Yuckmouth

My teeth were a pediatric dentist's nightmare. My bottom jaw was too narrow to accomodate them all, so one of my bottom teeth had no room and was growing directly behind the others, and they were a crooked mess. Up top, I had an extra set of vampire incisors and a huge gap between the front two. So before I got my braces when I was 11, I had three extractions.

I will never forget getting those braces put in. My braces were all metal, all wraparound and were applied to my teeth with a barely neolithic instrument that worked with a trigger-like thing on the side that the technician would pull back and release, causing a metal drill to deploy force down. The technician's hand slipped once, slicing a two-inch gash into my upper gums. Blood gushed, and she and I both started crying. I was sent home to heal for a week before the rest of the braces could be applied.

So I really was a metal mouth for three and a half years during the most awkward period of any girl's life. It was so embarrassing, especially my freshman year in high school, when everything is already embarrassing. I did my best to speak with my lips as close together as possible to hide the nearly always-filled-with food unironic grille I was sporting.

Those trips to the orthodontist to have them tightened are probably the worst memories of my childhood. I knew going in each time that I would be miserable and hungry for three days after. And no matter how much I complained about the wires digging into the insides of my upper cheeks, they’d always tell me to use wax and rinse with saltwater. I have deep scars to this day from the ulcers those wires caused.

I got the braces off before my sophomore year. My teeth were straight, but I still had a horrible overbite -- if I bit down on my back teeth, I could touch the roof of my mouth with my finger -- but my orthodontist had taught me to just hold it forward so that my front teeth met.

As a result, I developed chronic TMJ. My jaw popped and locked up constantly. I had a headache and sore neck for the next five years, until my mom made me an appointment with a plastic surgeon to assess my weak chin. He told us to make an appointment with an oral surgeon as soon as possible.

We made the appointment, and the surgeon recommended TMJ surgery. Unfortunately, before he could do anything, my upper palate would have to be stretched and my teeth realigned. Orthodontically.

So the summer before my senior year in college, I got my second set of braces (from a new orthodontist). At least this time, they were the stick-on kind, clear on the top and metal on the bottom. As a bonus, I was equipped with a palatal separator: a big hunk of metal that attached to my back top molars and sat a few millimeters from the roof of my mouth. In the middle was a rectangular, expandable bar that I turned with a key each night. Each turn of that key forced my palate to expand, and each turn produced a shot of pain that I could hear and feel through the roof of my mouth and into my sinuses.

The pain I could deal with. The speech impediment I could not. Try spreading your fingers across the distance of your back molars without touching the roof of your mouth and saying, “The inquisitive queen, in search of a clue, was quite curious as a calico cat.” All my hard c and q words were impossible to pronounce.

The worst thing I experienced as a result of my tongue not being able to touch the roof of my mouth and function properly came when I went to buy tickets to see my favorite band in the world for the very first time. It was the days before Ticketmaster got us all over the barrel and we could buy concert tickets from multiple vendors without a 30 percent markup for "convenience fees." I went to the guitar shop in Burlington and placed my order and was issued two tickets for Motley Crue. “Not the Hrew!,” I shrieked. “The Hure!!”

My surgeon and orthodontist were both in Wilmington, three hours from my college. I was never (and still am not) a morning person, but during my senior year, I arranged early morning Tuesday/Thursday classes so I could be on the road by noon in my sad orange car with plastic seats and no air conditioning to be there for 3 p.m. appointments and be back at my apartment by 7 p.m.

I’d finished with the palatal separator, so I was able to give my oral reports with a little more confidence. I did make a big point to grin wide when I had my first legal to buy license picture taken. I still bitched and moaned about having my ID constantly scrutinized when I was buying beer or going to bars. (I wish I could go back and slap 21-year-old me.)

Still had braces when I moved to Raleigh and got my first crappy job. My employers, who paid me a whopping $5 an hour to write biographies, were gracious enough to let me come in at 11:30 on the days leading up to the surgery when I had to go see my doctors in Wilmington, as long as I stayed late to make up my hours. I’d leave Raleigh at 6 a.m. for my 8:30 a.m. appointments and come dashing back.

One time in particular, I came tearing into the parking lot at work and saw black-clad, rifle-bearing swat team members racing across the street. I found the door to the office locked and was reaching for my key when a co-worker opened it and jerked me inside. A wanted murderer was holed up in the motel across the street.

In October, I went in for my pre-op consultation with my surgeon. He told me he hadn’t yet decided whether he would wire my jaws shut after surgery. If I were wired, he explained, I’d have to keep a pair of wire-cutters on me at all times in case I threw up, so I could hack through the wires and prevent a premature rock-star choking-on-vomit death. He also told me to go hog wild and gain 20 pounds, as I would lose that much during recovery and was already very slender. (Again, I would love to go back and slap 22-year-old me.)

My surgery took place over Christmas break that year. I took two weeks off without pay. The surgery involved making diagonal breaks in my lower jaw to slide it forward and secure it with bolts. My chin was to be sawed off across, lifted up and bolted back on. As a bonus, since I was already to be under anesthesia, my surgeon would scrape the cartilage that formed the little parakeet beak that was my nose and reattach it to the tip, giving me a dainty turned-up nose.

I took the single Valium I was prescribed at 4:30 a.m. and my mama drove me from Shallotte to New Hanover Memorial in Wilmington. I changed into a hospital gown and was wheeled to anesthesia. The nice practitioner put the mask over my face and told me to think about the beach. “I don’t really like the beach,” I thought. “I’d rather….”

My next thought was that I really needed to throw up, but I panicked because I didn’t know if my jaws were wired shut. I’m told I sat straight up and spewed projectile blood that had been dripping down into my stomach from my tubes in a 90 degree right-to-left projectory, then passed back out in my recovery-room bed.

My mama was there with me a few hours later when I woke up. She told me I didn’t really need the mirror I was requesting and squirted water into my parched mouth. Unfortunately, I had no feeling in my bottom lip, and the repeated water squirts dribbled down my chin, causing a horrible rash.

Tonya, my best friend, came to see me the next day. My mama left the room and Tonya started crying. I hadn’t had access to a mirror yet.

After two days in the hospital bed, I was allowed to get up and go to the bathroom on my own and saw the horror first hand. Both my eyes were blackened, my face was swollen to "Mask"-like proportions (Lord forgive me for making that comparison), my lips chapped and bleeding, and my chin was raw and blistered.

The following day, I was released. My mama had bought me one of those early 90’s shiny nylon windsuits. I normally would have rejected that outfit outright, but I didn’t have to pull it over my comically huge head. So I sported it with my Doc Martens.

I spent Christmas in bed in Shallotte with my mama’s overweight ginger cat. The television in the room wasn’t hooked up to cable, and it didn’t have a remote, so I watched a lot of local programming and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

All I could think about was how filthy my hair was, so against doctor's orders I took a bath. I laid back in about four inches of water and worked shampoo into my hair. But my head was so huge and heavy I couldn't sit up. Not wanting my mother to see me naked, though she gave birth to me and had overseen my catheter a few days earlier, I just laid there as the water got cold. After a while, I was able to perform a great act of gymnastics and rearranged my body 180 degrees so that my head was under the faucet and I could rinse out the shampoo. I reached up and turned off the water. My hair was nearly dry and my body temperature was probably falling dangerously low before I was able to hoist myself up and out of the tub. That was probably the first time in my life I was grateful that nobody was paying attention to me.

Two days after Christmas, my mama took me to my follow-up appointment with the surgeon and he gave me the all-clear to go back to Raleigh. Before she drove me back, mama took me to the GNC at Independence Mall to get my quick-weight-gain powder and supplements. Mama was still using a cane from getting hit head-on a few years earlier and I had a big pumpkin head and two black eyes. A woman in the mall approached me, put her hand sympathetically on my arm, and asked what happened to us. “Cosmetic surgery,” I replied.

Rexy was ready and waiting with lots of high-calorie blender recipes to supplement my regimen of Ensure and baby food. One afternoon, he came home with a big Bojangle’s bag and I whimpered. He put some chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy in the food processor and gave me the dinner for which I will always be most grateful. Rexy did such a good job with the high-calorie food that he gained 20 pounds as I lost 20 pounds.

In the meantime, I resumed my life with two black eyes and a huge, swollen, chapped face. Tonya and I had a blast going to the store and making up stories to tell the nosy strangers who asked what was wrong with me. “Stepped on a rake.” “Jail beating.” “Alien abduction.”

When I drove down to Wilmington for my follow-up appointment two weeks later, my surgeon decided I wasn’t taking my soft-food diet seriously enough and wired my jaws shut. I drove straight to work and a co-worker asked me how I was doing. I shrugged and smiled. “If you don’t feel like talking, just say so,” she said snottily. So I scribbled an apologetic note and asked her to tell everybody else (this occurred in the days before interoffice e-mail).

I was only wired shut for a week, but OMG, it was the longest week of my life. I couldn’t say a word. If you know me personally, you can immediately grasp the difficulty that week presented me. I couldn’t smoke, so I had Rex exhale his second-hand smoke directly into my face. Rexy changed the answering machine to let callers know I couldn’t speak. I walked around with a notepad, and on a trip to the mall I ran into a high-school classmate and had to write him notes. (Saw him again at the 20-year reunion and we laughed about that.)

Got unwired, stuck to my soft-food diet and completed my follow-ups for the next few weeks. Had the wire stitches pulled out of my nostrils and will always use that as a benchmark for pain.

The following summer, when I was 23, I was back to normal and had my braces removed and a permanent retainer was placed on my bottom teeth. I popped it out and had it replaced twice before I gave up.

Two years later, I had a painful bulge along my bottom jaw. I figured it was a wisdom tooth coming through and made an appointment with my oral surgeon. He did an x-ray, then removed the bolt that had worked its way out. My sister Jill found this hilarious and reminded me over and over that I’d had a screw loose in my head.

It’s now 16 years since my surgery. I’m pain-free in my neck and head, I have a bit of a chin to speak of, my teeth fit together and I like my nose. Unfortunately, my bottom front teeth moved right back into their chaotic, crooked mess. More power to them, I say. I’m not touching them again. I think they have character. And I married an Englishman.

For further reference, click here.

Living up to the spaz writer stereotype

My gmail hasn't been working well lately and friends haven't gotten my e-mails. I sent my final-round News and Observer entry from gmail last Thursday when it was due, and I haven't heard back either way and am freaked out that it might not have gone through.

So tonight, I Googled Southern nonfiction calls for entry and came upon one for an anthology. I followed the rules closely, submitting "Genius Is in the Eye of the Beholder" in the required font and size, along with my personal contact info.

The call for entry required a 50-word bio, so I wrote:

Leigh Ann Frink is a writer living in Raleigh. She grew up in a small town on the N.C. coast and studied at Elon College and the University of London. She married an Englishman who has learned to appreciate collards. They have a cat named Eudora. She blogs at thatgirlfromshallotte.blogspot.com.

I felt pretty good about myself. Then I went back and reread the call for entry rules. The deadline was March 1, 2007.

So I feel suitably silly in my stress-induced mania. But at least I have a 50-word byline I feel pretty good about.

Girls who like boys who like boys

(from left: Greg, Rex, LA, Jason)

I love gay men. They make the best friends for straight girls. They can get right up next to your heart without the stress of intimate straight male/female relationships or the passive/aggressive nonsense girls give each other.

Plus, they'll listen to your stories, agree that your girlfriends are bitches and men are asses, they'll tell you when your outfit looks stupid, and they can lift heavy objects for you.

The intimacy of straight women and gay men is a story as long as time. Fancy ladies always had companions their rich husbands could trust to escort them to events. My mother had a friend who loved taking her out to fabulous events and having her on his arm because she was so pretty. He was a pageant judge. Enough said.

My next-door neighbor, Michael, was a year older than me and heart-breakingly beautiful. His family moved in when I was 11 and he was 12. We were just like peas and carrots from the get-go. We started out playing hide and seek. Before we knew it, we were making up elaborate dance routines (including dramatic lifts) a la the Solid Gold dancers. In 1983, though he was a Carolina fan, he watched the NCAA Championship game with me and hugged me tight when my Wolfpack won! During my Duran-Duran crazed Freshman year, Michael would come over at 11 p.m. to stay up all night watching "Friday Night Videos" with me, as our hometown didn't yet have MTV.

He was my friend, but he was my mother's pet. He spent hours at our house talking to my mother. Michael was a football hero in high school and a top scholar. But he never had a girlfriend. On prom night, when he was a junior and I was a sophomore, we both had "dates" we didn't care for, but we posed together in my parents' living room in our finery, and for years after, I showed friends the picture of the two of us and said he was my date, because he was so much cuter than my real date.

Just after college, my best friend Tonya and I were total club girls. We loved early-90s techno and were more interested in dancing than being hit on, so we started going to gay bars in Myrtle Beach (where she lived) and Raleigh (where I lived). We were at Offshore Drilling in Myrtle Beach one night and ran into Michael for the first time in five years. He swept me up into his arms and spun me around. With no conversation at all, we had a mutual love and acceptance moment. Then we ran off to dance to Utah Saints.

I didn't see Michael again for three years. The next time we met, I was standing in the bathroom at my parents' house putting on makeup before my sister's funeral in 1994. He walked right in and put his arms around me. We stood there for a good minute, crying and not saying anything. That was the last time I saw him. I've heard he lives in Atlanta.*

At the time of that very bad thing, I was living with Rexy. I'd sped home three hours away with no clothes and had to call Rex the next day to please bring me some. He not only packed me a bag of clothes and girlie underwear, he packed himself a bag and stayed for the funeral. After that happened, he welcomed my sister Jill, my best friend and my boyfriend into our flop apartment and never complained.

Fast forward a few years, I was living in the house I bought with my by-then ex-boyfriend and was working retail. I couldn't pay the mortgage by myself and needed a roommate badly. A friend recommended one of his friends, a straight guy. He moved in and we immediately clashed. His girlfriend freaked my cat out and made him throw up. We rarely spoke and I was relieved when he moved out after six months.

But I found myself without a roommate and source of income, so I put the feelers out among my friends again. Enter Jason (J$). J$ and I didn't know each other at all when he moved in. He was a chef (voted #1 in the Triangle in the Spectator while he lived with me) and worked completely different hours from me. I'd come home from work at five and he and his crazy boyfriend would have already got the party started.

My favorite J$ story was when he and his boyfriend took me to Flex, a leather bar, on a Sunday afternoon around Thanksgiving. I was the only girl in the place, which didn't bother me a bit. After a while, a group of bears and leather daddies started setting up a table and bringing out covered dishes a la a family reunion. It was beautiful, me and the fellas having Thanksgiving together, and none of them treated me as anything less than a member of the family.

Jason moved out after 18 months and I was in a position where I could pay the mortgage by myself. I was working at the agency then. I went to a going-away luncheon for a co-worker about a year later and sat next to a designer named Greg. He told the group he'd bought a condo that was under construction and was planning to move back in with his mother until it was finished.

"Don't go home, move in with me!," I blurted out.

So he did. Greg and I barely knew each other, but on the night he moved in, I invited him to a Christmas party at Rex and Ray's, and he went along and a beautiful group friendship was born.

That was on a Saturday, and the following Friday night, as we were both single, we decided to spend the evening together, getting to know each other. We'd established we both loved 80's music trivia, so we bought "Songburst" on e-Bay and settled in to play. "I want to play you a song," Greg said, putting a remix of a Cher song on the stereo. I stood there listening for about a minute before I blurted out, "This is killing my buzz."

For the next eight months, we played Songburst, listened to 80's compilations we could both agree on, cuddled up under a blanket on the couch to watch movies, shared the occasional smooch, and took care of each other. Though I hadn't intended on having a roommate again, I was sad when my Greggy moved out.

I spent the next few years on my own at home, though I had regular play-dates and vacations with my boys. Rex, Greg, four other friends and I were in a beach house for a week (a tradition that's on its sixth year now). I needed something from one of them and said, "Hey Angel?" Greg and Rex both responded "Yes?" in unison. Then we all gasped. I felt like I'd been caught cheating.

Rex and I went shopping and had fabulous dinners and parties at his house. Ray and I spent hours swapping Southern stories. J$ and I got in lots of trouble. Greggy and I cuddled up and played games regularly. Robby was my number one state fair ride buddy, Will Ferrell movie and concert date.

The time came, though, when I realized I needed to find a straight boy companion, as I wasn't getting any younger. I can't remember how I stated it in my match.com profile, but I pretty much said, "If you're scared gay boys are going to hit on you, don't contact me."

I met and married Steve, who became best buds with all my best buds. And if I'm a queen bee, he's a lesbro. At least three of our girlfriends call him their fake husband.

-----------------------------------

*(UPDATE 8/1: Michael found me! He's in Atlanta and is happy, safe, warm and loved by a wonderful man. Check out this pic he sent me: it's the two of us at the NC State Fair in 1982.)

Ray-Ray's pearls of wisdom

My friend Ray told me tonight: "If you want to never be criticized, haul off and do nothing."

No story needed. Perfect advice.

Thanks, darlin'!!

Welcome home

I blew off my 10-year high school class reunion. Didn’t regret it until my mama sent me the write-up, complete with a picture, from our hometown weekly. I took it over to show my best friend from home who was living on Morgan Street. Her roommate saw it and asked, “Who are all the old people?”

Tonya and I were still single and living it up. “We should have gone!” I told her, “We still look good!”

Ten years later, I got an e-mail from our class valedictorian with plans for 20th reunion festivities. Classmates were invited to tailgate at Friday night’s homecoming game, and Saturday night's main activity was a catered dinner (no mention of alcohol) at a golf club, described as an event for classmates and spouses, with a footnote saying, "We realize child-care problems may arise. Please advise if you need to bring your children."

I wrote this to my two girlfriends from school:

"Is there a tasteful way to ask for the number of ‘bringing children’ responses before replying to attend the dinner event on Saturday?”

After a good deal of debate, my friend April and I decided to go. We had, after all, grown up in a small town where everyone had gone to school together from kindergarten through graduation.

I sent in a check the month before, and the reality set in. There was no way I could lose 20 marriage pounds. What if I ran into the boy I’d been crushed out on since third grade, after my mother ran into him five years ago and he asked how I was doing, and she told him I'd been in love with him all those years?

On the three-hour drive down, I was a nervous wreck. When we blew into town, we stopped at my favorite Scotchman convenience store to stock up on adult beverages.

We got up to the counter and I gave the clerk my card. As I waited for it to go through, I admired an impulse-purchase rack of Halloween novelties. I picked up a severed ear and realized upon touching it that it was made of that slimy, floppy, rubbery stuff little kids like to play with. I screamed, "OH MY GOD, IT'S GROSS!"

Beside it was a severed tongue. I picked it up and spun around to Steve and said, "Look, I'm Gene Simmons!" It was then that I saw the five people lined up behind us and became embarrassed. I turned too quickly to put the tongue back on the rack and in the process knocked a bunch of things off it and onto the floor. I ducked down to pick them up and put them back and even more stuff fell off. I shrieked, "It's getting worse!"

At that point, Steve announced to those waiting behind us, "I'm sorry about my wife." Then he crouched down and told me to sign the receipt while he picked everything up and put it back.

April met up with us at my parents’ house. They were out of town, leaving us alone there for the first time ever. She was even more freaked out than I was, and we were talking a million miles an hour, fussing over our appearances and pacing the carport (no smoking in the house). “We’re really doing this,” we assured each other as we had our personality drinks.

We really did it. And we really loved it. We spent two hours hugging people we hadn’t seen in 20 years, shrieking in surprise and lying, “You look just like you did in high school!”

Even my darling husband, who comes from a land without proms, yearbooks or reunions enjoyed himself. It was a sociological experience for him, observing me slip effortlessly back into my native accent of flattened-out vowels and unenunciated diphthongs. Plus, he got to feel like a rock star when classmate after classmate told him how much they loved his English accent.

I’m so glad I went, and I was a little sad leaving the next day. We stopped at the Scotchman to gas up the car. The same clerk was working. The novelty rack had been moved.

Careers: Where dreams go to die

We totally didn't have time to do it, what with all the jobs and meetings flying around, but feedings are an unfortunate biological need, so my friend and I dashed across the street to Chick-Fil-A at noon today.

"I can't believe I wanted to be a writer when I grew up," I told her as we waited to cross.

"I wish I could go back to college," she replied, "just so I could tell the graphic design majors that their careers would be spent mostly making changes."

"I'd tell the writing majors to just give the clients what they want. It's just not worth the fight," I sighed. "I sometimes wish I could just go work in a store."

So we started fantasizing about the perfect jobs for us if we could make the same salary we now make.

We decided we'd work at Trader Joe's. She would be the wine specialist and I'd be the sample lady. That way, we could work within chatting distance and hook each other up all day. And we'd never have to worry about what to wear to work, as we'd have our sassy Trader Joe's Hawaiian shirts to wear with jeans.

On the downside, we realized, we'd probably have to undergo quite a bit of team-building, which we both hate. "I could deal with that," I told her, "as long as I could work the cash register, ringing the bell and shouting 'We've got a landlubber!' from time to time."

If I could shout several times a day, I think I'd be a very happy Leigh Ann.

No place like home

I grew up in a happy, safe, little town on the coast. Most locals subscribed to the Wilmington Morning Star or the Myrtle Beach Sun Times newspapers for daily and AP news. There wasn't a whole lot of major news out of Shallotte, and when there was -- like a bank robbery or the busting of a corrupt town official -- it was picked up by one or both of those dailies.

For real Shallotte news, we read the Brunswick Beacon, our hometown weekly. The Beacon reported on everything from the occasional truck break-in to the high school's sports to the activities of the Long Bay Garden Club. It ran the weekly television schedule, school lunch menus and tidal predictions for the fishermen and surfers.

When I did really well on the SAT in the seventh grade as part of the Duke University Talent Identification Program, I was featured in the Beacon. Wish I had a copy of it. I had waist-length, bone-straight, North American field mouse-colored hair and a mouth full of metal. I was quoted as saying I enjoyed reading, writing, drawing and sewing (I was taking classes for the last two and was really bad at both, but my mother was in the interview and coaching me).

My mother always sent me the Beacon when I was in college and the first five years after, when I was a struggling editor here in Raleigh. I loved reading the wedding/birth announcements and court docket to keep up with the people I knew. But by the time I was 24, it seemed like my former classmates who stayed back home had peaked out, so I cancelled my subscription.

The Beacon went online last year, and I started reading it again, but I complained to my mama that the content was very limited. So she got me a subscription for Christmas. I try reading it once a week when it arrives in the mail, but I've been gone for 20 years and don't know any of the names in my former favorite sections, and half the obituaries start out with "born in (not Shallotte)," and that's just not something I want to know. I like thinking it was preserved in a time-capsule just for me.

I was flipping through the latest issue yesterday and saw an eighth-page item that warmed my heart so much I ran into our office to show my English husband.

"Giant collard," the caption read. The photo was a little old Shallotte native standing above her eight-foot collard plant. The copy read: "She said it isn't the first oversized collard plant she has cultivated. She said all she did was fertilize and tend to the plant."

So now I'm craving a good pot of collards -- not the fancified ones you can get at "new Southern" expensive restaurants in Raleigh -- the ones grandmas and great-aunts bring to family reunions back home. Collards washed and chopped a day in advance, then cooked down slowly with fatback and some sugar.

I'm also craving that safe, happy little world of my childhood.

Unos, dos, tres, catorce

I am addicted to reading the comments on gawker.com. Commenters Ellagood, Lolcait and TedSez are my idols.

My darling co-conspirator has the same amount of adoration for the West Ham message board and its all-out flame wars. One of the threads today was on the topic of the Irish. We saw U23D at the IMAX recently, so Steve, hoping to better educate me on the longstanding rivalry, sent me a post that included:

"And for our American readers, prepare yourself for a shock: Ireland was not colonised by the British, it was an integral part of the United Kingdom, with fair representation at Westminster."

From: Frink, Leigh Ann
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:20 AM
To: Steve Plowman
Subject: RE: Best post of the day...

They may have been well represented at Westminster, but the all-American Beagle kicked the setters and wolfhounds to the curb.

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Plowman
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 11:33 AM
To: Frink, Leigh Ann
Subject: RE: Best post of the day...

Careful, if you get any sharper someone’ll offer you a newspaper column.

-----------------------

Yay for Uno, the official best dog in the world! We had a beagle named Suzy when I was very small. She went to live on a farm.

A Frink by any other name...

My husband and I have different last names. In fact, my husband, mother-in-law, father-in-law, stepson and I have five surnames between us.

It's not like I'm in love with the sound of my last name or enjoy explaining it every time I make an appointment. I don't even speak it when ordering or picking up, because with my accent it sounds like Frank, and when I overcompensate for my accent, it sounds like Freak. So I just spell it out to people: F-r-i-n-k and add, "Like 'drink,' but with an 'F.'"

The name was common in my hometown, and is the name of a character and a producer of "The Simpsons." But non-Brunswick County natives and less-than-hardcore Simpsons nerds have never heard it before and love to give me terms of endearment I've heard a million times before, including:

Freaky Frink
Super Frink
Super Frinky
Frinkshow
Frinkenstein
Frinkster
Frinkazoid
Le Frink
Frink-o-rama
Frink of Nature

My sister Jill used to sing along with the old-school rappers Whodini “The Frinks Come Out at Night" because she thought that's what they were saying. My first shot at literary fame in college was marred when the magazine printed my byline as "Leigh Ann Fink."

So yeah, it's not the greatest name in the world, but it's my name, and it could be worse. Steve e-mailed me a story from Yahoo UK quoting a London city councilman named Ed Balls. And let's never forget the NASCAR driver named Dick Trickle. Or the English actor Edward Woodward, whose name Noel Coward described as sounding like "a fart in the bathtub."

I got married when I was 36 and had been working and making a name for myself in this town for 14 years. The idea of taking a man's name seemed really outdated to me, especially as Steve didn't give my daddy a goat and four chickens. Hyphenating my surname didn't appeal to me, as Steve and I weren't from landed gentry and didn’t create an empire with our marriage. Add to that the fact that I have two first names and didn't need my business card cluttered up with two last names as well: I’d have to choose between using a tiny font or knocking off a line of contact information.

My very traditional, Sainted Southern Mother put up a huge one-woman campaign to “do the proper thing” and become Leigh Ann Plowman, but I’ve worn her down over the last three years. I just remind her that she and I have the same last name -- the one she gave me -- and nobody could ever question our mother-daughter relationship.

Come to think of it, her claims of “tradition” might just be a smokescreen. The Sainted Southern Mother stories in my columns and blog that appear alongside headshots of my ever-changing hair color could be her number-one reason for wanting me to abandon our unique name.

Sorry, mama. Not gonna.

The worst thing to say to a Southern woman

I usually talk to my mother on Sundays, but I missed her yesterday and called just now to tell her my good news about being picked for the second round for the News and Observer columnist position.

We got to talking about my last blog entry. The wreck happened 20 years ago and we've never talked about it much. So we started talking about those fateful events.

My mama asked me to tell her what she looked like when I saw her. "You don't want to know," I replied. "I really do," she responded. "I shouldn't tell you," I said. "You have to," she implored.

"Your hair looked really bad," I admitted.

Bitchin' Camaro

I came of age in the 80s. MTV came along when I was a tween and I slept each night with the radio on. Reagan-era consumerism was ingrained in me, and I had to know where the beef was so I could consume it.

When I was a sophomore in high school, the cute senior boy who looked the most like George Michael drove a white Camaro. As a result, I absolutely just had to have a white Camaro. It was all I talked about.

Unfortunately, I couldn't keep myself from getting caught doing PG-13 things boys could get away with but girls couldn't. I was always under restriction.

So I didn't get my drivers' license until a month before I turned 17, even though I'd been driving since I was 14. I have a summer birthday and was working my first job as the world's worst waitress when I looked out the window over an ordering customer and saw that white Camaro, my daddy behind the wheel and my sisters' permed heads in the passenger and back seats.

I cannot begin to express how much I loved that car, which I called the "Storm Trooper," after the white, plastic warriors in "Star Wars." It was soooo freakin' hot at the time and made me feel hot by extension. I'd drive around the beach with the Beastie Boys' "License to Ill" blaring from the tape deck, drivers' seat pushed back as far as it would go so, even though I was driving with my tiptoes, I had maximum chillax effect.

That car emboldened me. I was too cool for school (figuratively: I got good grades). So one night on King's Highway in Myrtle Beach when I got it in my head that I could beat the Maserati next to me in a drag race, I blew a rod in the engine. And I got in trouble, as I rightly deserved, having caused more than a thousand dollars' worth of damage to the car. By the time it got out of the shop with a new engine, I was weeks away from going to college and had proved my untrustworthiness, so I didn't get to play with it so much that summer.

My little liberal arts college didn't have a policy banning cars for freshmen, but my parents did. I got dropped off there and had to learn to walk to get where I wanted to be.

That was August. In October, my sister Amy called me in my dorm room. She told me our mama had an accident. Then Daddy got on the phone and told me I needed to get to Duke Hospital as soon as possible.

I had no car. I called my friends from home who were living an hour and a half away in Raleigh to come get me. As she never got out to the area much, the friend driving took me with her to her cousins' house outside Greensboro, half an hour in the opposite direction. I was a freaked-out mess, but what could I say? I was so polite I don't think I relayed to her just how serious the situation was, and she's not an inconsiderate person.

When I finally got to the hospital and told them who I was, I was quickly escorted to the trauma unit. A surgeon came out and handed me a clipboard, rushing through the facts about how this surgery might not save her life, so the next of kin had to sign a release form protecting the hospital against lawsuits in case the patient died. I was 18 years and three months old when I had to sign that.

They wheeled mama past me to surgery a couple of minutes later. I'm so glad nobody else has to know how I saw her. She was covered in blood and her head was split open, her completely shattered lower body covered by a hospital sheet. She was conscious, though, and she held my hand. I was crying my heart out, and she said, "I'm so sorry about your car."* I became 90 percent less shallow at that moment.




*My mother's car, a Pontiac diesel was out of gas that morning, so she took my Camaro to work. She was hit head-on by an impatient passer in the opposite lane. Though she had to be removed from the wreckage by the jaws of life and airlifted 140 miles away to Duke University medical center, the Camaro saved her life, as it crunched right up on impact. Her car would have caught fire and exploded.

Isn't she?

I am a firstborn and, though I don't ascribe to astrology unless it fits into my point, a Leo. So I had three and a half blissful years of being the supreme princess of the universe (think of the tutu-wearing little sister in "Welcome to the Dollhouse"; my best friend I grew up with helpfully pointed out that the character was just like I was).

I was totally unprepared for Jill to come into my life. Her unwelcomed presence interfered with my master plan of total world domination. My Sainted Southern Mother loves to tell the story of my initial inspection of Baby Jill: "Flush her down the potty, Mama." After being assured that was not an option, I helpfully suggested giving her to the devil, only to be once again rebuffed.

 I went on to find creative ways to rid myself of this nuisance stealing my thunder. I would creep into her room, drag her out of the crib, stash her in the closet, then take her place in the crib with the bottle. Never worked. She had a healthy set of lungs.

Jill learned to walk at the astonishing age of eight months because I dragged her all over the house in my attempts to dispose of her. I convinced her to drink a bottle of perfume by telling her, "It'll make your insides smell good." At the emergency room, the staff assured my parents she was fine, just drunk from the alcohol in the perfume. Then there was the time I locked Jill in the wooden toybox and sat on top of it for a very long time before my mother came in and freed Jill, then snapped a shot of Jill screaming and me beaming.



My sister was the perfect child. She was loving, affectionate and never met a stranger. She had a winning smile and a head full of soft, ash blonde ringlets. "Hold still, Jill," my mom overheard as she came down the hall to find me standing over Jill with a pair of scissors, beautiful curls spread across the floor (see first picture posted). Her hair grew back straight after that.

When I went to kindergarten, the world was a safe place where children could stand at the ends of their driveways waiting for the bus with no need for parental supervision. Jill would toddle out and wait with me. So it took my mom a while to realize Jill was missing that day I took her to school with me.

I went on to ignore Jill for many years. Amy was born when I was in first grade and she and Jill were closer in age and had to share a bedroom. I had my Duran Duran-plastered lair to myself through middle and high school and had no use for either of them.

Our age difference placed us in different schools, which was a plus when I entered high school and she was a tween already taller than me, but the same clothes size as me. We could share our awesome 80s wardrobes of Gasoline jeans, Jamz, parachute pants and fluorescent tops. Couldn't share shoes, she outgrew me when I was 10 and she was seven.

We started to sorta bond in that era, mostly because we had to share a bathroom in the morning to curl and tease our perms. Jill had become savvy about my weaknesses by then and had started paying me back for all the torment I'd laid on her. She'd wait until I started brushing my teeth before making an elaborate display of going to the bathroom, guaranteeing a gag-response from me.

Our insults to each other were so stupid, of the "I know you are, but what am I?" genre. Whatever one sister said, whether it was as innocuous as, "I like oysters," the other would respond with, "You LOOK like oysters." This worked really well until Jill and I were alone in the car when I first got my license, and the Psychedelic Furs' "Pretty in Pink" came on the radio. "I love 'Pretty in Pink!,'" Jill announced. "You LOOK like 'Pretty in Pink,'" I snidely shot back. "Thanks!," she replied. D'oh!

We grew up in a sleepy beach town. The closest malls or movie theaters were an hour away north or south, which was really inconvenient to kids with curfews. We hung out at the beach, terrorizing the tourists. At the beginning of my senior year in high school, I was enjoying wine coolers in the dunes with my friends, when my sister and her best friend appeared. My buddy Charlie offered them a drink, and I screamed, "That's my little sister!"

I went away to college and lived it up my freshman year. It really pained me to go back home that summer, back to girl-child rules after living with none for a glorious, fun-filled year. I was really taken aback that they hadn't saved my bedroom as a shrine to me: Amy had moved into my room, leaving Jill with the big bedroom. I had to spend the summer on a cot next to the wall.

Jill, in the meantime, had become completely stunning. She was nearly six feet tall and rail thin. My parents enrolled her in runway modeling classes, and she could sashay around a room like nobody's business.

That summer, on my 19th birthday, my friends and I went to Crazy Zack's at North Myrtle Beach. We took Jill with us. I gave her my college ID and she somehow got stamped legal. As she swished through the room, frat-boy types crazily vied for her attention. I walked along behind her going, "She's 15, she's 15, she's 15..." I ended up getting kicked out for underage drinking. Sent my friend back inside to drag Miss Popularity out and we went home around 1. Not sure how, but my parents found out I had taken Jill to a bar, and I got grounded. At 19. Jill went on her merry way. I never lived at home again.

Oldest kids always get the strictest restrictions. Daddy would check the mileage on my car, when I was allowed to drive it, to make sure I hadn't strayed outside my boundaries. Jill was allowed to drive four hours away to hang out with me in my college apartment when she was 17. I loved letting her do her thing unrestricted in our hedonistic household. We were starting to have a blast together, and she ran some interference for me. For example: She came up the night before my college graduation and things got ridiculous. When the phone rang the next morning, Jill was the only body among the various ones passed out around the apartment who could get up and answer it. I overheard her say, "Oh, hey mama... you're where? 30 minutes?"

Not long after that, Jill went to her first Grateful Dead show and didn't come back for good. She lived the nomadic life for years after that and became a crusty gutter punk, hitch-hiking and living in squats from San Francisco to Minneapolis to New York. I was living in Raleigh by then, scraping out a living as an assistant editor while waiting tables at night, but I'd always take her collect calls. She'd breeze into town a couple of times a year, and I totally remember picking her up at the bus station or wherever and rolling down the car windows, then making her shower and change into some of my clean clothes at the apartment. I cannot abide the smell of patchouli.

But by then, even though we couldn't have been more different, Jill was becoming my very best friend.

No matter what else we had to do, we always made time to watch "Pretty in Pink" when we were together, loving Duckie and swooning when Blaine sent Andie the picture on the old-school computer. That was our thing. We'd quote along line-for-line, including "Blaine? That's not a name, that's a major appliance!" But our favorite was Andie, talking to her dad before going to the prom by herself: "I just want to let him know he didn't break me." Without fail, we'd always burst into tears during the OMD prom scene when Blaine tells Andie, "I always believed in you. I love you."



We went on like this for a couple of years. Then Amy got killed in 1994, and it changed us both forever. Jill had been living back home for a while, but retreated back to New York. My live-in boyfriend dumped me and I quit the job I hated and worked retail for a year. But Jill would come back home to North Carolina every three or four months and we'd go out to the Fallout Shelter, the Five-O or the Comet, a dive club immortalized by Ryan Adams in his Whiskeytown days in the song "Yesterday's News." Then we'd come home and watch our movie.

I got a job at a national advertising agency and got swept up in the glamorous life of working 50+ hours a week, traveling and attending fabulous parties. Jill decided to start her career in clinical herbology and scored an internship at an herb farm outside Charleston, S.C., where she lived in a camper in a field.

When she called me to tell me that she and her friend Chris had decided to have and had successfully conceived a baby, I completely freaked out. "Our parents will die!," I pleaded with her. And I have never been the maternal sort, never understood why anyone would want to be a parent, and I mourned the loss of my party-buddy sister.

Jill called home after three months of pregnancy to break the news to my parents. Charleston is about three hours away from Shallotte. Three hours later, my daddy showed up and took Chris for a ride in his truck. They came back a couple of hours later, and to this day, only the two of them know what was said during that ride. Jill and Chris were married two days later at a rent-a-chapel in Myrtle Beach, with only my parents and Aunt Jo in attendance. I will always regret not being there, but when Jill e-mailed me a single line: "I'm getting hitched tomorrow," I swear I thought she was joking.

I didn't get to spend time with Jill while she was pregnant. She and Chris decided to move to a rural area outside Lexington, Ky. She gave birth to Joshua at home with a midwife. I caught a flight out there two weeks later. I was still resentful of this change she'd imposed on our lives, but when she put that baby in my arms and I gazed down on his beautiful face, I felt a love I didn't know I was capable of having. Kinda like on "Friends," when Monica assured Ross's baby that she'd always have gum, but I told Joshua I would give him both of my kidneys if he wanted them.

Jill and Chris moved to hippy, liberal Asheville, in the N.C. mountains a year later. My family was thrilled, though it was a six-hour drive for my parents and a four-hour drive for me. It didn't matter, we had a baby to love! Two babies soon after, when Banyan came along.



When Joshua was born, Jill had the first-baby protective thing going on, wherein anyone granted her short permission to hold him had to be seated and still. But she'd sling Butter Ban into the arms of anyone willing to take him. I went to visit them when Banyan was two weeks old and was holding him in the organic grocery store while Jill perused the aisle. A nice lady came up and admired him and asked, "How old is the baby?" "Two weeks," I replied. She told me I looked great and I thanked her. Jill snarled at me and I smiled at her.

Over Christmas that same year, Jill and I went to a bar together. I got carded and she didn't. She got really upset, but I pointed out that I'd remained a creature of the night and out of the sun while she was a hippy out in the herb field. Then the next year, at her 30th birthday party, she introduced me to a group of her friends. "Who's older?," one asked. We both pointed at the other and in perfect time, replied, "She is." She laughed it off, apparently still in a good mood from the present I gave her in commemoration of her 30th year: I got my friend (and amazingly talented graphic designer) Greg to help me make a spoof of the Blue Mountain cards the older women in our family are so fond of sending and had it framed for her.

The over-the-top sappy text read:

All that I am, only you know
You wish all my wishes with me
When I stumble, you ground me
You're half of my heart
You're so very pretty in pink
I would give all I have
For you never to hurt
My sister, my bloodline, my link
And I want you to know
Just how lovely you are
You will always be pretty in pink




I stayed single for a long time. I met Steve when I was 35. For Thanksgiving that year, I invited my family from Shallotte, Wilmington and Asheville to my house in Raleigh to meet Steve. Five minutes after she met him, Jill pulled me aside and whispered, "You need to marry him."

Steve and I got married the following June. Jill spent the night before with me and we stayed up late talking and watching our movie. We had our makeup and hair done in the morning and she made me pull it together and eat a sandwich.

At the ceremony, Jill stood next to me, and when the Unity officiant called on her to say a few words, she said, "I'm afraid I don't have anything prepared, but I'm so honored to be here, and I want you all to know that Leigh Ann will always be very, very pretty in pink."

Random five-minute commute to work

I was doing way over the speed limit in the left lane on Capital Boulevard this morning. Just before I got to downtown, I saw a severed, wigged, mannequin head lying next to the barrier. In the split second it took me to process that the head was not human, adrenaline took over and kept me from wrecking.

If I had wrecked, it would have made for a very amusing police report.

My father's sons

(That's me on the right, looking about 8 years old, perfecting the pose I sported in most pictures during my party years. Bonus: That's my natural hair color.)

My daddy is the consummate guy's guy, a good ole boy, as we say in the South. He's always driven a pickup, never went on a job interview, spends just about every spare moment on his boat, loves his Wolfpack basketball and NASCAR at man-volume. My memories of trips half-an-hour away after church on Sunday to Wilmington or Myrtle Beach for lunch are overriden with the misery of him blaring the race and smoking Vantage cigarettes with the windows of the Country Squire wagon rolled up.

My mother gave birth to me alone with her doctors as was the custom in 1969. Daddy, who'd been whiling away his nervousness by playing pool and smoking cigarettes in the doctors' lounge at the hospital, came to see me with two days' worth of beard.

I was the firstborn, the apple of my Daddy's eye at the time. My mama tells me stories of him coming home from work every day to gaze at me. When I was a toddler, he started instilling his sense of humor in me, instructing me to yell, "big fat mama!" at my pregnant mother in public and to call him "pretty papa."

When I was three and a half, Jill came along. She looked EXACTLY like our daddy, and he was floating on air, though he'd been hoping for a boy to call his own. But Jill was his mini-me and quickly became his pet project.

Two years later, Amy was born. When my daddy went to visit my mama, postbirth, in the hospital, she told him it was a boy. He just about hit the ceiling with elation. "Just kidding," she smirked, deflating him.

They had planned on stopping at two, but now they had three. All girls. My daddy had wanted a son, as I suppose most men do, whether they admit it or not. I overheard him on the phone congratulating his buddy: "A boy? You lucky sumbitch!" Though I was about nine years old at the time, it perplexed me (and hurt my feelings): "What can a boy do that I can't?"

Here's why. My daddy wanted sons, but fate was against him on that one. So he treated us like boys.

* We'd toss a baseball back and forth until Daddy would inevitably toss it to heaven (pretending to throw it then hiding it behind his back). He'd tell us to wait for it, and we'd stand craning our necks straight up as he went back in the house.

* I fired a shotgun for the first time when I was nine and weighed about 50 pounds. Daddy stood behind me, steadied it on my shoulder and told me when to pull the trigger. I'd pull it and get thrown five feet backward onto the ground. I wouldn't cry as Daddy picked me up, dusted me off and said, "Okay, this time, aim higher."

The best thing, though, was going out on the boat on the inland waterway between Shallotte Point and Ocean Isle Beach. We'd wait on the front porch for Daddy to come home from work, then chase his truck down the driveway yelling, "Take us fishing!!!" When he was in the mood, he'd hitch up the boat, bundle us in our life jackets, and drive off teasing us that a boat was following us. Our favorite joke at the time was, "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood?" Daddy would always shout, "Three!" over and over, pretending it didn't get old. Silly responses never get old to little kids.

I called Jill yesterday to ask her what her favorite memories were. She said, "The smell of motor oil and salt water." I agree. Daddy would back the boat into the water and tell one of us to hold it steady while he parked the truck and the other two scampered off to watch the minnows in the giant bait tank at the marina. Just about inevitably, the small-framed little girl holding the boat would refuse to let go of it as the tide took her away, and Daddy would wade/swim out to bring it back for us to get in.

Daddy has always been a net fisher, as it works for shrimp and flounder, which are abundant down home. I learned so much out on that boat. We'd drink Sundrop and eat Vienna sausages while Daddy drank Shlitz, waiting for time to drag the net back in. When the nets came in and were dumped in the bin, as he released the non-edible sea creatures, he'd tell us what each of them were. His favorite thing was to set a croaker on the bench next to us to freak us out with its bellowing, bullfrog burps.

Our favorite thing, though, was going clamming. From Shallotte Point, we'd motor out to one of the little marsh channel islands. We didn't clam with rakes, we dove for them. In fact, that's how we all learned how to swim. My daddy would put one of us on his shoulders, wade out to his chest level and dig around with a foot until he found a clam. Then he'd tell the little girl on his shoulders, "Left foot, go!" And she'd dive over him, swim down and not surface until she had a clam.

We all eventually grew out of being daddy's little buddies into, in our varying ways, the kind of fearless adolescent girls that make men say they're afraid of having daughters. But it was probably because we took so much after our Daddy.

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Random memories that don't fit into the narrative, but I love:

Remember the Juicy Fruit tree commercials in the 70's? Daddy would go up to the tv and say he'd pick us some gum, then grab it from his pocket while we were distracted. We thought he was magic!

He'd tell us to look up at electric lines and tell us he could walk on them, but he couldn't find his acrobat shoes in the attic. He'd freak us out by telling us we had ancestors or that we had hesitated in the hall. But he'd make up stories about wampus cats and thrill us for hours.

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A super display of ambivalence on my part

I just called my mama for our weekly post-church chat (wherein I wait around until after noon to call her). Asked her if she'd gone to the store yet for a case of beer and chips/dip for the big game. Warned her that she needed to get on it -- the grocery store shelves would be getting bare.

Football, like chess and poker, is something people have tried to explain to me many times over the years, but I just glaze over. Too many rules, too little action for my attention span.

Back in high school, I went to every football game freshman and sophomore years because I was in band (shut up and don't look at me like that). Junior and senior years, my friends and I would either go to the games with Seagram's wine coolers shoved up our sleeves or say we were going and party on the beach. Went to half of one homecoming game my freshman year in college and ate KFC out of the back of a friend's Camaro before getting into some contraband Wild Turkey.

My friends Rex and Ray have season tickets for the NC State games. Ray is a huge Pack supporter (he has three degrees from there) and is also big Mr. Sportsfan. They throw elaborate tailgates in the extra parking spot they paid for and cover with a tent. I used to go to the games with them, but I rarely ever ventured into the stadium. My job was to entertain Rexy, who isn't a big football fan, either. So here's what would always happen: We'd all leave two hours before the game, party it up, then everyone else would go into the game and Rex and I would keep the party going in the parking lot. I'd still be hanging in there when everybody else came out at halftime, but would need to lie down in the Expedition afterward, bladder aching because I can't bring myself to use a (shudder) port-a-potty. I'd wake up from my nap after the game, completely dehydrated and nearly in tears from needing to go. Everybody else would come out and want to party for another hour until the parking lot cleared out. I'd relent and go to the port-a-potty, trying to hover, hold up my jeans cuffs and not touch the wall. And my jeans would always end up touching the floor, causing me to gag.

So I stopped going.

Needless to say, I'm less than excited about tonight's Super Bowl. All I know about the teams is that the quarterback for the Patriots left his pregnant actress girlfriend for a supermodel. I only know this because I waste a lot of brain cells reading celebrity gossip blogs.

In the days before the Interweb, I'd leave the game on so I could watch the commercials and cheer on the otherwise oppressed creative teams who were lucky enough to have clients with deep pockets and enough trust in them to let them go all out and make great work. Now, I can go to AdWeek or any number of sites to see the spots, so I can skip the game.

Speaking of advertising, years ago when I was at the agency, one of our clients sponsored the halftime show, so I watched that. Halftime shows used to be a great production, but now they're Disneyfied, lowest common denominator pap (Thanks, Ms. Jackson). I mean, come on -- Paula Abdul prerecorded? Without MC Skat Cat? What, Stacy Q, Pebbles and the surviving member of Milli Vanilli were unavailable to lip-synch? Pfft.

The biggest football fan I know is my British ex-pat mother-in-law. She lurrrrves her some Dallas Cowboys. That didn't rub off on her son, who came to this country years after she did.

Steve is still true to his country's obsession. We subscribe to Fox World Sports so he can follow his beloved West Ham. He spends hours and hours playing World Football Manager on his laptop.

Yesterday, he was quite put off over hearing an ESPN talking head refer to the Super Bowl as "the most important game in the world." "Well, it is," I teased.

Indignant, he sputtered, "The World Cup is the most important! And the Olympics -- what about the Olympics??!!"

"The rest of the world doesn't count, " I replied, smiling sweetly.

He's so gonna pay me back for that during ACC/NCAA basketball tourney season.

Anyhoo, go (football team of your choice)! Wake me when it's over.