The Island Book Club: Vacation in Derry, ME...No really. It's fine. Nothing weird ever happens here.

Please note: The Island Book Club is not a thing. Once a book club is established people will want to read about sparkly vampires and abusive relationships dressed up as steamy sexy times and allegorical nonsense that makes me want to gouge out my eyes with a pencil. Nope, not a real thing. However, I love book recommendations, so please share in the comments.

I grew up on a steady reading diet of Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, The Baby-Sitters Club, Christopher Pike, classics, and Stephen King. When I was ten, I read both Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and Carrie within a month or so of one another. If you're not familiar with these books, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is Blume's beloved novel about a 6th grader, Margaret, who is navigating middle school, experiencing her first crush, and dealing with the inevitability of being female, namely developing breasts and having to get her first bra and getting her period for the first time. Carrie is the story of  teenage girl raised by a frighteningly religious mother whose telekinetic powers are brought on by the start of her period during gym class. She's tormented by most of the kids in school, including having pig's blood dumped on her at prom. She gets her revenge by blowing everything up and killing everyone...with her mind. Periods are no fucking joke. Judy Blume and Stephen King both understand this.

I had no business reading Carrie as a ten year old but I did anyway. I did an informal poll on Facebook this week to see if other people read "age inappropriate" books as children. I feel so much better knowing that many of my friends were right there with me, reading Stephen King, Judy Blume, Toni Morrison, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Alice Walker well before we maybe should have. It's like when all the older girls at school passed around Forever...(another Judy Blume classic); we want to know what's going on over there. Both my older brother and my Grandma G were into horror fiction, most notably Stephen King and Anne Rice. I had a readily available stash of books at home and in Detroit when visiting so I started reading. Neither of them discouraged me but I wouldn't say they encouraged me either. Unless you count that time I stood in line at an Anne Rice book signing for both me and my grandma; that might have been a bit encouraging. Anyway, I love Margaret and Carrie equally and am glad I read them at the same time. They fit together in a way that was in no way intended by the authors. They're weird bookends on my pre-teen life.

I didn't really get into Stephen King novels until a year or two later when I picked up Christine and IT from among the books my brother left behind when he left for college. IT is my third favorite King novel after Carrie and The Stand. When I first read IT, it was the longest book I had ever read. It clocks in at just under 1100 pages in paperback form. It was also the most terrifying thing, book or movie, I had ever experienced.

IT takes place in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, arguably the worst place to live ever. Derry shows up in a handful of other novels and short stories but is the focus of IT. Derry is as much of a character as the members of the Losers Club and Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The story is about a group of seven friends who come together in the summer of 1958 to battle the evil that has taken over their town and killed a bunch of children, including the sibling of one of the Losers. The story moves between that summer, the present (1985), and several interludes of Derry history as told by the one of the narrators, another Loser named Mike Hanlon. The seven friends return to Derry as adults to do battle with IT again. What they discover is that IT has always been a part of Derry and that the killings will continue on a cycle if they can't stop IT once and for all.

A lot happens in this novel. IT most often takes the form of Pennywise, the world's creepiest clown. Think what would happen if Bozo the Clown and the John Wayne Gacy had a baby. That would be Pennywise. What makes IT more terrifying, is that it appears as whatever the person it's stalking fears most. During the course of the novel, we see IT through the eyes of the Losers as a mummy, a leper, a wolfman, an old crone, a giant bird, and a statue of Paul Bunyon come to life. In the form of Pennywise, IT makes other terrible things happen, like blood dripping from photos, fortune cookies with unfortunate surprises, and the fact that most adults turn the other way when anything terrible happens. They can't see the evil of IT although they can be taken over by it as evidenced by Bev's father and several other adults throughout the past and present.

I decided to reread the book in anticipation of the new film version coming out this week. I saw IT last night (more on this shortly) and was not disappointed. I didn't finish the novel before I saw the movie as I had intended; I'm about 200 pages from the end. What this rereading has made me realize is that I forgot a lot of things that happen in this story. Since the novel was published, it was made into a 1990 television miniseries starring Tim Curry as Pennywise. This is probably the reference point I have for IT. The miniseries is good; it's a mostly faithful adaptation of the novel. It gets about as close as it can given that it was on network tv (imagine what it would have been had FX or Netflix been around). In addition to Curry, the cast included John Ritter (in his sexy facial hair phase), Annette O'Toole, Harry Anderson (my favorite tv judge), Tim Reid (my favorite from WKRP in Cincinnati), and Richard Thomas (yes, from The Waltons) as Bill, the leader of the Losers. The kid cast included Jonathan Brandis and Seth Green. Tim Curry is, by far, the best part of the miniseries (I'm sorry everyone else). His Pennywise the Clown is campy and scary and evil; exactly what you want Pennywise to be. A lesser actor would have made Pennywise a joke.

The miniseries stayed faithful to the back and forth between the past and present that makes the book such a powerful story. Stephen King is a gifted storyteller and one of his talents is layering narratives within his novels. In a novel like IT, the history of Derry is hugely important for the children to understand in order to do battle with IT. They uncover the 27 year cycle by tracing old events like deadly explosions, fires, and shoot outs in the town. Mike Hanlon becomes the town librarian, staying in Derry to be the keeper of the history and the watcher. He calls them all back to fulfill the promise they made as children. The rest of them have forgotten what happened that summer; that's the genius of both the novel and the miniseries. We get to watch the six of them remember. We journey with them as they realize what happened and what they're facing again. In the miniseries, it's a little over the top and tv movie of the week but it's still powerful and shows what a capable storyteller King is.

This is the one thing I missed in the new film. Rather than trying to cram everything into one film, director Andy Muschietti has divided it into two chapters. Chapter One, out now, focuses on the Losers Club as children only. Many of the iconic scenes from those chapters are here: Ben being bullied by Henry Bowers and his cronies, Beverly and the bloody sink, the postcard, the rock fight, the movie theatre scene. They're all here but the nuances of the back and forth story telling is missing. I understand why this is and I applaud the filmmakers for making the decision to break it into two films. Normally, I'm against movies being made into two parts for no reason but it works here (I'm looking at you, Peter Jackson and the later Hunger Games films). IT would be disappointing if it was all crammed into one movie. This part of the movie is now set in the late 1980s, which works well for the story. The young cast is awesome; I enjoyed all of them. My favorites are Jack Dylan Grazer as Eddie and Finn Wolfhard (from Stranger Things) as Richie. Grazer's Eddie is a 12 year old version of an old man and he is so good at this. Wolfhard is playing opposite of his Stranger Things character and it's nice to see his comic side as Richie, the loud mouth of the group. Sophia Lillis as Beverly steals the movie from the boys; she's the right mix of tough and vulnerable and pre-teen girl. She and Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) have a running joke about New Kids on the Block that is both hilarious and unexpected. And yes, she does look like Molly Ringwald.

That's what I enjoyed most about the new film; there's humor and horror. At the end of the day, these are children who are doing something way beyond their years. It's nice to see the magic of youth and childhood friendship in this version of the film; I always felt that was lacking in the miniseries. They just do things there whereas here, we see the sides of friendship throughout the story. One of the things I didn't remember about the novel was the part where they all fight about taking on IT. Fighting with a friend is the worst without the added drama of an evil menace killing everyone.  Friendship, especially when you're young, is about the fun times and the terrible times. Your friends are the ones that stay with you through it all. The film captures that conflict and that truth so perfectly.

And really, that's the power of Stephen King.When you strip away all the gore and scary creatures and sex, his stories are about relationships and the human condition. He captures the magic of childhood and contrasts it beautifully against the harsh reality of adulthood. Our deepest fears manifest as a creepy clown or a leper in an abandoned house. An entire town is both part of and oblivious to a dark evil within. Our relationships protect us and get us through.

Just as long as we never, ever have to go to Derry.
Pennywise image
Miniseries kids
New cast

The Brownie Friendship Song

I was never going to be a good Girl Scout. I'm not good at selling things, we moved a lot when I was younger, and I'm not a fan of the outdoors. I was in Brownies (girls aged 6-8 I believe) but never made it past there. We moved and I moved on to do ballet, gymnastics, softball, and eventually found a true home in theatre. I support the Girl Scouts despite my failure as one.

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, the Brownie friendship circle song "Make New Friends" pops into my head. If you're not familiar with the song, take a moment to listen:

We used to sing this song at the start of our meetings and yes, we sang in a round. Our meetings would typically end with another friendship circle with the added bonus of a friendship wish. Basically, a friendship wish is making a wish and passing it on to the girl next to you by squeezing her hand. That's how Brownies roll. The squeeze thing also happened when I joined the theatre department; we did something very similar during our pre-show circles. Friendship is friendship no matter where you are.

Anyway, this song gets in my head randomly from time to time. Sometimes I know why the song pops into my head; there was that time I found my Brownie sash and it had my friendship patch on it. Or another time when the Girl Scouts were out selling cookies and were having the best time hanging out with one another despite the fact that it was 10 degrees out. Other times, it's a lot of little things that make the song appear. This week has been one of those week; stressful, kind of stupid, and the type of week that needed to be over the second it started. I decided to treat myself to some new books for my Kindle (for gym reading) and stumbled upon the thing that finally caused me to hum "Make New Friends".

There is a fifth Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book.

I had no clue. It's called Sisterhood Everlasting and takes place about ten years after the last book. If you're not familiar with these books or the two films based on the first two books, the story is centered on four friends who literally grow up together. Their mothers, all pregnant and due around the same time, meet in a fitness class for moms and become friends. While the moms drift apart, the girls remains friends throughout school and into college. They share a "magical" pair of pants that fits each girl perfectly despite each one being a different shape and size. There's drama, heartbreak, humor, trips to Greece, nerdy boys, and above all else, friendship. The first book was released in 2001 (the year I graduated from college). I didn't read any of the books until later, maybe around 2008. By then, the first four books were all out and I was able to read them back to back.

The books are solid YA fare but aren't patronizing and don't feel totally like YA novels. I liked many of the characters, particularly Tibby, Carmen, and Brian, and even though I was much older than the main characters when I started, I could see myself in them and in their struggles and successes. I felt for them and laughed with them. I had friends sort of like the girls in the book. At the time, I was moving a lot, first back to Virginia following Hurricane Katrina, then out to California because everyone should move to California once in their life. Adult friendships are challenging. As a slightly more introverted person, they're downright stressful. I've written about this before; adult friendships are almost as stressful as dating.

What I liked most about the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books was that they followed female friendships in a realistic way. The girls fought, they shared secrets, they kept secrets from one another, they just knew when one of the others was in trouble or needed the rest of the group. They were jealous of one another, which does happen. Sometimes friends move past it; sometimes they don't. This group always found a way to work through the bad things without diminishing them or making light of something sad or upsetting. They also celebrated when things went well and laughed and had inside jokes. Ann Brashares, the author of the series, captures all the complexity of friendship in a way that many novels fail to do, especially when the characters grow up.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a fifth book exists. It was released in 2011, well after I stopped reading the original series. I don't remember hearing about it but am excited I found it. I'm only a few chapters in and already I'm back in the world of Lena, Tibby, Carmen, and Bridget. Already, I'm a bit of an emotional wreck (a very sad thing happened already to a character I really love). The book picks up as the friends are approaching their 30th birthdays and they're all in various states of unknown. They're still friends but maybe not as close as they once were, maybe not as in each others' lives as they were back in the day. And of course, they're spread around the country and the world.

This is exactly what happens in real adult friendships. Whether you've know a person since preschool or met in college or at work, eventually everyone has to start their lives. People get married, they have kids, they move for jobs, they get divorced, they grow up. Friendships shift and change and sometimes, they fade. It's sad but it doesn't mean you failed as a friend or a person. I've struggled with this over the years; losing touch with friends or investing time into friendships that I shouldn't anymore, not because of anything negative but because they've come to their natural end. I don't expect Sisters Everlasting to solve all of the problems of changing friendships. But I like the comfort of the story more than anything else.

On the same day I started reading Sisters Everlasting, I watched the first four episodes of the Netflix series Stranger Things. I won't spoil anything about the show but in the first episode, the boys, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas are explaining to Eleven what a friend is. She's never heard this term before and is genuinely confused by the concept. Mike tells her, "A friend is someone that you’d do anything for … and they never break a promise … that’s super important because friends tell each other things; things that parents don’t know." I had no idea this show that so many people love for so many reasons would get friendship, at least for the group of boys and Eleven, so right. The fierce dedication they have to finding Will and the protectiveness of the boys towards Eleven and her towards them makes me think of the girls of the Sisterhood too. My only other comment on Stranger Things, for now, is #PoorBarb.

I don't expect Sisters Everlasting or Stranger Things to solve all of the problems of changing friendships. But I like the comfort of the stories more than anything else. Sometimes my fictional universes make me feel better about my actual universe.

You may now form your own friendship circle and sing "Make New Friends" in a round. Now that song is in your head...you're welcome.

You're Doing Everything Wrong: Summer Edition

First a musical interlude:

I suck at summer. I admit this openly and without hesitation. While I love summer (it's my second favorite season), I stopped being good at summer in high school. My favorite summer activities include:

• Getting sunburned (despite using appropriate sunscreen)
• Feeling sweaty all the time
• Reading
• Going to the movies
• Drinking iced beverages
• Happy hour (as long as it's not at a rooftop bar; see second bullet point)
• Going to concerts, even outdoors, despite the second bullet point 
• Eating junk food at baseball games
• Avoiding pools

I feel like I was better at summer when I was younger. I spent more time outdoors (and even sort of tanned except that one time my ears got sunburned) and while we were not a traditional summer vacation kind of family, we did go on a lot of road trips. Most of these road trips were to Detroit or from one military posting to another but they were always an adventure. When we lived in Alabama and Louisiana, we did go to the beach pretty frequently. I also recall thrill-filled amusement park adventures with my cousins and brother. The summers of childhood are about freedom and fun and exploration and imagination. And staying up really, really late. That's what I remember.

I'm guessing that it was late high school and into college where my summers turned from summers of fun and frivolity to work and work and some fun on the side. I spent summers working in theatres; my high school theatre, Summer Lyric Theatre at Tulane, and various little theatres and weird performance spaces around New Orleans. I never went anywhere or really did "summer" things but I had the best time. Some of my fondest memories from college (in particular) are from those summers working the box office at the Lyric (as our older patrons called it), trying to figure out where a patron left her tickets (answer: in the freezer next to her jewelry) and hanging out with my friends. Theatre parties are the best parties; don't let anyone tell you differently.

Joining the workforce has meant that my summers are just a continuation of the rest of the year. There's not a natural break anymore. I'm always doing some project or planning something at work and don't seem to have the time to really take off and enjoy myself. Even when I taught, I worked over the summer both at school and at a theatre so there was never the break that most people believe teachers have. Many of the summers of my early/mid-twenties involved friends' weddings so I tended to make the destination wedding my vacation by spending a day or two wherever it was rather than doing something separate. So really, summer just became a hotter, more humid version of the rest of the year.

I should be experiencing the type of summer that I sometimes dream about: concerts, vacation at the beach, trips to the winery, baseball games, and relaxing with a good book. This is the first summer in eight years that I don't have a large user conference in an uncomfortably hot location (think Phoenix in July) to plan and attend. I don't have to be concerned with seating arrangements at the awards breakfast (hint: it doesn't really matter where people sit at these things) nor do I have to prepare myself for product questions while I'm waiting in the restroom line. No work polos to pack (rust? gray? blue? some new weird teal shade?) and no lengthy discussion with other co-workers about what is and is not appropriate to wear at a professional event held in the summer. I have my summer back but I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

A few months back I wrote about the difference between doing things by yourself and being lonely. They're not the same thing; doing things by yourself is fun but sometimes you don't want to be by yourself. Some things lend themselves to being done in groups or at least with a few other people. Summer, for me, is not a solitary season. It's about being outside and soaking up the warmth of the weather and of others. I think that's why I like going to outdoor concerts so much. A summer concert combines my love of good music, being outside for a very specific time period (in the pavilion of course; no lawn seats for this girl), and being around others who enjoy/love the band. It's a temporary community that I can get behind even when that temporary community stands at inappropriate times during the show or gets into fights in the parking lot (true story).

Not my photo but from another devotee.

What it comes down to is that I need to reclaim my summer. It's not that I'm doing everything wrong when it comes to summer; I'm just not really doing summer. I didn't prepare enough to take a big vacation but I can spend my weekends doing summer things. I can take Fridays or Mondays (or both) off to extend the fun if I want to. I need to rally the troops (my friends and family) to join me on adventures. I must go outside more despite the heat and potential for sunburn. I should probably invest in a hat. I can stay up late and not feel terrible about it in the morning although I may have to redefine what "late" actually is. I will find Superman ice cream in Northern Virginia if it takes all summer.

I need to rediscover the summers of my childhood and the joy of slowing down while still participating in adventures.

To a summer of small adventures!

The unexpected creepiness of Cousin Balki

Summer is winding down and with it summer reading lists. I'm sure in the next few weeks, students across the country will scramble to finish their reading lists or at least read the Sparknotes version (or whatever lame way kids are not reading these days). This was never me when I was in school. I usually had my reading list done by the end of the first month of vacation and the librarian would give me more books to read. I'm a school nerd and proud of it.

This is how I came to read my first Stephen King novel. I was done with my summer reading and was looking for something else since I'm an inside kid. My brother had been reading Stephen King for awhile and I'm pretty sure that I took the book from his room (probably without his permission). My first Stephen King novel was Christine. I read it in a few days and was totally hooked. I moved from Christine to Carrie to IT and never looked back. That summer, I also "discovered" the collection Different Seasons that featured the story "The Body". I had seen Stand By Me several times already (I was going through a Corey and Kiefer phase at the time too) and didn't realize it was a short story first. My favorite King novel is The Stand. I read it for the first time my freshmen year in high school. I've probably read it at least a dozen times since. This is no small feat given that it's an enormous story and one of his longest novels. The miniseries is my favorite miniseries and I'll watch it anytime it's on. I  read his newest novel, Joyland, back in June and enjoyed it. Definitely a good summer read.

I was thinking about Stephen King this week while traveling for work. Specifically, I was thinking about a short story called "The Langoliers". This story appears in the collection Four Past Midnight and was made into an incredibly cheesy tv movie starring a who's who of 90's tv stars: Dean Stockwell from Quantum Leap, Patricia Wettig from Thirtysomething, and my favorite, Bronson Pinchot from Perfect Strangers. Yes, Cousin Balki was in a Stephen King movie. Cousin Balki goes a little crazy and is not very Balki-like. I remember finding him super creepy when I first saw it and wondered if he was trying to shed the Cousin Balki image by playing a super creepo.


Anyway, the story is about a red-eye flight from LA to Boston that goes awry. One of the passengers, a young blind girl (who is also psychic) wakes up to find all but herself and nine other passengers on the plane. Everyone, including the pilots, are gone. The plane is on autopilot. There just happens to be a pilot on the plane (played in the movie by David Morse, a favorite actor of mine) and e lands them in Bangor, Maine and things get creepier and creepier from there. If you're a fan of Stephen King novels you know that nothing good ever happens in Maine. The airport is deserted, people start hearing strange noises, and one of the group, Mr. Toomey, goes bananas. The group figures out that they journeyed through some type of "time rip" and that caused everyone to disappear and eventually will mean they will disappear too. Schemes are hatched, Langoliers approach (because of crazy Mr. Toomey), and heroes are sacrificed. You should really just read the story or watch the movie to get the full plot. There's a lot going on here and summarizing it is tough.

I've been traveling for work since 2004 (on and off) so I've spent a lot of time in airports. If I were to calculate the total time I've spent in airports since 2004, I would be a sad person. I'm sure it would equate to thousands of hours spent doing very little. Airports are the perfect place to waste time because you can't really go anywhere once you're beyond security. Setting any kind of fantasy or horror story at an airport makes absolute sense to me. On my trip this week, I had to go to Lake Elsinore, CA. Lake Elsinore is between LA and San Diego and both of those airports are farther away than I wanted to drive. So I booked my flight into Ontario International Airport (in California not Canada). It's a pretty small airport and was totally as it should be when I got in on Sunday. There were people around and the TGIFriday's was open. It's like Oakland Airport's less gritty twin.

On Tuesday, my training ended at 3:30 so I was in good shape to get to the airport on time to return the car and have a quick dinner (since I was getting into Phoenix after 9 pm). It takes about 40 minutes to get to Ontario. There was no traffic so I made good time and made it to the airport a little before 5. This is when things started to get weird. There was no one, not even airline staff, anywhere in the ticketing area. There were no other passengers that I could see. The only noise was the whir of the machines at the security line. When I made it upstairs to security there were two other passengers and six TSA agents. I don't even think it took 5 minutes to go through security (unheard of I know). Once I got through security, the gates were empty too. My first thought was that maybe things opened up after 5 for evening flights or that I had hit a lull in arrivals. I just couldn't figure out why there was no noise. It was eerie and unsettling. The Coffee Bean was closed - devastating. Even when I've been the first person in for an early flight or on the last flight of the night to arrive, there's always noise at the airport. There was nothing.

So naturally, being me, I immediately thought of "The Langoliers" (both the story and the movie). The airport reminded me of the scenes after the group lands in Maine and there was no one and no noise or anything. It was just eerie. I didn't even see where the other two passengers went after we got through security. And it seemed like the TSA agents had been trained to be super quiet because they weren't even making noise. I also happened to be taking a red-eye from Phoenix to Charlotte that evening so clearly I was living the plot of this story. Ontario was already in the time rip and I would follow suit once I got to Phoenix. In the next two hours, I would also have to find a blind psychic, Cousin Balki (because someone needs to go crazy and it's not me), the brainy guy from Quantum Leap, and David Morse. David Morse would also be able to fly a plane and that's how we'd get to Phoenix for the rest of the plot to play out correctly.

Because this is how life works.

What really went down is this: everything in this airport closes at 4 pm except Round Table Pizza, the bar, and the gift shop (it closes at 6 pm). An entire airport closes down its services at 4 pm. I totally support airports not opening everything at 5:30 am or super late into the night because there aren't that many people but 4 pm? That just seems weird especially given that by 5:45ish people finally started to arrive and the airport went back to feeling like an actual airport. So instead of finding my group of survivors or dealing with creepo Cousin Balki, I read my book (The Hangman's Daughter), had some expensive pizza, and continued on my way to Phoenix and Charlotte and then home to DC.

And this is why Stephen King is a genius. I haven't read this story or seen the movie in years but I immediately conjured up images and plot points from this story. In many of his stories, it's the mundane or the ordinary person or object that causes the most terror for the characters and the readers. Most of his villains are not the monsters of fantasy (although he's got some good ones - Pennywise is terrifying) but ourselves. Or at least the way our mind processes what's happening around us or gives into the events of the story. Many of my favorites, The Stand, Carrie, Christine, Misery, play into that psychological scare which to me is better than a gory, monster filled horror story. The reality of these stories is what is truly terrifying.

And this is my brain on jet lag. Welcome to my world.

Because I can't help myself - more Stephen King fun!

Bronson Pinchot photo
Other photos by me.