May Day! Why Can't I Get Paid for This?

When I was growing up, May Day meant just one thing: having to practice dancing with boys who didn't want to make eye contact, never mind hold your hand and dance in a complicated pattern around a pole of colored ribbons.

Nicholas, the boy whose name inhabited crudely drawn hearts on the inside of grocery bags turned book covers, where I swore "2 loved 2 be 4 gotten," was assigned as my May Day buddy. He kept his hand in a fist the entire time, making me feel I was grasping a sweaty boiled egg. Able to turn any male disregard to my advantage, I wrote in my journal of his warrior grip poised for action should another of the boys attempt to not look at me too closely. I nearly swooned.

I loved May Day, delighted to be given permission to shake my groove thing during school hours, even if it wasn't to Motown, while having an excuse to wear flowers in my hair and do giant macramé. The combination of dancing and good hair mojo is still a winning combo for me. Offer me turning in a circle and, well, what can I say? You'll have me at hello. 

May Day performances are one of the many rituals that have no relation at all to what life as an adult will be like. For one, there are not that many places where one can hold a ribbon and dance with your hair in a bun, outside of the Beijing Olympics. I have a dark pity for the kids I see now, their eyes glistening, who get their ribbon placement exactly right. I feel you. This is just one more of those skills they teach us, like how to properly measure bodies of water, that will come spilling out of our mouths at the grasping end of a job interview gone horribly wrong. Your adult brain knows you should bring up your expertise in power point but instead your inner kid grins and points out emphatically that you were Maypole Queen in both 5th and 6th grades. It sounds way more clever in your head--trust me. 

So this is a distress call: May Day! May Day!--which we of many unmarketable skills and useless knowledge know is from the French word m'aider, meaning "come help me." I'm seeking comments from all of you out there who know a little too well what I'm talking about:

What was your favorite thing you learned as a kid that has proved completely disconnected from a living but which you devoutly wished guaranteed you an occasional workday (when you are in the mood) and a Kardashian income? 

Come on, come help me. I'll be here, practicing my circles.

What I learned from Playboy Bunnies

I have just returned from Beverly Hills, that sparkling universe where people have wheat grass martinis for breakfast, and the Mercedes is the car their teenagers drive. I am from New York City, and we don't understand L.A.  We don't get it at the most fundamental level because you can't walk it. I forget this every time I go there, however, and seduced by the sunshine and the manicured hill outside my hotel I forget that in 500 yards in any direction I will encounter a freeway--not to mention the horrified looks of the drivers as they lower their windows to ask if I've broken down and should they call my man servant.  

Returning to the hotel after a visit to Rodeo Drive--a cross between Graceland and the Truman Show--my disassociation with L.A. increased with my first encounter with an alien being I believed existed only in the fecund imagination of a geek especially gifted with Paint Brush Pro. I nearly collided with a Playboy Bunny. Or, as I soon discovered, a wanna-be bunny. I had inadvertently wandered into their warren, where about twenty-five of them were gathered for a contest that night, when one of them would be chosen to remove the inhibiting 18 inches of fabric she was wearing and have her navel stapled--in short, to become her dream, a centerfold. 

Let me not bore you, dear reader, with the physical differences between my petite black-clad body and these towering tan goddesses, toned and augmented into perfection. Each of us has a fine enough imagination. Let me settle a matter for you here, however: they exist. While no doubt air-brushed to erase human nuisances like nose hair and pores, they are indeed a life form. And a disruptive one, at that, especially for the straight male population, who paid $18 for a Bud Light at the Beverly Hilton bar to watch them adjust the best things that money could buy. 

After the initial shock wore off, I felt a kind of calm pleasure watching them as I sipped my wine. There was something comforting in seeing that they existed. They seemed less bunnies then worker bees, humming around each other, looking for a way to make a good life out of what they felt they had to give. There was a humanness to it, even in that odd scenario--like seeing actors off stage, whispering their lines to themselves, wanting nothing more than to be so good at pretending that they believed it themselves. Though experience, age and apparel choices separated us, I understood their striving to become, even if I felt their plan had some serious flaws--the least of which was the expiration date I knew was stamped on their chromosomes, and the more serious spiritual danger of placing one's worth in another's hands. 

There was no resentment, no envy, no "over-the-rainbow why-can't-I" in me. I saw the bunnies as people, and the sea of judgment separated, landing on one girl picking at her cuticle. I saw her as she was in high school a short time ago, worried about passing, about being asked to the prom. And I worried for her. Not to win the night, but to win herself, to survive the lesson I knew was coming. She lifted her head and caught me staring. I smiled and mouthed, good luck.