Fog-Soaked Easter Eggs and the Dogs Who Loved Them

(I wrote this for Yahoo Voices' "Easter Memories" section.)

Fog-Soaked Easter Eggs and the Dogs Who Loved Them

Laurie Brown, Yahoo! Contributor Network

Easter morning started early at my house growing up. My dad (aka The Easter Bunny) always played golf at 6am on Sunday mornings and Easter was no exception. We had a decent-sized backyard with lots of good hiding spots so although I was never a witness to it, I think the hiding went quick and easy. These eggs were always ones we dyed ourselves. If it was older kids doing the job the eggs would be the vibrant pink, purple, green and blue depicted on the Paas Coloring Kit. If younger kids had a hand in it the eggs had a tendency to come out a weird grayish-purple from mixing colors and grubby hands. It wouldn't matter though because when all was said and done all the eggs, no matter who the creator, would come out sort of spotted and odd-colored and not really looking like something anyone would want to eat. This was thanks to fog.

It was almost always foggy in the morning in Monterey, California where I grew up and especially at 6am. Set an egg on the grass or behind a bush in the fog, wait two or three hours until the kids got up, and you would find eggs that looked significantly different than the night before. I can still see them clearly...mottled would probably be the best word to describe them. If it was a really wet, drpping fog, much of the dye would wash off and then you'd have a pale egg, maybe slightly sickly looking but still worth money if it was the coveted twenty-five cent egg. Slugs loved these wet, slick eggs and you'd want to pick them off before you put the egg in your basket near your candy.

Of course following their usual morning routine the dogs would go out before the kids and they did some unauthorized egg hunting on their own. Sometimes they liked to boast of their find by carrying into the house a pinkish egg in their drooling mouth. Others preferred to sneak their find off to a corner of the yard and eat it leaving only the bits of colored shell behind as evidence. Once, a black lab belonging to my brother unearthed a long missing egg at a Fourth of July barbecue that both looked horrendous and smelled terrible.

I'm all grown-up now and living in the Midwest. I still dye eggs but they remain the color intended. I have dogs but since I don't hide eggs they have nothing to unintentionally hunt for. It always a very nice day but I do miss those damp Easter mornings with the crazy looking eggs and the happy, smelly dogs.

Sample Sunday - Collecting for the Mob.

From STAND-UP GUY :

So Robert and I started out as collectors. After a while we were called the collectors of the last resort because they would call us when it was the last resort, when they tried everything else. So, we would – now this is violent – knock on their door, bust open their door, come into their house. If the guy was in there we would get him together in front of his whole family and beat the living shit out of him. Cripple them if need be. Beat ‘em with a baseball bat. I only used Louisville Sluggers, they’re the best bats. Don’t kill ‘em. Leave them breathing. That’s what we would do.

I kind of like got invigorated with all this, you know. I couldn’t wait for the next time to go. It was the power, all that power. I was never scared, not even the first time and it was just a job after awhile. We knew they might have weapons but they weren’t going to use them against us because most of these people were fucking idiots. They were pathetic gamblers, people that didn’t have the respect for the money they borrowed. They borrowed money and they gotta pay it back. And they were asked to pay it back many, many, many times. We were the last resort, Robert and I. We beat ‘em up in front of their families. We beat ‘em up in their businesses. No matter where they were we were there. We never left without putting a hand on somebody because that’s what we did. There were other people who went before us who were very negotiable, but not us. We were the last resort like I said, that’s it.

Robert took me on a couple of light cases first to, you know, get me involved, warmed-up. Just maybe a bitch smacking or something, you know. Or push a guy up against a wall type thing. Then it got worse and I got into it and then we started getting all the contracts for that kind of thing. We were fed them. It wasn’t very busy, maybe one or two or three a week. I wanted to do it every day of the week. I wanted to be a gangster, right there and then, I was invigorated. I loved it.

I would have to come back and pick up the money after I gave them the beating. They would get it some way, I never had a problem. A couple of people wanted to turn me in, but you do that then, you know, I’ll be in jail but Joe Blow my friend won’t. He’ll be on the outside and he’ll get you.  We only did this for a couple of years though. Robert was married and his wife was giving him pressure about getting a real job so he left. He was a union painter and had two kids. Finally he said I got to give this up my wife’s on my back. Needless to say he came back to it after about a year, after him and his wife split up.

I loved beating people up. In nightclubs, when they fucked-up in my club, I loved beating the shit out of them. At this one place I’d throw them over a fence into a stream behind the club. I loved that, throwing them into a stream half-conscious, after I beat them up. Then they’d know not to fuck-up where I worked. My clubs were clean. No one fucked-up. My clubs were run with an iron fist. You fuck up in my club and the word got out you’d be hospitalized.

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Moonshiners v. Toddlers & Tiaras: Smackdown

I love reality TV and anyone who says they don't has never seen Bret Michaels in his flame pajamas, WITHOUT his bandana, attempting to have vh-1 approved phone sex with a complete stranger on Rock of Love.

I was hooked on Toddlers and Tiaras from the *ads* for the show. Sparkly dresses, nut-job moms, pixie stix? Please. It took me a little longer to warm up to Moonshiners because it's about, you know, Moonshiners. But since my husband likes it and since he watches T&T with me the least I could do was watch Moonshiners with him.

So, drawing my inspiration from the Midwest's own Li'l Miss and Li'l Mister Horseradish Pageant, here are my categories and likely outcomes should Toddlers & Tiaras and Moonshiners ever go head to head:

1. Best Costume: It's hard to beat pink cupcake dresses with Anita Bryant hair and fake horse teeth but the winner has got to be Tim from Moonshiners and his denim overalls. In the summer worn without a shirt, or come fall when a tee becomes necessary, it's the consistency that wins out here. Every episode. Just like Gilligan. Winner: Moonshiners.

2. Best Talent: Those little girls can bust some moves. They can also stand there awkwardly working the hem of their skirt while their mom has a conniption fit out in the audience. The Moonshiners dudes can build/fix anything and manage to hide an entire still operation out in the woods camouflaging it against spies both from the air and on the ground. Still, it's hard to beat a tiny muffin in full on luau wear including a coconut bra and cardboard ukelele hula-ing herself dangerously close to the edge of the stage. Winner: Toddlers & Tiaras.

3. Best Personality: This depends on if you mean personality as in sweet and charming and someone you'd like to hang around with, or personality as in you can't tear your eyeballs away from them. T&T has plenty of both, moms and daughters, with a definite lean towards the crazy-personality. However, I'm going to give this award to Tickle from Moonshiners because he is such an agreeable guy, willing to do whatever is asked of him and totally supports the cause if you know what I mean. Tickle loves him some 'shine. Winner: Moonshiners.

4. Best "Beauty": This is sort of unfair because there are some very pretty little girls on T&T. I mean it's sort of hard to tell sometimes under all that fake hair and grandma-style make-up but I think it's basically true. (An aside - in my own attempt to go "glitz" as as a kid I tried to put on some fake eyelashes and ended up in the ER because I glued my eyes shut.) Tim from Moonshiners looks like he might be a handsome man but his "total package", cowboy hat, shirtless overalls, etc. really isn't working for me. Winner: Toddlers & Tiaras.

5. Best Platform/Where do you see yourself in five years?: Well, Tim wants to go legit and get a license and stuff so he can pass the heritage of moonshining down to his son without the whole it being against the law thing. Tres noble. On the other hand the goal of most of the T&T contestants is to live in a pink castle with a purple unicorn. Hmmmm. Winner: Moonshiners.

6. Most resourceful: I have seen moms on T&T who when confronted with a uncooperative curling iron go into the kind of state that would allow them to lift a car off their little beauty queen. And never, ever get near a pageant mom whose room key card doesn't work fifteen minutes before beauty. Again Tim and Tickle can build anything, bend and fold metal to their will, chainsaw down trees to build a shelter, hide propane in the woods. Whatever it takes. Not that the moms on Toddlers & Tiaras don't believe in whatever it takes, they do. Including giving their 4 year old energy drinks so she'll be "on" for talent. Winner: Both.

7. Best Use of a Mason Jar: This one seems like a no brainer given the very nature of Moonshiners, but some of those moms and daughters drive a looooooooong way to get to those pageants. Just saying. Winner: Moonshiners.

Ultimate Grand Supreme: Well, Moonshiners won the most categories, but it's not really ever hard to watch like good reality TV should be. You don't really hate yourself afterwards. It's interesting, has some historical value and raises some ethical questions along the way. No one gets drunk (except Tickle), no one gets slapped and no one bursts into tears. The same cannot be said for Toddlers & Tiaras. Although to be fair, I've never seen anyone drunk on that show. But they don't need to be, they are plenty wacked-out as is. And I do feel bad about myself afterwards. For about five minutes. Winner: Toddlers & Tiaras!!!!!

Teaching Myself Speed Reading

When I was a kid I was fascinated by the commercials for speed reading. This was probably in the late 1960's, early 1970's. I loved to read and was somewhat hyper-competitive in terms of any sort of academic achievement. If there were people out there who could speed read...child or adult, man or woman...then I wanted to speed read too.

In the commercials the readers shown ran their hand over each page in a vaguely waving motion, kinda fast because this was, you know, speed reading, and then quickly turned the page. They could finish a whole book in record time. Why they wanted to read so fast was never discussed and it didn't occur to me to wonder about their motivation. I also don't know if it was ever explained what the swishing of the hand had to do with reading fast or if I just didn't listen to the particulars, but I did believe the magic waveswish had something to do with it. You could not speed read if you didn't use your hand.

So I started to train. I would get a book and buzz through it as fast as my eight year-old mind could go. Fast was the method. Read fast. I'd skim over small words. Who needed "the" anyway? "A", "an", "and" were for slow-poke readers. Words I didn't know? I'd think about those later. Not really knowing why I'd waveswish my hand over the pages absorbing maybe 60-70% of what I read. That was enough as far as I was concerned. It was an exhausting way to read but after a few months I felt gratified because I felt I had accomplished my goal of becoming a speed reader. I gave myself an imaginary certificate with a large fake gold seal.

It wasn't until years later that I learned there was a real method to speed reading. It was not just reading as fast as you could and their method was not dissimilar to my own. Skip the small words and concentrate on the bigger issues. And my unapproved method of speed reading definitely helped me in law school where we would have to consume massive amounts of written words although I had long ago abandoned the waveswish part. I find that even now, firmly in middle age, I still employ my technique even though I'm not in a hurry and have nothing to prove.

Next time: How the "bee" verbs ruined my life.

A Gangster Goes To Prison

From Stand-Up Guy - A True Crime Gangster Memoir.

When I finally got sentenced the prisons were so over-crowded they were moving people around, shuffling them around the different prisons. The first place I spent time in was in Suffolk County, New York because that’s where it all happened, on Long Island. Then I did the tour. I had O.C. next to my name because I was associated with organized crime and they didn’t keep us in one spot too long because you were apt to meet people in the same boat. They didn’t want us to be together so they kept on shuffling us around. I went to three or four different prisons in two years, which wasn’t bad.

Actually Sing-Sing was first but it was just processing, it wasn’t a full-blown prison, it was a reception center. Before you went to do your time you would be processed at Sing-Sing. Nobody was really staying there. All your paperwork, your medical exams, everything would be done there and then you’d go to a certain place, a prison, wherever they wanted to send you in the state of New York. I was at Sing-Sing maybe about four, six weeks, something like that. They had reconditioned a lot of stuff there, electric gates and stuff. They weren’t electric years ago, they were all powered by levers. It was amazing how they did it. It was noisy but you got used to it. But then these hacks, some of them were assholes, and at night they’d come down and take that big key and they’d run it across the bars and they’d wake you up. You never had a good night’s sleep in those damn places, between that and the fucking rats eating my commissary if I left it in a bag on the floor. You’d hear them in there scratching around, the mice and the rats and the roaches. I’d wake up and peel the roaches out of my hair. The Long Island institutions were filthy, the New York institutions in general were filthy. Sing-Sing was okay because they just rehabbed that. 

They tried to segregate the psychos from the normal people, they put them on a certain tier they call it but it didn’t always work out. You always got somebody in there that’s going to aggravate you. Everybody’s on edge, I mean it’s not a very happy place to be. You make the best of it. That’s what I used to tell guys that were all nervous and stuff, afraid they might get killed. “Well, it’s easy for you to talk, you’re six foot six”. I’d say, “Yeah, it’s not very easy for me to talk because if a big chunk of metal hits me in the head it could knock my six foot six body down and kill me.” Or a shank. There were plenty of shanks in there but I never had one. Never wanted one. They could search my cell ‘til the cows come home and they wouldn’t find shit. I used these, my fists, you know, that was it. I had shanks pulled on me and I pulled them out of people’s hands believe it or not. My reflexes were good, take it right out of their hand like nothin’. You know, I got stabbed a couple of times in my life, in the hands, but whatever.

I went to one prison in upstate New York I really liked. Erie County Penitentiary. It was supposedly a Civil War prison. Architecture-wise it looked like a castle, a fortress and it was absolutely spotless. They were very clean up there, you could eat off the floors. And the food was great because they had all this property. They were in upstate New York and they had their own cows, their own chickens, their own pigs and they had their own slaughterhouse and they had their own butchery so you ate really fresh food. And they had farms with vegetables fresh right out of the ground. And there were decent guards up there. They were really cool, different than the ones in Long Island where they treated you like a piece of shit. These people treated you like human beings up there. It was very good. It might have been an old prison but they had new ideas.

It was very close to the Canada border and in the winter all you would see was white. Look out the bars, the window and you see the yard was about six feet high in snow. They had an indoor yard where you could get your exercise. They called it the indoor yard, the indoor facility because in the winter you couldn’t go outside because of the snow. The yard was filled with snow so they had an indoor thing to get your recreation. They had pool tables up there, it was really neat. Church services and AA meetings with cake. They loved me there because I was so neat with my cell. Oh, you’re so neat. We like people that are neat.

I did have one incident up there. You were allowed one phone call a month. I went up to the phone and this
guy wouldn’t get off and I was supposed to call my girlfriend at the time at a certain time and he said, “Fuck
you, I’m not getting off this phone.” So I grabbed the receiver out of his hand and I broke his nose with it
and split his lip. I made my call, you know and they were pretty cool about it. They just said this was a
skirmish and this was a warning and one more time there would be trouble but I didn’t cause much trouble
up there.

Available here:

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Sample Sunday - Popped at the White Castle.

From Stand-Up Guy. A True Crime, New York City Gangster Story.

Joey picks me up the next afternoon and we make arrangements for Gino at four o’clock to meet us at the White Castle parking lot. A big White Castle out on Long Island, where these two guys would be in a red and white vehicle. I told them what kind of vehicle I had and we’d meet in the parking lot and they’d find us or we’d find them. When we get there I say to Joey roll around the parking lot once. We roll around it once, twice, and I see these people sitting around in cars with their newspapers up in their faces, like a lot of them. Cars parked way in the back of this White Castle parking lot. Everyone’s got newspapers? C’mon. And why is this helicopter flying around? I said to Joey, “I don’t like this. This is looking bad. I got a bad feeling the other night and I got a worse feeling today.” We didn’t have cell phones in them days so we had to go to a pay phone to call Nick.

“I don’t care what you do, you’re going to fucking do that! Do it!” And he hangs the phone up.

“Joey, he said do it”.

“Okay, Nick said to do it, well we’ll do it.”

So we see the red and white car come in. It looked like the Starsky and Hutch car, it really did. I said, “Joey, we’re gonna get popped. I got a feeling we’re going to get popped”.

“Are you such and such?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re such and such from the Hamptons. Gino sent us.”

All of a sudden helicopters are coming over, these people with the newspapers are all running out of their cars. Guns are drawn, sun-roof is opened and they’re standing on the roof with guns pointed at me. I mean I had all sorts of shit going on here. So I’m popped. They wanted to be real cool so they locked me up and they locked Joey up and they’re trying to find out who Nick was because Gino happened to talk to him on the phone a couple of times, on the pay phone in the dog grooming shop. They really couldn’t trace it, but they wanted to know who Nick was. When I was arrested they wanted to know names and people I knew.

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UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330879050&sr=1-1

Tiny Time Pills, Chalks Vitamins, etc.

A couple of nights ago my husband and I were driving home and we passed a Walgreens which he noted was ranked 8th in providing the most pharmaceuticals to people who make meth. Meth is a big problem here in Missouri. So we started talking about what it was that was the basis of meth. Was it cold medicine? Allergy medicine? Something like that that was once readily available to customers but was now kept behind the counter. This conversation then got me to thinking about the cold medicine Contac and it's fascinating Tiny Time Pills.

When I was a kid in the 60s Contac was the go-to over the counter medicine if you had a cold and they advertised heavily. It was a capsule with a blue bottom and a clear top and it was filled with candy-looking little sprinkles that were marketed as Tiny Time Pills. According to my kid analysis of this product when you took the capsule (was it made of plastic?) some of the pills dissolved right away and helped your cold symptoms right off, and some of them were smart pills that hung around in your system until the first ones wore off and then they did their thing. How this all happened was a matter of medical science far to complex for my grade-school mind, but I believed totally in the concept.

I did have two questions though. The first was, how did they fill up the capsule with the little pills? I envisioned someone (an Oompa Loompa?) filling up the blue bottom and then oh-so-very carefully stacking up the pills one on top of the other and then quickly slapping on the top. How did both halves come together each filled with pills without some falling out?Honestly, 45 years later I'm still not sure how that's accomplished. Second, was there any chance at all that the Tiny Time Pills were actually candy like the "pills" that came in the toy nursing kits which were popular with my crowd? I often felt adults were hiding candy from kids in sneaky ways.

My entire life I've loved candy but as a kid I was obsessed with it. My life revolved around Hershey Bars, licorice, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Pixie Stix. But I'd eat any kind of candy. Cheap candy (butterscotch disks), middle-of-the-road candy (Lemonheads, Hot Tamales), chocolate as noted above and "good" candy which in my family was See's Chocolates. I was highly supervised when there was a box of See's candy in the house and it was doled out sparingly. Bummer!

One time, when I was being watched after school by a neighbor, a bottle of Chalks Vitamins called out to me. Chalks were the kids vitamins of the 1960s and I *loved* them because they were highly sugarized and came in fruit flavors. These flippin' vitamins were candy as far as I was concerned and I looked forward to bolstering my health every morning. But it was afternoon at my neighbors and I was just hankering for something sugary. First I snuck one Chalks. Then another. Then another and another and another until I had eaten half a bottle. They were delicious too. I did worry I might get caught but the neighbor had three kids of her own so I would innocently shift the blame to them. Sure enough, after dinner the neighbor called my mom to report the missing Chalks. Her kids had denied involvement and all signs pointed to me. It was dangerous my mom said, to eat all those vitamins. Did I do it? No, I said. I did not. Even at nine I understood the notion of sticking to my story and stick I did. I never confessed. And, I never suffered any ill effects at all of eating half a bottle of Chalks Vitamins. None. Which leads me to the conclusion that there was nothing but sugar and flavor in those small square pillows of yumminess. They were candy! I was right!