DDOP-23 Indigo

BlueButterfly

 

Description:

In which the Bathtub Mermaid talks about blue jeans and butterfly wings.

Transcript:

No transcript, but topics include denim, 4-H camp, campfire songs, singing with people, and the wings of butterflies.

Links & References:

Credits:

  • The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
  • Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
  • Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

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DDOP-22 Oxblood

Found on the internet.

Description:

In which the Bathtub Mermaid riffs about the color Oxblood as a fall shade.

Transcript:

No transcript, but topics include Oxblood as a fall color, my favorite ankle boots, and a visit to the doctor.

Links & References:

Credits:

  • The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
  • Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
  • Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

Contact Me:

Audio Player

DDOP-20 Silver is the Color of Laughter

Gene Wilder

Description:

Silver is the color of laughter… RIP Gene Wilder.

Transcript:

My husband asked me to talk about the color silver. Silver is source of humor for us, because I tease him about his strawberry-blond beard going gray, and he insists it’s going silver. Alternately, when my roots are growing out, he’ll point out that there are streaks of silver in my hair, and I’ll glower at him because what woman wants to be reminded that she no longer has her childhood hair color, or that no amount of will will make hair grow in pink.

But the glowering isn’t really meant, and silver is something we laugh about.

Silver for me is the color of rain. From my earliest memories I’ve loved rain. I love the kind of rain that comes in thick, heavy drops, and the kind that is so fine you can’t even tell it’s raining unless you catch a glimpse of it from the corner of your eye.

I even like the needle-sting rain that precedes sleet in what passes for winter in Texas, which isn’t really, all that different from what passed for winter when I lived in northern California. I like the staticky hiss of rain when it falls into the pool, and the way when it rains on end – as it often does here – and then suddenly stops, the world sounds brighter because the background sound of rainfall has sharpened all the sounds.

There are times when rain isn’t quite so welcome, and times when it is. Today, on the way home from a routine visit to my doctor, the skies opened in a sudden silvery downpour. Once inside, I turned on my computer and learned Gene Wilder had died, and the summer storm felt appropriate, somehow, as if Mother Nature herself was acknowledging that this wise, funny, surprisingly gentle, actor, director, and writer was transitioning, or had transitioned, to a different state of being.

I’ve been reading all the different reports of his death, all the mentions of his iconic roles. For many, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was their first Wilder. I love that film, and his performance in it, but my first introduction to him was in Blazing Saddles.

However, the story I keep coming back to is one from the book Gilda Radnor wrote while she was battling ovarian cancer. She talked about filming The Woman in Red, and how, after the film had come out, someone told Gene he should have married the beautiful girl from that film. He responded by telling the person, “I did.”

I don’t believe in a literal Heaven, but if there was one, I think today would find Gilda welcoming Gene inside, and then I think there would be some kind of cosmic Old Comedians home, where Gene and Gilda would trade stories with Robin Williams. Belushi would show up too… and David Bowie would be there just because Bowie would fit in with every crowd.

Obviously other people would eventually be part of the gathering, but the one constant would be that there would be laughter… quiet laughter, raucous laughter, soft titters, loud guffaws, and big, bold belly laughs – as many kinds of laughter as there are kinds of rain.

Alternatively, the energy that was once Gene Wilder’s life force is now sprinkled throughout the universe, touching all of us with humor and kindness and grace, the way his performances always did.

Either way, he will be missed.

And silver may be the color of rain, but it’s also the color of laughter. Shiny, delicate, magical laughter.

Links & References:

Credits:

  • The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
  • Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
  • Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

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DDOP-17 Of Ochre and Ogres

Cook Dinner Tonight

Description:

In which the Bathtub Mermaid riffs about ochre and ogres and spices.

Transcript:

My aunt Patricia in Connecticut suggested that I talk about ochre. Specifically, she asked me to riff on yellow ochre, and I’ll confess, it’s one of those words that I’ve seen printed all my life and never heard spoken aloud, so I actually checked the pronunciation.

When I mentioned this at dinner, our friend Ben mentioned that he’d once been part of an RPG campaign where ochre had come up, and I asked if it had been an ochre ogre.

“No,” he said. “It was ochre slime.”

“My idea is funnier…” I continued riffing, “Oooh! It was an ochre ogre who likes okra!”

Fuzzy, my husband, added, “And watches Oprah!”

And now you have an idea of the lofty dinner conversation we have at my house.

And you also know that it’s possible to get to your mid-forties without having heard common words spoken aloud.

I usually write and record these Dog Days episodes in the late afternoon, over a mug of coffee, but I woke up today with an itchy/scratchy throat and the beginning of a migraine, so I didn’t even begin until after ten pm, which is why this is coming at you at 11:59 pm. I am the queen of getting things in under the wire.

So I went looking for pictures inspired by ochre, and what I found was a picture I took after a trip to Penzeys Spices. (I went in for one thing and came out with a bag… it is impossible to spend less than fifty dollars at Penzeys.)

Ochre – all the different versions of it – red and yellow obviously, but also, sienna and umber – reminds me of spices. The yellow ones – saffron, curry powder – moving toward orange with turmeric – different chili powders – and then the sweetening spices like cinnamon and nutmeg that bring us into the browns. I love the colors as much as I love the flavors.

I want to keep this brief tonight, so, as per Nutty’s suggestion, and the fact that so many Dog Days participants are talking about food, I’ll do something foodie tomorrow.

Links & References:

Credits:

  • The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
  • Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
  • Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

Contact Me:

DDOP-14 Orange

Mermaid Shelfie

Description:

My hair smells like an orange creamsicle.

Transcript:

My friend Selena suggested the color orange.

There’s a song that my mother used to listen to when I was a kid… a Leonard Cohen song called Suzanne, though she only ever listened to the covers recorded by Joan Baez and Judy Collins. I never cared much for the song – it’s kind of monotonous and makes me feel like maybe you can only really appreciate it if you’re kind of stoned – but there’s a line in it, “and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China” that has always captivated me.

To this day the color orange is tied to both the fruit and the tea for me, and I really like the combination of both together.

I’ve always been really nocturnal, and when I was in high school, I loved to be the last one awake at night. I would wait until everyone else was asleep and then creep down to the kitchen and brew a pot of tea – nothing special – just whatever was around. Sometimes plain old Lipton and sometimes something else. (Nowadays I’m as picky about tea as I am about coffee, but then, I took what I could get.)

I would take the tea to the table with a cup and milk and sugar, because I did that then, and a few oranges, and I would sip tea and read books late into the night, or, if I wasn’t in the mood to read, I would fill notebooks with stories.

No, I don’t still own the notebooks. I have no idea what happened to them all.

I love the way even the blackest of black teas, once brewed, is a deep orange-amber-brown color. I love the way tangerines are almost fizzy when you bite into them and their juice bursts onto your tongue.

Oranges are my go-to fruit in winter. I use navel oranges for most things, but we also buy those easy-peel clementines – the ones that are marketed for children – even though we don’t have kids, and we eat them like candy.

I could talk more about orange… I could talk about the Golden Gate bridge and the perfect sunset and how it’s a punch of color when you include it in a bouquet or a vase of flowers, but I think I’ll stick with the fruit.

Oh, except that I’ll mention that my new hair stylist has me hooked on Kevin Murphy’s haircare lines, so now my hair smells like an orange creamsicle all the time, which makes me grin.

Links & References:

Credits:

  • The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
  • Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
  • Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

Contact Me:

DDOP-13 Teal

SJ Sharks

Description:

To me, teal is the color of ice skating.

Transcript:

My friend Fran asked me to talk about the color Teal.

Originally, I was going to combine it with turquoise, but I decided it would be cheating. Besides, teal it’s a distinctly different color.

To me, teal is the color of ice skating.

I don’t remember learning to ice skate; it’s just something my mother and I always did when I was a kid. I remember skating with her on Deal Lake in New Jersey, and on the foot-thick rippled ice of the frozen reservoir in Georgetown, when they hadn’t yet frozen over the baseball diamond.

I remember weekend trips to the ski resorts in Loveland and Vail where we would skate instead of ski – I lived in Colorado for seven years and never learned to ski – and I would complain because I was wearing itchy thermal socks over tights under my jeans and I would be sweaty and cold and skated out long before the adults were ready to go home.

I remember holding Benjamin’s hand when we skated at ice rinks in Colorado – both of us in those double-bladed skates designed for wobbly children and Donny Osmond.

And I remember, in the winter before we all wanted those sneakers with roller skate wheels attached, that my friends and I would go to the rink at the Y in Arvada Colorado twice a week after school to participate in the open skate.

I never took lessons – none of us did – but we learned to scissor our feet and use the right edges, and do simple spins and tiny jumps even without formal training. We learned to shoot the duck and race around the rink, and sometimes we even wore cute little skating skirts to do it, but mostly we just wore jeans.

After we moved to California, Mom and I stopped skating, until the year before I met Fuzzy. That was the year the Sharks moved to San Jose, and they opened their training center for open skating in order to offset costs.

Mom and I went to one of the first sessions, but the rental skates were horrible, so we went directly to the pro-shop to buy proper figure skates. I’ve never been a particular hockey fan, but the rookies have to work in the pro-shop and when a soulful Russian or Finnish hockey player is holding your foot in his huge hand and asking you, in accented English what size shoe you wear, and saying “You vill com vatch us play, yes?” How can you say no?

And yet, I never made it to a live Sharks game, even though I lived only a short walk away from the Shark Tank for several years.

In fact, the only time we ever went there was for figure skating shows – it was a tradition that I went every year with Mom. But then she moved to Baja Sur, Mexico, and I moved to Texas, where the ice shows never come.

And my skates, my beautiful white figure skates, sit unused on the shelf of my hall closet, their blades protected by rubber guards in… guess what color? Naah, I’ll just tell you: teal.

Links & References:

Credits:

  • The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
  • Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
  • Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

Contact Me: