Life Can Be Stressful But Fun

When Spring Vacation rolled around for Wes and Wally that year they did not need to be worried about not having anything to do.  Wes was living with his Dad and his new family but chose to come and stay with Wally and I for the week.  I did not ask any questions as I had already heard stories.

That was a real stroke of luck since I had managed to over extend what time I had to finish the ice show costumes, make some draperies for a client, work on the second apartment in the house of Dearborn and was trying not to dwell on the fact that Mother was coming to see the ice show.

If you notice the lovely capes in the picture above, that is the one that the costume chairman said took fifty-two hours to sequin with just as many sequins on the back.  My two guys laid it out on the dining room table and got to work.  I actually think they had fun working on it or maybe it just nice for the two of them to be together. They chatted away, watched MTV and got all the sequins put into place in two days.  Have to say they did an excellent job.

The Starfish costume was a different story.  The basic dress of neon green had to be skin tight down to the knees with a flared petticoat of net from the knees to the ice. My best guess was that it took a thousand hours to cut out all the little pieces of green seaweed, outline them in green sequins and hand sew them in place. Then due to the fact that net petticoats and the toe picks on the skates were an accident looking for a place to happen plastic had to be had sewed to the under side of the petticoat.

The thing on my head was a giant starfish with a diameter of five feet.
A slight tipping of the head threw your balance off and disaster struck. This costume was part of an undersea number to the Beatles "Octopus's Garden" done in black light with skating octopi  or octopuses and lobsters.  It was pretty spectacular however during one show a starfish fell onto her knees and could not get up.  Everyone skated off the ice except her but two lobsters came back out of the curtain, each one picking her up by an elbow and whisked her away.  Glad that was not me!  

For fun and entertainment for Wes and Wally after they hot glued for a few days they got to go to the Dearborn house and strip wallpaper
and find the hidden archway between the living room and kitchen. They got the archway opened up.  To my delight all the original woodwork was there and in very good shape. Since they worked so hard for four days I did spend a couple of days taking them around Detroit for fun things to do. All their help did take some of the stress out of my life and it was fun to have them together after almost a year and a half.

The ice show had seven performances the last weekend of April every year.  As the weather got warmer in April a cloud of fog would descend over the ice every evening.  Once skaters would start gliding across the ice the fog would disappear.  When the arena was all decorated with the curtains and drops hanging from the ceiling it had a very eerie look to it.  After starting on costumes in September, casting the show in November, handing out the costume pieces in January and eight weeks of rehearsals through March and April showtime was the time to just enjoy everything that took all that work.  For all the hours of work and rehearsals, the beautiful but not easy to skate in costumes and the feeling that I was the worst skater there the magic happened at every show when the music dimmed, the music started and it was showtime.

Somehow I was not looking forward to Mother coming to see the show.  She was arriving on Saturday morning which meant she would either get to stay home with Bowser or come to three shows. But that was not the only reason I was not looking forward to the visit. She had not been to Detroit since I had moved there and I had not been back to Oklahoma.  Our communication consisted of frequent phone calls during which I always discovered something new I was doing wrong.

The visit was not too bad.  She opted to come to the Saturday night show which worked out best for me.  I had the feeling that she wondered why I spent all that time working on it but she was never much of a "volunteer" type person. I did manage to keep her entertained after the show was over by taking her to Greenfield Village, lunch at the Ford Mansion, shopping in downtown Detroit and any thing else I could think of. By the time she left I learned Bowser was too big of a dog, I needed to let my hair and fingernails grow, the house was small but alright, buying the house in Dearborn was not a good idea  and she did not like anything about Charles even though he took us to one of the most expensive restaurants in town.  Her attitude towards any male I even mentioned had always created a long list of reasons they were not worth even discussing, seeing and certainly not dating. What a relief to put her on the plane.

Maybe this was the beginning of my realizing there was nothing I could do to please her except change everything about me and all the things I enjoyed doing. Somehow in my head I was still the twelve year old girl who always said "Yes" to Mother when I really wanted to yell "NO". But she was my Mother and my twelve year old self did not know anything else to do but agree with her about everything. It was going to take my forty-three year old self awhile longer to learn.

I really do not know how Wally going to summer camp came about. There are some memories that totally slip my mind.  The little Cub Scout who camped once or twice and was not your happy camper suddenly wanted to go to a camp miles away in the northern part of the state for three weeks. Somehow camping, from our first trip with borrowed equipment, he had fallen in love with it.  Over the course of a year and a half since our first trip the question came up every few weeks as to what I had planned for the weekend. His face would light up when I answered with no plans, where would you like to go? 

Wally did not have any friends who were going and for him to want to go was a real sign he was growing up.  I was just a slight bit envious but at the same time it would be a relief to not have to worry about what he was going to do when I had to get some work done.  The bad part about him going was that I really missed him when he was gone.  A weekend with his Dad was not too bad but towards the end of school that year he went to Quebec with his French class for five days. They rode the train from Windsor, Canada to Quebec and could only speak French once they arrived there.  Cool trip for him but by the second day I was lost without him. It was going to be a long three weeks for Bowser and I.

Before school was out we had a surprise visitor for several days.  Then slid into a summer with a lot in interesting events.

Good Times

Someone once said that when you look back at things that occur in your life you tend to only remember the happy or the good parts.  I guess that might be logical because it is much nicer to block out the bad and only remember the happy parts.  Guess I tend to look back on the bad parts and make good use of them so that I don't repeat them.  Can't say I was always successful with that attitude as old patterns of behavior are hard to change. 

By the time the second year rolled around after the divorce I was slowly beginning to realize that it was much easier to create good times and good memories.  It was so much more fun to wake up every morning and think what a great day it was going to be rather than waking up with a sense of dread.  When things did go wrong I was slowly learning how to get over them and go on. Besides there was no one else to blame and the best thing to do was to laugh and go on.

After the first parent-teacher conference at Wally's middle school I was not extremely happy.  First of all, every teacher conference that I ever attended I got scheduled right after some mother with a straight A student.  I could overhear what a wonderful student Johnny or Susie was and wonder why this parent had to even attend except to gloat over what a wonderful child they had.  When it became my turn I got to hear what a nice boy Wally was but that he never turned in his homework. How they knew he was smart and did well on tests but since home work was a big part of his grade he could do so much better.

I knew Wally did his homework but somehow it just never got turned in.  He would carry it to school but somehow did not remember to turn it in.  So we started a Movie Night.  Every Tuesday night we would go to the dollar movie in Royal Oak and I put a list on the refrigerator of things I would not let him do every time I got a bad report from school. I think there were about four or five things on the list with the last one being no more Movie Nights.  In the course of the semester with more conferences and notes from the teachers he lost all but the last one. My great idea did not work so well so before we lost Movie Night I tore the list up and decided that Wally was really a great kid and he was doing great in band.  Besides I rather enjoyed Movie Night and maybe having an A student was not all that important. Having a fun child was much more important.

The first costume check for the upcoming ice show was interesting.  The eight guys I was in charge of for the most part did very well.  One of the guys could actually sew better than I could and I discovered that one of them was actually a male stripper.  The best though was Kevin and Michael.  Michael and Kevin met in France while touring with Holiday on Ice.  Kevin had been a junior champion in Men's Singles several years before and Detroit was his home.  Both always appeared in full make-up complete with false eyelashes and it took some getting used to on my part.  Costumes with pants required an inseam zipper so that it was easy to change costumes without taking your skates off.  Kevin got creative and hot glued his zippers in. Zippers, hot glue and orange satin are not a good combination and the pants had an interesting rippled look to the inseams.  This required two more yards of orange satin and me making Kevin's pants. Actually I ended up making all of Kevin's costume as I did not trust him and it was a good thing I liked him.

My two costumes passed the test and I got two huge bags of trim to be applied to them.  Looking at the instructions for the Starfish costume all I could think was "you've got to be kidding".  It required a hundred little pieces of green felt to be cut out and decorated with green sequins.Then there were yards of green toille (net) that was to be made into a shirt to go around my feet.  Then there was the bag for the Japanese cape that was to take 52 hours to put on the sequins.  I seriously thought about putting a hex on that costume chairman.

I should have known better than to put a For Rent sign in front of the house I bought in Dearborn.  Between a booming interior design business, the up coming ice show and all those costumes and trying to be a decent mother to both Wally and Wes, since he seemed to have decided I was not so horrid, there were not enough hours in the day.  Perfect timing for a gal to call very interested in seeing the downstairs apartment at the Dearborn house.

I explained to her that I had some painting to do but she was anxious to see it anyway.  So I figured that was perhaps the best thing to do.  Maybe their is a reason why I can't remember her name so I am going to call her Opal.  Opal was about my same age and said she was a Therapeutic Masseuse.  I had not heard about that occupation before but I did decide not to ask. She did love the apartment and asked if I could paint a couple of rooms in particular colors.  Being in a benevolent mood I agreed.  Interesting that she wanted the kitchen in a pale peach which was supposed to be good for digestion and the bedroom in sky blue with clouds painted on the ceiling. Nothing like a challenge and I knew some people put mirrors on the ceiling but clouds was a whole new thing.  We settled on a date, she paid the deposit and the first months rent and I went shopping for paint.

By the end of February I had the apartment painted and had to have the city code person come out to give me a Certificate of Occupancy. I did notice he stared at the bedroom ceiling for a long time but did not say anything.  The downstairs passed so I asked if he would check the upstairs apartment while he was there.  That was where the bad news came in.  Seems like the kitchen sink flunked due to no garbage disposer.

He wasn't impressed when I pointed out it was a vintage sink.  Then he said the back stairs were no longer legal and I needed to remove them.  I made no comment after his terse answer about the kitchen sink but I did wonder what would happen if Opal set the downstairs on fire and the upstairs person could not make it down the front stairs.  There were times a year or so later when I would remember that thought.

So I was rather caught up on everything but my costumes and Charles suggested we go skiing before rehearsals started and snow melted.

Wally and I both had skis and boots but Charles had to rent some.  We went off to Traverse City and spent the weekend flying down the slopes. Charles was worried about Wally, which was nice, but I worried about him.  Let's just say his skiing posture was a little different than most.  But he always managed to get down the hill in one piece and it was really a fun weekend.

I caught myself liking Michigan and Detroit more everyday.  I am a winter person so it was fine with me if there was snow from November to Easter.  The kids have always joked about the fact that there was never a snow day in Michigan.  The roads were cleared by seven in the morning and if you had a sidewalk in front of your house it had to also be cleared of snow by the time children walked to school.

There was so much history in Detroit from automobiles to music, fantastic architecture, the Henry Ford Museum and a great art museum.  Detroit is an amazing city in the fact that hardships befall it but it always manages to make a comeback. The news has always loved to tell all the bad aspects such as crime and poverty but you find that in every city, large or small.

It was really beginning to feel like everyday was fun.  Spring meant the ice show for me and some special things for Wally.  It was kinda of nice that Wes was showing up a lot since he now had a driver's license.  Hopefully life will stay this way.