Mike Your Manners, Folks

Which side of the plate does the fork go on? How should you ask someone for a date? How do you stay safe on social media?

These are the kinds of questions Yvette Bethel answers for children throughout the region. And now adults, too.

 

Etiquette in the 21st Century? How quaint! I thought it went out with Emily Post and Miss Manners.

 

But Bethel charges ahead, preaching civility by holding etiquette classes at schools and recreation centers throughout the area through her All Forks LLC. (www.yvettesetiquette.net).

 

Children of all ages are shown a table setting and are asked to learn where everything goes. They go through various meal courses and are surprised to learn there are such things as a teacup and a saucer. They learn how to introduce themselves and start a conversation with a guest they don’t know well. And if you sneeze, cover your mouth and nose and say “excuse me.”

 

Children are told not to talk on the phone during dinner.  One boy took her advice and left his off the table at home, but his father was reluctant to stop talking on his own phone. The boy confronted him about the etiquette lesson. “We had a very nice conversation,” the boy told Bethel proudly at the next class.

 

 

When it comes to social media, Bethel focuses on safety. “I teach them not to accept a ‘friend’ request from just anybody, because you don’t know who’s out there,” she says. Their parents are encouraged to monitor their kids’ phone use. “No matter what you teach the children, it won’t work unless the parents are involved,” she says.

 

Bethel tries to get kids to put away their phones at bedtime. “Out of a class of 20, I was astounded to find that none of the kids did that,” she said.

 

For older kids, dating is a big topic. Bethel discourages boys from saying they are “getting with” a girl and instead says to call her a “friend.” Rather than focusing just on what the girl looks like, they should get to know her better. An invitation to go out should be preceded by some small talk.

 

Bethel, who once worked at Burlington Mills, has taught Sunday school for years at Laurel Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Sutherlin. A Halifax resident, she took on volunteer work, and on her son’s advice took on six foster children over time. She found that these kids needed training in such routine matters as grooming and table manners.

 

Bethel held a successful class at TJM Community Center and took online classes at IAP Career College to become a licensed etiquette consultant.  Then she went to public schools, community centers and even Averett University, where she taught foreign students American etiquette.

 

She is holding a Women’s Empowerment Tea Party at Washington Coleman Community Center on July 13. Contact her  allforks4life@gmail.com. Bethel also teaches cell-phone etiquette, self-grooming and how to be charitable. She holds workshops for various clients.

It must be hard to be married to an authority on etiquette (As a B&B spouse, trust me on this!) She told her husband, Linwood Bethel III, “I’m going to give you the same activity that I gave the kids. I said ‘When we go to the restaurant, I want you to put your phone away and I want you to observe and see how many people are actually talking.’ Now he’s more conscious and not talking on his phone.”

Young Love, Baseball and the Atomic Bomb

 

Only the classiest U.S. cities have two professional baseball teams. New York has the Yankees and Mets, Chicago the Cubs and the White Sox, and Los Angeles the Dodgers and the Angels. Oh, and Danville, Virginia, too, with the Otterbots and the Dairy Daddies.

 

What? How can that be? Yes, the Dairy Daddies of the Old North State League have started their season in the same arena in Dan Daniel Park used by the Otterbots of the Appalachian League. Both teams are made up of college players during their summer break. You’ll be hard -pressed to find any born I the last century.

 

What’s with these crazy names? Apparently, that’s the trend in minor league baseball now. Baseball is only part of the entertainment at these games. Who needs pricey Major League Baseball?

 

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My elementary school romance came in the third grade, when I fell in love with my teacher. I was really smitten.

Maybe it was mutual. The young Fairmont School teacher told my mother, “I wish I had a little boy just like Mike.” Aww!

I was so enamored that I memorized all of the state flowers for her, and I recited them in front of the superintendent of schools when he visited the class. I’ll bet my classmates were jealous. I couldn’t tell you what those flowers are today. I’ll bet I am even allergic to some of them.

We had a learning project about China. Really, in 1949, after the Communist takeover? That was pushing things. She took us to San Francisco’s Chinatown, and I had a lovely romantic lunch with her (and the other annoying third graders.) I should have bought her flowers, though I was too young to order champagne.

Then the bottom fell out! She got married! Arghh! My true love has forsaken me! Her new name was Mrs. Marston  (I don’t remember her maiden name.)

If the superintendent ever came back to class, I would have just declared to him, “She broke my heart!”

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News reporters are shown in movies and on TV as aggressive, combative people ducking in foxholes in wars. Or working all hours to bring down corrupt politicians. Or risking their lives to find the killer ahead of the police.

But some assignments can be fun and aren’t that hard. Take, for example, my coverage of nuclear explosions. You heard me right!

I experienced underground nuclear tests when I was the AP’s Las Vegas correspondent from 1968 through 1970. Suddenly the memories of U235 and U238 uranium in high school physics came back to me. I could actually explain an atomic bomb blast.

No, I didn’t go underground to report on these tests.  I sat at a bar at the Mint Hotel, the tallest building in Las Vegas at the time. When I felt the room shake, I called the Los Angeles bureau and said, “Release the bulletin. The bomb went off.” Then I would have another drink. The people in L.A. receiving my call were jealous and didn’t appreciate my style of reporting. I never won a Pulitzer Prize for my sterling stories.

Once, a visiting AP reporter from Boston joined me at the bar.  He was in Las Vegas to get a quick divorce. He started writing his own version: “Las Vegas buildings swayed like palm trees in a desert breeze.” Well, they didn’t, and I rejected it.

The last Nevada test was conducted in 1992. They were banned by a treaty in 1996. No more fun!

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Correction: In the column last week about Paco’s restaurant, I said Arrocha’s wife, Maribel Fragas, helps at the restaurant. She is actually co-owner.

When Your Child’s Interests Don’t Match Your Own

 When we adopted Sara from Honduras, I had no idea I was getting an entrepreneur. But I did know that she would be a fanatic animal lover.

 

Her brothers and sisters were chickens, and she also loved dogs, cats and birds. In our first outing with her in 190, she became enthralled with a parrot in a cage as we ate at a Tegucigalpa restaurant. Sit down and eat, Sara!

 

Arriving at our home in Arlington, VA., she immediately struck up a friendship with our dalmatian, Brandy. Her fondness for animals presented a problem with me: I have never been keen on pets, and I was allergic to many of them.

 

She found a stray dog as she came out of the movies near our summer home in South Boston. When we couldn’t find an owner, she talked us into taking it to Arlington with us. I sneezed much of the way. I didn’t know her as a forceful little girl, but she leveraged all of her contacts at school to find a home for the animal.

 

For her school’s career day, she followed a veterinarian and was fascinated by her work. She was hired as a kennel assistant. But Sara preferred becoming a veterinary technician, “because there is more hands-on work,” she says.

 

Meanwhile, there was an endless stream of disgusting little creatures at our house: gerbils, hamsters, Guinea pigs and rabbits.  Yuck! There were some of her beloved chickens, hatched at Pickett’s preschool and on their way to permanent homes near South Boston.

One dog at our house wasn’t enough so Sara drove 350 miles to get a poodle on a whim. Owners of another poodle in the litter took him to Sara’s wedding years later!

I thought I was free of this menagerie when Sara moved out in her early 20s, but she lived in the house next door to us 10 years later in South Boston when her husband Lance’s job was upended in Georgia.

Of course there were four or five barking beasts next door. Was that enough? No, Sara decided to invite strangers with their dogs to her house so she could groom them. Up and down our lane in cars all day—yap, yap, yap! Doggie hell. We even got her to buy new gravel for the worn-down road.

 

But hey, she was making money doing this! She got to be pretty good. She loved it and it showed. Customers adored her! She posted photos of each grooming on Facebook. She would get thank-you notes so many times. She even hired helpers.

 

Finally, it was time to move to Christiansbutg (near Blacksburg), where Lance had landed a good job. It turns out that grooming was in just as much demand there. Sara, now 34, has opened a business, called Solo Paws, and has four or five employees and more than 500 regular customers! They love her work too! Some have even driven the 126 miles from South Boston.

Well, she didn’t get any of these skills from me. But I am so proud of her!

The Risks of Timing the Market

To me, a house is a home, not an investment.

Case in point: My mother’s residence in Placerville, Calif. She died in December 2008, at the very depths of the Great Recession. My friends told me to hold on to the house and rent it out as an investment until the market improved.

 

Three thousand miles away in Washington, D.C., I did not want to deal with repairs and complaining tenants. Neither did my sister, who lived a mountain range away in Nevada.

 

I put the house on the market as-is and sold it for a measly $200,000 to someone who paid in cash.  I visited the house a year later and was amazed at all of the work the new owner had put into it.

 

After another four years, I looked on Zillow out of curiosity to see how much the house appreciated when the economy rebounded. I was amazed to see that it had been sold for $180,000, a $20,000 loss. How did that happen? I’m guessing the sewage system my dad installed did not meet code.

 

Then there was a friend in California who realized before everyone else that houses were overpriced  in the mid-2000s and the market was going to tank. She sold her house at a great price and moved to an apartment. But within three years, housing was still booming and she decided she was wrong.

 

Tired of apartments, she bought another house. Then CRASH. She had been right in the first place, but wrong in her timing.

 

In stocks, as well as housing, I have tried not to time the market. The mantra at the Kiplinger Editors, when I worked there, was “Buy good stocks and hang onto them.” (Of course, you know what the good stocks are.)

 

Several pitfalls I can recall:

 

—So many people I know unloaded stocks at the bottom of the market in 2008. They missed the great recovery that followed.

—I made my broker dump stocks tied to the Dow-Jones average in the 1980s because I didn’t want to trade in dinosaurs like U.S. Steel and Conrail. But others did quite well. Newer companies were a lot more volatile and risky. If I had it to do over again, I would have put my money in Vanguard’s fund tied to stock averages with limited broker fees, if any.

—If a broker you don’t know well tries to sell you something, look out. I thought Mortgage Investors of Washington sounded good in 1971, but the company tanked because of poor management.

—Avoid hunches. After I saw the musical “Annie,” I thought it would make a hit movie. I was right, but my Columbia Pictures investment soured for other reasons.

—Dividends aren’t everything. I never forgave my grandfather for selling his Walt Disney stock in 1953 before the creation of Disneyland and Disney’s TV show. They didn’t pay enough, he told me.

—Leave investing to the experts. By picking my own stocks, I was really competing with mutual fund experts who knew more about them than I did. My investments in a Morgan Stanley private fund may not double or triple the market, but I don’t have to worry about them.

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When Pickett and I went to visit my daughter’s family near Blacksburg, granddaughter Aria got quite ill with the flu. So it was decided that we octogenarians should return home but bring the healthy Bryce, age 7, with us.

 

What a delight! As I was tracking my blood pressure, we shared a good laugh over a joke. The reading was the lowest I have had in a long time.

 

Bryce often focuses on my age of 82 more than I would like. But he said, “I am glad you have made it this far so I can be with you,”. Awww. I answered, “I promise to attend your high school graduation in 2035.”

 

 

 

Sometimes You Have to Just Listen

 Sometimes you just have to listen. Like the time my piano teacher told me as a 14-year-old, “You shouldn’t quit your piano lessons. You have potential.”

 

I had successfully played some google woogie and early 50s pop music at two parties and in a music class.  But ignored him and quit. One of my biggest mistakes.ever. My priorities changed. How many times have you made an error like that?

 

As an adult I was getting better at listening. I still dabbled in the piano, mostly playing by ear. But I listened to the lady in the next apartment play, and she kept making the same mistakes every time she played a song. I wasn’t going to fall into that trap.

 

So I resumed piano lessons at age 34. I enjoyed it a lot, but I couldn’t memorize songs anymore. Once I got into a quarrel with her over the song “Satin Doll.” She kept saying I was playing the dotted quarter notes wrong “But that’s not the way Duke Ellington played it,” I insisted.

 

I switched to a jazz piano teacher, jean Butler. She introduced me to the Real Book,  a “fake book” with only melody and chords. At the time, the book was illegal but later became a legal standard for the jazz world. I loved it!

 

I even performed at my own wedding, but I played mostly for myself for the next 35 yeasts on my wonderful Yamaha grand piano. But all of a sudden, in 2017 I was working with a teacher on sight singing, when I laid down a few bars of jazz at his request.

 

“You have GOT to join a jazz band,” he said. I was listening. I surprised him when I really did. My friend Ron Worthy jammed every week with a group in the basement of someone’s house in a mostly African-American section of Washington. It was a jazz musician’s dream! These guys were pros, and I loved it. But I was in over my head and decided to switch to a class in Tysoons Corner, where a guitarist, saxophone player, trumpet player and a drummer and I played along with professional guitarist xxxx. It had the great feel of a jazz combo, and the next year I played with Jeff Antoniuk and his group in Annapolis. Perhaps the highlight of my music was playing with this group Twins Jazz, one of the prime jazz venues in Washington. My friends came. What a thrill that was!

 

But I wasn’t finished as I moved to South Boston. A week after Tunnel Creek Vineyards opened in Roxboro in 2001, I admired their Chickering grand piano and asked if I could play it. When I did, the owner said, “Can you come back on Saturday?” I listened.

They paid me well for Saturdays and Sundays, even giving me billing in their d ads. What a thrill!  Th only instruction I got was to play softly so as not to interrupt the talking. They weren’t listening to me? Well fine, no pressure. I could play whatever I wanted. But the long hours they wanted me to play took a toll on my arthritic hands, and I had to quit after three months. I recently boasted to one of the many follow-up big-time acts they host that I was first. They are impressed.

 

After playing for some receptions and parties in the area, I listened again when Nan, the 89-year-old pianist Mt. Carmel Presbyterian Church, was out with hip replacement surgery. “We need a pianist,” was the call. I have stepped in, but hymns are difficult for me. I am playing with chords out of a hymn fake book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When to Give Up on a Sport

 Have you played a sport? Well at some age you have to give it up. It’s just a matter of time. Most professional athletes don’t go beyond their late 30s.

I never played any serious sports, but I dabbled in some. Here is what I have given up so far and when. What about you?

 

—Boxing, age 12. My dad handed me some boxing gloves and wanted to teach me the sport. When my right hook smashed into his face, he decided to quit. I don’t know why I didn’t box again. I enjoyed it SO MUCH!

 

—Touch football, age 30. I went out for a pass, and a defender, a good friend, knocked me down. That’s illegal even in the NFL, I think. He went on to be a hot-shot Washington attorney. It figures!

 

—Golf, age 30. As I kept hitting double par (in the 140s), my instructor told me I would never get better unless I played more than three times a year. Well, who would want to do that?

 

Jogging, 45. It’s tough on the knees. Also boring. I’m told there is a runner’s high after about six miles, but I never got that far.

 

Roller skating, 45. My friends were appalled when I entered a race in the World of Sports rink with two 15-year-olds. I ended up last, but I was proud of myself.

 

Swimming, age 50. It’s probably the best sport for older people, but I hate it. I don’t like to put my head under water.

 

Baseball/softball, age 50. I strained a leg muscle running to first base. I couldn’t hit the ball squarely with my bat anymore, and I couldn’t catch a fly ball. Easy decision.

 

Tennis, age 60. A friend had a knee replacement just so he could keep playing. Not me! (I tried pickleball but I couldn’t see the ball well due to an eye condition.)

 

Basketball, age 75. Well, really about 50. But a few years ago, a 9-year-old grandson challenged me and boasted, “I have a feeling I am going to clobber you.” Oh, trash talk, huh? With my height advantage, I clobbered HIM. Boy, that felt good!

 

Bowling, age 80. I once bowled a 200 game, but my arthritic hands and bad back can’t tolerate this sport anymore.

 

Soccer, age 82: I hadn’t played in years, but I dribbled the ball a little with a grandson last month. I got tired easily and was afraid I’d fall down.

 

Silver Sneakers, combination aerobics and weights exercise. I still do that!

 

Croquet: I still think I can manage to tap the ball through those wickets. The gopher holes on our lawn make it a tough course, though.

 

Bike riding: I go from 6 to 10 miles on standard and electric bikes. I hope to increase my range this summer. I love this sport. Trouble is: I just can’t afford to fall!

 

Skiing: My favorite sport off all! I feel safer on snow than on a bike. I can still do five or six runs for an hour before my knees hurt and I get tired. (But it’s a lot of driving, money and trouble for an hour of fun.) Not ready to give this up yet!

 

Walking: Oh, wait! Here’s one you never need to give up!