Sound of Freedom

(While I will not remove what I say in this post about the movie “Barbie,” I will, however, concede that for some reason I can’t fathom, it’s trending, and people want to see it. Hey, I still have my Barbies from childhood in my attic- I love Barbie. But the movie looks…heinous. And I stand by that).

I’m trying to feel better.

I skipped church this morning in favor of a quiet walk in nature. Connected with all three of my sons. Cooked a little, listened to beautiful classical music, with a little Gershwin thrown in for good measure. Read some, planned a few trips, went on a boat ride.

But I don’t feel better. My appetite is gone, my heart flip-flopping around in my chest. I don’t feel better. But I will. Eventually.

I don’t know who is out there reading this, maybe no one. That’s not really why I write this blog anyway, not why I do anything, for that matter. But if you’re out there, I have a piece of advice for you:

Go see “Sound of Freedom.”

Please understand, I know those children. I worked in a youth shelter in an inner city where I witnessed human trafficking up close, and I counseled those children. So allow me to paraphrase what actor Jim Caviezel said in what I believe to be one of the most heart-rending scenes of the movie, as the camera simply pans in on a close-up of his face:

Watching this, doing this job, eats away at you, until you can’t function. You dream of these children. Their eyes haunt you, you worry yourself sick until you can’t eat or think of anything but them. It breaks you to pieces, and once you’re broken over these children, you never really get those pieces back.

That’s what it did to me. I can still see their eyes. Every day.

The pandemic took me away from the center, and I have not as of yet returned. Every day I wake up and consider emailing my supervisor to put me on the schedule. And every day, I ask myself:

Am I strong enough to go back? I honestly don’t know.

(Movie spoiler alert):

Imagine the following scenario:

A talent agent who attended your daughter’s school play the day before shows up at your door. “She has talent, real talent,” this beautiful, perfectly coiffed woman says to you in your living room, and of course, you agree. After all, she’s your talented beautiful daughter.

The woman hands you her business card. Glossy, beautifully embossed, just like her. We want to treat her to a professional photo shoot, she says. Then we’ll show the pictures to the right people. Your daughter is jumping up and down with excitement, what little girl wouldn’t? You decide it can’t hurt to let her get this free photo shoot.

You bring her to the location, and it looks great. Lots of happy kids, photographers, equipment and lights, food and drink, toys and music, just a great vibe all-around. You begin to walk onto the set, but the beautiful woman stops you.

No parents on set, she smiles. We want the children to act natural. Sorry. Pick-up is 7:00, sharp.

You and the other parents smile sheepishly at each other, feeling lucky that your brilliant children were chosen. You decide to run errands for a couple of hours since you can’t watch. You hug your daughter, and tell her to have fun.

You return to an empty building. No children, no photographers, just a dark, empty building. She’s gone. Just gone. Like she never existed. Because she and all of the other children were sold, in a matter of two hours, to the child sex traffic trade.

That’s the opening scene in the movie, “Sound of Freedom.”

You scoff. But that could never happen here, you say. Not in the United States.

Why not?

This post is not about child sex trafficking, a multi-billion-dollar industry. We know there are more slaves now than when slavery actually existed, and millions of those slaves are children. Our children. I don’t care where they live. They are all our children.

This post is about choice. Your choice to ignore that embarrassing pink horror of a movie “Barbie,” and give your money to “Sound of Freedom.” Maybe even scan the code at the end of the movie and donate a ticket to someone who can’t afford one.

In the movie the sound of freedom was music. Laughter. Singing. Dancing.

In real life, it’s something different for everyone. The sound of your boat lapping over the waves. Your flight to Paris taxiing down the runway. The clink of wine glasses in a five-star restaurant. The excited screams of your children at the waterpark.

Enjoy those freedoms. I’m going to enjoy the weekend sounds of my sons banging in and out of the house. Quiet music, cooking from scratch, hanging towels on the line.

But I have some soul searching to do. Because the backdrop of my life is always, and has always been, about children. And I think I need to go back and start helping again. And stop being a coward.

If haven’t already, see the movie. Cry, and let it break your heart. Then help. In that order. That’s the least any of us can do.

Vibing

One of the cardinal rules of blogging is never to tell your readers how busy you are, because it implies you’re too busy for them. So I won’t use that as an excuse for not posting on Wednesday.

But posting on Wednesdays has proven to be challenging this summer. So there is that.

Until next week, I’m tired. The delicious kind of tired, when every bone and sinew in your body knows you have finished your week at the most optimally positive and productive way possible.

Great week, ya’ll.

So enjoy this video, my newest favorite song to sing on my way to work to get my daily vibe going. More on that later.

Have a great time this weekend.

Sorry Not Sorry

Until last Thursday, I had never seen the movie “Love Story.” I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either. The dialogue was contrived and old-fashioned, but the simplistic wholesome quality of it eventually won me over.

Ollie won me over. What woman doesn’t want a man like Ollie? To fight for her, defend her against doctors, corporations and rich fathers, to stay by her side through disinheritance, societal stereotypes, borderline poverty, illness?

Ollie never wavered. Jenny was a lucky girl.

My favorite part of the movie was something rarely mentioned in reviews of the movie. Reviewers focus on the love story itself, but I loved how when he was rich, Ollie’s path to law school was straightforward:

My Daddy will pay.

Once his father cuts him off for marrying beneath his station, Ollie had to find a new way to become a lawyer.

He did it by working. Odd jobs, cutting expenses, scholarships. Before we knew it, Ollie made Law Review, then partner.

Sometimes the obstacle is the way.

Anyway, good flick. Here’s a cute video since I’m feeling love-buggish. Not the best version, but the sexiest. I know Ella and Doris do it better, but this girl does black dress and red lipstick best. Sorry.

But love means never having to say you’re sorry.

God Bless the U.S.A.

No post today. Never forget I’m a military girl, through and through. Thank someone from the military for their service today and enjoy Lee Greenwood singing his song, which makes me blubber every time I hear it.

Real Quick

Hi folks- I’ll try to post something for tomorrow from Phoenix. Right now I’m headed out the door for my flight. Thanks for checking in!

WiFi How I Hate Thee

notmaryonhercomputer

Wifi, How I Hate Thee

First, the above is not a photo of Mary. If it was a photo of Mary right now she would be banging her head on the desk or wall- shoot no she’d be taking shots of tequila and texting her friend and webmaster guru to ask to post because her computer is being temperamental with the swanky hotel wifi. Hence, why I’m posting and not her. Mary asks me to convey her apologies for not posting , and to let folks know there will be no new posts for the rest of the week. Hey it’s good time to delve into some of her past posts. Don’t be forlorn  . . . She will be back Monday!! Toodles.

Thanks Go Daddy

small logo of Chrysalis Collective

So I’m reading this book on marketing websites, and it seems I have broken two cardinal rules of choosing a domain. 

First, I did not use a “.com.”

Pribyl warns me to not overestimate my readers’ IQs. That even if you log in once, you’ll default to “.com” the next time because it’s second nature, and you’ll never find me again. But isn’t that what autofill is for? Once you’re following, you don’t need to type the whole URL in, it’ll just pop up. I mean, sheesh.

Anyway, if typing in the letters O-R-G instead of C-O-M are that taxing on you, we wouldn’t get along anyway. Go read a cereal box. I mean, good things are worth it, right? 

Oh, and the “.com” version, while being strangely non-existent, was also ironically taken. Not by a website, but by some dumb schmuck who decided to buy it for ten bucks, then try to sell it to me for 8K. Yeah, right. And since I had already become emotionally attached to The Chrysalis Collective, I wasn’t about to try and bond with another domain.

And with that, chrysaliscollective.org was born. I went from the dot com world of posting about mani-pedis and artichoke dip, to the dot org world, where we have podcasts, help the homeless, and solve world hunger. 

It’s a lot of pressure, but I’m up for it. 

(I’ll still be blogging about fun stuff, too). 

The second thing the book suggests is to choose a short and easy-to-spell domain. Again, for the IQ-challenged.

Ruh-roh.

My domain name is obviously not short. And as far as spelling, I’m a fantastic typist, and even I have trouble manipulating the consonant blend of “c-h-r-y-s.” My fingers kinda fumble over the keys. Ah well. Again, autofill.

But since The Chrysalis Collective is devoted to change and all the mess that change embraces, and since my tagline is “Be You Now,” I steadfastly refuse to dumb down my URL for my readers. My readers are smart, educated, and passionate, and enjoy the finer things in life. And they certainly won’t be deterred away from provocative award-winning content by a few measly letters. That’d be like dying of thirst in the desert with only three steps to go towards a pitcher of ice-cold water, and deciding it’s not worth it and turning around.

Don’t be a silly goose. And yes, I just compared my website content to ice-cold water in the desert. 

Welcome to The Chrysalis Collective.

Throwback

I’m giving an important work presentation on Wednesday, and I need to save it on a USB. I wasn’t having any luck finding one yesterday in my computer bag.

Desperate to not have to drive to Staples in the summer crowds, I reached first into my mind, and told myself I would find a USB, and that I would manifest it. Then I reached into a small side pocket, and felt a USB snuggled all the way at the bottom.

Victory.

(You can manifest negatively too, don’t forget. You know when someone you don’t care for just keeps showing up everywhere you go? That’s because your thought processes are passionate, and the Universe feels the desire and the passion you feel about that person and wants to give you what you want. It doesn’t discern that the feelings are negative, it will just bring that person to you over and over and over. How about when you go to the store with your hair a rat’s nest and your ass in old sweats, and you panic, thinking, “I swear to God, if I see anyone I know looking like this…,” and yep. You see your crush, your ninth-grade English teacher, your dentist and your kid’s hot soccer coach. The Universe doesn’t discriminate in its manifesting. If you think hard on it, no matter if it is a victory, a defeat, or a pain-in-your-ass, it will be delivered to you on a silver platter, voila! More detail will be in my book).

When I plugged the USB into my Mac to save my presentation, I waited for the SanDisk’s orange glow to begin pulsating, like ET’s heart inside of the plastic bag. Suddenly some old documents popped up.

“Electronics,” one document was titled.

“Cursing,” was another.

“Mean Kids.”

“Questions.”

“Spanx.”

“Summer.”

What the…. I thought, and I began to click through them. I read and read, and didn’t stop laughing for an hour.

I had unwittingly unearthed archives from when I wrote the “South Jersey Mom” blog for the Atlantic City Press, blogs that were never published because my budget got cut. In these funny little pieces my twins are 12 and Tommy is 8, an eight-year old then who turns 19 today, July 6th, 2021.

Finding these pieces was a revelation for more than one reason, the main being that in ten days I leave for a writing sabbatical in New England, and as I won’t have time to blog, I was originally just going to post videos that week. Now, I can post these throwback pieces. What fun.

Another revelation is my writing voice in these pieces. It’s more stressed, more divisive, less centered. And my late husband takes center stage in a couple of them, and it occurs to me that the way you write about someone when they are alive is much different than the way you write about them when they are gone.

But I’m going to publish them, as is. They were written eleven years ago, and while that is a chronological speck when we consider the amount of time humans have been on Earth, to me it’s a lifetime. If you took the person I was ten years ago and put her in a room with me now, I probably wouldn’t recognize her. And I certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with her.

She was a mess. But dang was she funny.

Talkeetna

(The immensity of Alaska prevents me from thinking about anything other than the immensity of Alaska. My musings on Alaska this week will be brief, since magazines do not accept published archived blog posts as submissions. Thanks for your patience this week).

I was digging through a small bowl of stickers in an quirky little souvenir shop in Talkeetna, Alaska, and I had five stickers in my hand to buy. All the stickers announced the greatness of Talkeetna, Denali, the wild, or Alaska. I came to the bottom of this big white bowl and picked up a small white sticker. I turned it over, and hand to God, as I stood in this obscure little shop in a town that voted a cat in as their mayor, in my hand was a sticker of a lifeguard boat and the words “Ocean City, New Jersey.”

I traveled 5,000 miles. I boarded four planes, two cars, one shuttle, a boat and a bus to get here. And there was OC, staring me in the face. You can’t make this stuff up.

You can read about Talkeetna, but if you want to understand it, you have to go there. It has one of the best views of Denali in the area. It’s a “grab a beer” spot for serious mountaineers returning from “the high one.” You can spot these dudes easily, they’re the really tan intense-looking ones. No trip to Alaska is complete without a visit to Talkeetna. Here are five highlights:

  1. Nagley’s Store. Novelties, toiletries. It’s iconic, and a must-see.
  2. Shirley’s Homemade Ice Cream. Toasted Coconut. Two scoops.
  3. Denali view. Walk to the end of Main Street, look to the right, and if it’s clear enough, there will be Denali Mountain in all its glory.
  4. Talkeetna Gifts and Collectibles. Three floors of everything your heart desires. We spent an hour in there.
  5. Denali Brewpub. We had blueberry mojitos and the best fish and chips ever. Great deck to sit and bask in the sun and watch the mountaineers, guides and climbers come down from the mountain and the rivers.

Serendipity

On Thursday I visited a place I often go to for peace and reflection, but it shall remain unnamed here. It is so far off the beaten track that you probably have never heard of it, but it’s possible that you have. Because while it is an obscure and unflashy place, it is also famous to those who love it.

Got your curiosity aroused now, don’t I?

(I don’t mean to be a tease. It’s just that I want to talk about this before my Mother’s Day celebration since I intend to drink moderately, and I want to write this while I am not schnookered. And since the woman discussed here is intensely private, I would never betray her trust. Please read this to the end).

So on Thursday, at this quiet place of reflection, I was approached by the proprietor. I say proprietor because while it’s a non-profit place, this elderly woman with the intense blue eyes is the reason it all came to be. After years of visiting this place, it is astonishing to me that I had never met her.

That changed on Thursday. Here’s the actual conversation:

“Hi.” (She sat down next to me. I shall call her Mildred.)

“Hi.”

“You’re in my seat.”

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry.” (I moved down one.)

(She settles into her wrought-iron rocking chair, and begins to rock). “So where are you from?”

“Ocean City.”

“I used to live in Longport.”

“That’s nice.”

“You’re so beautiful.”

“Oh, wow, thanks.”

“Can you help me today?”

“Excuse me?”

“I need help today.”

“Oh, um, with what?”

“Manning the gift shop.”

“Oh, well, I’d love to, but I have to pick up my son from college. I’m on my way there now.”

“How about Saturday?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I have a lot of things going on.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“No. Nothing as important as what happens here.”

“Oh, well, that’s true, but the traffic will be terrible, and it’s a long drive…”

“No, it’s not.”

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, I guess I can give you a call.”

“No, just come.”

“Well, ok, what time?”

“What time can you be here?”

“1:00?”

“Come at 10:00.”

“Um, ok.”

“Can you stay until 5?”

“Mmm, probably not, I’m making dinner, how about 3:00?”

“How about 5?”

“Um, ok.”

We talked extensively after that about our backgrounds, our families and our careers. By the end of the conversation I had purchased a $200 statue, agreed to help her with donations, and learned that her husband was buried in the same cemetery as my mother. She led me to her car, and started giving me stuff from her trunk: a bag of oranges, jarred spaghetti sauce, boxes of granola bars, iced teas. I begged her to stop, to not give me her personal provisions, that I didn’t need them, but she informed me that that’s what old people do: they give their stuff away to their children. We hugged, and I promised to be there at 10 a.m. sharp Saturday.

To describe the seven hours I spent there on Saturday would take more space than a blog post, but let me say this: I am stingy and economical with my time, and I don’t like having it wasted with nonsense. I confess I showed up expecting the worst.

But I got the best.

Throughout the day I met people whose lives were changed by the place. Every person who walked in had a story about love, healing and gratitude. I knew I was in the place I should be in that moment in time, and that no matter what flashy parties were going on, no matter what adventure trips I had coming up, the only thing that mattered in that moment was standing in that little shed, listening to those stories.

I will be returning again. And since Mildred has sons but no daughters, and since my mom has passed, she has decided that I am her daughter now. Not bad for a Saturday, huh? Let me end this story with a bang:

After meeting Mildred, I stopped at the cemetery to place flowers on my mother’s grave for Mother’s Day, and when I looked to the left, there on the headstone, I saw it. I wasn’t surprised because, as I have told you, this kind of stuff happens to me all the time:

Mildred’s husband is buried right next to my mom