn’t figure out the schedule. Okay. I patiently (really, for those of you who know me IRL) explained the schedule to her (as well as I could, because…). She condescended to me with something like, “You are so wonderful for doing all of this. It is a labor of love, isn’t it?” Errrr… Yeah. Actually it kinda was because I did LOVE the organization and what it did for so many kids, including mine. And I loved [most of] the folks I worked with throughout the years. But there were others, and a lot of parents (like Norma), that drove me bat-shit crazy. Not to mention that I worked my butt off for very marginal pay and only occasional kudos. My journey from that organization to where the heck I am now would be a whole ‘nother thing.

So mommy’s little darling never really got integrated properly into that particular experience and by the end of Tech Week (ask any actor what tech week is like!), we had an episode where she barricaded herself into a dressing room and locked the door from the inside and I wasn’t there at the time but I remember Madame Producer, who could talk any kid into anything, saying something like she didn’t want to go anywhere near that kid because she didn’t want to be bitten.

That kid was never in another production and I would say what we may have done right and/or wrong but lawyer. And lawyers NEVER make anything better, given my limited but horrendous experience with unscrupulous lawyers harassing me and my children for nothing. Alas.

In more positive news, us girls met with Louie-Louiiii for lunch today. Man do we miss him. The Benevolent Despot caught us all taking off for lunch at the same time in one vee-hickle and he said he hoped we didn’t get into an accident because he’d lose a big chunk of his “brain trust”. LOL! (snort)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2016 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.