Two months from today

This is another post about teeth and surgery. I'm going to be explaining exactly what my surgeon will do, so if you're squeamish, skip it.

I can't sleep, which means I still think it's Sunday, May 8th (Happy Mother's Day!). So I'm thinking about what I'm going to be doing two months from today, on July 8th.

I'm going to be going to the hospital where my wonderful surgeon is going to make my orthodontist like my teeth for the first time in my life.

You know what I said when I met my surgeon the first time? I think I was in middle school and the surgeon asked me if I knew why I was there. I very cleverly told him, "Dr. H doesn't like my teeth."

I previously explained that I have an under bite where basically the space my lower teeth wrap around is bigger than my upper teeth (like, my teeth are in concentric bite shaped circles...). Like I said, originally it wasn't so obvious from the front, it was more like my lower jaw was just wider, but with my braces they pulled my lower teeth forward, so it's under bite all the way around.

So my surgery is in two months.

I've gone back and forth about a gajillion times whether I want to be wired shut for six weeks or have plates and screws. There's a tiny risk of nerve damage with the latter, and no risk of nerve damage for the former. With the latter, I'll know as soon as I wake up from the anesthesia whether the surgery was successful. With the former, I won't know till they unwire me.

But that's not what I'm using to make this decision.

The last time I saw the surgeon, he reminded me and my parents of our choices. As we were leaving the hospital, we were discussing it. My parents both agreed that they wouldn't be able to deal with being wired shut for six weeks, they'd feel claustrophobic in their own heads.

Suddenly, two thoughts came to my mind.

Thought #1: I love to ski. I haven't actually skied since 8th grade because I got busy in high school, but I was really good in middle school. At one point in maybe 6th grade, I decided to try snow boarding.

It completely freaked me out. I had both feet attached to the same thing. I couldn't handle it.

In the car, I suddenly realized it might be like that, only my head instead of my feet. My head's a lot more important than my feet. It'd be talking instead of walking that I wouldn't be able to do properly. Not a pleasant thought.

Thought #2: At some point when I was little, I would imagine anywhere between ages 5 and 8, my father read The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask to us. After this, we rented the movies. I don't remember anything about The Three Musketeers movie, which makes me think I might be imagining having rented it, but I do remember some scenes from The Man in the Iron Mask very very vividly.

Mainly, I remember the last scene. The king, who turned out to actually be the younger twin and therefore not the legitimate king, has been put in the iron mask he previously made his brother wear because he is evil and knew his brother had the more legitimate claim and was afraid someone would find out. You just see him thrashing around this room that he's clearly locked into. There's been this decree that no one is to speak to him or be spoken to by him or anything for the rest of his life and he gets his food through a little cat flap on the door and he has this iron thing on his head. It looks like a knight's helmet.

Except he can't take it off. He's completely trapped inside it and when you throw in that he's trapped in this room completely alone until he dies with no human contact whatsoever, you have to imagine that he's going to wind up trapped inside his head and going crazy.

I don't know why I watched this movie when I was little. My parents were pretty good about making sure the things we watched were age appropriate, and to be fair, it's not like this movie ever gave me nightmares.

But I think that's because it never occurred to me that there could be any kind of equivalent in my own life.

Driving out of that parking garage listening to my parents talk about being claustrophobic in their own heads, I realized I would feel like I was reenacting that last scene for the whole 6 weeks.

Hell no, I thought to myself. I'm getting plates and screws.

So, with the method decided on, the next step is the actually surgery.

This is the part you don't want to read if you're squeamish about surgery.

Basically, the goal is to widen my upper jaw and bring my lower jaw back and to the side slightly (because as if my face isn't screwed up enough, it's crooked... I'm kidding. From the outside, my face is fine. Although I can tell my lower jaw is crooked, and I can see how it's made the rest of my face slightly crooked. Moving on.).

To do this, they're basically going to slit my upper palette and put in a permanent palette expander. BTW no matter what I had decided about plates and screws or wires, I would have wound up with plates and screws on the top.

Then they're going to cut into my lower jaw. I'm not exactly sure where. I know one of the cuts is going to go through the very back lower right of my mouth because that's where the wisdom tooth they had to take out for the surgery was. Other than that, I just know they're gonna cut into my bones and pull my jaw back and to the side.

Then they put a bunch of metal in and screw it all together.

And voilá. Perfect teeth.

Then I spend two nights or so in the hospital. Which honestly is making me somewhat nervous.

I've never spent a single night in the hospital. When I got my wisdom teeth out is the first time I've gone to a hospital for something more than a consult or getting blood work done, unless you count when I was born, which I don't.

And of course, I'm 19 which means I'm not a kid. Maybe it sounds childish, but I'm praying they'll let me have my parents there when they knock me out and wake me up. I mean, they're doing stuff with my mouth and teeth and jaw. Considering my extreme lack of hospital experience, I think I deserve my parents there....

PS I'm just gonna point out that I have an older sister who broke her leg at 18 months, and two brothers who have each gotten stitches and various other bloody things that got taken care of in the emergency room.

They all had parents around for their hospital treatment!! Well, except for the times when they were staying with friends or on biking trips or whatever. But they still had someone with them for all this stuff....

Window shopping online is depressing

I've done this both with shoes and vacation spots. It's all depressing.

See, first I went and added about a million shoes to my Zappos wishlist. A lot of fantastically cute shoes that I can totally see Ginger Rogers dancing in. Or maybe Rose Marie wearing in the Dick Van Dyke Show. Seriously, has anyone ever noticed how fabulous her shoes are?? Mary Tyler Moore is always just in pumps. Rose Marie has fantastic shoes.

Anyway. So then I was all, let's plan a dream vacation on Expedia! But I couldn't make the website do what I wanted. I kept thinking it was actually gonna book me and I didn't really want that.

But just now I was reading [The Customer Is] Not Always Right and there's a lot of posts there from people in New Zealand, and a lot of time they talk about the Maori people. Being the occasionally naive American (I always forget that Australia and New Zealand were populated before the Brits started sending convicts there....), I was intrigued (hey, that shows my naivete is only occasional. I admit that I don't know everything and I try to learn. See? Really naive Americans either don't realize there's anything beyond our borders or think everything outside our borders is actually within our borders....). Wanting to know more about the Maori, I went to my favorite "won't teach you anything but will give you a little context/background for it" source: Wikipedia.

Wikipedia explained that the Maori were Polynesians who went to a different part of the South Pacific. I'm not sure if they left the Hawaii area or got separated from the ones who wound up in Hawaii. Either way, besides a lot of evolution, their culture is closest to Hawaiian/Polynesian type cultures.

Well, this reminded me of the Polynesian Resort in Disney World, which is where we used to stay. When I was little, my family went to Disney World pretty much every year during Christmas vacation (actually, I have no idea how often it was. I remember a lot of things as being every year that actually were a lot more occasional.... Or like how I remember my "uncle" Scotty [surrogate uncle. Mom's college friend. Practically full time babysitter. At least in my memory.] picking me up from kindergarten every day. My mother tells me it was more like once a week.) and while I'm sure we didn't always stay there, I don't remember staying anywhere else.

Anyway, I've always thought that when I discover some way to fund a trip to Disney World (yeah right), that's where I wanna stay.

So not gonna happen. During the "value season" the cheapest room is $385. And it doesn't look like that even includes continental breakfast, which means 3 meals a day on top of that, plus park admission, plus any kind of nightlife stuff (my parents used to go to the Adventurers Club and occasionally take us... That was awesome...)...

So I'm thinking when I go and take a vacation sans parents, it'll have to be to Vegas. You can stay in The Venetian, which is a far from lousy hotel, for $149. Plus in Vegas there's always the chance of coming out on top...

Although considering all you can do at 19 is scratch tickets, I'm not expecting much right now. But I do have a 21st birthday in a year and a half and it's never too early to start planning....

And no, I don't just wanna stay at the Venetian because that's where Phantom is. Added bonus.

'Course the downside to all this is my 21st birthday is gonna be a Wednesday, probably the first week back to class second semester. And going three hours west (time zone wise) is not really a great idea for a weekend. I mean, if you're gonna mess with your sleep, you might as well be gone long enough for it to make a difference.

Which means my 21st birthday trip (pardon me. 21st birthday DREAM trip.... Well, sort of dream. Is it bad that a part of me would rather Disney than Vegas for my 21st birthday?) won't be able to happen properly till March when I'll have a vacation....

'Course this is assuming I somehow have the means to go to Vegas. Or Orlando. Which honestly is unlikely.

See? This is the problem with online window shopping!!! I wind up thinking things through too much and being like, hey! I could do that! If I weren't in college and had a really awesome job with a really good salary that gave me really long weekends......

So, the moral of the story is: anyone wanna go to Disney World with me and front the cash for an epically fabulous hotel?? Oooh, and we should totally go to a character breakfast. I don't care where it is, they have them in the Polynesian and the Grand Floridian (well, ok, they did 10 years ago. I assume they still do.) and they have character lunches (maybe other meals too... I dunno...) in Cinderella's Castle. Which is where Peter Pan offered to teach me to fly when I was, like, 4. I don't actually remember that. Although I do remember him sitting on the back of a chair.

Sigh. Someday I'll be rich and famous and be able to spend two weeks in a super fantastic room at the Polynesian. Maybe.

That's the goal, anyway.

My Favorite Show

You could say my childhood was defined by musicals: Peter Pan, Fiddler on the Roof, Sound of Music, the King and I, My Fair Lady, the Music Man... The list is pretty long, but figure it's mostly Rogers and Hammerstein, a little Lerner and Lowe, and generally "classic" stuff. In other words, all stuff my mother loves.

Especially when I was little, my siblings and I were all really into Peter Pan. I had an obvious reason, but I don't know what the pull was for my siblings. The point is, we all loved it.

When I was maybe 6, my whole family went to see Cathy Rigby in Peter Pan in Boston. We had seats right at the front of some balcony. I don't know which one, I just remember feeling like we were really far back, so part of me thinks it wasn't the mezzanine. Either way, I should probably mention here that the beginning of this story is about my brother, not me.

My brother was about 3 at this point. He knew the show, but I guess he didn't know what to expect. My mother watching him says that as the overture started, he levitated to the front of his seat. He sat up perfectly straight and you could tell he suddenly knew what he was there for.

Now comes my part of the story, just remember the whole levitating-straight-up–to–the–front-of-the-seat thing.

My junior year of high school, I went to see Phantom of the Opera in London. I'd never seen it on stage before and haven't seen it since.

Before this, I never really had a favorite musical. At this point, I considered Phantom and Les Mis to be among my favorites, by I wouldn't have picked one.

Phantom of the Opera starts very slowly, both on stage and screen, because it has a prologue before the overture. There's an auction and the last item the audience sees auctioned off is the chandelier sitting on the stage. The auctioneer says, "This is the very chandelier which figures in the famous disaster." He goes on about lighting for a bit and finally says, "Perhaps we can frighten away the ghost of so many years ago with a little illumination! Gentlemen!"**

Then the chandelier starts lighting up and lifting off the stage as the overture starts and the scene rewinds to the height of the Paris Opera House (by the way, this sequence is really cool in the movie....).

At the age of 17, I sat on one side of Her Majesty's Theatre in London on some random balcony watching the auction (My seat kind of sucked actually. But it was totally worth it.). As the auctioneer said, "Gentlemen!" I sat straight up. I moved to the edge of my seat. I was utterly transfixed on the chandelier now rising off the stage and the big awesome "duhm duh duh duh duh duh duduh..." (sing it, it's totally the tune...)

I had the same response as my three year old brother.

Now, I'm not saying that Peter Pan was Teddy's favorite show (although it might have been...), but suddenly, when I realized the reaction I had had, I realized I was kidding myself. I love Les Mis, really I do. And I love all the other shows I considered among my favorites. But I suddenly realized I do have a favorite show. And that show is Phantom of the Opera.

I'm not the only one with this reaction to the chandelier.

Last October, the production of Phantom in London celebrated its 10,000th performance and its 24th birthday. In honor of the occasion, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Michael Crawford joined the cast for curtain call (by the way, if you don't care about the whole video, ALW comes on at about 1:30 [technically it's later, but the orchestra does something totally fitting for his entrance, so just start there....], Michael Crawford comes on at 3:40, and he says what I'm talking about at about 4:42):



Ok, so maybe Mr. Crawford's reaction doesn't mean it's his favorite show. But I had the same reaction to something as Michael Crawford!!!!! That's really exciting for me... He's one of my idols. He's amazing and awesome....

As for the rest of watching the show in London, the guy who I saw playing the Phantom was Ramin Karimloo. That's the guy who, less than a year later, would originate the same role in Love Never Dies.

Wait, does that count as originating the role? I mean, he's not originating the character, but he's the first person ever to play that part.... Huh... Confusing...

I haven't seen Phantom since then, other than the movie and lots and lots of YouTube (both of it and LND), but I can still feel like I'm sitting in that seat. I can still feel like I'm there. My reaction when the chandelier went up only scratches the surface of how I responded to finally watching the show on stage.

**These lines are from Phantom of the Opera but may not be exactly word for word the lines. I am remembering them and writing them as I remember. I am also punctuating them as I see fit.