Skip to main content

Frank and Me

  Lord have mercy. It's Friday night — which means Guinness night in this house — so I try the ol' Pandora on the television again. Sometimes this works out for me and sometimes it doesn't. It's hard to try the Smart TV with a couple of old people in the house.
    Anyway, I turn it on for a little backdrop for my chili cooking on a cold night and I decide to use the quickmix button.
   I'm thinking Frank Sinatra and Luck Be a Lady is nice. Then it's followed by Jackie Wilson. Then Jackie's followed by Hank Williams. Then Hank is followed by Dean Martin. Then Dean's followed by the Supremes and I Hear a Symphony. This causes me to stop and think for a minute: Am I maybe just a little bit less hip than I thought I was? Well, that answer was obvious.
   And then I get a little indignant. I think maybe Mr. Quickmix is a real person and I should have a chat with him. Tell him that I like the Red Hot Chili Peppers and that new Mumford and Sons group. I'll tell him I use curry powder on everything and that I secretly click on stories about Ashton and Mila as much as I do NPR.
   This all sounded like a great idea and then Johnny Mercer came on singing Baby, It's Cold Outside. Clearly there's something wrong with this new-fangled Smart TV.
   It's right up there with my weekly conversations with Verizon. They're all . . . "But you owe us 400 dollars because in September of 2010 you were three days late with your payment and your corporate discount is null and void because you didn't renew it and your family plan went up because one of the lines added internet access and you neglected to give us your first born child and your only diamond."
   And I'm all…."But my bill was 115 dollars last month and you told me I would get a discount because I've been such a loyal customer…" And they were like…"Call us at 3:52 p.m. on Dec. 22 and we'll see what we can do."
    Wait, Under My Thumb just came on after Bobby Darin. Maybe there's hope for me yet.

"Basically, I'm for anything that gets you through the night - be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniels." — Frank Sinatra








  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Like to Call Them Ow-Bows

   It’s a toss-up. Do I write about the fact that if you search “jobless goddess” in Google the dairy goddess and the library goddess come way ahead of me, or do I write about the fact that my husband is incapacitated due to a broken elbow? I guess I’ll go with the broken elbow. Besides, who the hell breaks their elbow anyway? My husband of course.    It started out innocently enough. I, in my desire to lose weight and become the wrinkly, thinner woman I was meant to be, decided we should start up the morning walks again. I prodded him while he was still under the covers. “Come on, let’s do it. You know we have to do this,” I said while tugging on my really sexy yoga pants (which, by the way, never get used for yoga).    To his credit, he got up, pulled on his pajama pants and went with me. We got about a 16 th of a mile past the driveway before he landed in the gravel. I’m talking a bed of gravel. Gravel embedded in the palm of your hand. Gravel ...
2 comments
Read more

He sells sea shells, I wish

   So now rather than being obsessed with fake fingernails I can’t afford, I’m becoming obsessed with checking this blog. I’m pretty sure all 52 views were made by either me or my husband.   That leads me right into the current situation at hand. We need friends. We’re desperate for them. I’ve started handing out my telephone number to people I meet while doing my meager freelance work. They think it’s for the story I’m writing but really it’s in hope that someday they’ll find a reason to call and then I can hit them with, “By the way, do you play cards? Bingo? Gin Rummy?” If I wasn’t so arthritic I’d throw Twister in there.    It’s not so much for me, it’s my husband who likes to have people around. I have become hermit-like since moving here while he has become convinced we could die here and not be found for months. He had friends back in Syracuse but he chose to stay home at night with his loving wife. Now all of a sudden I get the impression he’d h...
6 comments
Read more

Parish the Thought

     I love small towns. When I lived in Parish, New York, there was no end to the reverie, not to mention the constant parades.      We had a Halloween parade through town featuring people of all ages marching in costume along a rather abbreviated parade route. It all culminated at the fire barn where a couple of old draft horses would pull along a hay wagon. Most all town festivities featured the fire barn.       Monday night bingo held there. The caller was a volunteer firefighter prone to bringing on fits of laughter when he drew N 44…which he pronounced as "N farty-far," whereby producing great gales of cackling from the middle-aged women who showed up every week, I think maybe just to flirt with the caller and the other male volunteers who collected their money. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun. I spent more than a few Monday nights there myself.      The gas stations served as restaurants in Parish. You...
2 comments
Read more