Tuesday, September 16, 2014

What’s New Under the (Punishingly Hot) Sun

One more article of mine has been published on the Girls that Roam site. As usual, it’s about Orlando; this time, about theme parks specifically.

I set up a little bit of a challenge for myself on this one. I decided to make the article be, in large part, about how to best navigate the theme parks. Why did I decide this? Well, I needed some sort of angle, because the fact that these parks exist is not exactly breaking news, so a simple overview was out of the question.

Not much about Florida theme parks, when you come right down to it, is really a secret. They’re some of the best known, and best promoted attractions in the world, so it’s a little hard to find new things to say about them.

I personally find theme parks a little overwhelming. I like them, but the noise, the crowds, and in Orlando’s case, the baking sun all wear me down pretty quickly. I figured I must not be the only person this happens to, so I decided to write an article that would make life easier for us easily over-stimulated folk.

The problem was, the group I was traveling with didn’t really see the theme parks in a way that has much to do with the average person’s Orlando theme-park experience. I traveled there on a press trip, a whirlwind affair where, over the course of several 18-hour days, we were taken to just about every spot in Central Florida--for about five minutes. One day we covered three parks—Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Universal Studios—in one dawn-to-darkness burst of roller coasters, fried food, and sustained shrieking.

As a group, we did manage to experience quite a bit of each park, but only because we were afforded essentially a VIP experience. Park staff escorted us to the front of lines, put us on air-conditioned buses to get us from park gate to park gate, and made sure we were properly fed and hydrated so that our energy didn’t flag.

What I’m saying is that this is another one of those articles that required a lot of research once I got home. I had to remember what it’s like to visit parks as a normal person (which I have done) and then find out what programs and perks exist that normal people have access to.

So that’s what this article is—a guide to remaining sane in Orlando, based on my completely insane theme park experience.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

That’s Ms. Soskin to You

I’ve had another article published by Girls That Roam, the online women’s travel magazine. This one is not about Orlando; it’s on Richmond, California’s Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

That’s a mouthful of a name, and perhaps in sympathy, my article ran a little long, too. It could have been tighter, I see now, but I do feel that the parts came together at the end, so I’m fairly happy with it.

I did want to make one note, though, just to show that I was raised right.

The Girls That Roam house style is to use a person’s whole name on first reference, and then their first name for subsequent references. I respect house style guides, having been responsible for compiling and enforcing several different ones in my time. This particular rule didn’t bother me at all until now, as all of the articles I have written so far for GTR have been about pretty laid-back (and relatively young) people who would think it was weird if I called them anything but their given names.

This Rosie the Riveter article was a little different, though. A person who gets mentioned a lot is park ranger Betty Reid Soskin, who, at 92, is just about old enough to be my grandmother. She is also African-American, which makes me even more inclined to err on the side of awkward earnestness. (I am thinking of a book I once read by two African-American women whose parents, born into slavery, called each other Mr. and Mrs. Delany until the end of their days—affording each other a respect that at the time they rarely got outside their home.)

What I am saying is that I would never dream of calling this woman “Betty” to her face, but the way the article appears, it looks like that’s what I’m doing behind her back. It’s just a house rule that I can’t change, and I hope I am forgiven--or at least unnoticed--by Ms. Soskin.

(She did mention, in a talk I saw her give recently, that she has mostly outlived her rage. So I’ve got that going for me.)

Friday, July 25, 2014

Child’s Play

I’ve had another article published on the Girls That Roam site, again on Orlando. It’s not my very favorite of the Orlando series, but I’m happy enough with it considering the challenges I faced writing it.

The first challenge was the subject matter: Kids in Orlando. You’d think that would practically write itself, and it’s true that there is a lot to say on that matter. But I’m about the least likely person in the world to say it. I don’t have kids, and while I did travel to Orlando and see lots of children having fun, the week I spent in Florida was actually one of the least kid-friendly experiences I’ve had since my early 20s. Of all the articles I’ve written this year, this is the one that required the most post-trip research.

None of us in the group I was traveling with have any children, which is good, because if we had, Child Protective Services would have taken them away in the first 24 hours. We spent our first evening seeing a John Waters one-man show, and then we drank with him, and then we went out for tacos in the middle of the night. And it only got less wholesome from there. We closed bars three times in one week, and at least two out of the eight of us hooked up with each other. (No, I wasn’t one of them; I just caught them making out in the back of the van.)

As for hookups outside of the group, I can’t begin to guess how many happened, facilitated by the modern marvel that is Grindr. Grindr is something that I almost thought was a myth, but whoa, Nellie, is it real in the world of young gay men. I got little enough sleep, but the guys…I don’t know how they’re still alive.

The second challenge I faced is the simple fact that I have written about 18,000 words so far on Orlando, and before I sat down to write this, I was starting to worry that I didn’t have many left in me. (For comparison, a respectable novel is 100,000 words.) But somehow another 1,800 found their way into a Word document, and arranged themselves in some kind of comprehensible order. I’ve been writing one article a week since mid-May, and now I get a little bit of a break, which is kind of nice. I’ve only got two more Orlando articles left, and they’re short, so I’ll make them happen somehow.

Friday, June 06, 2014

Cringe. C-R-I-N-G-E. Cringe

I am not an extroverted person by nature, and I don’t normally like to be the center of attention. I kind of freeze up when all eyes are on me and it’s not a situation I like to seek out.

My writing, though, is something I do like to put out in front of people. I’m oddly unselfconscious about my work and always quietly proud to see it out in the world. I don’t think I’m delusional about the quality of what I do, but I have not yet outgrown the kick I get out of seeing my name in print. I’m always pleased when an editor decides that something I produced is strong enough to survive out there. I suspect I feel about an article the way a parent feels about watching a child in a spelling bee. Maybe the kid isn’t going to be a winner, but I’m proud to see him up on the stage competing.

Occasionally, though, something happens that makes me feel more like my kid’s up on stage all right, but maybe with his hair sticking up oddly, or ketchup stains on his shirt.

Something like that occurred recently with one of my Orlando articles. This one was on the city’s lesbian scene. I’m happy with how it turned out, and was very pleased to see the publisher, Girls That Roam online magazine, promoting it.

I was a little taken aback, though, when I saw the lead photo used to promote the article. The shot was taken at a lesbian pool party that I’m sure really happened, but not in any universe I’ve ever occupied. In the foreground of the photo is a striking looking woman in a bikini. She is tall with chiseled features and an envious mane of hair—she looks something like the product of a union between Laura Dern and Barbarella.

Behind her is a baby butch in Ray Bans and a backwards baseball cap—this is the kind of lesbian who looks like Justin Beiber. She appears to be about to grope the amazon woman, and she has an expression on her face that looks a little like she’s thinking impure thoughts and a little like she can’t believe her luck. (It’s exactly the expression I would be wearing if I had even been invited to this party.) Behind them is a soft-focus sea of Sapphic debauchery, scores of wet, oiled, drunken 21- to 25-year-old women on the make.

It’s awesome.

And it would all be fine, except that the day the article hit the Girls That Roam social media pages is the very day my 93-year-old grandmother decided to find out what this Facebook thing is all about.

I accepted her request immediately—I was her first friend--and then went to my page, curious what impression it was conveying that day. Because I’d been tagged in a Girls That Roam post about my article, it appeared at the top of my page along with the photo.

This is not an awkward outing situation—my Grandma has known the score for years and treats Pipi like a fifth grandchild. So no real harm done. I am still quite proud of my kid, and we will all get past the fact that he chose to wear his raunchiest t-shirt on his big day before an audience.

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Killing Me Softly

Girls That Roam online magazine has published another of my Orlando series. This one is about soft adventure in the Orlando area. Candidly, I like this one. It was fun to research and fun to write. Some articles are only pinned down on the page after a struggle. Sometimes it takes a while for me to decide what my point is. Sometimes structure is hard, and sometimes it’s just hard to find more than a few words to say about things I’m expected to go on about for paragraph after paragraph. But none of those problems came up here. There is so much fun stuff to do in and around the city, and learning this was such a pleasant surprise, that this article practically wrote itself. This week, though, I have to start an Orlando family travel article. This may be a different story. Anyway, the link to the outdoors article is here: http://girlsthatroam.com/killing-softly-orlandos-outdoorsy-adventurous-side/.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Blue is the Funniest Color

And here’s one more Orlando article I’ve just had published. This isn’t even the end of it, but it is all for now. I’ve written so many Orlando articles in the last 6 months that there’s a little bit of a backlog on the Girls That Roam site—they’d have to call it the Girls That Spend a Lot of Time in Central Florida site if they all went up as quickly as they’re written. So I expect that a few more will go up in the coming months, but I can’t be sure of the schedule. This article is on my first Blue Man Group experience.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

More Orlando

I just noticed that another of my Orlando articles has gone up on the Girls That Roam site. It has actually been up for quite some time; I just happened to notice a link to it in an online newsletter that the site sends out every so often. Here’s the article--it’s a review of an excellent restaurant called Prato in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park.