“May I unclog your pipe, Princess Peach?”

“Why, yes, my Super Mario, but be gentle, my pipes are tender and there is not enough toilet paper in the world to clean the mess if you break it.  My pipe has been broken by one of your kind (Italian) before and it took years of therapy (ie, boring my friends to tears and crying in my dog’s back)  and drinking a vineyard of wine for me to open the door for your services  (plumbing).  But you know what, Mario?  I am okay with it all. Sometimes you just have to throw caution in the wind.  Make a decision. TAKE A VACAY!  Slap it on a credit card.  Sell all your crap on eBay to pay for it. Because life is long and if you don’t fill it with a story, then all you’ve got is a toilet that is clogged because you tried to flush the TV guides.  So yes, my Super Mario, take your plunger and pump away as I, Princess Peach, am ready to be ravished!”

Let me explain this one.  Out of the blue, a friend asked me to go to Italy for a week this summer, a cheap and cheerful little holiday, with air mile points and to survive off of white carbs and local plonk. This is our prime and this is our time, she said, let’s do it.  Eat, pray, LOL, I thought.  I want to go!  But there were pros and cons to weigh.

“You are broke,” my mother, nay-sayer said, “If you can’t afford it, you shouldn’t go.”

“You will get Italian bone,” A friend, yay-sayer, said.

Decision made.  Italian bone trumps poverty.

Apparently Italians in actual Italy are different from Italians here in North America.  I’ve been to Italy once as a young lady in the ’80s, menstruating her way through Europe.  That is my curse, literally, every time I go on vacation, without fail,  Aunt Flo packs her bag and hitches a ride. Back then, I had noticed European men were freaky about lady flow.  ”You will curse our village, and its citizens, with your sangria clotting, cover your astro turf and be away with you!”  Was the rough translation, via a pocket dictionary and through my understanding of latin based languages based on one Spanish course I took in third year university.

North American men don’t care about such things.  They will pull a ‘pon with their teeth and throw down a towel to get to their destination.  Which is far more civilized as far as I’m concerned. Maybe things have changed in Rome and Aunt Flo and I will be in luck.  In any case, I have compiled a list of my favourite Italian-ish men…let’s groove:

First of all, I do believe that this is Andy Garcia, who is not Italian but Cuban descent. But when I googled “Italian men” his picture came up on a blog with the caption “Close Enough” and if its good enough for this awesome blogger, its good enough for me.

Fabrizio Moretti, the drummer from the Strokes, who is only half Italian and actually born in Brazil.  I like him because he dated Drew Barrymore for a while.  I always thought Drew Barrymore would play me in the film version of my life.   He is super cute. I also thought he was full Italian.  Joke’s on me.

This is Dario Franchitti, IndyCar champion, winner of Indy500.  He is married to Ashley Judd who I love because she is the bi-polar Voice of Reason of that crazy Judd family.  They were the best guests that Oprah ever had and when Wynonna Judd sang “I Want to Know What Love Is,”  I actually cried.  You think I’m joking but I’m not.  I have a super mushy side.  Anyway I love a man who puts up with all that whacked out estrogen.  But again, he is only half-Italian…the other half, Scottish.

I make no apologies for my love of Leonardo Dicaprio.  His modelizing ways makes me feel like he is floundering his way through love.  He and Kate Winslet need to get it on.  Kate Winslet is in the running to play me in the movie of my life so maybe Leo could play my future husband since they’re so good together.  Oh, and he is about as Italian as my secret ingredient in pesto (Corn Flakes!) but the name counts.

Seriously, even Super Mario is a watered down Italian.  He is created by a Japanese designer and although originally from Brooklyn, lives in Mushroom Kingdom.  But his M.O. is to save the damsels in distress.  Or just unclog their pipes, which is all I’m asking at this point.

And here’s Wynonna on Oprah, wanting to know what love is, which might be the next step AFTER ITALY:

In my high school in Quebec, the students were segregated: Disco and Disco Sucks.  Disco Sucks were the majority rule and those who were Disco walked silently down the halls, heads down, not looking at anyone in the eye.  Discos ate lunch in the bathroom, where the mirrors were, and they could pick their perm ‘fros and practise their hustle moves without getting kicked in the head.

The first time I saw a Disco person up close was this girl who was new in the school,  and who had unknowingly claimed a locker smack dab in the midst of Pink Floyd disciples.  She was wearing a bunny fur bomber jacket, high-waisted skintight jeans tucked into platform boots.  Her dyed blond hair had perfectly executed side flips, like wave breakers, and no curling iron marks!  Do you know how hard it is to make it smooth? Hers looked like a helmet. And her face was perfectly maquillaged, swoops of blue eyeshadow under razor-thin arched eyebrows, streaks of pink blush, and layer of shiny fuchsia gloss so thick that if you stared at it, you would go blind.  Like an eclipse.  She was awesome.

Some plaid boy hissed:  ”Disco bitch!  Kill her with fire!”

She barely batted an eye: “Go fuck yourself, farmer.”  As she swung her silver sequinned purse over her shoulder, she clomped away with her pack DuMauriers, a whiff of Shalimar trailed her. We all stared, the girls and the boys, dressed stupidly and all the same in our flannel shirts from the men’s department at Horizon.  Nobody bothered her again.  She was a French girl named Louise and she turned out to be A-OK.  Once we skipped gym class and went to Gaby’s for french fries and she told me that she missed a couple of years of school because she had a baby at 12!  She gave it up for adoption and her parents made her live with her crazy grandma. She was very funny and could blow smoke rings without moving her jaw.  She only stayed a year and never ended up graduating with us but when I think of Disco, I think of her.

I also thought of Disco last week when Donna Summer and Robin Gibb passed away.  Like I said, it was just not cool to like Disco in my neck of the woods.  We listened to “Progressive Rock” like Genesis, Pink Floyd, and Yes.  But when someone would put on the “Dark Side of the Moon,” I would get anxious.  Please stop the howling.  I couldn’t take the tedious moaning from a cave sounds.  I didn’t own any of these albums because there was no point.  You couldn’t escape them from the radio station we listened to called CHOM.  It was a downward spiral of screaming and endless guitar riffs that could set your watch by, day after day, night after night.

Secretly, and I’m only confessing this now because I am a LOCA and I don’t give a fuck, I LIKED DISCO!

I loved to go shopping in downtown Montreal in the 70s and go to Jean Junction where they would blast the music and I would sing along, joyfully, trying on Road Runners:  BURN, BABY, BURN!  DISCO INFERNO!

And I never told any of my friends from school this but on Friday nights, my French friend and I would go to a roller rink in Brossard and skate with boys who had blow dried feathered hair and wore gold necklaces with little mini Jesus crosses over their furry chests:  JIVE TALKIN’!

And the very best times were had in the summer, going to LaRonde, the amusement park at Man and His World.  You would take a little trolley train from the Metro to the gates of the parks and see couples in full-on coital, humping on the grassy hills underneath the trees.  I think people in general had more mojo back then, and I think Disco helped. Something about the beat and all the moaning.   The rides at the park were operated by toothless Carnies who gave you extra spins if you weren’t wearing a bra.  My favourite ride was the Bobsleigh, where you would go around and up and up and down super fast while the lights flashed and the music blasted:  I FEEL LO-OOOOOVE! I FEEL LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE!

Why on Earth would you want to go to The Dark Side of the Moon when you could feel such unbridled joy?

I kept my secret, all through high school and up until now.  I was grateful that Disco didn’t actually die like they said on the cover of Newsweek when they closed Studio 54…it seeped into other genres, sometimes furtively and other times with a wink and a nod.  For example, it was perfectly acceptable to like David Bowie, but let’s face it, he had Disco Fever along with Mick Jagger and all the other androgynous types wiggling  their crotch lizards around in tight satin pants.  Blondie was considered “Punk” when she came on the scene.  Bitch, please…Disco with rap, hardly anarchy.  Even Patti Smith, who is the coolest chick ever, had a Disco bone…just listen synthesized to the riffs on ‘Dancing Barefoot” and if you don’t want to put on a pair of roller skates and whirl around shakin’ your groove thing, I don’t want to know you.

Dubstep:  You have some homage to pay.

And here is Cake, playing a classic Disco song “I Will Survive” and not without hipster irony either:

Do you know what your real age is?  A woman in a yoga class asked me that a few years ago and at the time I said “37!” because I had just turned 36 and wanted a year to ease into the next age so I wouldn’t be traumatized  because what a drag it is getting old…and 36 was a scary age because Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana died then and no way was I getting on that proverbial boat, The Candle in the Wind. As long as I could miss it and die at any other future age, I would be golden.  Golden Brown by the Stranglers!  That’s my funeral song, by the way, don’t wear it out  just yet.

“No, not your chronological  age, the age you are in your mind…for example, I am 39 but I think I am 21 because that is when I was my hottest,” this woman who asked the age question was pretty hot, if she was any hotter she would be fornicating her way down the street so maybe getting old in her case was a good thing.

Oh!  That’s easy, I’m 12.  That is how old I was when I figured out the world.  Currently, as a Lady of a Certain Age, if I were to transport the mind my pre-adolescent self, age 12, into my peri-menopausal vessel, I think I would function the same way, if not better.  I was a sharp 12 year old.  I knew stuff.  I was a keen observer of human behaviour and hid in corners and spied on conversations.  I read a bookshelf full of Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins novels.  I stayed up late and watched the pornography that would come on the community channel after midnight…only in Quebec!

In Grade 6, I turned 12 in May, I was in a class where the teacher thought it would be groovy try a new learning method where the students would complete modules and go at their own pace.  It was the thing to do in the seventies.  We sat in quadrants in the beginning but we could change things around…freely!  Nobody hates change and freedom (I’m a bottom!)  more than me so the whole scenario gave me anxiety.  I was an introvert and really quiet and a head taller than everyone else.  Like a like a cigar store Indian statue, I was just a grim background fixture in the classroom.  But in my seating group in the beginning of the year, the new girl at the school, named Lynn, held court.  She had the kind of personality that was larger than life, that everyone was drawn to and was just the catalyst I needed to break out of my shell.  She was fearlessly funny and really kind to me.  We wrote stories and drew pictures, sang jingles at the top our lungs;  ”WE ARE THE FREAKIES, WE ARE THE FREAKIES, AND THIS IS OUR FREAKIES TREE!!!”  Good times.

When we got to Grade 7, we had to smarten up.  It was a new high school because in Quebec it went from Grade 7 to 11 and then CEGEP.  Also we were in French Immersion so we had to concentrate and sit in rows, single file.  The part of the brain where you learn language is made out of a low quality gluten filler in my head so paying attention was a waste of time.  I would make comics and pass them to Lynn after class.  I had this continuing strip about a young woman named “June Thursday” who was making it on her own as a secretary and coping with her roommates but everything always went amok.  It was crudely drawn on looseleaf and completely pornographic and politically incorrect.  Lynn loved it and was my task master, demanding more each class. I think I churned out 2 or three pages a day.  I didn’t know it then, at age 12 she helped me hone my imagination because let’s face it, when you are in high school, the last thing the school system wants to churn out are free thinkers.

She wrote poems, not for school, just for fun.  I still have one about a lonely whale named Finnegan, a freak attraction because he is “The Last Whale” living in a fetid, polluted lake in the fictional town of Omega where tourists come and throw breadcrumbs at him.  In the end he kills himself out of despair and I dare you not to cry if you read it.

When we were 12, we had unbridled creativeness and our whole lives ahead.

Flash forward to last week when my friend, Lynn Crosbie, had a book launch party at The Mascot for her latest book, Life Is About Losing Everything.  Lynn writes the weekly Pop Rocks column for the Globe & Mail on Tuesday and has written several books, described as poetry and prose, including Dorothy L’Amour, Queen Rat, Pearl, Paul’s Case, and Missing Children.  My daughter, who wants to be a writer when she grows up in two minutes, just finished her first year of English at University of Toronto.  One of the books she studied in class was “Missing Children” and she was thrilled to tell her friends, “My mother knew her when she was 12!”  She and I went and it was packed and there was love in the air.  And beer!

The book, check it out here, is a memoir that jumps back and forth through time.  She  recounts little anecdotes, descriptions of people that are tragic and hilarious. You don’t really need to know what’s going on at all times, suspend your imagination and relax and enjoy the moment.  I can’t express how good it is, I read it in one sitting on Mother’s Day.  I am featured in a chapter as Silver in Did You Think We Wouldn’t Notice?  I am most honoured!

Through the beast that is Facebook, Lynn and I had caught up on our lives a couple of years ago, and it was like we were 12 again.  Except with booze.  We even made a prank phone call.  And the other day, she took me out for a birthday drink…yes, I got older but trust me, I am 12, I’m still collecting toys in cereal boxes…we talked about getting older and redefining who we are as there has been much man-baggage zapping our precious energy. Existentially, we are becoming liberated as LOCA’s who don’t give a fuck and we have the best years ahead.

We are The Freakies:

This week in first world problems, 1% edition, Linda Evangelista and French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault have reached a child support settlement after a couple of days of hilarious court testimony. Oh, the accusations! It was said that she wanted $46,000 a month for round-the-clock nannies and body guards, he said she was a gold digger, they had only dated briefly when she got pregnant in 2006.  It was getting really ugly so they had to back-pedal.  Supposedly it was all wild gossip, she didn’t ask for that much and he didn’t say she should have had an abortion.  One thing for sure, nothing attracts rampant sperm better than a set of achey-breaky ovaries.  Mammas, tell your sons when they grow up to be cowboys, DON’T RIDE BAREBACK!  And if an “accident” happens, man up, pay, and shut your pie hole.  Nobody wants an asshole for a father.  You go, girl.  You can tell whose side I’m on.

My level of excitement over the press coverage of this brouhaha went through the roof.  I’ve been a Linda fan since the “Haircut” back in the 80s.  When my friends and I started reading fashion magazines, we picked our favourite models, the ones that looked most like us, and copied them.  We didn’t make a fuss over how it was presented to us like they do now, whining:  ”All that photoshopping makes that level of  beauty unattainable!  Magazines should be showing real women, blah blah!”  Fuck that! I don’t want to see “real” anything, I want to look in a magazine and be blown away.  You don’t expect to open up House and Home and see pictures of  kitchens with mismatched Rubbermaid containers half-eaten bags Dempster bread on the counter ( welcome to my crib).   I feel the same about fashion models.  Let them be better than us, even if it’s fake.  I need something to aspire to that is totally superficial otherwise I am bored.  Iron out those wrinkles, stamp out that cellulite…challenge accepted!

When I was a youngster in Montreal, my friends and I looked at fashion magazines for inspiration to hone our own personal style.  We didn’t complain about the airbrushing as it was back then, instead we took the cues and applied them to our own lives.  Magazines were our guides to successful modern living. Attaining the look was an adventure. Seventeen magazine had Phoebe Cates in Butterick sewing patterns that we messed up in high school Home-Ec class.  We diligently followed the “bikini blast diets” that Glamour provided for us every spring.  We copied Isabella Rossellini’s cat eyes from Mademoiselle with some vintage liquid eyeliner we got at Ben E. Noodleman’s pharmacy in Westmount.  We rolled up our Levis jeans like the photo spread called “Mean Jeans” and I got my hair cut like the model that looked like Elvis….so began my perpetual ever-changing hair metamorphosis.

And then came Linda Evangelista in the late 80s with her shorn locks and for the next 20 years, my hair plan was mapped out for me.  She was the most super of all the supermodels, in my humble opinion.  She got a bum rap from that comment she made in Vogue:  ”We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”  Whatever, let them eat brioche. I get what you’re saying, sister.  Besides, she’s a model, not an oracle.  I long for the days where models were actually in magazines, not out in the streets with their tragic lives exposed to the world.  And! I personally don’t want to live in a world where D-List actresses like stumpy troll Hayden Panitierre are pushing products for cosmetics companies…that is a job for a supermodel!  Bring them back and I might actually buy a magazine again.

Enough ranting, here’s the gallery:

This is the short hair that put her on the map.  Pro tip: Short hair requires accessorizing and a lot of manipulation.  For me, it was a pain in the ass.  I am lazy and I hate the feeling of product, whatever kind crunchy or greasy.   But without it, I looked like a  hedgehog.  The “sideburns” would inevitably grow out unevenly and I’d end up trimming one side and then the other, then making a mess…not good.

This one was “the bob” which is super easy for me, my hairdresser at that time said I had Asian hair and should just be worn straight.  I think Linda has some wave in hers and this was probably a bitch to style.  The uber-short bangs only last that way for about a week but it’s just as well.  One of my friends once dubbed this hairstyle “the retarded Dutch girl” and once you see that, it cannot be unseen.

The red hair was my favourite look, makes green eyes pop. I dyed my own hair back then and ended up using clown red Manic Panic in a desperate attempt to keep it fresh.  Problems include the red hair dye fades super fast and stains your towels and pillows and your hair eventually goes brassy.  And again, when the word “clown” can be used in a description of your hair, you are fucked.

This blond business was four years ago.  My current hairdresser copied this perfectly for me and made it look “money,” not like a dumb,fun, blond but like a lady with a rich husband and a mean backhand. Blonds do not have more fun.  I couldn’t handle the fraudulent representation of my lifestyle. The floor boards screamed out “Liar!”  So my friend and I dumped a box of generic brown hair dye on it and brought it back to reality.  That was when I fired Linda as my hair guru, in my mind of course, she has no idea I exist.  Later, I ended up getting my hair lopped off like a hairstyle that I had copied from her 10 years earlier but I considered it self-emulation because she doesn’t not have the patent on the pixie cut.

4 years later, I haven’t really thought about her and of course, I have been growing my hair out.  I don’t really have a fashion mentor these days, everything I do is inspired by the Buddhist philosophy of detachment.  I don’t want anything.  I shop in my own closet.  You’d be amazed what it is stuffed in the back.

Then Linda appears on the news! How interesting is it that we currently have the same hair style!  It is serendipity! She is back in my consciousness and I love her!  I WANT THOSE SUNGLASSES SHE IS WEARING TO THE COURTHOUSE!!!

(Update:  A smart style hound from my Facebook identified those sunglasses in the top photo as Derek Cardigan for Clearly Contacts in Birch and they are on sale for $59…my pair has just been delivered and are sitting on top of my head like a crown,  I am basking post-hunt glory!)

And lest we forget:

A few days ago, I had one of those “lucid dreams” that I’ve had regularly since I was four years old.  You know those ones you have where you are not quite awake and you are dreaming but you are aware you are dreaming, and you want to move but you can’t move a muscle and you swear that there is a someone in the room and he is going to come and sit on your chest and suck all the oxygen out of your lungs and you want to scream but you can’t because you are in a state of sleep paralysis?  I can’t be the only one who has these because Wikipedia tells me it’s normal (ish).  They call it “Old Hag Syndrome” because in some cultures, it is an old hag (always a woman!)  that is sitting on your chest blowing evil spirits into your soul.  Yes, that seems legit, some ghost bitch wants to go to all the bother of riding my grill.  Lil ol’ me, I have no power anywhere in which to wield any kind of malevolence, my credit cards don’t even work.  What a waste of nefarious ectoplasm.  You would think if an evil spirit wanted to spread around its diabolical agenda, he or she would do it more efficiently, like squatting in the water filtration plants of majors cities.  They could form an Occupy Movement for disgruntled ghosts and spread the word through the pipes so that in the morning, we all get an extra jolt of bitchiness in our cup of joe.  Maybe that explains morning rush hour road rage.

Most of the time, I think my “old hag” is a raccoon that casually waddled into my bedroom from that ridiculous window that swings open on its own even when there is a tiniest breeze.  So far its all been my imagination but I have duct taped the window shut just in case.  The other night, the thing was bigger than a raccoon.  It was man-sized and super clingy.  I couldn’t tell if I was scared or excited.

“Maybe you were visited by Jesus,” my Facebook friend suggested.  He the one that lives in Australia and was instant messaging when I finally fully woke up at 3:40 and was able to turn on the lights to find solace on the interwebs.

“No, it wasn’t Jesus, I would have felt a prickly beard and smelled B.O.   This thing was smooth and hairless…maybe it was AN ALIEN!”

“Well that’s enough internet for me, gotta go now, bye,” and he logged off.

I was fully awake so I checked my email.  Every once in a while one of you kind readers of this blog will send me a private message because writing a comment is such hassle.  You have to decipher wobbly writing of some gibberish and then say something that’s not embarrassing or make up a clever user name because it is out in the internet and somehow your mother might read it.  One of my favourite e-mail pen pals is George who lives somewhere near Bay City, Michigan, at “the base of the thumb” whatever that means.  He first wrote me a couple of months ago saying that he found my blog serendipitously by googling “hand bra” and he ended up laughing instead of fapping (no such thing as “too much information” in my world)  and he has been reading all the posts ever since.  I love him so.

The night of my lucid dream, he wrote:

I  can’t sleep!  Sometimes I wish you lived under my bed and I could take you out and play with you whenever I wanted.  I don’t mean to sound creepy.  I just mean we could have a few beers and play Scrabble while we watch tv.

Not creepy at all, George, just mind blowing.  Maybe we are all living under each others’ beds waiting to come out and play. In the night, our sleeping spirits become interlopers moving fluidly through U.S./Canada border.  The internet is like public transit for ghosts.  George is my “old hag” but he doesn’t want ill-will, he just wants to hang!  That is so cute!  I’m not afraid to go back to sleep now…sweet dreams, George, let’s spoon!

And this has nothing to do with anything except when I think about ghosts, I think about Jack White and here he is in my video of the week, beating up Gary Oldman:

Yesterday I had big, important plans but I ended up not doing any of them.  First I was going to go to the gym first thing but it was too cold to move so I deemed it a Possible Snow Day, pretended to be sick and took to the bed.  I ended up watching “Live with Kelly” where Jessie Palmer was her cohost. You know who Jessie Palmer is:  He was born in  Toronto (homeboy!), raised in Napean, played college football for Florida, then the New York Giants and the Montreal Alouettes.  He was The Bachelor in 2004 and now he is a football commentator.  He looks like this:

My big question watching the show:  Why is he still single?  He’s so handsome and he has a bubbly, agreeable personality that even your mama would like.  He’s funny and self-depracating.  He thinks Megan Fox is “out of his league.”  Bitch, please. As though any man, no matter how dysmorphic or Aspergery, thinks he is out of any woman’s league.  That kind of stupid talk sort of makes you want to hit on him.  But then you don’t, because he’s just too perfect.  The litmus test fantasy is what would happen if you were trapped alone on a broken elevator with him.  He is the man you want to love but ultimately when you stand next to him, you become hyper-self-aware of ugliness vapours emanating out of your rapidly gaping pores.  Nope. Pass.  Press the emergency button.

The other important plan was to obtain Jack White’s new release CD, “Blunderbuss” at an actual record store, NOT iTunes.  I need solid, concrete music, not this internet sorcery that is my current music library since getting separated, this is me:  ”Oh, you can take all the CDs, I will just copy them onto this computer one by one until I grow old and die.” Of course I missed a bunch of albums that I ended up obsessing over even if I would never listen to them again.  On one hand, there is less clutter but on the other, it’s a precarious situation, the computer will probably break and the iPod will spontaneously terminate itself and I will be tuneless.  And alone.

By mid-morning I had moved from bed to couch, still too cold to go out.  Pretending to be sick would be an all-day event so Evangeline offered to go get the Jack White before her class downtown.  Yay.

Now I love Jack White.  Here he is:

Toronto Star’s Ben Rayner describes Jack White as a weirdo, which can’t be denied and is why I love him so.  He looks kind of like Johnny Depp on estrogen supplements.  He is a temperamental genius, graphic proof here…and is there any other kind? He dresses in costume, like a 19th century bandit which is kind of off-putting and badass at the same time.  Repulsive and fascinating, the dichotomy is a recipe for capitulation. Imagine being trapped in an elevator alone with him.  Somehow, without even knowing how you let it happen, you would walk out with a hickey and a broken bra strap.

While she was gone, I put on my favourite movie of all time:

Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66 with Christina Ricci before Thinspiration ruined her and her acting career.  This  is one of those independent cult movies that if you say the phrase “spanning time,” people will either look at you blankly or laugh knowingly, the video clip says it all.  Vincent Gallo has such intense charisma that it is creepy. His default expression is a mug shot. You can’t spend too much time thinking about him or you might go out and get his name tattooed on your chest.  One thing you might want to consider, is checking out the shop on his personal website.  For $50,000 you can go out on a date with him and for $1,000,000 you can get his sperm!  Not bad.  And if you were ever so lucky to be trapped on an elevator with him, be prepared to re-enact a certain scene from The Brown Bunny.  Or maybe that’s just me.  Should probably just take stairs from now on.

And with that, I leave you with the viral video of the week, Carrie Manolakos and her cover of “Creep’ that is sure to make your ears orgasm (I didn’t make that up):

I saw the Titanic in 3-D over the weekend.  I know we’ve all moved on to other topics and I don’t care what the haters say, it was totally exciting and I have been ruminating about it ever since.  The next night I pretended my couch was a life raft and I was safe watching the ABC Titanic Downton Abbey-like mini-series and then Saturday Night Live waiting for the rescue ship to show up.  And then during Aquafit on Tuesday, I pretended all the bobbling silver lady heads in the water were drowning victims and our pool noodles were life vests and we were flailing for our lives when really we were doing  rocking horse kicks.  Such fun!

My daughter and I went to the local Beach Alliance theatre where I wore my Neil Degrasse Tyson tshirt in honour of his contribution to the newly revised version of the film.  Hipster geek girl ticket taker “got” my tshirt as she must be a Redditor. No secret codes of when the narwhal bacons (google it) were exchanged because she was probably weirded out that an old lady, who could never see a narwhal bacon because midnight is past her bedtime and she was probably alive when the real Titanic sank , was wearing a meme shirt:

Memes may well be the newest lowest form of humour but I’m still laughing.  LOL.

Anyway, apparently the star configuration in the sky the night the Titanic sank was all wrong in the film. After seeing the film for the first time, Astrophysicist extraordinaire, Neil Degrasse Tyson contacted James Cameron in a letter to let him know of this anachronism. James Cameron ignored it. Years later they bumped into each other at a planetarium of all places and Neil asked him why the sky was whack and James said:  ”Dunno” then puffed up his chest and said:  ”Well, last I looked Titanic grossed 1.3 billion dollars, imagine how much more I would have made if I got the sky right?”  As he is all about the details (change the devil or God to “James Cameron is in the details!”), he fixed it for the new version, so just for that, it’s worth seeing again.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same as it was the first time.  Kate Winslet casually walks around in flimsy short sleeve dresses on the deck of the ship like she was in Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s April on the North Atlantic, brrrr.  Dear James Cameron: Did they not have goose bumps back in 1912?  Those would have looked amazing in 3-D.  The rest of the effects were sort of meh and those 3-D glasses tickle the third eye chakra, it’s almost distracting.

Also the second time around (actually the bazillionth time I’ve seen it, but second in the theatre where I am not distracted by the spiders and clutter in my own personal tv watching ashram), I got the gay subtext between Creepy Cal  (Billy Zane) and his man servant Bruuuuuce Ismay  (Jonathan Hyde).  Why else would dude run around a sinking ship chasing Jack because he was on the payroll?  Only a man with a boner would bother.  Did dapper society men in 1912 get their eyebrows groomed? I bet the latent homosexual ones did. And whatever happened to Billy Zane in real life?  Is he crazy?  I have a feeling he is a heap of trouble.

Also just so you know, according to the laws of physics, Jack and Rose could not have shared the raft.  Force of gravity is larger than that of buoyancy, so they both would have sunk, so let’s not joke about it anymore.  And I like a fat Kate Winslet better than this new sinewy version:

I love how she went around, promoting the re-release of Titanic 3-D talking trash about how she hated that Celine Dion song and about the reversal of fatness between her and Leo.  Don’t get me started about Fat Leo.  I. Love. Him.

Here are my thoughts on Leonardo DiCaprio, who has eclipsed my lust for Fat Vince Vaughn:

He reminds me of  Orson Welles and Orson Welles was my favourite fat man.  Maybe he will even get that rotundo, in which case he will probably not score with the models so much. Speaking of which, I feel like Leo’s chronic modelizing is just because he is not self-actualized. Dr. Drew would know what I mean.  I know of a fellow who modelized for years and when he did settle down it was with a Filipino nanny of one of his spawn (modelizers often breed randomly, I’m looking at you, Mick Jagger).  I feel like it’s a just a phase for Teflon Leo, he hasn’t met me yet and my environmentally friendly ways.  I recycle bacon grease!  Dear James Cameron:  Hook me up!

And on that note, check out this video about the Titanic artifacts and it  actually did melt my cold, icy heart and make me cry, DON’T LAUGH:

Last week I went to the hairdresser for the full works:  cut, colour, local real estate gossip.  I hate sitting still but I love my hairdressers at Crown of Jewels and wish they still lived in my locker row at the gym so we could carry on our conversations in hushed tones every single day instead of once in a blue moon, which is how often I get my hair did. A couple of years ago I thought I would grow my hair long but I learned in order to reclaim one’s mojo, one does not simply NOT go to the hairdresser.  You have to go periodically and get trimmed and de-silvered.  I have brown hair mostly and probably two dozen silvers (grey, white, pigment disabled, or whatever you want to call them).  They’ve come to populate insidiously around the temple and if I wear my hair down, you can’t see them, but I’m a hair chewer/puller so I wear it in a pony tail to thwart that habit and prevent choking up hairballs.

It’s too many silvers to constantly pull out but not enough leave alone and start the process of reinvention that I am just dying to go through. Women with full silver hair rule.  Last weekend, my sister-in-law (dark brown hair) mused out loud if she should let her hair go white.  We were all shocked (not really) that she coloured her hair every three weeks!  Here’s a pro tip: If you keep your hair dark like that and you miss a week of touch up then stay out of the wind, because when it blows, the white roots make you look bald.

We fashioned a wig out of toilet paper and draped it over her head and we all agreed:  Yes, let your hair go white, just don’t forget to wear lipstick.

I get kind of tired of women complaining about the ageing process and how they have become invisible to men on the street. If I’ve learned one thing in my LOCA years, for every woman no matter how thin, fat, young, old, freaky, or dull, there is some man out there with a bottle of hand lotion and a tube sock who thinks she is the ultimate goddess of his imagination.  Unless he is sitting in a tree on front of your house, you just may never meet him.  The ones who are ignoring you can just go die in a fire.  Fuck ‘em if they can’t appreciate your unique beauty, clearly they have no taste. If you can’t love yourself than who will?  This is why you have to embrace the changes and let the silvers shine.

Here are my top 5 women who rock the silver and keep their mojos in tact:

1. Kristen McMenamy

She was one of those first generation “supermodels” from the 1980s and 90s.  Her style wasn’t the kind that inspired your brother to steal your Vogue magazines as convenient fap fodder.  She had a Three Stooges haircut and a body that cried: “Nutrients!”  She inspired that whole “heroin chic” that is now the Thinspiration movement.  I liked her back then because she was super cool and edgy.  Now with her long, grey hair, she looks wise, ethereal and slightly damaged like she is one full moon away from the insane asylum. In a good way though. She is the friend you want to have for therapy and diet tips.  You can tell her about a weird dream and she would listen to the entire plot with interrupting to tell you about hers.  She knows which tea is good for what ailment and she always has cigarettes just in case.

2. Olivia Tracey

Olivia Tracey was Miss Ireland in 1984 and Top Ten in Miss World and Miss Universe 1985 and is now an actress in her early 50s.  She let her hair go white in her forties which made look even more glamorous and launched her career.  She’s in an episode of the Gilmore Girls where she is at a cocktail party and everyone around her looks dumpy, frumpy and tired while she glows like Glinda the Good Witch.  It’s a Celtic thing, all that rain and Guinness that makes the silvers magical.

2. Deborah Harry

Debbie Harry is a portrait of a lady badass.  This is how aspire to be when the silvers run rampant.  The key here is to never let go of the rock and roll.  Note to future self:  Do not walk dog in a K-Way windbreaker and corduroy pants.  Wear a black leather Gauthier jacket and Vivienne Westwood shoes and carry poop bags in a Chanel wallet along with nude photos taken of myself in younger days.  Put pink tips in hair and wear lipstick at all times.  Marry Jack White.

4. Carmen Dell’Orefice

Even when Carmen Dell’Orefice was 15, she looked 80.  She’s been modelling since she was a malnourished child at the end World War II.  She proves that elegance is timeless and poise commands more attention than chicken cutlets stuffed into a bra.  It is an attitude that gives an inner strength.  She looks like she could take the cinnamon challenge without making her mascara run.  She will probably always smell of gardenias even if she dies alone in her Park Avenue apartment and they don’t find her for a week.

5. Iris Apfel

Iris Apfel is a design icon who is the embodiment of groovy.  Last year at the age of 90, she launched a line of wildly coloured lipsticks and nail polish for MAC.  Once you get over 90, you can never be too eccentric.  And basically you can say what you want, whenever you want and become a Twitter superstar:  Shit the Old Bat Says.

It’s going to be awesome.

Separated at birth! They both look exactly the same! And they are both fettered by one dick!  Donald Trump! Jenna Talackova, on the left, is a transgendered and disqualified Miss Universe Canada pageant contestant and Ivanka Trump, on the right, is her father’s daughter.  Here’s a question: Why don’t Trump spawn rebel like normal children?  His sons are even more vulgarian than he is, shouldn’t douchebaggery skip a generation? Here they are with a dead leopard:

Trophy hunting, now there’s thousands of dollars well spent. As a carnivore and savage mousetrapper, I get the concept of hunting for food and even how this particular African safari helps the local villagers, how ever smug the Trumpzillas are about helping the poor.  But there is something grotesque about wealthy men killing endangered animals for sport just for the photo op.  You have a guns, of course you’re going to win. Here’s a Trump reality show pitch: Eric and Donald Junior go back to Africa as bounty hunters to kill Kony! In one episode, Donald Junior gets dengue fever and has to hang out at the base camp with a sexy, busty nurse named Ursula. Hilarity ensues when D.J. gets delirious with the fever and strips off all his clothes yelling: “Uuuuurthhhhh-ulaaaaaaaah!”  (In real life, I’ve seen a drunk man yell out for his girlfriend “Ursula” just like that, it was even better than Brando’s “Stella”) Meanwhile Eric and Gahiji, the African guide, go off hunting in the jungle.  Gahiji gets bitten by a snake! In the bum! And Eric has to suck out the poison!  More hilarity!  The longer it takes them to find Kony, the dumber it gets. That is a show I would watch.

Score two points for the Donald Senior.  Firstly, he was “supposedly” embarrassed by his sons’ safari pictures and secondly, Jenna’s back in the competition! Apparently, the Donald has over-turned the decision to disqualify Jenna from the pageant on the basis that she was born a boy.  Jenna, who is now 23, underwent gender reassignment surgery at age 19 and by all accounts is legally a woman.  She will get to compete with 65 contestants in Miss Universe Canada in Toronto on May 19, and if she wins, she will compete in the global Miss Universe.  Good luck, Jenna!

Anyway, I’m surprised people even care these days. Don’t people watch tv?  Phil Donahue in the 1970s had shows on transgender and every talk show since, including Oprah, has had perfectly eloquent guests explaining at how, at an early age, they did not identify with the sex they were born as, it’s really not that hard to understand.  Thankfully, it’s no longer a considered freak show by compassionate people. That scene from”The Crying Game” (it’s twenty years ago!) is just a typical one night stand from The Elephant and Castle on half-price wing night, it could happen to you! And so what?  Modern men are more concerned about hidden gluten in their food than they are about women with hidden penises.  Further more, if you were a space alien and you came down to Earth to learn about human sexuality Kinsey-style and all you had was Google porn for research, you would think the vagina was just there for decoration since everything is up the bum hole.  Sometimes I rue the day (not really) I let my nephew remove my parental control block as I have seen golf played in a way that would make even a proctologist wince.  Or hand out his business cards. Why must I click on every link? Oh, who am I kidding?  I love all the surprises in the jungle that is google safari.

In the meantime, check out this satire on the beauty pageant industry, 1975′s SMILE.  I loved this movie as a kid, I still put Vaseline on my teeth when I’m in a nervous situation:

No, I’m not going to analyze last week’s Season 5 premiere of Mad Men, so stay with me, I’m going to talk about boobs and show you some that will blow your mind.  Anyway, I fell asleep by accident and woke up during the dirty white carpet scene that I am assuming is a metaphor for Don Draper’s madonna-whore complex, which is why you should always have 4 or 5 backups because they get dirty fast.  The carpets and the whores. That just might be me and my Freudian thought process.  It was on again on Monday, thank the tv gods,  and I stayed awake but I did go into a self-preservation coma during the party scene.  I’m frightened by Megan’s teeth (get a Twitter account!) and her zou-bisouing miniskirt-wearing ways.  Everyone else was dressed appropriately, what is happening?  You have the power, Matthew Weiner, make time stop! Hippies: Do Not Want!

I’m worried about what will happen to Joan and her girdle/torpedo bra combo when the hippies do inevitably take over.  You would not believe how much I fretted over what would happen to her body when the writers impregnated her at the end of season 4.   It’s just a tv show, Peterson, they’ll handle it tastefully.  Thank the tv gods again that they didn’t show any of it. Yes, pregnancy is a beautiful thing but I don’t even want to see Joan have a run her pantyhose, much less baby drool on her chest shelf.  So far, so good, as you can see from the above photo, she can vacu-pack all her post-pregnancy baby weight in a girdle…almost.   This woman is always milkshake away from archaic overbrim.  Which is a fine art if you ask me.

Even though she’s built like the La Leche Dairy Queen, Joan is not breastfeeding.  Carnation baby formula was all the rage in the 60s so that choice makes sense although extremely disappointing. I could get behind the times a-changin’ if Joan became a unapologetic public lactation advocate.  She would breastfeed at home with a shocking glass of wine (I did that in the 1990s, shut up! Both my kids can tie their shoes with the imperial standard knot).  Maybe she’d go back to work and pump in Roger’s office while she smoked a scandalous cigarette and the men peered over the transom to catch a glimpse of her pimentos (I made that up, it sounds 1960s doesn’t it?).  It just seems like such a waste.  And for you google interlopers, I am aware of your search terms and I still love you, here are Christina Hendricks’ NSFW leaked nude photos from her cellphone.  They may or may not be hers, apparently “they” did some vein configuration analysis that came up positive.  I know they are not mine because they are free from dust mite bites.  Otherwise it’s like looking in a mirror.

And speaking of lactation celebration, last weekend Toronto had a visit from the The Milk Truck.  I wanted to check out but I was without my own wheels so I followed it on Twitter instead.  This is the Milk Truck:

Yes, on the roof is a giant fibreglass breast with a flashing pimento on top.  The Milk Truck is the brainchild of Jill Miller, a Pittsburgh based performance artist whose idea is to bring breastfeeding awareness to the uptight masses using humour and folly.  Have you ever been to a mall and your baby needed a snack pronto, your nits are zinging and you go to the salesclerk at the Burlington Coat Factory and ask:  ”Excuse me, is there a room I can go to breastfeed my baby?”  And the salesclerk looks you up and down and at your booger covered hoodie and says; “No. We don’t allow that here.”  The Burlington Coat Factory doesn’t allow that.  True story, it happened to my friend in Buffalo before the days of Twitter.  Nowadays you get on your phone and tweet to  the Milk Truck and they will come to your rescue and do some social media shaming.  How awesome is that!

That would never have happened to me.  First of all, I would never ask if I could breastfeed in public, I would just do it. Nobody ever busted my ass because I was a badass, smooth operator who used Patricia Field purse as a diaper bag.  Ironicially, I think it’s those meek mothers who cover everything up with a blankie that garner all the negative attention from the mall police.  They can’t see any pimento so they ask you to move along so they can watch you pack it up.  Bitch please, I see what did there.

And as promised, here are some awesome boobs I found of a British journalist in Africa bonding with her sisters.  It’s such a cool photo series but prudes will find it NSFW.  Don’t ask me.

And I leave you with this to contend with on your own… here’s that Zou Bisou Bisou video, it’s all rage on iTunes, LOLCats: