I Saw Your Nanny

Yikes! As a former nanny myself, I find this to be a fascinating blog. "I Saw Your Nanny."

"We will be posting your reports of nanny sightings on this blog. So often mothers and other nannies have commented that they wished they had an avenue to contact the parent of a child they saw being mistreated by the nanny. We want to be that resource."

They share both "bad nanny" and "good nanny" stories.

The bad: "I saw a young Jamaican nanny...interacting in a disturbing way with the child in her care. The child was about 18 mos old, white, towheaded, dressed in unisex clothing. The child was reaching out and trying to communicate something to the nanny and the nanny was looking at the child, without smiling or good humor, and saying "Whooooooooo caaaaaaaaares..." several times in response to the child's attempts to communicate. Also almost no eye contact with the child while handing child food."

The good: "She is African American, middle age, her charge is a male Caucasian toddler of around 3-4 yrs old. Usually they are both just standing around or probably waiting for someone, but there is absolutely no denying or second guessing just how happy or well adjusted this little boy is, and how comfortable he is to be with her. Her caring and patience shines through each and every time I happen to see them out there."

One Fish Two Fish, and Bella's Closeup

This is a special post. It is in this post that I introduce you to a new blog, the brainchild of a person very close to me, with whom I will soon be collaborating on some new creative projects. Everyone, please meet One Fish Two Fish, the blog of Sloan Taylor, a very dear friend and, yes, family member of mine.Sloan has experienced roughly as many personal changes as I have in the past year or so. Right around the time I moved here, Sloan was happily (or, rather, unhappily) ensconced in the pre-med program at Loyola University, with a very carefully plotted future laid out in front of her, involving MCATs and wart freezing. (Mmm.) Then one day she had a revelation. Med school was someone else's dream, and her heart cried out for an artistic future. Specifically, that of a writer and filmmaker.

Of course, I'd been stewing in my own juices back home in Indiana, happily bored and running the business I'd started in college, thinking about moving to Chicago for reasons of comedy and creativity. I had no firm plan, and no idea of how to get where wanted to be, but I knew I had to change. I was consumed with thoughts of a similar swerve into completely unknown territory.

Long story slightly shorter, here we are now, both in Chicago, proceeding on parallel paths of creative development. She's helped me adjust to city life, introduced me to the pleasures of the Lake Side Trail, the Chicago Botanic Garden, laughed and played and chilled out with me. And now we're collaborating.

So be warned - when Sloan writes about short film projects and talks about "Homicidal roommates, mysterious mitochondria, and ass-less chaps," she's talking about things I will be participating in. (Although, fortunately for you, not the chaps part.) Ever wanted to see me making an idiot of myself in short comedy films? Here's your chance.

I know, I can't believe it, either. I've said all along that I'm a writer with no desire to perform, and, truly, the thought of stepping onstage like so many of my new comedy friends makes my knees knock with a Richter-like intensity, but I can't deny that as I've been working my way through the writing program at Second City, and becoming immersed in comedy through The Bastion, I've been suffering from an unscratched itch. I need to see my words take on other forms, and work out creative ideas in a fuller scope.

And since I'm not in a position to cast actors, and all I have to work with at the moment is Sloan, her camera, and a few assorted friends, here we go. Sloan plans to document her evolution as a filmmaker online from the very beginning. If you start reading her now, you're going to track the artistic blossoming of someone with tremendous potential, who I know is going to make a beautiful creative contribution to this world. She's that kind of person - she grew up a Montessori kid in a house with no tv, and tons of art and science. I think it's going to be amazing for those of you who decide to follow her on her adventure, as she explains the trials and tribulations of heeding the call of becoming an artist.

So watch this space. And watch her space. And let's see where all of this is going. Hooray!

Another Pointless Thing To Busy My Mind With

A few weeks ago a friend who lives in my neighborhood told me about a terrible incident wherein, as she was coming home after work in the wee hours of the morning, she saw the police on the scene of what turned out to be a hit-and-run that killed a pedestrian. This happened right on a corner near my work, and near several restaurants that we frequently visit. My friend said there was a sheet covering the body and that the victim's shoes were several feet away, indicating that they had been literally knocked out of their shoes by the impact of the accident.

A short while later I read a little blurb in the New Yorker about a similar case, long unsolved, where the same thing had happened - a hit and run victim had been knocked out of their shoes.
I've been thinking about this at random moments ever since. It's morbid, I know, but that's where my curiosity takes me sometimes. Turns out other people have been similarly curious, and there are lots of reports on this kind of thing online (including one from my internet acquaintance at the CTA Tattler). It happens frequently in particular types of blunt force trauma.

Party Like It's 2006

Forgive me, I haven't exactly kept up the pace here these last few days. I had an all-day wedding over the weekend, plus a late-night comedy party fest Saturday night. Getting to bed at 3:30 just doesn't suit me very well. I'm pretty lame - more the "read until 9 or 10, get up at 5 or 6 and hit the gym before work" type. But it was well worth it.

I served as one half of an all-female best man team for a friend (of a friend) who got married at the Columbia Yacht Club. It was an honor to be included in such a small private ceremony, and especially to be entrusted with calming/wrangling the groom, administering the pre-wedding Zombie, keeping a tight hold on the rings and marriage license, and offering the groom the last gumstick of his bachelorhood in the hotel car on the way to the club. The groom didn't hesitate to complain that the gum was rather smashed and flavorless, and laughed when I pulled out my cell phone to sign up for the next level of my writing class at Second City on the way there (I always wait until the last second), all of which added a nice touch of normalcy to the day.

The ceremony was supposed to take place on a boat out on Lake Michigan, but the weather wasn't cooperating, so it was held inside the club instead. Then there were drinks and chitchat before moving to dinner at a restaurant nearby, where the four-year old boy who became my default date ate all the croutons off my Caesar salad and offered me a few french fries as consolation. (I indulged him because he and his seven-year old brother were a little frightened by the tornado sirens we heard in the cab on the way over, and they were both a little peeved by the buckets of rain that drenched us as we dashed from the cab into the restaurant. Well, plus, I'm a softie and I usually indulge kids anyway.)

Then there was the comedy tour, during which K-Rock and I gave Apiary Nate (our editor from NYC) a whirlwind tour of Chicago laughs and beer. It was great to meet Nate, the mysterious "Charlie" figure to our "Angels." He's a real flesh-and-blood dude, after all. One of the friends he brought along asked how we knew each other, and I explained that we sort of didn't. "I got an e-mail out of the blue one day," I said, and then I wondered - how long had he been reading this blog before he asked me to edit the Chicago branch of his beloved Apiary? Turns out it was a few months. Nate's nothing if not thorough. Read all about it on the post I slapped together on the Bastion.

Even after a soothing long bike ride to and from class at Second City on Sunday, and almost ten hours of sleep last night, I'm still feeling a little wrung out. Sometimes I wish comedy were more of a morning activity, but I don't think that's ever going to change, so I guess I'd better get used to it.

Random Stories and Observations

Earlier I wrote a blog post about a Swedish sex shop exploding. Recently, a Swedish newscast was interrupted with an unexpected clip, over the shoulder of the news anchor, of some explicit you-know-what. That's so much more embarrassing than the weather blue screen malfunctioning, isn't it? Oh, those sexy Swedes.Why can't old dogs learn new tricks? It's not stubbornness. It's a protein.

Why are porn spams always so clumsily worded? One I got the other day featured this subject line: "Have all delights using this wonderful product!" Not just one or two delights, ALL of them. Do people who buy and use these sex-enhancing products end up yelling equally weird things at the peak of their fun? "Meet young willing grils noww!" "Hot pron whenever you want!" "Don't be sexually shy with this herb!"

Something I've noticed again and again lately as I attend more comedy shows: bartenders don't give much of a crap about people who prefer to drink diet pop or water when everyone else is drinking beer after beer.

Sometimes, they'll ignore you entirely, probably assuming that you're a cheap-ass who won't bother to tip them on a plastic cup of water, but, in my case, they're wrong. Here's a dollar. Gimme some water.

"You've Got to Jump Off Cliffs and Build Your Wings on the Way Down."

Some of my older brothers were big science fiction fans, and classics from Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Douglas Adams, and, of course, Ray Bradbury were a part of my reading environment since before I can remember. One day last week I finally got my Illinois driver's license and Chicago Public Library card. Of course one of the first books I nabbed off the shelves was sci-fi related - Sam Weller's biography of Ray Bradbury.

(I had the book with me the next day when I met a friend at a cafe. He picked it up and said "Hey, do you know Sam Weller? He's a nice guy!" Boy, is the world getting smaller.)

A lot of opportunities to do new things are coming my way these days*. It's so easy to immediately think: "I've never done this before. What makes me think I can do this?"

I conducted my first video interview with a local up-and-coming stand-up comedian this week. (When it's edited, it will be here.) Afterwards we had a drink and chatted more about his creative experiences. He talked about making a snap decision to move temporarily to New York earlier this year, where his career and art took a quantum leap. "I didn't even know where I was going to stay until I got there," he said.

"If you waited until you had every detail taken care of, you'd never go," I said, speaking to both him and myself.

I thought about the Bradbury book again. "You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down."

(Interview with Weller here. Collection of Bradbury quotes here. And more here.)

*I'm working on some stuff that will be published in Jargon Chicago. Neat-o.

Cutest Referral, International Superstardom

Vanity googling. Who can resist? Certainly not me.Did you know I was the recent surprise winner of the Toronto Film Prize?

According to Reuters, "''Bella' received no buzz and
little ink during the 10-day event, but still managed to win
the festival's People's Choice Award, voted on by moviegoers."

I give Canada smooches...many, many smooches.

Also, today I celebrate the cutest referral phrase I've tracked so far.

Awww...some little kid must have googled this phrase: "scaryest thing of a animal on earth." Well, either that or a slow adult. Anyway, it's cute.

And finally, a German site and a Japanese site have both linked to me recently, one because of my interview with DVD Trash writer Nick, and one because of my interview with Bubblegumfink.
Seriously, dudes, as Marcus Pawelczyk says, "Seit mehr als sieben Wochen befragt Bella Rossa, angehende Schriftstellerin aus Chicago, in ihrem "Interviews With Bloggers"-Projekt jene Menschen, die genauso wie ich unverhältnismäßig viel Zeit darauf verwenden, Weblog-Einträge zu schreiben. Diesmal: Nick von DVD Trash." Don't make me say it twice.

The title of the post on the Japanese blog is, for reasons I'd probably rather not know, "JACKINTIME." The site describes itself thusly: "This E-zine is enjoying Stage,Cinema,Music,Book,Art,...and more! YARD* Fun TO POP culture YARD* Fun to POPcultuer Transration>>English Here Powered by Google." No, it actually says "transration." Really.

Tater Tots With Future Superstars

Or, "How To Trick Cute Funny (Probably Soon-To-Be-Famous) Boys Into Meeting You Out For Tater Tots In Six Easy Steps."Step One: Blog about comedy in Chicago, link to a NYC comedy blog.

Step Two: Have NYC comedy blog e-mail you to ask you to run their Chicago branch. Accept offer. Meet cool local girl already knee-deep in the scene, kick off new venture together.

Step Three: See local comedy shows. Notice outstanding performers in those shows.

Step Four: E-mail one of them, and be all "I'm sort of a journalist, and blah blah, and do you want to be interviewed?"

Step Five: Meet unsuspecting boy in local diner, acknowledge right off the bat that you're new to all of this and totally making it up as you go. Enjoy his joke about it being a form of improv, interpret his lack of running away as cue to continue.

Step Six: Order tater tots. Proceed with "interview." Wonder why more people aren't doing this.

Two Minutes of Funny

This kind of short comedy film is very inspiring to me. Such a simple setup. Such simple camera work. But so funny.

But Then Again, Jesus Loves Everyone

Make your own! Thanks to Dale for the link.

NcDonald's?

My last name begins with "Mc." (Let's fictionalize it into McDonald for now.)

Three times over the past few weeks, when giving personal information out over the phone, I've had people on the other
end of the line confound me with their confusion over the spelling of my
last name. I'll go to spell it: "M...c....capital D...o..." and they'll interrupt me - "Are you saying 'M' or 'N'?" And I stop, confused.

Am I saying "N?" How many last names start with Nc? NcDonald's? NcNulty? NcIntyre? Who are these people, and why do they always make me feel like an idiot who's misspelling my own name?

...Any Bar Weighting More Than 5 Pounds

A three-parter on consumer ridiculousness.

Number one, a complaint about the biggest waste of my dollar all summer long: spray-on sunscreen. Specifically, the one at the left, known as "Coppertone Continuous Spray Clear No-Rub Spray Sunscreen Whatever," or, as I've come to think of it, "Coppertone Sticky Wasteful Unpleasant Overpriced Human Shellacking Product."

It was almost ten dollars, and gave me about four thorough applications (arms and legs) before the can was empty. It went on like spray paint, and left me feeling sticky in a way that I worried attracted and attached more bugs to me that I would normally walked around with.

It also had a weird highlighting effect on my arm hair, sort of like after you have your first professional leg wax, and then you sit in the sunlight and realize that all the little blonde baby hairs were left behind. It left me looking strange, feeling like I'd been laminated, and determined never to spend money on anything like it ever again. Oh, and most importantly, despite it being SPF 50, it still allowed me to incur sunburn on both my arms and legs.

Number two, the phrase "Do not use any bar weighting more than 5 pounds on this station" is making me crazy. I have been staring at this sticker on one of the weight machines on my gym for over a year and have been fighting the urge to correct it with a Sharpie. Either that, or I want to go in and mess up all the rest of it: "Constult you're fizzician...faliure too complie could rezult in serrious injery or even deff!"

Number three is something I have no photographic proof of, because it's something I read when I was about 14, but it still pops in my head now and then and makes me laugh like crazy. My mom bought a set of ginsu knives, and because even then I was a word-crazy freak, I read the little inserts that came with the product. It was obviously written by someone in Japan with a weak grasp of English, because, among the admonitions in the text were the phrases "Warning: knives very sharp" and "Keep out of children."

My New Camera Phone and "Legs Not Butt"

I've been having fun recently with the camera feature on my new cell phone. I took this snap of a part of my body and sent it to a friend, who immediately text messaged me back to protest me sending him "obscene" pictures.

I knew full well that he would think it was a butt, not because I'm likely to photograph and share my backside, but because he is. I was very pleased to tersely text back and tell him it was actually a modest picture of my legs, and he was a pervy jerk for assuming anything else.

Isn't it nice that scientists and engineers have toiled entire lifetimes in obscure, underfunded, poorly lit laboratories the world over, so people could live free of disease, enjoy instant communication, and traverse the globe in shiny airplanes? And also, so people like me could spend an hour framing and capturing a perfect photo of what is now labeled on my cell phone picture gallery as "Legs Not Butt."

Random Weird Thing Seen This Week

(Not seen by me, but still worth mentioning.)

A sparrow and a pigeon fighting over a chicken bone.

"Thinking To Myself"

This phrase annoys me to no end. Of course you're "thinking to yourself."

Unless you have superhuman brain powers, you're not thinking to anyone else, now are you?

Recent Referral Links

More fun with referral stats. A new source of my popularity: people looking for Swan Brooner.

Tons of people still find their way to my blog because they're looking for Cats That Look Like Hitler, and Old Porny Whatsherface. The latest pervs to visit here looking for her are from Finland, Morocco, Belgium, France, and the exotic and beautiful Flint, Michigan.

And finally, as an example of the mind-blowing scope of my appeal, hits from Hallmark Cards AND the Adult Film Database. Within minutes of each other. Awesome.

Just for fun, I'm going to include text, with no followup content, on all of today's most popular searches, and see what that does to my traffic. Here goes:

Steve Irwin
Facebook
Kampusch
Pinky
Path to 9/11
Suri Cruise
Natascha Kampusch
Video
Apple
Google
Lonelygirl15
Katie Couric
Germaine Greer
Tony Blair
Ubuntu
Microsoft
Steve Irwin
Sex
Search
Online
Bush
web-20
Shopping
Iraq
crocodile hunter
newspaper
Terrorism
Porn
11
web2.0

Cat Obsessed With Flushing the Toilet

Flush, watch. Flush, watch. Flush, watch. Repeat until removed from bathroom.

Overheard This Week

*
From a friend at lunch: "If I wanted a bossy old Asian lady to yell at me and push unappetizing food on me, I'd go have dinner with my Grandma."

*"So then after the guy hit me in the shins with his fender, he rolled his eyes before he got out of his car to feign concern for my well-being."

*A mother, three times the size of her child, after grabbing her daughter roughly by the arm and staring her bug-eyed in the face: "It's not what you said. It's how you said it. Now say it again." Frightened little daughter: "I love you."

*Teenage boy, after stepping onto an admittedly pee-smelling El train: "It smells like my Grandma's ass in here."

Welcome To Crazyville, I'm Bella, Can I Ask You To Leave?

My boss is home in Ireland this week, drinking Guinness and playing golf with friends. In other words, he's a bastard, and I hate him for being able to spend all week doing what I wish I were doing. (Well, except for the golf. That crap is boring.) So I'm holding down the office by myself, save for various colleagues popping in and out every three hours or so to send faxes and stuff.

So of course, this week all the neighborhood nutsies (or merely confused-ies) are out on parade, and since I recently moved my desk right in the front window, I'm sitting here like magnetic crazybait, and it's a freak-a-thon all day long. Our friendly neighborhood police are, at the moment, actively on the lookout for one of the "colorful characters," i.e., chittering wingnuts, who stroll the sidewalk in front of my office. See if you can guess which one, as we learn a little about our cast of characters. In order of appearance:

1. The mostly toothless man who stands on the sidewalk picking his nose with one hand and smoking a cigarette with another. He must be smoking cigarettes rolled in plutonium paper, because it takes six hours to burn them down to the filter, making the "I can't look out the window without getting totally grossed out" period painfully long. He also uses his nose-picking hand to scratch his yahoos every so often.

2. The mostly toothless man who came in once and asked me if this business and a related business were "fronts" for something else, wanted to know how we made our money, and now knocks on the window to wave at me when he walks by. One day he happened to go by right as I was coughing on a wrongly-swallowed swig of water, and came in to ask me if I had a cold, and if so, could he run to the local store to pick something up for me, since I'm a "nice girl." I believe he said his name is Richard, although I don't really care.

3. Four very tall and confused Ethiopian teenagers who came in one day asking for me to "send a message" for them. Maybe they thought we were an internet cafe? At least they seemed satisfied with my "We can't help you with that," and left without any fuss, unlike the stinky homeless men who come in proposing to wash our front windows with their greasy rags for $3, despite the "No Solicitors" sign in the front window. Those guys never take no for an answer, and on the occasions I have said yes to them, it's usually been just to get their stinky, alcohol-y selves out of my personal space.

4. Random confused and/or crazy people who look inside the front windows, perhaps think there's no one here, open the door, come in, and, when I stand up from my desk and greet them, back away and leave. What did they think they were coming in here for? If I hadn't been here what would they have done? What the, you know, hell?

5. People who not-so-discreetly slip things from hand to hand in broad daylight, and then slap money into each other's palms. Trading baseball cards, kids? Sure you are! That's why the local high school has metal detectors at every entrance!

6. Morbidly obese motorized wheelchair demons. I just saw another one one two seconds ago, while I was typing #5. She was wearing shoes, unlike many of them, and had an oxygen tube crammed up into her nose. She was also smiling quite broadly, for reasons I don't quite understand.

7. The dirty-looking dude with creepy long fingernails who leaned a tire iron outside the door to come in to sit down on one of our leather chairs, kick off his shoes, and freak out me and a tiny, soft-spoken co-worker with nonsensical questions, and a total lack of receptivity to our "is there something else we can help you with? If not, we need to get back to work now." Actually, he did respond to that one, but by saying "I'd like to stand here and look at you for awhile," instead of just leaving. He had a huge wad of cash falling out of one pocket, and after we practically pushed him out the door the first time, he came back in five minutes later to tell us that he was scouting for a film crew, that things weren't always what they first seemed to be, and that the plant by my desk was more full of life then many people he knew, and also, could he have one of the rocks the plant was sitting in? When he asked me how "they" had managed to "trap me here," I moved toward the door again in a "please leave" gesture, and he finally split. Then we locked the door and called the cops. Ding ding ding! That's right, if you guessed the cops are looking for crazy person #7, you're our winner! Grand prize: the Chicago Police Department on your speed dial!

Calpurnia Then and Now

(If I didn't write about my cats every once in awhile, I wouldn't be a good blogger, now would I?)

I enjoyed a nice day out of town this holiday weekend (which I urgently, desperately needed), and one nice surprise was pulling the memory card out of my camera while at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, and realizing there were photos in the camera's regular memory that I had lost some months back when my laptop crashed.

They were, of course, Very Important Kitty Pictures. Baby pictures of Calpurnia, to be exact. Pictures of her at roughly three weeks old, when my old neighbor back in Indiana found her in a tree with a few motherless siblings.

In the first one, behold the teacup-tiny cuteness, the giant eyes and ears, and witness the bewildered expression on her face, in which she looks, as a friend put it, "confused to be alive."

She looks all "What? I'm a kitten? I'm alive? Where's my mommy? My mommy is gone? You're my new mommy? Well, okay...I guess. Wait, what am I again? I'm a 'kitten?' Okay."

Then, in the next two, observe her evolution from a few measly ounces of blue-eyed fuzzwonderment to several pounds of long, lean, golden-eyed fierceness. I really can't believe how tiny and helpless she was.

Living Dolls - Requiem For the Self-Esteem of Swan Brooner

My bud at FourFour* put up links to the entire Living Dolls child beauty pageant documentary that aired on HBO several years back. I'm going to post some of the best/worst ten minutes right here, for your amused horror.

Skip ahead to minute three on this clip, and witness Mr. Shane and Mr. Michael, who live in big fat mansion in Alabama, making money off of ridiculous white trash mothers who shell out huge dollars for hair extensions on babies, and appliances to cover up missing teeth, and whorey makeup on six year olds.





Here's a clip of them training their own daughter, and training a little boy whose mother is weighing the pros and cons of spending money on growth hormones or pageant competition. You just have to see it to believe it.

And then there's Swan's trip to Mr. Shane and Mr. Michael's, where she goes through beauty pageant boot camp. The tacky house. The man singing "He's Still Working on Me." The fake affection the men show little Swan, probably only because her mommy is paying big (HBO-funded?) dollars to get extra training from them. It's unbelievable.

(*Four Four is now blogging for Celebreality. See? Another example of fun blogging leading to a "real" blogging gig. I love it! Congrats, Four Four!)

Seasons Change and So Do I

It's September. Summer is drawing to a close. Nothing is as important to a struggling, underemployed, still-adjusting transplant like beautiful weather, a sparkling lake, and acres and acres of beautiful greenery. I feel like I've taken full advantage of summer in Chicago, and yet, somehow, I feel like I've taken it for granted, because I'm very sorry to see it go.

To recap summer in Chicago, a few things bear repeating.

1. They're called skorts. Quit looking at me weird.

2. A bicyclist should, indeed, keep her mouth closed while traversing the Lake Shore Trail at a high rate of speed, lest she find herself choking on the hard-thoraxed insect of inevitability.

3. Hand-holding rollerbladers are agents of darkness and should have their wheels revoked.