The Souvenir

My parents have been married for decades.  They might appear normal on the outside, but considering they are my parents, you know they're probably not. My mother has glamorous hair and eyebrows that stand straight out, and my father wears Hawaiian shirts and aviator glasses.

This is how they always look, and how, for the most part, they have always looked. For a brief time a few years ago, however, they looked different. My mother was sporting the short, mousy regrowth of hair after chemotherapy, and my father had grown his down to the middle of his back.

This story begins during that strange time. My father, newly retired, and my mother, recently in remission from lymphoma, chose to celebrate by taking a trip down south. They went to a bunch of museums and nice restaurants, but my mom pretty much goes away just to go to gift shops. She collects miniature tea sets, and just about the best place in the world from which to procure one of those babies is a well-stocked gift shop. Apparently one of the gift shops down there was so wild, my parents picked up souvenirs for both Elyse and me while they were there. My sister got a gorgeous, silky, blue robe. I got something completely different.

I got Dave.

Dave is a puppet about the size of a three year old child. He wears pepper-printed pants. He is a fantastic chef, I assure you, and has touched the lives of many.  My parents insisted he looked like the Swedish Chef, who had previously been my favorite chef of all time. It's important to note here that though two men may indeed both be puppets, chefs, and make similar facial hair choices, they can in fact be incredibly dissimilar. Something happened the minute Dave Puppet entered our house, and nothing's ever been the same. It started with Dave himself.

Dave began to look terrified.

His face slowly stopped making the goofy smile he came with.  I don't know exactly how, but whatever was keeping his mouth operational was deforming into a horrible shape and simply wouldn't bend back.  This endeared him to me tenfold. Some of my friends have gotten to know Dave pretty well, too. Dave is so beloved by my friend Sarah that he has been known to stay at her house for weeks at a time, on long, luxurious davecations.  Dave has been hung from doorways, tucked into beds, and shed on by cats. Dave also makes quite a good snuggling toy, in case I need to spend a night away from home myself. That's how he lost his stick.

It may look, to the untrained eye, that Dave spends most of the time in abject terror, but trust, he is a fearless traveler and big-time overnight trips enthusiast.  Dave usually rides in the car, belted into a seat, but when he needs to be transported in a car without room for a puppet passenger, he needs to travel as luggage. It breaks my heart to put him in a suitcase, and I do try to pack as lightly as possible, so most of the time, Dave ends up crammed in on top of my fresh pairs of underwear in my backpack.

Dave is a great man, a great chef, and a great friend. Dave is the single greatest souvenir ever purchased. Dave has changed my life and the lives of all those around me. Dave wears the pepper pants. 

a moon star is born - the buhchichala

In the 90s, I was a little fat girl living in New Jersey. Growing up a little fat girl was hard enough, but on top of that, I was weird. I was the kind of weird that got stuck in the cargo net and got sent back to preschool for hitting a kid and perfected the art of paper ripping when I lost my privilege to use scissors one Halloween. I had no play-dates. I got no invitations. Not having friends didn't really bother me, though, because at home, I had an audience that couldn't escape.

My mother and sister, who were home with me all day, were basically just there to look at me, I was pretty sure. My sister was older, INCREDIBLY smart, and could read easily, while I struggled through Go Dog Go.  My mother encouraged my creativity because she had no choice. My father was at work all day and other places after work, so he missed out on a lot of my primo material. One such effort, known simply as "Buhchichala," will forever be my masterwork and has given the name to this very blog.

My sister and I took baths together every night, because we were routinely washed by a mother who wanted to make sure we never smelled bad. It is easy to fit multiple children in a bathtub, and it does wonders to conserve water. One such evening, my mother left the bathroom for a minute while we soaked. I'm not sure what she went off to do, but I sure wanted to find her and impress her somehow. I devised a plan. Almost a plan. It wasn't really a plan so much as an instinctive response to my mother being in a different room.

I ran down the hallway as fast as my drenched, bare legs would carry me. I yelled "MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY" as I bounded, sure to get her attention. I then performed the most incredible feat ever seen on earth.

Buhchichalaaaaa! THAT'S WHAT I SAID! Buhchichalaaaaa! THAT'S WHAT I SAID! Stick your elbows in the air, shake your derriere! Buhchichalaaaaa!

 On the spot, I had made an instructional dance song that really showcased all of my talents in one brilliant act.

I turned my naked, dripping heiner to my mother, shook it back and forth, and bellowed "BUCHICHALAAAAAAAA."
I whipped my head around and informed her "THAT'S WHAT I SAID!"
I repeated this. I then told her how to do the dance, first shoving my elbows in the air, then shaking my derriere. I then reiterated that this was, in fact, "BUHCHICHALAAAAAA."

I didn't know what I thought my mother was going to do with this, but I sure as shit wanted to make sure she saw it.  She liked it. She liked it so much that she made me show my father and grandmother and neighbors.

I was a star.

*I may remember my mother's hair more glamourously than it really was.
**My sister is totally hot now and doesn't smile like this anymore.