The Underappreciated Eating Establishment Series: IHOP

Obviously kosher.

It was the kind of breakfast you take a picture of. Especially if you’re a nerd about food like I am. But as my boy D Hardcore says, “Generally, all people are geeks about something.”

When D and I sauntered in to IHOP last Thursday morning I was a flapjack away from syruping my pants. Is that IHOP logo dishware I see? A coffee pot flipped open, waiting for the fill, at each individual table? A mini bar boasting four fruity varieties of melted maple sugar???!!! I had a suspicion the International House of Pancakes was trying to romance me. This suspicion was further confirmed once D and I settled down with our menus and let the IHOP soundtrack permeate our pancake-obsessed brains. “Three Times A Lady,” “Unbreak My Heart**, ”Lovely Day.” FUCKING PERFECT. This is the music your grandfather would seduce your grandmother to, present day.

Or maybe I just relate the whole IHOP experience to the elderly because before Thursday morning, the only IHOP meals I remember vividly were taken with my grandparents in Florida. And it was always a “breakfast for dinner” trip. I was never thrilled with the idea of consuming breakfast in the evening, but I also willingly combined lox spread and tuna fish on a cinnamon raisin bagel (the Jewish appetizing sampler) at eight in the morning, so what the hell did I know. Besides, my Poppy LOVED his steak and eggs (can’t take that away from the man) and when you eat at 4:00pm on a Sunday, it can probably even be classified as brunch (if you’re a lazy New Yorker). Or linner, yeah yeah, I know.

One very important development that came out of these night trips to the International House of Old People was the Jones children’s love of coffee. Poppy drank his coffee light and very sweet and whenever he emptied a half-and-half into his mug he would fill the tiny empty container with sugary brew for his grandkids to sip. Our enjoyment of this ritual began more with the novelty of drinking from a thimble-sized cup than from the coffee itself, but eventually The College Man and I were sucked into a lifetime of incessant caffeine consumption, and at a ridiculously early age (5 and 9, maybe). I’m surprised the two of us aren’t five feet tall. And one thing I never realized about the mini-coffee routine is that in order to pass on a pint-sized café to each of his grandkids at the beginning of a meal, Poppy had to suck down enough coffee to free up THREE cream containers - and he only put one in each cup of joe. No wonder the man went to the bathroom so often. I’m surprised he wasn’t chattering like a wind-up toy by the end of the meal.

The three Jones kids were still ordering off the kiddie menu when IHOP was in the Florida restaurant rotation and we pretty much ordered the same thing every time. The College Man fed his love of sausage and other unidentifiable, encased pork products, whereas Rachel and I mostly stuck to the Funny Face, a massive chocolate chip pancake finished with a whipped cream and maraschino cherry smile (dessert for dinner).

Side note: Maraschino cherries taste like balls of Nyquil covered in Sweet n’ Low. Those things are nasty. All her life, Rachel has been eating maraschino cherries for two.

My tastes have expanded a bit since I was nine, and in an attempt to stray from the Funny Face (which I haven’t been able to order for 11 years anyway) I approached my latest IHOP excursion with a few goals in mind. I wanted to eat basically every breakfast food I have ever had a hankering for in one sitting, and by ordering only one selection off IHOP’s insanely inclusive combo menu. I wanted to nail down the perfect combination of breakfast’s sweet and salty offerings. Fuck the West Side brunch. I wanted eggs AND pancakes. Chocolate chip pancakes. I wanted to sit down in an IHOP and drink my own full mug of delicious coffee.

I thought it was going to take me about forty-five minutes to choose the right breakfast combo off IHOP's eight page menu, but it turns out The Breakfast Sampler, first option on the menu, is the breakfast I’ve been searching for my entire adult life. Two eggs (over easy, of course), bacon, sausage, ham, hash browns, and two buttermilk pancakes. I submitted my order to the waitress and bumped my flapjacks up to chocolate chip. Best $1.59 I ever spent. D Hardcore went with the classic “Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity, ” which pleased me to no end, basically because I wanted to mention the RTF&F in my blog. Again, everyone’s a geek about something. D’s breakfast was missing the hash browns and traveled a little lighter on the salty meats, but the gist of the meal was the same. Eggs, then pancakes. His stack was topped with blueberries and a massive dollop of whipped cream.

A few reasons why everyone should indulge in the IHOP breakfast:

1. Toppings (blueberries, chocolate chips, etc) are both BAKED INTO and loaded ON TOP OF IHOP’s amazingly fluffy pancakes. This makes all the difference in the world. There’s no strategic saving of chocolate chips for the last bite here. My pancakes were tinged brown from their chocolate stuffing. Pancakes as envisioned by Willy Wonka.

2. The Whipped cream topping. For breakfast!

3. Hash browns that are actually cooked until they’re WELL DONE. I am so sick of raw breakfast potatoes. Note to the cooks of New York: EVERYONE likes potatoes well done in the morning.

4. Crispy bacon. See hash browns.

5. Unlimited coffee in self-serve percolators. No waiting for refills. Unlimited creamers for easily amused grandchildren.


Okay, so D and I consumed the better part of a breakfast fit for four and hopped on the train downtown. Hardcore, the lucky bastard, didn’t have to work until 4pm but I plopped down at my desk at 11:00am ready to give birth to the entire IHOP menu. “We need hammocks where we can lay and rub our bellies.” D said to me before we parted ways.

I was faring pretty well until about 3:00pm when I decided, although I was barely hungry, to eat a salad and add some greens to whatever was already swimming around in my body. And this seemingly harmless lunch was what put me over the edge. In fact, I wanted to post about my IHOP breakfast last week but I couldn’t even think about pancakes until I woke up this morning. I decided at around 4pm on Thursday that I would wait another year until I ate at IHOP again.

But when I do, you’re all invited. I’ll make you each a little coffee of your own.


**Toni Braxton, I SO owned your album.

The College Man: Observing the High Holidays

Voicemail left on my phone at 2:29 am this morning:

The College Man: Yooooooooooooo. Happy 4/20. (Almost singing) Haaaappy 4/20! Heh heh. It's your brother, in case you haven't figured it out.

After hanging up, The College Man surely completed his sacred 4/20 ritual by gorging on matzoh, macaroons and other kosher-for-Passover products. Nothing quenches the munchies like unleavened eatables.


L'Chaim bitches!

Purell: An Office Obsessed

Almost exactly a month ago I started work at the new gig, and not in the most ideal first-day-of-work state. Pummeling through that first week, I was about as sick as I get - hacking cough, runny nose, the chills, sweats, visions of death, "daymares" about babies named Moses...the works. I rolled up in the dub room blowing my Jewish honker about once every five minutes, my damp, transparent tissues forming a snot pyramid on the corner of my desk while I waited for the arrival of my new garbage pail. So I wasn't all that surprised when my lovely co-worker K-Boogie asked me an hour into my first shift if I had "gotten [my] bottle of Purell" yet. When I answered no, she handed me an economy size pump bottle of the clearish goo - ten pounds worth of antibacterial power-slime. But I did kind of look like I was bitten by the monkey in Outbreak at the time, so I figured K-Boogie was dropping a subtle and valid hint that I might want to try and contain my germage for the sake of the office. Turns out people in this office are just freakishly obsessed with that Purell shit.

Purell has always seemed pointless to me. Perhaps the sticky, antibacterial gel is useful in airplanes, porta potties and other unfortunate places in which access to running water is lacking, but I still have issue with the fact that hand sanitizers don't eradicate bacteria. These products simply KILL the little guys, leaving thousands, millions of dead bacterial cells on the surface of your skin. YUM. But my coworkers seem convinced that applying this shit seven and eight times a day keeps them healthy in this science experiment of an office environment.

A few different arguments have been presented to me to emphasize the value of Purell use and the product's indespensibility in the workplace. The dubbers are particularly devoted to the preventative slop, and have recounted frequent incidents of unsanitary practices committed by other officemates as grounds for conversion to frequent, water-free sanitation. They are particularly emphatic in their descriptions of men who leave the bathroom without washing their hands (unapologetically) and blatantly sick coworkers who refill their water bottles by sticking the nozzle right up and around the communal tap after they've put the container to their germ-ridden lips.

"I open the bathroom door with a paper towel now." my coworker T-Money told me one day. "And I buy water bottles to bring to the office. I won't drink from the water cooler anymore."

I don't know if it's out of disbelief that these incidences occur as frequently as the dubbers propose, or if it's just sheer laziness, but I couldn't give a rat's ass about what lingers on the communal water dispenser. Both before and after these germcentric, germphobic conversations I have grabbed the door handles in the bathroom, full palm to metal, and I drink about twice a day from that infected cooler. I never really saw the logic in worrying about those little things. The dude that doesn't wash his hands in the bathroom before he opens the door also touches the coffee pot you're gonna pick up ten minutes from now, so what's the difference if you pick up his ass-paramecium now or later? You ingest, on average, somewhere between 7 and 10 spiders a year. You won't die from a little bathroom bacilli.

Another point I have made in the Purell debates is the familiar argument that hand sanitizers kill off both harmful and benign bacteria and the lack of exposure to these germs that we have been living with for centuries (peacefully and realtively healthily I might add), makes us more suceptible to their negative effects. By attempting to create an unnaturally sterile environment in the workplace, one essentially makes him/herself more vulnerable to attack by bacteria in the future. Instead of bathing in Purell these people should be going to the gym to build up their overall immune system. Or playing in dirt for Christ's sake.

I personally like the tactic employed by an old coworker in the Citi. "The Popcorn Man," as he was called, visited the counter flanking my cubicle every day for the entire month of February to stick his bare hands into a massive tub of Popcorn Factory Popcorn. A few notable things about this tin o' corn:

1. It arrived in the office in early December.
2. Almost everyone in the office contributed their special brand of microscopic creature to the tin's cheese and caramel-covered contents.
3. At least one woman attributed her rapid-fire 24-hour virus to her consumption of the popcorn. Chances are there were many more silent victims.

Did this seemingly poisonous substance kill The Popcorn Man? Hells no! The Popcporn Man just kept on coming, dipping his adventurous paws right in there. Sure enough, like the Dread Pirate Roberts with his Iocaine powder, The Popcorn Man developed an immunity to the contents of that snowflake-adorned petri dish, one cup at a time. I believe that man could work in a classroom full of snot-covered first graders and never get a cold. He could have sex with Pam Anderson and not catch the Hep-C. If New York were struck in Biological warfare, The Popcorn Man would be the only one left standing.

So as I enter my second month at the new yabbo, on the verge of an illness as irritating as the first one, I look up to The Popcorn Man for guidance and inspiration. My coworkers will tell me I'm sick because I refuse to lather up with their gooey gunk. They'll tell me Purell's 62% ethyl alcohol content will kill off the germs that plague me. But I'll embrace my illness and I'll touch the goddamn doorknob sans papertowel, because that's what The Motherfucking Popcorn Man would do. And that guy's gonna live forever.

The Crossover Bridge: Blackalicious at B.B. Kings, 4/1/06

So I saw Blackalious at B.B.King's this past Saturday with Jay-Z, Ken Tailey and Ken's friend Gravy. It turns out Gravy knows more about cheesy 80's romantic comedy than any man should, but he did earn major points by showing much love to the consistently overlooked, Some Kind of Wonderful. Eric Stoltz (yes!) stars as a Keith, an artist/mechanic (he's good with his hands) and social misfit who lusts after the "hottest girl in school" (who frankly, needed to show a little more skin). There is a montage shower/date-prep scene soundtracked by a tune of the same name as Lea Thompson's softly sexy yet unattainable screen persona "Miss Amanda Jones." And Mary Stuart Masterson plays Keith's dykish tomboy of a best friend Watts, who alternately bangs her drumsticks and insults Keiths's dream girl to hide the fact that she wants the kid's cock and a pair of diamond earrings on which the idiot spent his entire college tuition (his "future"). This film marked the climax of eighties cinema, my friends. Gravy, you kick ass for knowing it.

80's movies don't have much to do with the actual Blackalicious performance, unless we're talking about the dress code of the audience. I was sort of expecting a hipster-heavy turnout at the show because of a Blackbook article I scanned a couple weeks ago, which made it apparent that Blackalicious is the default "favorite rapper" of nearly every up-and-coming indie musician.* I didn't expect to see a solid sea of cropped leggings, mismatched garments and matted, overgrown locks, however. I mean, who wears a blazer to a Blackalicious concert? And where were the homies at? Blackalicious is now to indie music what J5 was to the jam band scene. The group brings smooth, easy hooks, intricate, literary lyricism and messages more palatable to trust fund hipsters** than say, Ghostface's "Whip You With a Strap" (one of the more poignant and compelling jams on his latest, Fishscale). It's wasn't too hard to picture the misplaced audience grooving to the liberal slang of "Paragraph President." But the crowd (aside from the front four rows of devotees) remained fairly stiff and composed. Too bad these kids only know how to dance to Joy Division.

Perhaps I'm not giving this concert experience its due. Gift of Gab was spot-on, as he always is when he shows up (two out of four times I've seen Blackalicious he's been mysteriously absent), spitting out classics like "Chemistry Calisthenics" and his Speedy Gonzalez freestyle with equal effortless flow. Plus, you can't undervalue the company of Ken Tailey, who does an awesome hip-hop shuffle to "Deception," while hollering, "Laaaaaa-da-di-da..." But two months ago I saw Big Daddy Kane take the stage at the Nokia Theater and motherfucker! That place was rank with down-and-dirty energy. Fists pumped the air and lyrics spilled out the mouths of worshippers - natural, uncontainable. Sweat and heat and sauce and love mixed in that pit below the stage and you felt on fire in the middle of it. Now, Big Daddy Kane was no doubt the highlight of the night (the headliner was the awesome-on-record, mediocre-in-person MF Doom), but all that hip hop show seemed to have in common with the one I just saw was a familiar smell and happy cloud of smoke overhead.

Again, this isn't to say that I didn't enjoy myself or that Blackalicious didn't put on a great performance. The encore, always the highlight of their shows brought longtime tour companions The Lifesavas and other openers and guests out in a freestyle free-for-all, ending with a choice exhibiton of Gift of Gab's slick rhymes. But the line that stuck in my brain was one he called out mid-set:

"...I cross the bridge to Brooklyn..."

When met with a deafening roar from an audience of mini Julian Casablancas', I couldn't help but remark underbreath, "I'm pretty sure he didn't mean Williamsburg."

*Side note regarding the "Favorite Beatle" category: None of you fuckers give Paul McCartney ANY fucking credit.
**I want a trust fund.

Requests in April snow

This morning Miss Stacia received an e-mail request from famous photographer Dustbin Cohen. "Tell me a story," he wrote.

Okay Dustbin, for you, the story of the underdressed girl who walked to work:

One morning after the gym a lovely young lady on the UWS put on a light sweater, a pair of sheer, capri stockings with motorcycle boots and an a-line corduroy skirt. She looked out her window and thought to herself, "it's sunny outside, if not so warm. I think I'll walk to work." Fooled by the glowing rays streaming through her window, the underdressed girl tentatively put on a scarf followed by her light/midweight jacket - outerwear that would prove to be a bit too cropped and pocketless to protect from the weather to come.

As the underdressed girl set out from her cozy abode, she relished in her seemingly fitting choice of garments. She felt light and comfortable, as she should, setting out for a fifty block walk. The underdressed girl fell into a robust stride, gliding over blocks in an easy fashion, forsaking the regular isolation of her headphones for the soothing calm of the late morning city streets.

But as soon as the underdressed girl hit Times Square the sky fell black and the wind started thrashing at her near-bare legs. Invisible droplets threatened her freshly lined eyes and her hands, gloveless and without shelter, began to crack and numb in the cold. Tourists everywhere flung up umbrellas in vain, attempting to combat an enemy that approached not only from the sky, but from Broadway’s incessantly flashing side corridors. The underdressed girl, shivering a mere ten blocks from her destination, considered cutting short her odyssey and taking refuge for one quick stop underground.

But the underdressed girl persevered. Though her mountain climbing legs were damp and cold, she chugged away at the pavement, clacking wood to stone ten blocks further, stopping only to commune with the Korean deli manager to purchase her usual banana and hazelnut brew.

Now the underdressed girl sits at her desk, her toes still a bit frigid from the journey. She is grateful to be inside. A flood of coworkers report, one right after the other, of the snow falling from the skies. And the underdressed girl sits at her desk and dreams of summer dresses and open toes.

Meet the (New) Coworkers: Rishchard Orleans

It's been a tough transition month over here at Collections are Dangerous. I've had to adjust to waking up at 10:00 am instead of 7:00am, to wearing jeans and sneakers instead of corporate couture, to eating Wendy's instead of Grilled Fiesta Chicken Lean Cuisines. Frankly, I'm exhausted from all the letting loose.

But I'm finally back in the groove, ready to dish on the peeps I've been getting to know over the past few weeks, people who will certainly inform and inspire future prolific postings by Miss Stacia.

Let's start with Rishchard Orleans, the thirty-something Williamsburgite (originally from Louisiana) who sits directly behind me and is my companion for the final hour of my wacky 11-8 schedule.

A few things you should know about Rishchard:

1. He is the drummer in a stand-up-comedy band called Tickle Dracula (also known as Scratch Mummy, Massage Wolfman and Indian Burn Frankenstein).
2. His wife picks out his clothes for him, and has impeccable taste (I also hear she's a dead ringer for Drew Barrymore.).
3. When he puts a rubber band around his forehead, cinching his unruly coif, he looks a bit like Michael Flatley .
4. He's on a no-cookie diet. Things he CAN eat on this diet include barbequed pork and brisket, hamburgers, burritos and more barbequed pork.
5. He doesn't like it when you call his mother a whore.

Rishchard and I initially bonded out of necessity - we are two of the only people in our department who are in the office past 7:00pm and frankly, it gets dull enough to floss by about ten after seven. But we came to find that we actually have a lot in common, including a love of smoked meats and reverence for Michael McDonald.

For some reason, my conversations with Rishchard often revolve around my religion. I can't say whether this is due to my penchant for poking fun at my own people or Rishchard's closet jealousy of Those Who Have Been Chosen. There are a couple things we have decided to agree upon regarding Judaism and tolerance in general, however:

1. Neither of us would protest if uber-frightening, barely legal duo Prussian Blue was "compromised" as Rishchard put it, in some way in the future.
2. Both of us think jokes emphasizing Jewish stereotypes are funny.

Since Monsieur Orleans is not a born Jew, which is kind of a qualification for harping on the offensive social attributes of a people, Rishchard and I decided to inagurate one another into our repspective heritage circles. As a result, Rishchard and I are now both Scottish Jews. We will wear kilts and drink Manischewitz at every wedding we attend from this day forward.

And as an honorary Jew, Richshard now has full-reign to participate in Jewish jokes of all kinds. I can't remember exactly how this little Semetic diddy got started, but just yesterday Jew Orleans and I rewrote the (Raffi?) children's classic "I'm Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee.":

Miss Stacia: I am a little Jewey Bumblebee. Won't my mommy be so proud of me. No, wait. I am a little Jewey Bumblebee. Pick up quarters, underneath the tree.

Rishchard: Shouldn't you use the word guilty?

Miss Stacia: I'm am a little Jewey Bumblebee. Grandma makes me feel oh so guilty. I am a little Jewey Bumblebee. On Shabbat cannot use energy.

Rishchard: How about, I am a little Jewey Bumblebee. Something, something something, usury.

Miss Stacia: HA.

Rishchard: Yeah, that comparative religion degree's really paying off.

Let's NOT talk about what happened in the green kitchen

Today at the new(ish)job in the dub room: In addition to hearing Ah-nold repeat "My name is Julius. I'm your twin brother!" over and over again to a Hawaiian shirt-clad Danny Devito, I was forced to sit through the movie Sybil in it's entirety. For those of you who weren't exposed to this profoundly disturbing movie in 6th grade health class by Mr. Mandell, Sybil is story of a multiple personality headcase, played by a super young Sally Field, who attempts to get to the root of her traumatic childhood. Occasionally Fields simply portrays Sybil, muted and confused, a woman unaware of the workings of her complex mental condition. But most of the time Fields bounces back and forth between Sybil's three or four dominant alternate personalties, in different degrees of annoying whine and tantrum.

How does a woman develop twelve personalities that are completely unaware of each others' existence? It probably has something to do with a schizophrenic mother's unnatural use of knives and buttonhooks. (These tools were most likely employed in the green kitchen.) It might have something do do with enemas or the forced holding of a young girl's bladder in the piano room. If you haven't studied the case or seen the film, I'm telling you, you don't want to know - it's fucking traumatizing. I for one, would rather view a hundred made-for-TV movies about teenage bulimia, (preferably starring a post-Full House DJ Tanner, or maybe Tracy Gold?) than suffer through this nightmare of a movie again.

Business Trip: Blackout Holiday at The Knitting Factory Tap Bar, 3/9/06

I always wonder when the turn comes where seeing live music becomes an occasion instead of a way of life. Generations of music lovers have made the same claim: We will forever enjoy sucking down Magic Hat in a basement bar while banging our heads to killer drum beats. And then along come fourteen-hour-days, endless errands, infectious and corrosive television addictions. All of a sudden you’re at the Knitting Room Tap Bar in a room full of suits and it’s been two years since you saw U2 at The Garden, four years since you’ve worshipped at the altar of “standing room only” and about five years since you’ve really lived, god damn it! Make my return to this sound-filled cavern count. Suck me backwards through the timeline. Shake the walls of my structured world and make me feel alive!

Good thing Blackout Holiday’s got chops. A combination of contagious melodies and painstaking polish, the band proved at their Knitting Factory show last night that they can ride the precarious line between wound tight and wound out. It is difficult to finesse roughness without sacrificing raw edge, but Blackout Holiday laces up and lashes out in all the right places. Rich’s voice is slick, a surprisingly soothing salve over the booming drum crashes and silvery riffs. Although the bands plucks more from early nineties grunge and arena rock than eighties new wave, Rich’s voice leads to The Stone Roses and Morrissey like the inescapable familiarity of an ex-girlfriend’s perfume. The bass lines are clean, fast and bold, standout enough to catch the ear of an amateur listener and perfectly synched with the companion thrashing and crashing. If anything this band is well rehearsed. But the real story of this band is in the drummer, Charles Palmer, trader-by-day, musician by night, and the party responsible for the unusual outpouring of suited, shiny-shoed support.

Palmer is an ogre on the skins. He rips through songs, tears into them with vicious teeth, sets a voracious pace with his ferocious, deliberate chomps. Palmer recently subbed in R&B quintet Damsel & Fly, showcasing his ease and comfort behind the barrels and demonstrating amazing proficiency and adaptability after minimal rehearsal time with silken-voiced Jasmine Jamillah and her soul-funk crew. But although the man is all soul – more groove than crash, more jah than g-d of rock - Palmer was built for caveman pounding. Fierce, but meticulously organized, the drummer’s reverence for experimental rhythmic organization is evident. The last song in the set was an especially acute sample of the drummer’s innovation, with Palmer leaning heavily on the left side of his kit, eyes closed, shooting calculated magic out his wands.

The beat connects the band to the earth. Watching the gravel fly, businessmen are brought back to simpler days.

The College Man: "Happy Birthday to Me Motherfucker!"

Happy birthday College Man. May the next year bring you happiness and may the women flow as freely as the Miller High Life. Now hit that bong!


Shayna and Adam celebrate another year closer to legal drunkeness.

The Inevitable Next Step

Digital Mad Libs. I used the age-old strategy of inserting mostly dirty(ish) words to try and maximize the comedy and in the end learned the lesson that you can never go dirty enough with your "verbs ending in -ing." (I guess kids still don't recognize the word "gerund," eh?)

The results:

Learn to Be a Rock Star
I'm at a new school. Its name is “The Miss Stacia School for Rock Stars.” The courses here are horny!

My first assignment is to learn to play the skin flute and sing like a rock star. To be a good rock star, I'm supposed to blow around a lot, to grab across the stage, and to tease at the audience. I did not act like that at my old school, so I think I'll have to work on it for a while; this will be interesting homework.

My second assignment is to learn to have an entourage, which is a group of people that always seems to follow around a rock star. I have a lot of friends, but for this assignment I suddenly have 6969 people following me around, telling me how brutal I am, how they really like my nipple tassel, and how I am the most hairy person ever. I can't be sure, but I think they are just saying that.

My final assignment is to put on a rock concert. I have to arrive in a lawnmower and walk the "fuck me red" carpet, past all the plunging fans with cameras flashing in my face. Then, when I get inside, my entourage will be there and I will pinch with them to the stage. Next, I'll perform deux songs, all while stroking across the stage, singing, and climaxing at the audience. This will be the toughest final exam I've ever had, and the one I'll never forget!

Office Mash-Up

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Digital Narcissist

Apparently I'm not the only one.

The Valentine Years: Rotting Candy, Dirty Cards and Unrequited Love

“The Valentine Years,” my last two years at West Hollow Middle School (seventh and eighth grade), were the only two years of my twenty-three in which I have received Valentine’s Day presents from a member of the opposite sex. (Sorry mom, the Popcorn Factory tins were tasty, but NO, I will not make out with you.) It's interesting that at this time in my adolescent life guys chose to pay attention to me, since it was BY FAR the height of my pre-teen awkwardness (read: fugliness). I straddled the “in-between” phase in a frizzed-out, shoulder-length blunt cut, blue-trimmed mouth metal that marked the near-end of my seven year relationship with my orthodontist, and a wardrobe that included tapered jeans and a random GAP baseball jersey that I inexplicably wore on sixth grade picture day (Did I even like baseball? Or the GAP?). Dazrazzle, will never let me live that down.

(Please peeps, send pictures if you have 'em.)

Miraculously overlooking my stringy frame and snowflake sweaters, a few guys actually went out of their way to “date” me in middle school. The first of these strapping young fellows was Ted Rosenquist. Ted was a year younger then me, but he was the guy all my seventh grade girlfriends adored. Ted, of course, turned out to be gay, immediately squashing my chances of avoiding one of the clichéd dating inevitables. I was young, yes, but I should have known. We DID first meet in Chorus and Drama Club. What a talented Tevia he was.

Ted and I maybe kissed three times. I can’t remember if he was good, I can’t even remember how long we were in our “relationship.” All I remember is that on Valentine’s Day Ted presented me with a gift bag full of candy of the drug store holiday variety – large bricks of milk chocolate molded into heart and cherub shapes, sheathed behind the display plastic of decorative boxes. At least one of the hearts had a face carved into it, finished off with colored, sugar-button eyes. I recall this with clarity because I kept that candy, in Ted’s gift bag, in my bedroom armoire to periodically reflect upon its cheesy implications. I didn’t eat a single piece of chocolate; I simply stored the candy away, a souvenir of my very first “real” relationship.

Fast forward. One day, freshman year of college, my mother calls me.

“Stacey Lauren! How long have you been keeping this disgusting, cruddy chocolate in your cabinet?! There is a major pest problem in here Stacey, it’s fucking gross.”

I had kept Ted’s chocolate in my armoire for SEVEN YEARS. Conveniently I wasn’t in the state of New York when mom figured this out. (I’d like to give a shout out to my mother and to the exterminator who helped rid my room of the infested remnants of Ted’s chocolate love, once and for all.)

The only other man who tried to woo me with gifts on Valentine’s Day was Paul Bennett. Paul may have bought me candy. I think he bought me a rose. I didn’t care much. I was hot for Paul’s brother Dave.

Dave Bennett was another baby-faced youngster (I was going through a phase) who became the object of my not-so-subtle obsession right around the time of my Bat Mitzvah. I flaunted my wiry frame and wrote him psycho love notes, and although he was cordial enough, (his nervous message to the camera on my Bat Mitzvah video: “Umm, hi Stacey. You look very nice, and, ummm, pretty. Bye.”) he didn’t have reciprocal pubescent longing for my skinny brace-face. Granted, my overly aggressive approach most definitely sabotaged any chance I had with the kid (which in reality, still probably equaled zero.) but I wanted to make sure Dave wasn’t mistaking his feelings of love for feelings of violent repulsion.

One night, I was hanging with Dave at my friend Kat’s house. I really must halt to explain Kat Piedmore’s house for a minute. There were absolutely NO RULES at Kat’s. This was the place where kids (myself included) played seven minutes in heaven and spin the bottle for the first time. This is where we would eat raw cookie dough until we were ready to puke, where kids would JUMP OFF THE ROOF onto Kat’s backyard trampoline. It’s amazing her parents were never sued. There was never active supervision of any kind. Kat’s parents were always rumored to be tucked away in their bedroom or doing work in an office I could never seem to locate. Mom’s station wagon was almost always in the driveway, but for some reason she never skirted past us in the kitchen, never checked on Kat in her room, never asked when I had arrived or when I was going home. Kat Piedmont’s house was the No Restriction Zone. Kat’s was the one and only place where the quintessential Stacia/Dave Bennett experience could have taken place.

One night after school Dave, Kat and I were all hanging out at the house when Kat left me to talk with my crush in her room, door closed. Maybe it was the artificial steaminess of Kat’s blacklight and lava lamp igniting the dark room. It probably had something to do with my frustration at my inability to lock Dave under my thumb, and it was definitely related to the overflow of hormonal juices suddenly pumped into my system upon my thirteenth birthday. But no sooner had Kat closed the door, than did I slam Dave up against the wall to shove my tongue down his throat. I was a fan of the hard sell. The move was executed completely against Dave’s will in a minor deviation from the ever popular “no means no” mantra (“no means yes?”). I assumed he would be turned on by my gutsy move, but it became clear pretty quickly – when he called his dad to pick him up – that my moves didn’t stir a twitch in my shy man’s loins.

Thinking back on it now, I probably scared the living crap out of him. Fuck you Seventeen Magazine for your shitty ass advice.

So Kat introduced me to Paul. Paul, Dave’s older brother, was in his first year of high school and was actually slightly better looking than the younger Bennett. He was also strangely free of standards that would have prevented him from picking up a middle schooler who was currently toiling for the attention of his younger sibling. Paul and I hung out at Kat’s a few times after school (for some reason Kat used to hang out with both brothers but dated neither) and we did end up hitting it off reasonably well. Enough for him to gift me on Valentine’s Day.

So again, I don’t really remember what Paul bought me for V-Day, 1996, but I DO remember the cards. That’s cardS, plural. Paul, that crafty little devil, mailed a sweet little “decoy card” to my house the day before Valentine’s Day. I can't recall if I even showed that one to mom. Valentine's night, Paul’s father dropped his son off with a gift and another card, which I opened with Paul in my upstairs bedroom (door open). The front of the “real card” depicted a woman sticking her long red tongue in a man’s ear as he exclaimed, “Ooh! That tickles!” The inside of the card had something to do with pulling my pants down to give me a good licking. (Thanks Daz for being on top of that one.) That wish was not so easily granted seeing as how my father popped his head into my bedroom every ten minutes. Paul also added a handwritten paragraph of his own describing dirty things a fifteen-year-old might want to do to a fourteen-year-old.

As soon as Paul left I ran downstairs to show my mother (who thought the card was hilarious).

So much for the decoy.

Happy V-Day Ted and Paul (and Dave, what the hell).

Bitch! You know what I want! I wanna talk to Lipton!

If you haven’t caught the two-hour Dave Chappelle interview on Inside the Actor’s Studio, FIND THE TIME. In addition to the hearing the real explanation behind Chappelle’s trip to Africa you will see:

- a ballet dance off between James Lipton and Chappelle
- Clayton Bigsby call James Lipton a Jew
- James Lipton use transitions like, “and then you recorded the sketch ‘I’m Going to Piss on You’…”

You will also be reminded that this past summer Chappelle got a bunch of his musician friends together including Kanye, Mos Def, Talib, Erkyah Badu and the Roots, for a block party in Brooklyn. This is the concert that reunited The Fugees. And Michel fucking Gondry recorded the whole thing and made a film out of it to add some reverb to the orgasm of it all. I had almost completely forgotten this movie was in production, but it’s finally being released. Opens March 3, bitch!

The College Man: Still Alive?

Devoted Collections are Dangerous Readers may have noticed the absence of College Man posts after December break. This is because The College Man, after being magnetically repelled from his Long Island abode by a force later identified as Naggus Extremus, retreated to his Maryland sanctuary where he has reportedly split his time building gravity bongs out of soda bottles and conducting a quality survey of U of M chicks' racks. The man is busy and I assume he’s got no time for my trifling chit chat, so I usually leave him alone.

But this afternoon around 1:10pm, acting on spontaneous maternal instinct and my building curiosity as to what the fuck he’s been up to the past two months, I decided to give Adam a buzz. He was, of course, sleeping.

ADAM: “UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHH.”
MISS S: “Hello?”
ADAM: “UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHH.”
MISS S: “Guess you don’t have class today, huh?”
ADAM: (croaks) “No…………………I do.”
MISS S: “What time?”
ADAM: (pause) “Twenty minutes.”
MISS S: “It’s a good thing I called then, right?”
ADAM: (silence)
MISS S: “Right?”
ADAM: (silence)
MISS S: “Are you hung over or just tired?”
ADAM: “Tired.”
MISS S: “Do you want me to let you go so you can get up?”
ADAM: “UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHH”
MISS S: “Alright buddy. Talk to you soon.”

The College Man lives up to his name. Kid’s doing just fine.

Birthday Glamour Shots with The Bonz

Sadly, The Bonz left her sparkle feather boa at the office.

On Wednesday, February 8, 1977, doctors in a Detroit hospital were startled when, seeking a cry to acknowledge the proper breathing patterns of newborn Bonzley Mortimer, they applied their obligatory tap to The Bonz’s baby buns and induced a wail that sounded less like less like the conventional “waaaaaaaaaaa!” and more like, “Daaaaaaaaaaavid Yuuuuuuuuuurman!”

Straight out of the womb the kid knew what she wanted for her birthday.

If you wear it ten times it practically pays for itself.

Before "Oh Al!" there was the swan dress, the outfit that consummated my Halloween obsession. Constructed in the first months of my junior year of college with the aid of a few reliable online vendors and a talented, albeit confused Chinese seamstress on Commonwealth Avenue, I managed to piece together the infamous feathered frock to flaunt it on a gorgeous, unseasonably warm night in Beantown. My seductively understated version of the notoriously panned, criminally misunderstood garment met a warm reception from both Oscar-associating waifs sporting last-minute variations on the "slutty college chick" ensemble, and wigged, glittered gay men attracted to dramatic plumes and creatively employed dancewear.



Every year following the Year of the Swan I have attempted to throw my creation back into the Halloween rotation, but it always feels wrong to repeat. The execution of a new idea accounts for ninety percent of my Halloween fun. But did I really ask a Chinese grandmother to sew the head of a plush swan to a white leotard so I could display her fine craftsmanship but one October eve? What a waste of feathered finery.

Then yesterday on Paper Magazine's online listings page:

ARMY OF BJORK
Who is it that never lets you down? Why it’s Bjork, in fact! You’ve sat through hour upon hour of Lars Van Trier films and you’ve pummeled pesky paparazzi, but you’re still no closer to Icelandic virtuoso Bjork. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Sprinkle on some fairy glitter and throw together your favorite poultry-themed dress, before heading over to not-so-Hidden Place Stain Bar for a Bjork-themed costume party. Go. Really. It’s not up to you.
Stain Bar, 766 Grand St., (718) 387-7840. 8 p.m. Free.

Sadly, my costume currently migles with Mama Jones' matching velour sweatsuits in a Long Island closet, but I'm not sure I would have had the cajones to doll myself up and head to a party without a Matthew Barney, or at least my good friend Leeloo. My real problem, however, lies in my inability to let go of the following three questions:


How many people actually have swan dresses sitting in the closet, waiting to be pulled out on Bjork night?

Who are these people? (Aside from crazy dog owners and Ellen.)

Am I really one of them?

Nerd of the Day

Since the issuing of my fancy corporate email account, I have been receiving and religiously filing away Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day emails, aspiring to one day study them like a fifth grade spelling list, potentially sparking the reactivation of a writer’s brain paralyzed by six months of transcription, travel & expenses and filing. Late one Friday afternoon, finally reaching the pinnacle of office boredom, I formulated the more specific goal of trying squeeze as many Words of the Day as possible into random sentences at work. This really did used to be one of my LEAST favorite elementary spelling and vocabulary exercises. I believe it was Tuesday’s regular assignment:

Monday: Write the word five times (Come on, this is cake.)
Tuesday: Use 10 words in a sentence. (Significantly more difficult.)
Wednesday: Use 15 words in a story. Story must contain a minimum of ten sentences. (Bitch, this will take me past Full House.)
Thursday: Study for exam. (Only if Veronica Vaughn practice tests me.)

Of course when the next Monday came around, instead of attempting to seamlessly integrate the word “gimcrack” into an email about the new central conference calendar, I defaulted to poring obsessively over Gawker’s jabs at Oprah fans (“OPRAH! OHMAGAH! YOU ARE SUUUUCH AN INSPIRATION!”) and searching Pitchfork for clotty reviews of over-hyped albums I’d missed while rotting away in my cubicle de silence. It wasn’t until January 13, 2005 that a particular Dictionary.com word nudged me out of my language lethargy. Most Word of the Day submissions are pretty pedestrian, but every once in a while a word will jump out, as did Jan 13th’s “sesquipedalian,” which, landing in my inbox, prompted an immediate forward to my friend Jen-Z – even before I read the definition – with the commentary, “Longest word of the day EVER.”

Opening the email then reaped the grandest of rewards:

sesquipedalian \ses-kwuh-puh-DAYL-yuhn\,
adjective:
1. Given to or characterized by the use of long words.
2. Long and ponderous; having many syllables.

noun:
A long word.

I mean, OBVIOUSLY.

This is the kind of gratifying coincidence that prompts nerdy boasting, an activity at which I excel. Last Wednesday afternoon by the copy machine, I had to tell Ken Tailey.

“I thought this Word of the Day was really long and then it turns out the word means really long and wordy!”

(Ken stares blankly.)

I forwarded Ken the aforementioned Word of the Day email and he was enthralled with my linguistic enthusiasm, you could tell. Later that afternoon, scanning my Word of the Day storage bank, I felt compelled to send him yet another word-related email:

From: Jones, Stacia
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 4:28 PM
To: Tailey, Ken
Subject: FW: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

another good one, especially if you're looking for words to convey a general state of wordiness:

Word of the Day for Tuesday December 6, 2005

logorrhea \law-guh-REE-uh\,
noun:
Excessive talkativeness or wordiness.

To which he responded…

From: Tailey, Ken
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 4:34 PM
To: Jones, Stacia
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

isn't that a venereal disease?

From: Jones, Stacia
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 4:38 PM
To: Tailey, Ken
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

stick to finance kent.

From: Jones, Stacia
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 4:40 PM
To: Tailey, Ken
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

although, the fact you spelled venereal correctly (and knew how to pronounce the word "heifer") proves you have a certain aptitude for the english language. i think...

From: Tailey, Ken
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 4:51 PM
To: Jones, Stacia
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

i pride myself on my ability to spell venereal. thanks for noticing.

I finally recognized our discourse as the perfect opportunity to begin integrating my Dictionary.com words, prompting a chain of (quite obviously business-related) vocab-laden emails…

From: Jones, Stacia
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 5:03 PM
To: Tailey, Ken
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

i am but a tyro when juxtaposed with your assidious and laudable pursuit of lexicon mastery.

(4 dictionary words of the day in there.)

Which morphed into an all out war…

From: Tailey, Ken
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 11:06 AM
To: Jones, Stacia
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

i think you mean assiduous. the fact that you wrote assidious instead of assiduous is insidious.

From: Jones, Stacia
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 12:07 PM
To: Tailey, Ken
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

Not so much insidious as incommodious or unpropitious.

From: Ken Tailey
Sent: Thursday, January 26, 2006 12:46PM
To: Jones, Stacia
Subject: RE: logorrhea: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

i was going for the faux rhyme w/ your made-up word, so while the definition could be construed as not perfectly apt, i'd wager it's not incorrect to describe your offense as tantamount to grammatical treachery.

Good game Kent. However…

Although you lambast me for errors of spelling, you fail to recognize how overly caustic language (Treachery? Really?) and non-existent, half-French compounds (What exactly is a faux rhyme?) encumber your execution. But in an attempt to assuage you and quell our respective pugnacious inclinations I offer this small concession. As Grammar subsumes both the spelling and usage of words, I acknowledge that neither of our grammatical delinquencies was significantly more contemptible than the other.

And as I demonstrate my commitment to the assiduous pursuit of proper grammar and spelling, I ask that you set aside your vainglory and allow me to conclude this discourse, as I am notoriously sesquipedalian and approach logorrhea.

Unless you feel compelled to comment, that is.

"and get more cheese than Doritos, Cheetos or Fritos..."

Last night Doom spit my very favorite line off Madvillainy, and for an artist with such an extensive catalog to choose from, that’s all I could ask for, really. I didn’t know most of Doom’s jams. He played a ton off MMM…Food and earlier albums I don't own, only touching briefly on the insta-classic that sold me and not at all on his latest Aquateen-splattered collab. No surprise cameo from Danger Mouse and no banging kick-start. My ladies and I, after force-feeding ourselves booze and drilling for last-reserve adrenaline until 12:05am on a Thursday night, held out for a particular menacing beat to mark Doom’s entrance, hoping the tinkling of West coast piano chords and a Cee-Lo chorus would announce our hero.

“His name’s…DOOM.”

No such luck. Although we did get the mask (for 40 measly minutes!).

The show, starting at 9:00 in the Space Mountain-like cavern of the Nokia Times Square Theater featured a legion of wordsmiths, many of whom eluded my quaint hip-hop knowledge base. We arrived in time for Big Daddy Kane’s entire set, a sizzling display of mike skills and gripping beats that bumped my crew into motion, even in our exhaustion and impatience. A jacked rapper in a black muscle tank (don’t ask me who it was, I have no idea) came out to sling some old-school hits, striking the reminiscence chord dead on. He flaunted the most obscenely huge triceps on record, bricks bulging beneath his skin. Throwing those hands in the air to “wave ‘em like you just don’t care” appeared to be quite the strenuous exercise.

The crowd was a mellow, breezy bunch, buzzed on weed and cradled in slick grooves. Miss Jazzy J was the first to point out the male/female ratio imbalance, about 80/20 in our favor.

“And they’re all fiiiiiiiine Stacey.”

For true. The theater housed a collection of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen under one NYC roof. Stylish brothers with silky swaggers. And Lillycita and I pointed out almost simultaneously, delicious scents smothered and seduced us from every direction. In a moment of pure creepiness we actually leaned forward and took a whiff of the guy in front of us, deciding that he, and his immaculately groomed compatriots, emanated the delicious floral aroma of freshly washed laundry. You know you’ve been hanging out at too many hipster shows when showers and clean clothes are enough to send you swooning.

**UPDATE: The grossly muscular rapper mentioned above has been identified as the Furious Five's Melle Mel. If you see this man on the street DO NOT give him any more spinach.

Someone Get Mama a Strunk and White

Miss Stacia is full of punctuation brainfarts these days, surely making errors including but not limited to:

- misplacement of commas/apostrophes
- over-hyphenation
- misuse of dashes
- limited understanding of dialogue/script formatting
- annoyingly excessive, although perhaps not erroneous, use of the parenthetical

These things used to be simple. My brian is dying in the citi.