Loving Tony

I recently lost a man I have loved since we were both children. He was 48 when he passed away - much too young for us to be prepared to lose him. Still, as they say, "It's not the years; it's the mileage," and he'd lived more than most people.

He wrote a published book in his 20s. In his 40s, he started working on an autobiography. It would tell details of his life, like how, at 25, he owned the second largest company of its kind in the world, printing backstage passes for the likes of the Rolling Stones, Madonna, and Billy Joel. He was making, we often said, more money than God.

Nothing in his life was of ordinary size and scope. Years later, he lost the company, and eventually, his family. He developed a drug problem that should have killed him. He consumed alcohol like it was water.

And, he lived to get clean and sober, religiously attending his meetings for AA, NA, and CA.

He asked me to write the foreward to his book. This is it.

*******************

Tony Perry is my brother. Most people gain siblings through some action taken by their parents, and are linked by biology, marriage, adoption, or in some other legal and definable way. This is not true for us; our parents might not immediately recognize each other if they passed on the street. There is no legal document defining our relationship. He is my brother because of decisions he and I have made, and because something in his soul speaks to something in mine. If you have people like this in your life – and I am fortunate to have many – you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, there are no words that will adequately explain it to you.

I remember the first time I saw Tony. I was a 14 year old high school freshman. He was a 14 year old sophomore, wearing a jacket that said, "Italian Stallion" on the back. He wore that jacket everywhere. He was loud, abrasive, charismatic and funny. I was quiet and unsure. At the first audition of the year, he made a hash out of the cold reading, and obviously delighted in doing so. The teacher sighed and said, "Never ask a techie to read lines." My attention sharpened – I was one of the few kids from my junior high theater department to actually have tech experience. It soon became apparent that not only was Tony a techie, he was THE techie in our school.

I also remember the first time Tony met my mother. So does Tony – she impressed him immediately. The school boundaries for our school were odd and elongated, so that a large number of my schoolmates came from the neighboring city, and rode the bus for half an hour to get to and from school. Tony was one of those kids. One day he missed the bus, and asked if my mom could drive him home. My mom always had a car full of kids, no matter where we went. "It's pretty far, clear out in Hidden Valley," I told her, but she was willing to take him. Tony climbed into the back of the car with an armload of books, far too many to be just his homework. "Hi," he said, "I'm Tony. I steal textbooks." Mom didn't bat an eye.

"Hello, Tony," she said.

Down the street from our school, there was a convenience store. Tony seemed to live on apple juice sold in little round, apple shaped, single serving bottles. He leaned over the back of the seat and said, "I feel like an apple juice. Can we stop and get one?" Mom slowed down and pulled into the parking lot.

Tony was beside himself. "She's stopping! You're stopping! You're actually gonna stop?"

"Sure," she said. "You have money, right?"

Tony talked about that for years. "I couldn't believe she actually stopped so I could get an apple juice!"

We had little in common, really, but it didn't matter.

Tony was the sun around which the theater revolved. He designed our drama guild T-shirts and our black satin jackets. He was our official technical director and our unofficial social director. Tony created our own holidays, The Thirteen Radical Days of Christmas, and as a group we designed a different activity every day for the thirteen days leading up to Christmas break. One day, we went to a Monty Python film festival; one day we bought our lunch from the generics aisle of Albertson's. (Remember generics? Remember when they took up an entire aisle?) He planned our group vacations to Disneyland.

On our first Disneyland trip, we had 9 or 10 of us, of both sexes, crammed into a single hotel room. My mother slept in the armchair; Tony slept in the bed next to me.

He'd started out across the room, on the floor, but two of the girls kept flicking Skittles candy at him after lights out. "Hey!" he yelled loudly, into the dark, "she hit my wiener with a Skittle!"

"Tony. Don't use that word," my mother chastised.

"Fine. She hit me in the penis with a Skittle." A few minutes later, he declared loudly, "She did it again!"

"Find somewhere else to sleep, then," Mom told him.

"There is nowhere else!"

"You can find someplace."

He walked around the room, stopping at the side of the double bed I was in. "I," he declared dramatically, pointing down at the bed, "am sleeping here." Then he looked down at me. "That OK with you?"

"Fine with me."

He checked with my mom. "OK?"

"OK. Now settle down."

I was notoriously chaste. For years, Tony took great delight in announcing to people, sometimes upon first meeting them, "I was the first man ever to sleep with Sharon Smith."

When Tony was arrested during my junior year, it absolutely undid me. I had not lived a life of unrelenting sunshine and rainbows, but this was, absolutely and undeniably, the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

One of the things we had in common back then was sobriety, a relatively uncommon trait in our group. When Tony arrived back at the school after being processed and released at the juvenile facility, I saw him climb out of the car and I went to meet him. I had never seen that look on his face, never seen him walk with that heaviness. He looked at me and said quietly, "They strip searched me for drugs, Sharon." My heart broke.

We were in the middle of rehearsing for our spring play, the largest show of the year. When Tony was suspended and then expelled and forced to complete the year at another school, I was a mess. Barred from even attending the show, Tony arranged for a bouquet of blue balloons to be delivered to the cast onstage during curtain call closing night. I wrote a sappy poem about it that was published in our school literary magazine, and saved one of the blue ribbons and wove it into my hair the next year when I went to the prom.

Tony was the only person I danced with at my prom. He was there with his fiancee, Jeanette. I was there hoping to see my best friend be crowned Prom Queen. Someone else won, and Tony barked to our table, "Nobody clap!" I clapped anyway – it was only courteous. I stepped on his feet twice during the dance; I am dance impaired.

Tony quite literally handed me back my life once. I'd been acting since I was 12, loved tech almost as much, and intended to continue doing both forever. But, I spent three of my four high school years with a teacher assigned to the theater classes simply because she had low seniority and no one else wanted the job; she'd never even seen a play before being assigned to us. I left high school having learned anything new, for three quarters of my time there, from the other students or on my own. I felt woefully inadequate to pursue anything theater related, even for fun. Oh, well, I thought, those are the breaks. Things happen. I'll get over it. Then Tony phoned one day shortly after my graduation.

The local university was having open auditions for "Chicago." Their auditions were always open to the public, so it didn't matter that neither of us were students - Tony wanted me to go try for a tech job with him. I dragged my feet.

"You don't sound excited about this!" he barked at me.

"I don't think I'm qualified to do anything."

"I'm not qualified either! Let's just go." Tony'd owned his own stage lighting company since he was 13; if he wasn't qualified, who was? I went with him. I spent the next ten years exclusively with the university theater department, then found I was also at home in other theater companies. As I write this, I'm preparing for the final dress rehearsal of a show, one I'm in with my husband and two of my kids. There are no words adequate to thank someone for handing you your identity back.

Most of the time, girls Tony was dating, and girls who wanted to date him, didn't worry about me at all, since I was obviously not a romantic rival. Sometimes, though, someone resented me. After Tony and Jeanette broke up, a girl working on a show with Tony and me took the opportunity to ask him out. He was taking the breakup pretty hard, and told her, "I just can hardly stand to even look at anyone female right now. I don't even want to be in the same room with any females." She was disappointed; in a few minutes, she became angry – at me.

Tony asked me, in the course of conversation, if I wanted to go to a movie the next night. Incensed, the girl said, "I thought you couldn't even look at anything female right now!" Tony looked at me, back at the girl, and expressed his puzzlement.

"That's not a female! That's Sharon."

The poor girl was fairly lukewarm to me after that, even years later.

When I got married, Tony stood beside my husband. When my first child was born, he brought a tiny T-shirt to the hospital that was a replica of our high school drama guild shirts. My children have called him "Uncle Tony" all of their lives. When he got married on New Year's Eve, I bought a black and gold formal to wear. When he broke his back, I drove him on errands and prayed for his recovery.

For years, he had the Midas touch. Nothing he tried failed, or turned out badly, or lost money. Since he never does anything in a small way, when it all went to hell it was really, truly hell.

Tony probably doesn't remember this, but when things got really ugly, with the cocaine, the booze and the craziness, I told him that he could only screw up badly in front of my kids once, and then he wouldn't see them again until they were 25. I meant it, too. He may not remember it, but somewhere he internalized it. He may have been absent from our lives for months at a time, but he never made me question whether he could be around my kids. He came close only once. The few horror stories they've heard, they've heard now that he's sober. They never had to watch him spiral out of control. That's a gift, too, to me and to them.

"Can you imagine me on cocaine?" he asked at one of our theater reunions. (Yes, we organize our own high school reunions, just for those of us from the theater department.) We all said the same things. "I don't have to – I saw it!" "It was ugly." "You're so lucky you never really saw it, Tony." "God help me, it was awful."

When Tony decided to get sober, he was a mess. His hands shook. His memory was dreadful. More than once, we'd be somewhere in public and someone would approach, saying, "Hey, man, it's been a long time. How are you?" Tony would have an entire conversation, then ask me after they'd gone, "Who was that, and how do I know them?"

His life sounds more like melodramatic fiction than a real life. It's not, I promise you. You will find yourself disbelieving what he has to say, but it all happened.

Tony is exasperating, clueless, infuriating, loving, amazing, talented beyond belief and his own worst enemy. I love him with all my heart.

Love him or hate him, you'll never forget him.

******************

I'm not sure what it will be like to be here on Earth without him.

I wish him peace in the next life.

I am so glad that those of us who knew him have each other to lean on right now.

I miss you, my brother. I always will.

Madeira

When I made mental lists of places that I wanted to visit, I never said to myself, "I really need to see Madeira!" I don't think it was on my radar at all. Then, we booked a cruise that would take my husband, myself, and two youngest children there.

This is our first glimpse of the city of Funchal, from the deck of our cruise ship.

Holy cow! So gorgeous.

By the time we tried to book a shore excursion, they were full, so we walked off the ship to see what we could find.

We found these sights before we even left the port.

I haven't edited any of these images, by the way - no filters, no color correcting. These are just as they came out of the camera. The colors really were that vivid.

We'd passed the first group of gathered cabbies hoping to entice us to hire them, but now we ran into a second group. We don't come from a large city, so we're not used to hiring cabs. My 18 year old and my 14 year old had only been in a cab once before.

One friendly but not overly aggressive driver handed us a homemade brochure. "I take you to the botanical gardens, the sea cliffs, a fishing village and back here. OK?" He named a price.

OK. Let's go see the island, we decided.

I'm so glad that we hired a driver. I would not have been able to make sense of, nor feel safe driving, the narrow, winding, hillside streets, even if I had access to a car.

It might have been worth the price just to see the Jardim Botanico da Madeira.

Looking down the mountain, you could just barely see the ship that had brought us across the Atlantic.

There she is - the Disney Magic.

Driving across the island, everything looked amazing and exotic to us - narrow streets, tiny cars, old buildings. We're from the American West, where something 50 years old is considered a teardown. Here, people lived, shopped and worshipped in buildings centuries old.

One of the local traditions turned tourist attraction involved sledding down the mountain streets. Straw hatted drivers steered the wheeled sleds down the mountain, and drivers like ours waited at the bottom to pick them up. We watched, delighted, but decided to pass on actually sledding.

A significant portion of the steep hills were terraced for growing. We're not wine people, but I hear that Madeira wines are highly rated.

The next stop was Cabo Girao, the tallest sea cliffs in Europe. The clear viewing deck was too unnerving for my youngest; she stayed well back. "I can see fine from here!"

Being a desert dweller, I find anything to do with water overly romantic (or overly terrifying, depending). I found myself in Camara de Lobos practically swooning. Drying fish! Battered boats! And the colors!

Our driver dropped us back in Funchal, where we had lunch and kept the camera clicking on our way back to the ship.

Maybe we'll be back there some day; maybe not. It will continue to be one of my favorite places that I never knew I wanted to see, until I was there.

All photos copyright: The Reflection Works Photography, 2013

The Example of an Olympian

Every two years, I watch televised sports. I've never watched a Super Bowl - I'm so glad that I can now see all the commercials online the next day - or a World Series. I don't follow Nascar drivers. I am, however, glued to the Olympics.

I'm not sure why that is, but it doesn't really matter. I watch the opening ceremonies, all 3 or 4 hours of them. I watch sports I know nothing about, and may never have heard of. I was delighted when I discovered curling. A sport played with brooms and a stone - how is it that everyone doesn't love this? My family mocks me, but curling is amazing.

Watching the Sochi Olympics, as usual I felt for every competitor who fell, exulted with every competitor who placed. Sure, I love it when Americans take home medals, but I don't need the winners to be American to be glad for them.

There's usually someone local at the Winter Olympics. I live 30 minutes from Lake Tahoe (home of the 1960 Winter Games), and many top athletes still live or train nearby. In 2014, the Lake Tahoe region had more medalists than 68 countries - yes, countries. It's exciting to know that there are locals on the podium.

Here in the Reno/Sparks area, everyone is particularly delighted this year by the gold medal win of David Wise, who grew up here in Reno, skied at local resorts, attended local public schools. He's one of us, and we all seem to claim him. The high school he attended held a schoolwide assembly in order to record and send a message of congratulations. His father was interviewed by the local paper. When I went with my Rotary Club to read to students at an elementary school, I discovered that they have an autographed poster hanging in their office; David Wise attended the school as a child.

Like most of the rest of the country, I found the choice of words by NBC News reporter Skyler Wilder as unusual, to say the least, when Wilder described Wise as living an "alternative lifestyle."

I was actually more and more amused as I read prose like this: "He's not like the rest of the field. Wise is mature." "At such a young age, Wise has the lifestyle of an adult."

That's because Wise is an adult. He's 23. He's five years past the legal age to be considered an adult. He's two years past the higher legal age to buy alcohol (which, ironically, is years past the age at which a person can join the military). It's not as if he's teetering on the cusp; the man has been a full fledged adult for years.

At 23, my daughter was a university graduate, and she took five years, not four, to earn her degree. At 23, my son in law was nearing graduation at the same university, and he'd taken two years off to serve as a full time missionary for our church. At 23, I had a husband, a mortgage and two preschoolers - and no, I was not a teenage bride. I was 20 when I got married and had my first child.

That's what seemed to really amaze NBC's Wilder: David Wise is a husband, father, and churchgoer, who says that he can picture himself being a pastor one day. The way Wilder describes it, you'd think that this was some kind of bizarre lifestyle heard about only in the pages of National Geographic Magazine. This is the ordinary, expected way that people behaved until a generation or two ago. In centuries past, when the average life expectancy was 35, Wise would already be one of the revered elders of his community. People matured fast enough to apprentice to a profession at 3 or 4, marry at 12 or 13, and lead communities by 18, because they had to. Prolonged immaturity was not a desirable or accepted outcome.

Now, though, society has decided that, in order to be an effective, happy, fulfilled adult, you have to have a prolonged adolescence that lasts for decades. What? How does that make any sense? Do we tell kids that in order to be an effective, mature college student, they should postpone learning to tie their shoes, write their name or do simple addition for as long as possible? "You don't want to rush it. Most people aren't ready. You have to figure out who you are first."

Adolescence in the biological sense lasts for about 6 years. Trying to drag it out for decades behaviorally, under the assumption that people can't handle growing up, is ridiculous.

Frequently - bordering on "always" - when I say things like, "I was married with kids at that age," someone replies, "Yes, but most people that age can't handle it," or, "That usually ends badly." When I say, "Let me introduce you to dozens of people, of varying ages, who were ready," I'll hear, "Yes, but more people aren't ready." I will never understand the mindset that says, "The majority is always right, and their ways are always desirable."

I think that the speakers are expecting, at that moment, that I'll say something like, "Oh, gosh, if the majority is doing something different than I am, I'm an anomaly (or wrong or misguided or misinformed or lucky)." What I actually think is, "Well, why aren't they ready? And what are they doing to ensure that they grow up?"

I mean, if you heard that someone wasn't walking, or reading, or driving, or holding a job, far (in fact, years) past the age that they should be mentally and physically capable, do you think, "Everyone else should slow down and do it the same way, instead of trying to achieve," or do you think, "They should get some pretty intensive counseling and intervention in order to catch up"? In theory, a healthy 5 year old who still crawled everywhere would just be exercising prudence, right, taking all those extra years to mature? Maybe he'll fall less often when he does start walking, right?

I'm not talking about perfectly mature people who know that they're ready, but choose, say, not to have children. My own deeply adored brother is childless in his 60s. I'm talking about the prevailing attitude of, "I'm just not mature enough to handle that yet. Maybe in another 10 or 15 years, I'll get there," and the society that says, "Oh, you're so smart to continue to be an adolescent into your 30s." How is it that we feel that people are adult enough to be college grads, nurses, police officers, fire fighters, social workers or members of the armed forces, trusted to make life and death decisions (often for large numbers of strangers), but we don't think they're mature enough to choose a spouse or parent a child? And worse, we're OK with that?

Yes, yes, I know all about studies that say that the human brain isn't done developing until about age 25. I happen to think that that fact proves my point. Is it easier to set attitudes, behaviors and expectations in place while the brain is still growing, or after it's done? I mean, we educate our young precisely so that when adulthood arrives, they'll be ready for it. Why do we assume that postponing maturity and responsibility will increase either characteristic?

I also fight not to roll my eyes when people say, "Well, I've been with my boyfriend/girlfriend for 10 years or so now. We weren't ready for a permanent commitment then, but now, after being exclusive or nearly exclusive, living together, raising kids together, buying a house and waiting to see if the relationship imploded or someone better came along, I'm now prepared to actually commit to getting married some time in the future." Do you not trust your own judgement? Will waiting, or anything else, change the age that you were when you decided to enter into this relationship?

"Well, it's different for you. You were raised that way," people say to me. OK, yes and no. If by "raised" you mean "taught by parents," then no, I wasn't raised that way. My dad was 50 before he got married for the first (last, and only) time. My mother told us all, over and over, that her first marriage ended in divorce because she got married too young, and couldn't see the dangers signs in marrying an alcoholic. If you mean "belong to a religion that strongly encourages marriage and families," then yes, I was raised that way. I joined the church, on my own, at 12.

Here's the thing - if it is widely recognized that it is possible for a family, town, group or culture to raise kids who mature faster than their peers, and do so while living ordinary lives in ordinary neighborhoods, by and large attending local public schools, why do we not widely accept this as a good thing, ask ourselves what they're doing right, and adopt those practices? Why don't we collectively say, "Hey, they're onto something"?

Sometimes, we do. I noticed this Bloomberg News story when it was first published - "Mission Training Grooms Mormons to Pursue Presidency, CEO Suite." The author noticed that LDS young men and women, ages 19 to 21, who went through missionary training and served church missions of 18 months to 2 years, "have gone on to become among the most distinguished and recognizable faces in American business and civic life." Mormons make up about 2% of the population, but "Latter Day Saints hold, or have held, a seemingly disproportionate number of top jobs at major corporations."

Why is that? The article talks about the rigid rules and fairly demanding schedule of work and study that missionaries experience. A Harvard business school professor quoted says, "I don't think there's any more demanding profession than being a Mormon missionary." The result, often, is a fairly young individual with skills, maturity and confidence. One former missionary, now dean of a prestigious School of Business, says that, before his mission, "I frankly didn't know if I could do anything. I came back with the confidence that I could accomplish most hard things."

Isn't this pretty much a no-brainer? If you expect and nurture maturity and responsibility, you will get maturity and responsibility. Instead, society is telling young people, "You can't do it. Don't even try, because you'll fail. It will be humiliating and futile." Is it any wonder that we get the exact opposite of maturity and responsibility?

It is worth noting that David Wise, and many other young successful husbands, wives, parents and employees, are not LDS. It's not exclusive to one school of religious thought. It's a process that's applicable no matter what your belief system. The entire Bloomberg article is geared toward taking the Missionary Training model and applying it to other circumstances.

It's also worth noting that even my own children sometimes disagree with me on this subject. "Come on, Mom! You know what I was like at 19 and 20! Do you really think that I was ready to get married and have kids?" one has asked me frequently. No, Child, I do not think that you, personally, were ready to choose a lifelong partner or start a family. That does not change my belief that high school grads should have a whole world of opportunities open to them, not be limited by their own immaturity. Having options available does not mean that each person needs to do the same things at the same time. It means the freedom to choose what you, personally, want, expecting that you can be successful at it now, not at some indeterminate time in the future.

What kind of message are we sending when we say, implicitly or through suggestion, "If you want to achieve anything, you need to do it before you get married or before you have children. After that, you won't be able to achieve your best or have any significant fun"? It's especially maddening when the people who say this claim to value marriage.

That's the reason people usually give for avoiding grownup choices or responsibilities - the idea that success is unobtainable, that it's impossible. If you get married young, or have children young, the conventional thinking goes, you won't get an education or have career success. The idea that being responsible and capable will somehow cripple you is odd, to me. It makes more sense when I hear things like this, from David Wise: "I think my lifestyle - the fact that I have a little girl to take care of, and a wife - really takes the pressure off of my skiing, because first and foremost, I have to be a good husband and father. When you're out there skiing for something bigger than yourself, it really takes the pressure off for me."

(In an interview with our local paper, his father also credits the work ethic David learned while attending public schools instead of an elite ski academy that may have instilled the idea that being athletically gifted gave you a "pass" in other areas of your life.)

I have, over the years, grown very tired of hearing how rare and gifted (or odd and out of touch) I am, for anything from being married young (and having a successful marriage and family) to not drinking to never having slept around. I've spent most of my life saying, "I'm an ordinary person. I'm not that amazing. If I can do it, other people can do it." I have now decided that this was the wrong approach. I need to say, "You're right. I am incredible and amazing. I am so advanced that I am barely human. I can accomplish things that ordinary mortals cannot. That's exactly why you should listen to me, and do things my way."

Or, don't take my word for it. You could look to the life of a 23 year old Olympic gold medalist.

Thanks, David, and congratulations. Congratulations not only on your athletic achievement, but your focus on what's truly important, what will last after your Olympic career is over. Thanks for bringing good publicity to Reno. Thanks for shining a spotlight on responsible, capable young adults - and the achievement and happiness they can obtain.

Hot Sauce

I love my home state, really, I do. There's reasons that I live here. I'm almost tempted to launch into a list of wonderful things that my state offers, but that's a discussion for another day.

Because, sometimes, my home state is tacky. Truly, undeniably, high ick factor tacky.

I've complained before about people's perception of our state and its... eccentricities. Sometimes, we are our own worst enemy, perceptionwise.

I've complained, for instance, that one of our local brothels - yes, local brothels, let the snickering begin - advertised itself on its billboards as a "deli." Please.

One of the brothels in the southern part of the state advertises itself on its billboards, up for miles before you encounter the place, as a "travel center." Truly.

Most of the brothels in Nevada have small signs out front that say things like, "Free Truck Parking!" The brothels themselves are usually housed in trailers, or collections of trailers, painted some bright colors. My husband glared daggers at me when I pointed out, on a recent trip, the columns (attached to nothing) surrounding the pink trailers. "Don't they just class the place up?" There were shorter columns around the dirt parking area; tres chic.

The "travel center" either ran into too many irate patrons who hauled their cranky kids in looking for restrooms, slushees and prepackaged pastries, or they discovered that they made more money advertising their primary purpose, because they put up this onsite billboard:

OK, truth in advertising; I can get behind that.

The small print just does me in, though: "HOT SAUCE  PHOTOS  SOUVENIRS."

Hot sauce?

Whether that's a euphemism or a condiment, in this context, I don't really want to know anything more about it.

That leaves me contemplating photos.

When I was growing up, the stereotype of sharing your vacation photos was having friends over to dinner, then making them watch an interminable slide show. Now, of course, it's all about social media; everyone you know, and potentially anyone else, can and will see your vacation photos. "This is me and a prostitute I met near Vegas." Maybe Bob in accounting will be impressed when he sees it, but it's hard for me to envision that. The club of People Who Pay For Sexual Services is not an exclusive or prestigious one; in fact, the first people who come to my mind are serial killers and people with few social skills.

Still, maybe ol' Bob really will be impressed. This is the sci fi themed brothel - yes, there is such a thing, you can't make this stuff up; maybe he's always wanted his photo taken with a "real, live Andorian," but he just doesn't have the cash to attend a Star Trek convention. It's hard for me to imagine a situation in which someone will be excited about their prostitute photo op, but I'll concede that maybe, in some circles, such a situation exists. (The thought just depresses me.)

For years, souvenir shops in my lovely state have been awash in prostitution themed souvenirs. I wish I was making this stuff up. You can buy maps of "The Pleasure Spots of Nevada," with all the legal brothels identified. You can get keychains that say things like, "Crib #4, Mustang Ranch." (The term "crib" hearkens back to the days when that term was slang for a prostitute's room. I can't believe that I know this stuff.)

The idea of buying them at an actual brothel is just a little too ridiculous for me. "Went to Nevada! Paid a hooker! Got a snow globe!"

Maybe you walked past Bob in accounting with your new brothel mug in your hand, hoping he'd be green with envy.

Personally, I can't imagine being impressed because you paid someone to be with you. It calls up images of elementary school kids giggling behind the building - "I gave her a dollar, and she let me touch her boob!"

If a woman walked up to you on the street and said, "I want nothing more than to have all manner of sexual contact with you!" I might think that you're attractive or charming. I still won't be impressed, but it's better than, "She had to - I paid for it."

Living here, though, I've been exposed to how the women feel. I remember a local prostitute calling up a radio station to enter their "Most Boring Job" contest. She's not showing your photo around work, bragging about how great her weekend was.

Sorry, Bob.

Keeping Up Appearances

I always wondered why my sister Lynne was so appearance conscious. Our mother wasn't. I wasn't. But Lynne very definitely was.

I have always been a function over form person. I really don't care what something looks like as long as it gets the job done. Like most kids in families of limited means, though, I was also very self conscious about anything that singled me out as poorer than the other kids, so I decided that that was what Lynne was thinking.

I was sure there had to be some environmental cause. I grew up believing that all taste was environmental. I have long since conceded that I was wrong.

My oldest daughter is so much more like Lynne than like me in her desire for impressive outward appearances. Since I was born when Lynne was 11, I didn't get to see her as a baby or toddler. I would watch Lana as a baby, displaying behavior that was totally foreign to me, and think, "Where did that come from?"

When she was only about six months old, Lana began to be stressed out by wrinkles in her crib sheet. Really. I would lay her down, and she would frown at the sheet, then begin making a frustrated noise as she smoothed her hand over the wrinkles, trying to wipe them away. Of course, even when she was successful in smoothing them out, any tiny move on her part would cause new ones. So, she'd start smoothing again, going, "Uh! Uh! Uh!" Thankfully, in fairly short order she would look away or be too tired to keep it up, and she would fall asleep.

She announced when she was barely two that she wanted to start going potty in the bathroom. I was sure she had no idea what that entailed, but after she hounded me for two weeks, I figured, fine. We'll see how this goes. It only took her a week or so to get it down to the point that she was dry all day. I was surprised and she was happy.

What annoyed her tremendously was throwing away the diaper she still wore overnight. After I took them off, I had always rolled up diapers and used the tapes to tape the bundle shut before throwing them away. I think most mothers do. It incensed Lana that she did not know how to roll them up herself and I refused to do them. I wanted her to take the diaper off herself and just throw it away. She hated that. It looked wrong! It was messy! She was totally undeterred by my insistence that it was OK for things to be messy in the garbage can. I wanted her to function independently, but she wanted things to look right.

At age two, she also started stressing out about wrinkles on her socks. You know how your foot is usually extended when you put your sock on, but when you flex it back or stand up, it creases across the front of your ankle? Lana hated that. It drove her crazy every day for literally years. She could not understand why this did not bother me, why I figured it was just OK to walk around in wrinkly socks. She dealt with this by pulling her socks up with great force many, many times a day. That stretched the socks out, sometimes to the point that the fibers were breaking, so now the socks not only wrinkled but sagged. This made her just about frantic. I wondered how many years it would take before she started taking our advice and just leaving them alone. Pointing out to her that our socks also wrinkled across the front did not appease her. To her, that was just proof that we were too clueless to know how socks should look.

In kindergarten she added a new sock worry. Now, it caused her a great deal of distress that the seam across the toes of the sock meant that the front end was more squared off than rounded. She would look at socks after she'd pulled them on and start making the familiar frustrated huffing sounds. "Look at that! They stick out!" she would say, pointing out some tiny protrusion or squaring off on either end of her toes. "They're fine," we'd say. "Socks do that." She became even more frustrated, wondering how her parents could be so utterly clueless.

Again, she dealt with the situation by pulling on her socks. She would grab the offending spots and pull them down under her feet, then carefully slide her feet into her shoes so the "corners" would be held down and out of sight. Naturally, this meant that getting her shoes on could take quite a while. And again, the major effect of this was stretching and pulling the socks out of shape, until the toe seams were two or three times the width of the rest of the sock. This did not actually bother Lana, because the wider the socks, the easier it became to wrap them around her foot.

She stopped being so obsessed with her socks quite so much about the time she started obsessing about the rest of her wardrobe. She had a very clear set of wardrobe dos and don'ts at a very early age.

During her kindergarten year, we bought a pair of ballerina flats that were, I thought, slightly large. They were on sale, though, and too large eventually becomes just right. When she put them on for school one morning, I asked if they fit. She assured me that they did, and I didn't think too much more about it in the morning rush.

When I picked her up that day, Terry and I were walking instead of bringing the car. I don't remember quite why. Even though we lived close to the school, we had to go down one of the busiest streets in town to get there. It wasn't exactly a serene stroll, so we didn't do it often. We set off for home, hampered by the fact that Lana's shoes came off every two or three steps.

At first, I thought it was some form of clumsiness. Then I started looking more closely. Her feet popped out of her shoes literally every step, and once out of every three or so times the shoes would fall all the way off. They were obviously still too big for her.

"Lana! Have your shoes been doing that all day?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," she said. "I tried to fix it." She slid her foot out of the shoe to show me that, across the bottom, she'd folded socks and laid them the length of the shoe to take up some of the extra room. "It didn't work, though."

"So your shoes have been falling off your feet every two or three steps all day today."

"Well, yeah."

"Lana! I asked you this morning if they fit! They obviously don't! Why would you wear shoes that are too big for you?"

She looked at me as if this was a patently stupid question. Then she looked down at her immobile feet. "Look how pretty they are," she said.

She went through a stage of insisting that everything she wore, even her underwear, had to be the same color. She started insisting that her hair be "done" for school when she was about seven. Ponytails were one of her favorite styles until she wore one for picture day in 5th grade. "I look BALD!" she shrieked when we got the photos back. "I look like I don't have any hair at all!" I don't think she ever wore a ponytail again. Dressing for the weather was always a problem; she would plan her wardrobe for days or weeks in advance, and was always thrown when told that she couldn't wear something because of the weather. She was happiest dressing in outfits that came with two pieces, so she was sure that everything "matched."

Coats were a constant struggle. "It's puffy! It makes me look fat!" she'd wail, at the ripe old age of nine and ten. We would insist that she leave the house in a coat in cold weather, knowing full well that she'd ditch it as soon as she was out of our sight. Terry, normally blasé about clothes, followed suit with a coat aversion of her own. It was maddening.

We'd get phone calls from friends, offering us coats for our kids. "They looked so cold walking home from school today," one friend said. When I told her that they both had coats in their backpacks, and that they refused to wear them until they were a block away from home, she thought that I was too embarrassed to admit that we didn't own any. Another friend refused to take my word for it, and simply showed up on our doorstep with hand me down coats for the girls. It wasn't the first, or the last, time we would be given coats. It didn't matter if we bought them or if someone else did, if they were new or used, Lana and Terry refused to wear them except in our presence. That problem wasn't solved until high school when they got letterman jackets. Those, they would wear.

Even into high school, Lana would try to put her clothing into "outfits." She would decide that a particular pair of jeans went with only two T shirts, and refuse to wear the pieces with other garments. We would tell her that jeans, any jeans, went with any of her tops, and she'd look at us as though we were crazy. We'd tell her that black and white went with any other color imaginable, and she'd look horrified. To her, black or white went with black or white.

When she was invited to her first formal, she insisted on extensive jewelry shopping, so she could find jewelry with stones the exact color of her dress. We told her, over and over, that pearls, diamonds, gold and silver would all be appropriate with a formal. She thought we had absolutely the worst taste imaginable. To Lana, you could only wear pearls if your dress had pearls on it; ditto for diamonds, gold or silver.

She was mortified when we couldn't find maroon shoes to go with her maroon dress and garnet jewelry. She was sure that her black shoes would look "stupid," and cause her to be a social outcast. She only wore them because it came down to wearing black shoes or staying home. She came back from the ball amazed: "There were other girls there in maroon, and they wore black shoes. There were girls wearing black shoes with blue and red dresses, too," she marveled. It has never done any good to point out that we knew this beforehand.

She still has trouble dressing for the weather. At college, she's been known to wear her favorite mesh slide shoes in six inches of snow.

While I take reasonable care not to look like a homeless person, I am not particularly "into" clothes. And with my children, the most important thing to me is that they function independently. As long as their clothing is clean and at least close to the right size, I will only veto it if it poses a health or morality issue. I don't care if my kids want to wear orange and purple together.

I once let my youngest daughter go to church in a Snow White dress up dress. When she put it on, I thought briefly about asking her to change. Then, I thought: it's a dress. It's clean. It fits. It's not too revealing. She looks adorable in it. Plus, she's 4 years old. So, she wore it, and actually got quite a few compliments. Life works that way when you're 4.

Poor Lana was always frustrated by my willingness to let her younger siblings dress themselves. She gave up trying to influence Alex too much, theorizing that, as a boy, he'd be hopeless about clothing issues. She would frequently tangle with Terry and Hallie.

Terry, being just a year younger, fared better than Hallie, upon whom Lana felt she could wield greater influence. Lana would try to coax very independent Hallie into clothes Lana had chosen for her. Their arguments would filter out into the hall and occasionally down the stairs.

"Honey, wouldn't you like to wear this shirt with those pants, instead?"

"NO!"

"But sweetie, these would look so much better."

"NO!"

It would finally drive me crazy enough that I'd intervene. "Lana! Go downstairs and let your sister dress herself."

"But Mom! She has no idea what looks good together."

"I don't care. Downstairs."

Poor Lana would sulk away, convinced that no one understood. How had she gotten stuck in a family of stubborn, styleless women, she wondered. And how could I not appreciate her efforts to "help" her sister?

Hallie is a bit older now, and often makes an attempt at matching her clothes. Still, she's young, and her choices don't always make sense to adults. In kindergarten, she wore her velvet dresses as everyday clothes, and chose sweatpants and a T shirt for picture day. Well, OK. It's her photo. She was clean, comfortable and happy.

A year later, she's in first grade and has just performed in her first school music program. She wore a pastel striped sweater under a denim jumper with red and black accents. Again, she was clean, comfortable, happy and even in a dress for a special occasion. She had a great time, and was very proud. We took tons of photos and clapped loudly. I just knew, though, that when I e-mailed Lana a photo at college she would groan and say, "Why did Mom let her wear that?"