I don’t do the dishes; I throw them in the crib.

I could tell you, Dear Reader, that my parents were Very Cool Parents during my childhood. I could tell you that, Dear Reader, but it would be a lie. Please understand that I have a very narrow definition of what it means to be a Very Cool Parent. My definition is as follows: a Very Cool Parent is a parent who sings and/or dances along with his or her child while watching or listening to Free to Be. . . You and Me.

Now, I have breezed through the past five years or so of my adult life, but – and this is the first time I have ever, ever admitted this – I have breezed through the past five years or so of my adult life ON A LIE. I HAVE BEEN LIVING A LIE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. I HAVE BEEN LIVING A LIE. And here is what I would whisper at this very moment into the Confession Cam were I being filmed for a reality television show:

I did not see or listen Free to Be. . . You and Me until I was twenty-four.

The shame! The shame! The shame that fills the hollows of my very very SOUL. But I believe I have made up for lost time, Dear Readers. I have Free Free to Be. . . You and Me on CD, and I have Free to Be. . . You and Me on my iPod, and I, a few years ago, had the pleasure of working with children of all ages and abilities over the past five years, and I had the pleasure of introducing aforementioned children to the glorious splendor that is Free to Be. . . You and Me.

And so: I present to you not my favorite Free to Be. . . You and Me song, but the song that is the strangest and the one that has the oddest video to go along with it. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you “Parents Are People” below. In “Parents Are People,” Marlo Thomas and Harry Belafonte show us that, in addition to being “people with children,” mommies and daddies can have jobs as umpires or bakers. At 00:51, it is obvious that mommies and daddies can also hold down the fort as hobos, and at 1:02, we see that mommies and daddies can waltz around town pushing Rosemary’s Baby-esque strollers, too. The possibilities are endless!

Oh yeah! The poem! For the (shameful, most horrible) poem below, I began to write using our Fashion Poem Prompt / Poem Prompt of Fashion — Prompt One . I chose Don Quijote as my famous and/or glamorous work of prose. But I kept going and going with it, and I didn’t have time to blend it with a glamorous poem. So that’s the story for the (most shameful, horrible) poem below.

Open Country

[poem has gone out searching for windmills kthx!]

Because Teen-age Angst Has Paid Off Well

Oh, dear readers. Oh, dear, dear readers. Vivienne is beginning to feel the ebb of NaPoWriMo’s tide. Vivienne is beginning to feel An Awful Lot Like Exhausted. And what happens when Vivienne feels An Awful Lot Like Exhausted? For one, she turns to Zelda’s Prompts of Fashion, which is a wonderful thing, as the Prompts are Wonderfully Fashionable. For another, she turns to do strange things in her poems, such as odd confessions about pickled beets, or, in this case, parentheses and references to now-canceled television shows. So perhaps, dear reader, you should gaze at this photographs of Rupert Giles, who very well might be the love of my life, instead of reading the poem which follows.

And, Zelda, um, OMG yes, we should most definitely nominate both Madonna and Judy Blume for the Ultimate Diamond Heart Necklace Award. Here’s the question, though: Ann M. Martin? Is she fashionable enough? Remember Claudia’s collection of shoes! Her habit of wearing Most Fashionable Tights with Shorts!

Poem Guest-Starring Buffy and Boots

Sadly canceled without an appropriate ending, much like Buffy herself was.  Le sigh.  And let us await the film version …