Sign my New Year's Slam book

In no particular order or preference, here are some of my memories of the year we just survived.

*Electrelane made the most beautiful song of the year.

* I went to Northampton, England, Steve's hometown to meet relatives. In the 10 days we were there, I never did adjust to the time difference and went home to the hotel every day at 4 p.m., when it was pitch black.

* Steve made his first music video, coinciding with my first stroll along the pebbly shores of Brighton, in the stinging cold mist as the sun set around 3 p.m.

* I had a lot of me time while Steve was out of the country, working at locations on five of the seven continents.

* I celebrated my first wedding anniversary with Mr. Sweetypants and forgot to purchase the single rose I was beholden to give him per our rose ceremony.

* I won an Addy.

* I fought the law and the law won.

* I followed the misguided antics of an online dater who blew my experiences with big losers in my online dating past out of the water, and I worked up the nerve to post Gawker comments.

* Steve and I ripped off the Jesus and Mary Chain in his home recording studio.

* I became a founding member of the Tuesday Night Board Meeting, which makes my week happy.

* I went to Vegas for the first time, then to Pahrump, Nevada, to meet more of Steve's family. Never did acclimatize to the outdoor temperature of 117 F, but I did go to my first brothel.

* Miss Eudora Thunderkiss barely survived anaphylactic shock after getting a distemper shot, but we found a great house-call vet so she never has to have one again.

* I had my dream vacation with my Megafun kids.

*I love this baby.

* I went to my 20-year high school reunion with Steve and April.

* My mama found an alligator in her backyard.

* I still get misty when I think about Freddy Mercury.

* Thaddy Mack/Kristel, Pookie/Tosh, and Roisin/Locke all got married. Buttercup got engaged.

* I got to see my beloved Wolfpack from floor seats then tape Coach Lowe for a work project.

* I got really mad and focused my energy on stopping really bad people.

* Walruses really like buckets.

* I got to sit and listen to Elvis Costello sing "Shipbuilding."

* I got a lot of flack for not having a baby.

* I came to peace with the corporate world.

* I coaxed my parents a few steps forward into the world of Internet commerce.

* I sent a guy to jail.

* I won two out of two games of bingo at the state fair and got a major prize.

* I started a silly blog called "That Girl From Shallotte."

Please leave comments and tell me about your year!

Look forward to reading your comments! Have a wonderful new year filled with silliness and laughter. I'll do my best to help provide it for you.

Love,
Leigh Ann

My sister lost her freakin' mind and moved to rural Vermont

Joshua got a crossbow for Christmas. Banyan got a hatchet and a slingshot. Jill went to the local blacksmith and he smelted them swords.

Weapons of destruction aside, I just used the words "local blacksmith" and "smelted."

Come home to civilization, Laura Ingalls.

Came thisclose to getting a Freddie Mercury tattoo

I remember crying my heart out when he died. Seriously almost got the tattoo, and even today when I hear "Too Much Love Will Kill You," I get misty and think about it. But I now know the pain and expense of having laser treatments to remove poorly considered tattoos.

Remember being a kid and having absolutely no idea what the band name referred to? We used to do the hustle to "Another One Bites the Dust" in sixth-grade P.E.

It's been years since I had a cassette player in my house or car, let alone a turntable, and I had "Killer Queen" on vinyl and "Greatest Hits" on cassette. So when I went totally digital with music and tried to replace my Queen on mp3, I was pissed off to find that the surviving members won't sell to iTunes. I resorted to getting all the songs from Limewire, which really makes me feel guilty so I only use it as a last resort.

Apparently, the latest version of iTunes segregates non-iTunes mp3s and won't shuffle them in a playlist or sync them to iPods.

I went to Barnes and Noble just now and put the gift certificate my boss gave me toward "Classic Queen" on CD. I uploaded it and am now rocking out to "Tie Your Mother Down."

Of all the gay men and rock stars I have loved in my lifetime, Freddie Mercury, 16 years after he left us too soon, still makes my little-girl heart flutter.

Christmas and New Year wishes from me to you

May your Christmas be smiley and your New Year full of fabulous outfits and awesome haircuts.

He fed me and I followed him home

In the first semester of my sophomore year in college, I fulfilled my life's dream of living in London. On the first day of my drama class at the University of London, the professor called the roll. One of the names she called was George Michael. It was 1988, and we all gasped. A boy known as Rex answered "here."

Rexy and I got to talking in the student union cafe a couple of weeks later. He was a member of my college's study abroad program, but we'd never interacted: The majority of us chose to live in flats in central London and partied together, but Rex chose to live with a family way out at the end of the Northern Line. He told me he loved to cook. I had been living on scrambled eggs and soup for a month, and I blurted out, "You should come over!"

The next afternoon, we took the tube back to Queensway and walked around Safeway buying ingredients for lasagna. That afternoon was the first of many times I perched on the front of a shopping cart he was pushing. We spent the night eating, drinking copious amounts of cheap Portuguese wine and laughing. Rex pretty much spent the rest of the semester on the couch of our midtown flat.

After one semester back at Elon, Rexy moved back to Virginia. He'd been kind of floating, changing his major repeatedly and not showing enough interest for his parents to foot the out-of-state tuition. My roommate Kathy and I were sad, but the three of us commuted between Elon and JMU to get together every three months or so.

Rexy at the time was struggling with coming out, and he wasn't fooling anyone with his wallet picture of a big girl who was supposed to be his long-distance girlfriend. In his frustration, he developed a really serious impulse shopping and charging habit. Don't get me wrong, I was on the receiving end of this addiction, and I got some freakin' awesome gifts, and some really strange ones -- including a five-foot-tall Swiss Colony sampler that Kathy and I never did finish -- but I grew increasingly worried about my Rexy.

So when I was about to graduate and had no plan other than to move to Raleigh where my favorite clubs were, I called Rexy (who'd come out by then and was disappointed at our anti-climactic reaction) and asked him if he wanted to come with me. He called me back an hour later and said, "Okay."

Rexy and I moved to a flop apartment not far from the State campus. We stayed there for just over four years. We were poor as paupers and both worked two jobs. Our treat to ourselves about every couple of months was to hit the Sunday Buffet at Golden Corral. We'd wear sweatpants and make a point to arrive during the last hour of breakfast, stuff ourselves, then drink coffee and smoke cigarettes until the lunch spread was served and then force even more food down our gullets. Then we'd go home and lie on the floor of our living room, moaning, sighing and snoring as "Beavis and Butthead" blared on the television.

We fought like cats and dogs, especially at the laundry mat before we were able to get our own washer and dryer. We'd go for days without speaking and then forget why. We both had really bad judgment with our approach to meeting men, and we got our hearts broken more times than I care to remember.

But we also developed a beautiful partnership and took care of each other through some really brutal things. Those stories don't belong here, they're just for Rex and me to block out/savor/learn from.

We split up to go and live with our respective boyfriends in 1995. I lasted four months with mine; Rex and Ray are still together.

Rexy was a bridesperson standing by my side in my wedding in 2006. He escorted my mama in and out, as he is one of her favorite children. Steve asked Rex to sign as an official witness on our legal, North Carolina wedding certificate, and as I watched them sitting there together, signing the most important document in our lives, I wept and made a mental note to myself to tell Rex nothing would make me happier than to sign his someday.*


(Steve and Rex both loved that I captioned this last photo on my personal Facebook album, "She's legally your problem now, Mr. Sweetypants.")

*2019 update: Rex and Ray just celebrated the fourth anniversary of their legal marriage and 24 years together. My heart is full.

Hungry Like the Wolf (pack)

In 1984, my Daddy took me to Greensboro (four hours away) on a school night to see Duran Duran. At that time, I was a Duran Duran-crazed 14-year-old girl who'd never had a boyfriend and believed Nick Rhodes would see her in the crowd and sweep her away to England. My Daddy sat in our seats holding all the Duran Duran merchandise I'd bought with my babysitting money while I ran down to get as close to them as I could. I screamed and cried through the entire show.

Yesterday, I took my Daddy to an N.C. State game and, because of a sponsorship project I did for work, we got to sit at a table on the court, just feet from the basket. We felt like total rock stars sitting there. We could see and hear everything our Wolfpack and Coach Lowe were doing. We both grinned like idiots through the whole game (Steve, who was in the stands, can confirm it) and our hands hurt from clapping.

So I don't know how to compare a 14-year-old girl's complete passion for seeing a poncy British band to a 66-year-old man's excitement at seeing his alma mater team kick some ass from a floor seat. There's no gauge. But I was pretty stoked at both. And I got to share them both with my Daddy.

-----

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Don't judge me too harshly for being sarcastic. Note the "almost" below.


From: (my daddy)
Date: Dec 16, 2007 5:05 PM
Subject: Thanks
To: Leigh Ann Frink

L.A.

Thanks for a wonderful day together Saturday. It's been forty (40) plus years since I've attended a home Pack game. The time with you and the fabulous seats almost made the wait worthwhile. GO PACK!

Love you,

Daddy

Random ridiculous moment at work

So they're repairing the freight elevator at work and have temporarily assigned one of our express elevators as freight-only. This, compounded with the fact that masses of old ladies are going to holiday lunches at the dining club on the top floor, means that the elevators are moving excruciatingly slowly.

I was coming back to the office with my lunch yesterday and had to wait with a huge group of people for the elevator. I knew most of them would be going to floors above mine and that I'd be shoved into the back behind them all, only to have to say, "Excuse me," and elbow my way out. As I stewed on this reality, the crowd around me gathered.

Finally, an elevator arrived. The rest of the crowd and I politely stood away for it to unload. And unload it did.

A drum corps filed out, dressed in full high-school marching band regalia. A drum corps complete with a bass drum strapped to a big kid, a set of quads, and a bunch of kids with snares.

My reaction wasn't, "What the hell are they doing here?" It was, "How the hell did they all fit into this elevator?"

It was like a clown car, I tell you.

The things we do to get paid

I'm not a real employee, but I have to work next Saturday.

Not only do I have to work on Saturday, I have to meet up with my art director and drive all the way across town to the RBC Center, fight the crowds and find a parking place. Then we have to wait around for two hours during some sporting event involving "hoops." Not only do we have to be there, we have to sit in floor seats next to the bench. The company I permalance for doesn't pay for my insurance, yet they'll subject me to the danger of having a sweaty, 7-foot, 200-lb athlete land on me or hit me with a ball. I'm told it's difficult to follow the plays from so close, so I guess I'll take a magazine.

After all that, we have to drive across town to a recording studio and wait around to film a Mr. Sidney Lowe for a promo we came up with. One of our campaign colors is red, so we're going to ask him to wear a red sport jacket. Hope he doesn't mind.

Gah. At least we get to bill.

Walking past the Lincoln Theatre (To Michael)

I do that every day from my cheap parking spot at a church off the beaten path downtown. I always look at the band names on the marquee. 97 out 100 times, I don't know who they are.

The headliner last Wednesday was Hanzel und Gretyl. You prolly don't remember them, but I drug you to see them playing with Sister Machine Gun at that space at Mission Valley well over 10 years ago. Besides us, there were probably 30 other people in the place. Dunno if you can recall that night, but I freakin' loved both those industrial bands and felt really bad for them: Every step they took on that wooden stage resonated through the nearly empty space.

I was probably among 20 people in North Carolina who bought the H+G cd. I lent it to the one I don't care to hear about after we broke up, then bought my own copy back from Record Exchange. I played it tonight for old times' sake.

My God, it was horrible. I mean, the beats are okay, what you'd expect angry-with-no-reason-to-be, bedecked-in-black-clothes-and

-Dr.-Martens kids in the 90s to dance to, but I don't know how people like I was then expected to be taken seriously using that kind of drivel as our mantra.

To wit: "Dysfunction, in the face of chaos! Swallow my fingers, in the face of chaos!

Gah.