Dropped Stitches

People have been telling me for years that I ought to write a book, but as a person who lives life in episodic chapters, finding any one theme in my own life that lasted long enough to complete a book was clearly not possible. But this Blogosphere was built for me—short, intense, globally shareable and with no selling or upfront cost. I am glad I didn’t push out a published effort before I was ready to start. This seemed like a good time.

The truth is, I started when I was ten years old, back in 1966. I had a small fortune on me, as it had been my birthday and I had a twenty dollar bill of my own. My purchases for the day included a 16 magazine, a white Slicker lipstick on a key chain, a pair of powder blue bell bottom polka dot pants, and a diary. Thus began a ritual of reading magazines, worshipping cute performers, putting on makeup and writing down the daily details of my little life and my perspective on the happenings and how I felt about them.

Nothing much has changed.

The bell bottoms were a bad decision, cool as I may have felt in them that day, and that decision set a precedent for the lifelong challenge of costuming myself, which to this day I still find overwhelming.

But back to the diaries. The process of writing down my thoughts has been a part of my daily life for 41 years. The earliest volumes were Christmas gifts from Hallmark Cards, pastel-colored pages in a date-per-page book, bound with a real cover and locked with a little gold key to keep all the secrets -- a security measure reinforced by the warning clearly stated on the first page of each new book: PRIVATE!!!! KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY DIARY!

By the time I was out of high school, girls my age were smoking pot and going all the way, and nobody was interested in keeping secrets. It was that “let it all hang out time” in the seventies, and diaries had gone the way of Nancy Drew books for most of my contemporaries. Since I wasn’t allowed to date until I was 16, sex and drugs had to wait until much later in life. So even as I was bound to the homestead with thoughts pure and impure, my daily missives expanded. Now relegated to spiral notebooks, I was unbound by the Hallmark one-date-one-page restriction, and I could go on and on, sorting through the events of my life.

Nothing much has changed.

And this, then, I believe, is the point I have to make with this blog, that so many people have implored me to write. A collection of stories (and really, I have some good ones, no doubt about that) isn’t important unless there is a benefit to the people who read them. We all have our stories.

Here’s my central theme and purpose: People don’t change. Behaviors do, focus does, and responses might, but the issues that color our lives, black and white or under the covers of many colors, stay with us all our lives, in one way or another. They either continue to hang us up, or ironically, if we do overcome something horrible, that redefines us as “survivors” of that issue, still making It a part of our curriculum vitae.

I won’t exhaustively address why we are this way, but I do emphatically know we do the same silly stuff over and over again until we get it right. And I know that there is no making Things right until you really and truly make It right for yourself. And in most cases, you have to fix It by yourself. If you have had a glitch in judgment that results in pain, shame, injury, loss, guilt, or even gross inconvenience, you cannot outrun it, cover it up, or forget about it. No matter how far you run, you’re going to be there when you get there. And that’s actually the good news and the bad news. We are all running toward ourselves, and this is as it should be.

Events and relationships and school and work and joys and embarrassments and illness and love, as we go along in life, are like the circular rows of yarn in a sweater that link one to the next, row to row, connecting and working their way along toward becoming a complete, attractive functional garment. And if there is a knot, a pull, a missed loop anywhere in that process, every row after that is affected.

I don’t have a domestic bone in my body and certainly never knit, but the analogy came to me in vision and here it is. You have a history of unfixed events, what I called dropped stitches, and when you hold that sweater up to the light, you can see that every careless connection has disrupted and compromised the whole design and pattern. It will droop, unbalanced off one shoulder or pucker, accenting your worst feature. The sweater will not fit, and it will never be comfortable.

If “Tapestry” was the music of our youth, Dropped Stitches is the theme of our maturity. I took a journey, back, and began the necessary unraveling of row after row, finding my own dropped stitches. Now the designer of my own brand, my own signature piece, this is the season to make it right.

I committed to myself that the second fifty years of my life would be different. I would re-knit the whole tapestry of my experience, until my life was something so comfortable, well, that I could just live in it.

How is your love life? Dr. Peter T. Pugliese's pherAdore can help.

Dr. Peter T. Pugliese's pherAdore self awareness, enhancing fragrance empowers women to be themselves. Dr. Peter T. Pugliese, a medical doctor and world authority on skin and aging, has developed and formulated skin care products for some of the world's best known companies. In fact, this world-famous physician formulated one of the first pheromone products on the market. Now, for the first time, Dr. Pugliese's own unique formula is available to the public as pherAdore.

You will feel sexier, more desirable and more confident in social and business interactions. As an example, women in sales report increased orders. For an actor or model use pherAdore before an audition and there will be no competition.

With couples, pheromones might cause a renewed interest in the other person, leading to feeling closer and being more attentive. Your significant other will look at you instead of the TV! In a large double-blind study, use of pherAdore was even shown to reduce signs of depression and fatigue. pherAdore will also work for men. Though we have not yet conducted a scientific study to prove that pherAdore can help men we have had numerous positive reports.

How is your love life? With pherAdore attraction is made easier, much easier. attraction is made easier, much easier.

ABS

I don’t know whose big idea it was to make a lumpy hard vertical stack of unseen muscles in the middle of our bipedal bodies into such a paragon of desirability, but I have just about had it with the whole “ab” thing.

Like many things that popular culture keeps throwing in my face, I have a simple solution to end this madness, globally. But since I am not yet Queen, I cannot change everything that is wrong with the world. (You can see my simple everyday solutions recurring throughout this blogsite; search keywords When I Am Queen. See if you agree with me on any of them. Let me know. Maybe we can start something. )

Now back to these anti-AB assaults. Stomachs, everywhere! They came spilling out of swim suits and sundresses, in every color, from every TV channel all through the joyous season of the holidays. It got so bad New Year’s Day, I had to just say something about it. Perky blondes and shiny men in tight shorts yelling at me to buy their torturous devices called Ab Lounge…Ab Dolly….AB Blaster…Ab Kill This and Ab Die That.

And this “six pack” business, what is THAT? Is it the end all of human physical perfection to be likened to a machine filled collection of stupefying brews in Alzheimer’s-producing aluminum cans secured with never-to-dissolve-into-the-earth plastic rings? That doesn’t sound pretty, so why is that the chosen euphemism for the lumpy hard vertical stack of unseen muscles? Six pack? Not even a physiological possibility, and when you deal with me, you gotta get the words right. Get the name of your object d’obsesseion right. I can’t help you if we can’t name the beast.

One more question: what are we really talking about anyway when we say “ABS”? With all this text-talk in letters instead of sentences, this ABS is not even a word: what the hell are ABS? How many ABS do you get? Is it my one abdomen what you mean? What is that, my belly? My pooch, my bowling ball, my gut, my gelatinous mass, my blub, my unworthy mound—is that what we’re talking about?

Most women universally actually use the word “hate” when referring to their mid-sections. I was one of them. And when this all came about with the whole ABS thing it rocked me back to my college days (Salt Lake City, 1974) and man, I had to get my head out of that place but quick. Here’s what I did.

I have redefined it so that every time I hear somebody promising stronger ABS, it means something to me that is, well, meaningful. Here it is.

A is for autonomy. A woman who has married five times in the hope of a fusion of mind, body and soul, I came to the notion of autonomy in mid life. It isn’t that I don’t need other people nor am I unwilling to ask for help when I need it. Accepting help requires a certain amount of strength and it also makes the people who can do something for you to feel really good about themselves. I have been on the receiving end of some remarkable grace from a good many people, for quite some time. This year, I want to realize a phrase I have used for some time, and make it manifest: you can be a whole lot more of a humanitarian when you are stinking rich than broke with good intentions. SO for me, this year, A is for AUTONOMY. Fill up my coffers and I will share as I see fit.

B is for bravery. That may seem odd coming from me because I hardly have a reputation as a shrinking violet. I have surely been bold, but that is not the same as brave. Bravery in my world isn’t about conquering enemies; bravery is about being honest with the people I love who are really messing up their own lives and the lives of people I care about. SO for me, B is for BRAVERY. Tell them the truth and let them take it from there.

S is for sustenance. I have not been hungry, really, for any length of time in my life. Oh, sure, there was a time or two when my own decisions left me temporarily without lunch money. Most times this was because I chose to leave a bad situation knowing it would cost me, but believing that freedom at any price is a bargain. And I have, like my entire generation, lost a lot of years of joy because of the obsession with weight, what it means about who I am, how I should feel about myself, what I can wear, how I apologize for myself and criticize others, in a blanket judgment call that obfuscates all other parameters of character. This is nonsense.

Autonomy, bravery and sustenance, there are the means by which we nourish and strengthen ourselves, inside and outside, mind, body and soul. That really is nobody’s call but my own. How I strengthen my ABS is entirely up to me.

The common thinking that if you’ve got flat abs, you’re a hero and pouchy- bellied people are lazy with no self esteem--- what a crock all that is, and I am so over it.
I want to live a well nourished life of joy, confidence, and fulfillment.

And I want a damn bellyful.

Is Love Right Under Your Nose?

Hi there, fans of all that is good and useful! I promised you a whole bunch of new blogs for our new home here at Google, and they are forthcoming. To tickle your mind until that time, I offer the following, written by another fabulous Pugliese woman, my sister Susan. More about Susan and her career in the coming days, but read about pherAdore. You will believe in magic! Blessings for the rest of 2007. Back soon. Love, Patti

There has been much speculation and controversy surrounding human pheromones and the use of pheromone products. Dr. Peter T. Pugliese, a medical doctor and world authority on skin and aging, says that he believes pheromones can work to help human females attract men. But not in the way one might think.

In animals, pheromones are a well-documented method of communication. By definition a pheromone is a chemical transported outside the body that has the potential to evoke certain responses in another individual of the same species. They were first identified in 1959 in animals as chemicals that attract the opposite sex and initiate mating behavior.

But Dr. Pugliese, who has developed a fragrance containing pheromones, called pherAdore, believes the power of supplemental pheromones for humans lies in the user sensing the pheromones. The key is how a woman is affected when she applies a male pheromone, which is what most products use. Studies have shown repeatedly that women are positively affected by certain male pheromones. They are more relaxed, and more receptive to male attention, and a receptive woman is more attractive to men. “When women become more aware of their own attractiveness they project a heightened sense of approachability," says Dr. Pugliese.

Women who have used pheromones report many positive effects in their social and business lives. They report feeling much more confident, more relaxed. They have more contact with men, are approached more frequently by men, and have more affectionate contact with husbands and boyfriends. So don’t think this product is only for single women – it could be useful in re-igniting the spark in your current relationship. "In married couples, pheromones might cause a renewed interest in the other person, leading to feeling closer and being more attentive”, says Dr Pugliese. Like getting your husband to look at you instead of the TV! Even more intriguing, in a large double-blind study use of pheromones was even shown to reduce signs of depression and fatigue.

Interestingly, users of the pherAdore, fragrance, a proprietary blend of four naturally-occurring pheromones combined with ylang-ylang., are instructed to dab the roller top in the area under the nose and above the upper lip, and also apply to pulse points, like wrists and behind ears, while most pheromone products instruct one to apply product anywhere on skin, or even clothes. Dr Pugliese explains that by applying the product to the area above the upper lip, the user is sure to sense the pheromone, and thus it’s potentially powerful effects. While this area of research is still controversial, there is so much positive and intriguing evidence that even skeptics believe it’s an area worth further study.

Click for more information on pherAdore.
Click for more information on Dr Peter T. Pugliese.

We've Moved to Google!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hello again!

After many months of travel to exotic and wonderful places, like Australia and South Africa and Roberts Redford's paradise in Sundance, Patti has landed safely back in Pennsylvania Dutch Country and I look forward to sharing all of those adventures with you.

We made the decision to leave our former Blog site to join the Google family of wordsmiths, and we are delighted that you have found us here. We appreciate the sensibilities of the Google corporation, and are delighted that it is now not only a company but a verb.

Please feel free to add this URL to your Favorites list, and we will be back soon!

Happiness is right under your nose

It seems like the simplest little thing in the world. Unscrew the cap of a pretty little rollette, breathe in a delightful fragrance and within minutes start to feel like you are on top of the world. And the world begins to treat you like you are All That and a bag of chips too. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is actually based on the mind-numbing complexities of chemistry that are responsible for the very existence of the human race.

I have to tell you my story about using the high-science pheromone blend developed as a remedy for menopausal symptoms of night sweats, mood swings and other unpleasantries of mid-life raging hormones. I was one of the early guinea pigs. I have become a global spokesperson for pherAdore, because I have seen it change lives, including my own.

I know there have been a thousand products thrown into the backs of magazines and seedy little internet sites, but there are pheromones and there are pheromones, and everything from the lowly moth to the perfect husband are affected by them. But nobody benefits more than that most magnificent of creatures, the mid-life woman. Let me tell you how.

The application is important, as pheromones are introduced through inhaling. Just use the rollette to run a little stripe right under your nose and breathe. You can apply as often as you like during the day—in the morning, for a mid-day lift, before going out at night. It is impossible to overdose, and will not interfere with your own fragrance.

The bit of initial fragrance is ylang-ylang, aromatherapy for reducing anxiety and elevating mood, and very pleasant. Once that essential oil dissipates, the pheromones do their thing, creating the most interesting cascade of biological events, safely and with no side effects.

Women have reported everything from selling more cars to marrying a millionaire! Husbands may behave strangely—bringing home flowers and asking about her day! Married women seem to feel re-kindled and it’s just a beautiful thing.

The developer of pherAdore, Peter T. Pugliese, MD has a unique view of pheromones, as he does on many things. Dr. Pugliese is the aging experts’ expert. He is the one the celebrity doctors call when they need answers. During an interview on 20/20, he explained that pherAdore empowers women to be themselves—and moreso with every passing year.

Pheromones are the chemical messages that a woman sends to let a man know she is interested, available, and here’s the key—that she is desirable. This is pertinent because as any woman consumer will tell you, all the ads we see are designed to make us feel that we are totally undesirable, unless we use whatever they are selling us.

That is what makes Dr. Pugliese so unique. His products all begin with the notion of helping to protect something that is valuable, rather than to correct an inadequacy. The difference between these two mindsets is huge, and has made all the difference to a great many women. With pheromones, being sold all over the place, from questionable sources, the hype is usually focused on men getting the girl to do his bidding. Wrong!! The overall effect of this product is that the woman using pherAdore has a heightened sense of her own attractiveness. Break loose a woman’s sense of her own power, and amazing things begin to happen—to her, for her, and the people around her. And happily, much of what we do is directly under the control of our own biochemistry.

The biology of reproduction stops, usually, somewhere in the early 50’s. The biology of attraction goes on as long as there are two people with a pulse. Men are always “on”, and always seeking a nesting place for their charms. Women, of course, are completely in control, and if the woman doesn’t say yes, nothing happens. What has plagued us for the last thirty years or so is this youth culture that makes mature women feel like they are past the age of acceptability in this dance of attraction between men and women. And we know now that when a woman feels inadequate, she begins to send off a message of “stay away from me”. It is a lot like the common wisdom that says that a dog knows when you are afraid of it, and therefore he becomes more aggressive, because he senses your vulnerability.

People can be the same way. Ever been in a business presentation where you can see the speaker sweating bullets? What happens to the room? The group shuffles papers, coughs, doodles, interrupts, does everything but pay attention. It’s because the message of vulnerability is coming from somewhere in that speaker’s soaked underarm and everybody knows this person is not formidable or worth listening to. The same thing happens when people are socially ill-at-ease. You see them in bars, clusters of women—or men—peering out over their drinks, looking around with a practiced non-chalance, like they want you to think they don’t care if anybody approaches them or not.

Pheromones are chemical messages too, and for some reason we do not quite yet understand, the messages of availability and desirability tend to diminish in women when they are no longer regularly in the company of men. This is societal by circumstance, but biology is destiny, and we know now that we can give biology that little extra push by introducing pheromones to the woman and letting nature resume doing its thing. And neither a fashion magazine nor Dr. Phil needs to enter the picture. Just a little whiff of pherAdore and the world becomes a pretty wonderful place.

This isn’t a stretch for the 90 million baby boomers who spent most of the 80’s putting something up their noses anyway!

But let me tell you what pherAdore did for me. I had been divorced for some time by the time the clinical trials on this pheromone blend came about. I was crazy mad in love with a handsome, handsome man who looked exactly like Sam Elliot and who had made it perfectly clear that he had no intention of marrying, ever, because women take your stuff, boss you around, make you have dinner at her mothers every weekend, and usually will produce a baby which will cry, throw up and poop all day every day for years and years.

He wanted no parts of any of this. I had been married more than once prior to becoming involved with this man, who at 43 was a confirmed and very happy bachelor. I wasn’t all that concerned about marriage and had been out of the baby business since a hysterectomy at age 31. This is why I was in the pheromone study, since I was exhibiting early menopausal symptoms as a result of that surgery a decade earlier. We were having a good time dating and found great joy in each other’s company, mostly because of the freedom it afforded both of us.

Once I started using pherAdore, all my symptoms were gone. Hot flashes, night sweats, cranky moods, stopped immediately. And for some reason, I just couldn’t get enough of this guy. I had never really had much trouble in that department anyway, but this was downright undeniably a boost in my libido. And that wasn’t all.

A little while later, I had to take a job out of town for a few months. On one visit home, I was minding my own business at his place, whereupon he suddenly and without prior conversation about it, proposed! With a diamond ring, and an expression of willingness to marry me anywhere or any way I chose, even the Catholic Church, my now-49-year- old bachelor boyfriend became my fiancé!

We celebrated our seventh anniversary this March.

So the question you have to ask yourself is not just “How’s your love life?” but also “How are you lovin’ life?”

The story of Lineman’s Lotion - Part 1 of too soon to know how many

The story of Lineman’s Lotion is a saga that literally consists of two decades of a real woman’s fountain of blood, sweat and tears. But within all the heartbreak of Patti’s odyssey to bring her dream to fruition, there were some amazing events, and people, that kept her going. This blog will provide a series of articles known as the Ten Magic Moments of Lineman’s Lotion. The first describes how the product came to be, twenty one years ago this month.

Bloody Knuckles, Ice Storms and Beer

In the rolling hills of Pennsylvania we are accustomed to winter weather, and before the advent of the Inconvenient Truth of Global Warming, we never heard the weatherman call for a ‘wintery mix’. It usually just snowed like crazy every year and the country schools where we live had thirty six snow days a year built into the schedule.
In March of 1986, we were having an ice storm, with high-speed frozen pellets pinging on the roof and rattling the windows, covering the porch with a sheet of treachery too severe to let the kids out. I hadn’t seen my husband in two days. He worked for Bell and was up a pole somewhere, splicing wires to restore phone service to the thousands of people holed up in their farm houses and bi-level homes without benefit of the Internet, which Al Gore had not yet invented.

I was using the time at home to finish up the report on a consult I’d taken when my Dad was traveling; I was manning (womanning) the lab we operated together. We were in the business of studying skin and testing products to reduce the ravages of aging. We specialized in functional topicals, the things that really could do some good when applied to the skin.

A client in the Midwest had an ingredient they called Skin Respiratory Factor, or SRF, which had a rather inelegant folklore. Although its therapeutic purpose was to shrink hemorrhoids, some actresses had told interviewers they used this greasy tube of medicine to get rid of puffy eyes and wrinkles. Trying to tag onto the success of the big cosmetic companies, one wild-thinking executive in this stodgy company investigated the players in cosmetic research, saw my dad’s work repeatedly referenced, and contracted our lab to investigate its mechanism. Further, we were to create a nice product which would serve as a sample formulary to the cosmetic manufacturers, who would in turn purchase SRF as an additive to their youth-extending lotions and potions.

All I knew about this test product, which arrived in a plastic bag and smelled like old socks, was that it was a by-product of the brewery industry. Somewhere in the mash that gets thrown away when the beer is being made, there is a long chain molecule that promotes healing of human skin tissue. My Dad was in Italy when the bag arrived, so I did the preliminaries, working up the parameters of performance and working out how little material it would take to do something good. We call this the “effective dose concentration” and I had already tested a dozen super cosmetic ingredients that worked well in lotions. We had recommended these to several high-end company clients, to replace the cheaper mineral oils and soap additives that so many had used for eons. It seemed the industry preferred to pay preteen supermodels millions of dollars to be the face of their anti-aging brands rather than improve the functionality of their products. No matter, I was happy formulating for my own benefit and to learn as much as I could.

I had never been much of a cook, but remarkably, I took to whipping products together in a beaker. I had developed what is called a good “feel”, which means that I selected ingredients both because of the physical properties of each raw material, and also an instinctive inclination about how the product would feel in actual use by the consumer. Although I wasn’t ever formally trained as a cosmetic chemist, I did have the most respected formulation consultant in the world as my father. I was fearless in formulating because you could always rinse a failure down the sink, wash out the glassware and start over again. It wasn’t like cooking where you could poison your family.

So I made this light little lotion, using all the things I knew were good for moisturizing and smoothness. I never formulated with a fragrance because they are generally the reason for itchy reactions. I tossed in the magic ingredient without concern at that stage for the way it smelled. We were after performance first.

Once the lotion was done, safety and stability tested, and felt nice to use, I set about designing a simple clinical study to see how it would work on ladies’ faces. My dad had a good subject pool, pulled from his former patient population. He had retired from family practice some years prior, and many of his patients had been farmers and various laborers as you would find in a small community. My job was to find a couple of dozen gals who weren’t really sophisticated skin care consumers—none of them regulars at the Estee Lauder counter. I selected farmer’s wives. Most would be found alternately in the freezing barn milking cows at 4:30 a.m. or driving a hay wagon in the blazing sun. Delightfully non-pretentious women, they were happy to have the pin money we paid our subjects, and they were the perfect subjects to try something new.

The ladies used the product twice a day, morning and night, and the results we were getting were quite good, at two weeks, four weeks and six weeks when they came in for evaluation. They liked the way it felt, and what it was doing for their complexions. Then one woman said something that ran through me like a lightning rod.

“My husband said I look better…” then she paused a minute and said softly, “and in 35 years of marriage, that’s the first time he ever said anything about how I look”.

BA-BIIIIIIIIIIING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was wildly intrigued by her comment, and the rest of the group echoed their approval. I was a little bit surprised that nobody mentioned the smell of the lotion, because it had a very yeasty topnote, coming from the active ingredient. I realized most of them were around farm animals all day, so a little trace of musty hops wasn’t going to be a big deterrent. But it wasn’t going to fly off the counters at Bloomingdale’s and that was where it was intended to go.

The study ended well, so I was trying to figure out how to mask the smell in a facial lotion without getting the fragrance concentration so high that it would be an irritant. I started typing my report to the client, saying that the effectiveness was high, and ultimately greater formulation minds than my own would have to work out an acceptable fragrance.

So I was sitting at the dining room table, pecking away on my enormous MacIntosh, and in the door comes my frozen husband. I greeted him warmly and brought him a drink. When he picked up his beer, his knuckles all split open. I was horrified.

“Don’t they give you anything on your job for that?”

“They can’t. Everything slimes up your hands and you drop your tools”.

“Well here, try this.” I screwed the lid off the specimen cup marked UF-386-07, and poured some lotion into his hamburger hands. He clapped them together and rubbed it all over the scrapes and cracks across his knuckles, and then did what everybody in the world does when they’ve applied something -- he cupped his hands, brought them to his nose, took a deep breath, and then exclaimed, “SMELLS GREAT!”

BA –BIIIINGG!!!!!

And in that moment, it occurred to me that what had been a handicap five minutes earlier had suddenly changed. Suddenly, I had a freeze-frame moment of thought: there were enough manufacturers in the world worrying about wrinkles, but nobody who deeply cared about the millions of hands that go to work everyday in pain. The hands that keep things running. The very hands that keep us all in touch. Like the hands of telephone linemen.

And the issue of fragrance?

Well, let me say this about that…there are some places where smelling like old beer gets you in the door.

Next time Part 2 of the Lineman's Lotion Saga: Patti describes her ground-breaking product test on a group of telephone linemen, known as The Bell Study, and how it changed her life forever.