Doggy Dayze

For some strange reason, my mom loves bulldogs.  She manages to get her hands on a new one every time she smothers one to death.  I suppose it makes sense because bulldogs have a face only a mother could love.  They were beaten with the cat o'nine tail centuries ago and the "flogged in the face" look remained a trait in their genes.  Also due to generations of inbreeding, they are inherently the down syndrome breed of dogs.  There are several other reasons why these dogs are abominable.  They snort instead of snore in their sleep, have sleep apnea, throw up when they get excited, blow bubbles out of all orifices, and the list goes on and on.  Secretly, I think my mom chose a bulldog as her buddy because it was the only thing so ugly it couldn't compete with her for men.

But my mom tried to boost the ugly dog's confidence.  Much like a girl tries to boost the confidence of her big fat best friend (aka 'BFBF') and tell her, "It's the beauty on the inside that counts."  My mom even named her "Beauty." 

She dressed her up in all kinds of fashions and costumes.  Wigs, formal gowns, Green Bay Packers cheerleading outfits, you name it!  My mom would go to the thrift stores and buy toddler and children's clothing and alter it to fit her pooch.  She also joined a bulldog club, where her friends and her would have a sanctioned event to bring their costumed dogs to.  The parties always had themes.  Of course Halloween was always an extravaganza.  One year my mom dressed up as Cinderella, and her dog went as her fairy godmother, coned dunce hat with ribbon streamers and all.  Another year her dog was too sick to attend, but my mother dressed her up and drug her along anyway. It was like us kids being dressed us up like dolls and drug to church in sickness and in health, rain or shine, even if on our death bed, all over again.

Other common celebrations are gala birthday parties for their dog's sweet sixteen. For this, the dog owners, or parents, as they preferred to be called, even post their dog's professional glamor shots, larger than life sized, all over the walls.  There's cake, pin the tail on the donkey, awards, carnivals; it's like the circus has come to town.  It's all about keeping up with the Jones's where one parent is constantly trying to outdo the last.

One day I was on the phone with my mom, and I couldn't help but pull my ear away from the speaker as she was scolding her dog.  My mom said to me, "She's throwing a fit.  She wants to wear the dress I just bought her, but I told her she had to wait because I need to alter it.  I told her it's a child's dress, but she wants to wear it now."

At that point, I could no longer bite my tongue at my mother's ludicrousness and flapdoodle and I uttered out, "Mom, you can put lipstick on a pig and call it whatever you want.  But it's still a pig....and it has lipstick on it."  Then I regretted those very words because she followed it up by exclaiming, "Oh, how clever!  I never thought about putting lipstick on Beauty!"

A couple months later, my mom couldn't find a babysitter for Beauty, so she schlepped the dog along for a ride across the state.  When my mom arrived to her destination, she informed the dog, and notified it to get out, stretch her stumps and use the potty.  The dog wouldn't listen, so my mother began scolding it.  My mom became vexed at the dog's disobedience.  Then she noticed a bubble coming out of Beauty's nose, and it seemed as if the dog was passing gas.
    "This is not the time to be farting around, Beauty." My mom asserted.

Then my mother realized the dog was not responding.  She was out cold, not breathing.  My mom attempted CPR, but couldn't remember what the ABC's and the CPR's stood for.  She also didn't have a one-way valve/non-rebreather. She rushed Beauty to the vet, where she was pronounced dead of a broken heart, or something like that.  At least that's what my mother told me.

Beauty had a nice burial and ceremony.  Unfortunately, most of her doggy friends could not attend across the state on such short notice.  But when my mom got home, they threw a formal event in Beauty's honor.  However, my mother insisted that no one wear black, because that's not what Beauty would've wanted. 

This tragic event brought transcendence to my mom.  She realized she could not bare the pain of losing another dog again.  So she put her "doggy dayze" to rest.  And may they R.I.P.

On Obsessions and Addictions...

My mother has a variety of hair-brained obsessions and addictions, some of which I have previously exploited.  Most recently is her obsession with Facebook.

My mother owns a computer, which she uses to card catalog all the children's books she collects and her many copies of Tom Cruise's "Cocktail." (She has a check out sheet just in case you might want to borrow it from her library.)  She saves this precious data on floppy disk.  Due to the existence of the floppy drive, you may have guessed that this prehistoric apparatus does not have internet capabilities.  So she goes to the public library for her Facebooking needs.

She has been thrilled to reconnect with old childhood friends from grammar school and finds ecstasy in commenting on everything anyone and everyone says.  The addiction has had a dominant influence on her life, giving her a high like no other narcotic, opiate, sedative, pill or potion could.  Ironically, it also helped boost her self-esteem a little, giving her something 'important' to do that helped her realize her purpose in life.

Although I accepted her friend request, of course I blocked her from seeing my posts, like most good "kids" do.  For heaven's sake, I'm not an enabler.

Through Facebook she received an invitation to attend a few school reunions.  One, a 20 year high school reunion, and the other a grammar school reunion. 

My mom has never been one to wear much make-up and has never been savvy about hairstyles, thus the wig fetish.  But this time she was going to venture out into a whole other realm and get downright experimental for her reunions.  By now her hair had grown back--and then some--and she vowed never to cut it again.  She prided herself in her new found identity as Rapunzel. 

On this particular day in which she was "experimenting" with "hairstyles" she had put all of her waist-length hair up in approximately 65 curlers.  She decided to try on some make-up while she was waiting for her hair to set.  In her pink and green Caboodles box she had a rainbow of colors.  Green, blue, purple and magenta eye shadows, hot pink lipstick and several different shades of blush.  So she began artfully painting her canvas of a face as beautifully as a Monet painting.  Brown eye pencil, blue eye shadow, and hot pink lipstick.  And a true Monet it was.  I mean, she could have been Tammy Faye Baker's sister.

("When she is done with her masterpiece, she looketh at her reflection into the heavens and calls her creation good.")

My mother called me on the phone shortly after her prodigious rebirth and told me she was amazed at her make-up, but still waiting for her hair to set.  She explained to me the story of being invited to her school reunion and trying different hairstyles. But now that she had her hair in curlers, she was bored and going through withdrawls. She couldn't wait to update her status on Facebook to let everyone know she was working on a physical metamorphosis for the get together.

She began to ramble on the phone to me and said, "I know I have curlers in my hair, but I really have to get to the library to check my Facebook.  You see, I've been saving this wig for a special occasion, and I think with this new look, I have just the guts to wear this wig out in public.  I could put it on over my curlers and go to the library, and no one would ever notice."

I suggested to my mother that she just wait until her hair was done, but she was adamant and defiant, so I suggested she put a plastic shopping bag over her head (and breath deeply).  At least it would keep her hair dry in the drizzling rain.  Yet again, she was too stubborn to take heed. 

It's bad enough going out in curlers, but trying to conceal this faux pas was like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So she covered all 65 curlers under her wig.  I can only imagine the gawking and snickering now.  "Hey Johnny! Get a load of this!!!" Nothing short of a freak show, people must have been baffled at how a person with hydrocephalus had survived this long.  I'm telling you, people would have paid good money to see this.  I should have set up a booth, keeping my mother hidden behind a curtain and charging $1 per person to see the woman with the world's largest head!

She was the epitome of a caricature drawn by Monet, "And it only cost twenty francs!!!!"

Eventually my mom figured out how she was going to style her hair, now she just needed to make arrangements to get to her reunion across the country.

Strong Aftershave

Now that my mother was bald she was experiencing liberation like never before.  I think of it like getting your driver's license and a new car on your 16th birthday, but my mother had managed to wreck every car she wrapped her hands around the steering wheel of, so she began biking everywhere.


It was a healthy addiction and I have to say she was in the best shape of her life.  She'd bike to the grocery store, church and to work and insisted on wearing dresses and high heels on these excursions.  The only thing that could have made her voyages more transcendent was if she still had her hair.  She grew heartsick over her lack of hair blowing in the wind, not to mention the noticeably crisp air gave her head quite a chill.  So my mother invested in an assortment of hats and wigs, most of which she found while rummaging through bins at second hand stores. Since she had head lice as a child and no longer had hair, she believed she was immune to it and was not intimidated by those pesky fleas.  (She is also not intimidated by athlete's foot apparently--again, another story for another time.)


She had a hat or wig in nearly every color and for nearly every occasion.  She literally became obsessed with hats and wigs.  She has a lot of weird obsessions, one of which being the Green Bay Packers, which I don't understand since she is not from Wisconsin, and has hardly ever been there and doesn't know a thing about football.  Yet, she had to buy herself a cheese head hat as well, but at least it was freshly sealed in it's original packaging.  She actually wanted to make her own cheese head out of old expired cheese she had laying around.  She said she could just scrape the mold off.  I had to explain to her that the hats were not "real" cheese and the poor woman burst into tears.


I had two favorite wigs though.  The Milli Vanilli with coordinating fake nose ring and the beaded Cleo. She called them something else though, as she named every single one of her wigs.  Most of them were named after books of the Bible.  She would try on all of her hats and wigs and take thousands of pictures of herself with these different looks. She wanted to figure out which ones she thought were most flattering and to experiment with different outfits to go with each. 
Her closet was overflowing with eccentricity.  She paired her beaded Cleo with a leopard spandex unitard (a leotard with full leggings--I'm not kidding here folks).  I cried myself to sleep that night, but snuck into her bedroom while she was sleeping, stole the cat suit and burned it.  She honestly should have been arrested for owning such an outfit.


As her hair started growing back, she donated most of her wigs to cancer patients (whom I'm assuming raised money by burning these wigs).  My mom vowed never to cut her hair again, but still couldn't kick the obsession with wigs from second hand stores.