Quick Tips: His and Hers Ideas for Romance

As seen in the February Issue of Main Street Magazine/ Quick Tips

Printed in Canada, ISSN: 1920-4299 by Rain Enterprises

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Quick tips February 2011

His and Hers Ideas for Romance

Janice Collins

Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do.

It's the way you love your partner every day. -Barbara De Angelis

Romantic Ideas

for Men

1 Draw her a warm bubble bath. Wash her back (& everywhere else). Take your time. Then towel her dry and carry her off to bed.

2 Give her a full body massage without expecting anything in return. You’re sure to get your reward the next night!

3 Little things go a long way. Hold her hand, link her arm through yours while you’re walking together, place your palm on the small of her back when standing beside her. Those tender gestures won’t go unnoticed.

4 Brush her hair at night. This can be very sensual. Be sure to use a brush, not a comb. And don’t pull. Be gentle. If you encounter a tangle, hold the hair above the tangle, then work it out.

5 Tell her you love her. Seems obvious, but many men overlook this. Women like to hear it. Often. Make her an audio tape and secretly slip it into the cassette player for her to

find.

Romantic Ideas for Women:

1 Do something different. Instead of a massage, graze your nails lightly down his bare back (if you have good nails). It will send shivers of pleasure through his body.

2 Let him pick one fantasy a month for you to fulfill. Make up a list for him to choose from (that way the fantasy will be something that you’re not opposed to). Then plan it out as an official “date.”

3 Have some sexy (but tasteful) pictures taken and give them to him as a gift. It’ll be something unexpected and special–meant for his eyes only.

4 Personally write him an erotic story. He’ll see a new and exciting dimension to you after that.

5 Put on some sexy clothes, turn on the music, then slowly strip the clothes off layer by laye

r while he watches.

Quick Tips for Writing Love Letters

Be in a good mood when writing a love letter. Never try to write a love letter when you're in a bad mood, not only will it be more difficult to write, but your bad vibes will make their way into the letter.

· Write a love letter anytime. Don't wait for a special occasion to write one. Anytime you want to spice up your relationship is a great time for a love letter.

· Your love letter should look appealing. Fountain pens look nicer than ball point pens. Plain paper is fine, but try to choose a better grade of paper stay away from lined paper or paper with lots of designs printed on it.

· Think about why you're writing. Do you want to say you had a good time, are you asking for a date, are you expressing your affection, do you want to know how they feel about you or do you want to say I miss you?

· Always hand write your love letter even if your writing is sloppy. Never type it unless your handwriting is truly illegible. Don't underline or write any words in all caps; it's like yelling.

· Only say what you really mean. Don't make promises you can't keep and don't write anything you may regret later. Once the letter leaves your hands there is no guarantee it will stay private.

· A one page love letter is great. Love letters aren’t meant to be long. As you get more comfortable, your letters may get a little longer but don't write a book.

· If you're writing an erotic lover letter, talk about yourself as well. If you wish to arouse you can write about how hot, wet, positions and lingerie.

· Re-read your love letter to make sure it says what you mean. You may want to write a rough draft first.

· Use a thesaurus to find unique romantic words for your love letter, such as:

~ Openers – Dear, Dearest, My Love, Dearest Love, My Beloved, My Sweetheart, My Darling, My Sweet, Darling

~ Middle – cherish, idolize, embrace, hold dear, adore, caress, desire, fondle, fascinate, passion, smitten, enchanted, captivated, treasure, stroking, touch, infatuated, precious

~ Endings – yours sincerely, with love, all my love, truly yours, love, till we meet again, your sweet peach

QUOTES

As seen in the February Issue of Main Street Magazine.

Printed in Canada, ISSN: 1920-4299 by Rain Enterprises

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check out www.mainstreetmagazine.net

QUOTES

You know you are in love when you see the world in her eyes,and her eyes everywhere in the world.

- David Levesque -

What Is It That I Love?

If asked why I love her I would sayIt’s the sway in her hips, the thickness in her thighs.
It’s the lust in her lips, the love in her eyes.
It’s the softness of her skin,the silk in her hair.
It’s the twist in her walk; it’s the sweetness in her talk.
It’s the way she loves me that makes me love her each day. That is what I would say.

- Justin Hutchins -

I can forget my very existence in a deep kiss of you.
Byron Caldwell Smith

The sobs and tears of joy he had not foreseen rose with such force within him that his whole body shook and for a long time prevented him from speaking. Falling on his knees by her bed. He held his wife's hand to his lips and kissed it, and her hand responded to his kisses with weak movement of finger. Meanwhile, at the foot of the bed, in the midwife's expert hands, like the flame of a lamp, flickered the life of a human being who had never existed before... Count Leo Tolstoy

True love is: A guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep... wait for the boy who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world even when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you' re just as pretty without makeup on. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky he is to have YOU... The one who turns to his friends and says, that's her- that's my girl!---Tilly Rivers

A Novel Idea

Irrational Behaviour
By CURTIS SITTENFELD

Maile Meloy called her first novel “Liars and Saints,” but there was a fair amount of evidence she was being ironic, at least about the saints part. There was also a fair amount of evidence that Meloy sympathized with the sinners, an impression reinforced by the title and contents of her new story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.” Almost all her characters are flawed: lawyers, Montana residents, unfaithful spouses, rich and eccentric older women, young women who are close to their fathers in nice as opposed to creepy ways, and multiple combinations thereof. They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests — by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they’d rather avoid — and Meloy’s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behaviour becomes eminently understandable.

Beth, a recent law school graduate who appears in the first story, “Travis, B.,” is teaching an adult- education class on public-school law in Glendive, a small town on the eastern side of Montana. The problem is that she lives and works a nine-and-a-half-hour drive west, in Missoula. “I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life,” she tells Chet, a ranch worker in the class, about having accepted the teaching position, which she did out of anxiety over her student loans. Twice a week, Beth leaves her Missoula law firm at midday, makes the drive, teaches the class that evening then turns around and spends the night driving home.
“There are deer on the road, and there’s black ice outside of Three Forks along the river,” she explains to Chet, who has quickly developed a crush on her. “If I make it past there, I get to take a shower and go to work at eight. . . . Then learn more school law tomorrow night, then leave work the next day before lunch and drive back here with my eyes twitching.” The bizarreness of Beth’s situation is matched by its plausibility; a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters, including Chet, who first shows up in Beth’s classroom not as a real student, but as a lonely person who on a random night happens to stumble into the school because it’s one of the few buildings in town with its lights on.
While the American West is clearly close to her heart, Meloy — who is 37, grew up in Montana and now lives in Los Angeles, and has won prizes from The Paris Review and the American Academy of Arts and Letters — bravely plunks down her characters in a wide range of times and places, including a 1970s nuclear power plant, an East Coast boarding school and Argentina. All these settings are equally convincing, granted verisimilitude by Meloy’s eye for the casually perfect detail: the knee-to-nose stretch, performed while lying in bed beneath a Charlie Parker poster, that a boarding-school girl learns from her roommate; the party in Buenos Aires where an appearance by the Prince of Wales sends the guests into a frenzy and a woman’s pearl necklace breaks and scatters on the floor. Meloy does her research — either that, or she’s lived many lives — but it never feels as if she included information just because, by God, she spent time unearthing it and now wants to make use of her hard work. Rather, she includes tidbits about, say, the playing cards used in raffles at the nuclear power plant because they’re organic to the stories.
Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them. In an allusion to the collection’s title, a character wonders near the end, “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?” The person asking this question is a man considering leaving his smart, appealing wife of 30 years for the much younger woman who gave swimming lessons to his now-grown children. Such a man isn’t particularly likable — in fact, the opposite — but it’s a mark of Meloy’s even-handed character development that you find yourself agreeing with him, thinking, Yeah, what kind of fool? In the end, everyone in these stories retains at least a sliver of humanity, whether it’s an 87-year-old who in her youth cheerfully appeared in movies under the Nazi studio system or a father who wordlessly offers his teenage daughter as sexual enticement to persuade a plaintiff to remain in a lawsuit.
Meloy’s restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories, which is boldly, but in how she chooses to reveal her plots, delivering shocking twists in as low-key a manner as possible. In “The Girlfriend,” the fact that the protagonist’s daughter was murdered is revealed in an aside. In “Two-Step,” Naomi, a medical resident, talks to her friend Alice about Alice’s suspicion that her husband is having an affair; and though the story is told from Naomi’s perspective, it doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through that she’s the one with whom the husband is cheating. Meloy drops this bomb understatedly, noting of Naomi that “she had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously — or at least soon — be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week.”
Thanks to Meloy’s spare, subdued style, the death and infidelity running through these tales don’t take on as grim a tone as you’d expect. Only one story, about the murdered daughter, really makes you want to slit your wrists; and, indeed, a wry humor appears regularly. An Argentine aristocrat observes that another man “was a bore; not even failure could make him interesting.” Or, as one wife tells another, “the whole soul mates idea . . . is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”
Meloy is also the author of two inter connected novels and an earlier collection, “Half in Love.” Personally, I prefer her stories — “Half in Love” is wonderful too — but she’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.

© Copyright, 2011 Main Street Magazine/Rain Enterprises
As seen in the February Issue of Main Street Magazine.
Printed in Canada, ISSN: 1920-4299 by Rain Enterprises

To find out how to receive your free copy of MSM check out
www.mainstreetmagazine.net

Main Street Music Scene

February 2011 Issue, MSM

Printed in Canada under ISSN: 1920-4299

All copyrights reserved

The Top-Earning Musicians Of 2010

by David Randall

What does it take to become one of the highest-paid musicians of the 2010s? A career that peaked in the '80s. Nearly half of the artists that make up this year's list of the top-earning music acts have been around long enough that they could have appeared on the soundtrack to Back To The Future.

In Pictures: The World’s Top-Earning Musicians

That U2, AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen and Madonna could collectively make an estimated $372 million between June 2009 and June 2010--a little more than half of the $700 million that the top 10 acts in music brought in--highlights the way that the music business has changed over the last decade. Apple's iTunes aside, few young consumers have shown that they are willing to pay for music that they can easily get for free. Album sales have plummeted by more than half since 2000, taking away a lucrative earnings stream for musicians and one of the ways that artists have traditionally broken through into the mainstream.

All of which makes the success of Lady Gaga all the more unexpected. The 24-year-old New York City native went from playing gigs on the Lower East Side to selling out Madison Square Garden within 30 months, thanks to an album that sounded like the best of early Madonna and videos that seemed to come from another dimension where wearing sunglasses made out of burning cigarettes makes perfect sense. With a worldwide tour and million-dollar endorsements with Polaroid, Virgin Mobile and Monster Cable, Lady Gaga netted an estimated $62 million over the last year, the seventh highest on the list. Madonna, meanwhile, came in below her, at No. 8 with $58 million.

Eighties super group U2 made more money than anyone else in music last year, netting an estimated $130 million on the strength of a worldwide tour that sold 1.3 million tickets at an average price of $94 a seat in North America alone. The band, which recently postponed some dates on the tour until 2011, will likely end up in one of the top spots on next year's list as well. Fellow classic rock staple AC/DC followed U2 with $114 million after finishing up a tour that grossed $2.3 million a night.

Acts that began their careers in the '90s--back in the days when it was still relatively easy to make money from recorded music--round out the rest of the top 10. With a net of $87 million, Beyonce once again proved to be the highest-paid female musician and No. 3 overall, though more than half of her total earnings came from endorsements with companies ranging from Nintendo to L'Oreal and from her growing fashion line. Kenny Chesney, whose $50 million in earnings landed him at No. 9, was the highest-paid act in country music last year.

Musicians may be less likely to break the $100 million mark in annual earnings next year, however. The concert business, which has long stood out as the lone bright spot in the industry, is wilting. Live Nation, which recently merged with Ticketmaster to become the most dominant force in the live music business, now serves as an industry bellwether. It recently announced that ticket sales for its top 100 acts dropped 9% for the year, amid a 17% drop in the concert business at large, and it expects sales to fall further.

The real drop in music industry earnings may be yet to come. "Everybody was surprised by how well the business held up last year, despite the economy crashing around us," says Gary Bongiovanni, the editor of Pollstar, a concert trade publication. The biggest fear of some promoters is oversaturation of the market, as the same acts tour year after year without a new album to support. That may soon lead to a decline in both ticket sales and ticket prices. "In today's world artists have to tour to make money because they can't just sit at home and collect their royalties and expect to make their mortgage payments," Bongiovanni says.