The Tiny Comeback

should we let our ego run wild and renew the blog???? HUH? HUH?

Acts of Random Sonnet Susan Reinhard (c) 2014

Acts of Random Sonnet Susan Reinhard (c) 2014

Mourning my great age and bedimmed beauty
Is a silly waste of rare precious time
I’ll ne’er again get the call of booty
And nothing works as it did in my prime
All I have left are these typing fingers
A three year old Macbook on internet
I lack the wit to fling great zingers
And no more plays do tickle yon ink jet
Still, I have relative health and SS
All that I need to survive day to day
A twenty five year old car who’s the best
Still walking even if there is no sway
I guess I’ll continue to bother you
Until I take leave of this Earthly zoo

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Mommas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be playwrights Part Two…Normal Life in the flood zone

Mommas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be playwrights

Part Two…Normal Life in the flood zone

– Susan Reinhard 8/30/14

By 1957, my father’s job at Bethlehem Steel was starting to have layoffs and closedowns. He had already been injured twice: a hernia and a huge burn down his arm from hot steel racing down a chute. I was never sure what he did there but Mom was relatively happy staying home as a housewife. She had her backyard friends to talk to over the fence and her constant stream of cigarettes which were considered normal and healthy back then. We did notice her sitting on the couch for hours, playing with the filter of the cigarette while she thought of things. (I didn’t realize where I got the daydreaming from until years later.)

Underemployed, Dad started a correspondence course for being a draftsman, copying building plans in the days before computers and copiers.  The shut downs at the Bethlehem were getting longer and longer. My Uncle Rich, the third child of the family (Dad was first, causing the shotgun disaster of my grandparents’ marriage) and lived outside of Cleveland, Ohio working for Ford Motors. Rich had found a lengendary soft job. He was a tinker, a metal worker, and Ford paid him not to do any actual work, just not to work for anyone else. Uncle Rich earned a good salary for staying home. Cleveland seemed like Nirvana, so my Dad packed up our 1940 Plymouth that looked like a huge olive on wheels and for which he had paid $90 in 1954, and went to Cleveland to look for work, leaving us behind to wait.

Most of my life in Johnstown before the age of 7 had been fairly normal, with healthy home cooked food and baking only done on a Saturday night. I had a magic ability to make fudge turn out perfectly and my sister and I played in the back yard and went to dangerous places alone, like the River’s edge (the same river from The Johnstown Floods) and a half built stone garage with teetering rocks. Mom wanted us out of the house and her hair from morning till dinner and we obliged. School was sufficient to keep us away during most of the year but summer vacation was the challenge. I remember we went up on a mountain and while dangling from the edge of a waterfall, lost my shoes. No reprimand for the daredevil events, just the missing shoes. Television really wasn’t a big part of our lives because that was for Mom to watch while we stayed out of her hair, but I remember good Christmases and fun Saturday night dinners.  My mother had been raised by her great grandmother, having been abandoned by both her parents, and despite her house being  full of old newspapers and snarling dogs, we loved Grandma Berner as every visit, she always had a warm Pepsi and a silver dollar for us.

But suddenly, one day, the house had been sold and we were packing getting ready to move the 200 and some miles West and North to Cleveland, Ohio. Dad had found a job as a draftsman and an apartment on The West Side of the city. I don’t remember any arguments at that time, just controlled and efficient work. You’d think that would have had a bigger impact but it was fine and the daydreams  had not yet became an addiction and actually disappeared for a while. They would soon return when the most terrible thing imaginable happened to my mother upon arrival in Cleveland. The thing no woman could contemplate, the thing that ruined her marriage and her life…she had to get…A JOB!

Mommas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be playwrights Part One…blame it on the Son of A Pioneer

Mommas, don’t let your daughters grow up to be playwrights

Part One…blame it on the Son of A Pioneer

– Susan Reinhard 8/18/14

In 1954, we were the first people on our block of Johnstown, Pennsylvania to get a television set. I was 5 years old.  It was black and white of course, but all of the neighbors would crowd in the living room every night the first week to see the magical box with its one channel that used shows from all 3 national networks: Channel 6, Altoona “From High Atop the Alleghenies.”

Like most American families, we were already unhappy, but, in 1954, we did not have all the communications we have in 2014. My parents, Betty and Carl had no idea what to do about it or how they got into the mess of marriage. Mom and Dad had NO idea how babies were made and married, determined to not have children.  However, the only advice about Birth Control Mom could find was from Dad’s slightly brain damaged mother. Grandma had gotten pregnant 12 times with 6 surviving; and my 17 year-old-mother didn’t know that Grandma had the 2 safe weeks wrong and took her advice. Mom then churned out two kids within 18 months of marriage and was not happy about it. With the third one, a miscarriage, she finally figured it out.

Mom had enough love and attention for one child, but not for two, and I was number two in birth order and value.  Kathy and I have very different memories of our childhoods. I sensed I was a mistake and was in danger. That my mother would call the Orphanage (or pretend to) when we were ‘bad’ had the desired effect on me. Being redhaired, I was told I was going to end up like my Aunt Betty Lou, (whom I later discovered had to be told that taking money from boys for sex was NOT a good thing ) who was never quite accepted in the family.

In 1954, spankings were acceptable and encouraged, so I learned to stay very still…preferably in my bedroom with the lights out while Mom patrolled the halls puffing on a Kent Cigarette and angry at the world.

And so, when the television set arrived, I tiptoed downstairs and saw the young and handsome Roy Rogers riding the beautiful Palamino Trigger to the rescue of…whoever that week…and  my fantasy life began. And I was the one being rescued.  It was then that I started to write little stories and draw little cartoon strips (yes, my cartoonists, from an early age I was drawing them). Roy was my first ‘boyfriend’ and the start of the years of fantasizing, a habit with which I still wrestle at the age of 64.

To be continued….

FINALLY! After more than 3 years starting working on a script!

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My first marriage only happened because I wasn’t a virgin. It was thirty years before I realized that I had been raped.  In 1969, I had just arrived at Ohio University, 200 miles from my home and my crazy mother. My first….what to call him? Not lover…because there was no love…my gynecological surgical tool…was a cute Sophomore who played guitar in a tacky local band, and the first of many tall, skinny ‘artists’ I was a sucker for. Bob invited me to his dorm room. I’d like to give you more details, but as I walked in, he closed the door, threw me down on the bed, pulled my clothes off…and raped me. About as seductive as a truck wandering onto a railroad crossing and being hit by the locomotive.

And ever the good host, Bob stood up angry and threw me out of his room shrieking.  “You didn’t enjoy it!” Bear in mind, he felt that he had no hand, as it were, in my pleasure. He had not inquired as to whether or not it was my first time. He felt that the very presence of his male member should be all a woman needed for enjoyment. I had no idea what was going on and it was a bit too painful to be “enjoyed”.

Granted, it was 1969, and although the sexual revolution had begun on the East Coast, it was still 1927 in Ohio’s mind. So, being that I did not yet know what Feminism was. I simply left his room, as he demanded, and went back to my dorm and never heard from him again. And if you want to know why I do not mention blood…he left the condom in and I didn’t know it was there till it fell out two weeks later. (Thankfully, after I had returned to campus from Spring break. Try explaining THAT to your Mother.)

So ergo, Eddie, my first husband was the virgin when I went to Atlantic City for a summer job and met him. Eddie was dating a female virgin at the time. (Of course, I didn’t find that out till later) She was a nice Jewish girl who would have been perfect for him, except he was more of a gentleman than my first…experience…and whenever they tried to have sex, she stopped it at the first sign of pain. (Oh, Sweetie…if only you had just gritted your teeth and let it happen, how different all three of our lives would have been.) This had gone on for quite some time by the time he met me and of course, I didn’t know about her when we started dating. I was far from perfect for him but it was possible to have sex with me because there was no barrier to the act. And being an idiot who knew nothing about such things, there was also no pleasure in our sex, but at least he didn’t get angry at me. Like I said, it was before Feminism.

However, I had to return to Ohio from the summer job and Eddie and I parted ways, hopefully to never to see him again. Well, he showed at Ohio University two months later. I thought it meant love but I later found out, it was just about having sex. Not great sex, but at least I didn’t stop him every time as she had continued to do.

So why did I marry him? I was shy and weak and anxious for what seemed to be love. After that marriage ended, all of my romances, and my second marriage were also about sex. After I divorced Eddie, I learned more about sex and had much fun with it, but never met a man who didn’t think he could do better than me. Still, there is a happy ending to this tale. I read an Ohio newspaper and there was the joyous news that Bob had died of a heroin overdose.  Karma. It’s a bitch. And now, so am I.

GRANDMA TRIES TO WRAP IT UP

You like to think that you are good with words
That you’ll find the ones that will solve it all
But emotions make them scatter like birds
Leaving you silent as a broken doll
Right now I can’t even find a good rhyme
To make the poems that fulfill my dreams
I’m so old that I’m running out of time
And this sonnet sounds like belches and screams
At least boredom has motivated me
To try and strangle my dusty daydreams
I am not the she nor are you the he
So no more romance, I will write elsewise
And leave younger broads to praise the cute guys
SBR 7.7.14

TMI

Before I was liberated by menopause, I estimate that I had sex approximately 1,500 times. I was fortunate to come of age in the midst of the sexual revolution. I am retired, but I do have some advice for men.

1.            Yes, you should love your penis, but your love life will be less rocky if you don’t act like it’s the only one available on Earth. Chances are it is NOT going to be the only one ever offered to your woman, so don’t act like it is. And if you think it is the largest one available, you never met my second husband.

2.            That said, remember no truer words were ever spoke than: “It’s not the size of the boat but the motion of the ocean.” (I am reminded of the Jeff Foxworthy joke: “But it takes a dinghy a whole lot longer to get to England than a steamship.”) HOWEVER, Love also helps the result.

3.            Porn movies mostly teach men to beg their girlfriends to try new things with disastrous results.

4.            Believe it or not, you did not invent oral sex and there will be other men who know how it works. And for the love of GOD, don’t talk about it…just do it!

5.            Women have more intense orgasms than men because our time is limited. After menopause, we are freed of needing them constantly and can concentrate on our gardening and grandchildren. However, remember that we still enjoy sex. It will be more fun with the woman next to you in bed than it will be trying to earn the money a younger wife will cost. .

6.            A man who doesn’t learn to control the constant craving is not going to give the attention to the career he will need to get rich in to afford the young women he craves. Catch 22 can be so amusing.

7.            You can be the most skillful lover on Earth and give the greatest orgasms but we will STILL dump you if you are mean or act like an idiot. This is why God made vibrators.

8.            There are 6,000,000 more women than men in America. Chances are we are going to end up alone and we must be financially and emotionally prepared for it. Statistics prove that women need a TON more money than men to buy a man, so chances are it won’t help us. This is why God made chocolate.

It's All Right

Sonnet on Spending too Much Time on Facebook

Sonnet on Spending too Much Time on Facebook

I want to meet living breathing people

Not just upon the Facebook’s icy page

Talk occurs beneath my church’s steeple

But the rest of Earth leaves me in a rage

Thine headphones seal off earholes in the gym

Or upon thine cell phone thou dost natter

Walking or seated with a visage grim

Sternly bearing your teenager’s chatter

Neighbors stand behind closed doors as you pass

Trying to avoid the hallway face to face

You’re home all day as they laid off your ass

And the hot men no longer give you chase

With a sigh, back you log on to FB

Hoping that your life will be less MT

I Forgot 97 so THIS is the real 100th Sonnet

Number 100 The Last Sonnet

Sonnet one hundred is eluding me

I’d like to end the whole thing with a bang

I never found the rhythm or the key

My lady doth confess they never sang

Will did have his mystery dark lady

But aging broads are dismissed as stalkers

Regarded more as Sad Sack than Miss Sadie

Unsexed by their medicine and walkers

Still, there are proud moments to remember

And gave to me respect for poet’s muse

Apt it is to end it in December

And while we still can do it without booze

And thus I end my farting with this biz

The final sonnet and Whoot! Here it is!

A Novel Idea -- Roxy's Lost Years Inspired by 'Amour Americain'

Day One Year One: I Am Reborn

I open my eyes and still I am in darkness. Slowly, shapes and dots of light reveal themselves. White and silver on a canvas of ebony black. I realize that I am breathing hard, with cold air ripping through my lungs. Some THING rattles by and I do not know if it is a rat or an autumn leaf. The poem! Find the poem! Reach into my coat to touch the envelope and I smile, I can breathe again. I remember that, despite losing everything, all of my worldly goods, that I am loved by God and one woman. There is nothing more a man needs in this world. Nothing!

However, it is dangerous in this alley at two o’clock in the morning when even the sounds of taxis and the number 6 train are rare and there are strange and desperate men like myself moving through the empty streets. I shiver from the chill as I only had a moment when I realized that the men were coming up my stairs and I only had seconds to decide on what I could grab before being dragged out and cast into the street by the goons…no! No, Robert, don’t do that to them and yourself…by the men send to clear me out of my home.

Of course I made sure the poem was safe against my heart and then I went to my easel and found my oldest and dearest friend: a camel’s hair brush that I have been using since college; and slid that into my backpack. No time or room for canvas or color except for a new tube of crimson red that had yet to have its mouth unstopped. Unstopped. Strange word to use right now. The poetesses in my life have left their mark.

R U HERE? M I – September 22, 2013

R U HERE? M I – September 22, 2013

So, after forty years of good playwriting and three years of mediocre poetry, it’s been suggested that I hunt down and tame the elusive essay. Ah, what an intellectual bunch we are on Facebook: suggesting essays instead of flower arranging or knitting. Yes, I know that I will get fifty FB comments defining ‘essay’ and how I’m screwing up the form, but…your suggestions will be appreciated…through gritted teeth at times…but appreciated, damn it. I pray that you will not sweat the grammar to death, as the reason I became a playwright is that I do not see dangling participles but I will put them into a speech if they sound natural. Playwrights don’t have to do that there grammar stuff right.

Thank God for Spell Check.

I will begin this with a statement you will not agree with. While we are all shining stars, all alike and valuable…I am flawed. Please, no happy bright reassurances, I have to confront the reality of being raised by a control freak Mother. When I ran screaming into the night at the age of 19, I was not aware that she had undermined my self worth and self confidence and had habituated me into taking care of She Who Deigned to Permit To Live If I Was of Service to Her.  That I left her was also the best thing that happened to her as she remarried to find companionship.

As for my companionship, I was ripe for anyone who needed to control others. Being rudimentarily female, these masters would all be men. It’s taken me till the age of 64 to realize that they were all also as rejecting and impossible to please as Mom. Part of the Controller is that they will always criticize you, no matter what you are doing for them. (Including paying the bills and keeping house for two husbands.) But I always tried to do better for them. I always thought it was my fault that they didn’t want to do anything for me, that I was unlovable and unreasonable and uneducated and inferior. I eventually left them all and here’s the funny thing…they are all still alone in their 60’s and 70’s because is no way to satisfy a control freak. It’s not about whether or not you do it ‘right’, it’s about control, and so you can never do it ‘right.”

All right. This is Essay 1 and the fun has just begun.

And only one Spell Check error!!!!!

Final Sonnet and end of Reinhard Rites Blog

Sonnet 99 -- Hey Now! Get your game on!

Sonnet 98 -- Life is More Than Sex and Romance

Sonnet 98 -- Life is More Than Sex and Romance

I don’t live in a theatrical script

Nor in the Most Magical Place on Earth

“Happy Ever After” leaves me feeling gypped

         As it’s too late now for houses and birth.

         Marriage is more about mealtime than sex

And Romance withers when the bills come due

Got some idea what a guy expects

And the message is she’s nothing like Sue

But you are as big a fool as I am

If you think that all that matters is bed

Men, without money, chicks won’t give a damn

Women, Love Sweet Love won’t comfort the dead

So I wish you all to find perfection

Just don’t look for it in an erection

From the play "Frenzy Witchcraft"

My Final Word on Sex (Down, Boy!)

My Final Word on Sex (Down, Boy!)

Perhaps my least appetizing memory of sex was in an improvisation class meant to help us free our minds to become better playwrights. We were given some simple situation with which to make free associations, and the key instruction of improv…go along with whatever your partner says or does. A geeky boy, whose name I didn’t know, interpreted this as permission to fly across the room and grab my then younger and perkier breasts; stand on his toes and shove his tongue down my throat. I pried him off and quit the group, but this is what often happens, at least metaphorically, whenever women try to talk about sex.  

Now, I’m a bit old fashioned. I believe that sex is to be performed by two consenting adults of any gender who want to get naked and jump into the fray. I don’t really believe in talking, I believe in doing…just not with random men in a writing class…or any educational setting. I have received two different phone calls from two different Facebook men and did not realize until later that they were looking for that legendary hot phone sex I had heard of, but never learned. I just cheefully talked about the weather and what I had had for dinner. WELL, I DIDN’T KNOW!  I’M AN OLD LADY!

We didn’t need to talk about it back in the nineteen seventies Free Love days. The most verbal we ever got was reading the pages of The Joy of Sex old loud to my husband while trying to place our knees and chins in the correct places that the flabby Hippie Couple in the drawings were demonstrating. This usually ended in a hysterically funny tangled crash to the floor followed by just DOING IT the same old way but on the carpet instead of the bed.

Although I can write a fairly hot seduction scene in a play (Talking God) and give dirty details (Amour Americain), I really never contemplated talking about any of my own excited protrusions or tunnels. If I attempt it, I sound like Lilith Sternin of “Frasier” with her emotionless, flat voice going “Oh do it, Baby. Do it hard.”

Alas, no. Despite my age and illness and unattractive body, I still believe it is something to do in reality, not on the phone or on Skype. I’ve heard it can be done so well in chat rooms that people pay, and you’d think as I playwright, I would be interested. God knows, I could create a false identity for myself, become Bambi the yodeling seventeen year old shepherdess, but you can already see I simply can’t take it as seriously as the chat room experts need.

And what I miss most about men is laying my cheek on a strong, denim covered shoulder, while we talk about our day. I miss their scent and their laughter. I miss having our fingers entwined as we walk silently breathing in Autumn air. Those little closed mouth kisses hello and goodbye, which was my last physical contact with a man and I’m smiling to remember it. So, I’m going to retire from all that and formally announce that the VIP box is closed. My last experiences with actual sex got worse and worse until that last pathetic, unexcited, inept tussle with the wrong man. But my final memory of men will be a sweet, friendly kiss on the lips with the right one.  What more could a girl want?

Sonnet 96 – Elvira Is Slowly Leaving the Building

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Sonnet 96 – Elvira Is Slowly Leaving the Building

She moves like Quasimodo, not Jagger

Her hair is white, her skin sags and wrinkles

To walk with cane has taken her swagger

And her day is ruled by poops and tinkles

Reading great books was not her specialty

Nor did she paint or sing or play guitar

She toyed with dialogue’s simplicity

She was an able worker, not a star

In short, she was simply not good enough

For a well read, talented, handsome man

Trust me, Angel, admitting it is tough

But I have to understand why you ran

May you find a Queen worthy of your throne

And makes both your brain and manhood moan.

Sonnet 95 -- Footnote in Some History Archival

Sonnet 95 -- Footnote in Some History Archival

Real life is about cleaning the damned house

Cooking meals and washing the damned dishes

I have no children or beloved spouse

It grows too late to make three more wishes

I am not smart enough for you, my love

I do not possess your dazzling talents

But you aren’t good enough for me, sweet Dove

You would never keep it inside your pants

So here I stand with dishes needing washed

Papers to shred…a muffler to replace

Worried about daring a rhyme of “frost”

While the sags and wrinkles demean my face

All we can hope for is raw survival

Footnotes in some history archival

Sonnet 94 - Too Much Time On My Hands

Sonnet 94 - Too Much Time On My Hands

 

I guess I'm a bitchy grumpy old broad

Too damn comfortable for my own good

I’m sick and dull and obviously flawed

I could have I would have done what I should

And as you fade away, your beauty grows

With dark eyes shining through papyrus skin

No more do I know what is truth or pose

You won’t get a chance to make it again

I don’t have the strength to get to the top

My body’s too old to capture a man

My theatrical life doth went kerflop

Fantasizing dumped my life in the can

But still, I don’t mourn my life or my fate

It’s just that we learned our lessons too late