Julie Anne Long

In praise of neighborhood celebrities

A few days ago I was hanging out with a friend who lives a few blocks away when she said to me: “Did you see that big rhinestone hoop earring Julius was wearing the other day?” 

Now, what’s funny about this sentence is that Julius (for the purposes of our story, I’ve changed his name) probably hasn’t the faintest idea what my name is, or what my friend’s name is, though I’m certain he knows us by sight. Julius is a particular checker at our local, very busy grocery store, and in a way, he’s a bit of a celebrity, as I bet the several thousand people who live and shop nearby know exactly who he is. In fact, I could probably go up to a total stranger at a nearby coffee shop and say, “You know that checker who…” and they would instantly know who I’m talking about.

        He’s cute, Julius is. Cute enough to inspire the occasional idle conversation between me and my friend, anyway. Slight, dark-haired, blue-eyed, youngish. Young enough to still be conducting experiments with his facial hair and to be trying out that aforementioned rhinestone earring, and for me not to worry too much that he’ll ever find out that I’ve blogged about him, because to be young and male means his favorite topic of conversation is him, and odds are good that he won’t find out that I’m an author unless I tell him point blank. But he’s sharp and friendly and funny and hyper and flirtatious (and straight, despite the earring, which mercifully only made a brief appearance), and he talks and laughs in a nearly endless stream as customers pour through his line. And he does know my cat has digestive issues (his cat does, too), because we talked about organic cat food and various other things I’ve bought over the years. Doubtless he knows things like this about hundreds of people.

        But a few months ago, Julius mysteriously disappeared for a time, and the grocery store was an entirely different place. The light and energy sort of went out of it. I heard person after person ask other checkers about him as I went through the line; when he reappeared months later, I heard person after person express delight. He’s positively gifted at his particular job (which he’s had for many years), and I think we all appreciate him. Even sort of rely on him.

        I’ve learned to be grateful for people like that, people who make the everyday chores of life just a little brighter, because boy, jobs that require constantly fielding the vicissitudes of the public are not easy (someday I’ll blog about my days as a Round Table Pizza cashier. Hoo boy.) Do you have someone like that in your neighborhood or hometown? Me, I also have the guy at the Greek fast food place, who cheerfully hollers out my order to the cook the minute he sees me—“The #1 with chicken! She likes onions!” We always have a few laughs while I’m waiting, and I always walk out a little happier than I went in. Not that I walk around in a cloud of gloom, typically, but you know what I mean. (The #1 is Chicken Shawerma over rice and veggies with salad. Yum.) Then there’s the woman at the gift shop, who does know I’m an author and who’s been marvelously helpful over the years, particularly when I’ve bought promotional items or gifts, and we talk about books and publishing and cats when I stop in. There’s the very pleasant guy from Pakistan who runs the tiny corner store where just about everything—incense, toilet paper, bungee cords, bottled water, sweatshirts, you name it—costs a buck. I once went in and bought a plunger and a box of pudding, and he said, very comfortingly, “Ah. I see you have a little problem, but afterwards you will have dessert.”

         So what about you guys? Any retail celebrities in your hometown or your neighborhood, someone who just makes the day a little brighter by being helpful and good at their jobs, someone you and all your neighbors know?  Conversely, is there someone you try to avoid in a particular store or a restaurant?? Ever had a retail job or a job serving the public? And what else is going on with everyone? I’ve been up to something for the past several days—I have a new little project I’ll reveal in a week or so. LOL. I’ll have a new contest up by tomorrow night, too.

Rainy days and Mondays don't particularly bother me, happily enough

Today wasn't even remotely rainy—it was gloriously sunny and clear and actually much too warm for a turtleneck—and as I usually do at least some work every day of the week, my Mondays are often awfully similar to my Fridays and Sundays and Wednesdays and—well, you get the picture—so I don't harbor any particular resentment toward them. But it's funny—as I work, I listen to what might be the oddest mix of music, and depending upon my mood, I might switch about from classical guitar to oldies, or alternative to classical, or jazz standards to my own CD collection randomly mixed up or what have you. I particularly love BBC 6—it's British alternative radio, and you'll often hear very fresh music there that winds up on American radio (or American car commercials, like Brendan Benson did, or on CSI Miami, like this Boards of Canada song I love, Dayvan Cowboy) a year or so later, and they often throw a lot of wonderfully random "roots of modern music" songs in there, too, with a complete absence of irony. The other day, for instance, I heard this song that sounded just FANTASTIC  in the moment—it was hook-heavy, with very hard, fast guitars and a sort of histrionic male vocal, and I thought: "Man, I must have this for my trampoline running soundtrack." I waited to hear who the artist was...and it turned out to be Deep Purple.  For crying out loud. From about thirty years ago. LOL. Astounding how fresh it sounded alongside all those other of-the-moment songs. And now I can't remember the name of the bloody song. I still need it for my running mix.

Anyway, my point is that it's funny how appreciation is often about context and time and distance. For instance, in my recent listening journeys I stumbled across the song in the video below, and as I never listen to what might be called "Easy Listening," I don't think I'd heard it in years. And I was actually kind of riveted, and freshly struck by how beautiful and utterly singular her voice was. And as I'm getting nice and old now and I'm no longer under any constraints to be cool, I'm free to love whatever I please. LOL.  So I love this. Also, I had to share this video with you, because get a load of her hair. We were talking about curling irons and hot rollers and what have you last week, and God only knows what went into the making of that do. It's kind of adorable and poignant, because such pains were obviously taken to make it pretty, but observe it with fresh gratitude that we don't have to do THAT to our hair these days. You'll probably be reading this on Tuesday, but what the hey.  I'll blog something else later this week, too. How's everyone doing? What are you listening to these days?

Musings on haircuts, beauty lessons and disasters, etc.

         Because it had been too long since I’d heard the “F” word shrieked in public, I decided it was time to take a trip downtown on the train. OK, I’m kidding. That wasn’t my real reason for going downtown. But I can seriously go for weeks at a time without hearing it bellowed in public, and sure enough—I swear, you can count on this the way you can count on, oh, the sun setting in the west—fifteen minutes after the doors of the train slid closed, someone bellowed it. Not just the word all by itself, mind you. It was preceded by the word “mother,” which was immediately preceded by the words, “I saw you lookin’ at me!” and all of this seemed to be directed at no one in particular, though I’m not entirely certain of this, as the person who shrieked them got off the train right after that, having apparently gotten it out of his system. (I can pretty much guarantee you no one was “lookin’” at him at this point. You never, never, never make eye contact on the train. If you do, it’s at your peril.) Clearly, MUNI brings out the best in all of us.

       I tell you, when you think about it, public transportation is quite an exhilarating little gamble. You pay your $1.50 (that’s what it costs here) to board the train, the doors slide closed, and for the duration of your journey, you might be sealed up in what amounts to a rolling Fellini film, and good luck to you. Then again, as every strata of San Francisco society rides the train, you might have an uneventful ride, or end up sitting next to the man of your dreams. I have sat alongside a dreamboat or two. More likely the man carrying a giant bag of aluminum cans and dressed in what appears to be an elaborate harness made out of duct tape will sit next to you and mutter about how George Bush and the 49’ers are conspiring to send the world to hell in a hand basket. This, in fact, was my experience on this day. He did pause once  in his mutterings to offer me a bite of his burrito. (“No thanks. I just had breakfast.”)

       (How about that? I’m digressing before I’ve even begun. )

       Anyhow, the occasion of my train trip downtown was to get a haircut. I have about forty pounds of hair, and it’s sentient. Well, once again I jest, but it really is rather willful. It’s pretty good hair, mostly, but when it gets too long my face looks like this little peanut peering out of a shrubbery, and the hair must be pruned. I love my hair salon—I blogged about this before, back when no one knew I had a blog—because it’s a bit posh (if you go by prices and the skill of the stylists) but there’s no attitude whatsoever, and you see all ages and genders and types of people sitting in the chairs. It’s a big sunny loft and they play good, eclectic music—it was Led Zeppelin on this day, and Led Zeppelin for me is always a random good omen. When I’m sitting in the stylist chair, I like to watch the other clients as they gesture to their heads sort of shyly and hopefully, explaining what they want to look like, while their stylists nod sagely and sympathetically. We all have our measure of vanity, and it’s rather touching. It’s fun to watch everyone walk out looking brand new, too.

        I got a great haircut, as I always do from my stylist, and she blow-dried me within an inch of my life. I was superfoxy for a couple of days. But then I washed it. This morning, I looked in the mirror this morning and thought…  “Huh. That’s funny. I remind myself of someone. Or is it something? Who could it be…what could it—Oh dear God. I look like my eighth grade picture.”  This was alarming enough to get me to scramble for the hair balm, and I rubbed some in and spent some time pushing my hair this way and that. In a few moments I looked more sophisticated and less jiffy-popped. Sometimes you just really have to show a new haircut who’s boss.

        Kathy K. sent me a great video link (How did you know I needed a blog topic, Kathy??), and it sent me down memory lane, pondering the things we do for beauty, and what we think of as beautiful. (You should check it out. It's fascinating.) I have a few memories: my first eyeshadow, which was iridescent sky blue and came in a tube, and which I stroked over my lids with a liberal finger in Junior High. It was probably made by Bonne Bell. It did nothing whatsoever to enhance my looks, but there’s something very sensual about stroking on color, an almost guilty pleasure: “you mean I get to draw on my own face?” That sort of thing.  I eventually learned to apply makeup without looking like a tart, and to choose colors that “suited” me. I never really grew to rely on makeup. That’s waaaaay too much work. And I do go out of the house without it on occasion, but never if I’m planning to go the grocery store where they have the cute checker. He warrants lipstick, at the very least. Not that I ever intend to do anything about said checker. I just, frankly, want him to admire my shiny lips. But truthfully, if I wear makeup…well, I realize I wear it primarily for me.

       I’ve had a few beauty disasters over the years, most notably when I had to wake up my dad one morning (he worked at night, so he slept during the day) to cut me free of the curling iron. It had teeth, you see, and I’d rolled my bangs all the way up in it—a grave mistake. It wouldn’t unroll. No matter how I tugged or pulled or plucked at it. I went to school (high school) late that day and missing half my bangs. I wept a little.  Freaking feathered hair. I could never get my feathers to lay flat against my head, a la Farrah. They always stuck out like…the roof on a pagoda.

       It’s a given that we’re all beautiful and memorable in our own unique ways. (No, don’t argue with me. LOL. I insist. I find you all extremely beautiful.) But what are your memories of makeup, and what’s your relationship to it now? Did you wear it because everyone did, or just because you liked it, or because you thought boys would notice you?? Do you have a particular weakness for lipstick or eyeshadow or some other little item, or the free gifts with purchase? :) Or could you not care less? Do you have any memorable beauty disasters to share? When’s the last time you changed your hair??

(P.S. Just learned BATS was nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award! Also, if you feel like it, go to the All About Romance Annual Reader Poll to vote for BATS in various categories. I just noticed it's consistently in several of them, including Best Romance of the Year and Best Couple, etc. Yay!)

On the "The Pursuit of Happyness," slipping into other dimensions, etc.

    I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness the other day, in large part because it’s set in San Francisco and it features a fake BART station entrance that startled me badly one night a year or so ago.  (Over to the left is what the entrance to a real BART station looks like. BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit system of trains linking SF to the rest of the cities in the Bay Area. MUNI is the San Francisco transit system comprised of trains and buses just in the city. You’ll need to know these boring little factoids for the purposes of our story.) This fake BART station seemed to sort of crop up out of nowhere at the edge of this large-ish rectangle of grass known as Duboce Park, which is also the name of a neighborhood roughly bounded by the Haight and the Castro. People play with their dogs there in the morning, and it used to be the best part of my morning commute—watching all manner of dogs out for their romp with their people as we rolled past in the train.

       Anyhow, there’s a MUNI train stop (just a sign and a bench) at Duboce Park and there has been for—oh, decades and decades as far as I know—but definitely no underground BART station. And yet one night as I was waiting for the train at the Duboce Park stop…. well, there it was: A BART sign and an entrance, looking quite convincing but surreal and a bit alarming because…how the hell did it get there?? A few other people were waiting for the train with me, and we all sort of circled this fake BART station warily, rather like cats do when you move their favorite chair two feet away from its usual place. No one actually sniffed it, but I’m pretty sure one guy wanted to.  There were about four steps leading down into it, and they were made of actual cement, which made it a BART station to nowhere, which was even creepier.

        At last, somehow, someone figured out that it was part of the Will Smith movie that had been filmed in the neighborhood recently. We greeted this information with tremendous relief. It meant there hadn’t really been a rip in the space/time continuum.

Anyway, there’s a quick little scene in the movie in which Will Smith’s character is running from a cab driver he’s been forced to stiff, and he barrels right past my friend’s apartment along Duboce Park and vanishes down the stairs into this fake BART Station, and then they cut instantly to the inside of a real BART station.  It was lots of fun to see this quick bit in the movie, and I admired the cleverness of filmmakers. They probably created our fake BART station in Duboce Park it because it provided a stretch of grass and a picturesque row of Victorians for long-legged Will Smith to race past.  Ah, Hollywood. None of the actual BART stations are situated in front of picturesque Victorian apartment buildings.

Something else a bit like this happened to me once before. If you’re a commuter and you take a train or bus to/from work, you know all about that “commuter fugue” state you enter into—you know, where you gaze slack-jawed out the window without really seeing anything because you’ve seen every bit of scenery thousands of times before? Well, one day when I lived in the Haight, I was taking the bus home from work and gazing out the window at the shops as we rolled down Haight Street, deep in a commuter fugue state…when very slowly but inexorably it dawned on me…all the storefronts were completely different. 

I sat bolt upright and stared, and all the little hairs rose on the back of my neck. It was outrageously disorienting. My mind flipped rapidly through a number of options. Was I on the right bus?? I craned my head at every block to look at the street signs; yep, they all said “Haight.”  Right street, right bus. But every business that I’d passed five days a week for years sported entirely different names and different signage. And I’m ashamed to admit that, in a wild few seconds of a desperate attempt at rationalization, I did consider that somehow I’d slipped into another dimension. I mean, I wasn’t in Narnia, or anything. Apparently I was still in San Francisco. But God only knew what year. And by the way, I didn’t like it—slipping into another dimension, that is. The sensation was a lot less fun than you might think.

A split second later my mind finally clicked into full rationality: “Oh! The Doors movie!!” And by that I mean the (mostly bad) movie with Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison—part of it was filmed on Haight Street, and for the filming, they’d temporarily changed all the storefronts to reflect what they were in 1967 or thereabouts. Boy, did I feel like a big dork. But a relieved dork.

So back to The Pursuit of Happyness: I really enjoyed the movie for quite a few reasons. For one thing, it’s the first time I’ve seen a movie that captures the San Francisco that I live in. I mean, there have been other San Francisco-set movies—The Maltese Falcon, Dark Passage, Mrs. Doubtfire, Bullitt, others I’m probably forgetting about—but this was the everyday San Francisco of buses and trains and offices and scrambling up and down hills to get to work and get home again, the San Francisco of neighborhoods and security gates and nutty people at the bus stop and parking tickets. Mundane and difficult and fabulous all at once. It also captured that dichotomy that is so completely San Francisco….for instance, you’ll be trudging along, absorbed in your cares, worrying about making your insane rent, dodging the traffic and nutty people, then happen to glance up, and see the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and—well, your heart will stop. It’s seriously like… “Holy crap! I live in Oz!” It’s just that startlingly beautiful, from so many different angles. It’s a small and dense city made out of hills surrounded by bright blue water, and from up high it looks like one of those exquisite miniature villages you should tuck under the Christmas tree. But sometimes the beauty feels strangely elusive, almost like a mirage. Like there’s a disconnect between it and the sometimes very gritty difficulty of actually living here. And because the city is so small, comparatively, the most posh neighborhoods and the very roughest are sometimes separated by a mere few blocks, and are often on the same bus line.

        So you really can’t ask for a more metaphorically perfect backdrop for the story in The Pursuit of Happyness: in the story, Chris Gardner spends a lot of time trudging those steep hills, running for buses, riding trains, and the movie takes full advantage of these juxtapositions between beauty and grit to make its point. It’s a great story, sweet and inspiring and engrossing but not cloying—in fact, in some ways it’s terrifying. I watched most of the movie with a knot in my stomach. I haven’t been quite as poor as Chris Gardner, but I have been sleepless-at-night poor before, clammy-handed poor, and boy, you feel that edge-of-the-abyss panic with him as you watch.  Will Smith was wonderful in the role. I also really admire strong, imaginative, determined, resourceful people who don’t stop to bemoan their circumstances but just do what they need to do, often creating something amazing out of seemingly nothing. Of course, desperation is often the mother of invention, and often leaves little time for bemoaning, but still. LOL. We usually have choices about how to harness, if you will, desperation, should we find ourselves desperate. I’ve written characters a bit like this before—Lily Masters in To Love a Thief and Tom Shaughnessy in Ways to be Wicked, for instance—and likely will again.

     So it’s a great movie to see for dozens of reasons, and on dozens of levels. If you’re feeling at all sorry for yourself for whatever reason (and who doesn’t, on occasion??), it’s inspiring to watch Chris Gardner reinvent himself in the face of extraordinary challenges. It’s about the power of self-belief. It’s about attitude, too, I think, because at no point did Chris Gardner act as though he thought the world was against him, though it sure must have felt that way pretty frequently. It’s a remarkable demonstration of what grace under pressure really means. I’m also willing to bet there’s nothing Chris Gardner takes for granted anymore, and he now knows precisely what he’s made of—and those kinds of things are the gifts that only hard times can give us. I like to think that hard times polish our rough edges, the way a river eventually polishes smooth the stones it flows over, and the smoother we become the more easily the things life brings will flow over us. We can only hope, anyway. LOL.

      So have you ever seen a movie that particularly inspired you, or really stuck with you for any reason when it was over? For instance, I found Daniel Craig in that bathing suit in Casino Royale quite inspiring.  Hee! Seriously, though: It’s a Wonderful Life?  Seabiscuit? Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure?? Is there one you turn to when you want to laugh, or be moved, or just need a pick-me-up or attitude adjustment? See any good ones lately?