Today’s Prompt: Name 5 items you’d demand to have everywhere you went if you were famous enough to do so.

I wonder what I’d be famous for. Probably not being a rockstar, because I’m too old, it’s too loud and I’ve never been able to sing. However, let’s pretend I’m Beyonce (because, seriously. Who doesn’t want to be Beyonce?)

The five things I’d require -

1. Hair and Makeup on call at all times and able to make all decisions without my input and make me look fabulous. I love having my hair and makeup done, but I have no skill or eye for what looks good. I want it done for me.

2. Diet Dr. Pepper. Ice cold. Never over ice. Within arms reach.

3. Someone to rid my clothes of dog hair unobtrusively. I want to cuddle the puppy, but he sheds his white hair all over my black wardrobe.

4. A scheduler who knows that I will not miss Kentucky basketball games because my being famous requires me to be somewhere. In fact, I want a scheduler like Ashley Judd’s that gets her tickets, but I’d want mine to be to every game, home and away, behind the Kentucky bench.

5. Fresh flowers that aren’t cloying. No roses, no carnations, no mums. Lillies, lilacs, etc. It’s not something I’ll ever splurge on, but fresh flowers are nice in any room.

I had a surprisingly difficult time coming up with these things! I am constantly in a state of wanting something or other, so you’d think this would be easy!

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You’ve heard of people that have Oscar movie screening parties and then a big Oscar awards ceremony party, right? I’ve always wanted to do something like that, but haven’t ever quite figured out how to make it work with podunk theaters and sometimes esoteric movies. A few years ago, I heard about the perfect solution to this issue and have tried to make it work with my schedule ever since.

The AMC Theaters Best Picture Showcase screens all the Best Picture nominees back-to-back on two weekends (it used to be just one until they expanded the nominee field). The nearest AMC Theater to us is in Newport, Kentucky – just across the river from Cincinnati. In order to make the 10AM showing, we had to leave the house at about 7:30AM.

I pre-bought our tickets through Fandango, but we still waited in a long (but fast-moving) line to get our swag and into the theater. We had press-pass like tickets on lanyards and could move in and out of the theater with ease. We bought some concessions before the first movie and received free popcorn and drink refills for the rest of the day. Worth it!

On the schedule for Saturday were four movies – each with about 30-45 minute breaks between them, plenty of time to stretch and use the restrooms and get refills and have a little bit of discussion about the film you just watched.

Jason and I went into the day without having seen any of the nominees. Luckily, we have plenty of lazy-football-sit-on-your-ass-all-day training.

We watched Amour, Les Miserables, Argo and Django Unchained.

Here are some quick-and-dirty thoughts about each:

• Amour was fantastic. It will never win over many American movie-goers hearts because of the pace and style, but it was just wonderful. Sweet, poignant, moving. Jason and I talked a lot about the film since we watched it. Emmanuelle Riva gave a stunning performance and her Best Actress nomination is well earned. (I’d love to see this film win some award – a Best Director for Michael Haneke wouldn’t be amiss.)
• Incredibly, I’ve never read Victor Hugo’s novel or seen any production of Les Miserables. In fact, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid it. People love it. Normally, something so popular is something I don’t always love. I was so, so wrong. I really loved this movie. I love Hugh Jackman, always. He was fantastic and earned his nomination for Best Actor. I dislike Russell Crowe and this movie didn’t change it. Anne Hathaway’s performance of I Dreamed a Dream was incredibly moving. Incredibly. Of the four we watched Saturday, this was both Jason and my favorite. I bought the soundtrack, yesterday.
• Argo got lots of love from earlier awards shows. It was a good movie. I’m not sure I understand the hype and the lovefest. It was good. It’s an amazing story. The film was well-done. It wasn’t stupendous to me.
• Django Unchained. Oh, Quentin Tarantino. I roll my eyes so often in your movies, but I also like them – not as much as your cult followers, but I do like them. This one was no different. It is probably the most violent QT movie, and we all know that is saying something. There was at least one scene that I knew I could not watch and closed my eyes and even plugged my ears throughout. With that said, there were some really funny moments in this movie. The Don Johnson/Jonah Hill scene was hilarious. I love Christoph Waltz, and I really enjoy Jamie Foxx. There’s some controversy, of course, about the violence (which I found often to be gratuitous) and the use of racially-charged language (which I am incredibly sensitive to, but didn’t find to be gratuitous).

So, in order, I’d say my favorites were:

1. Les Miserables
2. Amour
3. Argo
4. Django Unchained.

We got home at 11:30 on Saturday night. It turns out that watching that many films is really tiring – even if all you do is sit for that length of time. We fell into bed, exhausted.

Next week, I’m flying solo for the remaining five films. I can’t wait!

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I wore uniforms for a large part of my childhood. Plaid jumpers with white shirts and, later, plaid skirts with those same white button up shirts. At the beginning of each school year, my mom would determine if we needed new uniforms – were they too tattered or had we grown too much? We’d then truck to the only Catholic school uniform store I ever knew of – talk about a racket – serving the entire Central Kentucky parochial school system.

I loved wearing those uniforms, even if my classmates complained that they stifled our creativity and were signs of “the man” wanting us to “conform” to “society.” (Lots of our bad poetry used these buzzwords and, for some reason, we always put them in quotes; I’m sure we were insufferable.) I loved that I could wake up each morning and know what I was going to wear. I’ve never been a fashion plate, and it is evident in my post-parochial school wardrobe. I loved, too, that my classmates had the same outfits on. Of course, because kids can’t avoid finding differences, we knew which families were wealthier than others, but there was no pressure to have the brand of clothing. We were all in the same boat, even if some kids wore Eastland loafers and others just Wal-Mart tennis shoes.

I’m sure I wore jeans every single day of high school. Normally, I paired them with the most unflattering boxy t-shirts from the clean clothes drawer. They were probably emblazoned with school mottos and logos. We were spirited. I wore no makeup throughout high school until probably the second semester of my senior year. My friends and I just weren’t very girly-girly.

College was more of the same, except I was sure to replace the high school logo t-shirts with sorority t-shirts. I hid the late-night pizza weight gain behind sweatshirts. The only difference was that I wore makeup more often and had to perform the smell-test on the clothes I picked up off the floor to wear for the day. This was adulthood, right?

This makes me sound like a slob – and I am – but I’m an appropriate slob. I am rigid in my belief that a suit must be worn to all job interviews. In the corporate world, I quickly conformed to the standard dress codes – suits for client meetings, business casual for office work, no jeans on Fridays (until I moved into the manufacturing world, yay!). Even now, with those jean Fridays, tops are still business-appropriate – no T-shirts or sweatshirts for me – even if colleagues don’t follow that unwritten rule.

One of the things I’m most looking forward to when my job ends later this year, is not having to wake up each morning and make a reasonable, adult decision about what to wear. My plan to work from home is not unintentional. I want to work from home in my favorite UK flannel pajama pants and UK sweatshirt (it’s all Wildcats, all the time ’round here) with my hair piled in a messy ponytail and yesterday’s mascara flaking off beneath my eyes.  Of course, client meetings will feature appropriate clothing, although not suit-wearing occasions.

That’s my uniform – comfortable slobby. There’s no chic in my preferred wardrobe.

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I am not a very well-traveled person. I like to see new and exotic places, but I’m really not very keen on modern modes of transportation. I love a good road trip and would almost always prefer to drive to a destination. I suffer from motion sickness pretty badly. Dramamine and similar pharmaceutical solutions don’t often help me – I think the point of those is to simply make you sleep through the worst part of it. Sadly, every medicine that makes other, normal people drowsy makes me hyper.

Because of that motion sickness, I really do not enjoy air travel. It’s a necessary evil sometimes, though, and the convenience of travel time saved is hard to beat. I’m sure that the smallest plane I’ve ever been on is a commercial regional commuter type of jet. I have no idea what they are called, I just know that I hate the ones with two seats – an aisle – and two seats on the other side. I prefer the window seat just so I can distract myself, and it does help to be able to see the outside world. I will say that flights with my husband are leaps and bounds ahead of flights without him. He makes me feel better by distracting me some, not judging me on the large quantities of food I consume (for some reason, my nausea is kept at bay as long as I eat plenty of food), and he lets me rest my head on his shoulder with my eyes squeezed tight during the worst parts.

I don’t know if everyone who gets sick flying also gets sea sick, but jeez-o-pete, it’s WAY worse. I have to admit that I even got a little sick in my kayak, just riding through a class II rapid (read, easy stuff). I’m not willing to pay tons of money for a cruise for a number of reason, but chief among them is that I don’t want to take the risk of being pukey for a week. The biggest boat I’ve ever been on is probably the ferry from Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty. Even on that trip, I lobbied hard for my high school drama teacher to let me stay behind and watch the rest of the group from the solid ground of lower Manhattan. Little surprise that she wouldn’t let a 17-year old me do that, alone.

Now, train travel. THERE is a mode of transportation that I dig. Besides public transportation systems in Boston, DC, Portland and Brussels, I’ve only ever been on one train trip – an Amtrak trip from Cincinnati, OH to New York City. I expected to be miserable. Basically, if I can’t see out the front window in the direction I’m travelling, you can pretty much guarantee that I’m doomed. However, the windows on our train were expansive and the view through the mountains of West Virginia, the rolling hills of Virginia and then the cities and suburbs was captivating. I always recommend train travel like that because you get to see something SO different than driving on the interstates. You see a state’s beauty in the backwood bends of the tracks, much like driving the backroads (which is my very favorite – as long as I’m driving!).

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I liked this prompt! Of course, I can’t stick to just three years, so I threw in a frivolous, bonus fourth one.

1988 -

This was the year that the trajectory of my life changed dramatically. My dad, an electrician who traveled during my childhood to find jobs, worked on the construction of a major new automobile factory in central Kentucky. We lived in western Kentucky. 1987 was the year we moved to join him there when he was hired as a permanent employee at the new plant. It took a lot of guts for my parents to leave the town they’d always lived in, to leave their parents and family and friends behind. My mom had one brother whose family lived near our new house. Other than them, we didn’t know anyone. I went to three new schools over the next three years, which was hard, but I ended up in a place with a life that I can’t imagine being any different.

2002 –

A crazy year of highs, lows and personal transformations. It began, literally, with the death of a friend in the early hours of New Year’s Day. It was a death that could have been prevented and for which we all felt regret and some measure of “What if…” It shook us out of the invincible days of youth and into the harsh realities of adulthood.

This was the year that, finally, once and for all I was done with my high school boyfriend. Because I was the way I was, I moved right into the hopes of another relationship that never materialized but I also could never move past.

I graduated college on a sunny day in May; I started my first career job two weeks later and moved on from it to my biggest career-building experience before the year was out.

I moved into my own apartment – in my dream hometown location, without any roommates. I was really and truly an adult, even if I could only afford to have Ramen noodles for dinner and frequently fell back on the generosity of my parents. I was the one responsible for taking out the trash, for the noise complaint from the downstairs neighbors and for the almost-fight that broke out on my balcony.

2007 –

Right now, I cannot recall much of what happened during the first half of the year. However, the weekend of my birthday in late July started a whole cataclysm of events that would change my life. (A good cataclysm. Cataclysms can be good, right?)

That weekend, I attended not one, but two parties. Because of the Friday night party and the resulting wicked hangover on Saturday morning, I very nearly didn’t go to Saturday’s party. No one would have missed me. A friend from work invited me to the family lake house of another guy we worked with but who I didn’t really know beyond recognizing him in the hallways. On that day in July, I would have never, ever, ever guessed that the guy who threw that party would move in to my house just 3.5 months later or that we’d get engaged the following year or that we’d be married six years later.

Frivolous, bonus, 4th year: 1991 –

I turned 11 years old in 1991. I started really getting into music, and a lot of the albums released that year shaped the person I grew up to be. Both Nevermind by Nirvana and Ten by Pearl Jam were released along with Gish by the Smashing Pumpkins and Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The first Lollapalooza concert happened. For a girl from a small town in Kentucky, still in middle school, I learned about music from the radio, MTV and my friends. I didn’t get to go to clubs in big cities like Seattle or Chicago, but I fell in love with the increasingly “mainstream” alternative music.

Also key years? 1996, 1998 and 2012 (yes, it’s that important to me)

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