Shows That I Love: New Girl

Shows that I love. We're starting with New Girl, obviously. The premise: a dorky teacher moves in with three single guys. Nick, a poor bartender. Winston, a small-time basketball star who played on a European team but since his return to the US is having a hard time finding work, and Schmidt, a womanizer with OCD. She quickly earns her way into their hearts with her lovably nerdy ways, and the four of them become best friends.

New episodes air on Fox on Tuesday nights, so normally my Wednesdays are ripe with emails, IM's, and Facebook wall posts from Melissa, Richard, Solomon and Mark R., that consists of random funny New Girl one-liners.

For instance, Melissa will email me and just say, "Why is she dressed like a woman's studies major?"  Or Mark R. will post on my Facebook wall, "I'm sorry, but that's how the electoral college works."  Or Solomon will IM me from work saying, "I'm going to have to reinstitute my ban on high-waisted shorts."

So to whet your appetites and tempt you to watch the whole season, here are some fun clips, and the lines from them that were left on my voicemail, worked into conversations, and mumbled during dance rehearsal arguments to lighten the mood (always works, by the way). Most of our favorite scenes are not available anywhere easily accessible on the INternet, so you'll have to watch on fox.com or OnDemand, or purchase the first season on amazon.com or iTunes. Or you can do what I do sometimes be a really evil selfish person and download free torrents.



"You want me to do a voice?"
"You look ravishing in your netting contraption.."


"Who washes a towel? The towel washes me!"


"I can taste my spine"


 "This is the saddest song....in the woooorrrld.."
 "cause the ice in the glass represents the tears from my eyes, dawg"


"I'm like a Dominican teenager playing Little League. It's just not fair for anyone else."
 "I'm feeling pretty twirly..."


"What if I had a croissant blog???"

 
"TWO MOONS HAVE PASSED!!"
 "Why do you start talking like a Native American when you get angry?"


"The downstairs neighbor put a password on their wi-fi..."
"I thought he was going to try to sell us something."


"Bees are dying. Don't pretend to know my pain..."


"It's like you're ripping the side block out of my mental Jenga."

My Dawg

This is my public apology to Melissa for seething at her back yesterday while we trained for next weekend's 5k together. For feeling like Dumpy Asthmatic Decrepit Smurf while she bounced along like Peppy Encouraging Bouyant Smurf. For wanting to yell at her, "For the love, if you're gonna run all peppy like that you might as well just start whistling like the 7 stupid dwarfs too!" For having to fight back the urge to slap her silly after each, "Come on, you can do it! We're almost there!!" For almost screaming out, "If you don't start huffing and puffing in 5 seconds, our 30 year friendship is over." For wanting to "accidentally" step on one of her happy rainbow colored laces and make her trip so I'd get 20 seconds to walk.

After all that, she got us both to run our longest and fastest: 3.3 miles at 9.57 minutes per mile. I run much faster when I'm hating on someone. Like those damn dogs that attacked me a few weeks ago. Today, Melissa was my pair of yippy biting dogs. Fortunately, I controlled myself and didn't kick her across the road.

....And I guess she runs faster with the Devil on her heels.

Monday Mornings With Zachary, Featuring Gavin Tygh!

Be sure to watch Melissa's son Gavin help his Pop Warner football team advance to the next round in Florida!

Tables Of Cards

The only reason Colson and Gavin like when Melissa and I want to go to Chili's.

The Red Of The Gods

Okay, this is why most women hate Melissa. I've told you about her always finding the perfect everything. Well, she walked in to a diner the other day with this on her fingernails...THE PERFECT SHADE OF RED POLISH FOR A BLONDE! You know how hard that is to find?? It made me want to slap her 7 times across the face.

I Thank The Bank For The Money, Thank God For You

(The title? Come on y'all, vintage Sawyer Brown!)


While I'm most grateful for this cute bunch today, I'd like to take a minute to be grateful for my friends. Oh yes, I have a few of them, don't look so shocked...

First, the original and still the best, Melissa. She's the devil on my left AND the angel on my right. How else would she be able to stick around so long...


While changing their dirty diapers, I never thought that my 4 oldest nieces would grow up to be 4 of my best friends, but here we are.

the one I'd go on a field trip with any day of the week, Bonnie May

the one I love getting late night calls from, Brianne Elizabeth

the one who knows what I look like doing "Superman! BANANA!", Brooke Suzanne

and the one who feels my sweat pain, Bethany Gates.

My dance partner Richard, who became one of my best friends our first Christmas as partners when he looked at me and said, "So...I like you, you like me, we don't have to get gifts for each other, right?" And then solidified our friendship when he later said, "Um, my dead gramma in her casket can spin faster than you." And his partner Solomon, who is wickedly intelligent but still treats me like a goddess. Bizarre, I know.

Hold on, I'm going to go so far as to add two more, who over the past year have become peas to my carrots. Everyone's Sugar Daddy, John Burns, who makes this list not just because his grammar is as good as mine, but because he gets me even though he doesn't like to admit it. (I'd add his wife Karen to this list but she's prettier than I, so screw that idea...)

..and the beautiful Antoinette Santoro, who makes me laugh for real, not the fake laugh that I usually use around most of you. Her sense of humor is so much larger than her chest, thank goodness, which is basically just average....

There! See? I have friends!

(Now, to hope that none of these people comment on this post with, "What? Who are you? Do I know you??")

The Larger The Family, The Less Freaks

One of the greatest benefits of having a large family; relatability. The larger your family, the less chance you have of being a freak. You can't be a freak when there's someone else just like you in your family. And there's bound to be someone else with your same issue, skill, disability, whatever when you can barely count how many cousins you have.

For instance, Cole got his first migraine yesterday, and now has to deal with that. "You've got migraines? Papa and Brookey get those too, you can talk to them about how they deal with it!"

That phrase could go on and on for days. "You've got diabetes? Kyle's got diabetes, you can talk to him!" "You wet the bed? Your mom wet the bed 'til she was 13, you can talk to her!" "You want to be a wedding coordinator? Your Uncle Ed was a wedding coordinator, you can talk to him!" "You stole your mom's car and drove to Nashville? Talk to Nathan!"

And on.........and on........................and on.

It's to the point where you have to work hard to be the first anything around here. Although Zachary was the first with asthma, so he's got that going for him.

Melissa Gone Wild

Did you feel it? The subtle shift in atmospheric pressure around 1:15pm on Thursday May 12th? The momentary darkening of the sun? Did you feel off balance for a second as the earth shifted on it's axis? An unexplained pulling at your back, as if a black hole had opened up behind you and was sucking you in? I know you felt something. You must have. Because Melissa and I ran into each other.

(For those not in the know, Melissa and I have been best friends since childhood. Well, only friends since childhood, if we're being honest....)

This unexplained scientific phenomenon happened at Chick-Fil-A in Audubon. I was coming home from the kids' piano lessons in Norristown, and Melissa had just been to a kennel in Audubon to pick out a puppy with her husband and kids. It was one of those rare days when neither of us knew what the other was doing. I didn't know I'd be going to Chick-Fil-A, she didn't know where Audubon was and had never been in that area before. Melissa and I don't live close enough to each other to run into each other. Our in person contact is always planned.

I walked up to the counter to order, and stopped in my tracks. I saw a woman from the back, and something about her made me stop in my tracks. Everything around me slowed down. I saw her feet first, and if you know Melissa, you know that her feet would stop anyone in their tracks. A man is known by the company he keeps, but Melissa is known by what she keeps hidden by Converse in the winter months. Her feet are prehistoric. Reptilian. Skeksis, even (only Andrew will get that reference, but it's a good one).



There are random bones and knobs sticking out from every which angle. You barely recognize them as feet. And then she puts on a toe ring and I want to shout out, "Gollum has his Precious!!".

But I digress. The point is, the feet I saw looked so familiar to me. I moved up this woman's body and realized I knew that tee shirt from somewhere. I looked up higher to the hair, and said to myself, "Huh, Melissa wears her hair like that..." But my brain took so long to register that yes, it was Melissa. You see, I never see her in the wild. I have never seen her when she didn't know that I was seeing her. It was like I was a National Geographic photographer on assignment in the Siberian tundra and I had just come upon a rare white tiger that I'd previously only seen in zoos.

A million thoughts were running through my head: "Am I really seeing this?? Can it be true? Don't make any sudden movements, you'll scare it! I wonder how it got here? What is it about to eat? Where is it going? Holy crap, it really IS white! Wow, it never does THAT at the zoo..."

Once my brain finally allowed me to admit it was Melissa, I walked up and stood right behind her without saying anything. She jerked her head around, and, being an extrovert, had the same reaction I had had minutes before, only very loudly and dramatically. We were both so flustered at what was happening that we couldn't complete a sentence. It was fragments of, "what is going....how did you.....i don't even know where.....puppy....i was at....the kids are...I...chicken.....andrew lives near here??...."

Fortunately she had to run because her husband and kids were waiting in the car, otherwise we'd have both probably melted into puddles of confusion as every neuron in our brains exploded like a 4th of July fireworks finale.

I finished having my lunch with my brother Andrew and LittleRFL, but I was in the fog of nuclear fallout. As soon as lunch was over, I got into the car and called Melissa. She was experiencing the aftermath as well. We talked for 60 minutes about the scientific anomaly that had just occurred.

We realized that we don't know how to be casual with each other. We've never had call to be, and have ZERO interest in such behavior. It would be beyond ludicrous for me to say, "Oh hey, Melissa! Funny seeing you here! Getting some chicken? Okay, I'll talk to you later!" She would sooner wear frosted eyeshadow than say to me, "Suzanne! I didn't know you were going to be here! Oh cool, Andrew lives near here, didn't know that! Ok, gotta run!"

We have learned in our lives how to do that with other people, in order to be accepted socially. But it's impossible to do it with each other. It's unnatural. It would have been much better if I had pretended I hadn't seen her, and the moment had never happened. It was too creepy for words, although I've given it many more words than previously intended.

So we apologize if the resulting earthquake, asteroid or blackout messed up your day. Trust me when we say our day was much worse. We saw something we never want to see again; Melissa and Suzanne trying to pull off casual. It's ugly, it's uncomfortable, it's degrading. It's like that time she and I went to the Philly Zoo and saw/heard the giant turtles mating.

Reminds me of a blog post my brother Eric sent to me the other day, written by a man who is losing his voice to cancer. Christopher Hitchens says:

"A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful."

To All The Moms I've Loved Before

Today the "Lewis Mothers 2011" yearbook comes out. I wonder who the class celebrities will be??!! I'm so excited!! Let's look....

MOST LOVED MOTHER

My own mother earns this title because, well, she's MY mother. Any woman who says, in regards to Angelina Jolie, "If God had wanted me to adopt African babies, He wouldn't have put that big ocean between me and them" is going to be the mother I love best. Even the most olive complected mothers pale in comparison.

MOST PATIENT MOTHER

Ah, the woman who used to understandably HATE Mother's Day, my sister-in-law Kathy. 20 years of marriage without a child and you'd probably avoid the day altogether too. And while I'm sure Kathy will no longer hate this holiday, I would guess she feels that every day since little Robert came into her life has been Mother's Day. After 20 years of waiting, the look she has in this photo is the look you see on her face all the time.

BEST NAVIGATING MOTHER

Talk about a life changing year. My sister Amy had to face every mother's fear when her daughter Ashley, who has some learning challenges, got pregnant. Amy navigated those rough waters with a grace and dignity that some might not expect from my sister. But I never expected anything less. Her love for her daughter, as well as for her childless brother, gave her the strength to choreograph the most beautiful of endings. And while most will never know the great toll it took on her, a few of us do, and we bow down in awe.

MOST HEALING MOTHER

My sister-in-law Sue has the unwanted distinction of being the mother with the sickest kids of the past year. But if anyone can handle that title, she can. No one can attend to and mend a sick child like Sue. From ear infections to lifelong diseases, she can manage them all with ease. She definitely missed her calling as a nurse. If my kids ever get very ill, I'm sending them to her house!

MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED MOTHER

Though this mother's baby looks oddly like an unsalted peanut at the moment, my niece Brooke will no doubt be putting the rest of us mothers to shame come December. She will be changing diapers and making bottles and folding onesies and powdering bottoms and tickling toes, all with both hands tied behind her back. I know I'm looking forward to meeting this perfect mothers' baby, who will surely have the fattest cheeks in all of Christendom!

MOST ATTENTIVE MOTHER

This toughest of nuts was forever cracked when her baby Landon was born. From the minute my niece Brianne laid eyes on that baby, she fell head over heels and turned into a big bowl of mush! That boy will never go a minute without knowing his mama thinks he's the smartest, most handsome, funniest, kindest, most talented, best dressed, fastest, most creative, best hairstyle, cleanest eater, best sleeper, ....you get the point. Landon's got his mama's full attention, and we all love seeing her soft and gushy side!

MOST PREPARED MOTHER

She may not now be or ever have been a Lewis, but my best friend Melissa has earned her place in this family's yearbook. While some mothers make decisions for their kids on a whim, Melissa analyzes to a gnat's eyebrow each and every decision regarding her children. Whether it be as simple as what outfit they should wear to a party or what the best course of treatment is for their learning disability, she will spend hours upon hours researching each and every possibility to find the perfect one. Her children can sleep deeper at night in the knowledge that what their mother has done for them has been exactly what they needed.

MOST EASY GOING MOTHER

Nothing ruffles this mother's feathers. My oldest niece Bonnie has 5 children under 13, and you never see her lose her cool. And why would she? She was born to be a mother. She's seen her kids safely through rough times with her relaxed, positive manner. There's not a week that goes by that either Melissa or I don't say to each other, "I really wish I could be more like Bonnie right now...why can't I just relax about this??!" No grey hairs in this mother's future, that's for sure!

MOST GRATEFUL MOTHER

I am so lucky to be part of a family full of strong maternal influences. The Lewis family as a whole would fall by the wayside if not for the perseverance and tough-mindedness of all of these women.

MOTHER OF THE YEAR

While the rest of us spent the last year ranting and raving like plucked chickens about our petty issues, my niece Ashley was quietly proving herself to be the most real mother of us all. She had the intelligence to realize that she wasn't ready for the challenges of motherhood and the courage to allow her child to be raised by people who were ready for those challenges. We should all hope that in the face of tough decisions, we would be as practical and as brave as Ashley has been. (Not to mention she gave her Aunt Kathy the chance to stop hating Mother's Day!)

*Wow, those moms are all so cool...I hope they sign my yearbook!

(p.s., keep your eyes on Being Suzanne Mosley around 8am, there may be a surprise in store!)

Suzanne Shamalayan

(For Melissa, who had nightmares for weeks after seeing the "Tree Man" on television.



Hopefully this will provide her with fresh nightmare fodder.)

Her nicknames may include 'wolf girl' and 'monkey face'.But 11-year-old Thai girl Supatra Sasuphan today insisted that she was after being officially recognised as the world's hairiest girl. Although the schoolgirl from Bangkok has faced merciless teasing at school, Supatra says being given a Guinness World Record for her hair has helped her become extremely popular.

Read more

Yellow Stars Of David All Around!

We survived Day 1 of Holocaust Week. Not only that, but people from all over are jumping on board the Nazi Diet cattle train. And by "from all over" I mean other people in my family. Oh, and Richard. So come along and ride with us! You know you want to be a Frank too...

Michael ate fried shrimp for lunch yesterday and brought home a takeout container of leftovers. His excuse was that he hadn't read the list of Approved Holocaust Food yet. Melissa yelled at him, "DO YOU THINK ANNE FRANK ATE FRIED SHRIMP??!??!?!?!! You're a terrible Nazi..." It's off to the crematorium for Michael!

Eric survived too. He instant messaged me at 4pm asking, "Do I have to ask you if I can have a stick of gum, Herr Kommandant?" He's the Hogan to my Klink, I love it......

Dieting is fun.

Mein Salad

It's Holocaust Week! That's right, Melissa and I start a new diet today, one that we created together. It's called the Nazi Diet. Oh stop, chill out. We've called it that because we intend on being just like Nazis when it comes to food. You know, the good part of Nazis. Their dedication and their organization. Admit it, those Nazis had organization and notation down to a science. They were, well, Nazis about it. They wrote EVERYTHING down. Everything was planned to a T.

And this first week we're calling Holocaust Week because we're going extreme. We're purifying our bodies of the toxins. Getting rid of every last one. Processed waste must be eliminated! Heil Protein! We're gettin' all Anne Frank up in dis piece! If you need us, we'll be behind the hidden cupboard in the attic, writing down every last crumb that we shove into our stupid pieholes.

Come on, it's called an ANALOGY. In the words of Zachary Mosley, did you ever hear of that?? We're not making fun of the holocaust, for the love of Beyonce Knowles. It was a tragedy of epic proportion. But it happened, so you can't not talk about it. And, just like every epic tragedy in life, it's up for grabs when it comes to analogy fodder.

We could have called it the Hiroshima Diet. Pearl Harbor Week. The Trail Of Tears Month. But we chose the holocaust because, well, Melissa started it. And then I jumped right on that cattle car and rode it straight into the fiery depths of Auschwitz, because I'm like that. Get me started down an analogous road and I won't get off until my ashes are drifting down like a light snowfall....

Too much?


(I love to freak you out.........)

Aging Fashion Icons

Whether in jammies

or formal wear....

whether riding in a mid-life crisismobile

Or posing with a thug gangsta....

whether carrying a baby

or carrying a baby...

whether playing angelic ingenue....

or badass party girl...

whether rocking a granny sweater and spectacles

or an ethnic headband and beads....

whether long Breck girl hair

or wacky highlights...

whether posing as a ballroom dancer

or a bowler....

whether drinking from a phallic straw

or rockin' Jingle Jugs.....

....one thing is for sure. My best friend can carry off any look with more style and grace than the rest of us all rolled together. Happy Birthday to the Grace Kelly of the nineties, Jackie O of the noughties, and sure to be Princess Di of the twenty-tens. May your reign as the Queen Of The Most Appropriate/Stylish Outfit And Most Gracious Demeanor/Behavior For The Occasion continue to inspire the rest of us wannabes forever.

(wish I had a picture of her in her Chili's shirt with giant globs of guacamole down the front. although come to think of it, she looked fresh as a daisy in that too...i'm hoping, if i'm around, that her family will let me dress her in kmart clothes and frosted eyeshadow for her viewing. just once i want a picture of her looking tacky, is that so much to ask??!!)

Ava's Fashions, Featuring Melissa

Two years ago, my annual Christmas Cocktail party was held on a blustery wintry night. Melissa's husband Michael slid his car into a ditch that night, on the way home to pick her up to come to my house. The tow truck took longer than expected, and they ended up not making it to the party. Around 9pm that night, Melissa sent me an email with this picture, saying she was trying to have a good attitude about not making it to the party, but someone needed to at least appreciate her outfit.

I was so busy that night I didn't get around to showing everyone her picture so they could ooh and aah. So today let's all give Melissa's outfit it's proper due, the ovation it never received.

It Was Great, Fuhgettaboutit!!

The amazing wedding reception at Capo's.