Some Number of Takes

Tossed off in the moments before we have to leave for the dance recital rehearsal.

1. Need to feel good about your weight? Find out how many cheetahs you weigh! Or what percentage of an elephant you are, or how many raccoons with bowling balls in a trench coat it would take to equal you. My Animal Weight gives you all this pressing information, and many more options.

2. If you follow the new genre of live musicals on TV, you'll be interested to learn that NBC's next production will be Jesus Christ Superstar, airing on Easter Sunday 2018. Now, I confess that I listened to JCS plenty in my teens because I loved Judas's opener, but the theology of it is sketchy enough that I think it's a rather questionable homage to the holy day. Not that I think the finer points of theology really concern the bigwigs at NBC, of course.

3. If you had told me thirty years ago, back when I was, oh, eight, that one day I would just order pizza for dinner because I didn't feel like cooking, I would have been flabbergasted. Those were the days when, if you wanted pizza, it was an occasion. You got your shoes on, and you drove down to Pizza Hut, and you sat at a table under a pseudo-Tiffany fixture hanging on a chain, and drank soda out of tall red plastic cups. Pizza was delivered to your table in a metal pan. You ate pizza maybe once a year, maybe more often if you finished your Book-It program at school.

Now, I look at the empty fridge and think about sitting for two hours in a high school auditorium watching the dances I'm just going to watch again tomorrow, and I think, "Yeah, Dominos." Served from the box onto paper plates, and maybe I'll break down and order a two-liter too, all off the Dominos app on my phone. Truly, I have come up in the world. When I was a kid, we just would have eaten box mac 'n cheese with hotdogs cut up into it, and we would have liked it, gosh darn it.

4. Speaking of things that happened a long time ago, my oldest turned 15 on Wednesday.

We got married seven weeks after graduating from college, and got pregnant a month later. Most of my friends my age have oldest kids several years younger, due to marrying later or waiting to have kids or whatnot, a fact my oldest children always reflect on when we go to visit people and there are no kids their age. I guess I'm a fairly young mom of a 15-year-old, but I don't really feel it these days with the aches of being 32 weeks pregnant. Perhaps when I'm 40 with a 17-year-old and a 2-year-old, I'll be positively spry.

5. Someone made the tactical error of putting stage makeup on the 6-year-old before brushing her hair. Now the eyeliner is all over the place, and we'll have to start again.

6. We have to walk out the door right now.