All Shook Up

Tiffany and I went to the California Academy of Sciences a few nights ago. If you haven't been, it's amazing. Right now it has this exhibit about earthquakes with an earthquake simulation called the Shake House. The Academy has been advertising the Shake House all over town, almost like it was an amusement park ride.

There's nothing really amusing about earthquakes. I've only been in a couple of mild ones, but Tiffany was in a terrible 8.4 in Peru, and so I could not, for the life of me, get her to stand in line to be shaken on the magnitude of San Francisco's massive earthquakes of 1989 and 1906. Not even by first taking her through the exhibit about safety (FYI, in case of an earthquake, toilet tank water is safe to drink. Toilet bowl water is not. Also, peanut butter really is a good item for your earthquake preparedness kit, just like I thought.). We got out of line.

It was a special night at the Academy. In celebration of gay pride, there was a drag show going on and we decided to experience that instead. Only, when I went to get drinks, they closed the doors to the drag show and wouldn't let me in, even when I made my most sad face. I pressed my forehead up against the glass and Tiffany did the same on the other side and I mouthed to her that I was going to the Shake House.

"What?" she yelled soundlessly.

I shook my body from head to toe.

"Oh," she nodded. She made her most sad face.

It was a lonely walk to the Shake House. But Tiffany and I have an emergency plan for what would happen if we were not together in a real earthquake. Not being together in a fake earthquake seemed trivial in comparison. Besides the drag show was just a few exhibits away.

I had only been waiting in line a couple of minutes when Tiffany appeared at my side.

"Hi," she said.

I broke out into a grin.

"You don't have to..."

"I know."

The Shake House was not too scary to me, except for the fact the there were 30 other people in the tiny space with us. Tiffany didn't like it. She gripped my arms with sweaty palms and almost ran over some poor woman on her way out the Shake House door.

Afterwards, we roamed the rest of the Academy and happened on an exhibit with pictures of the animals that have lived on the earth over the ages. It was the strangest thing... one of the animals looked just exactly like Tiffany in the Shake House.

Tiffany in the Shake House.

Bag Lady

I hate purses.

They fall off my shoulder and, because I don't use any one purse regularly, I can never find anything in them. Usually Tiffany and I share a purse and she carries it because she likes purses. She likes funky purses and classy purses and sophisticated purses and colorful purses. Normally, it's not a problem to share. But there's a certain sharing limit. Like, she'll draw the line at my water bottle.

"It's not a backpack, Rebecca," she reminds me.

Anyway, on our recent trip to New York, I took my own bag. You couldn't call it a purse. It's a satchel, really, and as soon as our friend Teresa saw it, she gasped in horror.

"What is this?" she cried.

"A bag," I said.

She touched it gingerly with two fingers.

"Did it used to be this color?" she asked, flipping the inside flap over.

"Ohhhh, wow!" I said. "I don't even remember that!"

Teresa refused to let me out of her house with my bag. So she ran upstairs and got one of her extra purses, a blue leather number. Tiffany loved the purse at first sight.

"You carry it," I told her. "I'm good with mine."

"Absolutely not," Teresa said.

I took the purse. I put it over my shoulder and dug through it at various times throughout the day to find my hotel room key, my sunglasses, my eye drops and, yes, my water bottle. All of that was annoying. But the purse was great looking. It looked funky and classy and sophisticated and colorful ALL AT ONCE.

It looked, as soon as my friend Zac saw me when he arrived,

"absolutely nothing like you, Rebecca."

I'll Say a Little Prayer For...

You know how competitive I am when it comes to children's affection.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, Tiffany and I made a quick trip to New York to see family and friends, including our old college buddies, Teresa and Bobby, and their two children, Peter, 2, and Julia, 4.

Even though we've spent time with both kids on several occasions now, at these tender ages I always feel I really have to make a strong No-Longer-First-First-Impression. That's why this time I made sure I was the one who handed Peter and Julia the Cookie Monster cupcakes we picked out for them at the bakery. And why, much to Teresa's horror, I didn't correct Peter when he held a teacup upside down and dumped pretend water all over a doll while demonstrating how he would feed his future baby brother or sister.

"That's so nice," I cooed.

Early in our relationship, Julia called me by name (okay, by my college soccer nickname, which is a syllable shorter) but seemed incapable of remembering Tiffany's.

"Mommy, remember when Rebo and That One came to visit?" Teresa told us she would say.

But this time Tiffany had me beat. Bad.

After our first night, Teresa broke the news that Peter had included only Tiffany in his evening prayer, right after his mommy, his daddy, his sister and the Berenstain Bears.