Anatomy of a refrigerator door

While Joe watched some snooze-fest on Charlie Rose tonight, I diagrammed our refrigerator door. I'm not necessarily proud of this. In fact, there were a million other more productive things I could've, should've done. Ah well. At least now you know I have a framed photograph of my fiancé with his dentist and dental hygienist on the fridge. (And yes, they're posing with balloons.)

Note: This is just the top of my fridge. There's an entirely different collection of crap on the bottom.

Ani, if you're out there, thank you.

10 reasons why I love Ani DiFranco:

1. Her voice is creamy. Seriously. Like vanilla pudding. It's a beautiful juxtaposition – somewhere between angelic and fierce. If Ani were singing shit about my pug, I'd turn up the volume and sing along. She's that captivating.

2. Her songwriting is AMAZING. I picture her scratching out lyrics between coffee refills in diner booths. Or on the back porch of her home in Buffalo, under an awning, in the rain, making sense of bad relationships, her 20s, her 30s, politics and pollution.

3. She's from Buffalo. My hometown. And without too much preaching, she became the poster child for a steel belt city with a reputation steeped in bad football jokes, blizzards and economic woes. A few years ago she purchased a historic church on the corner of West Tupper and Delaware Avenue, rehabbed it, reopened it as a music venue and called it Babeville.

4. She is 11 years older than me, but it never felt that way. In the mid-1990s, when I first started listening to Ani, newspapers and magazines labeled her militant, angsty, angry, gay, bisexual, feminist, rocker grrrl, younameit. As a teenager, I couldn't think of a better chick to idolize. She was complex; a Rubik's cube of sexual identity, with song lyrics like poems, marked by peaks and valleys in an emotional landscape not unlike the one I pounded. Britney Spears and I are the same age. (Arrggh! It's true!) Yet it was Ani I latched onto like a long-distance pen pal. (Ani and Jewel to be exact.) From my bedroom in the middle of nowhere, with its pink walls and quilted bunk bed blankets, I spent my nights alternating between Ani and Jewel, a cross-pollination of a fan. Romantic and wispy. Pent-up and pissy.

5. She can fingerpick a hoedown beat like nobody's business. Ani could pluck a love song using her guitar strings to clean out the grit from under her fingernails. She's that fast and that good.

6. She's a journalist's wet dream. She's funny, disarming and ridiculously quotable. ("Some people wear their heart up on their sleeve. I wear mine underneath my right pant leg, strapped to my boot.") Even her terseness is eloquent. ("My songs are just little letters to me.")

7. She's a stubborn success story. Ani has repeatedly turned down baller contracts with major record companies. She formed Righteous Records in 1989 with Dale Anderson, a writer from The Buffalo News, and renamed the company Righteous Babe Records in 1994 after she and Anderson parted ways. The company now produces a growing list of emerging artists – Andrew Bird, Bitch and Animal, Arto Lindsay, Sara Lee and Hammell on Trial to name a few.

8. Her song, Angry Anymore, was my anthem for years. Listen to it. It's cathartic.

9. Fuck you at the start of a refrain never sounded so pretty or so appropriate. Untouchable Face is a lyrical feat of genius.

10. She is finally happy, and I'm happy for her.

--

PS. Joe took me to the Tampa Theatre last night to see Ani. The tickets were a Christmas present. (Thank you, Joe!) I cried tears of happiness during the show. It was dark, so no one saw.


***

I was born again because of Ross.

This is a story about a bicycle, and the power a bicycle had over my life when I was about 21 years old.

His name was Ross (yes, he was a he) and I first laid eyes on him when I was dog sitting for my Aunt Shirley, who lived next door to my Nana and Papa in Brant, N.Y.

Brant, N.Y. is one town over from North Collins, and it is where all my mother's relatives live. Most of them live on Brant-North Collins Road, a winding, rural, two-lane stretch that cuts through Southeastern Erie County. It is also the same road I grew up on five miles north of my Nana, my Aunt Shirley, my Uncle Joe, my Aunt Helen and so on ...

By the time Brant-North Collins Road gets to my house it is called Langford Road.

Once you pass my house, Langford Road drops down a hill, runs past Crances Superette, past Aaron Skora's house, past the Friedman farmhouse, past Fox Road and the New Oregon Church and ends in a valley, where two brothers named Ed and Mike Snashall used to live.

For the purpose of this story, I will call Langford Road Route 249, which is its official Department of Transportation designation.

Save for high-speed traffic and the usual blind spots, Route 249 is a perfect road for cycling, and its paths through the towns of Farnham, Brant and North Collins have not changed since 1935.

Ross was the first bicycle I pedaled on Route 249 that didn't have training wheels. He was a clunker of a 10-speed I spotted hanging upside down from ceiling rafters in Aunt Shirley's basement. The only fetching thing about Ross was was that under the dust, he actually had a brand name. See here. And here. 

The day I handed my aunt $25, I pedaled Ross home and pledged out loud to my mother that I would bike at every opportunity until I dropped 25 pounds. 

(A side note: At 21 I weighed 25 pounds more than I do now, which is what happens when you party in the woods at 17, 18, 19 and 20.)

Beer-belly up and feeling pretty shitty about it, I stuck to my plan.

Ross and I were inseparable. He was rusty and so was I, and we welded together like fuzzy blue corrosion. He was a boy bike and therefore had the boy-bike bar, and I didn't mind that I had a circa-1983 boy bike with a chain that required so much grease I would go to bed with oil skids on my calves. I only cringed when Ross would, without warning, switch gears every time I stood up to pedal. 

Clunk-clunk. 

But even that was OK, as I bragged to friends that I had found myself the only automatic transmission bicycle in town. 

"You're like a born-again biker," said Ro (the best friend.)

And I was totally evangelical about cycling. I'm certain I logged 300 miles on Ross in one summer. I worked as a recreation director at a day camp four miles from home, and I'd bike it nearly every day with a lock box that contained the day's lunch money on my back - 15 pounds in dimes, nickels and quarters.

Just for the hell of it, I would pedal 30 miles into the suburbs listening to the usual mixed tapes. Ani DiFranco. Indigo Girls. Counting Crows. George Clinton. When the A side would end, I'd flip it to B. Often on these 30-mile rides I would have to flip a tape three times.

A couple months in I recruited Ro, who I forced up Route 249 in 95-degree heat, holding her water bottle out like a carrot, taunting her with it until she reached the top of the hill. It was, she says, the worst and the best motivation she ever endured.

When fall came I was 15 pounds lighter and totally addicted to the road. Sometimes, when I reached the top of a steep one I would cry, not out of frustration but out of a profound sense of accomplishment. And sometimes, on those long even stretches, I would belt out whatever song I was listening to on my mother's little yellow Walkman and glare maniacally at slack-jawed, bug-eyed truck drivers as they banged past. 

When winter came I insisted on pedaling through light snowfall. December air is intoxicating and I used to pop a peppermint candy before a long December ride just to heighten the taste. 

When January came and the air howled through my ears, I would wear a headband to cushion the stabs. And when eventually, inevitably, snow would blanket my town, I would pout about how I couldn't wait to move to Florida, where I would bike every day.

But of course that didn't happen. I moved here in the fall of 2004, 25 pounds lighter and with a Schwinn bicycle I bought a year after pedaling Ross from one end of Western New York to other. 

The Schwinn cost me close to $300, and though it took me on a 65-mile ride around Lake Chautauqua in Upstate NY, and across the state of Rhode Island for a last-hurrah trip Ro and I planned the summer before I left for Florida, it lacked Ross' depth of character. It didn't have an automatic transmission. It's paint wasn't peeling and and it didn't have a name. It was of course, totally tricked out with a tachometer, dual water bottles, a flashing rear light and gel seat, and shortly after I moved to Sarasota it was stolen outside of the Selby Public Library.

Lucky for my waistline, I never chunked on the 25 pounds I lost from three years of devout cycling. And yet the road fever is extinguished. I've tried since to rekindle it (by assuming that if bought a nicer Schwinn it would return) but the compulsion to blaze 30 miles in one day has yet to sock me. 

Until now.  

Two stolen Schwinns later, I'm back at Square One with a $40 Target bike, trying to explain to Joe how important it is that he ride with me.

He's making headway. Slowly. 

Which is another story for another day ...

--

PS. Bicycle photograph by Julie Frame. For more of her work click here. To purchase photographs click here.

O Buffalo.

What is it about Buffalo? It's a ghostly city lined with crumbling steel mills, surrounded by brick buildings with their windows punched out. The outskirts of the city, a town called Lackawanna, looks like the bottoms of a pair of muddy worn out jeans. The inside of the city on cold winter days from the top of the Skyway bridge is a kind of Gotham City snow globe. When you move away from Buffalo and tell people where you're from they shiver and say, "Sure glad you got outta there, aint ya?"

That's the thing about Buffalo. Most of the people I talk to who grew up there and no longer live there rarely speak ill of the place. (We save that for the people who remain.)

Tim Russert is a good example, rest his pundit soul. Ani DiFranco is another good example. Even Johnny Rzeznik from the blasted Goo Goo Dolls gets misty-eyed when he talks about Buffalo ...

Rather than listen to me go on and on about why I love Buffalo, its pierogies and chicken wings, its dark old soul and puffy winter coat'ed people, I'm going to, in honor of Russert, post bits of what other people have said about the place. Here goes:

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"It's a really beautiful old place. It felt really good to be back where I grew up. It's sort of that whole getting-back-to-your-roots thing only that sounds cliche, but there's definitely a different kind of dramatic tension there than in L.A. ... It just reminded me that this is who you are. This is where you're from. It's never anything to be ashamed of, and it actually gave me strength to have a sense of my own history. It's so easy to come out to L.A. as an outsider and plant your head so far up your own ass you can disappear."

- Johnny Rzeznik on returning to Buffalo after the success of his 1998 album, Dizzy Up the Girl. The band recorded its next album in a 100-year-old Masonic ballroom in the city.

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"Like a typical Buffalonian I came back. There's a high recidivism rate in this town. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave, so I'm back living two blocks from the hospital I was born in. It's the community I desired all along, all those lonely folk singer-in-a -car days. It's finally being realized."

- Singer Ani DiFranco in an NPR interview on her decision to purchase a 137-year-old church in Buffalo and turn it into a concert hall.

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"A few weeks before Dad's 75th birthday, I called him and announced, "I'm finally in a position to buy you a new car." For his whole life, Big Russ bought only used cars, and when I was a boy, I used to say, "Dad, someday I'm going to buy you a brand-new Cadillac."

I sent him Cadillac, Mercedes and Lexus catalogs. "Look them over," I told him. "You can have any car you want, with any options. It's a birthday present. When I come for Thanksgiving, we'll pick it up."

On Thanksgiving, visiting Dad in Buffalo, I said, "Okay, which one?"

"Let's go for a ride," he said. We got into his Chevy Caprice and drove to Jack Adkins Ford. A tall, thin man with a Buffalo Bills jacket came out to greet us.

"This is Charlie," Dad said. We shook hands. "He gave me a good number on my trade-in. Charlie, show him the car."

"We followed Charlie into the showroom. There, all shined up, was a black Crown Victoria. I couldn't believe it. "Dad, it's a cop car!"

"Isn't she beautiful?" he said. He opened the trunk. "You can get three suitcases in there, and two cases of beer."

As we were heading home, I said, "Dad you could have had whatever you wanted - a Cadillac, a Mercedes, a Lexus - but you chose a Crown Vic. Do you really think it's better?"

"No of course not," he replied. "But if I came home with a fancy Cadillac, do you know what people would say? 'His kid made it, and now he's too big for us.' This is who I am."

- Tim Russert, from "Big Russ & Me."

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"There's a part of the country could drop off tomorrow in an earthquake. Yeah it's out there on the cutting edge, the people move, the sidewalks shake. And there's another part of the country with a land that gently creaks and thuds, where the heavy snows make faucets leak in bathrooms with free-standing tubs. They're in houses that are haunted, with the kids who lie awake and think about all the generations past who used to use the dripping sink.

And sometimes one place wants to slip into the other just to see, what it's like to trade its demons for the restless ghost of Mrs. Ogilvey. She used to pick the mint from her front yard to dress the Sunday pork. Sometimes Southern California wants to be Western New York.

It wants to have a family business in sheet metal or power tools. It wants to have a diner where the coffee tastes like diesel fuel. And it wants to find the glory of a town they say has hit the skids, and it wants to have a snow day that will turn its parents into kids. And it's embarrassed, but it's lusting after a SUNY student with mousy brown hair who is taking out the compost, making coffee in long underwear.

- Folk singer Dar Williams, from "Southern California Wants to Be Western New York."