Category: Columns

There’s a haunting scene in the middle of the Route 66 Museum in Kingman, Arizona. A life-sized diorama depicts a family of forlorn-faced Dust Bowl refugees rolling slowly West along the Mother Road in a loaded-down pickup truck.

Pots and pans dangle from the side of the rickety rig and too many old suitcases balance up top. A baby pouts from under a torn blanket and a child in ratty duds perches on an overturned crate in the truck bed. Dad, suspendered, plods along beside them on foot. Blanketed in dirt, they seek a better life in California.

My family and I are headed in the opposite direction. We’ve driven from California to spend our spring vacation careening over this famous highway in a rented motor home. It’s 80 years after the Great Depression and the current economic downturn hasn’t yet incited the kind of desperation those hard-luck migrants faced.

And yet it’s funny how many times during our trip we’ve felt like those rag-tag refugees in their rattle-trap jalopy.

RVs make a racket as they rumble and lurch down the highway, dishes clinking, metal blinds clacking, engine barking like a tubercular wolf. We pull into abandoned parking lots to throw together makeshift meals of toast and cheese, then eat them in our cramped cabin because it’s too cold and windy outside to set up the folding table. We bump-thump over curbs, unaccustomed to the vehicle’s exterior dimensions, and whack-smack our heads on low doorways, unaccustomed to its interior ones.

I’m not a ginormous person. Not hulking. Not alpine. I couldn’t, like, take down Ann Coulter in a cage fight, although I’d really enjoy trying. But at five-foot-ten and prone to heels, I’m on the lanky side.

Still, I’m astonished how many readers meet me and make this exact comment:

“Wow. You look so much … shorter in your photo.”

I get it all the time. As if it were a perfectly rational thing to say. As if they believed my column mugshot were actual size, and the rest of my body should be six, seven inches tall.

“You’re big,” people inform me. “We thought you were this petite little thing.” They don’t say it in a “Wow, life is full of fun surprises” kind of way. They say it like it’s disconcerting. Like I’ve forever destroyed their ability to trust themselves.

One woman actually held up my book, pointed to the author photo on the back and said to her friend, “Look at her! That’s a small person, I’m sorry.”

The first few times it happened, I let it go. Chuckled, shrugged, tried not to feel like a freak. Maybe squatted a bit, trying to slowly, surreptitiously shrink down to the size folks picture me to be. The size they really, really want me to be.

Everyone knows you’re not supposed to date your boss. It makes things messy at the office.

I dated mine once, and can attest that things did get messy at the office. Also in the car. And on the sofa at his place.

We flirted. We kissed. We got naked. Shacked up, got married, had kids. Even now, we continue to grope each other in front of the subordinates, open each other’s mail, and answer our home phone singing, “Aloha! Deano’s Weiner Shanty” — all behavior that is really frowned upon in a corporate setting.

Mr. Boss Man and I were in college when we began canoodling among the cubicles, and our tryst failed to raise a ruckus. Some colleagues offered high-fives; others rolled their eyes and made occasional gagging sounds. Most just dismissed us as indiscreet young idiots.

Today, though, employees who date coworkers may be asked to sign a “love contract” declaring their romantic alliance. Known formally as “consensual relationship agreements,” these documents confirm that both parties willingly entered into the affair, and that either one is free to end it without professional ramifications.

I saw one that read, “The undersigned independently and collectively desire to undertake and pursue a mutually consensual social and/or amorous relationship …”

Whew! Makes me hot just reading it.

They warned us: Before long, we’d all feel the effects of this recession. Now it’s happened to me. I haven’t lost my job. No evicted family members have shown up at my door. In truth, the financial crisis hasn’t yet walloped my wallet.

But it’s messing with my mind. Feeling the economy slowly constrict around our national lifestyle, I find myself in a spend-not panic: Would you like to see the dessert menu? Sigh, better not. Valet parking? Don’t be ridiculous.

Call me a brat, but it starts to piss me off. Is this the end of life’s small pleasures? A friend of mine relinquished her daily Starbucks cappuccino (extra shot of espresso, single pump of caramel) in favor of boring, home-brewed joe in a thermos.

“How bad is it,” she lamented, “when a girl can’t even have a little cup of fancy-pants coffee?”

But I had a recent revelation while driving my car and listening to an old song, appropriately, by Squeeze. I was blissing out on those endorphins that come from singing loudly to ’80s music when my guilt-check clicked on: This feels too good. Is it naughty? Is it wasteful, extravagant, thriftless? Am I somehow squandering money that, as soon as next week, could stand between my children and a bowl of pork-flavored ramen noodles?

And then a shocking jolt of relief: No. This euphoria? This is free.

There are certain things a woman is supposed to have accumulated by this point in her life. A signature perfume. A conversation-stopping potluck recipe. And a Hollywood hunk of choice.

I have none of these things, and I spend little time fretting over it. But I must admit that each year at Academy Awards time, I grapple with some shame that I have no favorite man candy to ogle on the red carpet.

I tend to watch the awards shows surrounded by opinionated gal pals and, for the most part, I can holler tasteless comments with the best of them. We gasp and grouse over actresses’ necklines, waistlines, and panty lines. My specialty is the bitchy accessory crack: e.g., “What is that in her hair, a Krispy Kreme?” or “Earrings or necklace, honey, not both.”

It’s when my friends start hooting and gyrating over the bow-tied, limo-emerging actors — bedroom-eyed Clooney, swollen-lipped Pitt, square-jawed Brosnan — that I find myself bored and heading to the kitchen for more artichoke dip.