So with great reluctance, I finally put my Thanksgiving away, the little Pilgrims and Indians back in the closet, the glorious red and russet leaves, still shiny, into a bag to throw away. All the pumpkins, great and small, a turban squash and the one truly royal, squat one were moved onto the terrace, awaiting transformation, as most of us do. There were no maple leaves on my table this year, because Spring came so late to my side of the street, and things bloom and flower and leaf here in strange disarray, as the sun hits them, so my side blossomed with jacaranda later than anywhere else, including across the street, and the maples never tired and dropped Fall onto the sidewalk, even into December.
But last year I'd had big, not exactly fat but scenically lush maple leaves on my table, and when I put the Pilgrims away, I found them, sprayed gold, as I'd done for last Christmas, still intact and ready to welcome the late come and even later acknowledged new holiday. It had been my plan to go to New York to meet up with loved friends, but the sweetest of them got ill, so the plan was cancelled. In my heart, where Jimmy Carter lusted, I was relieved, because I'd started my new novel and was grateful to stay put, especially when the news came in that it was 21 degrees in Manhattan.
Then I hied me to Blick Art supplies to get the gold spray for the pumpkins and the nuts and the pine cones I'd collected all year-- not many, but when you see one, you know to keep it, like a good friend. I had stopped by Trader Joe's for fresh flowers, some sprigs of pine, and roses, and drove into the sidestreet by Blick's, to park my car. There was a young woman pulling into one metered space in the shade, and as I had Mimi in the car, I pulled up beside her to ask her to move forward so Mimi wouldn't be parked in the sun. I honked my horn, before I saw how or who she was. To my surprise and general universal sorrow, her face was flat against the wheel, her hands holding the sides of it, her posture, shoulders not quite heaving, one of complete despair. I knew that it was only love that could do that, and wondered why it is called love.
Empathetic as I try to be and mostly am, I am also Mimi's mom, so I rolled down my window and asked her if she was all right and would she mind moving up. She was Asian, and young, and very lovely, her eyes not quite streaming. "It's going to be all right," I said, and hoped it would be. I went over to her after I'd parked and told her I was sorry for whatever it was, not saying I knew it was love, but that she was young and lovely, and everything would change as it always does. She asked me if we had to put money in the meter. As it was Sunday we didn't.
I saw her again inside Blick's, and knew she was an artist, so wanted to tell her to use what she was feeling to make a great work of art. But I lost sight of her in between the rows of paint and great displays of brushes, and couldn't show her something I'd found in one of those little books they sell for $4.95 that have about twenty words and are making people fortunes, that said 'Creativity solves everything."
I gathered up my spray paints and glitter, and paid and left. Her car was still on the street. So I took the most beautiful of the long-stemmed roses and left it in the handle of her car door.
When I got home I gilded all the pumpkins, and silvered a fallen branch I'd picked up in March it must have been, and set it in a glass vase by my fireplace, strung it with candy canes, stuck in some pine branches, and added some water. Then I hung some captious angels and red and green and glittery Irish fairy folk from the little dangles on the ceiling that are supposed to hold speakers for the sound system, but as I don't have one here, I imagined Carols in my head, and even sang "We Three Kings," first the melody, then the harmony. Star of Wonder, Star of Night. My daughter-in-law is very observant, so they have been celebrating Chanukah, and as our relationship is just starting to get really good, I know better than to try and show her my Christmas.
But it is very beautiful. Most glorious are the nuts spread out on the sideboard, all sprayed gold. Almonds are good, and that great ugly nut that my old friend the musician Tiger Haynes called 'nigger toes' because he could, being black, hold the gild beautifully. But best are the hazel nuts, as they add their own shine. And there's glitter on the pine cones. They stand like a magic forest around the nuts, so you'd hardly know this was Los Angeles.
And then I invited Christmas to come. I hope it comes to all of you. I hope it comes Big Time to the woman in the car.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Sunday, December 02, 2007
A Church for Britney Spears
As longtime friends know from reading this Blog, my life for the past several years has been a search not just for the cliches, Love and Fame, but also for God, perhaps in itself a cliche. Last Sunday in my panic to find inspiration, or at least the motif for a new novel, I went to Self-Realization on Sunset and walked twice, or thrice as Tommy Thompson would have writ, around the Lake Shrine, willingly suspending Disbelief, and asking for guidance. That night before I went to sleep, I believe I called aloud several times for Help, and asked that God make clear what I should be writing, or, even better, send me an idea.
The next morning I went to my computer, which is my sometimes wont, when I should be doing Yoga or meditating, and Lo! On the e-mail was my answer! So God is into technology, and could, should He/She choose, have an online service. Let let us call it FAITHBOOK.
Anyway, I started the novel and felt good about it, so today, having from the same source found an old Friend, capitalized as I met her in Quaker Meeting, and she told me she was now going to Unity on 14th and Maple, I figured what the heaven. Went there this morning at 9-- and the little children from the Mt.Olive Lutheran Preschool's Choir of Angelic Voices sang their sweet songs, and just before the parson, a woman, began her sermon, one of the mothers, in jeans, took her three-year-old, she must have been, up closer and held her and squatted and the jeans, cut low, went down below the mum's bottom cheeks to reveal quite fully the crack in her ass. And I thought this would be the right church for Britney.
I wanted to write that down but didn't have a pen so prayed for one, and Lo! God sent me a blue one, from the box beside the Hymnal, inviting me to make a donation(didn't.) At that point the parsonette began her talk and it was about Advent which this is the first Sunday of, getting ready for the Coming, and she said, referring to Matthew, that much of it draws on Jewish scriptures, and I thought, as I do from time to time, that is probably where I should be.
There was a minister in Weinheim, the little village in the Bergstrasse where I went to write my novel about neo-Naziism in Germany in the early '90s named Herr Lohrbacher, the only person in the town to admit there was such a thing, a precursor of the publishers who were to reject the book on the same thesis-- no neo-Naziism in Germany-- especially since they had almost all just been bought by Bertelsmann, the powerful German publisher who had never had any connection to Naziism either, until they finally admitted they had. Herr Lohrbacher, a highly intelligent and obviously questing man, had suggested to the local schools not only that they examine the Holocaust-- Weinheim had been one of the three villages where Hitler did his out-of-town tryout for Krystallnacht, on September 22nd, 1940,rounding up the Jews of that village, along with those from Hemsbach and Mannheim, and sending them to Gurs, a leftover Pyrenees prison from the Spanish Civil War, to see if their neighbors would say anything(they didn't)-- but also introduce Jewish studies into the German schools, since he was himself a Lutheran, and felt as the minister did this morning, apparently accurately. that much of Christian gospel came from Jewish scriptures, and, in addition, that there was a morality in Judaism that would be helpful to Germans. After that Herr Lohrbacher got about 85 death threats a day. But there was no neo-Naziism in Germany.
Anyway I left the service with little feeling of uplift, so that one isn't for me. But I did get a chance this afternoon to go see my old(88) friend Betty Garrett perform the songs she had written, abetted by a company of players at Theater West, which included a still radiant Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1954. That year has significance for me which some who read this will understand, but Lee said not to tell anybody, I don't look it, and at Virgin Atlantic Airlines where I have Frequent Flyer Miles, that is the year I was born. In the audience was Connie Sawyer, who is 95, sharp, pretty, still driving, and living at the Motion Picture Home where she entertains at lunch, to which Betty and I will go.
So there is uplift in unexpected places. We have only to be open to it, with hearts full of hope and love, at least on occasion.
In spite of the Stagehands' Union going back to work, I am having trouble striking my Thanksgiving, as I really love my table, all my little Pilgrims sitting on pumpkins and a bed of leaves I keep adding to. Because of the lateness with which Spring came to my block, the trees are still dropping leaves of a wonderful color, as I hope I will, too, in my attenuated Autumn.
The next morning I went to my computer, which is my sometimes wont, when I should be doing Yoga or meditating, and Lo! On the e-mail was my answer! So God is into technology, and could, should He/She choose, have an online service. Let let us call it FAITHBOOK.
Anyway, I started the novel and felt good about it, so today, having from the same source found an old Friend, capitalized as I met her in Quaker Meeting, and she told me she was now going to Unity on 14th and Maple, I figured what the heaven. Went there this morning at 9-- and the little children from the Mt.Olive Lutheran Preschool's Choir of Angelic Voices sang their sweet songs, and just before the parson, a woman, began her sermon, one of the mothers, in jeans, took her three-year-old, she must have been, up closer and held her and squatted and the jeans, cut low, went down below the mum's bottom cheeks to reveal quite fully the crack in her ass. And I thought this would be the right church for Britney.
I wanted to write that down but didn't have a pen so prayed for one, and Lo! God sent me a blue one, from the box beside the Hymnal, inviting me to make a donation(didn't.) At that point the parsonette began her talk and it was about Advent which this is the first Sunday of, getting ready for the Coming, and she said, referring to Matthew, that much of it draws on Jewish scriptures, and I thought, as I do from time to time, that is probably where I should be.
There was a minister in Weinheim, the little village in the Bergstrasse where I went to write my novel about neo-Naziism in Germany in the early '90s named Herr Lohrbacher, the only person in the town to admit there was such a thing, a precursor of the publishers who were to reject the book on the same thesis-- no neo-Naziism in Germany-- especially since they had almost all just been bought by Bertelsmann, the powerful German publisher who had never had any connection to Naziism either, until they finally admitted they had. Herr Lohrbacher, a highly intelligent and obviously questing man, had suggested to the local schools not only that they examine the Holocaust-- Weinheim had been one of the three villages where Hitler did his out-of-town tryout for Krystallnacht, on September 22nd, 1940,rounding up the Jews of that village, along with those from Hemsbach and Mannheim, and sending them to Gurs, a leftover Pyrenees prison from the Spanish Civil War, to see if their neighbors would say anything(they didn't)-- but also introduce Jewish studies into the German schools, since he was himself a Lutheran, and felt as the minister did this morning, apparently accurately. that much of Christian gospel came from Jewish scriptures, and, in addition, that there was a morality in Judaism that would be helpful to Germans. After that Herr Lohrbacher got about 85 death threats a day. But there was no neo-Naziism in Germany.
Anyway I left the service with little feeling of uplift, so that one isn't for me. But I did get a chance this afternoon to go see my old(88) friend Betty Garrett perform the songs she had written, abetted by a company of players at Theater West, which included a still radiant Lee Meriwether, Miss America 1954. That year has significance for me which some who read this will understand, but Lee said not to tell anybody, I don't look it, and at Virgin Atlantic Airlines where I have Frequent Flyer Miles, that is the year I was born. In the audience was Connie Sawyer, who is 95, sharp, pretty, still driving, and living at the Motion Picture Home where she entertains at lunch, to which Betty and I will go.
So there is uplift in unexpected places. We have only to be open to it, with hearts full of hope and love, at least on occasion.
In spite of the Stagehands' Union going back to work, I am having trouble striking my Thanksgiving, as I really love my table, all my little Pilgrims sitting on pumpkins and a bed of leaves I keep adding to. Because of the lateness with which Spring came to my block, the trees are still dropping leaves of a wonderful color, as I hope I will, too, in my attenuated Autumn.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
The Executioner's Sort-of Song
Norman Mailer, two-fisted, ornery, and prodigiously talented, is dead at 84. I knew him, Horatio, not well, but colorfully, as he was truly a colorful man, and, more often than not, a really good writer.
I met him during the course of my flagrant and flighty success with The Pretenders, when he was running for Mayor of New York, and there was a fund raiser in the mansion of a Bryn Mawr friend of mine, a jillionaireness who was a character in the novel but too spacey to read it, so had no idea. Her husband, though, to whom I had introduced her, had been my doctor when I lived in NY, and although not too sharp medically, could read, so had read it, and said "You're a very naughty girl." But he wasn't angry, I don't think, just pleased he had seemed memorable, if somewhat silly and impotent.
I was standing on the second story of her marblelized manse, with an actual balustrade carved from the same, looking down at the party in the-- well, it wasn't quite a ballroom, but could've passed for one, certainly can in memory. Mailer was a few steps away from me, very short and thick and sputtering with bombast, in a sort of endearing way. I was being followed around town and interviewed by Marlene Nadel, a bright woman with the Village Voice, who was marking down my words and actions, thrilling to me at the time, of course, because I knew I was not just the mindless author of a sexy bestseller, but nobody else outside my immediate family which included my classmates seemed aware of that, but Marlene apparently did. It was at this point that I engaged in a verbal wrestling match with Mailer, who was having an affair with a writer friend's wife who was at the same time also having an affair with the wife of Mailer, material, rich as it was, unthinkable for me to use at the time, innocent that I really was beneath the sequins and high-level soft core, which Dr. Nahm, the philosophy professor at Bryn Mawr pronounced my work. I considered the writer whose wife it was a true friend, so put out of my mind the sexual proclivities behind their smart facades which apparently went pretty deep.
Anyway, there stood Mailer, and I engaged him. I don't remember what I said, but Marlene noted it and put it in the article-- Village Voice, 1969, I wonder if those records exist?-- but whatever it was pricked him. It was then I noted I was standing but a few feet away from the rather low balustrade, remembered that he had stabbed his wife, and that it would take but a quick swat of his muscular arm, and splat! There would go the rest of the books. So I shut up. But my feeling about him was rather tender, as I sensed a good soul beneath the bluster.
When an actual good novel I'd written, Touching, became the landmark libel case in fiction-- a very long story I have told elsewhere-- and Doubleday, having defended me all the way to the Supreme Court arguing the decision against me would have a chilling effect on fiction, once the Supremes declined to hear the case(except for Justices Brennan, Stewart and Marshall, the pro-1st amendmenters on the bench at the time)turned and sued me on the basis of the indemnification clause all writers sign holding the publisher blameless, it became necessary for me to try and get important writers to line up with me, asking Doubleday to withdraw the suit. I had to call writers I didn't know to ask for their help-- plead, really. Those calls
were made very early in the morning, as most of the writers were in the east. Besides, I didn't want my children to hear, as they were already in a state of fear and confusion that had fallen like a termiter's blue bag over our house, which we had to homestead so Doubleday couldn't take it away from us. Robert was delivering Herald-Examiners on his bicycle when I was on the front page, and thought I had committed a crime-- if you couldn't explain the First Amendment and Fiction to a jury in Santa Monica, how explain it to a ten-year-old boy? My daughter, seeing her floor being waxed, asked "Are you selling the house? Will I still be able to go to my school?"(In those ancient days, remember, people moved to the flats just so their children could be part of the Beverly Hills school system.)
So there I was, at six in the morning, calling those I admired and was intimidated by but had never even met(Truman Capote: "THat's TERRIBLE!" he mewed. "I shall call Nelson this very morning!" "Mr. Capote," I said, "thank you. But Nelson Doubleday doesn't own it anymore.") Then I called the fierce Mr. Mailer. His secretary got back to me. "You can add his name to the list, but he said for you not to do that anymore. He was a character in somebody's novel and he didn't like it."
Warm-spot-in-my-heartedly, I stepped up to see him decades later, when he and George Plimpton(another Helas!) were doing their Fitzgerald-Hemingway thing at the 92nd Street Y. By then Mailer was on two canes. I introduced myself, and did a quick summary, cutting to my gratitude at his having supported me.
"I SUPPORTED YOU!" he actually shouted, planting himself somewhat uncertainly on his feet, and lifting both canes in the air, waved them like the capricious little boy he still was, even old.
So there goes another one who was just the man you'd hoped he'd be. I am happy he got to write his last piece declaring God creative, and probably a writer, maybe not unlike Mailer himself. I hope Mailer welcomes Mailer.
I met him during the course of my flagrant and flighty success with The Pretenders, when he was running for Mayor of New York, and there was a fund raiser in the mansion of a Bryn Mawr friend of mine, a jillionaireness who was a character in the novel but too spacey to read it, so had no idea. Her husband, though, to whom I had introduced her, had been my doctor when I lived in NY, and although not too sharp medically, could read, so had read it, and said "You're a very naughty girl." But he wasn't angry, I don't think, just pleased he had seemed memorable, if somewhat silly and impotent.
I was standing on the second story of her marblelized manse, with an actual balustrade carved from the same, looking down at the party in the-- well, it wasn't quite a ballroom, but could've passed for one, certainly can in memory. Mailer was a few steps away from me, very short and thick and sputtering with bombast, in a sort of endearing way. I was being followed around town and interviewed by Marlene Nadel, a bright woman with the Village Voice, who was marking down my words and actions, thrilling to me at the time, of course, because I knew I was not just the mindless author of a sexy bestseller, but nobody else outside my immediate family which included my classmates seemed aware of that, but Marlene apparently did. It was at this point that I engaged in a verbal wrestling match with Mailer, who was having an affair with a writer friend's wife who was at the same time also having an affair with the wife of Mailer, material, rich as it was, unthinkable for me to use at the time, innocent that I really was beneath the sequins and high-level soft core, which Dr. Nahm, the philosophy professor at Bryn Mawr pronounced my work. I considered the writer whose wife it was a true friend, so put out of my mind the sexual proclivities behind their smart facades which apparently went pretty deep.
Anyway, there stood Mailer, and I engaged him. I don't remember what I said, but Marlene noted it and put it in the article-- Village Voice, 1969, I wonder if those records exist?-- but whatever it was pricked him. It was then I noted I was standing but a few feet away from the rather low balustrade, remembered that he had stabbed his wife, and that it would take but a quick swat of his muscular arm, and splat! There would go the rest of the books. So I shut up. But my feeling about him was rather tender, as I sensed a good soul beneath the bluster.
When an actual good novel I'd written, Touching, became the landmark libel case in fiction-- a very long story I have told elsewhere-- and Doubleday, having defended me all the way to the Supreme Court arguing the decision against me would have a chilling effect on fiction, once the Supremes declined to hear the case(except for Justices Brennan, Stewart and Marshall, the pro-1st amendmenters on the bench at the time)turned and sued me on the basis of the indemnification clause all writers sign holding the publisher blameless, it became necessary for me to try and get important writers to line up with me, asking Doubleday to withdraw the suit. I had to call writers I didn't know to ask for their help-- plead, really. Those calls
were made very early in the morning, as most of the writers were in the east. Besides, I didn't want my children to hear, as they were already in a state of fear and confusion that had fallen like a termiter's blue bag over our house, which we had to homestead so Doubleday couldn't take it away from us. Robert was delivering Herald-Examiners on his bicycle when I was on the front page, and thought I had committed a crime-- if you couldn't explain the First Amendment and Fiction to a jury in Santa Monica, how explain it to a ten-year-old boy? My daughter, seeing her floor being waxed, asked "Are you selling the house? Will I still be able to go to my school?"(In those ancient days, remember, people moved to the flats just so their children could be part of the Beverly Hills school system.)
So there I was, at six in the morning, calling those I admired and was intimidated by but had never even met(Truman Capote: "THat's TERRIBLE!" he mewed. "I shall call Nelson this very morning!" "Mr. Capote," I said, "thank you. But Nelson Doubleday doesn't own it anymore.") Then I called the fierce Mr. Mailer. His secretary got back to me. "You can add his name to the list, but he said for you not to do that anymore. He was a character in somebody's novel and he didn't like it."
Warm-spot-in-my-heartedly, I stepped up to see him decades later, when he and George Plimpton(another Helas!) were doing their Fitzgerald-Hemingway thing at the 92nd Street Y. By then Mailer was on two canes. I introduced myself, and did a quick summary, cutting to my gratitude at his having supported me.
"I SUPPORTED YOU!" he actually shouted, planting himself somewhat uncertainly on his feet, and lifting both canes in the air, waved them like the capricious little boy he still was, even old.
So there goes another one who was just the man you'd hoped he'd be. I am happy he got to write his last piece declaring God creative, and probably a writer, maybe not unlike Mailer himself. I hope Mailer welcomes Mailer.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Order Your Thanksgiving
I passed Whole Foods this morning on the way back from Mimi's outing, and they had a sign up that said 'Order Your Thanksgiving.' It seemed to be not what it seemed, not simply 'Sign up for your turkey,' but 'Put Everything in Order so you know what you are Thankful for.'
Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday, because I could do it up brown, and orange(pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell) and it was the single meal for which I received unqualified praise from my family, including Robert when he was little and already a critic("Gourmet, again? Why can't we have hamburgers like every other family!") Whatever there was of the maternal in me reached full court press at that time, and the house was afloat with fabulous smells for days, besides the rigor of making home made pumpkin seeds as croutons for the soup, and the horror of cleaning up afterwards, which I tried not to think about and besides, there was Maria. I loved Thanksgiving, because it combined in me love of country, love of family, and love of beautiful colors, which are never more beautiful than in autumn, even if you live in a place where there really isn't any, but you could always find a few trees on Carmelita that shed their leaves and they changed enough so you could decorate the table.
When Don got sick I asked the doctor if he would still be with us for Thanksgiving, and the doctor, being his friend who had missed it when he might have been able to save him, more in denial than Don, said "which Thanksgiving?" but he left us on the 14th of November, coming up fast I notice out of the corner of my psyche. I made Thanksgiving anyway, with the family joined by a friend who loved him and was a little crazy, too, Susan Swanson, who went out in the backyard in between courses and came back in and said "I just had a talk with Don." In those days I believed everything, so I thought she probably had.
My life since then has been nomadic and erratic, to say the least, but anywhere I was where there was a kitchen and some orphans I could have for a sitdown, I made the glorious meal, usually with colorful plates and even more colorful food. This year I will have my grown son, still critical and contentious but basically sweet in heart, his wife-- I really like her-- Lukas, who is 7 and more argumentative than Robert was but just as bright(all Harry Potters read, the last one without moving his lips) and Silas, 4, with whom I am very much in love.
The hunger for romantic love has finally left me, the reluctant-to-let-go vestige of teenager vanished, replaced with a sense of peace because the last man for whom I thought I yearned is still good for a laugh, which turns out to be more important. But I am very frightened for my country, which I loved with a passion and poetry, both. I am putting an article from today's Times underneath my jade statue of Kwan-Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, hoping she will activate what's in the piece, and they will indict Bernie Kerik this afternoon, and that will impact on Rudy, because I am really scared. I mean scared. I think it was Will Rogers who said the Lord must have loved the ordinary man because he made so many of them. But I don't know Who loved the lunatic fringe, because there seem to be a lot of them, maybe enough to tilt the election the wrong way. I am afraid of Hillary, not because I think she will do wrong, but because I don't really believe in my heart that the country as a whole will believe her. And that Giuiliani got the endorsement of Pat Robertson is chilling. We are in an economic downslide, and that will affect everybody except the ones who have steered the ship of state onto a sandbar.
But, hey, it's Autumn, and there's one tree on Montana that sheds its leaves as they turn all the colors of Vermont, and I have collected and put them in the center of my table, underneath little pumpkins and one majestic Turban squash, with two little Teddy Bear Pilgrims, a man and a woman in appropriate attire for being grateful atop the colorful pile. And there's a cornucopia, which of course life really is, with all kinds of things falling out of it, in this case all manner of fall flowers, which there wasn't anybody on duty yesterday at Whole Foods to determine the price, so the manager made a mistake and let me have it for a song ("Keep your Sunny Side up," I think was the name of the number)
So I am, in spite of the news, really happy as Thanksgiving approaches, knowing there is much to be grateful for. I will clean up my apartment and my act, and put everything I can in order, including my cortex which the paper said today is strengthened by exercise so you don't lose memory. They told us at the Mindfulness seminar I went to at UCLA some weeks back that meditation thickens the cortex, oh at least they think it does, but it's hard to measure. Still, every once in a while, when I remember, I think of my cortex growing thicker, and that, in a way, is a kind of mediation. It beats the skin growing thick.
Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday, because I could do it up brown, and orange(pumpkin soup in a pumpkin shell) and it was the single meal for which I received unqualified praise from my family, including Robert when he was little and already a critic("Gourmet, again? Why can't we have hamburgers like every other family!") Whatever there was of the maternal in me reached full court press at that time, and the house was afloat with fabulous smells for days, besides the rigor of making home made pumpkin seeds as croutons for the soup, and the horror of cleaning up afterwards, which I tried not to think about and besides, there was Maria. I loved Thanksgiving, because it combined in me love of country, love of family, and love of beautiful colors, which are never more beautiful than in autumn, even if you live in a place where there really isn't any, but you could always find a few trees on Carmelita that shed their leaves and they changed enough so you could decorate the table.
When Don got sick I asked the doctor if he would still be with us for Thanksgiving, and the doctor, being his friend who had missed it when he might have been able to save him, more in denial than Don, said "which Thanksgiving?" but he left us on the 14th of November, coming up fast I notice out of the corner of my psyche. I made Thanksgiving anyway, with the family joined by a friend who loved him and was a little crazy, too, Susan Swanson, who went out in the backyard in between courses and came back in and said "I just had a talk with Don." In those days I believed everything, so I thought she probably had.
My life since then has been nomadic and erratic, to say the least, but anywhere I was where there was a kitchen and some orphans I could have for a sitdown, I made the glorious meal, usually with colorful plates and even more colorful food. This year I will have my grown son, still critical and contentious but basically sweet in heart, his wife-- I really like her-- Lukas, who is 7 and more argumentative than Robert was but just as bright(all Harry Potters read, the last one without moving his lips) and Silas, 4, with whom I am very much in love.
The hunger for romantic love has finally left me, the reluctant-to-let-go vestige of teenager vanished, replaced with a sense of peace because the last man for whom I thought I yearned is still good for a laugh, which turns out to be more important. But I am very frightened for my country, which I loved with a passion and poetry, both. I am putting an article from today's Times underneath my jade statue of Kwan-Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, hoping she will activate what's in the piece, and they will indict Bernie Kerik this afternoon, and that will impact on Rudy, because I am really scared. I mean scared. I think it was Will Rogers who said the Lord must have loved the ordinary man because he made so many of them. But I don't know Who loved the lunatic fringe, because there seem to be a lot of them, maybe enough to tilt the election the wrong way. I am afraid of Hillary, not because I think she will do wrong, but because I don't really believe in my heart that the country as a whole will believe her. And that Giuiliani got the endorsement of Pat Robertson is chilling. We are in an economic downslide, and that will affect everybody except the ones who have steered the ship of state onto a sandbar.
But, hey, it's Autumn, and there's one tree on Montana that sheds its leaves as they turn all the colors of Vermont, and I have collected and put them in the center of my table, underneath little pumpkins and one majestic Turban squash, with two little Teddy Bear Pilgrims, a man and a woman in appropriate attire for being grateful atop the colorful pile. And there's a cornucopia, which of course life really is, with all kinds of things falling out of it, in this case all manner of fall flowers, which there wasn't anybody on duty yesterday at Whole Foods to determine the price, so the manager made a mistake and let me have it for a song ("Keep your Sunny Side up," I think was the name of the number)
So I am, in spite of the news, really happy as Thanksgiving approaches, knowing there is much to be grateful for. I will clean up my apartment and my act, and put everything I can in order, including my cortex which the paper said today is strengthened by exercise so you don't lose memory. They told us at the Mindfulness seminar I went to at UCLA some weeks back that meditation thickens the cortex, oh at least they think it does, but it's hard to measure. Still, every once in a while, when I remember, I think of my cortex growing thicker, and that, in a way, is a kind of mediation. It beats the skin growing thick.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
A Danish in place of a Madeleine
An enormous piece of my history vanished today: coalesced from several parts of my recollection and then clocked off, wiped from the planet, and even the orb of memory. All clicked away by the death of Robert Goulet.
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
A Danish in place of a Madeleine
An enormous piece of my history vanished today: coalesced from several parts of my recollection and then clocked off, wiped from the planet, and even the orb of memory. All clicked away by the death of Robert Goulet.
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
I was very young, younger than I was, and for some reason I cannot recall, was going out with Billy Rose, the dwarfy little electric entrepreneur who had brought elephants onto the stage, married tall and often. He was at the time, I remember, also going out with my then best friend Sue Mengers, the soon-to-become-famous agent who was going out with him for reasons I CAN recall. Key to this scene is my mother, who got everything wholesale without seeming a cliche or particularly Jewish: she was elegant and beautiful and, at base, I think, an anti-Semite, though it was probably just ordinariness that she loathed, lack of education, bad grammar and ugly neckties, as she was later in life to hate fat people, old people and poor people. Anyway, Helen's dream of the perfect exit... well, I will put it in her own words: "If the H-bomb comes, I want to be in the Inner Room of Loehmann's." The Inner Room was where women of very high breeding, a lot of them, seized designer dressers with their labels cut out from each other to be able to buy them first. I tell you this so you will understand about the chiffon wrapper.
There hung in my closet, never worn, a see through chiffon not-exactly negligee, but what you would put over it if you still hoped to entice. It was shrimp colored, according to the manufacturer who was smitten with my mother, but I would call it coral, softer than vibrant a shade, with long feathers of the same hue all up and down the front and around the collar, so it might have been a boa worn today, being Halloween, by a drag queen, (though I understand they have cancelled the Gay Parade on Castro in San Francisco, which must be a terrible blow so to speak..) I was still, at the time this peignoir hung in my closet, a very innocent young woman, stupid, I suppose, as much as moral, waiting for my great love, having loved not wisely but not too well either, squandering some juicy years on Anthony Perkins who was as clever as he was handsome then, and whom I didn't realize and/or wouldn't acknowledge was gay.
So I had this apartment on East 73rd Street, and Billy Rose, already quite elderly but still incredibly famous which was catnip to Sue and somewhat poignant to me, as I saw him as more sad than important, took me home one evening after feteing me in his limousine via the Sixth Avenue Deli, following the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia. Or maybe it was Lord Jim. In any case, no moves had ever been made towards me on his part, the only crudities having fallen from his mouth, as opposed to what he offered Sue, an open fly and "Put your hand on my cock," all of which I was later to appropriate and use to great benefit in The Pretenders, my first and perhaps last novel to ever be a breakaway bestseller, larded as it was with sex and the pungent and piquant melancholy insight I was able to bring to this mythic little man as a character.
Anyway, there we were in my apartment, and he rolled back the mirrored door of my closet, saw the feathered coral peignoir, and said: "Who you saving this for, Robert Goulet?" He pronounced it with a hard final 'T', so I realized at once that in spite of all his success, money and connections, he had not an iota of suave, much less the ability to pronounce things in French. It was shortly after that that Sue and I were having dinner at Sardi's, and he walked in, and Sue said "with us sitting there like the Dolly Sisters," and I used that in the novel, too.
Also he had a mansion on Fifth Avenue he invited me to, a time or two, and in his front hall, up a winding staircase, he had Michelangelo's David, maybe the original which he could have afforded at the time before giving it back or perhaps his relatives squabbling for many years over his estate sold it to the Duomo. But there it stood, on the landing, and he said "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you want to ball him, right?" To say the little man was limited is being very kind, but then, I was probably that, too, except when I hit the typewriter.
Still, it all came together with his death, and my being able to re-construct him as a crude but touching figure in The Pretenders, though Sue was and remains very pissed at my having conflated(Janet Malcolm might say) her character with mine, softening what was too hard about her, but creating-- it was a creation-- a memorable dramatis persona.
George Abbott, during his courtship of Maureen Stapleton-- they danced together into what I think was his hundredth year, when he dropped her because she was annoyed at his seeing other women-- wrote her a letter she read to me, in which he said "I have heard that this is supposed to be about Billy Rose." The fact that glittery people were actually corresponding about my novel was more thrilling, almost, than its being a bestseller. Best of all was Maureen's calling me in the middle of the night from the Beverly Hills Hotel, somewhat more than slightly wined up, saying "I've been robbed. They left my jewelry and they left my money, but they took my copy of The Pretenders. You're going to be very rich." It was true, I should have been, but my publisher wasn't prepared for its success, so was hundreds of thousands back orders behind and then went out of business before giving me my royalties, but that is another story, and according to my inner metaphysician, all for the best, as had I been as rich as was earned I probably would have bought a yacht and anchored it next to Harold Robbins' in Saint Tropez, and never become. Become what? we have yet to determine, or the Fates or the Furies do.
Maureen said she was going to go straight to Doubleday's on Fifth Avenue(it still was then) and say "Have you got a Child's Garden of Verses? And have you got The Pretenders? And if you do, why the fuck isn't it in the window."
I miss her. I never missed Billy Rose, but that is because I made him better and more interesting than he was, which I have a tendency to do with those I encounter. But I am touched by the loss of that moment, when the coral peignoir hung, and an old, powerful little man said "Who you saving that for, Robert Goulettttt?"
Thursday, October 18, 2007
DOGGIE DAY AFTERNOON
My hairdresser, as writ in a prior e-mail, having been betrayed by a colleague, so he lost his salon and, having married well, fled to Italy, left me no choice but to curl up and continue with my uncut hair. Curiously, the same has happened to Mimi: her groomer broke his hand, so he can't cut her. So we are both the same, facing our own untended to future. In Mimi's case it is exacerbated by her having tangled with the gummy nettles in Venice, so her underbelly was shorn, as were the tops of her legs. Her hair grows fluffy and white(the groomer was able to wash her,) giving her a face sided by mutton chops as they were called on the face of one of our least successful presidents, I can't remember his name, there's a prize if you know, her body hair flaps out in kind of a square above her chest, so she looks like she is wearing the mantel of a Pilgrim, which will be fine for Thanksgiving should the groomer's injury last that long.
Lovely as she is, even overgrown, she has still been frequently snapped at, barked to and strained at the end of a leash by a little black terrier down the street, whose infirm and aging owner can't hold him, so it's been a little tense. But yesterday that woman collapsed on the street, and as a kindly neighbor walked her dog, Kerby I found out his name is, I gave her my shawl to put around her shoulders while we debated whether or not to call 911. In the end, she seemed well enough to return to her apartment, and when Kerby returned, he apparently understood I had helped his mistress, so he was civil to Mimi. How strange, that dogs understand that much, and retreat from their anger when sympathy is called for. What a shame that people don't do the same.
I have started wearing my safety belt again when I drive, a sign that I want to live, which I do on account of I've started a new novel so you may not be getting too many of these from me; that will be an indication that it is going well. I have named my leading character Emily, after my new best friend who has also become the newest best friend to fall off the planet, as once I become close to people they seem to disappear. Her failure to communicate has not made me strike off her name as it is a good one, as I think the book will be, though you may not know it was me what writ it, as I am going underground as a novelist, adapting a nom de computer so I can begin a new life as another person, perhaps with better sales. If you were on tenterhooks as to the thrilling outcome of my library lecture, don't be. I got a moving violation on my way to the library as it came up quicker than I expected on my left, and made a turn from what officer Rosenberg his name was said was the wrong lane. I begged him for mercy but he had none, nor compassion neither but wanted to know what I was going to speak on at the library, as I pleaded with him to let me off with a warning, and I said 'My books' at which point he wanted to know where he could get them and I said "The library." "Not Borders?" he said contemptuously. "No," I said, "it's been a while since you could buy a book of mine, but I have this story I just finished," I said, fishing out the tale I had written for Silas, that was right behind my proof of insurance. "You haven't finished it," he said, "it's not very long." "It's a short story," I said. "A children's story." "I am not a child," he huffed, and continued writing. "Please let me off," I said. "I'm sorry. I panicked" "I,I,I," he said. "It's all about you." "You sound like my son," said I, which he did, and at that moment I saw with dazzling clarity, his name being Rosenberg, that he had issues with his mother and I reminded him of her. Oh, God. A Jewish mother. WHo would have thought it, those days I imagined I would be in the Rainbow Room.
Needless to say the library talk did not go well, as I was greatly deflated, as was my audience, consisting of a few close friends I had invited, a pushy would-be screenwriter, and a homeless man. At one point I spoke of Happy, my Yorkie who(not that, Happy was a person) died in Paris, and how I had sprinkled his ashes on all the great artists at Pere LaChaise, and put the collar he had worn on Oprah on Jim Morrison's headstone. "Is it true that drugs were involved in his heart attack?" the homeless man asked. "My dog's?" I queried, giving us the best and probably only laugh of the evening.
A little later he began to sing-- the homeless man, not my dog. It was some Doors song, not one I could make out. But the librarian told me afterwards there was something in what he sang about Asylum, and coming home. There was a very tuned-in guy Blackberrying at the sushi place I go to a few days afterwards, and I asked him if he knew what song it was, and he Googled a few key words, right there at the sushi bar, and came up with 'The Soft Parade."
This impressed me and made me hate more than ever the broker I had when Google first was coming on the market who refused to invest $100,000 for me. I would be worth six million today. I don't know who I am madder at, him or the cop. Oh, yes I do..
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lovely as she is, even overgrown, she has still been frequently snapped at, barked to and strained at the end of a leash by a little black terrier down the street, whose infirm and aging owner can't hold him, so it's been a little tense. But yesterday that woman collapsed on the street, and as a kindly neighbor walked her dog, Kerby I found out his name is, I gave her my shawl to put around her shoulders while we debated whether or not to call 911. In the end, she seemed well enough to return to her apartment, and when Kerby returned, he apparently understood I had helped his mistress, so he was civil to Mimi. How strange, that dogs understand that much, and retreat from their anger when sympathy is called for. What a shame that people don't do the same.
I have started wearing my safety belt again when I drive, a sign that I want to live, which I do on account of I've started a new novel so you may not be getting too many of these from me; that will be an indication that it is going well. I have named my leading character Emily, after my new best friend who has also become the newest best friend to fall off the planet, as once I become close to people they seem to disappear. Her failure to communicate has not made me strike off her name as it is a good one, as I think the book will be, though you may not know it was me what writ it, as I am going underground as a novelist, adapting a nom de computer so I can begin a new life as another person, perhaps with better sales. If you were on tenterhooks as to the thrilling outcome of my library lecture, don't be. I got a moving violation on my way to the library as it came up quicker than I expected on my left, and made a turn from what officer Rosenberg his name was said was the wrong lane. I begged him for mercy but he had none, nor compassion neither but wanted to know what I was going to speak on at the library, as I pleaded with him to let me off with a warning, and I said 'My books' at which point he wanted to know where he could get them and I said "The library." "Not Borders?" he said contemptuously. "No," I said, "it's been a while since you could buy a book of mine, but I have this story I just finished," I said, fishing out the tale I had written for Silas, that was right behind my proof of insurance. "You haven't finished it," he said, "it's not very long." "It's a short story," I said. "A children's story." "I am not a child," he huffed, and continued writing. "Please let me off," I said. "I'm sorry. I panicked" "I,I,I," he said. "It's all about you." "You sound like my son," said I, which he did, and at that moment I saw with dazzling clarity, his name being Rosenberg, that he had issues with his mother and I reminded him of her. Oh, God. A Jewish mother. WHo would have thought it, those days I imagined I would be in the Rainbow Room.
Needless to say the library talk did not go well, as I was greatly deflated, as was my audience, consisting of a few close friends I had invited, a pushy would-be screenwriter, and a homeless man. At one point I spoke of Happy, my Yorkie who(not that, Happy was a person) died in Paris, and how I had sprinkled his ashes on all the great artists at Pere LaChaise, and put the collar he had worn on Oprah on Jim Morrison's headstone. "Is it true that drugs were involved in his heart attack?" the homeless man asked. "My dog's?" I queried, giving us the best and probably only laugh of the evening.
A little later he began to sing-- the homeless man, not my dog. It was some Doors song, not one I could make out. But the librarian told me afterwards there was something in what he sang about Asylum, and coming home. There was a very tuned-in guy Blackberrying at the sushi place I go to a few days afterwards, and I asked him if he knew what song it was, and he Googled a few key words, right there at the sushi bar, and came up with 'The Soft Parade."
This impressed me and made me hate more than ever the broker I had when Google first was coming on the market who refused to invest $100,000 for me. I would be worth six million today. I don't know who I am madder at, him or the cop. Oh, yes I do..
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Tuesday, October 09, 2007
What, and Leave Show Business?
My friend Carole Kessie has suggested that title for the events of this evening. I am celebrating the Silver Anniversary of my New Best Friends(besides all of you, some of whom are Old Best Friends) the Meads of Sante Fe, who gave their daughter and you the fabulous wedding posted on the blog. The Meads will not be with me, but that will not keep me from celebrating them, though my method of doing so might be less than one (or two,Walter and Emily) might have wished.
I will be speaking at the Santa Monica Library, the little one at Ocean Park and Main, and the title they have posted on their website(though I didn't get top billing: Clint Eastwood did-- he isn't speaking, they're running one of his films) is 'My Life as an Author.' That was not a title I gave them, but one they chose themselves since they did not know exactly what I was going to say, but then, neither do I.
What I thought it might be is an Interactive Evening. That is to say, my new, young and very bright agent who wanted me to write a memoir keeps asking me 'What is the arc?' The 'arc', I believe, is an expression originated in Hollywood when you go in to make a pitch for a movie, and the suits want to know 'Where is it going?' 'What is the point?'
As I have no idea where my life is going, and I am hopeful it has a point but I don't know that yet either, I am simply going to spin as I used to do, especially at my first(and only, if you don't count the Wall Street Journal Europe or Howard Johnson's with Simple Simon meeting a Pieman across the front of my uniform) job, in the Comedy Development Program at NBC, headed by Les Kolodny, a fabled William Morris agent who would get calls for writers and take the job himself. There was, at the time, no idea I could not take and weave into a tale, a sitcom, a musical, the hope of a nation, etc. Lester had a dream one night that I was spinning before a group of monied and powerful Chinese TV people, and at the end they all nodded joyfully and clapped and wanted to buy it, and I turned to Les and asked 'What did I say?' I couldn't remember and neither could Lester, and none of them was able to help me as I didn't speak Chinese.
So it will be tonight. I will simply spin, like a taller (not much) Rumplestiltskin, but I will ask my listeners to look for the arc and tell me what it is, and whoever comes up with the best answer gets a prize. At the same time, I will ask them what to do with the outfit I will be wearing.
As most of you know, or at least those who read these, I had this most glorious time in Taos at the aforementioned wedding. But when it was all over, with some time on my hands before I moved on, I wandered into the village and became a Taosian, with a Taos mind and Taos eyes. Left to my own diminished devices, I bought an ensemble that looked to me, at the moment, absolutely wonderful, an Indian patterned skirt and a brown blouse made from wood. Let me say now that as I hung it in mine own closet I thought "What happens in Taos should stay in Taos." Still, as I bought it thinking it would be right for this evening, I am going to make that, too, a part of the Interactivity, and ask at the end who I should send it to. Lima? Are they recovered yet from their quake, and even if not, would they wear this?
Carole (who gave the report its title) suggested I should send it to Julia Roberts to wear on the ranch. But as the latest celebrity rags which none of us reads as in olden days no one read the Inquirer, the maid left it, and we have seen only on the stands in grocery stores suggests, Julia's marriage is coming apart. I would not want to add fuel, in this case, wood, to that fire. So any of your sugggestions would also be welcomed, though I will have no more prizes, as what's given away in the Santa Monica library stays in Santa Monica.
About this evening: the woman who booked me, a Friend, literally, one of my softspoken buddies from my sometimes-attended Quaker Meeting, will not be present, because she is allergic to the paint they have just finished putting on the walls. When I expressed some concern, as I, too, am highly allergic, the asst. chief librarian said "It's all right. They haven't painted the basement."
The basement. I am assured if they open the doors, you can smell the sea. The basement of the Santa Monica library. It is not exactly where I pictured myself being at this point in my life, when I was spinning for Lester and the Chinamen, as my insensitive lawyer referred to them during my libel trial. At the time, my 20th year, I imagined myself at the Rainbow Room at this point in my life, though I doubt I imagined myself ever getting to this point in my life at all, as I thought I would be, as my then, (now retired) psychic Pattie McLaine predicted, "forever young."
In addition to the basement and the wooden blouse, my hairdresser, Dusty, has been betrayed by his fellow(I use the term loosely) hairdresser to whom he ceded his salon in a burst a generosity with the single caveat(which he wouldn't know what it meant) that he be allowed to come in and cut a few days a week. But the expletive deleted bastard sold it out from under him, and now Dusty had no place to go but Italy. So my hair is left unruly and uncut and will tangle in its little girl(that part still maintains) curls this evening, above the wood.
Oh, Youth! Where is thy Sting, it seemed at the time. And Fame! Where is thy Spur?
Oh, yes. Now I can feel it. Did you have to stick it just there?
I will be speaking at the Santa Monica Library, the little one at Ocean Park and Main, and the title they have posted on their website(though I didn't get top billing: Clint Eastwood did-- he isn't speaking, they're running one of his films) is 'My Life as an Author.' That was not a title I gave them, but one they chose themselves since they did not know exactly what I was going to say, but then, neither do I.
What I thought it might be is an Interactive Evening. That is to say, my new, young and very bright agent who wanted me to write a memoir keeps asking me 'What is the arc?' The 'arc', I believe, is an expression originated in Hollywood when you go in to make a pitch for a movie, and the suits want to know 'Where is it going?' 'What is the point?'
As I have no idea where my life is going, and I am hopeful it has a point but I don't know that yet either, I am simply going to spin as I used to do, especially at my first(and only, if you don't count the Wall Street Journal Europe or Howard Johnson's with Simple Simon meeting a Pieman across the front of my uniform) job, in the Comedy Development Program at NBC, headed by Les Kolodny, a fabled William Morris agent who would get calls for writers and take the job himself. There was, at the time, no idea I could not take and weave into a tale, a sitcom, a musical, the hope of a nation, etc. Lester had a dream one night that I was spinning before a group of monied and powerful Chinese TV people, and at the end they all nodded joyfully and clapped and wanted to buy it, and I turned to Les and asked 'What did I say?' I couldn't remember and neither could Lester, and none of them was able to help me as I didn't speak Chinese.
So it will be tonight. I will simply spin, like a taller (not much) Rumplestiltskin, but I will ask my listeners to look for the arc and tell me what it is, and whoever comes up with the best answer gets a prize. At the same time, I will ask them what to do with the outfit I will be wearing.
As most of you know, or at least those who read these, I had this most glorious time in Taos at the aforementioned wedding. But when it was all over, with some time on my hands before I moved on, I wandered into the village and became a Taosian, with a Taos mind and Taos eyes. Left to my own diminished devices, I bought an ensemble that looked to me, at the moment, absolutely wonderful, an Indian patterned skirt and a brown blouse made from wood. Let me say now that as I hung it in mine own closet I thought "What happens in Taos should stay in Taos." Still, as I bought it thinking it would be right for this evening, I am going to make that, too, a part of the Interactivity, and ask at the end who I should send it to. Lima? Are they recovered yet from their quake, and even if not, would they wear this?
Carole (who gave the report its title) suggested I should send it to Julia Roberts to wear on the ranch. But as the latest celebrity rags which none of us reads as in olden days no one read the Inquirer, the maid left it, and we have seen only on the stands in grocery stores suggests, Julia's marriage is coming apart. I would not want to add fuel, in this case, wood, to that fire. So any of your sugggestions would also be welcomed, though I will have no more prizes, as what's given away in the Santa Monica library stays in Santa Monica.
About this evening: the woman who booked me, a Friend, literally, one of my softspoken buddies from my sometimes-attended Quaker Meeting, will not be present, because she is allergic to the paint they have just finished putting on the walls. When I expressed some concern, as I, too, am highly allergic, the asst. chief librarian said "It's all right. They haven't painted the basement."
The basement. I am assured if they open the doors, you can smell the sea. The basement of the Santa Monica library. It is not exactly where I pictured myself being at this point in my life, when I was spinning for Lester and the Chinamen, as my insensitive lawyer referred to them during my libel trial. At the time, my 20th year, I imagined myself at the Rainbow Room at this point in my life, though I doubt I imagined myself ever getting to this point in my life at all, as I thought I would be, as my then, (now retired) psychic Pattie McLaine predicted, "forever young."
In addition to the basement and the wooden blouse, my hairdresser, Dusty, has been betrayed by his fellow(I use the term loosely) hairdresser to whom he ceded his salon in a burst a generosity with the single caveat(which he wouldn't know what it meant) that he be allowed to come in and cut a few days a week. But the expletive deleted bastard sold it out from under him, and now Dusty had no place to go but Italy. So my hair is left unruly and uncut and will tangle in its little girl(that part still maintains) curls this evening, above the wood.
Oh, Youth! Where is thy Sting, it seemed at the time. And Fame! Where is thy Spur?
Oh, yes. Now I can feel it. Did you have to stick it just there?
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
RETURN TO NOT-OK CORRAL
So we have ended our journey, temporarily, Mimi and I, Mimi having been left behind for the long weekend I went to New Mexico, and still looking at me with a slight shadow of betrayal in her eyes that I didn't take her for what she guesses was the best part of the trip. She has been through a lot: a crash diet so she would be able to fly Air France, and then they didn't even weigh her, a tangle with a bramble bush in Venice, a long train trip back to Paris hidden in a bag onto which non-dog-lovers piled luggage, in a Cuccetta with six bunks like we were all in the Navy, except for Mimi who hadn't been inducted, a day of redemption and grooming in New York, then a return home, if indeed LA is home, where she was left behind, a non-member of the wedding.
The Wedding: Taos. A setting with a Sacred Circle, which indeed it was, strung from nearly every tree branch white cymbidium orchids waving in what everyone had prayed would not be a hostile wind, and was friendly enough except for a sudden downpour. Still, a loving group of rapt guests splendidly attired did not flee the watery onslaught, sitting proudly upright as hotel attendants crowned them with opened black umbrellas, so it looked a bit like The Barefoot Contessa, only the happy version.
The Couple: Meg and John, beautiful as one would hope, the bride looking very much the fairy princess, tall and radiant in a jeweled tiara with veil attached, which she gamely threw off as the weather might have done was she not cleverer and more in charge of her life than Thor and his darkly playful buddies. Pretty, colorfully clad bridesmaids danced down the soggy, newly-turfed aisle as though it were the runway of a fashion show in Paris, and the Mother of the Bride, my particular favorite, all swathed in brilliant purply-burgundy satin, with a flowered crown, read her favorite poem I'd have to guess it was, The Walrus and The Carpenter, leaving out the end where the oysters were eaten, as we'd had a lot of them the night before.
The Night Before: the rehearsal dinner, to which everyone was invited, family or no, and the father of the Bride, a munificent soul, semi-lamented that he was useless, which is the last thing he was and is. They are a most unusual couple, Walter and Emily Mead, gifted, generous, imaginative and affluent in the best sense: what they have they rejoice in spreading around. The spread that night was beneath a white tent strung with lights as the next day would be strung with orchids, and every chair a bride. That is, the chairs were covered with white, a great royal blue bow in the center of their backs where their asses would have been, had they been Bette Davis at her grandest.
Outside the tent lightning flashed and thunder more than roared: it snarled and ripped and crackled and threatened, challenged and argued there was no way it would be kept out, invitation or no. The positive people who were in attendance, almost everybody, negativiity not being a part of the menu, were sure that was Nature's way of clearing any possibility of storm the next day. Filled with drama, the night was, as it should have been according to all who know Megan, the bride.
The next day dawned sort of promising, hoping, really, that the skies would clear, as they did for the time the wedding was scheduled: 2:45. But things got a little behind, so by the time the actual ceremony began, the clouds let go. But present along with neuropaths and homeopaths and naturepaths and all manner of paths except for, to the best of my observation, psycho or socio, was Ali, who works with Megan in the Pilates studio, and told us the Italian saying that the bride who is rained on is blessed, which sounds better in Italian as almost everything does.
The children, who were many of all ages and sizes, were entertained through the afternoon by Cirque-de-Soleil-in-training young people, dressed as brightly as though they'd already gotten the job, twirling and tight-rope walking and stilt-dancing, though they might better have been called, for the moment, Cirque de Pluie.
But then everyone went into the ballroom, which outsplendored splendor, each table set with a brilliant and different colored cloth, every chair, again, a contrasting colored bride, bow on butt, every centerpiece a topiary cut into the shape of a circus animal, sprayed with gold and strung with tasteful glitter and the assurance that no topiary had been harmed in the production. Oh, it was so splendid. I mean splendid. I have never seen such flowers as there were there, even when the richly pompous football team owner took over the Bel-Air for his daughter and larded it with flora that would have funded another season of David Beckham.
Fitzgerald said "The very rich are different from you and me," But these very rich are different from the very rich because you can feel their hearts in everything they do. It was all so loving and generous one could have wept, and perhaps some did, but no one out of sadness. Modigliani, (probably present in reincarnated form) said there are those who have, and those who don't have, and those who know, and those who don't know, (hanno e non hanno, sanno and non sanno--see, I told you it sounds better in Italian.) But this was about those who have and know. And as for the guests, as far as I could tell, there were no phonies. Oh, maybe one.
I stayed for an extra day or two, so I could have a body treatment from Ali, who stretched me back to where I could once again do my yoga, and so I could drink in a little more of the clear New Mexico air. Greeted last might by Mimi, who was still sort of miffed, as whether or not dogs have long-term memories, she knows she missed out on something special.
Then this morning I got up to my regular life, with a NYTimes at my doorstep. And besides the Iraq scandals and Bush vetoing a child health bill there's the headline about Hillary out fund-raising Obama, and I wonder if the Star Spangled Banner shouldn't have its last lines changed to
THE LAND OF THE FUND RAISER
AND THE HOME OF THOSE WHO USED TO BE BRAVE.
Maybe we should all give it up and move to New Mexico.
The Wedding: Taos. A setting with a Sacred Circle, which indeed it was, strung from nearly every tree branch white cymbidium orchids waving in what everyone had prayed would not be a hostile wind, and was friendly enough except for a sudden downpour. Still, a loving group of rapt guests splendidly attired did not flee the watery onslaught, sitting proudly upright as hotel attendants crowned them with opened black umbrellas, so it looked a bit like The Barefoot Contessa, only the happy version.
The Couple: Meg and John, beautiful as one would hope, the bride looking very much the fairy princess, tall and radiant in a jeweled tiara with veil attached, which she gamely threw off as the weather might have done was she not cleverer and more in charge of her life than Thor and his darkly playful buddies. Pretty, colorfully clad bridesmaids danced down the soggy, newly-turfed aisle as though it were the runway of a fashion show in Paris, and the Mother of the Bride, my particular favorite, all swathed in brilliant purply-burgundy satin, with a flowered crown, read her favorite poem I'd have to guess it was, The Walrus and The Carpenter, leaving out the end where the oysters were eaten, as we'd had a lot of them the night before.
The Night Before: the rehearsal dinner, to which everyone was invited, family or no, and the father of the Bride, a munificent soul, semi-lamented that he was useless, which is the last thing he was and is. They are a most unusual couple, Walter and Emily Mead, gifted, generous, imaginative and affluent in the best sense: what they have they rejoice in spreading around. The spread that night was beneath a white tent strung with lights as the next day would be strung with orchids, and every chair a bride. That is, the chairs were covered with white, a great royal blue bow in the center of their backs where their asses would have been, had they been Bette Davis at her grandest.
Outside the tent lightning flashed and thunder more than roared: it snarled and ripped and crackled and threatened, challenged and argued there was no way it would be kept out, invitation or no. The positive people who were in attendance, almost everybody, negativiity not being a part of the menu, were sure that was Nature's way of clearing any possibility of storm the next day. Filled with drama, the night was, as it should have been according to all who know Megan, the bride.
The next day dawned sort of promising, hoping, really, that the skies would clear, as they did for the time the wedding was scheduled: 2:45. But things got a little behind, so by the time the actual ceremony began, the clouds let go. But present along with neuropaths and homeopaths and naturepaths and all manner of paths except for, to the best of my observation, psycho or socio, was Ali, who works with Megan in the Pilates studio, and told us the Italian saying that the bride who is rained on is blessed, which sounds better in Italian as almost everything does.
The children, who were many of all ages and sizes, were entertained through the afternoon by Cirque-de-Soleil-in-training young people, dressed as brightly as though they'd already gotten the job, twirling and tight-rope walking and stilt-dancing, though they might better have been called, for the moment, Cirque de Pluie.
But then everyone went into the ballroom, which outsplendored splendor, each table set with a brilliant and different colored cloth, every chair, again, a contrasting colored bride, bow on butt, every centerpiece a topiary cut into the shape of a circus animal, sprayed with gold and strung with tasteful glitter and the assurance that no topiary had been harmed in the production. Oh, it was so splendid. I mean splendid. I have never seen such flowers as there were there, even when the richly pompous football team owner took over the Bel-Air for his daughter and larded it with flora that would have funded another season of David Beckham.
Fitzgerald said "The very rich are different from you and me," But these very rich are different from the very rich because you can feel their hearts in everything they do. It was all so loving and generous one could have wept, and perhaps some did, but no one out of sadness. Modigliani, (probably present in reincarnated form) said there are those who have, and those who don't have, and those who know, and those who don't know, (hanno e non hanno, sanno and non sanno--see, I told you it sounds better in Italian.) But this was about those who have and know. And as for the guests, as far as I could tell, there were no phonies. Oh, maybe one.
I stayed for an extra day or two, so I could have a body treatment from Ali, who stretched me back to where I could once again do my yoga, and so I could drink in a little more of the clear New Mexico air. Greeted last might by Mimi, who was still sort of miffed, as whether or not dogs have long-term memories, she knows she missed out on something special.
Then this morning I got up to my regular life, with a NYTimes at my doorstep. And besides the Iraq scandals and Bush vetoing a child health bill there's the headline about Hillary out fund-raising Obama, and I wonder if the Star Spangled Banner shouldn't have its last lines changed to
THE LAND OF THE FUND RAISER
AND THE HOME OF THOSE WHO USED TO BE BRAVE.
Maybe we should all give it up and move to New Mexico.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
YOM KIPPUR IN VENICE
Thus it was that on the afternoon of Arev(sp?) Yom Kippur,the eve of Yom Kippur, so perhaps it was Arev Arev Yom Kippur, that Sorah Gwen, a renegade Jew, that is, she was not so much rebellious as lazy in her prayers, at least to the Israelite G_d, which is what her cousin Susie used to refer to H_m as, wandering instead into the quieter realms of Quakers and Buddhists, the last of whom were mostly fallen-away Jews, so she could meditate in Silence, which she liked better but was still lazy about, so it was that on the sunlit terrace of the Cipriani in Venice she sat down with friends to have her last self-indulgent meal before beginning her Yom Kippur fast. And as it was her day to try and be very much a lady, she wore a flowing skirt. And as she sat down a wasp did enter into the underfolds of that skirt just as she met what would have been chair but instead met stinger, and stung her thrice on the upper inner right thigh, quite near what Anais Nin would call her sex, but she was not a Jewish writer.
So far had she come that she did not scream or even react except to say in quiet voice to her friend Elisa, "I sat on a bee," which it was not, as it turned out, but a wasp, as they discovered when they retreated to the ladies room and it did fly out from under her skirt and land on the wall, as witnessed by another woman who did change out of her bathing suit. Then came the pool man with ammonia which Elisa did apply and all went back to dine, as though naught had occured of major moment but it stung like hell.
Now all night long, having begun her Yom Kippur fast at sundown like the good Jew she tried to be on occasion, Sorah Gwen did writhe and smart and took of many anti-histamines which she hoped G_d would not consider breaking her fast, and prayed to G-d all through the night to relieve her from her discomfort, but so pained and swollen was she on that tender inner thigh by morning that she didn't give a damn and ate breakfast.
Then three rabbis met on the deck of the Giudecca to discuss the question Sorah Gwen had in her mind, not to mention the tender part of her inner thigh.
Rabbi Gamaliel said: "Why would this woman who thought herself a good person be stung thrice by a Wasp?"
Rabbi Eleazer said: "Was she not eating lunch with Goyem?"
Said Rabbi Herschel, "They were not Wasps, but Wascs, being mainly Catholics and as they were two of them Italians they were certainly not Anglo-Saxons when it is well known that WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, not White Italian Catholics."
"But if a bee stings in the bush, and nobody feels it, is there any harm?" quoth Rabbi Gamaleil.
"You miss the point," said Rabbi Eleazer.
"So did the wasp," said Rabbi Herschel, imagining himself to be a wit.
"But why the tender part of the inner thigh when no one has been there in decades?"
"Perhaps to remind her there is no pleasure that cannot be remembered in pain, especially since it has been so long since it brought any pleasure."
"But why this woman?" said Rabbi Gamaliel. "Had she not been brought out of the railroad station at Santa Lucia with her dog only to be greeted by stinging nettles with gummy glue on them that had to be removed pulling hair by hair all through the night from the little dog, whose Jewish name was Miriam, although she was called Mimi, and never made but a slight whimper of protest because she understood she was being helped? And if the little dog could survive such an ordeal, why does the woman complain at being stung thrice by a wasp?"
"She is not complaining," said Rabbi Herschel. "She is only wondering why it happened? And why was she stung not once but thrice?"
"Three," said the Rabbi,"if you study the Kabbalah not necessarily in the group with Madonna, is the mystical number that means creative imagery."
"There is not much that is creative in a wasp sting," said Rabbi Herschel.
""There is the next day. How it does swell and change colors more mysteriously than the sunset. And that is the hand of the Creator."
"But do you dare to say that Yahweh is underhanded?"
"I say only that there are mysteries too mysterious to question, like why are there mosquitoes when they serve no purpose."
"Perhaps they do to other mosquitoes," said Rabbi Herschel.
"But what does this have to do with Yom Kippur?" Rabbi Eleazer asked.
"Everything," said Rabbi Gamaliel. "For four days Sorah Gwen had the best time of her life at the Cipriani in Venice, where there is a drink called by George Clooney when he was at the Venice Film Festival last year the Buona Notte, vodka and bitters which he invented and she thought tasted terrible, and as a result had for her final breakfast on that perfect day the Gwendollini, which name she made up to get even both with George Clooney and Hemingway who had invented the Bellini, but the Gwendollini she had the ego to think was better, being cranberry juice and prosecco, a fine way to start that last glorious day.
"There is no pleasure without pain. To be a Jew in this world having so much pleasure would be a sin were you not stung three times on the tender inner thigh by a wasp, as not to feel pain as a Jew would be a pain."
All were impressed by his wisdom, except for Sorah Gwen with her big welt on her tender inner thigh, and still wondered 'Why me, G_d?"
And then she remembered the even wiser words of her cousin Sorah Lori, who had explained to her once the basis of the Jewish religion, why, at the end of every prayer and show of faith and abstinence, each celebration of great and terrible days in their history, Jews sat down for a meal. Sorah Lori summed up in very few words the entire history. And it went thusly:
"They hate us. They want to kill us. Let's eat."
Happy New Year. East something. You'll feel better.
So far had she come that she did not scream or even react except to say in quiet voice to her friend Elisa, "I sat on a bee," which it was not, as it turned out, but a wasp, as they discovered when they retreated to the ladies room and it did fly out from under her skirt and land on the wall, as witnessed by another woman who did change out of her bathing suit. Then came the pool man with ammonia which Elisa did apply and all went back to dine, as though naught had occured of major moment but it stung like hell.
Now all night long, having begun her Yom Kippur fast at sundown like the good Jew she tried to be on occasion, Sorah Gwen did writhe and smart and took of many anti-histamines which she hoped G_d would not consider breaking her fast, and prayed to G-d all through the night to relieve her from her discomfort, but so pained and swollen was she on that tender inner thigh by morning that she didn't give a damn and ate breakfast.
Then three rabbis met on the deck of the Giudecca to discuss the question Sorah Gwen had in her mind, not to mention the tender part of her inner thigh.
Rabbi Gamaliel said: "Why would this woman who thought herself a good person be stung thrice by a Wasp?"
Rabbi Eleazer said: "Was she not eating lunch with Goyem?"
Said Rabbi Herschel, "They were not Wasps, but Wascs, being mainly Catholics and as they were two of them Italians they were certainly not Anglo-Saxons when it is well known that WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, not White Italian Catholics."
"But if a bee stings in the bush, and nobody feels it, is there any harm?" quoth Rabbi Gamaleil.
"You miss the point," said Rabbi Eleazer.
"So did the wasp," said Rabbi Herschel, imagining himself to be a wit.
"But why the tender part of the inner thigh when no one has been there in decades?"
"Perhaps to remind her there is no pleasure that cannot be remembered in pain, especially since it has been so long since it brought any pleasure."
"But why this woman?" said Rabbi Gamaliel. "Had she not been brought out of the railroad station at Santa Lucia with her dog only to be greeted by stinging nettles with gummy glue on them that had to be removed pulling hair by hair all through the night from the little dog, whose Jewish name was Miriam, although she was called Mimi, and never made but a slight whimper of protest because she understood she was being helped? And if the little dog could survive such an ordeal, why does the woman complain at being stung thrice by a wasp?"
"She is not complaining," said Rabbi Herschel. "She is only wondering why it happened? And why was she stung not once but thrice?"
"Three," said the Rabbi,"if you study the Kabbalah not necessarily in the group with Madonna, is the mystical number that means creative imagery."
"There is not much that is creative in a wasp sting," said Rabbi Herschel.
""There is the next day. How it does swell and change colors more mysteriously than the sunset. And that is the hand of the Creator."
"But do you dare to say that Yahweh is underhanded?"
"I say only that there are mysteries too mysterious to question, like why are there mosquitoes when they serve no purpose."
"Perhaps they do to other mosquitoes," said Rabbi Herschel.
"But what does this have to do with Yom Kippur?" Rabbi Eleazer asked.
"Everything," said Rabbi Gamaliel. "For four days Sorah Gwen had the best time of her life at the Cipriani in Venice, where there is a drink called by George Clooney when he was at the Venice Film Festival last year the Buona Notte, vodka and bitters which he invented and she thought tasted terrible, and as a result had for her final breakfast on that perfect day the Gwendollini, which name she made up to get even both with George Clooney and Hemingway who had invented the Bellini, but the Gwendollini she had the ego to think was better, being cranberry juice and prosecco, a fine way to start that last glorious day.
"There is no pleasure without pain. To be a Jew in this world having so much pleasure would be a sin were you not stung three times on the tender inner thigh by a wasp, as not to feel pain as a Jew would be a pain."
All were impressed by his wisdom, except for Sorah Gwen with her big welt on her tender inner thigh, and still wondered 'Why me, G_d?"
And then she remembered the even wiser words of her cousin Sorah Lori, who had explained to her once the basis of the Jewish religion, why, at the end of every prayer and show of faith and abstinence, each celebration of great and terrible days in their history, Jews sat down for a meal. Sorah Lori summed up in very few words the entire history. And it went thusly:
"They hate us. They want to kill us. Let's eat."
Happy New Year. East something. You'll feel better.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
MIMI DOES DEAUVILLE
I am reliqishing today's report to my petite chien, Mimi, who, in addition to her other virtues, has unexpected gifts of observation.
MIMI DOES DEAUVILLE
Although I, Mimi, a Bichon Frisee ( that means curly-haired lap dog in Francaise, for those of vous who are not international) arrived at Deauville too late to catch my great love, George Clooney-- (there's still time-I'm a young dog, and so is he,) reports about his new film,Michael Clayton, are OUTstanding. Less radiant is the word about Brad Pitt's The Assassination of Jesse James: a bitch who got there before me said she could hardly wait for the coward Robert Ford to get it over with. And the locals were a bit en colere that Brad and Angie made their exit from the ville so vite (Six hours. One French journalist described him as une etoile filante: (a shooting star.) Matt Damon, there for Bourne (La Vengeance dans la Peau-- sounds meaner in French), was courtois (polite) and accessible, so was liked by all.
The Deauville Film Festival( this is the 33rd) is deliberately known as American, (Festival du Cinema Americaine.). Not as screamy or as pushy as Cannes, the weather far more chill (it is Normandy, the Northern coast of France, facing La Manche( and September) and the people less hysterical than their cousins to the south, lining up respectfully behind the gates to await and ogle, when indeed it would be easy to storm the barricades or even walk around them, the entire staff being open to conversation and wheedling, the festival has an elegant air. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was the center of this year's hommage to Sidney Lumet, the most luminous presence among the older set except for Marlon Brando, whose ghost hung over the proceedings via a brilliant documentary from Turner Broadcasting with Canal 1, a very long but riveting demonstration that Brando dead is still bigger than most people alive.
Ira and Abby is Woody Allen manque,(not quite up to the freckled one), but funnier than the Ben Stiller would-be comedy The Heatbreak Kid, Bonneville offers a still hypnotically gifted Jessica Lange with the always amazing Joan Allen and Kathy Bates in a road saga more literate than Kerouac's without so many words, and Waitress shows up just as dear on this side of the Atlantic. Zoe Cassavetes makes her directorial debut with Broken English with a nice personal assist from mama Gena Rowlands, both in the picture and at a press conference.
Terrible surprise of the festival is Teeth, from director Mitchell Lichtenstein about a sweet young thing with vagina dentatum, every unsure man's imagined nightmare. It shouldn't happen to a dog. Moi-meme, I had to stop watching about the time the third thing got bitten off.
My personal favorite was The Dead Girl, a series of powerful vignettes concerning all the women touching on the finding of an anonymous woman's corpse, featuring some of our most brilliant actresses: Toni Colette, Marcia Gay Harden, Piper Laurie, still in powerful fettle voice-wise; a gallery of your favorites whose names you might not know, but should. My amie du voyage, Suzie, an Apricot poodle, hated it. But then, she loved Teeth, proving once again, chacun a son gout.
But turns out I was right! Dead Girl won! Mimi, LA CRITIQUE!!!!
MIMI DOES DEAUVILLE
Although I, Mimi, a Bichon Frisee ( that means curly-haired lap dog in Francaise, for those of vous who are not international) arrived at Deauville too late to catch my great love, George Clooney-- (there's still time-I'm a young dog, and so is he,) reports about his new film,Michael Clayton, are OUTstanding. Less radiant is the word about Brad Pitt's The Assassination of Jesse James: a bitch who got there before me said she could hardly wait for the coward Robert Ford to get it over with. And the locals were a bit en colere that Brad and Angie made their exit from the ville so vite (Six hours. One French journalist described him as une etoile filante: (a shooting star.) Matt Damon, there for Bourne (La Vengeance dans la Peau-- sounds meaner in French), was courtois (polite) and accessible, so was liked by all.
The Deauville Film Festival( this is the 33rd) is deliberately known as American, (Festival du Cinema Americaine.). Not as screamy or as pushy as Cannes, the weather far more chill (it is Normandy, the Northern coast of France, facing La Manche( and September) and the people less hysterical than their cousins to the south, lining up respectfully behind the gates to await and ogle, when indeed it would be easy to storm the barricades or even walk around them, the entire staff being open to conversation and wheedling, the festival has an elegant air. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was the center of this year's hommage to Sidney Lumet, the most luminous presence among the older set except for Marlon Brando, whose ghost hung over the proceedings via a brilliant documentary from Turner Broadcasting with Canal 1, a very long but riveting demonstration that Brando dead is still bigger than most people alive.
Ira and Abby is Woody Allen manque,(not quite up to the freckled one), but funnier than the Ben Stiller would-be comedy The Heatbreak Kid, Bonneville offers a still hypnotically gifted Jessica Lange with the always amazing Joan Allen and Kathy Bates in a road saga more literate than Kerouac's without so many words, and Waitress shows up just as dear on this side of the Atlantic. Zoe Cassavetes makes her directorial debut with Broken English with a nice personal assist from mama Gena Rowlands, both in the picture and at a press conference.
Terrible surprise of the festival is Teeth, from director Mitchell Lichtenstein about a sweet young thing with vagina dentatum, every unsure man's imagined nightmare. It shouldn't happen to a dog. Moi-meme, I had to stop watching about the time the third thing got bitten off.
My personal favorite was The Dead Girl, a series of powerful vignettes concerning all the women touching on the finding of an anonymous woman's corpse, featuring some of our most brilliant actresses: Toni Colette, Marcia Gay Harden, Piper Laurie, still in powerful fettle voice-wise; a gallery of your favorites whose names you might not know, but should. My amie du voyage, Suzie, an Apricot poodle, hated it. But then, she loved Teeth, proving once again, chacun a son gout.
But turns out I was right! Dead Girl won! Mimi, LA CRITIQUE!!!!
RETOUR A PARIS
Had the best day in Paris I ever had, probably because I took it as a day, living in the Moment(French pronunciation,) not expecting or hoping that something was just around the corner, just looking at the corner itself. And of course there are no more beautiful corners in the world than the ones in Paris-- a friend of mine once called it an open-air museum, and that is what it is. My clever daughter-in-law had come here once on an architectural tour so had given me a destination I had never even heard of the two times I lived here(very young and not that old,) the Butte Chaumont, a park in the 19th where I'd never been.
The day began exceedingly fair, not a cloud in the sky, rare for Paris. Mimi and I walked the Champs Elysees, crossed the Avenue Montaigne, where I'd begun as a sprite-in-training, to the Pont de l'Alma. There were still fresh flowers on the Herald-Tribune monument, a gold torch in symbolic imitation of the Statue ofLiberty's. Most people think that a memorial to Diana, since that was the place she went into the tunnel. A Parisian woman put a rose on the pile at the base, and said it was good that people still remember. Someone said in the course of this journey that the whole thing about Diana had gone on too long, but I'd read a wonderful piece in the NYTimes about our need to grieve, and that this at least gave us something good to grieve about.
Then Mimi and I crossed over to the Left Bank, made an attempt to talk reason to Air France which charged $150 for Mimi to come and refused to let me pay round trip at the start, wanting the 150 Euros to take her back, which by the time I leave will probably be about $250. Every day sees another bad hit thanks to George Bush, whom the good George(Clooney) called an imbecile in an interview with the French press. Anyway, it has been worth it to have her here as she is loved by all the French, even those who can't stand each other. I am lucky enough to have a wonderful friendship with the family who lived upstairs from me on Rue de la Pompe; they'd invited me to dinner my fist night here, so I could renew my love affair with Gaspard, who is now eleven and was my favorite little boy(he was two) until my gifted son made me a grandma.
Walking along the Quai D'Orsai I stopped at Cafe Fregate across from the Louvre and wrote the following pome.
Je trouve my groove
En face du Louvre
Trying not to move into rage
At seeing George Bush
With his moosh like a tush
On the Herald-Tribune front page.
They were just out of it
When we stopped for a bit
At the Pont de l'Alma ce matin
Where Diana's face
Still haunts the place
Where the end of her life began.
The absence of news
Liberated my Muse
And Paris became its own pome
Where the sky looks much higher
And souls aspire
To make this work of art into home.
The air is so frais
On this rare, sunlit day
That you think you could live here forever
With a heart full of love
And that sky high above
And a head full of things that are clever.
But the unvarnished truth
Is that even with yourh
And a truly original flair
Though the place won't erase you
Neither will it embrace you
It's a city that just doesn't care.
Actually when I first returned to live here in '97 I met a woman who'd been Art Buchwals's secretary. She was still beautiful, Dietrich-ish, and when I told her how much I loved(or wanted to be loved by) Paris, she said the city was "indifferent." I suppose it's easy to be indifferent when you're that beautiful. Used to praise.
Adoration.
Anyway, I loved the park in the 19th, took Mimi home for her first ride on the Metro which was almost her last. There was a pit bullwithout a leash, against the law but that doesn't bother Parisians, and Mimi had the same innocence I guess I used to have, and greeted him with a friendly bark. Fortunately he was as indifferent as Paris, so ignored her, lying fat and panting under the seat of his owner, a few chairs away from a baby in terrified Mother's arms. Ah, Paree! Toujours an avanteur.
Had dinner with a French mother and daughter I knew from Bali, and the next day lunched with a lovely Frenchwoman, Dominique, and her son Dorian, whom Robert, my son, calls "the little boy who killed Happy." If you remember the story, Happy and I on a visit here in '97 had lunch at Pere La Chaise, at the tomb of Oscar Wilde, and that night ate at a small restaurant where a chubby little boy, just over one year old, ran up and down the sidewalk and played with Happy. A beautiful woman came and put a glass of champagne in front of me and said, in French I could understand, "this is because you were so kind to my son Dorian." "Dorian?" I repeated. "After Dorian Gray," she said.
Being then in the deepest trough of my mysticism, I could not think it a coincidence, made friends with her and invited them to come to my hotel the next evening for a drink. Dorian was in his full puppyhood, and Happy, quite old, seeing the presence of a younger dog, went fully into his macho, and became Happy of the Jungle, fiercely running around the room, holding his toy bone in his mouth, his youth and vigor restored.
Right after that, we all left the hotel. They went their way, and Happy suddenly fell to the sidewalk, legs outstretched, rigid. I called the vet and he said it was a heart attack, and I would have to put Happy down. We sat a restaurant, Happy in my lap as I sobbed, and gave him a strand of fettucini Alain Delon. I took him back to the hotel, called Robert in LA, and we wept over it together. Then I told Happy I didn't want to have to put him to sleep. I turned off the light and patted him, comforting him, asking him please to help me. When I turned on the light at four in the morning, he was dead.
I took him to Vanves in the back velvet bag I had used to smuggle him into the Literary Guild party, and cremated him, afterwards sprinkling his ashes on all the greats of Pere La-Chaise. The poem about it exists, if any of you want to read it. Gregory Peck liked the poem so much he was kind enough to record it for me.
Dorian,.a beautiful boy, now eleven, still has Happy's toy bone on his wall, his mother told me. And, oh yes, he has a CD that his mama, gave me. I do hope it's wonderful. And that he will become a great vedette. That's star.
It would be only right. Happy was sooooooooooooooo talented.
The day began exceedingly fair, not a cloud in the sky, rare for Paris. Mimi and I walked the Champs Elysees, crossed the Avenue Montaigne, where I'd begun as a sprite-in-training, to the Pont de l'Alma. There were still fresh flowers on the Herald-Tribune monument, a gold torch in symbolic imitation of the Statue ofLiberty's. Most people think that a memorial to Diana, since that was the place she went into the tunnel. A Parisian woman put a rose on the pile at the base, and said it was good that people still remember. Someone said in the course of this journey that the whole thing about Diana had gone on too long, but I'd read a wonderful piece in the NYTimes about our need to grieve, and that this at least gave us something good to grieve about.
Then Mimi and I crossed over to the Left Bank, made an attempt to talk reason to Air France which charged $150 for Mimi to come and refused to let me pay round trip at the start, wanting the 150 Euros to take her back, which by the time I leave will probably be about $250. Every day sees another bad hit thanks to George Bush, whom the good George(Clooney) called an imbecile in an interview with the French press. Anyway, it has been worth it to have her here as she is loved by all the French, even those who can't stand each other. I am lucky enough to have a wonderful friendship with the family who lived upstairs from me on Rue de la Pompe; they'd invited me to dinner my fist night here, so I could renew my love affair with Gaspard, who is now eleven and was my favorite little boy(he was two) until my gifted son made me a grandma.
Walking along the Quai D'Orsai I stopped at Cafe Fregate across from the Louvre and wrote the following pome.
Je trouve my groove
En face du Louvre
Trying not to move into rage
At seeing George Bush
With his moosh like a tush
On the Herald-Tribune front page.
They were just out of it
When we stopped for a bit
At the Pont de l'Alma ce matin
Where Diana's face
Still haunts the place
Where the end of her life began.
The absence of news
Liberated my Muse
And Paris became its own pome
Where the sky looks much higher
And souls aspire
To make this work of art into home.
The air is so frais
On this rare, sunlit day
That you think you could live here forever
With a heart full of love
And that sky high above
And a head full of things that are clever.
But the unvarnished truth
Is that even with yourh
And a truly original flair
Though the place won't erase you
Neither will it embrace you
It's a city that just doesn't care.
Actually when I first returned to live here in '97 I met a woman who'd been Art Buchwals's secretary. She was still beautiful, Dietrich-ish, and when I told her how much I loved(or wanted to be loved by) Paris, she said the city was "indifferent." I suppose it's easy to be indifferent when you're that beautiful. Used to praise.
Adoration.
Anyway, I loved the park in the 19th, took Mimi home for her first ride on the Metro which was almost her last. There was a pit bullwithout a leash, against the law but that doesn't bother Parisians, and Mimi had the same innocence I guess I used to have, and greeted him with a friendly bark. Fortunately he was as indifferent as Paris, so ignored her, lying fat and panting under the seat of his owner, a few chairs away from a baby in terrified Mother's arms. Ah, Paree! Toujours an avanteur.
Had dinner with a French mother and daughter I knew from Bali, and the next day lunched with a lovely Frenchwoman, Dominique, and her son Dorian, whom Robert, my son, calls "the little boy who killed Happy." If you remember the story, Happy and I on a visit here in '97 had lunch at Pere La Chaise, at the tomb of Oscar Wilde, and that night ate at a small restaurant where a chubby little boy, just over one year old, ran up and down the sidewalk and played with Happy. A beautiful woman came and put a glass of champagne in front of me and said, in French I could understand, "this is because you were so kind to my son Dorian." "Dorian?" I repeated. "After Dorian Gray," she said.
Being then in the deepest trough of my mysticism, I could not think it a coincidence, made friends with her and invited them to come to my hotel the next evening for a drink. Dorian was in his full puppyhood, and Happy, quite old, seeing the presence of a younger dog, went fully into his macho, and became Happy of the Jungle, fiercely running around the room, holding his toy bone in his mouth, his youth and vigor restored.
Right after that, we all left the hotel. They went their way, and Happy suddenly fell to the sidewalk, legs outstretched, rigid. I called the vet and he said it was a heart attack, and I would have to put Happy down. We sat a restaurant, Happy in my lap as I sobbed, and gave him a strand of fettucini Alain Delon. I took him back to the hotel, called Robert in LA, and we wept over it together. Then I told Happy I didn't want to have to put him to sleep. I turned off the light and patted him, comforting him, asking him please to help me. When I turned on the light at four in the morning, he was dead.
I took him to Vanves in the back velvet bag I had used to smuggle him into the Literary Guild party, and cremated him, afterwards sprinkling his ashes on all the greats of Pere La-Chaise. The poem about it exists, if any of you want to read it. Gregory Peck liked the poem so much he was kind enough to record it for me.
Dorian,.a beautiful boy, now eleven, still has Happy's toy bone on his wall, his mother told me. And, oh yes, he has a CD that his mama, gave me. I do hope it's wonderful. And that he will become a great vedette. That's star.
It would be only right. Happy was sooooooooooooooo talented.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
An Open Apology to George W. Bush
I stopped by Barnes and Noble yesterday and thumbed(all thumbs) through The Reagan Diaries. There is no such entry as the one cited in my last report, in which Ronnie was alleged to be anticipating a meeting with George H.W.'s son, the doofus, a word he does not use but might have if he was actually confronted with him, Ronnie being a man of the people and a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, when the screen was filled with a number of Doofi.
So I apologize for attributing as fact something that was obviously just an Internetnik's attempt at wit. Just because it wasn't true, though, doesn't make it false. Still, as W has never admitted he had made a mistake about anything, I think it correct to one-up him on graciousness. Reagan never said that, but that doesn't mean he didn't think it, or that it wasn't accurate.
Further to W- we congratulate him on the engagement of Jenna to a Rove trainee.
It put me in mind of the night many of us gathered on the windswept hill outside San Quentin protesting the coming execution of Caryl Chessman, a robber and rapist who had had a visible change of heart and mind, educated himself and written, quite well too, while on Death Row, becoming the poster child of those who opposed the death penalty. I was a graduate student at Stanford then, and went with Ken Kesey, a buddy, along with "hundreds of students" the radio said, though maybe there were forty of us, who ached through the chilled vigil that night. There were sandwich trucks, and Marlon Brando arrived around four in the morning, and he and his lawyer announced around 7 AM that in the event they were unable to save Chessman, he had agreed to let Marlon play him in a movie about his life... and death, it turned out at 8: 01 AM. Though Marlon never made the movie, and Chessman was very dead, a number of those on the hill that night connected and became lovers, in what seems somehow a livelier(execution notwithstanding) manner than what was to come: Match. com.
In the same way, all who have fallen, or come back on stumps, have not done so in vain. Mr. Bush's war has given this couple the time to discover each other. God Bless America, a nation of lovers.
So I apologize for attributing as fact something that was obviously just an Internetnik's attempt at wit. Just because it wasn't true, though, doesn't make it false. Still, as W has never admitted he had made a mistake about anything, I think it correct to one-up him on graciousness. Reagan never said that, but that doesn't mean he didn't think it, or that it wasn't accurate.
Further to W- we congratulate him on the engagement of Jenna to a Rove trainee.
It put me in mind of the night many of us gathered on the windswept hill outside San Quentin protesting the coming execution of Caryl Chessman, a robber and rapist who had had a visible change of heart and mind, educated himself and written, quite well too, while on Death Row, becoming the poster child of those who opposed the death penalty. I was a graduate student at Stanford then, and went with Ken Kesey, a buddy, along with "hundreds of students" the radio said, though maybe there were forty of us, who ached through the chilled vigil that night. There were sandwich trucks, and Marlon Brando arrived around four in the morning, and he and his lawyer announced around 7 AM that in the event they were unable to save Chessman, he had agreed to let Marlon play him in a movie about his life... and death, it turned out at 8: 01 AM. Though Marlon never made the movie, and Chessman was very dead, a number of those on the hill that night connected and became lovers, in what seems somehow a livelier(execution notwithstanding) manner than what was to come: Match. com.
In the same way, all who have fallen, or come back on stumps, have not done so in vain. Mr. Bush's war has given this couple the time to discover each other. God Bless America, a nation of lovers.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
A Comedy of Terrors
So to begin with, while still in LA, there was the saga of my apartment key. Twice in one day I was locked out, once because I forgot my key-- the young, rock-climbing-in-the-gym neighbor scaled my terrace wall and let me in, later in the day the Time-Warner man came and as I stepped out into the hall to welcome him, my door blew shut. "Do you know how to break into an apartment?" I asked. "I'm from South Central," quoth he. So I got in.
Where was your extra key? you may ask, and rightly. I had had many made but none of them worked. My knowledgeable friend Pam Korman who knows where to find everything sent me at last to a locksmith who knew what he was doing, so finally I had many extra keys, one of which I attempted to put in those magnetic boxes you attach to something you can get into, only to discover I couldn't open the box. At last, everything seemingly in order, I set off for New York, via the fabled Jet Blue. We were diverted to Buffalo.
Mimi was the only one allowed off the plane, as she had been under the seat for nine hours by then, imagining she was on her way to Paris, where sadly she will not be going because in spite of losing the requisite weight she has acquired a tendency to bark when left alone in a hotel room, so it will not do to try and sneak her into the Cipriani. She will stay instead in New York with her other mother, Carleen, who is kinder and gentler anyway. In Buffalo, where we were kept for many hours till Jet Blue could complete its paperwork, Mimi found a post that could accommodate her needs, which was a better chance than many of the passengers had. When we finally were allowed to make our way into JFK, it was almost four in the morning, and the terminal floor was strewn with sleeping passengers whose flights had been postponed until the next day. At the luggage carousel, as we waited, hoping, an announcement came over the loudspeaker that all passengers from cancelled flights would not be receiving their luggage until the next day, so they should all go home and get some sleep and come back the next morning. At that point the offices of Jet Blue were stormed by a hundred furious passengers, so the poor man in charge, who wasn't really, had no choice but to release the luggage even though all the handlers had long before gone home.
I got a car into New York with two young men(24 and 25,)former roommates from Cornell so they could not have been morons who work at Goldman Sachs and another equity firm-- their flight had been cancelled after they'd waited since 6 AM. I said I was sorry about what the market was doing to innocent people, but that it would be appropriate if in addition to destroying everything the country stood for Bush also left office having torpedoed the economy, and one of them said "Yeah, it would be a tough way to go out."
"Do I detect a note of compassion in what you're saying?" quoth I.
"Well, uh, I guess," he said.
"Don't you care about what he's done?"
"Well, uh, I don't really pay that much attention."
"What about Iraq?" I said.
"Well, I don't really relate," he said. "Neither my father or my mother was ever in the service."
"And how about the fact that we are loathed worldwide. Don't you read the papers?"
"Not really," they said. I mean both of them. The second said: "We focus on our work and the rest of the time we communicate on the Internet, mostly with our friends on Facebook."
So the next day I saw Facebook on the cover of Newsweek and called my broker to buy some(Hey, if we're going to go down in flames we might as well have a smart asbestos suit,and my last broker had ignored my call to buy Google before the original offering) But he said it is not for sale yet. Apparently it was thought up by some kids at Harvard who couldn't work computers so they asked their friend the Geek to set it up for them and he stole it. What a world. Insensate graduates at Cornell and thieves at Harvard.
To travel back to a time when Ivy League and Seven Sisters stood for something, I was wined and dined by my friend Evie Rich the next evening, along with some other classmates from Bryn Mawr, and they were all still smart and touchingly concerned with the world we sort of live in. Evie was the first black(they were still called then) admitted to Bryn Mawr, which happened because her mother worked for a Main Line lady(they were still called then) who went into the kitchen and found young high-schooler Evie reading Catallus in the original Latin, so, astounded, sent her to Bryn Mawr for an interview and she got in. When Evie arrived the first day of college, they sent her to the maid's quarters. In spite of that, she was not then and is not now bitter, but only a fighter, and brilliant, and she says Obama can't win because this country isn't ready to elect a black man. Like me, she likes Edwards, and says if she could organize all the seniors they could get him in, but I suggested she not call them seniors as none of us likes being called that, so we arrived at Boomers and Beyond.
How did this happen? Nobody ever told us there was this thing called aging. Oh, maybe Shakepeare, but he was such a Drama Queen. All we ever knew to fear was death and failure, not necessarily in that order. I spent the first Monday of my sojourn here in the dentist's chair, under gas, and even under gas still had an inspiration. As the dentist grafted in a piece of bone(Dear God, was it Your purpose to degrade us for staying longer than You originally intended except for maybe Methuselah?) I asked him where the bone came from, and he said "a cadaver." Ugh. But still, as I was gassing, curiosity and still functioning intellect overwhelmed repulsion and I queried where he got the cadaver, and he said the University of Miami tissue lab.
So here's it is: 'A HALLOWEEN CAROL." A mild mannered middle-aged(to be generous) man gets this bone graft and every Halloween turns into a drug lord. Robert di Niro can play Alistair Sim, for those of you seasoned enough to remember Alistair Sim.
Oh, God,if you're really out there, how did this happen? To think how afraid we were that we would never find love, or have children, and now understand fully how fallow were those terrors. Of course the upside is/was that we were here when this was still the greatest country in the world, admired by almost everyone in those countries we could still afford to visit. When our turning to torture was unthinkable, not having to ferret out plots against us because even those who were jealous had to admit there was much to admire. Where did it go? Though we do understand by whose hand.
The following from Reagan's Diaries, sent me by my friend Hal:
'A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son
around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the
political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all
the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and
has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New
Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or
something. That looks like easy work.'
From the just published REAGAN DIARIES. The entry is dated May 17, 1986.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where was your extra key? you may ask, and rightly. I had had many made but none of them worked. My knowledgeable friend Pam Korman who knows where to find everything sent me at last to a locksmith who knew what he was doing, so finally I had many extra keys, one of which I attempted to put in those magnetic boxes you attach to something you can get into, only to discover I couldn't open the box. At last, everything seemingly in order, I set off for New York, via the fabled Jet Blue. We were diverted to Buffalo.
Mimi was the only one allowed off the plane, as she had been under the seat for nine hours by then, imagining she was on her way to Paris, where sadly she will not be going because in spite of losing the requisite weight she has acquired a tendency to bark when left alone in a hotel room, so it will not do to try and sneak her into the Cipriani. She will stay instead in New York with her other mother, Carleen, who is kinder and gentler anyway. In Buffalo, where we were kept for many hours till Jet Blue could complete its paperwork, Mimi found a post that could accommodate her needs, which was a better chance than many of the passengers had. When we finally were allowed to make our way into JFK, it was almost four in the morning, and the terminal floor was strewn with sleeping passengers whose flights had been postponed until the next day. At the luggage carousel, as we waited, hoping, an announcement came over the loudspeaker that all passengers from cancelled flights would not be receiving their luggage until the next day, so they should all go home and get some sleep and come back the next morning. At that point the offices of Jet Blue were stormed by a hundred furious passengers, so the poor man in charge, who wasn't really, had no choice but to release the luggage even though all the handlers had long before gone home.
I got a car into New York with two young men(24 and 25,)former roommates from Cornell so they could not have been morons who work at Goldman Sachs and another equity firm-- their flight had been cancelled after they'd waited since 6 AM. I said I was sorry about what the market was doing to innocent people, but that it would be appropriate if in addition to destroying everything the country stood for Bush also left office having torpedoed the economy, and one of them said "Yeah, it would be a tough way to go out."
"Do I detect a note of compassion in what you're saying?" quoth I.
"Well, uh, I guess," he said.
"Don't you care about what he's done?"
"Well, uh, I don't really pay that much attention."
"What about Iraq?" I said.
"Well, I don't really relate," he said. "Neither my father or my mother was ever in the service."
"And how about the fact that we are loathed worldwide. Don't you read the papers?"
"Not really," they said. I mean both of them. The second said: "We focus on our work and the rest of the time we communicate on the Internet, mostly with our friends on Facebook."
So the next day I saw Facebook on the cover of Newsweek and called my broker to buy some(Hey, if we're going to go down in flames we might as well have a smart asbestos suit,and my last broker had ignored my call to buy Google before the original offering) But he said it is not for sale yet. Apparently it was thought up by some kids at Harvard who couldn't work computers so they asked their friend the Geek to set it up for them and he stole it. What a world. Insensate graduates at Cornell and thieves at Harvard.
To travel back to a time when Ivy League and Seven Sisters stood for something, I was wined and dined by my friend Evie Rich the next evening, along with some other classmates from Bryn Mawr, and they were all still smart and touchingly concerned with the world we sort of live in. Evie was the first black(they were still called then) admitted to Bryn Mawr, which happened because her mother worked for a Main Line lady(they were still called then) who went into the kitchen and found young high-schooler Evie reading Catallus in the original Latin, so, astounded, sent her to Bryn Mawr for an interview and she got in. When Evie arrived the first day of college, they sent her to the maid's quarters. In spite of that, she was not then and is not now bitter, but only a fighter, and brilliant, and she says Obama can't win because this country isn't ready to elect a black man. Like me, she likes Edwards, and says if she could organize all the seniors they could get him in, but I suggested she not call them seniors as none of us likes being called that, so we arrived at Boomers and Beyond.
How did this happen? Nobody ever told us there was this thing called aging. Oh, maybe Shakepeare, but he was such a Drama Queen. All we ever knew to fear was death and failure, not necessarily in that order. I spent the first Monday of my sojourn here in the dentist's chair, under gas, and even under gas still had an inspiration. As the dentist grafted in a piece of bone(Dear God, was it Your purpose to degrade us for staying longer than You originally intended except for maybe Methuselah?) I asked him where the bone came from, and he said "a cadaver." Ugh. But still, as I was gassing, curiosity and still functioning intellect overwhelmed repulsion and I queried where he got the cadaver, and he said the University of Miami tissue lab.
So here's it is: 'A HALLOWEEN CAROL." A mild mannered middle-aged(to be generous) man gets this bone graft and every Halloween turns into a drug lord. Robert di Niro can play Alistair Sim, for those of you seasoned enough to remember Alistair Sim.
Oh, God,if you're really out there, how did this happen? To think how afraid we were that we would never find love, or have children, and now understand fully how fallow were those terrors. Of course the upside is/was that we were here when this was still the greatest country in the world, admired by almost everyone in those countries we could still afford to visit. When our turning to torture was unthinkable, not having to ferret out plots against us because even those who were jealous had to admit there was much to admire. Where did it go? Though we do understand by whose hand.
The following from Reagan's Diaries, sent me by my friend Hal:
'A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son
around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the
political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all
the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and
has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New
Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or
something. That looks like easy work.'
From the just published REAGAN DIARIES. The entry is dated May 17, 1986.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, August 10, 2007
A Tale of Two Pats
There are some great women in my life, many of whom you are. One of the outstanding is Pat McPherson, who was president of Bryn Mawr when I went back there in my second teen-hood, whose wisdom I have long followed, especially apt since she is now seated in the elevated stands of the American Philosophical Society. Twas she who told me there would never be another Happy but I should have a creature, and so influenced am I by her I stopped in after that Fateful-in-a-Good-Way lunch to the pet store next to the restaurant, and found Mimi. At our last lunch she told me Edwards was a "lightweight," so I considered not wanting him for the candidate.
Then there is the second Pat, one of the smartest women I have known even though she has spent most of her adult life in Southern California which turns out to be a particular blessing for me as we lunch frequently and it keeps my mind going. At our lunch yesterday she said Edwards was a "lightweight," so having heard the same word twice from two different Pats, each one of them singular but of a special breed, I teetered on the brink of stopping loving him completely, though along with all bright women I would have liked the chance to elect Elizabeth..
But having made that teetering almost decision, I went to the gathering for him yesterday, a ludicrously organized or rather disorganized event at a place on La Cienaga called 'Republic' where all cattle-called while waiting too long and having parked too far away(I hadn't listened to the warnings of no available space so found a spot a block away) while I and the politically enlightened Bill Boyarsky enjoyed a shadowy bar next door to the cow pen till the "organizers" got their act together and let us in.
Meanwhile, across the way at Area, where the Lindsay Lohan S-I-Ts(Sluts in Training) usually gather in too short skirts and silver sequins there was a dinner for Barack. Some blocks away was Hillary at a gay bar, all these Dems being in town for an interview by LOGO or LOCO the gay TV satellite station.
We heard Edwards on a speaker and then he showed up. Much as I love both Pats, they're wrong. He is, as I felt about from the last go round when he was dragged down by Kerry, the most honest of all of them, his positions on health care and the insurance and drug companies drafting the bills so there is no chance for the people, as well as his stand on lobbyists, which is FIRM, are clean and clear, his energy is terrific, and he is smart enough so that if he did get it and get in, he would choose the right people for his cabinet and advisers so he could catch up to Hillary on the international problems in which he seems weaker than she, although Bill thinks she would keep us in Iraq forever. (By the way, I was told by a pleasant Dem that Hillary has gotten more money from the drug companies than anyone except Rick Santorum.)
So he's my candidate, and I hope people will listen to him and he can make it through to a photo finish with Elizabeth okay at his side. At the end of his speech Bill gave him a fist-up, which meant he was moved and it was kind of his high-five into the smoggy air of LA where he thinks bicyclists should train for the Olympics in China where they won't be able to breathe.
Meanwhile, cleaning up my computer in preparation for my trip(NY-France-Suisse, Italie) I found the following old Report from April, 2006, which seems just as apt but even sadder now.
It has occured to me that what's wrong with this war, besides that it never should have happened, is that there are no songs. The Civil War had 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,',' WorldWar I had 'Over There!' and WorldWar II had 'Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition', the last being the early work of the great Frank Loesser, who went on to give us 'Guys and Dolls.' A fine tunesmith, as those guys used to be known. I began to wonder what Frank could cook up, with his endless versatility, for this epic error. 'Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition into the head of Pat Tillman'? 'There'll be Blue Birds Over the Un-Armored Land Rover'? 'I'll be Home for Ramadan? I mean, what's a songwriter to do? Even George M. Cohan, our Yankee Doodle Dandy, would be hard-pressed to come up with a ditty for this one.
But perhaps it's the Chicken and the Egg. Perhaps if we had a really good song it would all get better. Even seem okay. Put your mind to it, all. Let me know if you come up with any ideas. I used to be a songwriter myself, when the world was young, which was one of the better bar-room ballads, when singers were singers, and presidents were presidents.
SOOOOOOOOOOOO, that's all the news that's fit to grouse about, at least right now, from yesterday and April 4,2006. Le plus things change, the plus they stay the same. Helas.
Love and xx
Committed
Then there is the second Pat, one of the smartest women I have known even though she has spent most of her adult life in Southern California which turns out to be a particular blessing for me as we lunch frequently and it keeps my mind going. At our lunch yesterday she said Edwards was a "lightweight," so having heard the same word twice from two different Pats, each one of them singular but of a special breed, I teetered on the brink of stopping loving him completely, though along with all bright women I would have liked the chance to elect Elizabeth..
But having made that teetering almost decision, I went to the gathering for him yesterday, a ludicrously organized or rather disorganized event at a place on La Cienaga called 'Republic' where all cattle-called while waiting too long and having parked too far away(I hadn't listened to the warnings of no available space so found a spot a block away) while I and the politically enlightened Bill Boyarsky enjoyed a shadowy bar next door to the cow pen till the "organizers" got their act together and let us in.
Meanwhile, across the way at Area, where the Lindsay Lohan S-I-Ts(Sluts in Training) usually gather in too short skirts and silver sequins there was a dinner for Barack. Some blocks away was Hillary at a gay bar, all these Dems being in town for an interview by LOGO or LOCO the gay TV satellite station.
We heard Edwards on a speaker and then he showed up. Much as I love both Pats, they're wrong. He is, as I felt about from the last go round when he was dragged down by Kerry, the most honest of all of them, his positions on health care and the insurance and drug companies drafting the bills so there is no chance for the people, as well as his stand on lobbyists, which is FIRM, are clean and clear, his energy is terrific, and he is smart enough so that if he did get it and get in, he would choose the right people for his cabinet and advisers so he could catch up to Hillary on the international problems in which he seems weaker than she, although Bill thinks she would keep us in Iraq forever. (By the way, I was told by a pleasant Dem that Hillary has gotten more money from the drug companies than anyone except Rick Santorum.)
So he's my candidate, and I hope people will listen to him and he can make it through to a photo finish with Elizabeth okay at his side. At the end of his speech Bill gave him a fist-up, which meant he was moved and it was kind of his high-five into the smoggy air of LA where he thinks bicyclists should train for the Olympics in China where they won't be able to breathe.
Meanwhile, cleaning up my computer in preparation for my trip(NY-France-Suisse, Italie) I found the following old Report from April, 2006, which seems just as apt but even sadder now.
It has occured to me that what's wrong with this war, besides that it never should have happened, is that there are no songs. The Civil War had 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,',' WorldWar I had 'Over There!' and WorldWar II had 'Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition', the last being the early work of the great Frank Loesser, who went on to give us 'Guys and Dolls.' A fine tunesmith, as those guys used to be known. I began to wonder what Frank could cook up, with his endless versatility, for this epic error. 'Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition into the head of Pat Tillman'? 'There'll be Blue Birds Over the Un-Armored Land Rover'? 'I'll be Home for Ramadan? I mean, what's a songwriter to do? Even George M. Cohan, our Yankee Doodle Dandy, would be hard-pressed to come up with a ditty for this one.
But perhaps it's the Chicken and the Egg. Perhaps if we had a really good song it would all get better. Even seem okay. Put your mind to it, all. Let me know if you come up with any ideas. I used to be a songwriter myself, when the world was young, which was one of the better bar-room ballads, when singers were singers, and presidents were presidents.
SOOOOOOOOOOOO, that's all the news that's fit to grouse about, at least right now, from yesterday and April 4,2006. Le plus things change, the plus they stay the same. Helas.
Love and xx
Committed
Monday, July 30, 2007
What I Wish Dick Cheney
A friend of mine who is more clever by three halves than Cheney,(pronounced Cheee-ney, which sounds more like what the man is, but no one gets right except Chris Matthews on MSNBC) sent me what amounts to a psychological background check of our benighted Vice President. It seems that in Natroma County High School, where my friend also went, the lovely Lynne, whose strong-willed mother carried a deputy badge even though she did only clerical work for sheriff's office, had this tendency to go after girlfriends' boyfriends, baton-twirling her way to the state championship, with what was referred to in the piece from "Truthout.org" as a "Playboy figure"which my friend, who was in high school with them says is an exaggeration-- she wasn't that sexy. But apparently she was to little Dick, who had been a fairly pleasant fellow up to that point, according to friends, which he had then. She took him from her closest friend, Joan Frandsen, became Homecoming Queen, at which point he became her campaign manager for Mustang Queen, another Wyoming honor. Passive and dazzled by her, he followed her urgings, abetted by a scholarship she got him from a rich Casper donor, to Yale where he flunked out.
I have to say now, intruding myself, that I am in a great struggle not to chortle. He floundered at Yale, and eventually flunked out. From the University where 'W' got Cs.
As Cheney himself later explained it, Lynne "made it clear she wasn't interested in marrying a lineman for the county." So she pushed him along and ruined the world for us all, except for those who have relatives or stock in Halliburton.
He went to Casper Community College, then the University of Wyoming, married her and got five draft deferments, the fifth one three months into a pregnancy the fruit of which was their daughter, (that daughter?) born exactly nine months and two days after Selective Service eliminated special protection for childless married men.
I have to interrupt this bloodless(except for other people's) saga to tell you that I had an emergency sushi run yesterday afternoon, where I talked to a man, an Iranian, who now lives in Dubai, and very well, too, I would imagine having heard some stories about Dubai and seen his card. Having just come from reading this piece, I imparted some impressions about Lynne being a strong woman, and the real cojones of the operation. "You think that's why their daughter is a lesbian?" he asked me. (Did you know Lynne once wrote erotic lesbian books? And when Wolf Blitzer tried to talk about that on her interview on CNN she blew him to blitz?)
Anyway, it's all very sad, especially as the authors, one a college professor specializing in the creative process, the other a retired psychotherapist, conclude Bush, like Lynne, offers the role of bully to Cheney's passive. So it's really Bush who's in charge, in spite of all the jokes. Oh, Hurry clock! Tick us alive into better days. And let nothing happen to that failed Wyoming lineman, except, since he's such a fiend for secrecy, that he die by a thousand revelations.
Another one, my life being sweetly serendipitous: when Cheney shot his friend in the face, my Jewru was in Bali. And as his life is more than serendipitous, he was at the time with a co- owner of the ranch where the shooting occured. It turns out the reason it took so long for Cheney to call in about the shooting was not because of his blood alcohol rate(which probably might have high, and so illegal, at least for shooting a buddy, and he had a history of drink as an anxious post-schoolboy) but because he was at the ranch with a woman, the wife of a European ambassador, and had to get her out before Lynne found out.
My friend, whom I believe is the country's greatest libel lawyer, even knowing my history, wants me to do something with the early part of this tale as fiction. Oh, I would, I would, but I doubt I'd be able to afford him to defend me.
As Fitzgerald might have said, the very Republican are different from you and me. Yes, might have answered Hemingway: they have passively aggressive Dicks.
I have to say now, intruding myself, that I am in a great struggle not to chortle. He floundered at Yale, and eventually flunked out. From the University where 'W' got Cs.
As Cheney himself later explained it, Lynne "made it clear she wasn't interested in marrying a lineman for the county." So she pushed him along and ruined the world for us all, except for those who have relatives or stock in Halliburton.
He went to Casper Community College, then the University of Wyoming, married her and got five draft deferments, the fifth one three months into a pregnancy the fruit of which was their daughter, (that daughter?) born exactly nine months and two days after Selective Service eliminated special protection for childless married men.
I have to interrupt this bloodless(except for other people's) saga to tell you that I had an emergency sushi run yesterday afternoon, where I talked to a man, an Iranian, who now lives in Dubai, and very well, too, I would imagine having heard some stories about Dubai and seen his card. Having just come from reading this piece, I imparted some impressions about Lynne being a strong woman, and the real cojones of the operation. "You think that's why their daughter is a lesbian?" he asked me. (Did you know Lynne once wrote erotic lesbian books? And when Wolf Blitzer tried to talk about that on her interview on CNN she blew him to blitz?)
Anyway, it's all very sad, especially as the authors, one a college professor specializing in the creative process, the other a retired psychotherapist, conclude Bush, like Lynne, offers the role of bully to Cheney's passive. So it's really Bush who's in charge, in spite of all the jokes. Oh, Hurry clock! Tick us alive into better days. And let nothing happen to that failed Wyoming lineman, except, since he's such a fiend for secrecy, that he die by a thousand revelations.
Another one, my life being sweetly serendipitous: when Cheney shot his friend in the face, my Jewru was in Bali. And as his life is more than serendipitous, he was at the time with a co- owner of the ranch where the shooting occured. It turns out the reason it took so long for Cheney to call in about the shooting was not because of his blood alcohol rate(which probably might have high, and so illegal, at least for shooting a buddy, and he had a history of drink as an anxious post-schoolboy) but because he was at the ranch with a woman, the wife of a European ambassador, and had to get her out before Lynne found out.
My friend, whom I believe is the country's greatest libel lawyer, even knowing my history, wants me to do something with the early part of this tale as fiction. Oh, I would, I would, but I doubt I'd be able to afford him to defend me.
As Fitzgerald might have said, the very Republican are different from you and me. Yes, might have answered Hemingway: they have passively aggressive Dicks.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
As the Dollar Plummets
So as I look forward to my brief European sojourn at summer's end, today's New York Times tells me how I will hardly be able to afford a coffee. The good news is that I had a visit from my most wonderful souvenir of Belfast-- you remember, the place that was the apotheosis of problems until George Bush switched the focus-- Fiona, who was, when I visited there for a piece for the Journal, the Lady Mayoress, married to David Alderdice, a moderate, a philosophy and position no more favored there than it is here, given as we seem to be to an age of extremists. Fiona is more than a breath of fresh air, she is a zephry. So I was able to fully appreciate where and how I live through her very clear, blue eyes. Also we went to a spa in Lake Arrowhead where none have gone before from my circle, which is about the size of a rubberband. All the men wear baseball caps, so my mother, if alive or reincarnated, with her addiction to believing men were the solution, would not find it good prospecting. But it was interesting to discover the high desert region near San Bernardino, and having missed the turnoff to 10 on the way out of town, we traveled unintentionally to El Segundo, where surely no one from Northern Ireland has ever been. Anyone can go to Las Vegas.
Having returned Sunday night in time to go to the theater, in order to make her trip as close as you can in LA to cosmopolitan, we attended the Pasadena Playhouse re-production of 'Can Can'. Here, my review.
The much touted re-do revival at the Pasadena Playhouse of the 1953 Cole Porter-Abe Burrows musical 'Can Can' did not live up to expectations, yet another argument why you shouldn't have them. In spite of great sets by Roy Christopher, promises in the program and in publicity for the show, which features for all of its failings a few miracle songs, it remains a disappointment. The problems of the original book have not been solved; the first few songs are third rate Porter, and silly. But when a male lead with a truly wondrous voice opens up his throat and his talent in the bridge of a ballad, "I am in Love"-- you remember what a great musical comedy was about. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
Not that this was that good in the first place. But it is an elevation to the spirit to hear a truly musicianly phrase sung by a genuine Broadway voice, even if Broadway is three thousand miles away, and this kind of musical is over half a century old. Kevin Earley, as Aristede Forestier, the uptight magistrate who doesn't want those naughty dances, has the glorious pipes, and is winning (enough) in a role that is stilted and cliched. Allegedly this was written as an homage to the late, great Abe Burrows, whose son Jim, the writer, is a hero to David Lee, the re-Creator, in partnership with Joel Fields. Lee is one of the brains behind 'Frasier', but his real love is supposedly the theater. In particular, the musical theater, which 'Can Can' is a sometimes satisfying remnant of. But the show that failed the first time isn't fully rescuscitated now, in spite of all efforts to breathe life into it. Still, Lord, Lord, there are those songs! "C'est Magnifique." "I Love Paris." Not even Porter at his best, they are still pulse-quickeningly better than most of what we've had since, and anything we have now. Hum me a ballad from 'A Light in the Piazza.'
MIchelle Duffy makes a noble go at the role of Pistache, the scampish proprietress of the Bal du Paradis in Monmartre, circa the '90s(the ones before the last.) In rehearsal and in full view, derriere too, is the dance that's causing all the fuss. Pistache has a passion for the success of her demimondaine dance hall, and a past deep amour for Forestier, the back story Lee and Fields have given them to enrich the book and make it work. It still doesn't. But she looks darkly attractive, in wonderful gowns by Randy Gardell, and tries to seem savvy in the songs, but isn't. Her voice is okay, but as Pistache she makes a Pastiche of such simple and wonderful lyrics as 'Oo La La... c'est magnifique!' running the words and the notes together in an arythmic way, a clear try for originality in a song she treats as though we have heard it every day and are tired of the same old delivery. In fact, we have not heard it, or anything like it in a musical for far too long, so it would be a treat to have it sung straight out, authentically.
Wonderful things are done by the orchestra, a good joke that is played on and with the audience. Adorable as a would-be dancer in the Bal du Paradis, is Yvette Tucker, whose energy and smile are radiant. She is partnered with Amis Talai as a sculptor who lives off her and whose supposed talent is later revealed as ludicrous which is supposed to make a comedic point. It doesn't. Except maybe 'Let Sleeping Musicals Lie.' But, wait a minute! Isn't it great to hear those songs?
Go!
So there you have it. My debut as a theater critic. You will not be stunned to know that the online theater website I wrote that for as a favor turned down the review, saying... what was it exactly...? that I should make it kinder and gentler, that that was what gave critics a bad name. Really? i thought that was what made them honest and sometimes witty.
In the same e-mail slog that brought me my debut's rejection came news that three Jane Austen novels, author disguised, character's names changed, chapters and outlines offered, had been turned down for representation by eighteen British literary agents, saying they would not know how to place them.
Having returned Sunday night in time to go to the theater, in order to make her trip as close as you can in LA to cosmopolitan, we attended the Pasadena Playhouse re-production of 'Can Can'. Here, my review.
The much touted re-do revival at the Pasadena Playhouse of the 1953 Cole Porter-Abe Burrows musical 'Can Can' did not live up to expectations, yet another argument why you shouldn't have them. In spite of great sets by Roy Christopher, promises in the program and in publicity for the show, which features for all of its failings a few miracle songs, it remains a disappointment. The problems of the original book have not been solved; the first few songs are third rate Porter, and silly. But when a male lead with a truly wondrous voice opens up his throat and his talent in the bridge of a ballad, "I am in Love"-- you remember what a great musical comedy was about. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
Not that this was that good in the first place. But it is an elevation to the spirit to hear a truly musicianly phrase sung by a genuine Broadway voice, even if Broadway is three thousand miles away, and this kind of musical is over half a century old. Kevin Earley, as Aristede Forestier, the uptight magistrate who doesn't want those naughty dances, has the glorious pipes, and is winning (enough) in a role that is stilted and cliched. Allegedly this was written as an homage to the late, great Abe Burrows, whose son Jim, the writer, is a hero to David Lee, the re-Creator, in partnership with Joel Fields. Lee is one of the brains behind 'Frasier', but his real love is supposedly the theater. In particular, the musical theater, which 'Can Can' is a sometimes satisfying remnant of. But the show that failed the first time isn't fully rescuscitated now, in spite of all efforts to breathe life into it. Still, Lord, Lord, there are those songs! "C'est Magnifique." "I Love Paris." Not even Porter at his best, they are still pulse-quickeningly better than most of what we've had since, and anything we have now. Hum me a ballad from 'A Light in the Piazza.'
MIchelle Duffy makes a noble go at the role of Pistache, the scampish proprietress of the Bal du Paradis in Monmartre, circa the '90s(the ones before the last.) In rehearsal and in full view, derriere too, is the dance that's causing all the fuss. Pistache has a passion for the success of her demimondaine dance hall, and a past deep amour for Forestier, the back story Lee and Fields have given them to enrich the book and make it work. It still doesn't. But she looks darkly attractive, in wonderful gowns by Randy Gardell, and tries to seem savvy in the songs, but isn't. Her voice is okay, but as Pistache she makes a Pastiche of such simple and wonderful lyrics as 'Oo La La... c'est magnifique!' running the words and the notes together in an arythmic way, a clear try for originality in a song she treats as though we have heard it every day and are tired of the same old delivery. In fact, we have not heard it, or anything like it in a musical for far too long, so it would be a treat to have it sung straight out, authentically.
Wonderful things are done by the orchestra, a good joke that is played on and with the audience. Adorable as a would-be dancer in the Bal du Paradis, is Yvette Tucker, whose energy and smile are radiant. She is partnered with Amis Talai as a sculptor who lives off her and whose supposed talent is later revealed as ludicrous which is supposed to make a comedic point. It doesn't. Except maybe 'Let Sleeping Musicals Lie.' But, wait a minute! Isn't it great to hear those songs?
Go!
So there you have it. My debut as a theater critic. You will not be stunned to know that the online theater website I wrote that for as a favor turned down the review, saying... what was it exactly...? that I should make it kinder and gentler, that that was what gave critics a bad name. Really? i thought that was what made them honest and sometimes witty.
In the same e-mail slog that brought me my debut's rejection came news that three Jane Austen novels, author disguised, character's names changed, chapters and outlines offered, had been turned down for representation by eighteen British literary agents, saying they would not know how to place them.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
With Liberty and Justice for All
So on our nation's birthday, like 60% of its citizens, I am incensed. Oliver Stone, having been turned down for a documentary on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "as part of the Great Satan" by Iran's president wished "the Iranian people well," and hopes "their experience with an inept, rigid, ideologue president goes better than ours," a statement that is smarter than any of Stone's pictures. I have a call in to a friend at the Department of Justice which she asked me not to make to her at work, for unspoken but obvious reasons, and a copy on my bed of 'Breakfast of Champions," one of the delicious books by my late but early as far as consciousness is concerned friend Kurt Vonnegut, who quietly railed in that book at the stupidity of 'The Star Spangled Banner,' empty as the lyrics were of any salute to the American people, an anthem composed of 'gibberish,' exclamation points' and 'question marks.' Thus it is that I turn to the words of our salute to the flag, that piece of cloth that Kurt points out is the only one in the world that it is an offense to let touch the ground.
When I was little, as everyone was once, I struggled with words, as most little people do. Having been lovingly incarcerated in a nunnery by my mother who was seeking her fortune or at least her survival and didn't know what to do with me at that moment, the first of many, I had to pray every morning with the other children who, I assume, were all Catholics, in front of the nuns. I was filled with terror, not so much of the nuns, scary as they seemed, but of God, who knew, unlike those around me, that I was Jewish. I was sure He would be mad at me for praying to Mary, with Jesus waiting in the wings. The prayer went, according to my recollection now, "Holy Mary, Mother of God,' etcetera, 'blessed be the fruit of thy womb." Womb. A tough word for a five year old. I never heard it clearly, and afraid to ask, for fear that would brand me an Israelite, said what I heard, which was, "the fruit of thy woo."
In the same way, when I got to P.S.9 in New York, my parents having reunited as was their erratic custom, I put my hand on my little heart in assembly and recited my allegiance to the flag. And what I heard and repeated was "One nation invisible." It was not until I stood next to an eight year old patriot, quick to correct my stupidity, that I learned the word was 'indivisible.' But I think now that my child's intution was probably correct. Maybe even in both cases. All those who believe in immaculate conception have my apology, but reason will prevail.
Except in our nation's capital. I am so sad. Sadder, I think, than angry, because I spent the whole day the day before yesterday being in a rage when the news of Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence came in, accomplishing nothing, I was so incensed, too infuriated even to take it out on the pool going swimming, or on the sidewalk walking my dog, and then Beverly Sills died. And I thought "I have wasted the whole day Beverly Sills died," and thought how much she would have enjoyed being aBle to go swimming, or to walk her dog. And I sorrowed not only for her and the great artist and woman she was, but for my country, which I loved with a great passion, even when Nixon was president.
John Edwards said at the fund raiser I attended for him, where a woman as unbending in her wish to get rid of Bush as Bush is in his wish to get rid of democracy as we knew it insisted on wasting his question time by asking about impeachment. Edwards wisely said, having served in the Senate at the time of Clinton's impeachment proceedings, that the process in Congress would interfere with anything else being accomplished. But I wonder if, indeed, the country can survive until the day he is gone. A friend gave me one of those little tickers that reads 'Bush's Last Day,' counting off the seconds and the moments and the hours until he goes, and something went berserk in its mechanism, as something has gone berserk in Washington, and it kept adding on days till I got so upset I had to throw it away.
We are hated all over the world, our spiritual stock having fallen even lower than the dollar against the Euro. England suffers for Blair's having supported this retard, a word that is no longer politically correct, but as politics is no longer correct, the hell with it,-- let's call a spade a spade except when it involves a spade. I said to my friend Billy Danoff who wrote 'Country Roads' and 'Afternoon Delight' and just got back from Ireland where at least in Shannon airport people saluted our troops, suicidally on their way to Iraq, "isn't it sad what a little moron can do?" and he suggested I put it to music, the tune of "ooooooooooo, what a little moonlight can do." OOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo, what a little moron can do. I don't know. What's the next line? Have we got time for the next line?
I remember a 4th of July where we stood on the South Lawn of the White House even though Nixon was still in it, loving our country, waiting for the fireworks, and one of our cadre-- I won't give her name, in case the Justice Department is rifling this website-- said "Let's smoke a joint for Mama Cass(who had passed that year)" Why do all the wrong people die too soon? How many stints can work to save the heart of a man who has none?
Keith Olbermann went on the air yesterday with a Zola speech, J'accuse!, accusing Bush and Cheney of everything of which they are guilty, and calling for them to resign. In Hong Kong the people marched at great personal peril on the 10th anniversary of the handover to China, pleading, insisting on the promise of democracy being fulfilled. We didn't just have a promise. We had it. How could this have happened? Why aren't we marching?
When The Little Prince got to a planet inhabited by a king, the king greeted him as a 'subject.' And the little prince wondered how the king could have known who he was if he'd never seen him before. "He didn't realize that for kings," wrote Saint-Exupery, "the world is extremely simplified. All men are subjects."
When I was little, as everyone was once, I struggled with words, as most little people do. Having been lovingly incarcerated in a nunnery by my mother who was seeking her fortune or at least her survival and didn't know what to do with me at that moment, the first of many, I had to pray every morning with the other children who, I assume, were all Catholics, in front of the nuns. I was filled with terror, not so much of the nuns, scary as they seemed, but of God, who knew, unlike those around me, that I was Jewish. I was sure He would be mad at me for praying to Mary, with Jesus waiting in the wings. The prayer went, according to my recollection now, "Holy Mary, Mother of God,' etcetera, 'blessed be the fruit of thy womb." Womb. A tough word for a five year old. I never heard it clearly, and afraid to ask, for fear that would brand me an Israelite, said what I heard, which was, "the fruit of thy woo."
In the same way, when I got to P.S.9 in New York, my parents having reunited as was their erratic custom, I put my hand on my little heart in assembly and recited my allegiance to the flag. And what I heard and repeated was "One nation invisible." It was not until I stood next to an eight year old patriot, quick to correct my stupidity, that I learned the word was 'indivisible.' But I think now that my child's intution was probably correct. Maybe even in both cases. All those who believe in immaculate conception have my apology, but reason will prevail.
Except in our nation's capital. I am so sad. Sadder, I think, than angry, because I spent the whole day the day before yesterday being in a rage when the news of Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence came in, accomplishing nothing, I was so incensed, too infuriated even to take it out on the pool going swimming, or on the sidewalk walking my dog, and then Beverly Sills died. And I thought "I have wasted the whole day Beverly Sills died," and thought how much she would have enjoyed being aBle to go swimming, or to walk her dog. And I sorrowed not only for her and the great artist and woman she was, but for my country, which I loved with a great passion, even when Nixon was president.
John Edwards said at the fund raiser I attended for him, where a woman as unbending in her wish to get rid of Bush as Bush is in his wish to get rid of democracy as we knew it insisted on wasting his question time by asking about impeachment. Edwards wisely said, having served in the Senate at the time of Clinton's impeachment proceedings, that the process in Congress would interfere with anything else being accomplished. But I wonder if, indeed, the country can survive until the day he is gone. A friend gave me one of those little tickers that reads 'Bush's Last Day,' counting off the seconds and the moments and the hours until he goes, and something went berserk in its mechanism, as something has gone berserk in Washington, and it kept adding on days till I got so upset I had to throw it away.
We are hated all over the world, our spiritual stock having fallen even lower than the dollar against the Euro. England suffers for Blair's having supported this retard, a word that is no longer politically correct, but as politics is no longer correct, the hell with it,-- let's call a spade a spade except when it involves a spade. I said to my friend Billy Danoff who wrote 'Country Roads' and 'Afternoon Delight' and just got back from Ireland where at least in Shannon airport people saluted our troops, suicidally on their way to Iraq, "isn't it sad what a little moron can do?" and he suggested I put it to music, the tune of "ooooooooooo, what a little moonlight can do." OOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo, what a little moron can do. I don't know. What's the next line? Have we got time for the next line?
I remember a 4th of July where we stood on the South Lawn of the White House even though Nixon was still in it, loving our country, waiting for the fireworks, and one of our cadre-- I won't give her name, in case the Justice Department is rifling this website-- said "Let's smoke a joint for Mama Cass(who had passed that year)" Why do all the wrong people die too soon? How many stints can work to save the heart of a man who has none?
Keith Olbermann went on the air yesterday with a Zola speech, J'accuse!, accusing Bush and Cheney of everything of which they are guilty, and calling for them to resign. In Hong Kong the people marched at great personal peril on the 10th anniversary of the handover to China, pleading, insisting on the promise of democracy being fulfilled. We didn't just have a promise. We had it. How could this have happened? Why aren't we marching?
When The Little Prince got to a planet inhabited by a king, the king greeted him as a 'subject.' And the little prince wondered how the king could have known who he was if he'd never seen him before. "He didn't realize that for kings," wrote Saint-Exupery, "the world is extremely simplified. All men are subjects."
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
AN ARGUMENT FOR TORTURE
Although my friends, all of whom I consider illuminated, and the majority of the American people are appalled at the idea of torture, perhaps an exception should be made in the case of Ann Coulter. I can think of no name to call her that would be vile enough to call her-- not 'bitch', which seems lightweight considering the object, or the c word that so offends, as it would be an insult to all the other c___s. It shames me that she is a woman, if indeed she is.
That she would attack John Edwards as she did, sneeringly alleging that he had a bumper sticker about the death of his son, and actually try to bring down Elizabeth Edwards, one of the most admirable women of my lifetime, whose courage and bravery and genuine intelligence are palpable even in this time of mass idiocy(see Paris Hilton/ George Bush-- has anyone seen them together? could they be the same person?) is a rent in the cloth of decency. Even as Elizabeth struggled to stay the great lady she is on Hardball today, asking Coulter politely to pull back on personal attacks, Coulter continued, attacking. What is the matter with the media, that they give this harridan a forum?
I am especially incensed because I went to a fundraiser for Edwards last night, in a genial setting, the Brentwood home of a real estate developer, Tom Safran, who went all out(sushi and chocolate covered strawberries, no piker he, gracious in the bargain, insisting we stay and eat even after Edwards had gone as he didn't want any leftovers) Of all the potential candidates in '04, Edwards was the one I believed: he seemed to me a consummately honest man. Now that we are faced with candidates who are divisive or unlikely to win, and Bloomberg, whom I like, stands to cost the Democrats if he runs, I continue to be moved by Edwards. I watched him last night through a lens, lightly: the video camera of the man in front of me in the garden, filming him. It seemed a fine portrait, handsome, of course, but also believable and smart. He asked the man to turn off the video while he made the following statement: "Of all the potential candidates, I am the most progressive, and the most electable." i wondered why he wanted the camera off for that one, but a smart friend said it was shorthand for 'I'm not a woman, and I'm not black.' If that's what it was, I'm afraid he's right. But I'm more afraid of Hillary. And more impressed by what he said when the video camera was on: "Bush is an idiot." That seemed to me direct, and fearless. Everybody with a brain knows that Bush is an idiot, but it takes a lot of balls to go on the record with that, in this environment.
On the way home I spoke to a friend who told me the talk in political circles is that big money people have dried up on Edwards, because of Elizabeth's illness-- they're afraid he won't go the distance. I wish I had a pile of money to give him. I wish elections weren't about money. I wonder what would happen to Abraham Lincoln if he were here and wanted to run. With today's vile decision by the Supremes to put corporations back in the catbird seat for picking their man(oh, who could it be? A Republican? Gee!) I wonder what's going to happen to this country. If they win again, I think we are lost forever.
Maybe Ann Coulter can be Queen. Or at least the madam of the whorehouse where they practice Bondage and Domination. I am so sad for my country. Dick Cheney and Paris Hilton. What's happened to us? If it weren't for the wrestler murdering his wife and son and then hanging himself, there might be nothing else on the news.
That she would attack John Edwards as she did, sneeringly alleging that he had a bumper sticker about the death of his son, and actually try to bring down Elizabeth Edwards, one of the most admirable women of my lifetime, whose courage and bravery and genuine intelligence are palpable even in this time of mass idiocy(see Paris Hilton/ George Bush-- has anyone seen them together? could they be the same person?) is a rent in the cloth of decency. Even as Elizabeth struggled to stay the great lady she is on Hardball today, asking Coulter politely to pull back on personal attacks, Coulter continued, attacking. What is the matter with the media, that they give this harridan a forum?
I am especially incensed because I went to a fundraiser for Edwards last night, in a genial setting, the Brentwood home of a real estate developer, Tom Safran, who went all out(sushi and chocolate covered strawberries, no piker he, gracious in the bargain, insisting we stay and eat even after Edwards had gone as he didn't want any leftovers) Of all the potential candidates in '04, Edwards was the one I believed: he seemed to me a consummately honest man. Now that we are faced with candidates who are divisive or unlikely to win, and Bloomberg, whom I like, stands to cost the Democrats if he runs, I continue to be moved by Edwards. I watched him last night through a lens, lightly: the video camera of the man in front of me in the garden, filming him. It seemed a fine portrait, handsome, of course, but also believable and smart. He asked the man to turn off the video while he made the following statement: "Of all the potential candidates, I am the most progressive, and the most electable." i wondered why he wanted the camera off for that one, but a smart friend said it was shorthand for 'I'm not a woman, and I'm not black.' If that's what it was, I'm afraid he's right. But I'm more afraid of Hillary. And more impressed by what he said when the video camera was on: "Bush is an idiot." That seemed to me direct, and fearless. Everybody with a brain knows that Bush is an idiot, but it takes a lot of balls to go on the record with that, in this environment.
On the way home I spoke to a friend who told me the talk in political circles is that big money people have dried up on Edwards, because of Elizabeth's illness-- they're afraid he won't go the distance. I wish I had a pile of money to give him. I wish elections weren't about money. I wonder what would happen to Abraham Lincoln if he were here and wanted to run. With today's vile decision by the Supremes to put corporations back in the catbird seat for picking their man(oh, who could it be? A Republican? Gee!) I wonder what's going to happen to this country. If they win again, I think we are lost forever.
Maybe Ann Coulter can be Queen. Or at least the madam of the whorehouse where they practice Bondage and Domination. I am so sad for my country. Dick Cheney and Paris Hilton. What's happened to us? If it weren't for the wrestler murdering his wife and son and then hanging himself, there might be nothing else on the news.
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