This reviewer left such a thoughtful review, I feel they understood my objective.
My book, "Craving Normal," available on Amazon.
Tag: 1960s
While promoting Craving Normal at the Brand Library in Glendale, I set up my books next to a tray of Twinkies. Below them, I put a sign saying, “Why Twinkies? Read the back of my book…” I did it as a “conversation starter.” I put that in quotes because the last time somebody used that term with me was when I asked my accountant why he had a silver streamer draped across his office door. His answer: “Conversation starter.” I nodded, and the conversation ended.
But yesterday, I got all kinds of talk when people inquired about my tray of Twinkies. Either they read the back of the book, or I told them, “Well, as a kid of health food freaks, I watched all the kids at school devouring Twinkies at lunch. So I craved them. That’s what I thought ‘normal’ kids with normal parents who lived in normal homes ate.”
A tall, older woman with a Boston accent came by and told me, “In the 1970s I used to give Twinkie tours.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, they were made in the same factory as Wonder Bread.”
She began her Twinkie tour spiel, pointing toward an invisible conveyor belt above her head. “And over here, the Twinkies are being filled.”
After she quit the job, she became a health food eater and never touched Twinkies. Oh, and she added this Twinkie fact. “Another woman I worked with, who used to give Twinkie tours, went on to become a Playboy playmate and then became a cop in Boston.”
I only contributed, “Wow.”
She looked down at my book. “I’d buy your book. Sounds interesting. But I’m 86 now and decided to stop buying things. Don’t want to leave my kids with a bunch of crap they don’t want.”
And the conversation ended.
My book is available! You can buy it here.
My naughty ways come naturally. Yep, I burst into this world strong-willed, adventurous, rowdy, curious, and ready for fun – rules be damned. Life experiences may have smoothed or sharpened some of my edges, but that kid is still kicking.
Witness one example of my “strong-willed” (bratty) behavior in the trailer I made for my up-coming book, “Craving Normal“: At Disneyland, I pushed a little girl out of the way from posing with the chipmunk named Chip (Or maybe it was Dale). Then I squeezed myself between the giant chipmunk and the little blonde girl who tried to pose for a picture with the Disney character. When the chipmunk began walking along with the little girl, I got fed up and, and with my face scrunched into a frown, pushed her away. She ran off. Then I smiled and posed with him all by myself.
While I may have mellowed a bit, I’m still THAT kid. I was born this way -> See, scientists agree.
Okay, enough about me. What traits of yours were apparent right from the beginning?
Leave a Comment
As a child I had a large imagination, which led to confusion. Why? Well, I believed flying dust particles were fairies and thought little people in the TV box spoke to me. I also believed giants existed. Mom read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales in which giants ate children, trolls lived under bridges, and old women stuffed kids in ovens. To me, giants were as real as that man named Walter Cronkite Grandpa watched on TV. I never met Mr. Cronkite, but I believed he was real, too. So when I heard an announcer on the radio say, “The Giants will be returning to San Francisco,” I ran through the house, screaming, “Mommy, giants are coming! Giants are coming!” imagining they were the kid-eating kind of giants. Then Mom calmed me by explaining they’re San Francisco’s baseball team.
What did you once believe as a child? Were you disappointed or happy to find out you were only confused?
Photo: I loved Grimm’s Fairy Tales so much I “read” (pretended to read while I made up the story) to my little sister. She seems riveted.
Leave a Comment“Craving Normal,” my stories as a child growing up in the 1960s and beyond, will be available soon. Here’s my nearly complete book cover. Think I’ll keep “Enthusiastic quote goes here.”
“Craving Normal,” by Michele Miles Gardiner – back book cover text:
Living in a rock hut on a nude beach, staying in a religious commune,
facing an angry man with a gun, riding camels, hiding her freaky health
food lunches from lucky Twinkie eaters – Michele didn’t experience any
of this when her family lived in the suburbs of San Francisco. Then came
the counterculture revolution. Her entire life changed: Michele’s young
parents sold their home, bought a car and trailer over-seas and took her
and her little sister to explore the world.
We know a lot about the “flower children,” but what does an actual child
growing up in that era have to say? While many tales about that revolutionary time
are on record, few come from the perspective of the children who lived it.
This collection of stories are from one child’s perspective – tales of
becoming a young adult whose brain, and life, transformed from her early
experiences. Rebelling by cheer-leading, eating junk food, attending honor
roll parties, dreaming of being a foxy stewardess/actress? Lame, sure.
But how else does a child of young parents of the wild Sixties generation
rebel? By countering the counterculture.
Michele’s collection of stories – in which she rarely takes herself too
seriously – span from her earliest memories of the suburbs (her idea of
“normal”), through growing up trying to find a place where she fits in, once
again. Does she find it? Is Hollywood a sane place to search for normalcy?
“Craving Normal” trailer here: https://youtu.be/Z0M1BTXK20Q
Leave a Comment
You can take the child out of the wild, but not the wild out of the child… apparently. This may explain many of my stories. When your brain is formed a certain way – on freedom, travel, adventure – makes it hard to be happy sitting in a cubicle, or locked up in school, following bells, rules and clocks. It’s a huge reason I’m self-employed. And why I’m still wild today.
Photo: Nude beach, Mykonos, Greece. I’m second from left; Little sister, far left, with beach friends.
I write about living in a rock hut on this nude beach in my book, “Craving Normal.” The story’s called, “That’s Not An Eel!”
Back in the 1980s I was brain-dead. A lot of young people were. I don’t know, maybe the mass idiocy was our only way to rebel against the generation before us, those “Flower Children.” They dropped out, sat in, protested, and wanted to start a revolution. The most revolutionary thing I did was to discover the height my hair could reach with hair spray and a big comb. The only thing I ever fought for was my right to party. While lumped in with the “Baby Boomers,” people my age missed out on the FREE love (Watch out you’ll die from AIDS!) and mind-tripping drugs.
Hey, it wasn’t easy to rebel against a generation that enjoyed public nudity and dropping acid. I guess I could’ve gone punk or goth. Instead I went vapid. Hence the plethora of shockingly stupid moments I’ll be sharing with readers in my book.
In my book, “Craving Normal,” I tell about my childhood experiences, memories and perspective of growing up in the era of 1960’s counterculture and the aftermath. I follow those experiences with stories of my own teen years in the ’80s. An era nothing like the Sixties. My teen/young adult stories in the 1980s are often pretty goofy. But so was that decade – a blur of neon spandex, head bands, big hair, and bouncy dancing. Totally counter to the years in which I grew up, where everyone seemed so deep and serious. But my teen years? Not so much!
I should preface my book with this cautionary small print: “Don’t try this at home. Results may vary.”
Photo: Yep, I’m wearing a headband. Must’ve been too tight, because my brain was numb. Excuse the bad Photoshop. But I blurred out my friend, as to not insinuate she’s as lame-brained as I was.
2 Comments
(Photo: Here I am orating behind the podium at Anarchist Forum in Hyde Park, London. And, yes, I’m wearing lederhosen. See, you’d be ranting too if you had to wear suede shorts with suspenders, didn’t have a TV or any junk food. My dad wrote on this slide, “Michele mouthing off.” My mom said I drew a small crowd.)
Look I’ve been working on my book, “Craving Normal,” for so long I have posts on my dusty old blog about it… from – gulp! – ten years ago. As a lover of words, writing and books, every year I attend the LA Times Festival of Books. Here’s one such visit I blogged about on my now defunct (or is it de-funked, as in lost its funk?) blog, “Aprilbaby’s California Life” –
I walked by the NPR booth and heard author Susan Straight being interviewed. I stopped because I heard her mention her eldest child was at the Coachella music festival. The interviewer asked, “Oh, so do you think she’ll tune in to hear you on the radio?”
I knew I could relate to Susan when she said, “Uh, no. She doesn’t listen to me at home. Why would she want to hear me on the radio?” Spoken as a true parent to a teenager.
Susan Straight is an author from the Inland Empire. I only learned that after stumbling upon the book, “Inlandia,” and saw that the forward was written by the very same Susan Straight. Intrigued, I bought the book and attended a panel discussion with Susan and other writers from “Inlandia,” an anthology of writers from the Inland Empire.
My only time spent in the Inland part of California is whenever I have to pass through it heading for the San Bernardino Mountains to go skiing or the one time I cruised down part of Route 66. As the writers of “Inlandia” tell it, their home has been disparaged as nothing more than where the Hell’s Angels, neo-Nazis and smog dwell. Until then, I knew so little about the Inland Empire, I didn’t even realize that much about the area.
During the panel, the writers spoke of a place they grew up where orange groves and date tree forests were so vast they’d get lost in them; where the Santa Ana winds and the sand would blast the paint off of cars; where the air smelled of Eucalyptus and orange blossoms. It was where they arrived, grew and stayed.
As a resident of the San Fernando Valley, another maligned Southern California area, I could relate. While I’ve only read a few chapters of “Inlandia,” I’m really enjoying getting lost in the stories of their misunderstood land.
As I bought “Inlandia” from the Heyday Publishing Founder, Malcolm Margolin, he asked me what I do. I told him I’m writing “Craving Normal,” my stories of growing up in California and traveling the world as the kid of hippies. Malcolm, the bearded Allen Ginsberg look-a-like, threw back his head and laughed. “Did your parents feed you lentil loaf when all you really wanted was junk food?”
I slapped him on the shoulder. “Yeah, how’d ya guess?”
He told me his kids could relate as children of hippies.
“Yep, I just wanted a Twinkie,” I told him.
He nodded in sympathy, as if he’d heard it a million times from his own now-adult kids.
Yet I’ve got a craving to be heard, so I persevere, closer than ever to having my book, “Craving Normal,” published. In all these years a lot has happened – raised my daughter who went off to college; started a successful business, Tree Audio; dealt with life and death – but always I go back to my stories, crafting them, shaping them, editing them. My craving is a constant obsession, as you see.
Leave a Comment
Hey, wanna see some photos I’ll have in my book, “Craving Normal”? Here’s one. Consider this photo (Dad and me) is from the time in my life I refer to as the “normal” period, and you might understand the thesis of my book. This was an ordinary day in my life. But It just got weirder from here. So please feel free to share your own freaky childhood photo or less than typical memory in the comments below. Pleeeeeease. Come on! I can’t be the only one.
Well, now that you’re here, I’ll let you know more about my book, “Craving Normal.” I do have a thesis: Born into a relatively calm period in the mid 1960s, which I considered “normal” – right before the explosion of the counterculture movement – I watched and experienced my world change. Language, music, fashion, lifestyles, ideas and expectations changed faster than we could toss out my slinky and turn on a lava lamp. While this period in history is often spoken about by the young adults of that era, a.k.a “flower children,” I write from MY perspective, that of a child, a REAL child. I like to think that’s one thing which make my stories unique. What were we kids thinking? What were our experiences? My stories then follow my growing up in the shadow of all these changes. While many are quite goofy, they show how I bopped around the world, a world I was still trying to figure out on my own – just as the generation before me tried to figure it out. But I also try to bring humor to all these experiences, whenever I can.
Like this photo I posted, I mean, how can I not look back and laugh? Seriously, this was just a typical day in my young life, one I thought completely ordinary. Why not? What else did I know? And I sure didn’t know things would get even more colorful… real soon.
If you’d like to keep updated about the progress of my up coming book, please leave your email here.
Thanks for stopping by.
