Tag Archives: childhood

How to start a girl band

Posted on by
6

Everything we learned about music, we learned from TLC and the Spice Girls. When deciding on our “band’s” name, my cousin Kate, my sister Lauren, and I chose “The Bomb Girls” because it was close enough to the Spice Girls to get us some recognition, but different enough so that no one could say we had copied them.

Our key instrument was a tiny Casio keyboard with pre-programmed techno music on it, and our voices that could easily rival Chili’s and Scary Spice’s. Every song we wrote had to have a rap in it, and our stage names had to be carefully chosen to go along with our band name.

“You’ll be Baby Bomb,” my cousin told my sister, who is the youngest.

“I want to be Hot Bomb!” I yelled, before Kate could claim the name first.

“That’s fine. I want to be Cool Bomb,” Kate said.

Lauren said, “I don’t want to be Baby Bomb.”

“You’re the youngest,” Kate reasoned. “So you’re Baby Bomb.”

“I want to be Cool Bomb,” my sister said.

I was elated. I got to be Hot Bomb, which would obviously catapult me to the star of the band. I could see it now. The whole family would be blown away by my amazing voice, songwriting skills, and of course, my beauty. Boys from school would fall all over themselves trying to get next to Hot Bomb.

My cousin and sister went back and forth over Lauren’s new stage name, and I managed to back my cousin up a little while daydreaming. After a few minutes, Lauren reluctantly adopted her new name, and we got down to the business of songwriting.

At the time, my cousin lived with our moms’ aunt, our Aunt Karen, and our moms’ sister, our Aunt Rikki. It must have been some kind of holiday because the entire family was gathered downstairs while we put together our new band up in Kate’s room while listening to Crazy Sexy Cool. It seemed that within minutes we had a couple of songs written and were rehearsing them so that we could perform our first concert downstairs.

Now I don’t know what to do
I’ll leave you
I don’t understand

I had this. I was the best Bomb Girl and singer ever, and I couldn’t wait to get this show on the road. I followed Kate down the stairs, with Lauren behind me, and we found Aunt Karen and asked her for her microphones. We gathered the family, set up our keyboard and turned on our music, and got ready to start.

Kate — Cool Bomb — was the group rapper, I was the singer, and Lauren — Baby Bomb — would jump in on the chorus, along with Cool Bomb. We were also supposed to dance.

The music beat in my ears, our family’s eyes were glued on all of us, and suddenly the room was very small and way too hot.

No, no, no, I can’t do this, I thought, looking from our family to Cool Bomb to Baby Bomb and back to the microphone in my hand. Kate looked at me expectantly. It was my turn to sing.

I shook my head and started backing away.

“Come on,” she and our family said. “Come on!”

“I’m not singing by myself,” I told my groupmates. “I just can’t do it!”

“Fine,” Cool Bomb said, and did my part. The three of us did the choruses.

Although the Bomb Girls wrote about a dozen more songs — and I think may have even recorded a couple in my bedroom with a crappy kiddie recorder — I knew then that my career as a diva wasn’t going to happen. It would be a good thirteen years before I could bring myself to sing in front of people again — and that was only under the influence of alcohol. I don’t even need a drop of alcohol to get up in front of people now, but poor little Hot Bomb just couldn’t take the heat.

Behind the scenes of my awesomeness

Posted on by
Reply

In my high school class, I was the token goth chick, complete with black beeswaxed hair, black lipstick, fishnet, and awesome knee high (platform) boots. Dir en grey (during their super crazy goth days) were my inspiration:

(By the way, “Hotarubi” is my all-time favorite Dir en grey song. I loved them until I met them after a concert and they completely ignored me. Douchebags.)

My favorite outfit involved straight-jacket pants — you know, the ones with tons of belts and buckles preventing you from running if, say, a crazed serial killer or rapist (or your high school science teacher) came after you. And a trenchcoat. Oh yeah, I couldn’t survive without the trenchcoat. (I still have lots of this wardrobe in storage. It’s going to be fun whenever I get to look at it all again.)

Anyway, most people were either afraid of me, talked a lot of shit about me, or were morbidly curious and talked to me on occasion. Mostly, they just couldn’t figure me out. Back then, that bugged me. Now I think it’s pretty cool. However, if they had known my biggest secret, they might not have been so scared.

At 15, I still played with Barbies.

Whoops, there goes my street cred.

My sister and I always played elaborate, daytime Emmy worthy games with our Barbies that would last weeks if we were careful. We both had great imaginations, and since there weren’t any kids in our neighborhood to play with we spent a lot of time inside together. We had a few cars, a plane, a limousine, and two campers, and TONS of dolls. There were the two hot twin Kens, my New Kids On the Block Ken, my hispanic Barbie, my African-American Barbie with the super cool short and veryvery curly hair, the hot blond Barbie who still smelled like the perfume she’d been sprayed with in the factory over ten years before, and a whole bunch more that I don’t really remember.

That was the last year that I really played with them, but I’ll always remember the good times Lauren and I had, spending the days of our childhood actually playing out the lives of the people we’d made up rather than just dressing and undressing our dolls.

Now I’m older and it’s not kosher to play with Barbies anymore, but I totally want to buy a Barbie and make my own Barbie of the Undead. Seriously. Click it. You know you want to.

What was your favorite toy as a kid? What are your best childhood memories of that toy? Share in the comments below!

All the white noise can't leave the scene behind

Posted on by
8

The first time that I remember it happening, we lived at the duplex.

I sat in the pink upstairs bathroom, doing my business. Suddenly, as if listening to a radio, I heard a woman’s voice. I couldn’t make out anything she said; most of it was static and crackling. I looked out the window. No one there. No one lived downstairs or upstairs from us, and to my knowledge no one was playing a radio in the house. As crazy as this sounds, the static came from inside of me.

(Note: I don’t hear voices. Promise.)

I got the hell out of the bathroom as quickly as possible.

It happened every so often after that, in the same pink bathroom. Same woman’s voice, washed out by static.

White noise.

Another time, I sat on Mommy’s bed in my parents’ bedroom while Mommy read to Lauren and I. The phone rang and Mom answered it. I could hear my aunt. While Lauren and I sat waiting for the conversation to end so we could get back to whichever Narnia book we were on, I heard the white noise again.

I looked frantically at my sister. She heard nothing. I looked at Mom and tried to tell myself it was just my aunt’s voice that I was hearing, but it wasn’t. I tried to tell myself it was some radio station crossed with the phone lines or something, but it sounded exactly like the same woman’s voice, all muffled and drowned out by static. No one else heard it, either.

I was definitely creeped out.

Luckily, I haven’t heard it in years.

Until last night.

I usually go to bed listening to some kind of music on my BlackBerry (it’s also an mp3 player) — especially if I can’t sleep, am stressed, or worried (which I am, all three). Last night I plugged in my headphones, stuck them in my ears, and heard weird noise.

Not headphone feedback.

White noise.

I can’t even really explain it, but I know it wasn’t just a regular headphone thing.

I noticed that I had accidentally turned my camera on (there’s a button on the side), so I exited it and the white noise stopped. A second later, it started again.

No woman’s voice, but it was definitely there, and definitely creepy.

“Lauren?” I didn’t want to wake her up because I knew she had to go into work for five in the morning, but I had to make sure I wasn’t losing my damn mind.

“Hmn?” She turned toward me.

“Listen to this.” I handed her the headphones. “I don’t have music playing. I promise. Just listen.”

I watched her face as she listened. Her eyes widened a little. “That’s weird.”

“Isn’t it? It’s fucking creepy. White noise,” I said, taking the headphones back and putting them back in my ears. I could still hear it.

I hadn’t even thought about the white noise I heard as a kid until this morning, when I was on Twitter talking to Kreshnik.

I’m trying not to think about it anymore. What are some weird things you’ve experienced but couldn’t explain? Leave a comment and share it!

Haircuts

Posted on by
4

During the summer before I turned nine (I’m an August baby), my little sister and I somehow managed to get lice. It still, to this day, makes my head itch terribly just thinking about it.

Lauren and I were probably playing Barbies or with our gigantic town of various action figures when we noticed a teensy black bug crawling around in our hideaway book. (You know, one of those hollow books you can hide things in?) We bounced down the stairs to wherever Mom was at the moment (probably in the living room watching General Hospital).

“Look Mommy,” we said, holding out the book to her. “What is it?”

I think my mother had a heart attack.

Luckily, my mom has always been calm and composed, and she recovered pretty quickly. She checked our heads and, sure enough, it was lice.

My sister and I were very close as little kids (and still are). At the time, we didn’t hang out with other kids outside of school. Since it was the middle of summer, we hadn’t come into contact with other kids aside from our cousins (who were lice-free). Yet somehow we had managed to both come down with the little buggers.

Mom immediately went out and bought the lice rinses, shampooing and combing the stuff through our long, shiny hair. I hated the scent of it, and I hated stooping over the sink as she rinsed it out. When we were both done, however, we seemed to be cured.

Of course, we weren’t. We did the treatment several more times over the next couple of weeks. Mom and Dad bombed the whole house, and soaked our stuffed animals in the tub with some stuff that was supposed to kill any eggs nested in our stuffed friends. All of our clothing and sheets were washed with scalding hot water, yet we still couldn’t get rid of the lice.

Finally, some well-meaning person told my mom to soak our heads with Vaseline. I can still remember Mom and Dad getting ready for the project. Dad bought some Ajax, which was the only thing that would cut through to wash the Vaseline out once we were coated. Lauren and I sat in chairs as Mom and Dad worked Vaseline into our hair and put plastic shower caps and plastic bags over our heads to keep it from dripping onto anything. I’m not sure how long we had to let it set in, but eventually it was time to wash it out. To this day, I can’t look at a bottle of Ajax and not remember my parents soaping up my hair over and over again, trying to get all of the Vaseline out. Unfortunately, my and Lauren’s hair was so long that it just wasn’t happening.

“We’re going to have to cut it,” said one of my parents. (I’ve honestly blocked out who.)

“NO!” Lauren and I screamed.

“We don’t have a choice,” Mom said. And then she took out the scissors from the drawer — the same scissors Lauren had once used to give her Barbie a lopsided haircut — and cut our hair as we cried and begged her not to.

Once our hair was shorter (and by shorter I mean boy short), the Vaseline washed out without a problem. And the lice? Were gone, never to come back. But I had one hell of a horrible haircut, worse than the haircut Britt recently gave her daughter Emma — I promise!! (I refuse to post pictures, because it truly was that bad.)

For the longest time after that, I refused to cut my hair. It grew all the way down to my hips before, at thirteen, I decided to cut it. Now I could care less; I cut it all the time! But for some reason, when I was a kid, my hair seemed to be my sole identity.

Do you have a bad or funny haircut story? Comment here with your best (or worst), and let’s show Britt that she hasn’t totally traumatized her kid!

Girl anachronism

Posted on by
3

It’s that time of year again. That clean scent is back in the air, daffodils are popping up everywhere, and it’s raining, raining, raining. I’m not awake enough in the morning to remember an umbrella, but as I was walking the block from my parking lot to our office building I was suddenly overcome with nostalgia for our downtown library (which is, ironically, right across the street from my office).

When I was little, the highlight of my week during the spring and summer was when Mom would take us downtown. She scraped up change out of a yellow plastic cup she kept on top of the fridge and we rode the bus to the Green. We walked from the Green to the library, which was my favorite place. I could have anything I wanted, if only I just took the time to look for it. I basked in the old scent of the books — no scent compares, even now — and the wood shelves. I could get lost in those rows and rows of books. I fell deeply in love with the library and my little plastic library card.

After we picked out two or three books each (sometimes more), we would walk to Dominic and Pia’s, a little hole in the wall pizza place that has been around since Mom was a kid. They have the best pizza in the world, hands down. Just go ahead and try to change my mind. Dominic and Pia are an Italian couple. The entire restaurant is run by family and has gained its reputation strictly by word of mouth. There is barely ever a free table, and the little place usually has a long line during lunch and dinner. (I actually just recently went there for lunch with my parents, and both Dominic and Pia were still cooking. They’ve got to be in their seventies or eighties by now.)

When we were finished eating (which was always awesome because it was one of the few times we were allowed soda), we would walk back to the Green and ride the bus home. We’d spend the afternoon reading our new books and looking forward to the next trip. Those are the days I will always think of when I envision happiness, safety, love, and fun. Those are the days that will always immediately come to mind whenever I think of my childhood.

What’s your favorite childhood memory?