Stormy Weather

While other people's childhood reminiscences might include building tree houses and tea parties with their genuine Chatty Cathy Doll, mine center more often on hurricanes.  The charming, leafy subdivision I grew up in was a peninsula that stuck out into Galveston Bay and which was smacked by tropical storms pretty regularly.  Every autumn, inevitably, I would be roused in the early morning by my mother who would announce that we had to put all our earthly possessions up as high as possible cause some stupid hurricane was heading our way and flooding was imminent.  Great.

And then, having stuffed our clothes and groceries in the attic and propped the couch up on cinder blocks, would we flee to higher ground?  Oh my, no.  We would sit and wait, "see how things go" and only leave once the bay waters actually invaded the house, which they did six or seven times (I have lost count over the years) before the city finally condemned the charming, leafy subdivision and forced my parents to move to a more sensible location, a move they should have made decades before.  Some of these floods were six and seven feet deep.

When I was six, the eye of Hurricane Carla, an enormous Category 5 storm, passed directly over the little town I grew up in.  The National Guard came to our door and ordered my father to get us out; we drove through water that came half way up the car doors.  And where did we go? Five minutes "inland" to my granny's house, a house you could walk to the beach from.  Cause that was safe.

And that's the point, the world I grew up in was astonishingly casual about hurricanes, storms that killed people every fucking year somewhere on the Gulf Coast.  Of course, meteorological predictions were much more primitive and tropical storms rarely travel in a straight path, so hearing one was "coming our way" was a prediction regarded with jaundiced eye.   My granny could do better watching  which way the birds flew.  The grocery store printed hurricane tracking charts on their paper bags.  During Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, the weatherman would interrupt with the latest coordinates and you could mark them on the map to see which way the fucking thing was lurching.  It was like a not very amusing game.  I remember the truism that it's supposed to be worse to be on the west side of the hurricane, but now I can't remember why.  Maybe it was unlucky.

But then came Hurricane Andrew and all his little brothers ripping up Florida; and Alicia, which finally forced my family from their home; and, of course, Katrina so now the storms get much more the respect they were due.

And now here comes little Isaac, still only a tropical storm and only predicted to hit land as a Category Two, but coming in with spectacular timing, interrupting the RNC convention (sort of yay) and eyeing the anniversary of Katrina (so very much not yay.)

That's why as I sit here, halfway across the continent, remembering the weird green color the sky would turn right before a really big storm settled in; the nasty stench of the muck that the storm surge would flood our house with; my mother wading through the den to reposition her favorite recliner, I'll be honest.  I am so grateful to be out.

Anyway, what this really started out as was a hearty wish of good luck and no hurricanes going out to our dear Jason in New Orleans and Mean Dirty Pirate in whatever truckstop he's in outside Gulfport.  Keep your tits dry honey.

HurriCan't

I was delighted with this pulpy charmer which our beloved Infomaniac used to respond to my comment that, in turn, responded to her very sensitive post about possible East Coast victims of Hurricane Irene (is this all too internal, too blogger-centric, too meta, too tootoo for you? Tough. Do try to keep up.)

My considerably less sensitive comment to her post said "Pooh. As an old Gulf Coast boy, I still say if it's to the right (starboard) of Florida, it's not a real hurricane." Yeah, that's right, I said it and I'm sticking by it, especially since Irene turned to to be such a wimpy little blow, not much more than a lot of rain and a chance for New York transit official to turn of the subway. (And what's with that? I didn't even know they could turn it off.)

I understand the anxiety of staring down the barrel of an oncoming hurricane, the tragedy of rushing down to the grocery to stock up on supplies only to discover your piggish neighbors have already scored all the beer and cheap scotch. But my substantial experience with them makes me confident that if, on Thursday, the storm trackers are warning you that the hurricane will come ashore in your neighborhood on Sunday, you can feel confident about sleeping in late that morning and then watching the Weather Channel to see where it actually wanders in.

Understand me, I am not exaggerating (for once) my hurricane experiences. My parents' home was located on a lovely, leafy peninsula that stuck out into Galveston Bay. In the thirty years they lived there, it was flooded seven or eight times and threatened pretty much annually. Eventually, the city condemned the whole fucking neighborhood for being too disaster prone and turned it into a nature preserve, complete with alligators. To this day, the nasty mucky smell of a mud flat at low tide is a nostalgic, Proustian experience for me.

So a Category 3 (Category 3? As in Category "What's the big deal, why are you being such a little Girl" 3?) storm comes along and I'm not impressed? It's nurture, not nature.

Barbarama

The messy Muscato continues torturing me with updates of his touring about Paris. Bitch. Not only is the tramp gadding about in my most favorite city (WITHOUT ME) he had the gaul (get it? Gaul, not gall? Oh never mind) to hit the Barbie doll exhibit there. Also WITHOUT ME. Go here for details, if you can bear to.

When I finished grinding my teeth, I was reminded of my girlyboy youth when my favorite pastime was playing with my friend Stephanie’s vast collection of Barbies. My favorite was a classic, with that early Barbie slutty-eyed face and three wigs. A cursory search on Google reveals she was “Fashion Queen Barbie,” a name that just makes it all even better. Then the Google search pointed me towards an E-bay auction where for only 50 bucks you can snag this:

All that and a grass skirt, too. A BARBIE DOLL GRASS SKIRT! Could life be any sweeter?

Louise Gets Down

With thanks to Muscato, from whom I swiped this.

One of the rewards of having arrived at a certain age is that I can actually remember people looking like this. When I was a mere child, most of the ladies I was exposed to had nailed this look down flat. Of course, as the perceptive Muscato points out, “Louise Wallis” sounds an awful lot like an anagram of "Walter A. Lewis," and it seems possible that Louise is, in fact, Walter. Give either of us a chance and we will unerringly head for the trannny connection.

Still, the cats-eyes, the slightly wilted bouffant, the insipidly understated accessories; all of it could have been any of my aunts, Sunday school teachers, or cashiers at the Piggly Wiggly that I knew so well. To the best of my knowledge, none of them could jam on an organ and a piano simultaneously, but then, I led a rather sheltered life.

On the Road

In the earlier post “News You Can Use” Jason reminisces about riding around in a boat being towed by a car which, in turn, reminds me of being young and cruising along in the back of my father’s pickup. We were going over to my granny’s house on a small back road and I was sitting on the open tail-gate with the toes of my bare feet just skimming along the road surface. Yes, any bump would have sent me flying to be mangled or some road debris could have chopped off my little piggies. Were my parents crazy for allowing this? Maybe. Were they white trash? Oh, yeah. But forty something years later I still remember that ride fondly.

My Telenovella Career

In primitive television times, before Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street, local tv stations had their own kiddy shoes to fill in the gap between soap operas and the news when grubby children descended from school and needed to be distracted with something so mommy could focus on her drinking. In Houston, where I grew up, the answer was Kitirik (her name came from the call letters of the station, KTRK, with I’s stuck in the middle. Who knows why? It was the 60’s.) She was suppose to look like a black cat as some vague-ass reference to their location on unlucky channel 13, so she wore sort of a hood with kitty ears and dressed in a black leotard, fishnets and heels. Of course. Doesn’t everyone want their children entertained by a dominatrix pole dancer?

I watched everyday, entranced. There were cartoons and cheesy local commercials, but the best was kids who got to appear on the show and be interviewed on their birthday. The high point of my young life were the two times I got to be a part of the birthday scrum on Kitirik. The first time I was so little. I don’t even remember it, something about being on a carousel, but by the second time around, when I was 6, I was much more sophisticated and still cherish the memory.

By that time, the set had changed and she lived in a tee house (why?) and the birthday brats were interviewed seated in a big nest (again, why? A cat and a nest, creepy and nonsensical. The director must have been on drugs and drinking. Heavily. If your career had wound up here, wouldn’t you?) Kitirik came around and asked us some bogus questions to give us each camera time. “How old are you? What’s your favorite food? What’s your daddy’s credit card number?” Then she gave us a toy and a Hostess cupcake.

Because I was a boy, I got a toy gun. It was Texas, get real. But what a gun! A red and black space laser rifle, perfect for blasting aliens. “Look, mama, a drag queen stripper gave me a gun and junk food!” No wonder I’m gay.