http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qBWvoUzWtw
This was produced with a little help from my friends. One of them has a website of vaudiotexts. If you’re interested in hearing more, or making one yourself, go to www.vaudiotext.com.
Tag Archives: divorce
When the Rain Stopped
Time for another male voice in The Diary of the Vixen Divorcee, don’t you think? My divorced friend, Mick, is here to provide it for us, with his tale of online dating. The brave man has gone where I haven’t dared to tread, yet.
After two years I’d moved on. I’d survived a public divorce, in which I had played a costarring role, the person who didn’t want it in the first place. I’d been the cuckolded husband, the last one in town to know, apparently the very last one. But that had been two years ago, and from what I’d eventually learned the extracurricular activities had maybe gone on two or three years before that.
I made a conscious decision not to date within my existing social network. That decision, and the intervening twenty-four months, had taught me bars and clubs weren’t the place to meet women, at least not for me. Maybe it was the sort of bars or clubs I went to, maybe it was the type of woman I was attracted to. I really don’t know, I only knew it wasn’t working.
Enter unsolicited advice from my friend, Wendy. “Give the online dating thingy a shot. You get to see what they look like, they get to check you out. You can explore mutual interests, see if you’d actually enjoy each other’s company beyond a glass of wine. Besides, if she thinks you’re a creep, she can just block your emails and move on. Look on the bright side, you can save whatever money you were spending trying to get women drunk on dollar shots.”
Solace for a Grieving Heart
I met my friend Ryan for coffee two weeks ago. (You first met Ryan in Solace for a Grieving Heart #2.) He was in town for a little R&R after all the upheavals in his life; he’d lost a job, moved across country for a new one, gotten a divorce, all within six months.
I said to him, “Next year has got to be better for you than this year.”
His reply was a laugh, followed by, “Losing that job got me into a new town that I like and a job that has my creative juices flowing again. My marriage was stifling me. Without all of this, I never would have known how much I love to dance.”
I thought, “I’ve got to stick around this guy. Let his attitude rub off on me. He’s approaching Buddha-hood here.”
Valentine’s Day Redux
Are you prepared for yet another side of me, from a different medium?
A few weeks ago a reader approached me and asked if I would like to be part of her new project. I like new adventures, so my answer was yes. With her help and that of a friend or two of mine, we put together a vaudiotext of the story Valentine’s Day. The result is that a piece of The Diary of the Vixen Divorcee is now on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-3GJpybDP8
If you’re interested in learning more about vaudiotexts, or making one yourself, go to www.vaudiotext.com.
Solace for a Grieving Heart
When I was young and down in the dumps, my mother, the Angel Ella, would say, “Georgia, quit thinking about yourself. Think about somebody else. You’ll forget why you’re sad.”
I was young and not about to listen to the advice of an older woman. Particularly not my mom’s. What did she know about life?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
My husband, Alan, walked out our door one day into the arms of another woman. Within a month I was reading to young children at an after-school program. One evening a week I walk into that library and my group, Ms. Stone’s Sunshine Club, jumps up and runs to the reading corner. I open up a book and they cuddle in as close as they can. They’re all smiles because they love the pictures. They love the stories. They love the attention.
A Touch of Velvet
When Alan loved me, his love wrapped around me like velvet; tender, caressing, sensual. I moved through the world as if I were always enfolded in the black velvet cape he gave me for my 50th birthday.
He remained infatuated with me at the time of this birthday. After knowing each other for 20 years, he still beamed like a boy as I pushed aside the white tissue paper and unfolded the long, hooded cape from its box. He knew me well, knew I’d be delighted with this gift. Still, I could see in his eyes that bit of doubt. “Maybe she won’t like it, maybe it’s all wrong,” he was thinking.
I threw it over my shoulders, pulled the hood over my head, admired myself in the mirror as I stroked the soft fabric, then twirled to enjoy the feel of it billowing out around me. I looked at him, at the happiness in his eyes now that he was sure of my pleasure at his gift.
Perfection. My 50th birthday was perfect.
And the Winner Is……….
Coco Chanel said, “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.”
As of this Valentine’s Day, at least one American woman can be guaranteed a future, because she’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day wearing Ubar, the perfume from Oman.
I know this because I started my Friday off early by knocking on the door of my friend Peter’s home. Remember Peter from Ah Have Always Depended Upon…..? He’s the man who carried my 9-foot-tall Norfolk Island Pine up three flights of stairs as if he were carrying a tea cup.
This morning he turned all that strength to the delicate task of tenderly picking one heart out of a bowl filled to the brim with pink and red hearts. Each heart represented one new subscriber to The Diary of the Vixen Divorcee, or one previous subscriber who had recruited a new subscriber.
I wish I had the resources to give a bottle of perfume to everyone who qualified for the
Valentine’s Day #2
Between my last Valentine’s Day as a married woman and my first as a divorced woman, (see Valentine’s Day), I spent my one Valentine’s Day as neither one nor the other holding hands with a handsome, dissolute, notorious lady’s man named Marius.
The setting for our tryst was La Perla, a restaurant on Playa la Ropa in Zihautanejo, Mexico. Our table sat alone, the furthest from the restaurant, the closest to the shoreline. Moonlight, starlight, gentle waves, warm breezes, the sweet sound of soft voices and laughter drifting to us from the few boats in the bay; this should have been the setting for The Vixen Divorcee’s First Kiss, right?
Valentine’s Day
The last Valentine’s Day I celebrated with my former husband, Alan, surpassed any dream I could ever have. None of the Hallmark writers or designers could have come up with this scenario.
Alan had been travelling excessively for business. He missed his birthday, my birthday, our wedding anniversary. But it’s Valentine’s Day, he’s home and
we’re going to make it special.
The Poetry of Seduction
Andrew Marvell said it best back in the 17th century. I have never come across anything written before or since that more convincingly and beautifully expresses the compelling reasons to indulge in passion.
Alan, my ex-husband, the scientist, would never have come across this poem before meeting me. I wouldn’t have expected him to know it. But bless his romantic heart, he learned To His Coy Mistress, and would, when the moment was ripe, pull out a few select lines. Always with the desired results.
But my own romantic heart hungered for more. I wanted what he could never have done. I longed for the man who, in a moment with stillness hanging heavily around us, would recite, unbidden, those lines for me.
I teased Alan that I would give myself, body and soul, to the man who did that.
French sculptor Auguste Rodin captured how I anticipated responding to an impromptu recitation of “To His Coy Mistress”.