I feel that my two most recent posts have been very maudlin and I need to lighten things up – that being the case I’d like to talk about the Daughter’s of the American Revolution, because nothing says light and funny quite like the DAR.

Several years ago my sister tricked me into joining the DAR, she did this through bribes of tiaras and costumes. I’m a sucker for any kind of head piece and since she promised to pay my yearly dues (for my lifetime) I reluctantly signed up.

I’m no stranger to societal organizations. I was once (also reluctantly) a Rainbow girl – which I was also talked into through  bribes of tiaras and hoop skirts (do you see a pattern here?).

The problem is my love of dressing up like a princess really conflicts with my deep seeded hatred of forced social gatherings. I have officially been in the DAR for six years now and not once have I gotten to dress up in period costumes – I have, however, been stuck in Many Many awkward forced social situations.

Now, I’m not saying the DAR isn’t a great organization dedicated to many worthwhile projects, but they lack one very important aspect – alcohol. When I watch the Gilmore girls, most of their DAR meetings take place with afternoon wine sprtizers on Emily’s patio, but not our chapter – oh no we drink mixers only – you know like soda and water… I’m not saying I need to be drunk to enjoy myself but seriously when you are hanging out with the DAR crowd listening to a Paul Revere reenactor speak for half an afternoon it certainly doesn’t hurt.  The DAR crowd, with a few exceptions, is almost entirely a group of women you wouldn’t be surprised to see on an episode of confessions of animal hoarding – you know because of all the cats… They are odd ducks to be sure.

Three years ago I was talked into attending the Pennsylvania state convention, being held in Scranton PA – you know somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit. And not only did I go but I paged. As a page you have to dress entirely in white – you have to wear gloves and fetch things for all of the older cat hoarders who are too lazy or enfeebled to get things themselves. As a page you are not allowed to sit down or eat anything (except during designated times). It was 48 hours of tortuous forced social gatherings where my feet hurt and I was hungry. You are also required to stay in a small hotel room with three other people (fortunately I got to share a bed with my sister) but most pages weren’t so lucky. I tried to put on a brave face I really did but the flask I had brought with me was too small for funnel I brought and my dream of secretly tying one on the entire weekend were hopelessly dashed.

At one point one of the more obnoxious, chipper pages says to my sister “I don’t think Becca is having any fun.” Um… duh. No one says DAR women aren’t observant.

I’m not sure what my point was to all this – I lost focus on the message I was trying to convey several paragraphs ago when my brain diverted itself to trying to locate the flask I haven’t seen since that fateful weekend. I guess what I’m trying to say is that last weekend when I learned the valuable lesson of not having multiple children my lovely sister and her husband where in Gettysburg to attend this year’s Pennsylvania State DAR convention – because that’s the difference between me and my husband and the two of them, you couldn’t get us to go without the use of a court order…

(If you are interested in joining or learning more about the DAR please visit National Society DAR or The Independence Hall Chpater  (thats my site – I made it – isnt it pretty?)  This has been a public service announcement)

I realize that I am getting old and out of touch because when I flip through the People magazines in our breakroom at work I only recognize about a quarter of the people in it. I’m also pretty sure that there are several commercials on TV featuring celebrities trying to sell you things, but I’m never sure if they are celebrities or just TV commercial actors, I’ll look at my husband and say “Is that someone we should know who that is?”, and my husband who is even more out of touch with this stuff than I am will stare blankly in response, give me about 5 seconds of eye contact before he buries his head back into his laptop and (I imagine) wonders for the umpteenth time how I tricked him into marrying me.

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Another realization I have come to recently is that no matter what I do – my hair will never be shiny and bouncy like the women on TV that use the same shampoo I do, I buy a lot of products, sometimes really expensive products and at one point in my life worked at a hair salon where we sold ubber expensive products and even then I was not bouncy or shiny…  I have finally come to the conclusion that unless I can go back in time and somehow add some Hawaiian ancestry into my gene pool this is never going to happen so I’m going to start saving my money.

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This morning I was getting ready for work and I decided to dress up – you know in a dress and everything and searched through the bottom of my closet for a pair of black heels, I had them on for about 10 minutes and remembered why they were buried in the bottom of my closet in the first place.

 When I was getting ready to leave for work I took a minute and fished my worn and tired ballet flats out of the shoe pile near our front door, my husband and I had this conversation:

Him: Are you looking for shoes?

Me: Yup

Him: But you have shoes, right here, you just had them on.

Me: Yup

And as I pulled on my ballet flats and stuck the heels in a bag to bring to the office I thought about explaining to him that the heels had a 30 minute window and I would take them to work and keep them under my desk and if I’m called into the Dean’s office, or if say Ed McMahon shows up with a crazy big check for me and a TV crew I will quickly step into them and hurry from my office. I wanted to tell him how there is no point in being in pain unless someone you care about sees you and think it makes your legs look longer, and since I never run into anyone I care about in the parking garage why would I do that to myself. But then I thought, he’s a man who wears doc martins to work he’s probably not really going to understand anyway.

I thought it was weird when I started only being able to walk on the dark squares on the diamond patterned rug at work, and then last night I realized I couldn’t go to sleep without turning over three times to the left… I would be worried about these things but who has the time for that? I really need to go wash my hands again…