Stephanie Lessing

I heard from my old pal
Jennifer O’Connell today. She was
eating a chocolate chip cookie and thought of me. How odd. When she asked
me what I was doing, I said, “Oh, just editing some stuff,” but I think she
might have suspected something. It got really quiet all of a sudden on my end
as soon as I found the remote. Jennifer
writes 30 books at a time so I tried not to let on how much I’m not writing
these days. I’m not one to do two
things at once and Jesse’s Bar Mitzvah has been consuming me pretty much from
the minute I wake up until I go to bed. All the planning is done. Now I just sit around and daydream about
it. This takes the whole day and a good
part of the evening.

I imagine him up there, speaking Hebrew and trying not to laugh
with his friends in the front row. And then my mind always cuts to the party
–where I envision myself in the coat closet all night. I was hoping to be a part of the festivities
but Jesse made it clear that he would like me to hide for most of the evening.

“Where do you want me to
go?” I asked.

“You don’t have to
leave. Just don’t dance or anything.”

I really like dancing, but I
like Jesse more, and I get why he would prefer if I wait in the car. It’s because even though, technically, he
will be a man on September 16, he’s a thirteen-year-old man. What thirteen-year-old man wants to see his fully-grown
mom partying? I certainly can’t think of any.

I’ve been to Bar Mitzvahs that were mistakenly designed to impress
adults with very little attention paid to what a thirteen year old boy wants on
his big day. I’ve heard the kids come home from these events complaining about
the adults’ long, boring speeches or that there was no room for the kids on the
dance floor or that all the adults were drunk out of their minds and making
fools of themselves. And so, instead of being insulted or thinking my son
doesn’t love me, I’ve decided to let him have his space and his own celebration
with his friends, not mine. These
parties are supposed to be for children.

That’s why I will have my
own party –in the bathroom. Any of the
few relatives who I did invite are welcome to join me in there. I’ll be in the stall with the loud music and
the bottles of tequila all over the floor, dancing, reading my speech.

Remember that "EVERYTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT BEING A GIRL I LEARNED FROM JUDY BLUME"   anthology I told you about?  I just found out some of us are going to be doing a signing at Edgartown Books in  Martha’s Vineyard Memorial Day of 2007.  Seems a little premature to mark that down on your calendars, but hey, time flies and since I don’t have a "news & events" page (I didn’t want one in case there was no news), I’ll be updating you periodically on my blog.  So there you have it.  The book will be out around the same time as "miss understanding," (October/Novemberish) I"m pretty sure.  I should double check these things before I post them, but I’m almost positive, and just so you know, the Judy Blume book is being published by Pocket Books.   But here’s the big news, Judy Blume has  a house on Martha’s Vineyard, so hopefully she’ll pop in.  I know I would pop in if someone wrote a whole book about me.

More news:  I’m number one in trade paperback sales at Hudson News last week for "She’s Got Issues" and number nine overall.  How wierd is that?  I almost forgot about that book. 

I think that’s it for now.

Girl Without Eyebrows

 Now be
careful here because my favorite girl in the world is missing her eyebrows and
you don’t want to mess with me. The
only reason I mention her is because the no eyebrow controversy has been around
since the days of cigarette holders and I feel it’s my duty to publicly defend
girls without eyebrows once and for all. 

 First of
all, not having eyebrows, although frightening-looking, isn’t as bizarre as it
seems. It could happen to anyone. Everyone gets a little carried away with the tweezer now and then. The
only difference between the girl with no eyebrows and the rest of us is that
she went all the way in her quest for perfection. You know how it is when you’re sitting there trying to reshape
your arch and you’re thinking, “If I just take out one more, I’ll have created
the world’s first perfect brow!” So you
pluck that one tiny, extra hair and now you have a little bald patch.

 “One
hair,” you’re thinking. “One freakin’
hair and now my life is ruined.” 

 But that’s
what we pluckers fail to realize, one eyebrow hair covers a lot more ground
than that for which we give it credit. They’re much longer than they look when they’re still attached to our
heads, and if one of them gets bent, it messes up everything. The girl with no eyebrows just couldn’t take
it anymore. She somehow convinced
herself that the best way to solve things would be to start over with a clean
slate. This doesn’t make her a bad person. Impulsive, perhaps, but not bad. If you’re a girl with no eyebrows, listen to me. It’s not your fault. 

 The truth
is there’s more than one person in my life who doesn’t have eyebrows, and they
are, I admit, both related to me. They will remain nameless, but I will say
this: One of them was senile and she had no idea what she was doing. However, after she’d committed the
unthinkable, she did have the wherewithal to notice the difference between her
and everyone else and so she took to drawing a thin, clown like tee-pee over
each eye in lieu of eyebrows.

 The other
person in my life who went the extra mile was born with one eyebrow about a
half inch higher than the other. 

Again, not her fault. 

Raise one eyebrow. It makes you look suspicious, right? Well, that’s how she felt all the time so she just went ahead and
tweezed off the offending brow. This is
a true story by the way. 

It immediately became apparent that she had created
a problem and there went the other brow. The thing is once you tweeze off your eyebrows completely, they never
really grow back. It’s almost as if they know what you did. You get a few
strays here and there, but you never get the full sweep.

 As if
this isn’t bad enough, this poor girl now has to create life-like brows on her
forehead every day for the rest of her life, with a pencil. You try to draw
hair on your face and then tell me this isn’t a real problem.

 And then,
after she spends hours trying to draw herself eyebrows, she has to ask everyone
in her family if they are on straight. She asks anyone who walks by. One by one they all lie. If anyone is stupid
enough to say that they are not perfect, she’ll rub them both off and start all
over. She has been late everyday of her
life for everything for decades because of this. If she does show up on time
for something, it’s usually because she forgot to put them on.

 My point
being, as always, there’s a reason for everything. And who among us can honestly say we’ve never ventured into
dangerous territory when it comes to removing hair we might very well want back
some day. I rest my case.

Did anyone happen to see the guest on the Tyra Banks show the other day who was crying because she didn’t have any eyebrows?  I was just flipping through the channels, I swear.  IT could have happened to anyone.  That show is always on!

More importantly, are they kidding?  How is that a show? THe girl was saying how all her life she felt ugly because she didn’t have any eyebrows and how she didn’t want to live.  Meanwhile, she was like the prettiest thing ever.  The whole time I was watching it, I was thinking, this has got to be the most pitiful situation I’ve ever been in in my life.  Here I am, sitting here, watching this girl cry about the fact that she doesn’t have two little thin lines of hair on her face, and then I remembered that I once wrote an entire essay about a girl who didn’t have any eyebrows.  I’m going to dig it out tomorrow to see if it was funny or not.  If it’s funny, I’ll post it.  If not, I’ll just pretend none of this ever happened.

August
21, 2006

Well
I got my first bad review. The reviewer clearly didn’t take a liking to Zoe, in
fact, he/she pretty much raked her over the coals and called her a pain in the
ass and not a funny one either. I also
got the feeling that he was irritated by the whole feminism thing, which he
referred to as Dworkin-esque. I googled Dworkin-esque and apparently Andrea
Dworkin was a pain in the ass as well. But the important thing is that he didn’t call me fat. And I think we can all agree that that’s the
bigger issue here.

August
16, 2006

I
went to Bed, Bath and Beyond today to buy Jesse a shower curtain. By the time I was ready to leave the store,
I had accumulated so much stuff I required a personal escort. 

I
found the shower curtains almost immediately but then I got distracted by the
bath mats. They were much nicer than what I was expecting, so I got two for Jesse’s bathroom. They look like sisal except they’re soft and they have a black suede
trim. That’s why I needed two. It was the trim. While I was admiring them in my cart, I got to thinking how nice
black towels would look with Jesse’s terra cotta tiles, so I headed over to the
towel area and got everyone in the family new towels. White for Kim, cream for Dan and I, and black for Jesse. Then I remembered that Jesse also needs new
sheets so I got him a couple of sets, which reminded me that Kim needs a new
mattress pad. The mattress pads were
tufted, which is what you want to see in a mattress pad, so I got a few. It was
at that point that I realized Jesse needed a shower rod for his new shower
curtain. Just as I was tossing the rod
into the cart, there in the distance I spotted my friend Lynn. I called her name and she waved and so we hung out in the pillow aisle for a few minutes talking,
but the whole time she was telling me about the burglar who fell off her
neighbor’s roof when she pulled into the driveway, I was eyeing the camel suede throw
pillows right behind her head. I love
Lynn and I’m terrified of burglars, but you can never have enough camel suede
pillows.

I
don’t know if you know this, but the pillows are right next to the kitchen
aisle. I thought about picking up all new kitchen appliances in pink (for
charity) but then I thought better of it. I can’t ask my husband or my son to toast their bread in a pink toaster
no matter how badly I want that pink mixer. And there’s no sense in having the toaster without the mixer. Even if all the money actually does go to
breast cancer research, it’s still wrong and I’m not the type to just buy
things because they’re pink. Unless
they’re towels or something.

So
I got the pink spatula and a non-stick frying pan.

 I couldn’t see over my cart at this point, so
I had to walk in front of it and pull it. People were smiling at me as if to say, “Oh my, didn’t we get carried
away!”

 I don’t smile back at people as a rule. I
respond verbally. 

 “I know! How ridiculous is this!” I said to
all the shopping smilers. I said these words while rolling my eyes, as if to  insinuate that I was pushing the cart for someone else.  Some idiot I hardly knew.  I could  be a floor manager, just doing my job, helping out a customer, for all they  knew.

By
the time I got on the checkout line, I was wheeling two carts. I noticed one of
the actual floor managers putting out doormats, which I need, so I got two, one for
the front door and one for the back. THe mats were stiff and unmanageable so I couldn’t stuff them into the sides of the carts without them flipping back over, so I had to carry one under each arm. A
few minutes later, Lynne walked by again carrying a small mop.

“What
the hell are you doing, Steph?” she asked, looking at my carts.

“Didn’t
I tell you? We just moved.”

“I
was at your house less than a week ago. I know you didn’t move.”

“Well,
we might,” I said.

The
nice gentleman who helped me to the car was kind enough to tell me that he
thought I made some really practical purchases. I thanked him and confided in him that a lot of people in the store were
laughing at me for having two carts. 

He
assured me that it happens all the time and that it’s nothing to be ashamed
of. 

That’s why I feel so much better about the fact that I
have to go back tomorrow. To get the
shower curtain.

August
2, 2006

I
know. 

Surprise! 

I’m
still working on this one though. I
need more pictures, right? I was
thinking maybe you could send me some and I’ll post them. But they have to be funny. Otherwise, why bother.

In
the meantime, I’m still looking around my office for stuff. I do have this one picture of me in a
wetsuit that’s sort of amusing. I’m standing next to my best friend, who
happens to be 5’11.” Actually it’s not
that funny.

 So the Super Saturday designer preview
shopping event in Water Mill didn’t go so well. It took us about four hours to get there,it was at least 120
degrees, my books weren’t there, and I had to go to the bathroom the entire
time. Other than that everything was
fine, except

I
happen to have worn pants and a long sleeve top that day. Granted both the top and the pants were
summery by any standards, but two poor choices nonetheless. After discovering that my books weren’t
there and that it was too hot to shop at the event, we got right back in the
car. I felt like I’d been caught in a rainstorm. That’s how much water had collected inside my clothes.

It
seems the only thing I blog about anymore is perspiration. I wish I had something else to tell you, but
lately it’s just been the sweating.

If
anything else happens, I’ll let you know.

I think it’s best if I don’t go to any more meetings. As you know, at the last one, all I did was cry. But yesterday’s meeting was even more humiliating. I didn’t cry at that one, but I did sweat. Like a man. And then I went on to call attention to it so everyone sitting there would be assured that I realize how disgusting I am.

The purpose for the meeting was to discuss my launch party for Miss Understanding, which will be at Bergdorf Goodman on October 24 and I’d be delighted if you were there. In fact, I’ll be sending you all e-vites, unless I have your address, in which case, you’ll get a real invitation. Somewhere on this website is a form for you to fill out but you can just email me.

The party will be a good one. I promise, and hopefully, if Louise Galvin, the celebrity hair colorist to whom I devoted an entire chapter of my book isn’t too pregnant, she’ll be my guest of honor. You have to see her. I won’t say anything else except movie star material.

So Louise was at the meeting, and my new HarperCollins publicist (adorable), and Louise’s team of publicists (beyond charming and gorgeous and dressed to perfection) and me. . .with the sweat rings. I don’t want to talk about it but let’s just say, I’m glad no one saw the magic marker that I noticed on the back of my pants when I got home.

Why do I go anywhere?

You’d think I would have learned my lesson from Chloe, but no. I wore white pants and a white shirt and then just sat there soaking myself.

Anyhoo, here’s what’s happening so far for the new book. Mark your calendars and I’ll have more information soon:

July 26
Hudson News Charity Event
Ovarian Cancer Research Fund
Nova’s Arc Project
Kelly Ripa is going to be there and a bunch of fashion people
Click here to view the event website.
Water Mill, NY

October 6
La Femme Film Festival
Beverly Hills, CA

November 2, 2006
Boston University
Boston, MA

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