Now that we have a bit of a reprieve from gift-giving with Valentine’s Day a distant bloody memory, I thought I’d offer some gift-giving advice….some very specific gift-giving advice. Here it is – portraits of the gift-recipient are not good gifts.

Did you get it? It was very quick. But you know the gifts which I’m writing about. You walk by the portrait artist in the mall whose hand is a blur of skin-toned charcoal and you think to yourself, “Hey, what a great gift idea.” Okay – right here, I’m with you. Yes, a gift of art is a wonderful gesture. It’s creative. It’s unique. It won’t shrink in the wash or require watering. Let’s go for it. So – you start to peruse the portrait artist’s collection…Cher? No, too eighties. A soft pastel of Justin Timberlake? No, too many sad memories for Britney. A pencil drawing of that adorable Asian baby the mall portrait artist is drawing right now? No, too personal.

Now here is where a critical decision is made and more often than not, it’s the wrong decision. What you should do at this fork in the road is reach into your own wallet, pull out your own driver’s license, hand it to the mall portrait artist and say, “Do you think you could do something with this photo?”

But you know what really happens, don’t you? Yes – you run home, rifle through your bedside table drawer or the tupperware container of all of last year’s photos, to find that one of your beloved where she’s smiling into the camera with such love, such honest emotion. And you think to yourself, “Yes, this is the photo I want the mall portrait artist to recreate for my beloved. She will love it.”

Alright – this is where I have to stop you and speak up for the beloved, girl beloved, boy beloved – it’s of no consequence. There are no gender lines when it comes to this kind of gift – no one wants it. But speaking as a female who enjoys the female so much, I’ll keep using the pronoun for the second person feminine, yes?

Cut to the day of the gift-giving. The holidays, Valentine’s Day, her birthday – whatever the celebration – the mood is light, you’re both having fun, maybe there are some drinks involved. You’re both enjoying each other’s company so much – until the gift is given. You hand her the wrapped frame – it’s about 11 x 17. She looks at it and then back at you, quizzically. Maybe she giggles a little apprehensively, “It’s so…big.” But you don’t hear the apprehension. All you hear is “This is the best gift ever. She’s going to think this is the best gift she’s ever got…EVER!” And then she tears the paper right down the center of the frame so that she’s staring herself in the face. But not just her face – a brightly color penciled version of her face with soft charcoal smudges of red for her cheeks and single strands of yellow for her hair.

“Here it is. She’s going to love it, love it, LOVE IT!” you think. But…she’s not saying anything. She’s just staring at it. Her brain physically overheating trying to find a way to quickly convert the inner scream that’s echoing through her entire body into two simple words of thanks. She puts it down. Looks up at you, smiles weakly….”Thanks. I’ve never gotten a portrait of myself before. That was very…..thoughtful of you. You must have thought a lot about that.” And then you launch into the story about how you just walked past the mall portrait artist, and it hit you, and whatever else you yabber on about because you just can’t get over how clever a gift it is.

Here’s the problem – in a nutshell. We don’t want portraits of ourselves. Ever. Only politicians and people who own restaurants want portraits of themselves. Yes, we’d love portraits of you. We’d hang them up gladly in the entryway of the home or the den or wherever! But of ourselves? Then we have to find the place where we’ll least connect with our own acrylic/oil/charcoal/pencil/pastel -ed vacant gaze. For me – mine is in the kitchen. I’m not in there too much so I don’t lock eyes with myself too much – or with the eyes of my cat which I’m also holding in the portrait.

Really – stop this form of gift-giving. It causes so much anxiety. We don’t want portraits of ourselves. Truly. If I had a nickel for every person this has happened to – well…I’d have fifteen cents. But my point is – a portrait of the gift-recipient is not a good gift. It is a gift albatross. Please help put an end to it.

I read yesterday that you died. Stomach cancer. That makes me sadder than sad. Even in the kindest people, things can turn rotten. I guess I thought you’d never die. And in a sense, you won’t. I’m sure you have enough “Neighborhoods” in the can to cover the next five or six generations of viewers.

I wish I’d written you a little sooner, like before you died. But you get busy, as I’m sure you know. In and out of doors, people to meet and greet, sweaters to change, and imaginary worlds to inhabit twenty-four seven.

I wish I’d written because I need to unload.  Because I blame you, Mister Rogers! I blame you for the scurge that is reality television! I’m sure you weren’t even thinking back in 1969 that your simple concept of showing kids how sneakers were made or the real goings-on of Make Believe would lead us to crap like Joe Millionaire or The Osbournes. How could you have foreseen your harmless daliances with Mr. McFeely would be co-opted into the framework for Elima-date?

In hind-sight, I guess you didn’t know. You were just trying to show us that we were all lovable – capable of love and being loved. Even though Lady Elaine kind of creeped me out at times because she reminded me of my second grade gym teacher, I loved your show. I loved the neighborhood. Everyone wasn’t in such a hurry all the time and they all talked real slow. And no one was a stranger, even if they were. I found that really comforting. I guess it was an early childhood version of Cheers.

Good-bye, Mister Rogers. Thanks for all the learning and the fun. I’m sorry to know that you’re not around here anymore. But the Neighborhood always will be. And I’m sure the Smithsonian is already picking through your cardigans. I just hope you were wearing your favorite one when you left. And your sneakers. It could be a long trip and you don’t want to be wearing your man clothes for that.

Sincerely,
Kelsey Flynn

Kelley went on a cruise of the Mexican Riviera with her family that was supposed to take ten days, but she couldn’t bear to be away from her boyfriend for that long. So she did what we all do when we’re homesick – she issued terrorist threats. She crafted two letters in which she calmly and rationally explained that if the ship docked, all 2,400 passengers and crew aboard would die.

Now – Kelley. How are you going to get back to your boyfriend, peanut, if you’re not going to let the ship dock? I guess love just knows no bounds. Or Kelley watched one too many I Love Lucy episodes. Needless to report, 120 military personnel boarded the ship and found Kelley crying into a payphone, “I love you too, Googly-bear.” And now she’s being held in Orange County, California – which is great! Because that’s where her boyfriend lives! It all worked out!

I have to admit, issuing terrorist threats got me out of some unhappy sleepover situations as a child. I can remember one lonely night at Justine Mittelman’s birthday slumber party. We had enjoyed an evening of Night of the Living Dead and Flashdance and petty inner clique girl warfare and everyone started to unroll their Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bags to go to sleep. But all I knew was I wanted to go home – NOW. So I did what Kelley Marie Ferguson and countless other resourceful desperate gals have done time and again – I wrote a terrorist threat and left it in the bathroom. “Call Kelsey’s mom to come get her or the birthday infidels die.”

1. That I was 31 once…for an entire year supposedly.

2. That there was a beginning to this war.

3. That shock and awe didn’t work the way they were hoping it would.

AWE, SHOCKS

I was just on the phone with my pal Jennifer Myszkowski. I called her at 10am on a Sunday. I guess my 31 years are showing as I don’t think that’s terribly early anymore, having gone to bed at 11:30pm the night before. It’s not that I don’t get wild – oh, I can shake it. I was at the Peking Garden in Hadley last night drinking watered down Heineken with a bunch of under-age UMass kids until 11pm! Yep, you read that right – eleven o’clock! HELL YEAH! Wait a minute, I just realized how that probably looks. No – I wasn’t portraying Prof. Humbert Humbert to any promising Lolitas. We just all happened to be in the same place at the same time.

My point is! that I woke up Jennifer this morning at 10am. We got to talking and sharing our feelings about all this war as is the only way to get through it and of course, we stumbled upon the words Shock and Awe immediately.

“You had me at Shock and Awe. You had me at Shock and Awe!” I guess we are hoping for a Renee Zellweger response from Iraq, aren’t we?

Jennifer asked who is responsible for this concept of Shock and Awe. Good question. It’s not the media. They’re responsible for doing their own Shock and Awe of the Shock and Awe concept on us, the audience, but not for initiating it. No, this concept of S&A (similar to S&M, but the spanking’s not as fun) smacks of a decidedly think tank flavor. So, I did some armchair research. And wouldn’t you know the Command and Control Research Project is behind it. It seems Harlan Ullman and James Wade are the responsible Drs. Strangelove.

They wrote the book! Literally – Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. It’s not in print on Amazon anymore, but a reader does give a very cogent review [ed. note: who needs print when you can get this title on the Amazon Kindle!]. Luckily, our S&A cronies at the Command and Control Research Project have it available in PDF form still.

In their 1996 racy hit, Harlan and Jimmy wrote about a “very selective, utterly brutal, and ruthless and rapid application of force to intimidate.” They figured the idea is to get the opposing force to quit before they die. Question is – how can you hear them surrender with all the Shock and Awe going on?

It’s one of those good bad things – in think tank parlance.