Easter – Clownmommy

The First Step on the Road to Vegetarianism

The waitress had just set down my food, the vegetarian combination, and my husband’s Doro Wat when she looked at my daughter and told her, “I’ll be right back with your lamb.” My child’s eyes grew large and filled with tears.
“I told you I don’t eat anything cute!”

It’s true. My daughter does not consume the flesh of any creature that might appear as a plush friend in an Easter basket.

My husband had been so happy to find something on the menu mild enough for our daughter, so that we could come as a family to this neighborhood Ethiopian restaurant where she does not like the way the vegetables are prepared.

The first time my daughter tasted the meat off her father’s plate, he didn’t tell her what it was. I wasn’t paying attention, I assumed it was beef. The Husband told me later that it was lamb and he hadn’t told her because he wanted to be able to go back to that restaurant as a family. I suppose I should have told him, that this would be perceived as betrayal. But, I thought he knew. How many episodes of The Simpson’s have my husband and daughter watched together.

How often does Lisa’s vegetarianism come up? Why didn’t my husband see this coming?

My own road to becoming a vegetarian began in elementary school the first time I refused to eat anything I had seen dead.
It was not long after we had moved to Montana and my father shot Bambi and hung the corpse in the garage to cure before he and my mother butchered the meat like some kind of pioneers, or Sweeney Todd, or Hannibal Lecter.

Some kid argued with me, “You eat cows don’t you?”

“Not anymore!” was my answer as a 7th grader and I still haven’t.

When the waitress returned with the lamb stew, she took one look at my daughter, turned right around, and returned the Ye Beg Alicha back to the kitchen. When we got our check it had been crossed off the bill.

I don’t know how this incident will to shake out for us as far as the timing of my daughter becoming a vegetarian. But, I’m pretty sure we won’t be going back to that particular restaurant any time soon.

This is an original NYC Moms Blog post.

Funundrum, Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey

For our Easter celebration we went to see the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus this evening. It was the 7:30 pm and the last show in Madison Square garden, a full house with lots of little girls in pretty spring dresses. The rigging was hauled away to be packed onto the truck at the end of each act.

Funundrum–what a strange title.

I could tell by the poster that the publicity machine had gone into action before the show had a headline act.

And, the show didn’t have a headline act.

co·nun·drum n.

1. A riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun.

2. A paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma

The acts were good.

Johnathan Lee Iverson is my favorite Ringling ringmaster.

And yet,

The show was oddly boring.

The music and the pace, driving driving driving relentlessly towards the finish.

But,

it was all the same rushed tempo,

Every single act.

The entire show as though to the same song.

The waitress at our local diner agreed with me.

Something was off.

There were only 10 clowns. (Only one girl.)

Tigers and elephants and farm animals.

All my favorite acts were there, tightrope, trapeze, teter-board.

But,

The show didn’t quite work

A Connundrum

Zing Zang Zoom

We went to see Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden, last week, on Good Friday, when we Catholics are supposed to be thinking sad and sombre thoughts.

Oh well.

I hate Madison Square Garden! It’s an ugly inefficient maze of a construction made all the more tragic because the old Pennsylvania Train Station was torn down to build it. I never saw it, but I’ve seen pictures and read descriptions of it being even more grand and beautiful than Grand Central Station.

Anyway, Zing Zang Zoom was better than we expected from the poster which said to me (as an experienced circus goer): “Yikes, we left Winter Quarters without a headline act.”

I had pithy thoughts of circuses and life–but they are gone, victims of the Easter/lice chaos.

I watched energetic young clown Joy Powers and missed my physical youth as I willingly paid way too much for cotton candy, a plush elephant named “Asia” and a plastic pony shaped beer stein filled with ice and sugar syrup for my own little force of nature.

Ash Wednesday

People can’t usually tell my religion by looking at me. I don’t wear a hijab, the Muslim head scarf or a wig like certain Jewish women. But, I identify with these women and feel self-conscious discomfort on the one day a year I wear a big sign on my forehead that says “I’m Catholic.”

I was startled to see a woman on the subway with a big black mark in the center of her forehead. I thought Ash Wednesday was next week. Just yesterday I was thinking to myself: “I think I’ll give up alcohol for Lent since I registered for that Pilates class.” But, I thought it started next week, and bam– Ash Wednesday is today!

In Midtown there were lots of people with ashes on their foreheads. I was in Rockefeller Center. St. Patricks Cathedral is across the street.

I overheard a young woman calling someone on her cell phone, “I’m just calling you to remind you to get your ashes.”

And that is how it is done–in a New York minute.

Usually a church service is produced around the event of the distribution of the ashes (ashes to ashes and dust to dust–just in case you forgot) though not necessarily a mass.

Overhearing a comment on the efficiency of the operation I took note of the time I got into the line that stretched down the block from the entrance to the cathedral. 1:33pm. At 1:43 I entered the church and by 1:46 I was done.

There were ushers passing out programs and guiding us into line. There were 3 priests in my aisle. They looked young though, maybe seminarians or grown men in alter boy costumes. (You wouldn’t think this was the religion I grew up with, I keep running into these situations that are so foreign to me.) They were taking shifts and rotating from the different stations, there was a container of wipes so they could clean the ashes off their fingers when they were relived. They seemed to rotate around the cathedral like lifeguards changing chairs at the city pool.

I tried to take in the silence, or the canned music or the gregorian chant or whatever it was that filled the space. Then my cell phone rang. Before I left the building I stepped into the tiny gift shop and bought some books on Easter and Lent for My Kid.

I was thrilled to find contained therein the same recipe for bunny salad made of pear halves on a lettuce leaf, decorated with almond halves, raisins, red hots and cottage cheese that I had proudly prepared for my family at Easter when I was in 3rd grade.

And so the calendar of the church marks the passing of the years and the changing of the seasons.

A neighbor is on NPR

In the bedroom cleaning and listening to NPR on the radio, going through old papers and magazines and filling clear plastic bags with recycling. Doctors Without Borders is mentioned and I realize I recognize the voice, the husband of a mommy-I-know from the playground, playgroup and school, the father of one of my kid’s friends. We live in New York.

This morning I took the Kid to church, we ended up not sitting through Mass but instead going upstairs to the classroom where my Kid’s First Eucharist teacher and a teenage assistant were helping kids to create hats for the Philip Neri Picnic. Apparently he was quite a joker, as one of the priests said, explaining how he created a picture of the saint winking. The kids put cutouts of Phillip Neri on cut paper plates and added ribbons and marker drawings and words. What they made looked like a cross between a Bishops hat and Minnie Pearl’s Easter bonnet. Whatever. There was a funny hat competition at the picnic.

At the picnic my kid and her friend ordered “off the menu” getting hot dogs without buns. They rode the pony twice and had their faces painted. My kid was a bunny. Her friend asked for a venus fly-trap. “That lady didn’t even know what a venus flytrap was!” This kid’s face was painted with something that looked to me like a purple poinsettia.

Walking home from St. Boniface we passed the afore mentioned “famous” father with his wife and kids. They were on the way to the train and asked if we’d been to a different neighborhood family’s birthday party, because of the painted face and ribbon covered craft in my hand (the Philip Neri hat). They were on their way to New Jersey to see friends. We have our own friends in New Jersey to see this week if it works out– a former co-worker of my Husband. They’re not in the area long, just a stop along the pilgrimage from India to Disneyworld

I was disappointed that my kid did not want to go see the STREB SLAM show in Williamsburg. That was the afternoon plan I had in mind. I miss going to STREB once a week for her to take her classes with the fabulous Fabio. When My Kid got on the FirstLEGO robotics team STREB went out the window. Also My Kid didn’t like the commute. But STREB was an important part of our lives from her first class when she was 3-years-old. There was a fantasy–what kind of cool modern dancers would these kids who started at STREB at 3 would be as teenagers. (check out my husband’s blog for his pride over my baby raising her geek flag.) Sigh.

There is a clownlab I could go to tonight. I don’t know if I will be able to make it up to midtown by 7pm. My husband and kid haven’t eaten. That’s important. The kid hasn’t done her homework yet. AND we are still cleaning and getting rid of stuff. The husband is amazed by how much paper there is to go through, paper, mail, bills, un-read books and magazines since his job situation went into transition. The transition, still not over, has been going on now for 8 months! We are worn out.

So nobody (meaning me) planned dinner and we went to Sushi D (the Kid’s favorite neighborhood restaurant) AGAIN!

Now we’re home. The husband is shredding again (working in the computer industry as he does, he has a healthy lack of faith and insists on shredding anything that has any of our names and a code number on it– which is pretty much every piece of mail that comes into our home)

Going through a box of old magazines–I forgot that I subscribed to “IN THESE TIMES” out of spite after George Bush II was re-elected. God, I remember the afternoon I spent sitting at the bar at the Cowgirl Bar and Grill on Hudson, when My Kid was in Pre-K at PS-3 in Greenwich Village, watching the election returns with tears running down my cheeks. The bartender gave me a free beer.

Real Estate is on my mind. The potluck First Eucharist event last night was at the home of a family of four that has a whole brownstone all to themselves. At the picnic today I overheard one of the priests telling some people that the two white clapboard houses next to the church AND the two brownstones on the block don’t belong to the chuch but belong to him (Bruce Ratner???) “He loves them. He brought them here from other locations.” (Bruce Ratner’s cabinet of curiosities–4 unoccupied houses on Duffield Street) OK I can’t even process that right now…