Beauty Dish May 2006 Archives

Monday, May 1, 2006   You can't beat FREE! I'm going to post quickie updates while I'm here, not my usual long (ha!) stories... I'm typing this at a tiny cafe. I arrived in London yesterday (Sunday), with just a few hours of daylight (if you can count drizzle) left to enjoy. I landed at Heathrow, caught the Underground Picadilly Line, and sat transfixed, a woman in an alternate universe, as we lurched past lush gardens, more climbing vines and lilacs than I knew could exist in one place. This is not my desert. I'm staying at an old hotel, just off Piccadilly Circus - London's version of Times Square- in a room tiny by American standards. I love it. I dropped my bags and wandered the streets with an umbrella and eyes heavy with jetlag. I didn't expect to experience much my first night, maybe find dinner, walk a mile or three, but five blocks out of the hotel a man accosted me. He wore a white robe made from cheap cotton, and the space between his eyes was stained saffron from some kind of ceremonial temporary tattoo. He handed me a book about "The True Truth of Yoga" and I stared at it for a moment, my mind, my brain, my legs seized with exhaustion. I couldn't compute. "We ask a pound for this. It goes to sick children." He looked at me with clear gray eyes, and I mentally traced the embroidered outline of his colorful cap. "You know, I am on the economy version of London. A pound is a huge amount of money to me. Here, take the book back. I'll give you twenty pence as a donation." His eyes aren't lying, I thought. This money may never see sick children, but he believes it will. I opened my change purse and tried to figure out which coin was twenty pence. Ah, the one that looks like a nickle. I handed him the coin. His eyes never left my face. "It's almost four o'clock." The man didn't wear a watch, but he recited the time, kept staring at my eyes, and I glanced down the street, nervous, ready to move on if only he would let me go. "We have a free vegetarian feast every Sunday, it's at the temple. Here, it's just across the street. There. See it? Please attend. There's no obligation. Free for everyone." Free? The rain tapped my umbrella. What the heck. I waved goodbye and crossed the street, opened an unassuming door under a carved wooden sign: "Hare Krishna Temple." I followed a rumble of chanting voices to a second story room, removed my shoes at the door, and sat in the back as a handful of devotees praised the sky, the universe, the birds, the blades of grass. We chant our blessings in all corners of this world. Why do we fear each other so much? I smiled at the men and women, let them blanket the room with belief, joined them at the table for brown rice and vegetable casseroles. They didn't ask anything from me, just let me eat, let me tell them about my life in the United States. I left the women a handful of Avon samples, walked back to my room under dark gray skies. Today I am walking to the National Gallery, then Westminster Cathedral, walking along the Thames and seeing the House of Parliament, the London Eye, everything there is to see. 2:46:29 AM    doorbell  [ ]   Caption the photo! I think Prince Harry is second butt on the right 3:57:01 PM    doorbell  []   Caption the photo! Now, normally I don't take photographs of toilets in my travels, but this is the first and ONLY time I've seen a toilet with a (padded, no less!) lumbar support! 3:58:44 PM    doorbell  [ ]

Tuesday, May 2, 2006   Caption the photo! It's elementary, Watson. From the condition of my cuticles, I deduce I need a manicure. 6:38:14 AM    doorbell  []

Wednesday, May 3, 2006   LIVE! From the BBC! I'm live at the BBC studios in London! More in a bit.... 2:03:27 AM    doorbell  [ ]   You can follow the We Media Global Forum here: http://www.mediacenterblog.org/events/06/wemedialondon/home/ There are links to live webcasting plus the conference blog. 2:10:56 AM    doorbell  [ ]   I'm covering the next talk for the Media Center blog, so please follow along here. This will be "live blogging" so I will update the entry every few minutes with more information, so refresh for the latest. 3:47:29 AM    doorbell  [ ]   so far... Just some thoughts on the conference so far... When I meet people and introduce myself, most people laugh. Some have asked me directly: What are you doing here? An Avon Lady? I'm surrounded my journalists and people with political backgrounds. It's a good question - Why are you here? - and I'm not sure I can answer it. I'm fascinated by the media discussion. 4:26:42 AM    doorbell  [ ]   conference photos You can see photos of the conference here: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/wemedia 5:28:18 AM    doorbell  [ ]   Background Noise and Black Suits Attending the We Media Global Forum is a surreal event when you're an Avon Lady. I'm sitting on a stuffed white plastic cube, my computer plugged into a scratched green tower. Seems like I'm the only person here who isn't a journalist or political/news blogger. Most of the media folks are from old school media. It looks to me like they are trying to go into the future by talking... and talking... and talking... about it. But you know what? The really new stuff happens unpredicably. I think the discussing will lead to new ideas, and I'm watching it closely. I'll have much more to say when I find a little time! Technorati Tags: wemedia 10:55:06 AM    doorbell  []

Thursday, May 4, 2006   Live at Reuters! Being a live blogger is tougher than you may think. You need to listen to the talks, digest the material on the fly - without benefit of reflection - and regurgitate what's being relayed into pixellated light. I'm learning as I go. Yesterday I met two hundred people. Today they'll seem like old friends. The people organizing the event are incredibly together and kind. Yesterday was a day of shouting opinion, listening to disparate voices explain why their work is important, the ways new media needs to mix and change to match the future. There wasn't group cohesion, no new vision visible yet at the surface, but I think it's there, just underneath, that it's taking form. Yesterday was too early for that. Today we'll see the tapestry being woven from everyone's experience. Technorati Tags: wemedia 1:03:08 AM    doorbell  [ ]   If you are new to Beauty Dish... I've been handing out my card, so if you're new to Beauty Dish, please peruse these links to get a taste of my crazy adventures! My favorite Avon adventures My personal stories There's plenty more at the site, the sidebar has a long list of Avon reviews, as well as links to stories posted at other sites, my Star Trek stories, and more. Thanks for visiting! Technorati Tags: beauty, Avon, blogging 5:50:17 AM    doorbell  []

Saturday, May 13, 2006   Spring Street This isn't meant to be poetic, or linear, or good. It's not for anyone but my Grampa. My grandparents lived on Spring Street since the day they got married. They lived there through World War II, when Grampa left for Europe with the Army. He returned to his wife and a toddler son he never met, the jagged memory of a German bayonet sprawled across his chest. He got a job at the High School as a janitor, fathered another son, but he never mentioned the war, not like his bunker buddies down at the Polish Club, not once over sixty years. When he died just a few weeks ago, he left behind a safe deposit box with two important medals of valor under a faded American flag. No one knew he earned them. No one in my family knows why, knows how. When I think of Spring Street, I don't think of the short road connecting the main drag to the elm-lined state college perimeter. I don't think of the rusty train that coughs and wails at the corner station. I just think of my grandparents and their house, an old New England three-tenement building that stands after years of love and neglect, all rolled into some solitary emotion. Spring Street means overgrown lilacs and stacks of molding egg cartons filled with the golf balls Grampa found on the college campus. Spring Street means Gramma rolling dough for pizza and Grampa diving for simple treasure in the dumpsters behind the strip mall adjoining his property. I lived in the bottom-floor apartment of my Grampa and Gramma's house for two years, when I was young, barely married, with a baby girl on my hip and a baby boy on the way. My husband worked long hours. I pushed my daughter down Spring Street in a pram, Grampa at my side. We searched the dumpsters together, found boxes of new greeting cards, cases of out of style shampoo, new cassette tapes with one-hit-wonder artists. Grampa stuffed everything in his "cold room," the master bedroom of the top tenement apartment. Most of the stuff still sits there, waits for the professional cleaners my dad hired to cart it away. Those are days of my life, I think. Each of those cards is filled with the breath I took when I was young, before I knew life never got easy, got slow. Grampa taught me how to live in the moment. He was never bored. He always had something to do, even if the something was sitting in his parlor reading a Louis LAmour mystery book for hours or listening to endless Red Sox games on a radio turned up way too high. He walked five miles a day until he turned 88 years old, then decided that three miles a day was plenty. When my Gramma died a few years ago, Grampa learned how to cook for the first time in his life. He told me about his successes and failures over the telephone, and I pictured him on Spring Street, way across the entire country, with a frying pan filled with pierogi and cabbage, his short arms reaching high to reach the salt on the top shelf. He missed Gramma something fierce, but filled his time with daily visits to church where the priest let him stand at his side during the consecration, the world's oldest alter boy. Grampa kept a complicated relationship with his two sons. I heard bits and pieces over my forty years about my uncle being the favorite, about the ways my dad felt slighted. I always wanted to hear more, but Grampa liked his secrets. I learned about making my own mysteries from listening to Grampa, and one day when he asked me a simple question about what I did the prior week, I grunted the way he would do when he didn't want to offer an explanation. "Good." I could hear him smile three thousand miles away. Two summers ago I drove my three sons 8,500 miles in one month, visiting all of our relatives along the way, our most important destination being Grampa's house on Spring Street. The entire trip I told 17, 10 and 8 how much fun I had with Grampa when I was a young girl. They didn't believe me. They didn't think an old man with a crooked nose and dirty fingernails who could barely hear them on the telephone could be very much fun. They didn't remember the way Grampa swung them higher than the sky, the nights laying on his couch listening to the victrola. We spent two full days playing golf, casting fishing line into the puddles in Grampa's dirt driveway, tossing baseballs, wrestling, and driving down to the coast to see the Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower. Whenever we talk about our trip, we talk about Grampa, and the way he wanted us to see all the places and things that he thought were special. When we drove out of the driveway, our windows rolled down, we all yelled "Bye, Grampa!" But Grampa shook his head and corrected us. "Never say Goodbye. Just say See You Later." Grampa lived on his own, in his same Spring Street home, until six weeks before his death. I thought he would live forever. He passed before my sons could see him one more time. I flew to see him, at a time close to his death, when he lay in a hospital bed, his arms bruised from too many needle pricks, too many attempts to make an old heart work. I scratched off a lottery ticket I bought for him at a convenience store, and we laughed when he won three dollars. I knew it was the last time I would see him alive. I wanted to stay at his side, wanted to hold his hand forever, until Gramma caught it again up in heaven. But I had to leave for home, for my young boys and pets and slow spring Avon. I didn't want to say goodbye. So I said the only thing I could. "See you later, Grampa." I miss him. I miss Spring Street. 12:41:22 PM    doorbell  []

Sunday, May 14, 2006   Hug your mom! Happy Mother's Day to everyone!!!!! Life is short and full of mystery and wonder. You never know what tomorrow will bring, so please hug your mom today - whether in person or in email or over the telephone, heck all three! 5:40:07 AM    doorbell  []

Thursday, May 25, 2006   Back in the land of the living... I'm recovering from a double wallop of bacterial grief. I had strep throat. I had bronchitis. I'm still taking antibiotics, but at least the room is sitting still when I sit up. Yay for modern medicine! I want to say Thanks for all the kind wishes I received in email. I will wade through the volumes, so if you've sent a note, don't expect a quick reply! I need to continue to rest and recover. While I'm hacking and laying around on the couch looking forlorn, please remind me what stories I still need to tell you. I know I have to tell you about what happened when I dropped off the gift basket at the bachelor party (woo hoo what a story!) and I have to finish telling you about Ulak's visit to NM and our drive down to wacky Roswell. I also got to meet the inimitable Diz while I was in NYC. Plus assorted thoughts on the conference in London. Geeze, I better get better quick before anything else happens! Love to everyone today. I'm so happy to be alive. 1:48:05 PM    doorbell  []

Tuesday, May 30, 2006   Sanctuario de Singularity Gandalf reaches into the depression containing the Holy Dirt of Chimayó My youngest son grew impossible legs while I traveled, while I coughed against a fever bed as hot as my New Mexico sun. He grew gangly arms, let his face thin to the same pointed-chin I own, moved from familiar Little Rascal to a tall introspective boy I don't quite recognize. All things change, I think. But I miss the child I could carry under one arm, the imp whose arms rose to circle my waist. I rose from illness, from three weeks of my own unwilling transformation, to find my son's hair meeting my chin. All things change, I think. I've changed, too, but in ways I can't identify yet. I'm not taller, not smarter. But something is different. Radical. I am in a cocoon, a luna moth, with wings heavy and lime green with iridescent scales. What's my destiny? I don't know. Both my sons stared at me Saturday morning. I sat on my bed, surrounded by piles of product, padded envelopes, my heart determined to catch up with work. My arms couldn't meet my desire, shook from fatigue as I carefully inspected each item. "C'mon, Mom. Let's go do something. We haven't gone anywhere in weeks." Gandalf, accented weeks as though he were a prisoner in solitary confinement fed on moldy bread and stale water. "Yeah, Mom." Harry picked his nose as he agreed with his older brother. I leaned over, grabbed him a tissue from the night-stand. "All right. We'll go on an adventure. But I get to pick the destination!" The boys helped me fill sport bottles with the mineral-laden town water. I threw cheese puffs and trail mix in a large zip-lock bag and added a handful of chocolate chips and a generous portion of chopped walnuts. I stood, bare feet on kitchen linoleum, and decided what wilderness we would visit. Someplace quiet. Somewhere gentle. The village of Chimayó. I almost left the house without Avon, but tossed ten samples of the new Avon Super Shape Anti-Cellulite Stretch Mark Cream in my purse. Two hundred years ago, a Chimayó friar was performing penances when a brilliant light burst from the hillside. He dug into the ground where the light appeared. His hands found a crucifix. The head priest brought the crucifix to a fancy church far away, brought it to be venerated, but three times it disappeared and was later found back in its hole. Then the miraculous healings began, healings associated with the dirt surrounding the artifact. I told the boys this story as we drove through the parched mountains west of my town, told them about the Chimayó chapel, and the way the newly-whole left crutches and before-and-after photographs in thanksgiving. "Geeze, Mom. You believe that stuff?" Gandalf spoke with a mouth full of snacks in the backseat. He cocked his head to the left, the way he always does before he explodes in a torrent of intellectual excess. "According to historical research, there is no evidence that Jesus was divine. In fact, one could make a case that he never existed at all." Gandalf continued, his words some kind of middle-school version of the DaVinci Code. Harry didn't pay attention. He leaned against the car door, a clipboard balanced on his knees, as he drew illustrations of penguins in space. I didn't answer. I kept my hands on the wheel, let my car slide past one herd of antelope, then another. They raced the wind, thirty, forty, fifty moving as one beast, a mass of delicate antler, of striped flank, of hoof-earth unison. Even though it was Memorial Weekend, we didn't pass another car. Chimayó snuck up on us. We fell from the mountains into the desert, with short sun-faded scrub and piles of white sand, fell into a village of a few adobe houses, a shack selling last fall's pinon and cheap religious trinkets, and the old chapel of miracles. A small dirt parking lot sat in front of the chapel with enough room for perhaps three dozen cars. Handicapped Parking Only. The blue sign spoke of hope, of the people who pilgrimage to Chimayó. We parked half-a-mile away, under the sparse shade of a mature cottonwood. The church welcomed us with a sheath of red desert roses overhanging the open wooden door. We filed inside, behind an old Latina in a wheelchair and her young caregiver. The chapel looking like nothing and everything at once. The walls were cracked brown adobe, tired, carrying the energy of a million broken people. Low wooden benches rested in uneven rows. Twenty or so visitors knelt on hard pine kneelers, their hands clasped in prayer, their eyes on the painted altar. Mexican saints surrounded us, their peeling fingertips pointing toward Heaven. The boys watched the flicker of a thousand votive candles. I pointed to the famous crucifix, to the hundreds of rags and crutches and photographs piled along the church sides. Gandalf found the holy dirt site first. A depression sank into the church floor, a child's orange plastic shovel helpfully left inside. He bent low, dug into the ground, handed me a shovelful of healing dust. I found a tissue in my purse, opened it, let the dirt collect inside, folded it as carefully as I could. We left. "Mom. Mom. Are all those crutches fake? Did people really leave those behind because they were better?" Gandalf's face crunched in an expression of confusion. I could hear his brain cells whirling with information he could not process. Harry shrugged his shoulders, picked up his penguin portrait as I gunned the car engine, one eye on the map. "Of course it's real. You don't know everything just because you're two years older than me. Haven't you figured out yet that there are mysteries?" Harry sighed long and loud. I smiled, but the boys didn't see. "Well, boys, to be honest, I don't know anything except that many people believe it's real. Sometimes believing in something makes something real, makes things happen. Harry is right about one thing. There are mysterious things that we don't understand. Maybe some day we will. So. It's still early. How about we drive to Los Alamos?" To Be Continued.... Technorati Tags: New Mexico, Chimayo 11:20:28 AM    doorbell  []

Wednesday, May 31, 2006   Congrats to Avon's New Pretty Woman! Julia Roberts has just been named the new celebrity spokesperson for Avon! What products do you think she needs the most? Post your thoughts in comments! I've added a Photoshop of Julia to our Avon Big As Your Head gallery: I'm personally thinking the new Super Shape stretch mark cream since she is the mom of twins! Technorati Tags: beauty, Avon, Julia Roberts 8:49:02 AM    doorbell  []