Cousins? What cousins?

Dear Ali,

I am Jack Bauer…. JACK BAUER!

I have saved the country multiple times from certain nuclear holocaust.

… You're welcome.

P.S.

The Seinfeld is safe, and your apartment clean, but I make no promises about the Oreos.

Well, that'll teach me to leave my computer on in the presence of mischievous cousins.

Dear Kiefer,

If you didn't want people to be "skeeved," as you say, you should have re-thought your film choices.

Exhibit A: A Few Good Men.
Exhibit B: A Time To Kill.
Exhibits C - J: An Eye For An Eye.

I mean, really! Look at your filmography. Look at your roles, sir. Murderer, murderer, child molester, murderer/child molester, KKK member, Three Musketeer. And not even the funny Musketeer. No, the other one. The one over in the corner alone, with the bottle of brandy and the look on his face like he just finished reading the entire collected works of Thomas Hardy. It was a Disney film, and you still managed to be creepy. What is one to think?

Also, I will not be at my apartment for the next week, so you'll have to entertain yourself. Don't touch my Seinfeld DVDs and don't eat all the Oreos. And it wouldn't kill you to pick up the Swiffer once in a while.

-Allison

Dear Ali,

Recently I was Googling my own name and your blog came up. I was reading through old posts and was intrigued by your disdain for my acting abilities. I'll have you know that acting is a very challenging profession -- I had to stretch myself to heights you've probably never known, and I am insulted by the way you are "skeeved" out by me despite the many movies I have been in that you enjoy. I especially know that you appreciated my role in Stand by Me.

I have decided to hide myself in your apartment and jump out at an appropriate moment. I'll be waiting for you to return . . .

-Kiefer Sutherland

Pop quiz, hotshot.

If you are trivia-quiz-inclined and are related to me on my mother's side (and really, aren't those just one in the same?), then you are in for a treat this week. I have created several new quizzes for us to enjoy. This time I'll be printing them out and bringing them to my parents' house, so we can all enjoy the brain-busting together.

Here's what's in store:
A new commonality quiz
A new movie character quiz

And some we’ve never done before:
Three “which Seinfeld character said it?” quizzes
A Family Quotation quiz (Thanks for the idea, Megs!)

See you all soon!

These previews are making me sad.

Oh, James McAvoy, please, please do not take the career path of Nicholas Cage. Don't do that. Don't do that. You're so talented. Stop and think about what you're doing.

This? Looks like a crap-flavored Nicholas Cage movie. The presence of Morgan Freeman does not fool me. It saddens me, but it does not fool me.

Really, James. Call up the Coen Brothers or something. Because it's so easy to start out with an Oscar nom for Leaving Las Vegas and then all of a sudden you're starring in Ghost Rider. Don't do that.

Virginia is for lovers... of laziness.

Last week the Stombaugh family stretched our annual reunion to a whole week and relocated it from Portage to Williamsburg, Virginia. Many thanks to Aunt Joan for all her planning and work. It was a marvelous vacation week. We slept in, played games, read, swam, and relaxed. We pretty much lived Aunt Linda’s life for a week. It was fabulous. I finished No Country For Old Men (definitely read this book, people), six back issues of Entertainment Weekly, and put a good dent in my second reading of The Secret History (seriously, run, do not walk, run to the nearest bookstore and buy it. And then buy a second copy and gift it to a person you really like and think should have access to wonderful literature.)

Poor Jen had a sinus infection for most of the week, but she still had a nice, relaxing time. Melis has been teaching Jules the rubber ducky song (and also to love Ernie and despise Elmo) and so I bought Jules a huge rubber ducky at the Williamsburg Toy Shoppe. It's almost as big as she is and I had some reservations that she'd wig out and be terrified of it, but she's totally cool about it. She's going to have to start bathing in the big tub to accommodate her new bath time buddy. While we were in the toy shoppe, some old ladies started cooing over how adorable Julia is and one of them offered to purchase her from us. So that was a little weird. But I like weird.

Ditch the apostrophe and stop declaring your ignorance to the vehicle-driving public.

So, today I was driving behind a Jeep and on the back window was a pink decal with the words:

Silly Boys, Jeep's are for Girls

And all I could say was, "Silly girl, grammar is for everyone."

Frustration, thy name is Penn Dot.

So I had to run an errand for my dear sister today, which necessitated me driving on that kind of road that makes you want to speed in the most egregious manner. You know that kind, all smooth surfaces and gentle curves and the sun is shining and the sky is blue and you just want to be that guy in that obnoxious Jaguar commercial where they pronounce "Jaguar" in three very distinct syllables.

Well, I couldn't be the guy in the Jag commercial. I couldn't even be the guy in the Dodge Caravan commercial. I got behind one of those Penn Dot line painting trucks that travels the road slowing people down so the paint has time to dry. It went 15 miles per hour as I followed it for almost 40 minutes. Forty minutes! No, seriously, take a moment to yourself to imagine that. You back? Okay. I couldn't pass because there's a big No Passing sign on the back of the truck, I couldn't take another path because there was no other path, I couldn't drive my car off the cliff and end my misery because I would have crossed the lines and messed up the paint. So, I said to myself, "I can't get out of this situation or change this situation so I'm just going to sit here and listen to my music and enjoy the sunshine and the scenery as it creeps past me literally in the time it takes for paint to dry." I was feeling very Zen.

This attitude served me well when a garbage truck pulled out in front of the Penn Dot truck, so not only were we going 15, we were stopping every two blocks. I burst into the maniacal laughter of one who has achieved peace with her soul-crushing highway experience and calculated how late I'd have to stay at work tonight to make up for my extended lunch break. But it's okay. I’m Zen. Really. Very Zen.

How do you know you have too many clothes?

When you inadvertently buy the same shirt twice.

Really, this is just ridiculous.

I've been waiting for those chipmunk voices to come back into my life...

Just barely into June! I can usually wait until July, but this year I needed my fix early. That's right, I busted out the Christmas music tonight. I'm in a funk and I'm tired and cranky and feeling weird and it's summer and I HATE summer and I really needed something good going on. And what's gooder* than Christmas music? I'm listening to Bono sing "Baby, Please Come Home" right now, and I can't think of anything more worth my time than that.

*Yes, I realize I just made that word up.

You can't stop the beat!

This past weekend, Melis and her students put up the Forest Hills Broadway revue, The Sounds of Broadway: 65 Years of Show Tunes from The Great White Way. It was a fantastic success and I’m sorry that some of you missed it. They sang a couple of songs from Jersey Boys and when they sang “Sherry,” the guy singing the Frankie Valli role sang it right to Aunt Sherry. It was totally adorable.

I was so impressed with the talent and dedication of these students and with how the Drama program has grown since I was there. Melis has done amazing things with that program. This show was really special to me because I got to help out with both of my sisters and the collaboration was a lot of fun. The three of us chose all the music in one dizzying night of Broadway madness. We gathered in our parents’ kitchen and compared lists and shouted things like:

“Do we really have to do one from South Pacific?”

“‘Close Every Door’ is a downer and it reminds me of the Holocaust.”

“I don’t think you realize the significance of Oklahoma in the history of musical theater.”

“Should we include one from Avenue Q?” “Only if you want Melis to lose her job.”

“Allison, stop singing your conversations to the tune of ‘Tradition’ or I am going to throw this copy of Fiddler at your head.”

We whittled our combined lists down to 82 songs, and then we whittled that list from 82 to 30, like some bloodthirsty townspeople playing a Broadway-themed game of Mafia. It was fabulous.

Along with Kelly, the awesome choreographer, we cast all the roles. (And I realized that Jen is the Simon Cowell of the Stombaugh sisters.) Melis directed, Jen taught the kids all the music, I wrote the song intros and offered occasional snarky comments, and Julia acted as the cutest Drama Mascot in the history of cuteness.

And then everybody worked, worked, worked. I always assumed Melis and Kelly worked themselves ragged on these shows, but it’s a different thing seeing it firsthand. Kelly would rattle off a list of ten things she needed to do the next day, but they were things like, “Construct a plant head for the Little Shop of Horrors number.” Like, who even does that? Melis probably got three hours of sleep in the last three weeks, Jen spent most of her life at the school, and the kids just ate, slept, and breathed that show. They learned the music, they learned the dancing and acting and blocking. They constructed the set pieces. It was all they did for three weeks straight. And it showed.

Jen has already begun choosing songs for The Sounds of Broadway II. Ladies, I’m voting to include “Tradition” this time, and I will sing my argument to you in the tune of that song.

George Costanza, visionary, serial napper.

“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth.” Isn’t that one of the clichéd things that guy says in that song they like to play at graduation ceremonies? Well, he should have added “and the ability you currently have to function without sleep.” I am a big proponent of the “life just keeps getting better” school of thought, but I am forced to admit that somewhere around the final year of grad school, I lost my ability to pull an all-nighter without repercussions. It used to be that I could skip a night of sleep once or even twice a week and I felt just fine. Then I got to the point where I needed the help of a caffeinated beverage to pull me out of my all-nighter-induced funk. Now the caffeinated beverages don’t even work. I can feel the tiredness underneath the caffeine alertness. And the caffeine alertness isn’t even actual alertness. It’s that shaky, twitchy, feeling-a-little-nauseous, maybe-I’m-gonna-snap-at-the-next-person-who-speaks-to-me kind of alertness. Which isn’t even really alertness. It’s closer in feeling and exhibition to schizophrenia. Or maybe post traumatic stress disorder. No wait, that’s not what I meant. I meant the other one, you know, the other one. Wait, what was I saying?

Man, I need a nap. And maybe one of these.