Rochelle Riley

I’ve heard it said that whatever you’re doing when the ball drops, when the year changes, when the moment comes is what you’ll be doing for the rest of the entire year.

In 2012, I will not be partying. I will not be drunk. I will not be focused on the crowds around me.

2012 is the Year of Me.

And as Beyonce sang, in a beautiful moment that Dick Clark broadcast from an old concert, I plan to focus on making sure the world knows that I was here.

I’m working on my footprint.

We spend years finding ourselves, which leads us to believe that we were lost. We spend years listening to others’ suggestions for our life path, meaning that we let others determine our direction.

This year, I’m determining everything.

At 11:59, I was letting a re-broadcast of “The Italian Job” watch me as I slept. By a stroke after midnight, the calls and texts began coming in.

In 2012, I will be joyed by surprises. I wish for the unexpected, the acts of love that come unplanned.

At 12:05, I turned the phone off and went to bed because in 2012, I plan to have a more regular schedule filled with exercise and predicted sleep.

And even though I threw the delivered newspaper into the house when Desi and I went out for our morning walk, I did not read it first when I came in.

No, I picked up a copy of the giant-print, King James Bible that I gave my mother on April 2, 1983 – the one that we traded for a new model a few years ago – and I read the first chapter. And I plan to read a chapter each day until I’ve read the entire book, again.  There are 66 books and 1,189 chapters, so some days, I will read more. But it dawned on me during the last week of 2011, that, for a Christian who was raised in church and attends church, I don’t really reflect on that book enough.

So either I believe, or I don’t. I will take to heart what the book says or I won’t. I decided that I do, and I will.

And beginning tomorrow, since I no longer will work on the Sabbath, I am cleaning house. No, not just cleaning the house. But cleaning my life of bad vibes, bad people and bad projects. I plan to make a list of what’s viable and important, rank them in priority order and get ‘em done in 2012.

I will do more for the people around me, especially children, especially the children who need me most, those whose parents don’t want them and aren’t raising them.

I will do more for my friends – building web sites and blogs and helping them market new ideas and companies and making sure that everyone is working.

I will do more for my family, which in their case, just means making more trips to North Carolina and Dallas.

And I will, in the greatest portion, do more for me. Like Jennifer Hudson, I believe. As a a former athlete, I will no longer make excuses for my malaise and laziness. I used food as a tool to dispel disappointment. But now, I’ve called a slob a slob. And now that I’ve read the first chapter of Genesis and tickled Desi’s tummy, I’m headed to the floor for stretches and sit-ups. Then a hot bath and some nontoxic tea before heading to church because, well, where else should I be on the first morning of a New Year?

The biggest cleanse begins now.

Sound like a lot?

Not really. Not in the Year of Me.

There are many reasons why I love Betty White, why millions of people love Betty White, why 317,000 Facebookers LIKE her static fan page that says nothing more than she is.

It is because, for almost 90 years, she has been who she is. She is funny, irreverent, risk-taking and consistent. Whether it was Sue Anne Nivens on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (the perky secret slut who was host of “The Happy Homemaker”)  or Rose Nylund, the naive and unaware to right before the point of being dumb – or Elka Ostrovsky, the caretaker of the house that three fish-out-of-water urban divas land in on TV Land’s “Hot in Cleveland.”

The bottom line is this: Betty White has been working for 70 years as an actress, comedienne, game show celebrity and for several years now, successful author. Her career began the year that “Gone with the Wind” was released – 1939. She has made herself at home in seven different decades, and I was never more excited than to be one of the 500,000 on the FB campaign to get Saturday Night Live to let her host. She did. The show as a hit. She won an Emmy.

Now I want her back.

So while we’re gearing up to get her back in Studio 8H in New York City’s Rockefeller Center, here’s a recent interview:

http://tv.msn.com/betty-white-hot-in-cleveland/story/interview/

I saw a little girl get married Saturday.

She was a 13-year-old babysitter who took my 3-year-old for long walks while I worked.

Then she was a 16-year-old high school student making decisions about her life.

Then she was a 19-year=-old college student – smart, funny, totally sure of her self. And then one night, she decided to go across the street to get something to drink. It was just a study break.

It happened in seconds. She never saw the police car that struck her. The car was involved in a high-speed chase that wasn’t allowed on the streets of Atlanta. The officer was driving in excess of 60 miles an hour.

It was the same night that Niki Taylor, the model and celebrity, was involved in a car accident. Niki Taylor’s serious injuries made all the magazines and newspapers. Carmen barely made it to the hospital.

She would be get better over two years, get to walk again again over five years.

And last Saturday, she walked down the aisle in a red & white ceremony that she planned herself.

She married a soldier. His fellow soldiers came in uniform. Two of them preceded her into the glorious atrium of a Dallas County office building that looked like a dream.

She danced the first dance with her husband beside a serene pool.

She and he cut a large multi-tiered red cake with white and gold decorations.

For three hours, through a glorious and short ceremony and a catered dinner, She was a testament to faith, love and the fact that only God knows.

And God knows we were happy to be there for that moment at a wedding that brought back memories, both bad and good.

But the good ones drowned out the bad ones.

And we never have to think about the accident again – until the next milestone, and we offer thanks again for how far she has come.

I love it when an old man calls me “baby.”

I know that when it happens, the man means no harm, no offense, that he is remembering, that he is, for just a moment, living another time when he was a mack daddy and he called all the girls “baby.” He might have, for a moment, been thinking of his daughters or granddaughters and let me have their term of endearment for a moment.

The man, whenever and wherever he is, could have been my grandfather, who called me that almost every day. My grandfather was a gruff, hard-working man who raised two families and never complained. He called me baby and he called every boy and man in our town “Charlie.”

I was as amazed that he did it as I was that everyone let him. No matter who he saw, he’d cry out, “Hey, Charlie!” And they’d always say, “Hey!” – whether it was Donald or Nathan or Bridgers or Derek or Tony or Nino or Winston.

The man on the scooter looked nothing like my grandfather, save skin like ebony and a wonderful smile.

I was walking, Desi, The Wonder Dog, when I saw the old man this evening. He was on a scooter with a basket in front and his cane in back. He was bowed over his lap. My heart stopped. Had he died while out for a ride? I called over, “Sir, are you all right?”

Nothing.

I called louder, “Sir, is everything OK?”

And he stirred as if from sleep, because that is what it was. He raised his head, still looking forward, never at me, and raised his thumb in the universal sign of “Everything’s all right.”

I smiled and continued our walk. But before I got to the corner, the old man was flying past, doing at least 5 miles per hour. He was totally awake, vibrant, the lost moment gone. He turned and waved, “Hey baby, how ya doing?”

“Fantastic, sir!”

And like that, he had turned the corner and headed down the street. I am a writer, not a photographer. By the time I realized that I should get a photo of him and fumbled with my Iphone to take it, he was gone.

It was the third time I’d been called baby by an old man this week, and every time, I thought of my grandfather. Those “baby’s” were gifts, and I didn’t mind at all.

My friend, LC, and I were at it again this morning, lamenting the state of American television, which has been sharked to death by so-called reality shows.

What was making us happy? The fact that some networks are re-making some of our favorite TV shows (Dallas, Hawaii 5-0).  This means two things:

First, we’ll have even more great shows to add to our must-see TV list that already has: “The Good Wife,” “The Closer,” “Burn Notice,” “Suits,” White Collar” and “Rizzoli and Isles.”

Second, it might hasten the demise of fake reality TV. The difference? “The Amazing Race,” a travel game show, is good reality TV.

Any “Housewives” show? Baloney.

Reality? Really?

Seriously, if cameras followed us around all day, they’d see carpet cleaners come and go with the dog barking the entire time, us sitting with piles of papers paying bills, us putting away groceries, which these women never seem to buy. They’d see real desperate housewives trying to fit 30 hours worth of into a 24-hour day.

“We are CEOS of our homes, and our children have ballet recitals, dance recitals, swim lessons,” LC said. “And that’s what we’re doing.”

Moreover, she and I are both working moms, so we’re among the women who run the house and run companies or work at full-time jobs.

We don’t know any housewives who walk around in designer clothes on soccer day or drink champagne every weekend – even though some could if they wanted to. But they don’t because they’re too busy dealing with real life. And real life is not loud, unless it’s the children, or boisterous unless a football game is on or the children are moving. We don’t do battle in heels.

“At what event have we ever attended have we seen two women go at each other in a fistfight?” LC asked.

Not one. Not ever.

Critics have panned reality shows for years, pointing out that they’re scripted, not spur-of-the-moment, that we don’t see the real stuff, just the horribly embarrassing stuff that makes the audience laugh at these women who think they’re stars.

But no amount of criticism is enough because these shows are taking up space for shows about real life, or shows that help us escape when real life is not funny or entertaining.

So here’s a tip for TV producers: give us drama and comedy and variety shows and reality game shows. But the fake drama? You can keep it!