The EPIC Mr. Don't Touch the Banana

The following post was written by Kikita, whose appreciation for bananas has led to endless laughter and entertainment.

I can't tell you where or how it all started, but it started. I can only guess it happened on facebook because that's where most things happen these days.
Let me be clear about something . . . I am not particularly fond of the taste of bananas. Ok, that's not entirely true. There have been several years where I absolutely loathed bananas, but now that I'm an immature adult, I have accepted them for the goodness that they can be.

It IS possible that the banana thing started shortly after the monkey thing. (I LOVE monkeys. I have several monkey stuffed animals and I can do a FABULOUS monkey sound, but that's not important right now.)

For all intents and purposes, I'm not sure that it really matters where the banana thing started. What IS important is that it DID start and was kept alive.

Typically, I will start working on the family Christmas video in late August or early September. As it just so happens, late August found me at a Willy Chirino concert.

It was there that I met my inspiration.

Every year I struggle with making sure the video is relevant to our Cuban-American family NOW while not forgetting and celebrating that we are still Cuban. But now the majority of the family prefers speaking in English, so they relate to a Cuban song in Spanish less and less. No, that doesn't make things easy.
But I had found my answer.

I started story-boarding and planning and ran into a few hiccups such as "what about the family that will NOT be at Thanksgiving?"
But I did what I could with what resources I had.

I am so grateful that my big, fat, Cuban family will do what I ask of them without question and will go for it. Participation was key in pulling this one off. And I knew it would be EPIC.

After Thanksgiving, I got to work. And, thanks to the help and support of some "real, live" editors (Thank you Mr. Simpson, Mr. Young, & Mr. De Castro), my plan was coming to fruition in ways that were even better than I could have expected.

 

This has to be one of my most favorite pieces that I have ever cut together. I love it because it's wholly Cuban (every good Cuban-American knows this song), it's fun, it's Spanglish, and it's . . . well, it's EPIC (even if I do say so myself).

It even inspired the title for this year's video: "ORO PARECE"

That is the beginning of a Cuban riddle that goes:
ORO PARECE
PLATA-NO ES

It's a play on words. "Oro" is gold. "Plata" is silver, but "platano" is banana.
IT LOOKS LIKE GOLD
SILVER IT IS NOT / BANANA IT IS

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado . . .

Mas café, por favor.

My mom is back from Miami.

She spent the entire summer there and she has stories.

Lots of stories.

A plethora of stories. (I know. The acorn does not fall far from the tree. Shut up.)

So we've been talking.

Or should I say, she's been talking. And talking. And talking.

My job is to keep food and drink on the table in between stories.

My mom, like any good Cuban, tells a great story.

And because she's 95, she tends to repeat her stories at times. ;-)

I'm a little burned out on my-summer-with-Fernando-in-Miami stories.

But she's here for the entire weekend.

So now, it's Sunday morning and I have another full day of we-went-to-the-Palacio-de-Los-Jugos-a-few-times stories to look forward to today.

There's only one way to get through this. Happy Sunday, people! =D

H/T Mica. Thanks, amiga!

I see Cuban people, mama-baby.

I told you there was Elvis.

And I told you about the whole Vegas-Wedding-Renewal-at-The-Graceland-Chapel thing.

I finally got the photo of my big, fat, Cuban family with Elvis. (Or The Elvis Tribute Specialist Du Jour.)

 

And then, suddenly and without much warning... he left the building. (I guess that's just his "way.")

"Man, I really like Vegas."  ~ Elvis Presley

How Many Cuban Girls Does it Take to Get ONE Photo?

So, remember when Amy and I were in Las Vegas a few weeks ago? While we were there I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to take a picture of us in the elevator.

But let me explain....

The elevators at Bally's (where we were staying) were mirrored. And you know how much I love Now-and-Then type photos.

Somewhere, I remembered, there was a photo of Amy and me that I had taken in a mirror. I'm pretty sure it was taken in Las Vegas. I wanted to recreate that shot.

I remember that I had the camera and I was pointing it at us in the mirror. It was quite good. And I remember liking it a lot. (Where is that photo? I know I've seen it recently...)

On our way out for the evening I tried to take the shot, but I wasn't sure it was coming out just right.

"Let's do it when we get back."

So, it's after midnight (which means nothing to most people in Vegas) and we're both exhausted and it's super-stinking-but-it's-a-dry-heat hot. Still I insist we have to do this photo shoot in the elevator. (Where is that original photo? I know I've seen it somewhere just recently....)

We get into the elevator and at the last minute A Strange Person gets in. (Of course, this is not at all strange in Las Vegas, land of Strange People, but that's not important right now.)

Amy and I both sort of panic when he asks, "Going up, or down?" (Argh! He's speaking to us! What do we do?? What do we say??)

At the same exact time: I say, "Down." She says, "Up."

We exchange a quick glance and AGAIN at the exact time time: I say, "Up." She says, "Down."

I'm the calm and quick thinking one... "Umm...so, is it after midnight?" I ask Strange Person who might be wanted in a few states - he's got a shifty look to him, who then goes off about how it's after 3 am where he's from way down in South Texas, "way down by the Mexican border" - like I was really interested in just how far he had to run to escape his chain-gang in south Texas that he was from and seriously, can't he see that all we want is for him to vacate so we can  have this elevator to ourselves so we can take the stupid picture and just go to bed?

Of course, I did not let on to Strange Person in the Bally's Elevator After Midnight* that I really did not care.  This made my (not as cool as I was at that moment) daughter collapse in a fit of laughter once Strange Person in the *B.E.A.M. (=D) had made his exit.

I was still very focused on trying to get the photo I wanted. She was not cooperating very well. In fact, she was seriously handicapped and was doubled over laughing so hard at what will forever be known as the Elevator Antics At Bally's.

Exhibit A:

 

Me? I was intent on getting that photo. (Darn it! I know I have seen it just recently! It's right on the tip of my brain. (As in that's how you would have something on the tip of your tongue in the same way.)

If I could get Amy to cooperate, I would just take the photo and then hunt for the original when I got home and do one of my Now-and-Then posts. (Where was that photo? This was sooo bugging me!)

I surely was completely incapable of blogging about the entire Bally's Elevator Scene with Strange Person. I'm just not that articulate.

Finally!

We got the photo I wanted...

I realized way later in sort of a slow-motion a-ha moment where I had recently seen the original mirror photo.

You are probably much quicker on the uptake and may have already noticed it...

See the first photo on the left of my blog header. That's Amy and me. In Las Vegas in 2006. We took the picture in a mirror. We. Did. It!

 

Shut up. I know.

"Ya, KIA, Ya!"

I drive around my suburban neighborhood in a minivan.
It's actually a KIA Sedona. And I like it. A lot.

We just call it The KIA. And that has become its given name.

Adam, who is 22 and who has, shall we say, a different driving style than I do, mocks me whenever I am driving and I accelerate to pass someone.

"Ya, Kia, Ya!" He shouts as if he were driving (no pun intended) a team of horses.

Mom accelerates.
Adam shouts: "Ya, KIA, Ya!"

It's even better when he does it with a Cuban accent, which makes it sound like he's yelling at the KIA to STOP.

"Ya, KIA, Ya! Por favor, basta ya!"

(Sorry, you have to actually speak Spanish to get that one and it's kind of impossible to translate. Just trust me on this. He's asking it to please stop.)

We laugh every time. (But then, you know, we're easily entertained...)

So, I had been thinking of getting a personalized license plate. (Okay, a VANITY plate. =D)

My original one, Smrtqbn (that also happens to be my Twitter name in case you want to follow me, but that's not important right now) has expired and I was trying to come up with a new plate.

SIDE NOTE: We applied for Cuba2Go, which is the name of my online business Cuba To Go!, and I got very excited about that, but the Braniacs Who Work At the California DMV wouldn't approve it (I am so not kidding about this!) because it sounded (wait for it....) racist to them. (Racist?? Seriously? Look at the stuff that has slipped by them!!!)

We even showed them extensive documentation that Cuba to Go! was indeed our business name and was REGISTERED WITH THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA as such, but no go.

Which now left us pondering other clever combinations of letters to make some kind of a mobile statement as we drove around town in The KIA.

How about "Ya, KIA, Ya!" ?

Yay! How cool is that?
We got kind of excited about it, until we put the letters together as they would appear on the license plate....

It was my 95 year old Cuban mom who was the first to say it: "Parese algo Japones."

Yep. YAKIAYA sure sounds like a Japanese surname.

Shut up. I know. So, who needs a vanity plate?

I have other ways to recognize my KIA.  ;-)

Mother's Day Without Mom

The following post has been brought to you by none other than Kikita the Awesome.

As you well know, Mami & Co. are touring Washington DC and Adam and I couldn't join the trip this time around. This means we have been left to our own devices and sometimes our devices can be rather silly.

Now, I'll be the first to to admit that Mami has "got it going on." (I daresay she wrote the book!)
She is the epitome of coolness.
What you may have only caught glimpses of, though, is that (in her infinite coolness) she has a total geek side. You may have guessed this from how much we love Lord of the Rings. (Or simply by her constantly stating that she is an "uber-geek.")

But then, LOTR IS pretty cool, so it may not count as geeky enough.

Well, there's more. Mami is also very into old school Star Trek. Any one of us kids could tell you that her favorite Star Trek film is "The Wrath of Khan" and that she always cries at the same part:

She loves Star Trek so much, that there was a time when I happened to be in Vegas during a Trekkie Convention and Mami was hoping I'd not only go, but bring her something back. (Regretfully, I didn't make it that far down the Strip on that trip.)

Of course you know where this is going. Since Mami was gone, Adam and I decided to do what we probably would have done with her for Mother's Day. We went to the movies.

Having been raised as Trekkies, Adam and I sat in the theater thinking "Wow! there are so many references to Mom's favorite movie!"

Too bad she couldn't be there. She would have loved it. I know that now you're probably thinking to yourself, "But Kikita, why didn't you just wait for her to go see it?"

Bueno, because "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few . . . or the one" (even if that "one" is Mami. =D)

Besides, if she wants us to take her to see it for her upcoming birthday, that can be arranged. ;-)

We love you, Mom!

Oh, the places you'll go...

I love my camera.
I take it with me wherever I go.

(Except for that whole incident when it crashed and burned and I was going to go meet Desi (*sigh*) and I didn't have a camera so I had to get a little pocket size one because of course I just had to document that particular meeting and now I carry the little one in my purse most of the time except for when one of the kids asks to borrow it which is the whole point of this post.)

Amy Kikita borrowed my camera. The little one.

She had places to go, she said, and things to do and she was going to document it all, and blog about it and so she needed the camera to take pictures because even though her phone takes pictures, it's really kind of lame.... (I know I'm a little wordy here today.  I have not had an internet connection for days and I'm a little crazed and it shows, but that's not important right now...)

So I was a little surprised when:
1) She returned the camera with all the pictures still on it.
2) She had not blogged about anything related to what was on the memory card.

Curious.

Sooo, I found these on my camera and decided to post My Interpretation of the events of her Big Outing...

She and Sheila went to the Aquarium of the Pacific...

where they went specifically to pet the giant bat rays because when would you otherwise get to pet a giant bat ray in real life? And there were no other sea creatures at the aquarium, only birds...

And so they were befriended by two colorful magic birds whom they named Chuli and Lalita - they weren't really sure if they were Cuban or African birds and the names seemed to work on both levels...

Kikita and Chuli share a moment...

Expecting to find fish at the aquarium, they were surprised, but not disappointed when they instead found a rare American Bald Eagle...
They called him Ambrose.

Their foray into aquarium life having confused them, (because of all the birds and no sea creatures) they decided to have lunch at Outback Steakhouse...

and drown their sorrows in beer...

and chocolate.

Having found sustenance in the gooey chocolate concoction, they decided to take in the culture at the Museum of Latin American Art...

where they had to scale The Endless Stairs of Doom...
 
Sheila apparently collapsed at the final step...

But they were rewarded for their brave quest when they stumbled upon The Suitcase of the Lambs...

Difficult to understand? Here's a close-up which explains it more clearly...

Okay, then. That was all quite random, wasn't it?

Don't know if I'll ever find out the actual events of the day.

But, inspired by their visit to the art gallery, I created this piece of art using wordle:

(did I mention that I took a muscle-relaxant earlier? Even so, I crack myself up.)  ;-)

Spring-Breaking

We're Spring-Breaking this week. I'm pretty tired from the whirlwind of just-before-spring-break activities

We attended a Passover Seder at the home of some dear Jewish friends...

And, of course, participated in the traditional Egg Dyeing Ritual at my niece, Helen's house on Sunday...

It seems most of our activities last week revolved around plates-with-circular-indents, but that's not important right now. ;-)

Now that we're on Spring Break, I am taking a few days off from my online activities to relax and regroup with my husband and kids and catch up on some other projects I've been working on.

Plus we're making plans to attend a Tea Party (ahem..) on Wednesday.

I'll be back in a day or so and we'll do a comment drawing for some cool CubaToGo! stuff. 

Until then, umm...talk amongst yourselves and (because it's my blog and I can post random stuff if I want to) please enjoy my very favorite of all-time Veggie Tales Silly Song, The (bilingual!) Dance of The Cucumber.

It's genius. =D

How to Cha-Cha

You know those uber-dorky people who have a dictionary and an atlas sitting near the dinner table so that they can look stuff up when they start arguing during dinner about ways to pronounce words, or the capital of someplace, or what exactly a rhombus is?

We are those people.

By the way... In geometry a rhombus or rhomb is a quadrilateral whose four sides all have the same length. The rhombus is often called a diamond, after the diamonds suit in playing cards.

Yes. Us uber-dorks argue about this kind of stuff. And I'm Cuban, so arguing is like breathing to me. ;-)

When I was growing up it was that same way. The dictionary and the atlas were staples of our meals much like black beans and rice. We eat this stuff up!

But now that we are post-modernists living in the 21st century, we've added the cell phone, which is usually off-limits during meals, but that's not important right now, because now there is Cha-Cha.

And Cha-Cha knows EVERYTHING.

How it works: You text 242242 and ask your question. ChaCha texts back the answer super quickly.

In the past couple of days Cha-Cha has given us the following information:

(I was having a disagreement on the costuming for our upcoming Bye, Bye Birdie show with someone when they suggested the girls wear poodle skirts and I argued <there I go again!> that poodle skirts were pretty much gone by the time the Ed Sullivan show was happening. I was right. =D)
The Ed Sullivan Show aired from 1959 to 1967. Ed Sullivan died in October of 1974. Thanks for ChaCha'ing!

And we also learned this fun fact as I argued (of course I did!) that Alice Cooper was not his real name...
Alice Cooper had his name legallly changed from Vincent Damon Furnier in 1975. ChaCha!

So, we're arguing and ChaCha'ing and arguing and ChaCha'ing and I'm thinking..

"What could be more Cuban? Arguing and ChaCha-ing!" .... My dad would have LOVED this! =D

The Taming of the Do - Part 1

DISCLAIMER: The following post may sound like a commercial for different hair products, but it's not really. I just added the photos and links because I'm a giver.  ;-)

Hair products are a big thing at our house.

We have to have different kinds of shampoos and things because all of our hair types are so different.

Lucy just got her long, waist-length hair cut and is sporting this adorable do:

She swears by this:
 
It's called it's a 10 miracle leave-in product. Our hairdresser, Kate, turned us on to it. It totally does what it says it will do.  Seriously great stuff.  (Thanks, Kate!)

Jonathan LOVES having curly hair. (This is just before I made him get it cut. He insisted I document this for posterity. "It's totally EPIC, Mom!" =D)
 

He uses a combination of things to keep the curl from getting too wild:

The Schwarzkopf got2b glued is a water-proof type-gel (totally affordable at $4.95 a tube at Target). Keeps those curls nice and smooth. (Thanks to Isaac for the tip!)

My sister-in-law, Michelle got me hooked on this for taming the frizzies:

Sabino Hair Solutions Moisture Block. Killer stuff. Especially if you're in a humid area. Totally works.

When we were growing up, my sisters and I used to set our hair ("setting" meant sectioning off the wet hair, gooping stuff on to it so it would "hold" and rolling each portion onto a hard plastic tube called a curler and then.... I don't think I can totally explain the drama of this process....I guess you just had to live it...*sigh*) with Dep or Dippity-Do. (I think they brought these products back when the whole hair-spiking thing started happening, but that's not important right now.)

In February, when my sister Alina was in Mexico (along with the rest of the fam) for Nicole's wedding, she was completely beside herself when she found the following hair products at the local drugstore:

Yes. That says "Gorilla Snot."  (Eeeww!)
Right next to its first cousin, "Camel Drool." (Double eeeww!)

Shut up. I KNOW. I wish I was making this up. Isn't that crazy-awesome? Or as Jonathan would say...

"That's EPIC!"  =D

The following commercial dramatizes the Classic Ancient Ritual of  "hair setting."

Thanks, Alina! This one's for you: