Inn Love

Dear Tori,

Girl, you know I've always been a fan. Way back when you were the above-average blond on 90210 with the beguiling eyes. My sister TP and I would take turns being the Look Out Girl in my parents' bedroom, since we were sheltered and therefore forbidden from watching mature programming such as your father produced. We had to keep an alternating eye out for the impending wrath of Mama Red. But it was worth it, because your outfits were cutting edge and cute, and occasionally, you would say especially profound things like, "If I had a swimming pool, and even though I put a fence around it, I'd still want to teach my kids to swim." You were referencing sex ed/safe sex at the time, which, of course you remember, but it kinda stuck with me, you know?

I'm still a fan, but I've got some constructive criticism for you. Now, first, girl, I know it's been a tough year with your father passing, and what with your not getting a proper good-bye with A-Spell. But I tuned in last night to "Inn Love," (thank you Comcast OnDemand, you're Comcastic) and, girl, I just don't think you were properly representin'.

I've still got to give you props for your adorable outfits. Even when you go to cradle roll with your 2 month-old son Liam of the perfect head. Your outfit is tres adorable, ma belle. Pigtails and pink flip-flops included.

It's just that I think the inner blond is shining through a bit too brightly. You're a little too Ugly American when you and your Scotsman hubs visit his mother land and you leave the B&B after "explosive diarrhea" and don't bother to alert the innkeeper that you weren't able to flush.

And when you brag about your stroller to all the other moms at cradle roll? Particularly noting the nice Paparazzi-proof feature? It's kind of ironic. Because, girl, you're on a reality show. If you're that concerned about protecting Wee Liam from the public eye, then perhaps this is not the year to invite rolling cameras into your love shack, n'ah mean?

I'm sure I'll continue to catch scant episodes via OnDemand to see how your own B&B, Chateau La Rue is doing, and to see how your wardrobe is unfolding, but in the meantime, one American girl to another, I'd try to project a little more of the astute Donna Martin and a little less NoTORIous, ya heard?

Ghetto Fabulous

Lovey Loverpants does most of the grocery shopping for the household, largely because he has sonic fruit-selecting abilities that I do not possess. If I am really honest about why I do not do most of the grocery shopping for the household, though, it is because I am not a proficient ghetto shopper; I am not conditioned for shopping in the ghetto. Now, I take care in using the word ghetto. And let me explain the implications of "ghetto" when I use it.

Ghetto, originally, from what I understand, just referred to a particular neighborhood where a particular ethnic or religious group settled. Greek Orthodox ghetto over yonder, Jewish ghetto just around the bend.

So when did ghetto become a derogatory? I knoweth not, historians, but I suspect it was somewhere around the time when the middle class began to dissolve in this country, when the chasm between upper and lower class widened, and the bridge between Brand Name Orange Juices and Generic Orange-Aid stretched much further than it had before. And suddenly, the kind of juice you buy manifests just exactly on which side of the tracks you live.

So to say that I shop in the ghetto is to say that I patronize businesses in a lower-income neighborhood. Sure.

But ghetto, in my mind, also refers to an attitude. Being "ghetto" is to be gritty, is to be not-to-proud, is to be unafraid to be loud. When I go grocery shopping in the ghetto, the experience is very sensual. Children scream and bash into my cart. At 10p.m. People smell odorous. People audibly express distaste for nasty looking foods.

And I? Am a little fawn in the forest who lost her mother.

I am not a snob. I am just ill-prepared to contend with the loud, the smelly, the all-up-in-my-grille when I am just trying to get some pita and hummus and soy milk and organic bananas for the week, for the love of my blessed little rations! I am so white for saying this, I know, but I just cannot be bothered, is all, and therefore I cannot appreciate the colorful, cacophonous experience of ghetto grocery shopping because I am five months pregnant and doggy-dog tired and I just want to get outta theya.

And for thinking those thoughts, I have been punished.

Last Saturday night, I headed to ghetto plaza. And, as five months pregnant had me, I decided I would get my exercise by parking in the most remote pocket of the parking lot. It was so remote, there were aboriginal tribes living there, who had never seen themselves in a mirror before, and had never heard of Netflix. I flitted from one store to the next, reserving my grocery shopping for last since I'd be hauling two big cartons of ice cream home.

Because the ghetto plaza is smart, ghetto plaza knows that its patrons will steal shopping carts. Therefore, the infrastructure of the ghetto shopping plaza's parking lot has cart-guards. That is, if you've stupidly parked in a remote corner of the parking lot, far far far from the grocery store whose cart you are using to transport your groceries, you will encounter a problem. Your cart will stop, abruptly, just as it passes over the invisible fence barring the cart from moving any further.

I glimpse my car, still parked in the remote part of the parking lot, forlorn and far far far away. Because I am in the ghetto, I do not have the option of leaving my cart where it is and to go run and fetch my car and bring it to the cart. Someone will pilfer my ice cream. And the rest of this bounty of groceries.

So I push. And then I pull. I am dragging a cart with no mobile wheels half-way across New England. And I am five months pregnant. And it is 10 p.m. at night in the ghetto shopping plaza. And people are pulling over to get a look at this crazy cracker who thinks she can outsmart the system.

Who's ghetto now?

Left to My Own Devices

My parents rarely left me alone until I was 10 or so. On the occasions when I was left alone, at home, to my own devices, I went buckwild.

My parents were, until very recently, very boring people. Boring by these standards: They paid their taxes. They had the same jobs since I was born. They subscribed to your standard suburban people magazines: Time, Better Homes & Gardens, Sports Illustrated. The people in their address books actually lived at those addresses and those were their real names. Their hobbies were reading, golfing, cooking, and vacationing to non-exotic places, like the beaches in South Carolina. They never talked about illicit drug use, shagging in microbuses, or anything else truly insane, other than doing unscrupulous things while drunk, like driving over railroad tracks, but that happened before I was born, so it really didn't count. Not that I wouldn't have been horrified (!!!) if my parents actually had talked about these things like they actually happened recently, "So, you know, we were all just lounging on Patty's back porch and talking about the best way to tame Wisteria when all of a sudden, Monica, started the wave, and by that I mean she lifted up her shirt..." but my childhood was mainly stable and very boring, and, for this, I consider myself very fortunate.

These days, my parents are much more interesting. But I'm not going to give you the goods on them for free. You'll have to pay to read about them in my autobiography. After I write it, someday.

But back to being home alone in the house of my boring parents. Even if my mother was only gone to the bank for 15 minutes, I would raid all of her Christmas letters - the ones that were addressed exclusively to her. I would go through her jewelry box and try on all of her gypsy-ish earrings. I would try to unlock my father's briefcase. I would go jump on the living room couch, reserved only for sitting on when company came over.

None of these activities ever netted me the kind of mischievous satisfaction I had hoped it would. Of course it didn't. My parents were very boring people.

And if they had anything exciting to hide? I'm sure they would have hidden it, in places that I would never have thought to look.

As years passed by and I was left at home with my siblings for long nights, and as I garnered a fairly large pool of babysitting clients, the temptation to stir up trouble began to fade. I didn't want to look at things that didn't have my name on them. I didn't want to open doors, or briefcases, that were obviously barring me from entry. I don't know if this was part of becoming a teenager and feeling as though I had so many thoughts of my own to keep under lock and key, but I began to be more respectful of the responsibility of being left alone.

Now, however, since I am Never Alone, since I have the loathsome chore of coming home every night to a warm, loving body, who immediately asks what I want for dinner, the moments that are Mine All Mine alone in our two floors of ghetto fabulosity are rich and delicious. Yesterday, while Warm Loving Body was practicing for his triathlon, I staged a photoshoot -- Ohhh and we've lost the entire state of Utah's readership and that of my sister at the mention of the word photoshoot. Not that I implied it was anything risque, even though, when my bunkmate finally found the pictures after sitting at his laptop for 8 hours where the pictures were SAVED TO HIS DESKTOP WITH HIS NAME AND "LOOK AT THESE" clearly typed, I told him that the man from craigslist had come over to assist me, since I wasn't very talented with the tripod.

I soon think my bunkmate will be password-protecting his laptop from now on....

Mama didn't raise me with no manners. But she sure did give me an imagination.