ALWAYS A BRIDE NEVER A BRIDESMAID

What do you call twenty-eight women sitting in the living room spreading melted Brie over rice crackers, pounding back the cocktails and yapping like crows sitting on a fence? If you said Tuesday night book club night you’d be close. In fact this was a bridal shower, for my cousin Francine’s daughter, Helen.

It’s been a custom for decades now to shower new brides- to-be with things that will help them set up a household but brides today have either lived on their own and collected their trousseau or in Helen’s case been down the alter more than once. That being said, this time around Helen has had a household shower, a teacup shower and then the one I was invited to, boudoir shower. Boudoir shower is French for being registered on the Sexy-R-us web site. Since she’s on her third marriage I think Helen needs a frequent flyer card for a divorce lawyer, not another pair of chocolate under-pants.

I don’t like boudoir showers. I won’t go to Candle parties because I don’t like people knowing what scent I use so I have no interest in opening paraphernalia for intimate relations. I wasn’t a complete party pooper. I bought her an over the bra that lifted and separated which Helen would likely be doing soon.

Amidst the some hot pot stickers and mini quiche I thought about how showers have changed. As a young woman I remember the speech I gave to my mother:

“If you ever give me a bridal shower I will boycott it.” I hated the crustless sandwiches and that brides had to sit in the wing-backed chair with the streamers of pink above over their heads while somebody made a hat out of a paper plate and bows. Now everybody drinks. But we didn’t have hooch back then because broads didn’t booze it up in front of their mothers. That and Auntie Vera had just gotten back from the Betty Ford Centre so there was a punch bowl of mocktails; two cans of pineapple and an anti-buse chaser.

When I got married I wasn’t registered anywhere. I wouldn’t dare dictate what gifts should be given. My aunts gave me family recipes and a nice piece of Pyrex and some cookie sheets. I know brides today don’t want cupboards full of junk but getting a horrible gift or two is part of the fun. You won’t remember perfect flatware choices, but a pink lady toilet paper cover is a great story waiting to be told. A story like that will keep you company when you’re old and in the nursing home.

Men often say some women play games and that statement is no truer than at a bridal shower. There are two kinds of people. People who like to play shower games. And the rest of us. There is always some game playing harpie who is screaming at everyone else, “Stop being party poopers. This IS fun.”

It isn’t fun. There is nothing fun about seeing how fast you can make pot scrubber into a doll. I don’t think pot scrubbers need faces. It’s not fun having to see how many clothespins you can get off a clothesline with one hand or having a hotdog tied around your waist to see if you can get it into a Coke Bottle.

For awhile the feminists tried to boycott the games. They wanted to act like men and hire a stripper. But believe me it isn’t fun having a guy called Long Dong Silver dancing in front of you to Donna Summers’ Love to Love You Baby on a boom box. You don’t know where to put your eyes and its never pretty when you’re mother starts disinfecting the leather couch.

I did find one shower in thirty years quite fun. We were asked to dress up in our ugliest bridesmaid dress. I remember Helen had to borrow one of mine because she had never been asked to stand up for anyone.

Always a bride never a bridesmaid apparently.

At that shower Auntie Vera was the hit of the afternoon. She wore her honeymoon negligee with Malabar fur slippers. When we whistled at her like construction workers she quipped,

“ I was pure as the driven snow when I got married. Why I walked down that church aisle, I said a few vows and that night I was supposed to be hot as a firecracker. But it was no 1^st of July I’ll tell you that. More like April fools.”

No matter how the games and customs have changed the free advice hasn’t. Every family shower we offer the bride-to-be words of wisdom on how to stay married. Except for a couple of us, most people are still married in my family because that vow ‘ till death do us part’ isn’t an idle threat, it’s a promise.

These are a few samples of the bon mots flowing on Helen’s special day.

“Never let the sun go down on your wrath.”

“Never believe a man when he says we’ll just lie down and talk.”

Aunt Vera who had been back drinking since 2002, took the prize for the most maudlin words of the day,

“ Appreciate your man while he’s alive because before you know it, you’ll be old and he’ll be dead and you’ll be eating beef jerky from a bag wishing you had someone to yell at.”

The afternoon drew to a close I decided to take Auntie Vera home with me. Last time she went back to the nursing home in that condition she almost got kicked out for feeling up an orderly.

I kissed Helen good-bye.

“ Maybe third time’s a charm, ” I said.

And Vera slurred, “ Yeah, maybe the horns in his head will match the holes in yours,” but Helen had that far-off look all brides to be have, like they’re soldiers going back to Afghanistan for a third tour of duty.

When I got home I tucked Vera under the blanket on the couch. I sat munching leftover crust-less egg salad sandwiches and realized that the main thing that has changed about bridal showers is me. I actually like them. Not because of the gifts or the party games, or even because I believe in happily ever after but because, except for funerals, it’s the only time I get to see my relatives.

At that moment Auntie Vera exhaled a loud snore followed by a long period of silence. Thoughts like, Oh my God what if she is dead? I’ll need a new outfit. I hope the relatives will fly up from the States. After about ,thirty seconds of mind chatter she inhaled once again. And the rumbling snores drowned out the sound of a train heading westbound.

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Chapter 1: THE BIG PICTURE

The summer of 1968 is where my mind plops down and lights up a smoke. I am ten years old. It’s hotter than Hades and we are all standing in the woodshed, attached to the summer kitchen, my siblings and my mother, still as soldiers, barely able to catch our breath. It smells like mouse shit and dried wood.
“Don’t make a sound,” she threatened us, “or I’ll crucify you.” My mother never followed through on these threats, but how many times I imagined myself being nailed on the back wall of the classroom, able to see everyone else’s test paper.
We had just gotten back from swimming; Alberta took us daily when we were haying.  She hated wasting any part of her workday, but we were always sweltering by noon.   She’d load us all in the back of the truck and drive like a bat out of hell through the backfield.  Maybe if she’d slowed down a bit, she wouldn’t have worn out so many transmissions. I can still see us, holding our towels tight around our necks, bouncing this way and that.  It was better than the Tilt-A-Whirl.
We cooled off in the river that ran at the back of the property. We called it the Cottage though the only building back there was an outhouse wallpapered with pages from the Sears Catalogue. We’d often eat our noon meal down by the grove of pine trees.  Our family always had our big meal at lunch. It was no fancy picnic - nothing from a wicker basket like you see French people doing in a movie. There wasn’t a checkered tablecloth or wine, not even a picnic table. Alberta would boil up a ham in a pot of potatoes. Some days we’d be so anxious to get wet she’d let us eat straight from the saucepan.  She caught me more than once drinking the ham water from the pot.  “Put that down, you pig.  Nobody wants your germs all over them.”  That was me from the get-go, taking more than she was offering. I’d stuff myself until I almost bust a gut and then jump in the water.  The rule about waiting an hour had not been invented yet.  Even if it had, by mid- summer the river was so low the water only went up to our knees. If we’d got a cramp, we could’ve just stood up.
The river ran directly downstream from the canning factory in Spike Mills. The bulk of what they canned was green peas. By mid-August the river had artificial green foam floating on top.  Every September we’d go back to school, our eyes oozing with pus.  When we’d complain about the infection, my father King would tell us to stop our bitching. “It’ll grow hair on your chest,” which is not at all reassuring to a ten-year old girl.
On that scorcher of a day, we’d just gotten back to the house and were standing in the front yard picking the sand out from between our toes.  Alberta had conniptions if we tracked it through the house, and there was nothing worse than getting it in the sheets. The sun had zapped our bathing suits dry and it was like we had never gotten wet.
One minute there we were - five children wiping our feet on the grass.
The next we were running this way and that trying to get out of sight.  5 kids. Three boys.  Brothers that I never had a conversation with.  NeilPatrickBill. One name. My mother yelled it out in one breath.  A group. A subset. There were two girls. Me.  Marley, the youngest. There we all were, plus my mother, standing in a woodshed, trying to outsmart one travelling salesman.
On summer afternoons, they could be seen walking up and down our side road. You could spot them a mile away, with their casual saunter like they had nowhere in particular to be. With jackets flung over their shoulders, carrying a big black suitcase, they sold anything you could imagine from gadgets to appliances to face cream - anything a housewife might need.
Alberta would never be accused of being a housewife. She spent more time in the barn than anywhere else, but she had a hate-on for those salesmen. To her they were blowhards who were trained to fleece innocent people out of money they didn’t have. By people, I mean King.  She was mad at him for years over getting talked into buying the Instant Color TV Converter.  It was only $4.95, but a big waste of money.  The salesman convinced my dad that the contraption would magically turn our black and white TV into a colour one. When it arrived in the mail, it was nothing more than a piece of plastic that you placed on top of the screen.  It had three colours:  blue at the top for sky, green on the bottom for grass, and in the middle orange for everything else. That would have been fine if you were watching outdoor shows like ‘Lassie’ or ‘Bonanza.’  But for indoor TV shows like ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ it meant all the characters had blue faces.  I hated that show to begin with - it was totally unbelievable that people would act that nice - but when Beaver’s face had a sky blue tinge, it really made me mad.

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FREE CONSULTATION ABOUT YOUR WRITING INCLUDED IN THIS TWO DAY EVENT.

AUgst 7th, 8th,

WRITERS WORKSHOP. CHECK IT OUT UNDER BUY STUFF.

This year my kids came back for a stopover. Some friends said I was asking for trouble by weakening my perimeters, but I was thinking of my retirement. When I get old, they’ll have to reciprocate and let me come stay with them. You may think it’s emotional blackmail; I think it’s financial planning. With the current economy, I’m on the Freedom 55 plan: I will retire when my kids are 55.

I wasn’t an empty nester without borders. I had stringent guidelines. They couldn’t go to the bathroom in the middle of doing the dishes — I had fallen for that one for 10 years. There were no extracurricular activities in the bedroom, unless they brought someone home for Mama. I liked that they had come home for one last nag. I told you money doesn’t grow on trees. Didn’t I say never to believe a man when he says, We’ll just lie and talk?

What’s the harm of kids back at home? Let’s not forget a time when it was customary for young people to live at home until they got married. Farmers. Italians. Cultures that knew enough not to kick kids to the curb, especially when they had gotten old enough to be of use to their parents. Back in the day, the adult kids were unselfish enough to make sure Mom and Dad would never have to be in the same room together at the same time because, lets face it, kids are the glue that holds many a couple together. Talking about their kids latest stunts bonds a couple together. Once they’re gone, what is there to chat about? Golf handicaps? The remains of their RRSPs? The latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy? That’s how my marriage ended. During the TV writers’ strike, the kids moved out and we were left in a room together pointing a remote at the TV with nothing to say.

Adult children should contemplate the words of Tammy Wynette. D-I-V-O-R-C-E is never pleasant for anybody. Think about it, kids. It’s a scary place out there on the dating scene for your parents. Gassy 50-year-olds with hair plugs doing the bump. Oops, I was having a flashback to last Saturday night at Raxx.

People say that they like having their space back, but in the old days there was no space. People lived in three-room farmhouses and had to share a bed with four people. With the current energy prices, that might not be such a bad idea — think of the money you’d save. Less than a century ago, they had less space and people turned out okay. Now we have 1.5 kids and 2,500 square feet of house and we feel crowded if the fruit of our loins is camped out in the rec room.

Many also argue that kids need to be independent, but we forget that they’ve been in daycare since two and had their own key to the house since they were five. We even cancelled Grade 13 so they could get through life faster. And just because they’re not under your roof doesn’t mean they’re not asking for cash.

Now I know they can return for too long. My cousin Francine’s daughter boomeranged back pushing a baby carriage before she’d even reached legal drinking age. Francine has a kid with a kid in the basement and her aging mother living in the spare room. Poor Francine is on 24-hour call, sandwiched between three generations of people who want her to wait on them. There are endless doctor’s appointments for knee replacements for her daughter. Apparently they gave out after too many childhood soccer games. The other night Francine was up until three in the morning, giving dating advice to her mother. Aunt Marjorie is 76, but she apparently still has a lot Romeos sniffing around in the seniors centre. “Men are never too old to be sniffing,” she declares.

I only had two kids return under my roof for a very limited time. There was a definite shelf life to our reunion, but I found out what good people they had become. As 20-somethings they were actually nice to me. In fact, I believe it’s far worse for teenagers to live at home. Kids should move out when they’re 14 and come back when they’ve stopped sighing and saying, Whatever.

When my kids moved out again, I realized I liked thinking of someone other than myself. I get weirder and weirder living on my own. I have started making small things into big deals. I could run a small country on the energy I am now putting into cooking and cleaning and my animals. At Christmas I went out and bought myself a pet, a dog named Gus. Gus is a Shih Tzu I got from the pound and, because he had fleas, he was shaved in the back. He looks like Kurt Russell with a reverse mullet: party in the front and business in the back. I brag about him. I have 346 pictures of Gus — more than I took of the children. Every morning I say, “Go out to the kitchen and make Mama a cup of joe.” Yes, he sleeps with me but he isn’t allowed on the couch. It’s crazy; I used to leave my real kids with babysitters I’d just met, but with the dog I’m running background checks on the kennel to make sure they don’t have any priors.

At night I sometimes pretend he’s Lassie from that the old ’50s TV show. Lassie knew if people needed her help. Lassie would go and find them in the well. So I say to Gus, “Go get the kids. Tell them Mama needs them back home with her. Go boy. I think one of them has fallen into $25,000 worth of student loan debt and needs his Power Rangers bedroom back.”

Gus is cute, but not that bright. He just stands there not staring at me, then walks around three times, gets up on the pillow and goes to sleep like he doesn’t understand a word I’m saying.

I am fortunate. I have written my own material for 30 years but to write for no other reason than because I love it has been gift. My writing is always creative and mostly humorous but the biggest gift it has opened me up to worlds inside of myself.  And the act of writing is everything I am not. It’s spacious and generous. With pen moving across the page I see what I really think. It strips away the press release I issue to the world.  The sell job I have done on myself, and to the people around me. It captures those two in the morning thoughts when sleep won’t come and one can hear the thoughts between the thoughts, the grace notes.  The still small stories that percolate beneath the surface bubbling up begging to be told.

I live on an island which I love. It should be the perfect place to write but like most people I often find myself longing for another life. One minute I want an urban life. Of course when I lived an urban life I wanted a country life. I was what I called geographically bi-polar. My mind straddling two worlds, always wanting the one I wasn’t in. So when I write I bring myself back to where I am in the here and now  I am 52. I have wisdom. I slow down and shine a light on what is in front of me. I sit on the south shore of the island and see the lake is down this year.  The wataer barely covers the rocks that were submerged. I watch my dog explore rocks . Gus has fleas so he had to be shaved and he looks like he has a reverse mullet. Business in the back and party in the front. The dog wanders off for a lap of water with no tolerance for a menopausal woman writing bad poetry. When I slow down the south shore is my version of going to church -the place where I can give my own sermon.  I come back to the parts of myself I have forgotten. To the stories that live inside of me.

When I turned 49 I decided for my birthday I would no longer wait for gifts. I would give gifts instead-so I gave my first creative writers workshop in my studio on Amherst Island. I had taught these years ago for The Second City Theatre but I wanted to share this ability to sit and find the present moment with other fellow writers. And it was open to people with writing experience and those with none. What I found is that no matter the level of writer, they all told themselves the same story. I am not good enough as a writer. I won’t be able to do it.

Over the next 7 workshops I saw that the Voice of Doubt was the biggest obstacle for writers (and most of the population) We had 10 year olds trying to and 90 year olds trying to writeand they still suffered from the  same Voice of Doubt. To paraphrase the philosopher Rilke doubt is the traveling companion of the creative life. The toxic troll up ahead of you in the morning, sitting on the end of the bed smoking a cigar, wearing a pink skirt with no panties saying “Oh you slept in. I’ve been up for hours.” It follows you around all day whispering like Victor Newman off Young and the Restless, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you. You suck. Have a cookie.”

So the workshops have been a wonderful venue to have students challenge that voice, evict it from their heads. With all that extra square footage they Brailled through and found the creative in a safe way.

I have delighted in hearing the follow up stories. Some went on to start their memoirs; some finished their screenplays. Some took that trip they wanted to take. Some painted incredible oil paintings. But all walked away feeling full and open to the idea that we all have the right to write our stories—Storytelling is what makes us human. Story telling is what we do to confirm we exist.

As it is with all teaching, it helps the teacher as much as the student. It reaffirms my desire to write. To put what I love first and move the pen across page. To push the pause button on the chaotic world and take notes of the passing show.

Deborah Kimmett has been employed as a freelance writer for 25 years. A Second City veteran she works for CBC Radio’s The Debaters and many magazines including Canadian Living and Kingston Life. She has completed her first novel and has a published book called Reality is Over Rated. Her writing workshops take place this year on June 12^th and August 7^th and 8^th. Register www.kimmett.ca under buy stuff.

New writers and writers who want to take the time to jumpstart their creativity and follow an idea through to completion.
This two day retreat will teach you how to get past your inner critic, develop characters that have strong voices, pick the genre and medium you are powerful in, and what to do to GET PUBLISHED.  You can book a B and B and come to the island to get away from it all, $150.00
Deb was nominated for 2009 National Magazine Humour Award and the Governor General Award in 1994 for her play Miracle Mother.

Everyone has a story to tell. Tell yours in the beautiful setting of Amherst island. Whether you’re a new writer or an experienced one this workshop is inspiring, safe and guarantees to get your creative juices flowing.

Deborah Kimmett writes for CBC Radio,  Canadian Living and Winnipeg Comedy Festival. She’s a 20 year veteran of the Second City and is a Governor General Award nominated author.

“Deborah’s so full of insight, the workshop was like sipping at a fire hydrant.” Bob Laroque.

Wonderful response from attendees. Excellent way to get creativity flowing.

Reserve your space by clicking here!

IAPSA Addiction and Public Safety. London Ontario. Closed to Public. Noon time keynote.

Crossroads United Church, 690 Sir John A McDonald,KINGSTON

$25 OPEN TO PUBLIC “funny funny show”

Get your ticket here!

Comedienne and storyteller Deborah Kimmett is returning to Kingston a. with a hilarious new show called The Relevant Deborah Kimmett. Having appeared at the Grand and the Condferedation Place Hotel, Kimmett is now brining her brand new show to a show to Crossroads United Church. “Theatre is meant to inspire and change your perspective. And so is church.. Plus the acoustics are great.”

Ministering to those in need of a laugh is Kimmett’s forte. She’s a regular contributor to Kingston Life, and has appeared many times at Kingston. As well as the Winnipeg Comedy Festival appearance on CBC TV she can be heard regularly on CBC’s Radio’s hit show, The Debaters, where fact meets funny, Kimmett has appeared 15 times so far. “I finally get to be paid for arguing.” Also her spotlight on Laugh Out Loud has been the number one download on I-Tunes for two months running.

LARC for Mom’s Day. Reality is OverRated “The trials of parenting” North Fred Hall Napanee.