"No Boys Allowed"

“No Boys Allowed!”

I don’t think I used my outside voice when I said it, but I wasn’t that subtle either as I leaned forward and said to the woman in front of me, “What the HELL is a Man doing in the women’s dressing room?!”  The woman in front of me was with her teen daughter getting ready to try on prom dresses.  And, as for me, I had an armload of unmentionables to try on…. That’s the department we were in.  And yet plain as day there was a man in the dressing room.  He was late 20’s to early 30’s, standing in front of the shuttered door where his woman was trying on formal dresses as well.  He was, it appeared, reading his cell phone … but who knows. 

Now I like men.  Honestly, I do.  I’d like to have one of my own some day; I hear they are handy to have around the house for plumbing emergencies and occupying the couch on Sundays during football season.  BUT there are three places – in fact, three SACRED SPACES, where I do not want to see a man (ever):

Ø  The Women’s Dressing Room where I’m trying on things that make me look fat (everything)

Ø  The Hair Dresser’s when I am looking like a drowned rat with foils wrapped around strands of my hair

Ø  The stall next to me when I am, well, you know…. Passing the time ….

Well, maybe a fourth – I was getting a pedicure once and the guy in the chair next to me behind a screen, was yacking it up on his cell phone.  I wanted to say:  SHUT THE HECK UP – I’m here to de-stress and I don’t want to hear your whole drama unfolding while I’m trying to pick my nail color.  (By the time I, the Original Cheapskate, decides to spend money on a pedicure, I am typically so stressed I am in an altered state of consciousness.  Anyone who ruins the mood of relaxation is running a risk… I can be a little testy.)

Point:  there are some places where we need to just be able to “be” without distraction and unwind. 

The woman at the cashier counter said, “It’s a tricky situation….” When I told her I asked a man to leave the dressing room.  I responded to her:  “No, it’s not.  There are some places women just NEED to be alone without men.”

Caveat:  YES if he had a minor child in the dressing room and was the sole guardian available to help her and make sure SHE was SAFE in the dressing room, I might stretch the rule.  But let me tell you about the Sanctuary of the dressing room.  Women see themselves in a full-length mirror only a few times a year and that is one of them.  It could involve swearing.  But typically outside the dressing stalls there is 3-sided, mirrored cove where you can spin and see if whatever fits you correctly.  If you have a teenage daughter, that’s the place where you say:  “Too low.”  “Too high.”  “Your father won’t let you out of the house in that.”  These are bonding conversations – and fighting words sometimes – that need a certain amount of privacy.  How do you know he’s not a pervert snapping pictures of your kid as he is standing there?  Maybe he is.  Maybe he isn’t.  The fact is:  You just don’t know.  And once men are involved in a ladies-only zone, how can Security “police” the area and make sure thugs aren’t attacking women in the dressing room and stealing their purses, etc.?  Do you know how many times women walk OUT of the dressing room really quickly to grab “the next size up” and leave their jackets, purses, packages unattended?  It’s dumb.  But it happens.  No, of course men aren’t the only ones who steal and a comrade in the next stall could take your stuff too.  But gender inclusion in the dressing room is just a really complicated mess.  That’s probably why at the Sporting stores, they have the changing rooms in the center of the store with doors running from floor to ceiling.  There is no inner hallway; you are either in the room, or you are not.

Back to the original story – the mom in the dressing room said, “Well I think he’s from another country.”  And I may have mumbled, “well he’s in AMERICA now…. And he needs to tow the line.”

So you are wondering what I said to him.  First I stepped out of the area to breathe something other than fire for a moment.  Then I looked around for my friend the clerk that I had been chatting with earlier.  She had evaporated.  I really wanted Her to be the bad guy, not me.  But she was not around.

I mumbled something grim like, “Yay.  I get to be the adult today.”  I stepped back in and took a breath.  “Excuse me sir.  It is not customary for men to be inside of the women’s dressing room.”

Is it really important what I said?  I did say it politely.  I think, though, it is MORE important what HE said:

“I didn’t see a sign either way when I came in,” and he smirked. 

Escalation of blood pressure, not tone of voice:  “It IS the WOMEN’s Dressing Room” – (He had to walk through an ocean of bra’s to get to the dressing room so I am pretty sure we didn’t NEED a sign.)

What happened?  I jumped him and jammed his cell phone down his throat.

PSYCH.  Just kidding.  What really happened is his girlfriend opened the door and he said, “It seems I am not wanted here.”  And she took his arm and pulled him inside the dressing room.  No.  I’m not kidding.

And I still felt weird going into the room next to them and trying stuff on. 

I did not come over on the Mayflower, I can assure you.  But I think that our culture is changing so fast and tearing down so many social customs that it is forgetting to ask, what’s the purpose for this or that rule or custom?  Maintaining a certain amount of decorum in society actually lifts us above the animals.  It is truly in the small ways that we establish a respect for life.  Manners and privacy are important.  If you don’t think so, then ask yourself how you felt the last time some jerk cut you off in traffic and gave you a hand signal not listed in the DMV manual.  Ask yourself if you are comfortable that we are rapidly becoming a voyeuristic society – where we watch things on tv that are highly personal behaviors and then expect everyone around us to NOT be having babies out of wedlock. 

We have to establish the water mark for social behavior.  If we continue to tear it down on television and subsequently in real life, we will find that we have opened a Pandora’s box of barbarianism that degrades us completely. 

One more example before I leave you to chew on all this.  I think we should find a way to “fine” parents who put vulnerable or embarrassing videos of their kids on social media online.  The one that went around last week was painful to behold.  Even though it was supposed to be positive it almost made ME cry FOR the kid.  She was about 9 years old coming home to her room with her school backpack on and sees a Rubbermaid bin in the corner.  She goes over to it and it is an adorable black kitten.  She picks it up and as the little kitten is meowing, the girl is so moved that she is crying hysterically holding it saying:  “Mom, can we keep her?”  “Mom, I want her.”  And stuff like that.  The kid is genuinely hysterical.  (well, in short order so was I because my Empathy button is stuck.)  This was such a raw, personal moment, WHY would you put it online so a million of your closest friends could see that your kid fell apart and your magnanimous gift of …. A cat? 

Wait for my new book coming out next fall called:  What the Hell is the Matter With People?  It’ll rock your world.

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Enigmas of 2019

There are things I looked at every single day on the way to work that made me ask:  “Really?!?”

Yesterday, January 2, 2020, the day after New Year’s I was zooming along to work on Route 5 in Fayetteville heading towards the intersection.  I looked to the right and saw a dark colored bike sprawled on the lawn on the right side of the road.  I glanced to see if there was a person anywhere nearby.  Like Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes:  I saw nothing.  I know nothing.  But it does make me wonder.  I feel like I’ve seen a bike there before and I’ve written this paragraph before.  What is it with abandoned bikes that unnerves me?

And then there is the Berm from Hell down the street from me.  A berm is supposed to be a mound of dirt, usually made to look like the lawn rolled up all by itself, so that water will not flow in a certain direction.  A good berm is a good thing and should make your heart want to sing “These Thousand Hills Roll Ever On” at the top of your lungs.  Not this berm.  This berm runs the full length of a property between two multi-family houses.  It has not been seeded with grass.  Giant rocks and debris are visible.  There is a messed-up looking animal cage thrown on it.  On the right side are scattered toys – that are quite obviously unused and unloved.  There are two chairs tilted on the right side of the berm and one of those metal enclosed firepits sitting there…. As if people would actually sit there for some odd reason.  It looks like the collision of backyard stuff and a dump heap all rolled into one.  It has been that way for more than a couple of years.  It seems to get worse with attrition.  I am wondering why the Town Zoning Board doesn’t “lean” on whomever is responsible to clean that crap up. 

Then there is what I call “the Limeade fence.”  Same road.  Similar situation.  A big house on either side and a limeade and orange Tang-colored fence separates the two properties.  One neighbor put up arborvitae trees to block – or shield – the view of the fence-from-Hell.  Again, the Zoning Board should be all over these jokers and get them to paint that fence a more “suburbial” color than limeade green and Tang orange. 

(As of this edit to the article, the neighbor on the west side of the Limeade fence has added yet another fence in front of it.  Apparently the arborvitae trees aren’t growing fast enough?  Again, Zoning Board:  I’d fire you in a New York City minute.  Get cracking with some code enforcement.)

The other day when there was no snow on the ground all of a sudden I remembered that I should rake leaves out of the drainage ditch that runs along the front of my property near the road.  So I got down into that ditch and raked like heck and transported the leaves to a composting location in the back yard, and went in the house feeling pretty accomplished… and pretty tired for a mid-lifer doing manual labor.  A few days later as I was waking up to start my day my eyes shot open with the thought:  I didn’t dig out the drain pipe that was not visible due to mud and rocks on it.  That matters because when the whatever source of water from my house – be it sump pump or perhaps eves troughs, or whatever – drains out it needs a place to go.  If that small 6 inch pipe is blocked very bad things could happen.  So on New Year’s Day I jumped down in the ditch again with my muddy boots and work gloves and shovel and searched for the pipe.  I found it quickly enough but had to throw a lot of heavy muck over my shoulder to free the front of the pipe.  Packed inside the front of the pipe was a good four inches of mud and dirt, so I leaned over with a trowel and scooped that disaster out.  Within seconds, a thin trickle of water came streaming out …. And continued for as long as I stood there.  Consequently, in the words of my immortal Real Estate friend Judy, I had to “invite the water and then give it a place to go.” 

So I continued to dig in the trench to give the water a place to move.  I do not know how it got blocked, by man or beast, but now I am aware of the need to keep tabs on the condition of that drain at all times.  So aggravating.  I wish I was the type of woman that men would love to take out dining and dancing late into the night.  But by virtue of where I live, I am the type of woman who is standing in muddy boots in a trench looking at blocked pipes and muttering soft profanities to herself.  I think of my former neighbor from Bridgeport, in his 80’s who said to me, “Naw, some people move here frum the city and think they kin make it in the country and they just aint cut for it.”  Glen would be proud of me.  I just know it.

Yet another enigma.  I want to acknowledge the personal pain that causes people to set up roadside shrines.  I know that every time they pass the place where their loved one died in a car crash or bicycle accident or the like, it is painful for them.  So they erect memorials.  But I am sure we should revisit the meaning of the Original Symbol before we go altering it as a seasonal decoration.  I am referencing the most popular memorial:  the wooden cross – a symbol of where the Savior of the World died – that has been put up as a memorial for someone … and now at Christmas has silver-blue garland wrapped around it (yes THAT kind of garland) and a Santa hat on top.  All of those symbols on the cross do not work for the rest of us.  They are kind of disrespectful.  Nonetheless, your grief is duly noted and we are sorry.  But, really.

Lastly, and it pains me to write this, the Dead Piano.  No philosophy teacher has ever asked the important question:  Where do Old Pianos go to die?  And yet, down the street is a piano on someone’s front yard.  Yep.  They just apparently had their fill of it and shot it out on the grass next to the driveway.  It fell over.  It has been there for six months now.  It is all bashed up in pieces.  I am wondering if her ex-husband played piano when he was cheating on her with a music teacher or WHAT?!?  But it is mid-winter and the piano lies in a heap right there for all the world to see.

Huh.  All these suburban travesties.  And I thought we were harsh on my friend Joe when we gave him the business for keeping a dead, rusty pick up truck on his front lawn.  Go figure.

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 one side of The Berm from Hell: