LaughAtlantis

Of love and men's fashion...

2010-06-04T03:11:46Z

My first love was Donny Osmond. It was brief and unrequited. He was tall and toothy, curly-haired, and apparently a little bit rock-and-roll.

I was four.

The one thing I remember vividly from that brief shining time before I moved on to Shaun Cassidy and Jon from CHiPs in quick succession (my tastes hadn't fully formed yet, apparently) was that I loved to watch men sing. This became abundantly clear a bit later when I would watch Sha Na Na and develop instant crushes on anyone singing lead. A tenor line in a fifties ballad, delivered soulfully by Johnny Contardo or Chico Ryan, would send me into paroxysms of delight. It didn't hurt, I suppose, that they performed bare-chested while in gold lamé stretch pants and jackets. I don't suppose I really understood the appeal of that when I was eight - I just thought, "Ooh! Shiny! And they're singing just for me!"

I grew up and studied musical theater myself. I learned that actors on a stage weren't singing for individual audience members - but were trying to draw them in and make each person feel like they were having an intimate experience. And that if performers can make you feel that when they are on television, they're really highly skilled. At one point I remember seeing a televised performance of my four-year-old Dream Date, Donny Osmond, doing selections from 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.'

In 'Joseph,' the audience isn't supposed to fall in love with Donny Osmond. They are supposed to be moved by Joseph's plight and impressed by his resolve and compelled by his reunion with his family. But I was watching Donny Osmond sing 'Any Dream Will Do' in that coat of many colors and all I could think was, "Ooh! Pretty! I wonder where I could get a coat like that!"

Which I guess goes to show you... Donny Osmond is just no Sha Na Na.

Hello, sushi!

2010-05-21T02:38:45Z

Monday was 'Introduce Joy to Something New' Day. On the table: sushi.

I have long been hesitant to try sushi because I am allergic to shellfish. A lot of sushi places simply list the Japanese words for the fish and not the English translations. Many more list the type of rolls but not the exact contents. For a novice sushi eater, this is overwhelming. For a novice with allergies, it becomes too much bother. How can I enjoy a meal fully if one hand is gripping the epi-pen in my purse "just in case?"

But this week is about doing new and different things. So when I told my husband I was willing to try sushi if he could find a place with a sushi-for-dummies-type menu, he leaped at the opportunity. Sushi is among his favorite foods and I think he's been waiting for this day in his heart for seven long years.

So off we went to The Naked Fish. I examined the menu carefully and at length. Rod and the waitress were patient with me. And soon, there was a huge array of nigiri and maki sushi rolls before me. Salmon, yellowtail, eel and avocado, smoked salmon with cream cheese (shouldn't that be on a bagel, I wondered?), spicy tuna with cucumber, avocado, and macadamia nuts... all allergy-safe and stunningly gorgeous.

Rod showed me how Americans mix wasabi into the soy sauce. I dutifully followed suit. (Apparently Japanese dab wasabi directly onto the sushi, but I am not ready for that.) And then I dived into the nigiri. I was sloppy about it and felt like an idiot, and ultimately didn't care. This was good food. The maki roll with the macadamia nuts was a flavor revelation. Sushi is everything I love - great fish and rice and vegetables and flavor profiles - it just happens to be raw. I sat back, kicking myself that I hadn't tried this years ago.

And once again (as with so many things lately), my husband was grinning from across the table. This time, it wasn't a smug 'gotcha' grin, but a 'finally, we can enjoy this together!' genuine smile. Sushi, here we come.

My life with epilepsy

2010-03-27T02:43:28Z

Yesterday was International Epilepsy Awareness Day. As an epileptic, I'm often asked, "What's it like to have a seizure?" I honestly can't answer that question. I can tell you how confusing it is to come out of one and about the time gaps I experience before having a seizure. I can explain how a seizure is the equivalent of my body running a marathon without my brain being present, and how I'm physically exhausted for solidly twenty-four hours afterward. But I think a more interesting question than, "What's it like to have a seizure?" is perhaps, "How has epilepsy affected your life?" Because the answer is: in some ways hugely... and in others not at all.

Every epileptic's story is different, but mine is a little more unusual than most. It's fairly common for epileptics with severe seizure activity to have brain surgery. It's pretty rare for people to need lung surgery as a result of a seizure. The number I was quoted was one in a million - though I'm guessing that's an estimate.

I was first diagnosed with epilepsy when I was 13, but I've had it all my life. I have what is known as juveline myoclonic epilepsy, or JME. It's a type of epilepsy that becomes more evident in adolescence as symptoms become more prominent. In my case, I went from being an absurdly daydreamy child to an awkward and clumsy adolescnet. You might think lots of kids are like that, but in my case, the daydreaminess was me having absence seizures, and the clumsiness was me having myoclonic seizures. Someone finally realized I wasn't just daydreaming when I was cast as the lead in a school play. I was taken out of the role during rehearsals when I would stop short in the middle of lines, pause briefly, and then claim to have lost my place. In fact, I'd was having absence seizures.

JME isn't just the daydreaming seizures or the myoclonic jerks. For me, it's also grand mal seizures. I had my first grand mal seizure in ninth grade, on Halloween Day. I can remember the moments before quite vividly and nothing for hours after. Sometimes that's how seizures are. They are breaks in your personal space-time continuum.

The lung surgery came my senior year in college. I had a seizure in late January and aspirated - brought saliva into my lungs. When you're conscious, you cough in order to prevent yourself from doing this, because saliva - while it's fine in your mouth and fine in your stomach is actually really terrible in your lungs. And in my case it ate a hole in my right lung, causing me to have part of my lung removed. I spent about six weeks in the hospital, didn't graduate from college at that time, and my life got derailed.

That's the thing about a seizure. It can come at any time and derail your day, and its effects can derail your life. So it's always been up to me to handle my disease as best I can. When I was first diagnosed, my theatre teacher told me that epileptics didn't belong in the theatre except in the audience. And I had to live with that in high school, because she was the only person who taught theatre or music at my high school. But being on stage has been a passion for me for as long as I can remember, and as soon as I got to college, I started doing as much theatre of as many different sorts as I could. Eventually I found my niche in improv. With some epilepsy meds, I've had difficulty "finding" words. That makes it tough to do scripted theatre at times. But with improv, you're making it up as you go along, and if you lose a word, you have a scene partner to support you and find the next word for you. They're making it up too, and it's their job to make the scene work and help you look good. It's all about supporting each other. So it's perfect.

There have been times in my life when my epilepsy has been very bad - my college years in particular - but the reality is that I've been lucky. Through combination drug therapy, I've gotten down to about one grand mal seizure a year. And my other seizures are generally not noticed by anyone but me unless they come in clusters. The worst part of the epilepsy has, in some ways, been side effects from medications. When I first went on meds for grand mal seizures at age 14, I gained 60 pounds. I didn't lose that weight until last year - at age 36.

The other difficulty has been how people treat me and is, in many ways, what a day like Epilepsy Awareness Day is striving to correct. Revealing that I have epilepsy can be a difficult thing to do, because I don't know how people will react. The best thing I can hope for is that people will be supportive and calm. Oddly, the most common reaction I get is, "Oh, my dog has epilepsy!" and even after hearing it so many times, I'm not sure how to respond. Lots of dogs twitch, especially while they sleep - and that's a great way to reference what a myoclonic jerk looks like - but I would still rather have people ask me questions about what to do if I should have a seizure or how they could be supportive. The theme of epilepsy awareness is "talk about it" and that's always been my credo as well - that I was better off if people had more knowledge than less, and so I'm happy to share.

Talking about it really does help. Three million Americans have epilepsy, but I didn't know anybody else when I was diagnosed. I had nobody to relate to about my illness. To this day, I've never met anyone with JME, despite the fact that it's one of the most common forms of epilepsy. There used to be more of a stigma about epilepsy; it simply wasn't talked about. So the whole idea behind epilepsy awareness - as a movement, as a day - is to make people feel more free about talking about it. To get rid of that stigma. Because it makes things much easier.

Stuff you should check out!

2010-03-09T07:48:52Z

So, I haven't blogged again here, even though I said I would. BAD JOY! BAD!

Well, sort of. I have been busy! I've been over at http://www.tellywonk.com, where you can read my weekly recaps of The Amazing Race. Which has cowboys, multiple Rhode Islanders, and incredibly stupid people on it this season. Stop by and read my sarcasm!

Or, if you are in the Bay Area, come check out my improv! I'm performing with Stone Soup Improv, a troupe in Oakland. I'm directing the next show on April 3 and want to pack the audience with friends! So buy tickets soon, as the shows tend to sell out. Check out http://www.stonesoupimprov.com for details!

Okay, more blogging soon, I promise. Sleep now. :)

I'm back, baby!

2010-02-25T03:12:22Z

So.

It's been a while, eh?

I suppose I could catch you up on the past two years of my life, but let's just say, in a nutshell: I live in California, I lost sixty pounds, and I'm a redhead now. Other than that, life remains pretty much the same... still married, still have a basset hound, still doing improv.

So.

Why come back to the blog after all this time? I've been thinking about blogging for a while, mostly because of Twitter. Frankly, sometimes 140 characters just isn't enough to get out all that's in my head space. Sometimes a girl has more than that to say. I'm a fairly vent-y person, don'tcha know? And recently I starting writing some stuff for tellywonk.com and just started itching to blog again, so here I am. I considered starting over from scratch, but there's a lot here at laughatlantis.com that I want to keep, so I'm just picking up where I left off.

There will be a re-design shortly. And hopefully I'll be updating frequently enough to warrant this fanfare - if you can call one post proclaiming "I'm back!" fanfare.

And with that... cue the fireworks and the dancing bear.

"The night was soupy."

2008-08-17T16:58:41Z

So, I moved to San Francisco about a month ago and have been volunteering for the San Francisco Improv Festival, which has been going on every weekend since. I wind up getting home after shows around 10:45 or thereabouts and I am constantly struck by how soupy this town is. There's inevitably a fog or mist lying over the BART station that follows me the three blocks to my home.

Every time I am in this kind of weather, it reminds me of the opening sequence of the movie 'Throw Momma From The Train,' where Billy Crystal's character is attempting to write a book and is stuck on the sentence, "The night was..." There's "The night was dry, but it was raining," and "The night was moist." Then his writing student, Danny DeVito, starts a story with "The night was humid." Billy Crystal freaks out and dismisses class, claiming a giant headache in his eye.

In San Francisco, the nights are... all of the above. Soupy, humid, moist, dry but raining... it's all the same.

But so far, I like this town!

The Escape Artist

2007-08-06T23:30:16Z

While Rod and I were in California, we got a call on our answering machine from someone saying that they had found our dog, Bacon. In that our dogs were staying with my mother, I was concerned and... well, pissed. My mom has a fenced-in yard and my dog is not Houdini. I didn't think there was a chance in hell that Bacon could have gotten out on his own. My mom made excuses about gaps in the door and the fact that the bungee cords that were supposed to hold it shut were not in place properly, but I sort of figured it was all bullshit. The last time we were at her house I sat outside the fence waving a chicken drumstick and calling Bacon's name but he couldn't get more than his nose through that gap in the door.

So imagine my surprise today when Bacon escaped our backyard. I came home, let the dogs out, and went upstairs to change my clothes. I was upstairs for perhaps ten minutes. Gah, that sounds like something a parent says when their child gets kidnapped: "I just turned my head for a minute!" but seriously, I was not gone that long. I came downstairs to let the dogs back in and Clyde (a.k.a. Canine 2.0) was whining and doing a little dance on the back porch. He came in and went racing around in a decidedly un-Clyde-like way. (He's an 11-year-old dog; he's not much of a racer-arounder.) I called for Bacon to no avail. I left the door open and waited for him to come in. No sign of him.

Finally, after a lot of calling for him, I went outside and discovered that there was a door open in our backyard - which is decidedly odd. See, our backyard has chainlink fences on all sides, and then an additional fence on the other side of each fence. But on one side, there is a weird double-fenced gate that goes into someone else's driveway... and apparently, someone decided to peer into our backyard and not shut the door.

Which meant, in essence, bye-bye Bacon.

I didn't think he'd go far. But he was no longer on the same street where he'd left yard. He was nowhere to be seen. I yelled; I clapped; I ran around... no puppy. Finally I located him (after someone else leashed him) around the corner and seven houses up from where he started. He didn't seem overwhelmingly thrilled to have to go back home.

I must say, wandering the streets asking people if they have seen a basset hound makes you feel like an idiot.

Wheeeeeee!

2007-08-04T01:27:34Z

I'm typing this post on my brand-spankin' new MacBook. I'm all laptopped up, yo.

De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da

2007-07-30T03:31:24Z

I really wanted to go to the Police concert at Fenway Park, but there was no way I was going to spend $95 on a ticket - not to mention, how much fun is a concert when you go alone, anyway? Rod knew how much I wanted to go though, so when the Weekly Dig sent out an email offering up a free pair of tickets, he fired back immediately with an email stating, "Did I win? My wife would love me forever." The Dig was happy to give him the tickets, on the condition that I provide email testimonial that I would indeed love him forever. Here is my reply...

_______
My husband would like me to attest to the fact that Police tickets would make me love him forever. The truth is this:

Rod and I have been married for three and a half years. He has not done a single load of laundry in that time. Despite the fact that we have an old, slightly infirm basset hound, Rod has only managed to pick up dog poop off our back porch twice. His hairline has receded, his waistline has expanded, he has stopped wearing his contacts, and his beard is more scruff than anything else. On top of that, I can't drive, I'm asthmatic, and I only have one lung, yet as you can see by his email below, Rod would rather have me walk to your offices than be inconvenienced on his comfy drive to work, the rat bastard.

But if he could get us free tickets to see The Police... wow. That would not just make me love him forever, it would actually make me forgive him for a lot of that stuff I just revealed. (Except the dog poop. There's just no forgiving that.)

So please, consider our request for Police tickets. You could indeed cause eternal bliss... and make make me blind to baldness. Quite impressive, really.
_______

The Dig apparently really liked my response because they now want to use it in their marketing stuff, as a "we'll give stuff away free but you may have to jump through hoops to get it" fun ploy.

I like being funny.

Summer Reading

2007-07-24T22:04:54Z

On my not-particularly-crowded bus home today, no fewer than four people were reading 'Harry Potter and the Deathly What-Whats.' Wow.

I realized something recently. For whatever reason, I don't do the 'light summer reading' thing. For the past three years I have set a goal for myself of how many books I want to read in a given year, and inevitably I'm going along just fine until about mid-May, when it all goes out the window. I can read light fluffy crap all winter and then late spring hits, the books get thicker, the content gets heavier, the prose gets denser, and the time it takes to complete a tome triples.

Examples:
In the past two months or so I have read (among other things) 'Middlesex' (Jeffrey Eugenides), 'Devil in the White City' (Erik Larsen), 'Nineteen Minutes' (Jodi Picoult), 'The Historian' (Elizabeth Kostova), 'Everything Is Illuminated' (Jonathan Safran Foer), and 'Lake of Dead Languages' (Carol Goodman). These are big and heavy and I read most of them in hardcover, dragging them with me to and from on the bus each day.

Comparatively, in February I read (among others) 'California Demon' (Julie Kenner), 'With Red Hands' (Stephen Woodworth), 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' (Brendan Halpin), 'Picking Up' (Kate Fenton), and shame of shames, 'His Wicked Ways (Samantha James). Two day reads, tops, all of them. And one of them is a freakin' romance novel. Kill me now. ( I read it based on a friend's recommendation. I will no longer be taking her advice on literary matters.)

So now I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. I want to read the new Harry Potter, all 784 pages of it. But I read the last two right when they came out, so that's a while back, and I have read easily two hundred books in between now and HP5. So I am faced with re-reading two HP 5 & 6, two giganto-books, before I move on to Deathly Hallows - by which point everyone in the world will probably have spilled some vital spoiler to me.

Sigh. Damn my parents for making me love reading so much.

Me-me-me-me-me-meme

2007-02-08T20:37:37Z

My friend Kirsten posted this meme in her journal and I liked it an awful lot - and I am sick in bed at home - so I am stealing it to pass the time and share with the world.

10 FAVORITES
Favorite Color: Purple? It varies
Favorite Food: Cheese
Favorite Month: October
Favorite Song at the moment: 'The Internet is for Porn' from Avenue Q
Favorite Movie: The Princess Bride
Favorite Sport: Baseball
Favorite Season: Autumn
Favorite Day of the week: Saturday
Favorite Ice Cream Flavor: Chocolate Chip
Favorite Time of Day: The moment I arrive home from work each day to find 2 excited basset hounds greeting me as if I was the best thing in the world

9 CURRENTS
Current Mood: Achy, if that's a mood
Current Taste: Phlegm. Nasty, I know.
Current Clothes: Grey pajama top, plaid bottoms, striped undies
Current Desktop: Fenway Park
Current Toenail Color: Natural
Current Time: 4:13pm
Current Surroundings: Bedroom
Current Thoughts: I wish my nose wasn't so stuffed up.

8 FIRSTS
First Best Friend: Nicia Travers
First Kiss: Dave Brown
First Screen Name: TiptonBlue
First Pet: Freckles, a Springer spaniel/beagle mix that my parents claimed "ran away" after it became evident that he was much too rambunctious a dog for our family
First Piercing: Ears
First Crush: According to my father, it was Donny Osmond
First CD: No idea. I got a subscription to Columbia House during my freshman year in college but I don't think I'd actually owned a CD before then.

7 LASTS
Last Cigarette: 1990? I think I only ever smoked two.
Last Drink: Multiple White Russians at my friend Katie's birthday party two weeks ago
Last Car Ride: Yesterday afternoon
Last Kiss: Yesterday, I think, though I got got good hugs today.
Last Movie Seen: On TV - Secret Window. In the theater - The Departed
Last Phone Call: My boss
Last CD Played: Soundtrack to 'Into the Woods'

6 HAVE YOU EVERS
Have You Ever Dated One Of Your Best Guy Friends: Sort of?
Have You Ever Broken the Law: Yes
Have You Ever Been Arrested: No
Have You Ever Skinny Dipped: No
Have You Ever Been on TV: Yes
Have You Ever Kissed Someone You Didn’t Know: In college, probably.

5 THINGS
Thing You’re Wearing: Grey tank top, plaid pajama bottoms, stripey undies. Didn't I say that before?
Thing You’ve Done Today: Read a monumentally cheesy romance novel
Thing You Can Hear Right Now: Random construction noises from the house next door
Thing You Can’t Live Without: Laughter
Thing You Do When You’re Bored: Read

4 PLACES YOU’VE BEEN TODAY
1. My bedroom
2. My bathroom
3. My kitchen
4. um... my stairs? I'm home sick Today is not a representative sample.

3 PEOPLE YOU CAN TELL ANYTHING TO
1. Rod
2. Jen
3. Cheryl
(That's a really hard one, actually.)

2 CHOICES
1. Black or White: Black
2. Hot or Cold: Cold

1 THING YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE: Ride in a hot air balloon

Blogathon Recap

2006-07-30T20:32:58Z

You can read all 48 of Joy's Blogathon entries on her Blogathon archive page. Right now, however, she is sleeping.

All good things...

2006-07-30T12:55:25Z

And so I bid adieu to my 24 hour blog-fest. I am exhausted and I don't anticipate having a coherent thought anytime today at all, but I had a great time and I raised just over $300 for Reach Out and Read, counting my non-verified dollars. I can't wait for next year!

No, wait, I can't wait to go to bed. Then we'll talk about next year.

Book Love: The Big List

2006-07-30T12:46:25Z

At one point much earlier, I said that while I had a top ten list of books, I could probably stretch that out into fifty. Done. In no particular order (except for perhaps the top five, which are genuinely top five material), here they are. I have pretty eclectic tastes, so not everything is going to appeal. Feel free to email me (joy@laughatlantis.com) and ask me why anything is on the list, why things aren't on the list, and why I didn't put explanations on this list. (The answer to that, by the way, should be pretty frickin' obvious.) I've been working on this list off and on for eight hours.

The Stand - Stephen King
Beach Music - Pat Conroy
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
Archangel - Sharon Shinn
The World According to Garp - John Irving
For Better, For Worse - Carole Matthews
The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
Danny, The Champion of the World - Roald Dahl

Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes
The Eyes of the Dragon - Stephen King
Genesis Code - John Case
The Westing Game - Ellen Raskin
Marley & Me - John Grogan
To Say Nothing of the Dog - Connie Willis
Midwives - Chris Bohjalian
Pope Joan - Donna Cross
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Alienist - Caleb Carr

Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
True Love (and Other Lies) - Whitney Gaskell
Moo - Jane Smiley
My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
The Lords of Discipline - Pat Conroy
Light a Penny Candle - Maeve Binchy
Misery - Stephen King
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Eight - Katherine Neville

Plain Truth - Jodi Picoult
The Burg-O-Rama Man - Stephen Tchudi
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
A Time to Kill - John Grisham
Light on Snow - Anita Shreve
Hominids - Robert J. Sawyer
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore
Lucky - Anna Sebold
The Source - James Michener
Zulu Heart - Steve Burns

Girl With a Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier
Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
Broken for You - Stephanie Kallos
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Heart of Gold - Sharon Shinn
The Once and Future King - TH White
The Anatomy of Motive - John Douglas & Mark Olshaker
The Inn at Lake Devine - Elinor Lipman

Ta-da.

Pornospactology

2006-07-30T12:33:06Z

I know what you're thinking. "Joy, that's not even a word! The 24 hours of writing has turned your mind to jelly! What the hell is pornospactology supposed to be?" Well, there are answers there. No, it's not a real word. Yes, my brain is officially jelly.

But the question of what pornospactology is - that's an interesting one. For the past six years or so, I have been doing improv comedy. I've worked with a handful of troupes and found myself in front of a huge number of different audiences. And inevitably, when asked for an input, someone in any given audience will call for porn, a proctologist, or a spatula.

Now, I understand the porn and the proctology suggestions. That's the audience member attempting to be funny. (For what it's worth, they should realize that they have just paid us to be funny. They themselves are not required to attempt it themselves.)

But a spatula... what is so funny about a spatula? Why, when an improviser asks for a suggestion of a household object or something smaller than a breadbox or just a random word that starts with an S - why does the mind go right to a spatula?

And so we have the concept of pornospactology. Obviously il's not a real science; it's just a brilliant amalgamation of three supposedly amusing inputs. If it were actually science, I guess it would be the study of why people think things are funny. And I bet that no amount of study would come up with an answer for that question because really... spatulas?