Drink Wine and Giggle

Take Your Cue

ADVANCE PREP:

Bring index or

cue cards

TIME TO COMPLETE:

An hour or more

BEST PAIRED

WITH:

DWAG #16

Experiences of

a Lifetime

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

—Joseph Campbell

To feel alive we need to be ourselves, to align our lives with the things we love. Take Your Cue is about letting go and finding the place inside you where there is joy. To Take Your Cue, simply take a stack of cue cards (also known as recipe or index cards) and write I LOVE… at the top in big bold capital letters. Fill in the rest of the card with whatever comes to mind, one idea per card. Filling out the first few cards may feel wobbly yet strangely exhilarating and familiar, like riding a bicycle for the first time in many years, but keep at it. Eventually the inner voice that keeps repeating that you don’t know what you love will get tired, allowing your true self to move your hand. It usually takes the inner voice ten minutes or so to become hoarse, so be sure to Take Your Cue for at least thirty minutes.

After thirty minutes take a breather. Have a glass of wine with your girlfriends and talk about a few of your favorite things. When you’re refreshed and ready, go back to your cue cards and put them into piles that seem to go together. There are no right or wrong ways to categorize your cue cards. Themes in your life will begin to emerge, and there may be an ah-ha moment for you.

The benefits of Take Your Cue are two-fold: first, you will be filled with gratitude for all of the things you LOVE in your life and second, you will see what you LOVE that you don’t have in your life or don’t have in sufficient quantities.

Take Your Cue is a great way to limber up for Experiences of a Lifetime (DWAG #16).

Lynne’s Giggles

Would you believe me if I told you that Take Your Cue changed my life?

I had two business degrees and a job forecasting pharmaceuticals, but none of my cue cards professed a love of numbers or a passion for the artistry of corporate mission statements. However my cards did spill over with the love of all arts, women’s causes and minimalist design. The cards prompted me to pursue an English degree part-time, study creative writing and acting, volunteer at a women’s shelter and throw out a whole bunch of stuff. Almost immediately those cards began to cue me that I must somehow quit my numerical day job.

LOVE in capital letters is a powerful thing.

Deb’s Giggles

I still have my cue cards from when we did this exercise several years ago and the results still ring true today of the things I LOVE. After putting my cue cards into piles that went together, writing an objective for each pile seemed to be the next logical step. For example, I had many cards related to how much I LOVE the outdoors and many cards on my LOVE for physical fitness and exercise. Therefore I decided that one of my objectives would be to train for and run in a marathon, which I did in December 2006 on Kiawah Island in South Carolina.

Who would have thought that a simple stack of cards would become the springboard I needed to improve my health and well-being?

Julie’s Giggles

The most difficult part of Take Your Cue for me was waiting for the thoughts and feelings of what I LOVE to start to flow. The obvious ones came quickly, such as family, friends and health. But I waited, was patient, and the rest flowed like the tears of a good cry. I discovered I really like to do things with my hands, like when I made curtains for my daughter’s room or fixed things around the house. Learning is very important to me, as is adding value through my work. I left the activity feeling refreshed and in touch with myself.

DWAG

#2

What Are You?

ADVANCE PREP:

Have access

to online personality tests

TIME TO COMPLETE:

An hour or more

BEST PAIRED

WITH:

DWAG #54

Childhood Excavations

Personality is the original personal property. —Norman O. Brown

Are you blue? Do you know someone who is green? Being blue or green is not about feeling down or being envious. Finding out if you’re blue or green means uncovering your True Colors personality type. One of the many advantages of the Internet is that you’re never more than a few clicks from a website with a quiz that will tell you exactly what you are. Personality tests are exciting, like horoscopes wrapped in a seductive puff pastry of science. The puff pastry tastes good until you get to the part that labels you controlling, opinionated or some other distasteful trait. Just remember to keep your sense of humor intact as you dig out the grains of truth in your personality test results, and treat the rest as food for thought.

To find out the answer to the question of what constitutes the essence of your being, a question that may have been gnawing at you for years and cost you a fortune in psychotherapy, select a personality test from drinkwineandgiggle.com’s online resources and begin your journey of self-discovery:

1. True Colors will tell you whether you are Blue (values authenticity, intimate relationships, harmony and nurturing); Green (values curiosity, logic, control and information); Gold (values order and tradition) or Orange (values freedom, risk-taking, and spontaneity).

2. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is the grandmother of personality tests and is still widely used for purposes good (girlfriend get-togethers) and evil (corporate pigeonholing). It took Isabel Briggs Myers (with help from her mother Katherine Cook Briggs) forty years to develop the MBTI that will slot you into one of sixteen personality types based on your scores along four dimensions—introversion-extroversion, intuition-sensing, thinking-feeling, perceiving-judging. If you want to know more about yourself than anyone rightfully should, do an Internet search on your four-letter personality type and kiss three hours goodbye.

3. If you’re in a hurry and want to know what you are in less than a minute, The Animal in You will give surprisingly accurate results using complex mathematical algorithms and zoological tables.

Print out your personality quiz results and bring them to your next girlfriend get-together. Mix them up in a pile and see if you can correctly match your girlfriends with their personality profile. The person with the most correct answers wins the Girlfriend Pop Psychologist Award and the opportunity to lead a girlfriend group therapy session.

What Are You? can take a few minutes or a few hours, depending on your interest in psychology and your desire to learn about the psychological composition of your girlfriends. No matter how deeply you burrow into your own and each other’s psyches, there will be surprises.

Deb’s Giggles

It’s amazing how accurate these simple tests can be. After you and your girlfriends take the color test you’ll find yourself starting conversations with I know you’re Orange, so you’ll appreciate this… or Because I’m Green, I’d like to set it up this way…. Once you have an idea of how someone approaches life, you’ll be better equipped to step into their shoes rather than on their toes.

I took the abbreviated version of the Myers-Briggs test and compared it to the results from when I took the test fifteen years ago. I went from ENTJ to ENFJ. Apparently, today I rely on my subjective nature (Feeling) more than I do my logical nature (Thinking). I agree with this change in the results and reason that it’s due to my accumulated experiences and (relative) maturity.

Finally, and no surprise to anyone that knows me, I am an otter.

Lynne’s Giggles

I am INFJ, the least common Myers-Briggs personality type that is associated most often with nuns, psychologists and extrasensory perception. Being grouped with nuns did not surprise me, but it made Deb snort. INFJs are the worst liars of all the personality types, so I won’t try to mislead you about my true color that is blue, the color of authenticity. The animal test revealed that I’m a deer—not surprising because I’m often caught in the headlights.

Of all the personality tests we taken, I’ve found Myers-Briggs to be the most valuable. Once you know your type, you can spend countless hours online merrily psychoanalyzing yourself. You can discover the personality types most romantically compatible with you, how you typically respond to stress and which celebrities share your type. The most famous person of my type (INFJs tend not to be celebrities except by accident) is Mahatma Gandhi. Deb is Oprah and Julie is… I’ll let her tell you herself.

Julie’s Giggles

I’m Princess Diana. My true color is blue (but blue is no reflection of my mood), my animal is a sable and my MBTI is INFP. I enjoy doing these tests and reading what someone who doesn’t know me at all tells me I am like. I tend to agree with many of the characteristics, but definitely not all of them. In the Chinese Zodiac I’m a Metal Pig, and apparently I often eat, drink and smoke too much, am not very active and am overweight. I take exception to that!

DWAG

#3

Learn the Lingo

Kolik jazyků znáš, tolikrát jsi člověkem.

You live a new life for every new language you speak. –Czech proverb

A study conducted in England in 2004 found that learning a second language can increase one’s earning power by $4,600 per year, but at least 90% of the non-immigrant American population is monolingual. Although we think of English as the first language of world commerce and diplomacy, only 5.6% of the world’s population or 443 million people primarily speak English (over 800 million people speak Mandarin).

Research has shown that fluency in a second language literally changes the way you think, making your mind more open to multiple solutions and ways of looking at problems and more resistant to age-related cognitive decline. Learning another language will give you a different vision of life in a way that simply strolling along the Champs-Élysées as a monolingual tourist never can, and it gives you a deep appreciation of the beauty and complexity of the English language.

Learn the Lingo uses the popular Patti LaBelle voulez-vous coucher avec moi method of language learning, whereby you learn a few intriguing foreign words, phrases or proverbs with your girlfriends—preferably in song—to entice you to learn more on your own. Most schools teach multiple languages, so it’s virtually impossible to get through high school and post-secondary education, not to mention the occasional transatlantic vacation, without at least some exposure to a foreign tongue.

Have someone in your group select her favorite foreign language and share a few choice words and come-hither phrases. Talk about the allure of the language and why you might have an interest to learn more. You get bonus points if you can pair wine and food with your lesson. Musical accompaniment is strongly recommended and a movie can further enrich the language-learning experience.

According to Ethnologue, the world’s authority on the culture of words, there are 6,809 languages in the world to choose from and plenty of public libraries, websites and mobile apps that can get you started on the road to fluency for free, so let the language classes begin. Nobody should have to go through life as a monoglot.

Julie’s Giggles

It was apparent at an early age that the French language had a je ne sais quoi appeal to me, as I took French in school far beyond the graduation requirements. Even today I’ll blurt out words in French, much to my family’s annoyance. I love the sound of the words; they play like a beautiful song to me in a very sensual way. I have recently picked up where I left off in high school, taking online courses, and will continue on my journey to learn French even if I have to suffer through a month long stay in France, damn it. C’est ma vie.

Lynne’s Giggles

I chose Greek for Learn the Lingo and paired my introductory lesson for Deb and Julie with a crisp assyrtiko wine from the island of Santorini. Greek is a wonderful language to study since so many English words have Greek origins, but there is a stiff cover charge called learning the Greek alphabet.

According to author Tim Ferriss, the best way to learn a foreign language is to find an interest to pursue in it. I love music, so studying Greek songs is a fun way for me to build vocabulary, speak and read at a challenging pace and improve my pronunciation. Also, when you learn language through song, you pick up expressions you’ll never find in a Berlitz phrasebook. In Greek songs you will find phrases such as I want to get drunk and yell out my secrets or Your lustful lies make everything look beautiful or I would give all of my money for a tango.

I gave Julie and Deb these wonderful Learn the Lingo conversation starters and a few more that will make their encounters with Greek people especially memorable.

Deb’s Giggles

I am definitely a typical monolingual American. I even had to research the French translation of voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir? Which is do you want to sleep with me tonight? Getcha getcha ya ya da da (no translation is necessary).

My alter ego’s alternative language is Italian. Before traveling to Italy a few years ago, I bought Italian language software and studied an hour a day for about a month. Learning to speak Italian was more fun, yet more difficult than I thought it would be. I learned some basics that helped me to understand some snippets of conversations I heard in Italy, but unfortunately it didn’t stick.

Learning a foreign language was on my Bucket List, but...

DWAG

#4

The Opposite of a Bucket List is a...

ADVANCE PREP:

None

TIME TO COMPLETE:

Less than an hour

BEST PAIRED

WITH:

DWAG #1

Take Your Cue

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. —Susan Sontag

"Chuck-it" list. The idea here is to draw up a list of the things that weigh on your mind, things that give you gnawing pangs when you think about doing them or things you think you should do but don’t really want to do. When you think about what you don’t want to do but think you should do, it’s called shoulding all over yourself. You can recognize this shoulding behavior because it usually leaves you feeling crappy. The purpose of a chuck-it list is to cleanse your mind of toxic shoulds and the anxiety that comes with them.

For example, you think you should climb Mount Kilimanjaro because it would be cool to say you’ve done it and you kind of like climbing things. But it’s so cold and dangerous up there—not to mention there’s no shower, no chardonnay and you have to sleep in a tent! So, chuck it!

Make up a list of three chuck-it items and share them with your girlfriends. Now take a candle and… you know the rest…

Burn baby burn.

Deb’s Chuck-It List

1. Not to degrade the value of Learn the Lingo, but chuck learning another language. Comprendes? Capiche? I am very envious of people who speak more than one language. I know that learning another language at my age is a good way to ward off dementia, but I can’t believe how difficult it is to do. I wanted to speak Italian before going to Italy, thinking that if I learned a few basics, then I could at least understand some of what was being said. For weeks I repeated words on cue and memorized the correct forms of the verb. But once I arrived in Italy and the natives realized that I was from the U.S., they spoke in English. The only way I’ll ever be able to learn to speak Italian is to actually live in Italy and immerse myself in their culture. Oh, how I would love to do that. Mmmm. Chuck it. That won’t happen either.

2. Chuck gardening. Wish I liked it, but I don’t. Wish it would relax me like it does for many others, but I only obsess about finishing from the moment I start. Wish my husband liked gardening since I don’t, but apparently it’s on his chuck-it list, too.

3. Chuck having a wine cellar. Don’t get me wrong. I want one. It would be cool to walk down a flight of stairs in your house into a dimly lit, dusty room with racks and racks of various fruity, spicy wines from around the world. I absolutely love the idea of having hundreds of bottles to choose from, discussing the age, the vintage and the composition. My problem is that I don’t want or need a house large enough to warrant a wine cellar and I haven’t seen a condo yet with a descending staircase to a winery.

Julie’s Chuck-It List

1. Chuck doing something every day that I fear. I have no desire to wake up every morning scared to get out of bed. I thrive on change and enjoy getting out of my comfort zone but don’t want to live in fear of experiencing new adventures.

2. Chuck learning a musical instrument. If one day I can play the piano, that’s great. If not, that’s okay, too. But I still want to continue to learn to speak French for that bucket list trip back to Paris.

3. Chuck trying to look like I did when I was in my twenties. I’ve decided to embrace each age that I am and be the best I can be with what I’ve got. I am going to live my life enjoying what I have and not keep looking back at what has passed. I may need to chuck all the mirrors in the house along with this one.

Lynne’s Chuck-It List

1. Chuck running a marathon. Until I make love for four hours straight—tantric sex is still on my bucket list—I’m not going to run for a comparable length of time.

2. Chuck learning how to cook anything that doesn’t require a single pot. I know it’s wrong and I will never get my beef bourguignon badge, but I don’t like cooking or watching other people cook.

3. Chuck reading all the books on my bookcase. I know I should read The Iliad, Titus Andronicus and Serious Training for Endurance Athletes, but it pains me to look at those spines that imply I lack backbone, so chuck it!

DWAG

#5

Do It By Heart

ADVANCE PREP:

Memorize a favorite passage

or poem

TIME TO COMPLETE:

Less than an hour

BEST PAIRED

WITH:

DWAG #31

Mud Pie On Your Face

Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar. —Jim Holt

The ancient Greeks believed that the heart was the organ of thought, emotion and poetry memorization; therefore, to say that you know something by heart is to invoke this ancient anatomical miscue. But is it a miscue? To learn something by heart, you do need to put your heart into it. Do It By Heart is where you and your girlfriends select a poem or a passage and commit it to memory.

The most important ingredient in Do It By Heart is the It. What do you want to memorize? What poem or passage do you believe is worth the trouble to remember and later recite for your girlfriends? Ideally you’ll want to find a passage of roughly sixteen lines that you can memorize in an hour or so and recite in one or two minutes. Anything longer than a couple of minutes will push your audience to the outer limits of their attention span where they will be tempted to open poetic musings on their smart phones.

Once you’ve selected a piece, you can either take a couple of lines to memorize each day or try to memorize it all at once. If you want to memorize your selection in a single sitting, read it silently first. Next, read aloud the first line and look away. Repeat the first line—visualizing the images behind the words as you say them—and check to see if you got it right. If so, proceed to read the second line. If you made a mistake, repeat the first line until you get it right. Go through the entire piece line by line: once you’ve made one pass, go through it again, only this time take two lines at a time, and then do three lines at a time and so on until you can recite the entire passage from memory.

When you have done a run through without mistakes, stop. Ideally, you have done your memory exercise just before bed and can sleep on it, allowing the words to crystallize in your mind. Over the next few days recite your selection from memory a couple of times a day, feeling the words and letting their rhythm and meaning dictate how it should be read.

When you get together with your girlfriends to read your poems or passages, you can really get into it by dressing as the author whose work you will recite, adding guest poetry readers to your recital via YouTube or simply reciting your piece describing why you selected it and discussing what the words mean to you. Have copies of your selections to hand out as a memento. (Be sure to pass along your handout after your reading so that you are not distracted with thoughts of multiple schoolmistresses pouring over every word of your poem as you recite it aloud.)

If memorization comes easily to you, you may want to sign up for a memory contest such as the U.S. Memory Championships, the pentathlon of memory that includes the poetry event where contestants memorize an unpublished 50-line poem in 15 minutes. The best memorizers in the world are approaching the 30-second mark to memorize a deck of cards, a feat considered to be the four-minute mile of memory.

Memorizing a deck of cards in less than a minute is only for the halest of do-it-by-hearters. If you or your girlfriends have talent and would rather memorize cards than poems, skip the world Memoriad championship with its measly $1,500 category prizes and Do It By Heart at a blackjack table in Vegas.

Lynne’s Giggles

It took me longer to select a poem than it took to memorize it. I wanted to recite a poem that I enjoyed and didn’t mind inflicting on Deb and Julie. I love Emily Dickinson, but Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me is not a good way to kick-off any girlfriend poetry recital.

I thought a romantic poem—romantic, as in eighteenth century romanticism celebrating the poet’s emotional response to nature—would be a good choice for Do It By Heart. Romance poetry tends to be rhythmic, upbeat and conversational and therefore relatively easy to memorize. I chose William Wordsworth’s Daffodils (also known by the somewhat morose title I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud) in which the poet watches a crowd of daffodils dance in the breeze and later recalls their flowery antics when he’s alone lying on a couch. Each morning over breakfast, I memorized a couple of lines and recalled them throughout the day to see if the lines had stuck. Many times I had to re-stick lines because a key word had dropped out and was wandering lonely as a cloud somewhere in my mind where I couldn’t retrieve it.

Deb’s Giggles

Without Lynne’s influence, poetry would have remained filed away in a remote moldy folder in my mind covered with several inches of dust. Other than writing my own simple rhymes, as I’ve been known to do for special occasions, I would not have considered poetry as a source of entertainment, inspiration or self-expression.

Recently, as I was struggling with a business idea, Lynne emailed me an excerpt from a Robert Service poem (I’ve come to know that storing health is better far than storing wealth) that made me pause and consider another perspective. Intrigued, I searched the Internet for Robert Service and was surprised to find he was the author of a poem I learned in seventh grade entitled, The Cremation of Sam McGee.

Well, thanks to this chance encounter and prompted by our Do It By Heart activity, I got reacquainted with Sam McGee. I liked the poem so much that I decided to memorize part of it, an exercise that paid off long after our girlfriend get-together. I was relaxing with my husband and stepdaughter in front of a bonfire on a beautiful Ontario night; it was the perfect time for a ghost story or as close as I could come to one. So, I started reciting The Cremation of Sam McGee:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold…

The singsong rhythm lulls third graders, family and girlfriends into forgetting that this is a poem about burning a corpse by the edge of a lake.

Julie’s Giggles

I love when I get an email with a quote that comes at a time when I need inspiration the most. One of my favorite poems is by Nadine Stair, the 85 year old who wrote, If I Had My Life to Live Over. She may not be a famous poet, yet her words are so simple, wise and touching and worth memorizing. The lines that move me are:

Oh, I’ve had my moments, And