Socal Mom by Donna Schwartz Mills

AAARGH!

This morning, I took Megan to the pediatrician for the fourth time in 10 days.

"Gosh, Mrs. Mills, we haven't seen this much of you since she was a newborn," the receptionist remarked. "Not that we don't enjoy seeing you and Megan," she added.

I know, I know. I like chatting with them, too - when I run into them at the mall. But this is too much. It's the last day of January, and we've already spent our $300 annual deductible for Megan.

Saturday night, Gareth was urging me to take her to the emergency room -- a place that I equate with hell, second only to Costco on a Saturday afternoon, and something to be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

"For a fever of 101? I don't think so," I said. "She's only been on the Zithromax for 24 hours - her fever should break tomorrow," I promised.

But yesterday morning, the thermometer still registered 101.3.

"I think we should call the doctor," he said. Now, my own mother is a classic hypochondriac who dragged me to the doctor every time I had a sniffle (and today racks up frequent visitor miles at her own E/R). So I've gone the other way. I don't want anything to do with doctors unless I'm convinced it's serious.

The problem is, as I have no medical training of my own (I don't want anything to do with doctors, right), I can't always tell when it's serious, and then I feel guilty for allowing her to go to school for two days with walking pneumonia (which happened in the first grade).

Her hacking cough had kept me awake. All I knew was that she simply wasn't getting better.

I called my sister, who was visiting her in-laws in San Pedro and had mentioned dropping in on us on their way back to Sacramento. "It sounds like she could have pneumonia," Linda said.

So I placed the call, prompting my husband to whine that I never listen to his opinion (and when it comes to the issue of when to call the doctor, he's right. He tends to overreact whenever something is out of whack with our daughter. Heck, we both do -- it's just that our hackles get raised over different issues.)

The weekend on-call doctor listened as I hastily went over the details of the last week and a half. "One of two things could be happening here," she said. "The antibiotic she's taking may not be the right one. Or it's possible that the bronchitis is viral and not bacterial -- so no antibiotic is going to work."

She prescribed a different medication to replace the Zithromax and suggested we come in this morning -- possibly for another X-ray to determine if it's gotten worse (thank goodness! No ER!)

So Megan and I piled back in the car at 7:00 a.m. this morning so we could get to the doctor's office in time for the 8:00 walk-in hour. (Their offices are about 15 miles away, but with the Monday morning traffic, it takes about an hour to get there from here.) The good news is that her lungs were clear -- so there is improvement.

They took a blood count and confirmed that the infection she's suffering from is viral, so no amount of antibiotic is going to help her. She just needs to let the bug run its course.

"Continue to take the augmentin," the doctor instructed. "That should prevent any secondary bacterial infection from happening."

So there you have it. She's still running 101, and is so bored with watching TV that she's actually picked up a book. And I'm still here.

A Mommy Blog Again

I'd like to thank Mark Evanier, Jen-O-Rama and Paul Harris of KMOX St. Louis for the kind words they posted about my Tonight Show blabbering. This thing got some actual traffic, which I guess is what happens when you write about something people are actually interested in. (If you came here to find those posts, you may view them here.)

Now that my walk down memory lane is over, I'm going to revert back to my usual subject: How to raise a child with good values when some of her friends' parents think it's normal to hand out $400 goodie bags at a kid's birthday party.

Apparently, the media are starting to catch on to the fact that blogging is not just a political activity, as witnessed in this article printed in today's New York Times.

If you are not already registered with the NYT and/or have no inclination to do so, let me sum it up for you: It's a look at the phenomenon of moms and dads who tell the world about their everyday experiences. Sometimes highly entertaining, sometimes boringly mundane, the Times recognizes that there has been a blogging explosion among today's parents.

And they take what, in my opinion, is a very condescending attitude, finding it "remarkable" that anyone would be interested in reading this stuff.

Now, grant you, I understand why my stats soared when I was spilling insider celebrity stories -- I know that's sexier than ranting on about my daughter's never-ending bronchial infection (which, by the way, rages on, thank you very much. I will post about that later and I know you will be scintillated). But take a look at the blogroll on my sidebar -- I read every one of the journals listed every single day. I learn from them, I laugh from their take on their experiences and I've made new online friends. Parenting is universal -- why would it be remarkable that others who are doing it would be interested in reading, and writing about it?

The author of the NYT article accused blogging parents of being navel-gazing, self-absorbed, selfish and basically uncaring, speculating that their children will be scarred when they are old enough to read what their parents wrote. I find this so ludicrous -- like once you become a mom, you're not allowed to write about the things that are important to you? Whatever happened to the advice to keep a journal, to write what you know?

Yeah, I know, these things are public -- but no one ever accused Erma Bombeck of harming her kids by exaggerating about them in her humor column. Show me a successful writer who didn't draw from his or her life. I feel so insulted by this, I just can't stand it. So did Toronto Mom, who expressed it so well here.

The one positive thing about the article is that it highlighted some of my favorites listed on my blogroll . It would have been nice if they included all the URL's instead of just a couple. Note to the NY Times Style Gurus -- if you are publishing an article about a website, leaving out the URL is just as bad as misspelling a source's name. Oh yeah, they did that in the article, too.

There is one more thing I'd like to rant about, and that is the brouhaha brought about by our current Education Secretary, Margaret Spellings, against PBS and "Postcards From Buster," a spinoff of the Arthur cartoon series. Actually, Kim at Catawampus rants about it better than I can. Read hers and then write to Secretary Spellings and PBS.

As for me -- I had another rather sleepless night worrying about the fact that Megan's barking seal cough was beginning to sound more like a walrus. She just got yet another antibiotic to replace the one she started on Friday. I'll scar her by writing more about that later...

One Final Post About the Tonight Show

When I applied to my first "straight" job, after 12 years in radio and TV production, the personnel director had a problem with my resume.

"Why have you had so many jobs?" she asked.

I had to explain to her how it is in entertainment -- that work is seasonal, that jobs you think of as worthy of listing (i.e, "permanent") may not last as long as the ones designated as "temporary." That the fact that you keep getting hired means you're good, not flakey (although being flakey isn't necessarily a bad thing in Hollywood -- as long as you get your job done).

Even if you are lucky enough to find yourself on a hit show that lasts more than a six-week run, you will inevitably go on "hiatus." A show's stars, producers and directors (the folks whose names flash by in the opening credits) earn enough money to enjoy these periods with lavish vacations -- or even just getting to know their families again at home.

The rest of the production staff - the assistants, runners and crew - need to plan for this period of several weeks (or even months) when they are off work with no pay. If you are not good at planning your finances (like me), a hiatus can be a stressful time. And if your show abruptly ends without a pickup, you have the additional stress of trying to line up your next gig.

The Tonight Show didn't go on hiatus. Johnny may have taken many deserved vacations, but his staff continued to report to work, day after day. The exception was when NBC ran the Summer Olympics and we got two weeks off... with pay. This was in addition to our regular paid vacation. We also had health insurance and a pension plan and annual raises. Ask any non-union worker in Hollywood -- even 20 years ago, this was unusual. And it's one of the reasons I admired Johnny Carson.

When the WGA held its five month long strike, a work stoppage that pretty much shut down everything in the business, the entire Tonight Show staff (except the writers) continued to report to work. By that time, I had sold my own first sitcom script -- but as I was not contributing writing services to the show, the Guild allowed me to continue working, too. On days I was needed for picket duty, I would run over to Disney or Universal or CBS, carry my sign for a couple of hours and then go to work. (The one exception was the day we picketed NBC; I thought it might be tacky to return to my office right after I'd been marching below it.)

The Tonight Show was dark for the first month, after which it was announced that Carson Tonight was negotiating an interim agreement with the WGA so we could get back on the air. And we did go back shortly before that deal was in place; Johnny wrote the first monologue all by himself and it was good.

It's no wonder that people who were fortunate enough to be on the Tonight Show staff stayed on for years -- lifers. In fact, the only real turnaround was with the junior writers... and the writers' assistant.

It was a comfortable, but not satisfactory for someone with ambitions of her own. It was three years before I sold another script, and I attributed that partly to the security of that weekly paycheck. I figured that if I was a little bit less secure, I might be more motivated to write. So with the promise of a new script assignment and the acquisition of a major league agent representing my partner and me, I quit.

My last day on the job, Fred de Cordova said goodbye to me in his own inimitable manner:

"Hurry up and fail so you can come back to us."

There are days when I wish I could...

Funny Props

In the winter of 1987, Johnny caught a winter bug that caused him to miss a week of regularly scheduled shows. While home sick, he discovered the newest phenomenon on cable: The Home Shopping Network. He came back to work with videos he'd made of the channel in its early phase, complete with pitchmen and women offering to "toot toot" a horn to encourage buyers.

The "Tele-Scam" sketch made its debut in February of that year and repeated several times over the next few years, with Johnny and Teresa Ganzel playing the Art Fern-like shills, selling elaborate prop pieces, like a "cubic zirconium" ring the size of a tennis ball, and a "pet branding set" that even included a little plastic branding iron ("Flipper") for your pet fish. On that first run, the bit was climaxed with a "Jamie Farr Orange Juice Squeezer." This was a bust of the erstwhile Captain Klinger's head, with an old fashioned squeezer on top. It was rigged so that when you twisted an orange half in the squeezer on top, juice would drip out its enormous nose.

It was hilarious. Siskel and Ebert were guests that night, and they begged us to sell that prop to them. Nothing doing; each subsequent time we did that sketch, we finished with Jamie Farr -- and it never ceased to get a big laugh.

Politics

Whatever Carson's personal political leanings were (and several of the articles I've read this last week indicate that he was rather liberal), he never let on to his public. When I arrived there, his longtime head writer was a Republican with connections all the way to the White House. ("I was one of Nixon's speechwriters," he once told me. "I know a lot of jailbirds.") In 1988, Ray supplied jokes to the Bush campaign -- while his partner on the show did the same job for Dukakis. Basically, the political comedy at the Tonight Show was equal opportunity... whenever someone in power did something stupid, he (or she) was fair game. And that's the way it should be.