#also german rap because it slaps sometimes

[tonixe]

★ Headcannons Bill with reader who a rapper☆

n.o.t.e.s - BILL IS SO MAJESTIC AND GORGEOUS AND SO HOT AND SO WONDERFUL AND AND SOO FUCKING COOL AND SEXY, LIKE AHHHHHHHHHHHHH. - also I wonder how different it would sound if there was rapper in the group.

w.a.r.n - fluff, imagines and me being a fan girl.

p.a.i.r.i.n.g - Bill kaulitz x fem!reader

w.c - 473

★ Being the rapper of the group, you have a jam session with Bill. Since you need your rhymes to sync with his lyrics, sometimes even when Tom is around, he started beatboxing and you would rap your lyrics out.

☆ You would suffer some backlash only because a) you're a girl and b) you're a woman. The fan's girls would go wild on you, like fr they would first hate you, but I see them warming up.

★ Your style would probably have the mix of Tom and Bill style together, Like definitely a snapback, oversized shirt or some bodysuit, cyber glasses, and some slap-bracelets or bead bracelets. -and just for some pizzazz a puffer jacket.

☆ -And with the crazy fan thing. Imagine you performing your stuff, and like you're in your vibe, your zone. And next thing you know you got hit with something by one of the fans in the crowd, like their phone, and ur just bleeding from your nose. And Bill just immediately rushed to you and like trying to help you out, while on stage.

★ let's just say, the fan who did. Got blacklisted.

☆ but lucky you got to finish your lyrics.

★ Imagine doing an interview with the rest of the band, and you're sitting next to Bill. After the simples question get asked like 'What do you do in your free time' or like 'favorite thing to do', and then you get asked the question, "Are you and Bill dating" your face gets red, and you just turn to Bill, who like too stunned to speak, and just blushing.

☆ lowkey, awkward and embarrassing but cute at the same timee.

★ Imagine being in the recording studio with bill, and your having a hard time writing a rhyme or like bar, and he start beatboxing, to trying to make a beat for you, but overall likes makes the both of you laugh.

☆ Bill loves the way you make bars like rhymes in your mind, he thinks there cool that out of nowhere you just start writing things down from rhyming and sounding out words.

★ Imagine, like coming up with a lyrics and you started like saying it, but it's like super fast like rap god fast, I just see bill sitting there with a smile just blinking at you and clapping from how good it was.

☆ ngl if you rap like fast in German, I feel it would sound crazy like demonic crazy.

★ He likes it when your bar goes with the rhythm of the song and it all just comes together, but it likes acapella too.

☆ definitely likes your flow and style.

★ He finds it entertaining when you rhyme two drastically different thing together and some how make it sound good, like rock and pillow

[oatmealmika]

FEM! TRAFALGAR LAW HEADCANONS BECAUSE I LOVE WOMEN

a/n : sometimes i just wish law was actually written as a girl cuz DAMN

first off, CLOTHES SHE'D WEAR!!

i'm getting major streetwear/chola style vibes from fem! law

like i mean ripped up baggy jeans, croptops, hoodies, oversized t-shirts, sports bras, long clickity clackity nails (if she really wanted to but very occasionally), and of course (his? her?) their hat

she got her earrings done when she was too little to remember so it's just annoying to have to redo them every so often

i have no clue who'd do her tattoos since she most definitely wouldn't trust some sketchy guy to do them

maybe herself but i don't think that's it either

and whenever you ask her, she makes up a different story (like that one blond guy in "ratatouille" who has a criminal record)

"woke up with it" "they're stick n pokes" "this guy i knew who would only wear bucket hats" and of course "nunya"

she is half german and half mexican (may or may not be self projection with the mexican part)

i get HUGE ymir from aot vibes with fem! law

she appears rude, hardheaded, and pessimistic, but she really does care about others and does have some hope in her (wishing her crew likes her horrendous hawaiian shirts)

her music taste is rock, rap, indie dream pop (tv girl), and then sad spanish songs that slap way too hard (i'm thinking "no me queda mas" by selena, a bunch of vicente fernandez songs my mom loves to play at full volume, and "amor eterno" by rocio durcal)

def not straight i mean just look at fem! law fanart on tumblr bro like honey... and man, am i glad she isn't straight cuz GODDAMN

if you go out with her, you need to order for her pls she can't do it on her own

but she will take the bill, no excuses

i think the type of person she needs as a partner would have to be okay with silence, they have to be outgoing and fun but mature with intense situations, and yeah

plays the bass guitar and has been for years

also plays the drums but her main instrument is bass

really wants to be in a band but not really since she hates the idea of having to be nice all the time for the public

at a mall, she either hangs out at hot topic, barnes and nobles, or justice the whole time

got a bunch of piercings all over her but that's a secret lol nobody knows...

UNTIL I TELL YOU: bellybutton, industrial, conch, ear lobe, tragus, bridge, middle tongue, hip, nipple, and then a bunch of genital piercings i will not be discussing any further XD

her most used apps are photos, notes, tumblr, pinterest, depop, and....... ao3

OKAY OKAY as hard as it might be to believe this, this is NOT self projection it is TRUTH

she doesn't religiously read fics or anything, just occasional oneshots about her nerdy crap when she's bored or something

my girl out here reading her "sora, warrior of the sea" 10k+ fics 💀

if you take her home to meet the family, at first they'll be thrown off by her intimidating looks, but soon enough they'll realize what a little loser she is! the cutie patootie she is <3

LOVE LOVE LOVES cringy 70s/80s/90s movies (think "grease", "the princess bride", "pretty in pink", "10 things i hate about you", etc.)

she doesn't know why. she hates the dumb stereotypes and all that stuff, but she just can't help it! she's so real for it too

idk why but i feel like she'd LOVE spiderman???? like as an obsession?

she is pretty normal about the live action movies, it's just SPIDERVERSE THAT MAKES HER GO CRAZY

she also wants to be good at art but never has motivation to do it

she def has an upside down smile (that what it's called? i think of it more as a "oh that's cringy look and stare y'all" smile)

is she scrawny? muscular? i can't decide honestly. like yeah guy law has some brawn, but he is still a pretty lanky guy, so that's why i see fem! law as a lanky chick. but i love muscular women... goddamn she is just lanky. she obviously has some meat on her bones, but not much.

that being said, i don't think she's very curvaceous either (let's pretend oda didn't draw her the way he did). she is no doubt an a cup, and while her butt is fairly larger, she's still pretty flat.

she also only ever wears sports bras since she thinks regular bras are uncomfy and a hassle.

for a va to replace masc! law's, i would say for japanese romi park. for english, i'd say either trina nushimura or elizabeth maxwell.

for one piece live action, i would want like zendaya as fem! law 😭 aye anything for queen zendaya

only bepo knows this, but she wears socks and sandals on sundays no fail.

has a tattoo somewhere of bepo's name inside a heart with an arrow through it (think those tattoos that tough guys get, with instead of bepo, "mom" is what's written)

fem! law still wears ugly ass hawaiian shirts, don't get it mixed up ✊

that's all for now :)

likes and reblogs are appreciated <3

have a good day!!

[elektrischemaidchen]

Weihnachtsbaum #4: Did Daniela just called me a slut?

This is the hardest thing we've ever done. By far, @franzliszt-official. This is a battle, lyrics vs music. And I think we're starting to get an idea of why most people who want to combine modern with classical music always do something with rap. And dear colleagues, you can all go on tearing your mouths out about what we do and how and why. We can't do it without semi-acoustics, and unfortunately we can't do it without having to adjust the tempo and Liszt's sheet music. We had to realise that after 7 hours today. And we're really shitting ourselves with XI…. suicide at the piano. What's more, yesterday we decided to tell you a little Christmas story. Each song now follows on from the next. So, fewer beats, fewer voice filters, just challenge. That's okay too. And finally there's the long-awaited revenge on the Wagner cult. We're going to write the story of Franz's last years in Maidchen style with a time machine and fulfil a little Christmas wish of our own ;) Are you coming along? ;)

PS: I know, the chorus is a bit more drastic. But I have every right to call Daniela a Nazi-cow. She wasn't "just" a member of the NSDAP, she's partly responsible for all this Wagner rubbish and cult. Daniela worked "beautifully" for the völkisch purification of art from 1928 onwards... 🤮

The lyrics in English are way more "in your face" than the German ones...;)

What a night

The door slams shut

I have the Walk of Shame

And he has his rest

We made love

And smoked together

Actually

Franz

Not so used up yet

But when I just turned

To leave

Daniela says

"I know what happened in there earlier!

I think you are a bitch, yes!

You devoured my granddad!’

Oh, please, girl, don't make me do it

You stupid, pale Nazi cow!

Oh, and dear listeners,

Now it's getting interesting.

Did Daniela von Bülow

just called me a slut?

Oh, please, girl, don't make me do it

You stupid, pale Nazi cow!

‘And I bet, Fräulein,

You're still proud of it

Women like you,

He knows plenty of them!’

I take a deep breath

Do what my therapist tells me to do

Count to ten, exhale,

wait, wait

But unfortunately now comes

What has to come

Daniela is also just talking

Wagner rubbish.

‘My stepfather is so much better

Than Franz Liszt.’

Daniela, I am very pleased that you are so sure of your

last words

Because everything against Franz is also against me.

Contenance, my dear, I say quietly

Before I yank her by her hair

And I'll give her slaps in the face

A whole sixty times

Unfortunately I have

No choice

Oh, girl, you made me do it

You stupid, pale Nazi cow!

Because I know

What was and what is yet to come

Travelling through time sometimes has its pitfalls

"I wish Wagner was still here!"

Daniela, cry more quietly

Now she's running to get her mum!

AND THIS WILL BE A BEAUTIFUL CHRISTMAS DAY!

OH YES!

BRING ME COSIMA!

OHYES! OHYES!

Finally, bring me Cosima!

Oh, girls, you're forcing me to do this

The first and the second pale Nazi cow!

[erizee]

i got tagged by @enigmatickal to answer music questions. ill warn u in advance this is going to be supremely disappointing because i only stanned two (2) bands in my life and get most of my music from amvs/tiktok/youtube recommendations. oof.

anyway still thank u :D

favourite album: im going to be boring for this one and say its the third mcr one even though i dont really listen to albums as a whole and more like theyre all in my playlists

favourite music genre(s): metal with a melody & pop that makes me Feel or has a melody that kinda goes sideways (does that make sense?) & political rap are the main ones right now honestly but i listen to a lot of stuff

favourite song: right now its dance macabre by ghost lol

most listened to artist(s): mcr & hatari are the ones i stan/-ned the most. poets of the fall are really nice tho and ive been listening to ghost 24/7 recently too and grandson also slaps ....are yall going to lynch me if i say eddie rath bc i know its bad but it kinda slaps though gjdkfkxksk,,,,,,, i dont have spotify so i cant actually check what i listen to most

an album thats important to you: yea i dont really listen to albums like that so does my "im sad" playlist count?

a song thats important to you: how much is it going to reveal about myself if i say body & little pistol & ghosting by mother mother. probably too much.

what makes you like a song: sometimes the lyrics, sometimes the melody, sometimes the beat, sometimes the Vibes, it honestly depends

your favourite instrument to hear in a song: bro i dont know i dont have an opinion on instruments

a song to dance to: somehow i dont dance ever and dance to every song i listen to at the same time. anyway ill say unwritten by idk who made it because ive been to a gay bar several times and a gay club four times and that one was on almost every time

a song from your childhood: moskau by dschingis khan, its my life by bon jovi, and uuuuh anything by roland kaiser bc my mom loved him

a song that reminds you of (any kind of) love: ooooh theres liebe ohne leiden which is unfortunately schlager (i know :/) but its about a daughter moving out & the dad is sad about it and the melody is also really really nice. contrary to popular belief i get along with my dad really well so its nice

a song you love lyrically: the sweet escape by poets of the fall makes me go ;-; i get so emotional even though its really cheesy kind of idk EDIT i forgot call me by shinedown and i hope yall have no idea where i got this song from this is already embarassing enough lol

i tag @idkjustbreath :))

[funface2]

When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us – The New York Times

Even if Max Bialystock hadn’t gone to prison for embezzling from the backers of his hit Broadway show, trouble would have found him one way or another. Didn’t he slap his business partner, the accountant Leo Bloom, after dousing the poor man with a glass of water during working hours? And while Max’s hanky-panky with Ulla, the receptionist, may have involved consenting adults, his whole business model was based on trading sexual favors with senior citizens for money. If ever a man in show business was in need of cancellation, it was surely Max Bialystock.

Not a chance! Max is a beloved figure who has, for more than 50 years, inspired not outrage but delight. The man is an institution, an archetype. He turned a song-and-dance spectacle about Hitler into a Broadway smash. Hitler! Max’s exploits have been chronicled in a 2005 movie and a long-running stage musical, both called “The Producers” and both starring Nathan Lane. Long before that, Max was played by Zero Mostel, in the first film directed by Mel Brooks. That original “Producers,” released in 1967 with a very young Gene Wilder as Leo, was a staple of my youth.

Now that fascism seems to be in bloom once again, it is a good time to revisit “Springtime for Hitler,” the show that made Bialystock and Brooks into household names. But like Leo when he first shuffles into Max’s office to audit the books, I’m a little nervous at the prospect.

The question of how much and what kind of fun it’s permissible to have with Nazis never goes away, and the resurgence of right-wing extremism around the world makes the question newly uncomfortable. When “Jojo Rabbit” showed up at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the fact that it played Hitler at least partly for laughs — with the director, Taika Waititi impersonating a goofy, gangly, almost lovable Führer — you could hear the wincing from across the border. The relative innocuousness of the film (which won the audience award at the festival) doesn’t entirely dispel the uneasiness around it.

If you’re fooling around in the costume of history’s most notorious genocidal maniac, you’re working in proximity to a powerful taboo. Which is exactly what makes Hitler humor irresistible, in particular for Jewish comedians like Brooks and Waititi. (Brooks dressed up as the Führer not in “The Producers,” but in a 1978 television special called “Peeping Times” and then in the 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”) Such cosplay represents a form of exorcism, a way of appropriating the symbols of terror and hatred and stripping them of their power by exposing their absurd, idiotic banality.

The goose-step clowning in “The Producers” has a long pedigree. The film premiered two years into the run of “Hogan’s Heroes” on CBS, a madcap, Emmy-nominated comedy about a German P.O.W. camp in World War II. One of the prisoners would sometimes dress up as the Führer to bamboozle the hapless commandant, Colonel Klink, and his bumbling minion, Sergeant Schultz. Those guys were always being bamboozled, though Hogan and his pals never did manage to escape.

It was sometimes hard for a kid watching reruns of “Hogan’s Heroes” — as I did nearly every weekday afternoon that Gerald Ford was president — to square the foolishness of Klink and Schultz with the genocidal monstrosity of the real Nazis. Surely it’s in bad taste to take evil so lightly. But in 1967, when “The Producers” came out, World War II was still within living memory for many adults, and so was a wartime tradition of mocking the enemy. Brooks, who attacked the history of comedy with scholarly diligence, was following in the footsteps of two of the great comic minds of old Hollywood: Charles Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch.

Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940) turned Hitler — thinly disguised as Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania — into a blustering, pompous clown, surrounded by snakes and toadies, drunk on ugly fantasies of world conquest. Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), set mainly in Poland just before and right after the German invasion in 1939, takes a less fantastical route to a similar destination.

These movies insist that what will defeat fascism — at the time a hope, not an assumption — is not so much military might or political cunning as an attitude that could be called the spirit of comedy itself. The fatal weakness in Hynkel, and in the officious SS men who spoil the fun in Lubitsch’s Warsaw, is their humorlessness. The simple, decent fallibility of the Jewish barber Chaplin also plays (a variation on his Little Tramp persona) is the opposite of the dictator’s buffoonish megalomania. The joke lies in the way the little guy impersonates the big shot, laying bare the empty grandiosity of his will to power.

Imposture is the ethical key to Nazi-mocking, a way of revealing the vanity and stupidity of people who insist above all on their own deadly seriousness. Bullies beg to be humiliated, and comedians are uniquely equipped for the task. In “To Be or Not to Be,” members of a Warsaw theater troupe pretend to be high-ranking Gestapo officers and Nazi operatives, and even Hitler himself. This ability to play, to pretend, to parody isn’t just a matter of professional training. The artistry of the actors — their ability to improvise and crack wise in potentially lethal circumstances — is what separates them from their foes. If the Germans were to win, all the fun would go out of the world.

The Germans didn’t win, of course, but unspeakable things happened anyway. With the terrible knowledge of hindsight, the gentleness of “The Great Dictator” and the high spirits of “To Be or Not to Be” take on a special kind of poignancy. Chaplin and Lubitsch saw the darkness clearly, but they could not yet measure its full depth and scale. Some of the jokes can make you wince. A vain German commandant is tickled to learn — from a fake source — that his nickname back in Berlin is “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.” “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping,” he says with a chuckle.

It wasn’t the best joke in 1942, and it sounded even more awkward in 1983, when Mel Brooks recycled it in his affectionate, puzzling remake of “To Be or Not to Be” (directed by Alan Johnson, who had choreographed “Springtime for Hitler” in “The Producers”). That film, unlike the Lubitsch version, is hard to find these days, but a snippet available on YouTube features Brooks as a rapping, break-dancing Hitler — a miniature tour de force of bad taste that reprises an immortal rhyme from “Springtime”: “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party.”

It’s funny because everyone knows the opposite is true. The only “real” Nazi in “The Producers” is Franz Liebkind, the author of “Springtime for Hitler,” a German exile too pathetic for any war-crimes tribunal, who keeps pigeons on the roof of his Greenwich Village tenement. His heartfelt tribute to the Führer is taken up by Bialystock and Bloom because they are looking for a surefire flop, a work of such stupendous bad taste that audiences will flee in disgust. But it’s precisely because no one could possibly take Liebkind and his ilk seriously that Max and Leo fail so spectacularly at their attempted failure. Because Franz is manifestly an idiot, any even moderately smart person could only take the show as satire. The triumph of “The Producers” is to suppose a world where the anxious hopes of Chaplin and Lubitsch have come true — where fascism has been expunged, its spell permanently broken by humanism and humor. That’s the world of “Hogan’s Heroes,” too, and also of “Jojo Rabbit.”

But what if we don’t live in that world? For a long time, laughing at historical Nazis has seemed like a painless moral booster shot, a way of keeping the really bad stuff they represent safely contained in the past. It never occurs to Max Bialystock that the audience might respond to “Springtime” as satire, and it never occurred to Mel Brooks that the show might be effective propaganda.

“The Producers” is naughty and silly, but it works to establish boundaries rather than transgress them. It plays with a taboo that it is ultimately committed to upholding. Whether a show like “Springtime” represents absolute bad taste or delicious good fun, it exists in a place far removed from the norms of civilized, rational discourse. A patron can be offended or amused by its nutty Nazis, but no one in their right mind — no one who isn’t operating at the mental and moral level of Franz Liebkind — could find it touching or persuasive. The very possibility of an actual, effective, politically empowered Nazi, a Nazi who could pose a real danger, is unthinkable. And the job of “The Producers” is to keep it that way.

Maybe that was always wishful thinking. In any case, recent history shows that the medicine of laughter can have scary side effects. Fascism has crawled out of the dust pile of history, striking familiar poses, sometimes with tongue in cheek. It has been amply documented that “ironic” expressions of bigotry and anti-Semitism — jokes and memes on social media; facetious trolling of the politically correct; slurs as exercises in free speech — can evolve over time into the real thing. A dress-up costume can be mistaken for a uniform, including by its wearer.

Meanwhile comedians advertise their racist jokes as bold challenges to the tyranny of political correctness, and brand their bigotry as boundary-pushing, taboo-busting bravery. The anti-authoritarian spirit of comedy that flows through Lubitsch and Chaplin to Brooks and his heirs is twisted away from its humanist roots.

At the same time, authoritarian leaders prove impervious to satire. Laughing at how stupid, pompous or corrupt they are doesn’t seem to break the spell of their power. The joke may be on those who persist in believing otherwise. If it were revived today, “Springtime for Hitler” might wind up being a hit for the wrong reasons. Or it might flop because those old Hitler jokes aren’t as funny as they used to be.

I don’t blame Max Bialystock. I find myself envying his misguided faith in the high-minded good taste of the public, even as I cherish Mel Brooks’s belief in our irrepressible vulgarity. Part of me looks back fondly on the days when fascism seemed like history’s dumbest joke. And part of me thinks we’d all have been better off if the opening-night audience at “Springtime for Hitler” had stormed out of the theater in a rage, leaving Max and Leo to make their way safely to Brazil.

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Bài viết When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us – The New York Times đã xuất hiện đầu tiên vào ngày Funface.

from Funface https://funface.net/best-jokes/when-we-laugh-at-nazis-maybe-the-jokes-on-us-the-new-york-times/

[mizannethrope]

Mother’s Day - it’s complicated

Today is Mother’s Day. I’m trying not to be sad.

I have been very open about discussing my mother’s fight with cancer and her death. I write about it a lot. I find catharsis in it so I continue. By writing about it and examining the feelings I have, I keep her alive with me a little bit longer. I keep up the exploration because I continue to learn so much from it. To counter the sense of loss I feel around the Hallmark holiday of Mother’s Day, I have sought to focus on all the other women in my life who have been like mothers to me. My mother loved me to an infinite degree but she also was acutely aware of her own limitations. I think she overestimated them but they were very real to her. My mother pushed me toward others that she felt would “improve” me. During my early life my mother sought out other women who could teach me the things she felt she could not. She was always striving on my behalf. In this pursuit my mother found or encouraged me to seek out surrogate mothers to learn from. She actively encouraged my friendships with these other women.

Let me tell you about some of these women and what lessons I learned from each.

When I was in early elementary school, Bonnie lived down the street from us in our townhouse complex. I’m guessing she was early 30s then. She had no children of her own, though I believed she wanted very much to be a mother. It wasn’t in the cards for her. Bonnie’s husband was a career Army officer and Bonnie was, at that time, a stay at home wife. My brother and I got to know her because we loved playing with her black lab, Machen, German for “girl.” Just as kids would go knock on a friend’s door and ask, “Wanna ride bikes?” I would knock on Bonnie’s door and ask, “Can Machen come out and play?”.

Bonnie had a challenging relationship with her own mother and father. Her mother favored her older brothers. Her father was remote and often cold. My mother, facing disappointment and problems in her marriage, confided in Bonnie and the two became close. Hours in Bonnie’s kitchen would reveal stories of her youth that stay with me today.

Bonnie had studied home economics in college. I’m sure this would be a questionable choice at best today, if such a choice were even an option. People often ask me about my love of food. I got it from Bonnie. My mom was not a very good cook. She never learned to cook in Korea. She improvised once she got to America but her repertoire was largely traditional American fare she learned from my great-aunts. Meatloaf. “Broiled” steak (more like boiled steak). Stew. Mashed potatoes. Frozen green beans and succotash. Because my mother worked, she stocked the house with Hostess cupcakes and Hungryman frozen dinners.

Bonnie was not a gourmet by today’s Food Network standards but she could work a cookbook. What I loved more than anything was watching Bonnie make and decorate cakes. She would make buttercream frosting and turn it into roses and flowers and leaves and grass and basketweave along the edges of a sheet cake. It was like watching something come to life out of a Wilton how-to pamphlet. Every cup of flour was carefully leveled. Every bowl of powdered sugar was meticulously sifted for lumps. Bonnie could also sew and crochet. At her side, I hooked endless potholders. One Halloween I recall we made sugar molds of black cats to put alongside a cake she baked for a friend. We tried over and over to get the sugar to turn pitch black (no gel food coloring back then). When I got the mix just right, we pressed the sugar into the molds and voila! Angry black sugar cats emerged, ready to stand along the orange frosted cake.

Bonnie was my main adult supervision and spirit guide for all my Girl Scout badges. We would pour over the Girl Scout Handbook and dog ear the pages with the badge requirements for the ones I hoped to earn that year. I hosted my first complete dinner party at her house (of course I got a badge for that one). I made whipped sweet potatoes with marshmallows and Swedish meatballs. I invited my parents over and served the whole thing. Bonnie gifted me cookbooks and let me watch her make sewing patterns and sew baby dresses for her nieces. She had a silver collection and a closet full of Kewpie dolls that she collected from childhood. Bonnie also had a weight problem and as a fat kid myself, we bonded over it.

Bonnie had lost 30 pounds at Weight Watchers but she had gained a good portion of it back when I met her. I was just a chubby kid. My mother fed me and fed me and then complained about how fat I got. I remember going to my first Weight Watchers meeting with Bonnie at the age of 12 at my mother’s urging. Having Bonnie to talk to about this was such a help. My mother had been too thin growing up and had never been fat. Her push-pull with me about food gave me whiplash. Bonnie could understand the torment I felt of loving food but hating it at the same time. It was good to have someone to confide in who got it.

Bonnie also had some coping mechanisms that were unusual. When in pain, Bonnie would laugh hysterically. One day she burned her hand in the kitchen. Rather than yelp or cry out, she began to... laugh. I looked at her like she was deranged. Once we wrapped her hand, she confided that her older brothers had often picked fights with her when they were children. When they would hit her, she learned to hide her tears so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing her hurt. Instead, she began to laugh. Her reflexive pain reaction was laughter. Never let them know you are hurt is something animals know as a survival skill. I had never met a person who had adopted this strategy in such a way. It made an deep impression on me.

Then Bonnie moved away.

Pat was our immediate next-door neighbor. She moved in when I was in 4th grade. She seemed to me to be a successful career woman. She was recently divorced with custody of her 3 kids who were all around my age. Pat subscribed to Cosmopolitan magazine and drank White Russians and pink wine. She was a potty mouth but very pretty. You could tell that she had been sought after in her younger years. Even in her mid-30s, life had not yet worn her down. In my 11 year old brain, Pat was very sophisticated. It was obvious she had had many boyfriends after her divorce. I had never met anyone like her before.

In our neighborhood everyone’s door was always unlocked. We all came and went without knocking, especially in the summer when everyone was home from school. No one went to summer camps back then. Some kids visited their grandparents. Most of our neighbors had family in Tennessee and when summer came, off they went to the Smoky Mountains. My best friend’s family was Cuban so her summers were spent in Miami with her abuelo and abuela. I was bereft without her company. The summers were long. One year Pat’s kids went to spend the summer with their father. I spent almost all summer at Pat’s house while they were gone. 

Pat had a stash of Cosmo magazines from the late ‘70s. Every issue was about sex, make-up, and dieting. It was the summer between 5th and 6th grade and I would go over to Pat’s house and spend hours going through issue after issue. I learned about the Grapefruit diet. I read articles about the mythical G-spot. Does it exist? Is it real? How would you know? The Atkins Diet was a thing. Lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks! Then the Beverly Hills Diet was a thing. Eat this, don’t eat that. Eat ONLY this. For 2 weeks. Then eat that. How much should you tweeze your eyebrows? Here is how to get the ultimate St. Tropez tan. I read every word and memorized every image. This was what being a liberated woman was all about. Right there in those pages.

Pat had, in a prior life, gotten her cosmetology degree and license. I would sit in her kitchen and she would cut my hair and put it on rollers. She also sold Mary Kay Cosmetics and had drawers and drawers of samples. Make up nirvana! All in pretty pink bottles. I would try on the different colors but because we had read Color Me Beautiful together, I knew that I was an “autumn” and should stick to the warmer shades. Pat also always had perfectly done nails. Long, polished talons, she would rap them on the counters and on the dashboard while she was driving. Click, click, click, click. When one broke, she would slap on an acrylic tip and lickety-split, they would be perfect again. Perfect looking but not real.

For all that she was worldly and intriguing to my 11 year old mind, she was also clearly struggling to stay afloat. Her job situation was often erratic. She moved from one thing to the next, finally falling back on her cosmetology degree and working in a beauty salon. Her kids seemed to be in perpetual trouble and were not doing so well in school. Her oldest son went to go live with his father. She found herself pregnant by her married boyfriend, had the baby and then found herself pregnant again. Her liberated woman veneer didn’t hold up so well once you scratched the surface. Sometimes the most important lesson you learn is what not to do. Pat was like that older sister you are intrigued by but who winds up being a cautionary tale. I caught onto that pretty quick.

Then my family moved to a new neighborhood.

I met Jenna in high school. She was my boyfriend Garrick’s mom. I think I was probably a sophomore when we first met. In senior year, Garrick and I dated. He was my prom date and we were together until the end of our first semester of college. While in high school, and even after we started college, all of our friends hung out together and we often landed at one house or another near our high school campus. Garrick’s house was one of those houses where we often found ourselves. We were a small posse of nerdy kids who got together on Saturday night to play charades and board games and did student government and band in school. (I was not in band, for the record but I was a big into Model UN and student government.) If we weren’t at Garrick’s house we were at Torunn’s house. Torunn remains to this day, the only truly natural blonde I’ve ever known. Garrick and Torunn lived in the same neighborhood and both had split level houses. The lower level of each home became our regular gaming and movie haunts.

Jenna and her husband were from Oklahoma. They were 25 years out of the University of Oklahoma but she still had a clearly distinct southern twang. Her husband Jim had a deep voice with no discernible trace of southern inflection to my ear. He was a perpetually calm presence. As even-keel and reserved as Jim was, Jenna was vivacious, warm, and very, very chatty. You can pluck a girl out of the south but you can’t pluck the southern out of the girl. I immediately took to her. We were fast friends, me at 17 and her at 46. Which is, funny enough, how old I find myself as I write this.

Garrick had an older brother so Jenna was mom of 2 sons and no daughters. I have even more in common with Jenna now than I did then. As the mom of 3 boys, I understand how impenetrable their lives can seem. More than just a friend to her, looking back, I’m convinced I was her conduit to her younger son and his social circle. Like Jenna, I live for conversation. Through our long talks I think she got to know her son just a bit better. Because I was a girl and I would spill. Boys share so little. I got to be a surrogate daughter and in exchange, I got another surrogate mother out of the deal.

Jenna would invite me to join their family dinners often. She had little choice. I would overstay my welcome at every chance because I so enjoyed the company of this family. At their dinner table I found a more adventurous menu than I had ever seen in my own home. Jenna made an arugula salad with strawberries. What is this insanity? Arugula? What is that? Fruit? In a regular salad? Salad in my house was iceberg lettuce and Wishbone Italian dressing. Jenna was a meticulous chef. Also a Weight Watchers veteran, she weighed and measured every meal like it was a science experiment. Everything was portioned and plated meticulously. It seemed so… fancy. I learned a lot from watching her prepare each meal. Salad, entree, dessert. Each carefully and lovingly prepared with more thought than any meal I’d ever seen in any person’s home. More than the food, there was the spirited verbal sparring that took place like nothing I’d ever seen. Words were not blunt force instruments lobbed across the table intended to inflict fatal injury like they were at my house. Here they were carefully sharpened little barbs meant only to agitate the opposing party enough to up the state of verbal play.

Garrick’s dad was an economist for the International Monetary Fund. Their dinner conversation covered world affairs and national politics. I soaked it up and tried my best to keep up with the conversation. Once in awhile, I managed to hold my ground and even best my companions. I recall one dinner where Garrick, in an effort to show his clear superiority in all things world affairs, threw down and challenged me to identify what the acronym SWAPO stood for. Having just dealt with a Model UN resolution regarding recognition of the South West African People’s Organization as the official government in exile of Namibia, I felt pretty confident on that one. I did not, however, correctly identify the role of the Shining Path in Peru in the follow-on questioning. This was the kind of thing we talked about. It wasn’t the kind of thing we did in my home. I didn’t go back to dinner there without reading the day’s Washington Post headlines.

This was also a family that had lived abroad and had traveled extensively. I was perhaps the only 17 year old girl in all of Northern Virginia, perhaps the entire eastern United States, who enjoyed watching multi hours-long travelogue slideshows with live commentary. But I *really* did. Garrick’s family had trekked all over the world, whereas I had never left the DC metro region. Sitting in his basement, I traveled the world with this family through their carefully curated slideshows. It made me curious. I loved their stories and I loved being part of their family rituals. I felt included and I felt like I became a little bit smarter just by being around them all.

There was an episode of Sex and the City where Carrie reluctantly breaks up with her boyfriend. Reluctant only because she really, really liked his mom. I can relate. I think I spent almost as much time on the phone with Jenna as I did with Garrick. When Garrick and I finally broke up, I might have been sadder to lose my girlfriend than to lose my boyfriend.

Of course we kept in touch but over the years that too, has waned. I hope that I can be a friend to my sons’ girlfriends and, someday, wives in the way that Jenna was to me. I recall that she was the first person who ever told me that I was a good writer and who encouraged me.

No one is shaped by only one person. These women I write about were not the only ones who influenced me or taught me things. It’s a complex calculus, making a whole person. I think my mom understood this. Only much later in my life did I come to realize how difficult it was for my mother to see me connect with these other women. How much it made her feel inadequate and how jealous she was of the time I spent with them. She never said this to me. One day I just understood it to be true. In knowing this and upon looking back, I value her and those relationships even more.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the women who shape our lives.