>See the sweet, lovely woman in this picture? She may look nice enough, but she posesses the power to simultaneously make me feel like the most brilliant, talented person in the world and a loser teetering on the edge of acceptability.

Earlier this week, she informed me that while this blog is quite entertaining, she is concerned that 1) I am drinking too much, and 2) I might be a lesbian.

Only she whispered the word lesbian so that the gardeners outside her pink stucco house in the lovely High Vista Boomer Museum & Golf Club where she lives wouldn't hear. Because, as we know, lesbian is a word that travels, and is clearly audible above 5000-decibel mowers and edgers.

It seems that my post "The Skinny Pirate" raised some red flags with my mother. "The way you describe your girlfriends as so sexy and gorgeous is just, well, inappropriate," she said. "It makes you sound like you're lusting after them or something." Lust, by the way, is another one of those words that lawn care professionals are trained to pick up while trimming shrubbery.

"Oh mom, only you would take it that way," I dismissed. "I'm married! And besides, my girlfriends thought it was funny as hell."

"And that's another thing," she said. "Your language. Everything you write has a curse word in it."

"Well, that's because I write the way I talk," I said.

"I raised you better than that," she scolded. And she's right. She raised me better than that.

But my dad didn't.

While the vocabulary in the house where I grew up was occasionally vast and intellectual, it was also very colorful. Depending upon his degree of frustration with us or with life or with non-running vehicles, my father's rainbow of expression ranged from pastel to psychedelic. When I started working in radio in my 20s, I found an environment that considered obscenity an art form as long as the microphone was off; so really, the chances that I would express myself in a more ladylike way were (insert expletive here) slim.

"Then there's all those references to drinking," she admonished. Lesbians, lust and drinking? The yard crew at High Vista was getting an earful that day.

"Oh come on, you know I don't drink that much," I laughed.

"Well I know it, but people reading your thing won't know that." She refers to my blog as my "thing" because she's not yet convinced that "blog" isn't some sort of cyberspace reference to a twisted sexual activity.

"And by the way, mom, you understand that this conversation is way too funny not to end up on my "thing", right?"

"Well, as long as you make sure everybody knows you're not a drunk lesbian, that's fine, dear."

Posted: Friday, Mar 19 2010 at 10:36 AM

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