Valley of the Kings

When I was younger I was a huge Wonder Woman fan. We’re talking pictures cut out of magazines, rushing home on Friday nights to catch Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman– well telling your Dad to apply the speed when driving your 6 year old ass home. Of course being six, I wouldn’t have said ass, but still, you get the point. I loved The Superfriends, and I even used to watch Batman in hopes that Wonder Woman would make a guest appearance (the closet we ever got was Batgirl). I also watched The Love Boat in the hope that Lynda Carter would be guest starring as my favorite Amazonian Princess – sadly the closest we ever got there was Charo.

I loved Wonder Woman SO much, that at school during playtime on the playground my friends and I would play Superfriends. I of course was Wonder Boy – with the girls fighting over who got to be Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl. The least popular friend of the moment was of course the evil villain we’d be fighting, and then we’d all battle crime on the jungle gym.

I had a costume party when I was 7; of course I had a red top with a WB logo on it (for Wonder Boy – not the WB network). There was a Wonder Woman cake with Wonder Woman paper plates, Wonder Woman napkins & Wonder Woman plastic cups – I even received a telegram from Wonder Woman wishing me a very happy 7th birthday. How did Wonder Woman know it was my birthday? Well, I’d invited her to my party - so she’d sent the telegram letting me know she appreciated the invitation but had business on Paradise Island that meant she couldn’t make it.


That year for Christmas I received perhaps the best gift a boy can receive – a Wonder Woman doll. Now this was New Zealand in the late 1970’s, so of course we didn’t actually have anything like an “official” Wonder Woman doll anywhere on the islands – those wouldn’t be available until the early 1980’s, but my Aunt was a doll maker, and a skilled seamstress. So my Dad had secretly commissioned her to make me a Wonder Woman doll. For Christmas that year, my brother and I had been with our mother in Paraparaumu – I still remember waiting with my brother in the hot New Zealand sun as my Dad was pulling up in his white Toyota to take us back home to Minihaha in Khandallah – Dad let us know he’d met Father Christmas that night and this year Father Christmas had left our gifts from him with our Dad. That way Dad was able to give them to us when we were picked up at the end of the weekend. Ripping the wrapping off the package, I can still remember the thrill of seeing Diana Prince right there in doll form. Diana had her own hand-sewn star spangled outfit, complete with magic belt, tiara, bracelets & lasso.



Later that year after Christmas when I was sick at home one week with some childhood illness (probably the mumps or the measles) my Dad even built Wonder Woman her own invisible jet out of plastic sheeting. I asked for and got my own mini “IRAC” computer – complete with blinking lights – both items had been built in my Dad’s workshop. With these accoutrements Diana and I were set for crime fighting.

Anyway, Wonder Woman was of course my most precious possession, and she was a huge hit with all my friends. Phillipa Scott would have me and Diana over for tea parties with Strawberry Shortcake and her friends Blueberry Muffin, Oranage Blossom and Lemon Meringue. Phillipa was sure that the boy of the Strawberry Shortcake bunch, Apple Dumpling, had a crush and as such would I mind very much leaving Diana with her sometimes so they could get to know each other better. Jodi-Ann Parker and Sharon O’Sullivan would always ask to play with Wonder Woman when they were at my house. Yes, Wonder Woman and I had a full social calendar, what with tea dates and saving other my other action figures and stuffed toys from certain doom at the hands of my brothers evil toys.

One weekend I went to stay over at Phillipa Scott’s house. She had a trampoline in her back yard and her mother was Scottish. Mrs. Scott made great rock cakes and Scottish Eggs. On this particular trip, Wonder Woman didn’t travel with me – I wasn’t sure she and Apple Dumpling were a good fit, and Phillipa and I had plans to be jumping on the trampoline a lot that weekend.

I returned home after a pleasant weekend of exercise and rock cakes to Minihaha. Things were eerily quiet down the far end of the house where my brother and I had our rooms. Walking down the hallway I made the right turn in the ante way to our bedrooms and opened the door to my room to be confronted from a scene taken from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. All of my soft toys were facing each, arranged from smallest to largest, forming a roadway up to an alter made of wood. Perfuming the air of my bedroom was patchouli, the fragrance coming from incense sticks; smoke lazily rising from the hot orange tips of the sticks, smoke hazing the air, the tips glowing amidst all the perfumey smoke. I was able to make out a sarcophagus resting on the wooden alter. (I later discovered the sarcophagus had been crafted from a Roses Chocolate box.)

There’s something strange about walking in on a reverent scene of stuffed animals and toys – you know something is very wrong, but you almost don’t want to disturb things.

I placed my overnight bag on the floor and approached the alter, being careful not to disturb the statuesque soft toy honor guard. I reached down and opened the sarcophagus, and found a mummy lying inside. A doll sized mummy. A doll sized mummy, tightly bound by strips of snowy white toilet paper.

Ripping the toilet paper shroud from off the mummy I was horrified to find that it was my Wonder Woman doll that’d been defiled.

This all smacked of the work of my evil older brother - JASON!!! I can remember crying and running out of my room, yelling for my Dad and my older brother. Yelling that he’d been in my room, and had touched my stuff. Tears on my face, my lovely weekend ruined by his evil ways.

Not even in the comics or on the TV Show had Wonder Woman ever been mummified.

The reaction I invariably get to this story is “Wow, your brother is SO creative. Wow, he’s really talented, does he still build things? Oh, yeah, poor you, that must have been bad.”

Roberto - on his first blind date

Scene from a short film I did a while back.

Wonder Woman OOWANOWTS

Me performing as Lynda Carter - the resembalance is amazing!

Amy Sedaris

I got to see Amy Sedaris *live* in person last week at Booksoup in Los Angeles.

Funny, witty - and she smelled grrrreat. I asked what she was wearing, but she didn't remember as she mixes two or three things together.

What, me read?

My boss at work is crazy. Really. Well, crazy in her use of the written English language.

For example, yesterday she wrote that in our department I was a dianond in the rough.

Today we received the e-mail informing us that the department had to follow specific instructions in case A or B, and if we didn't do this then we weren't correct in either cases.

And a personal favourite - the e-mail thanking everyone for pitching in and going the extra milage.

I guess it's not so much that she's crazy (she is), but that she doesn't read what she's written prior to hitting send.

Or perhaps I'm not wordly enough. But, this does allow for work place jokes. I got to ask my coworker who's recently engaged how many carots her dianond ring is. With all theses cases around, who knows where to store anything - but it's lucky they're there with all the milage we've been putting on things lately.

Not dead yet

Bleeding internally. Well, that’s what the doctor says. Shouldn’t I urinate blood or something really dramatic?

Sadly no, in this case it’s nothing so obvious. I’m a bit tired now and again, but originally I just put that down to work. Maybe it’s actually cause my circulatory system is leaking itself into other systems in my body.

There was a boy in my primary school in New Zealand that used to pee blood. We were all really scared; partly cause he was mean as all get out, and partly ‘cause his urine was red. Other boys would go tell teachers, others would just steer clear.

Anyway, nothing so dramatic as crimson urine in my case, but still rather surreal. I feel phantom pains at weird times – especially as the doctor mentions different regions of the body, But I think that’s more cause I’m my Dad’s boy than anything else. All my Dad’s sons aren’t huge fans of hearing about blood or operations.

It’s well known family lore that when my sister sliced her wrist on an old door by accident that the nurses ran up to him when they arrived at the hospital leaving my poor sister with her tea-towel bound wrist clamoring for attention as my Dad looked so pale - like he was about to faint.

So, here I am, waiting to hear the results of my ultrasound. I wonder if Katie Holms felt like this when Tom ran the ultrasound over their kid.

I can't find my glasses - without my glasses

I can't find my glasses. My prescription sunglasses to be exact.

Very annoying. I remember having them as of Friday of last week, but now - the Borrowers have them I guess.

I hadn't even had them a year - sigh. I seem to be careless now and again with things like that, which is why I generally have a place for everything when I arrive home.

Keys on my monkey key holder right by the front door, rings in my African animal wood carving bowl, my bracelet from Boyd in my Fiji shell box on my dresser - but the sunglasses normally went straight back in their case in my bag.

The case is empty. Not even checking on consecutive days has had them turn up there. Strange how I do that, check the same place (in this case a very small space - the sunglasses case), JUST in case I missed them the first and second times I looked. I mean, my eyes aren't great, but they're not that bad.

I guess I'll go check the car,



again...

People are paying rent around here.

Well, that’s what I heard anyway. The other evening, my friends and I were leaving Largo in Hollywood – they’d driven up from San Diego to see Margaret Cho with me on my friend’s birthday.

As we walked down the street around the block from Largo, we arrived at their car. All of us were saying goodnight and then this tattooed guy in a wife beater comes purposefully marching up to us. Right away he demands that we “keep it down – ok” as “people are paying rent around here”.

Now, it’s not as if we’d been really loud – if we had then I could totally see his point. Anyway, his mission done with us, he immediately quick steps it over to other people coming on to the street also moving towards their cars. It’s always strange to me when folks feel they can impose their will on others with impunity.

Anyway, I spoke with my friends the next morning and it turns out the guy actually may have said that he has a 10-month old baby upstairs. Maybe I need to get my ears checked.

Well, whatever the case, it just makes it worse. 10-month old babies aren’t supposed to be asleep at night, and, shouldn’t he really have been at home looking after the infant, rubbing rum on the gums or something rather than accosting people in the street to keep it down?

I mean, people are paying rent around here.

Too Deep For Me

Strange, 2006 is already here.

New Year, new beginnings. To have a beginning does something have to begin? Is there no beginning, only afters, and no befores.

That's what Momentary Gods say, they look after the now and pass their section of time onto the next Momeg - always an after, never a before.

I may not have known you before, but I'll know you later.