I go through favorite beer phases, as I’m sure everyone else does. I’m over my Stella kick, and am now too far from Worcester to regularly find Wachusett ale on tap. So my new obsession is Harpoon’s UFO.

Beer, as with music, I connect with great people, places and memories in my life. The first time I had Harpoon’s UFO was the day that we moved in to our current place. It was a frigid day at the end of December about 2 days before Christmas. My unbelievably tolerant family had helped us haul furniture all day, and just as we had finished unloading the U-Haul it became stuck in the snowy driveway. About two hours later, and with the help of many kind neighbors, we got the truck out into the street and headed to the nearest restaurant for a burger and a DRINK.

My brother-in-law ordered a UFO and let me have a sip. I was instantly in love. But it very well was because I was thawing in a warm restaurant, exhausted and sweaty, and surrounded by the greatest people on earth. You truly know the people who love you the most - they are the ones who help you move. And to all of those very very GOOD people on both sides of our family who have helped us move four times in four years, I raise my bottle of UFO to you.

From Daily Daguerreotype

My phone is on the last legs of its battery life. This is to be expected seeing as I’ve gone a number of days without charging it. Wouldn’t normally be a problem, except that last night the dog ate my phone charger.

“Ate” is not entirely accurate, more like “shredded beyond recognition.” This seems to be her new gig. She’s shredding toys left and right, and has recently gone after my slippers as well. She can shred them all to kingdom come for all I care, as long as she steers clear of the leather sofa.

Most dog owners get upset when their dog starts to chew on things. Not me. I’m seeing the many upsides to this. I’m lining up a whole stack of items that I’ll smother in beef jerky and then shove in her direction. Bills, my cleaning supplies, Matt’s registration for class next semester… we could live a sweet life of Thoreau-like solitude while Berlin destroys all connection with the outside world.

Which reminds me of my best friend whom I owe a phone call. She as well, as some other wonderful people, were left without power in Columbus, OH this past week. Aside from the rotting refrigerator food, it kinda sounds like paradise.

Sorry, Kiks. I’ll get around to replacing the ole phone charger in a solid 2 months. Til then, just call Matt if ya need me.

Editor’s Note:

I got nothin. You’ll see after reading this post that I have the best friends ever. I’m not even kidding. Try to fight me on it and I’ll win every time.

You come here to read a poor excuse for a blog, but what you will read here by Deneese is some mighty fine writing from someone I respect, admire and love more than most. Plus she’s freaking hysterical.

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When Priscilla told me that she wanted to honor me with a guest-spot on her blog, I responded that I would accept the invitation with grace, style, and panache, oh, and by the way, I’m totally going to write about boobs.  She seemed unreasonably happy about this, perhaps because of the sundry and interesting google hits she should get after today.  You can thank me later, P.

So yeah, boobs.  I’m the proud owner of a pair, as are roughly 50% of the world’s population.  As a species, we really should be so over them; I mean really, they’re just so common.  But the fact of the matter is that we ladies are placed under an extraordinary amount of pressure to fret over and contort them to fit society’s unreasonable standards for the feminine physique, blah, blah, blah, stop me when you’ve heard enough.

Enter me.  Me who had the immense pleasure to gestate and birth the most adorable of offspring.  Me who found that lo, after birthing and nursing said offspring, not a single solitary body part of mine remained in its proper location relative to the rest of my body parts.  Specifically, childbirth did a real number on my boobs.  And so I recently decided, like any good American consumer, to venture forth on a quest to Giant Lingerie Conglomerate Based Right Here In Columbus located conveniently at Local Ubiquitous Town-Center Style Suburban Outdoor Mall to find myself some new delicates.

But first a little history about this particular location of Giant Lingerie Conglomerate Based Right Here in Columbus.  You see, they recently closed this branch for many months for the purposes of a major renovation.  Huge signs covered in half-naked, frighteningly gargantuan super-models blocked our view of the store as they made their transformation.  And when it reopened?  Well, let’s just say Local Ubiquitous Town-Center Style Suburban Outdoor Mall had itself a nice little red-light district.  Neon lights, lone mannequins posed suggestively in lone windows, mirrors, loud techno music.  Good-bye, Columbus; helloooo, Amsterdam.  This is the scene for my shopping excursion.

So I wander into this classy little joint thinking I’ll be in and out in no time.  Clearly I was in my happy place when that thought crossed my mind.  The decision-making process to pick out and buy a new bra is absolute insanity.  I am presented with an infinite number of combinations of push-up, push-together, poke you in the ribs with wires, lace, satin, cotton, polyester, full-coverage, moderate coverage, no coverage, demi-cup, with straps, strapless, lined, un-lined, front-closure, back-closure, beige, nude, black, brown, pink, various animal prints including colorful zebra stripes omgIcan’tbreatheTHECHOICES!  I’ve had fewer options when buying a friggin’ car.

Gentlemen readers of Priscilla’s blog, if you have made it this far, you may now be thinking to yourselves that a) Priscilla has questionable taste in friends, and b) you have absolutely no frame of reference to truly understand what I’m saying here.  To address those points as a thoughtful blogger a) I can’t believe she asked those other people to guest blog either, what was she thinking?! And b) Consider for a moment if you had to go through this same decision-making process to get fitted with, say, a jock strap for your boys.  A jock strap you had to wear every day.  Push-up, or not?  Wires, or no?  Satin, cotton, polyester, or a blend?  Would you like a professional fitter to measure you today to ensure a proper fit, sir? Not a pretty picture, am I right?  So keep reading, and try to empathize with me here a bit, mmkay?

No less than 20 minutes later, I’ve wandered through the entire store, mouth agape, senses accosted, without having selected a single solitary item to try on.  Which, of course necessitates a second pass through, upon which I take the exact opposite approach and just pick up one of everything in what I guess to be my size.

So then, like a sheep to the slaughter, I join the line snaking around the store to wait my turn in the fitting room.  In the midst of cursing myself for choosing a beautiful (read: crowded) Saturday afternoon for this shopping excursion, I look around, hoping to find solidarity in this sisterhood of women within the shared goal of hoisting our bosoms to an unnatural location closer to our chins than our rib cages.  Instead, I find that I’m surrounded almost entirely by middle-aged moms with an unhealthy addiction to make-up, perfume, plastic surgery, and SUPER! SHINY! JEWELRY! These women are additionally surrounded by gaggles of pre-teen girls carrying loads of undergarments which are not only completely inappropriate, but some of which feature words in all caps emblazoned across their asses.  Charming.  Tell me, internetz, who lets their 13-year old buy underwear from GLCBRHIC?  WHO?  When I was their age (omg, when did I get to be old enough to say that?), I didn’t care what my underwear looked like because nobody was going to see it but me.

But I digress.

By the time I make it to the front of the line, the techno music and the giggling teens have started to eat away at my brain.  The sixteen-year old tartlet who is managing the dressing room chaos is all “And would you like me to measure you today, ma’am?”  And I’m all “You just called me ma’am.  That would be an automatic no.” And she’s all “But your size can change!”  And I’m all “If you come any closer to me, please know that I’m going to hog-tie you with your tape measure and make you listen to NPR.”  And with that I’m whisked to a changing room without further ado.

After trying on about a dozen different garments, I finally settle on the least garish, most sensible (again, when did I become this person?) bra I can find that doesn’t immediately suggest that I might be workin’ a side gig as a lady of the night.  (Of note, the bra I pick purports to have been scientifically developed to fit properly.  And what frat boy developed that particular branch of science, I ask you?)  So armed only with my lone bra and my wits about me, I fight my way back through the crowd to pay for my purchase.  I should mention that there are signs all around the store advertising $10 OFF SELECT STYLES OF BRAS, and I assume that since one of those signs was located directly adjacent to the display from which I plucked this particular style, I will emerge from the store victorious in paying slightly less than my monthly mortgage payment for my find.  Oh, sweet, naïve Deneese.  The clerk at the counter, who addresses me with as much disdain as if she had discovered me stuck to the bottom of her shoe, indicates that since my scientifically developed bra is a brand new item, it isn’t subject to the discount.

At this, I consider leaving the bra at the counter and walking out of the store.  But I hear a little voice inside me saying “Just do it, Deneese.  Do it for your boobs.  They NEED this bra.”  And so I listen to that voice and hand over my credit card.  There’s really no good reason for listening to the voice; at that point, I just needed someone to tell my sensory overloaded brain what to do.

Moments later, I emerge forth into the sunshine of that beautiful Saturday afternoon, squinting like a mole.  I think of our mothers and how they burned their bras in protest.  I wonder what would happen if we bucked cultural norms and burned our bras.  Then I picture an image of me going up in flames like a roman candle, reduced to a pile of ashes with a metal wire on top because “scientifically developed” probably = “flammable as all get out.”

By now I guess you’re wondering to yourself what the point of this post is.  Demanding, aren’t we?  Well if I must have a point, it is that women go to a lot of damn trouble to take care of our boobs.  We support them daily, we smush them into sports bras to give them extra support, we squash them into paper-thin sheets of tissue to examine them for irregular lumps, and frankly, they deserve a little bit of respect since they also fulfill a pretty important purpose in sustaining our children.  Take care, gentle readers, to appreciate the women in your life and the things they do as women, and understand that if they’re cranky, they may have a misplaced underwire poking them in the ribs, so cut them some slack already.  In honor of my friend, Priscilla, who just completed the Three Day Walk for Breast Cancer in honor of boobs (and cancer, too) I told her I was going to write about boobs, and write about boobs I did.  Because that’s the kind of friend I am.  True to my word.  Helpful.  Always ready to offer an illustrative sketch from my life for the betterment of mankind.  Or the promotion of my friend’s hot new blog design.  Which are pretty much the same thing in my book.

Editor’s Note:

I heart Heather Atwell. I could go into all kinds of crazy telling you about her adventurous outdoorsy spirit, her love of Kingdom Animalia and her lovely collection of winter sweaters. But really all I can get out onto the page is the fact that when I think about Heather Atwell, I wish I had met her years earlier and lived right around the corner from her as a kid so that we could play in the swamp together. She gives me warm fuzzies inside and I think after reading this lovely post by her, you’ll understand why I think she and I were cut from the same cloth.

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In the early eighties, my grandmother’s in ground-pool spawned Schenectady, New York’s entire frog population. My brother and I could have spent afternoons splashing and swimming in the refreshing chlorine oasis, but alas, it was an in-ground pond filled with ickiness. Despite the pond scum and green algae, it was magical, because it was filled with tadpoles. My brother and I brought some home in a plastic container, and watched hopefully as they grew and changed in the next few days. Then, before they became frogs, they died. It was sad for us.

You can imagine my glee one morning a couple months ago when I noticed that an empty planter filled with rain water had become the new home for a school of tadpoles. I watched them squirming about and remembered the tadpoles in my grandmother’s pool. I excitedly told everyone – friends, coworkers, even strangers - about my new pet tadpoles. I could not wait for the day they would become frogs and hop off into the big wide world.

For weeks, it became my morning ritual to check my tadpoles before I left for work. I imagined my three year-old nephew’s amazement when I gave him some of the tadpoles so he could watch them grow.

After a particularly chilly evening, I stopped for my morning visit with the tadpoles before work. Sadly, only one tadpole paddled about; all the rest were dead. What a terrible fate for these tadpoles. I blamed myself. Perhaps I should have put the planter inside my apartment. The disappointment of my second failed attempt at raising tadpoles flooded me with childhood sadness.

I shared the news that my tadpoles had died and most people just stared back blankly. There is really no way to console a person who loses her tadpoles.

It’s been a few weeks since this happened, and what you should be wondering is why a grown woman is still thinking about dead tadpoles. I’ll tell you why. They were not tadpoles. They were mosquitoes. Yes, the common mosquito that spreads disease. And I was tending my very own batch of mosquitoes with love.

When I realized my tadpoles were, in fact, mosquitoes, I thought, this is a story I must keep to myself. On so many levels, it is beyond embarrassing to know that for weeks I doted upon my tadpoles and told others about my tadpoles, only to learn that I am a complete idiot and the tadpoles were mosquitoes.

I suppose I was in denial from the beginning. My tadpoles looked nothing like the pictures listed on Wikipedia. And they never had that true tadpole joie de vivre either.

Next time, I’ll know better.

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I’m posting the following links as a public service announcement for your safety:

This is Berlin with Ursula, her bestest friend in the whole wide world. She and her lovely owner, Lee, have taken us under their wing and taught me all about first-time dog ownership. They’ve been patient with us when Berlin was shy and scared and didn’t know what to do. They’ve opened up their yard, their toys, and their water with us. And I can’t tell you how much I adore Lee. She’s one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever talked to, and I truly enjoy every moment I spend with her. I kinda think of Lee and Ursy as our big sisters. And if there’s anything I love and could not get enough of, it’s big sisters.

From Daily Daguerreotype

Ok, I admit that this photo is complete crap and is being posted in it’s unedited glory PRIMARILY because of the lady with the major wedge. I laugh not AT her but WITH her, because that’s totally me on most Saturday afternoons.

Editor’s Note:

Our first guest post this week comes from Justin Shatwell, an editor over at Yankee Magazine who writes a music column there. We met while working together, and after a brief, five-minute conversation about his impeccable music taste, we pulled out the safety pins to become blood brothers. He’s by far the hippest cat to ever reside in the Granite State and walks around making quotable quotes all the time. When I asked him to write a guest post, his response went a little something like this:

Funkiest Priscilla,

If the young and disaffected clamoring for a better tomorrow on the internet were a revolutionary guerilla army, you were our Che Guevara.

Peace,
Justin

What’s not to love? And here’s a little music review by him of a band you NEED to check out…

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There are few instances when it is either safe or socially respectable to follow strangers back to their van. Spending an evening hanging out with folk musicians is a borderline case in both regards. Lucky for me, they weren’t just any folk musicians, they were husband and wife vagabonds Rebecca Hall and Ken Anderson, otherwise known as Hungrytown. And it wasn’t just any van, it was the Blue Meanie, their custom built twenty-two foot long wannabe Winnebago. Inside they crammed a bed, shower, toilet, kitchenette, and desk. It’s wireless, has room for their instruments, and carries all the gear they need to set up impromptu recording sessions. It’s also blue and stocked with diet soda which they serve up liberally to guests.

If you ever, in a fit of youthful idealism, declare your intention to work for the U.N. and your parents demand to know where that will get you in life, refer them to this post. Ken, a reformed lawyer whose first official act was to retire, and Rebecca, an erstwhile English major, kicked around the lower echelons of the world service for years before deciding to follow in the footsteps of the Carter family. They quit, cashed in their pensions for a small house in Vermont and their big blue touring machine (the van was more expensive), and they haven’t looked back since. I caught up with them five years into their odyssey after they rocked the geriatric face off the Rutland Free Library.

The first thing that strikes you about Hungrytown is how damn cute they are. Seeing them on stage, you’d swear this whole “folk musician” thing was just an extended second honeymoon. The show is full of sidelong glances, little jokes, and matrimonial barbs. Before one song Rebecca reminded Ken “Now don’t forget the new intro” in the same tone one might use to remind their husband to bring the car in for an oil change or to empty the lint trap before drying the linens. They’re genuinely having a good time. They’re the type of unspoiled musicians that are still perfectly pleased to be playing a thirty seat room half-filled.

Musically Hungrytown is like few folk acts out there. Not because they’re pushing the envelope with turntables and electric sitars, but because they’re doing exactly the opposite. Ken and Rebecca kick it way old school – like 1930’s old school. Most folkies I know either try to modernize the genre or go the traditional Celtic route. Hungrytown opts instead to revisit the golden age of Appalachia. The majority of their music is purely American, referencing the kind of acts that played the Grand Ole Opry when Elvis and Johnny Cash were kids. The twist is that most of the songs, though ancient, are brand spankin’ new.

Ken and Rebecca discovered folk relatively late in their musical lives. While they were international bureaucrats, they kept their sanity playing separate gigs in New York. Rebecca was a jazz singer and Ken played drums for a rock outfit. It was only after a conversion experience with an old folk anthology that Rebecca started toying around with Americana. Ken didn’t join her until he filled in for her regular bassist for a major gig (in order to achieve this feat, he had to learn how to play the bass in three days. If that’s not love, Cupid can freakin’ eat me). For whatever reason, they found in folk something they didn’t find elsewhere. They have an incredible knack for writing songs that sound so authentic they might be referred to as forgeries. They also found something they can do well together, which sounds cheesy as hell, but seriously, isn’t that what we all want? They take the trials and tribulations of their daily lives (like those involved in buying a new house or living with your husband in a very small van), craft them into simple versus, and hurl them back in time. The soul of the songs is modern, but they sound like something that should be coming out of a gramophone.

Hungrytown is definitely worth a listen. They may be a little too authentic for some tastes, but the charisma of their live shows it worth seeing in-and-of-itself. It is a rare thing these days to see a band that really took the leap of faith to become musicians. It’s easy to quit your job at Starbucks to chase the dream; leaving behind a secure high-paying job to hit the road in a genre that rarely brings in a lot of cash, that’s something else entirely. The drive required to do that is something hard to describe, but they where it on their sleeves at every concert. It’s worth going to one of their shows just for the inspiration. I guarantee it’ll be an experience as classic as their sound.

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You can preview their album “Hungrytown” in the sidebar widget. Enjoy!