DAME LIZ-PS

She was not very deep, but she was not shallow, People had gifted her from infancy for just being beautiful But there had not been beauty that intense and unmistakeable on the screen before.
To go out with Mike Todd, who hungered for her from afar, she demanded a jewel, Of course he sent her one. That was not so unusual. Men sent her things all the time.
Theirs was the perfect relationship: as in all great love stories, they were crazy about each other, and it ended too soon and tragically. Maybe God is a screenwriter. Maybe God saw that if Mike had lived, it would have become ... what? Boring?
She was so easily bored. But she was smart, which you didn't expect, and how else could she be but spoiled. So much adulation from the world. So much vanity without self-esteem. A gorgeous little girl with a driven mother, What else could she have been but self-absorbed, when the world was absorbed with her,
If there is Peace that you can feel, may she rest in it. If there is an Afterlife, as we all hoped, where the wits and hunks and romantics who enhanced her passage through this earthly vale are really all waiting for her, let them not fight over her, Or., maybe considering how much she enjoyed a good drama, let them fight.
We will miss her presence, But she will live forever on Netflix.

the end of the world

So it's the end of the world as we knew it. As much as we understood, sadly,that Borders was over, it was still a shock to pass Barnes and Noble at 66th and Broadway and find it not just disappeared, but papered window to window to ceiling to floor in red, with some announcement of a company to come, that, I believe, will sell clothes.
For some time now the writing has been on the wall, or, more accurately, the Kindle. Someone was reading one in the park this morning-- a beautiful day, PAY ATTENTION! THIS COULD BE OVER SOON, TOO!--- and I sighed as I read, (still on paper, The New York Times, to be edited came the bulletin on my e-mail, by Jill Abramson, who was taught the business by my beloved Sandy Burton when she was the first woman bureau chief of Time in Boston--) the growth in celebrity novels by Kardashians whom I still don't consider celebrities & Snooki who can't read. Heartened by the next two benches' occupants, one reading Balzac and the other Agatha Christie from actual books, I returned to my less than spacious apt., its view bleakened by the high-rise-in-progress, to see my next door neighbors' Wall Street Journal on the floor headlined: Economic Outlook Darkens. No shit.
The good news is that I have two friends just back from death's doorway. The bad news is I was not with Shelly and Byron at Lake Geneva during the summer they were all so productive and sexy. Woody Allen has co-opted living in another time, and done it prettily and fairly cleverly, too, so I had to put aside my long-time antagonism/jealousy--as I have told before, we shared office space at NBC during my first and only job when I was 20, and were supposed to save the Colgate Comedy Hour, and he came to work only on the day we got paid, whereas I was there every day with a new sitcom or a musical and you know which one of us prevailed. Still, I would not mind having the opportunity to time-travel and hang out with Percy and Mary and the rest of the laudanum-inspired gang on the water that glorious summer, and maybe teach Shelly to swim, which would change and extend the course of English poetry.
Two guys just came to check on my awning, the motor having died so I cannot lower it and hide the lego orange and black obscenity that is the new building. One is from Nigeria, where an uncle came back from America with jeans and sneakers so he could not wait to emigrate, won the lottery, and so is here but has a friend who spent ten hours in the emergency room and no one ever helped him so says America is not what it was. Really? Snooki, jeans and sneakers notwithstanding?

SEE Book of Mormon and Die

As my friends know, I just lost my adorable Mimi, the world's brightest and most accommodating Bichon Frisee. She traveled the world in a little black bag, never making a sound or relieving herself till the end of the journey, no matter how lengthy it was--New York to LA, D.C. to Paris-- up for anything as long as she could come along. The disease that felled her attacks young toy dogs, mostly female, its cause and cure unknown.

Any pet owner will understand 'distraught' is not a good enough word to describe my state of soul. I have been through this before, and all my losses have conflated, including the death of my very young husband. So I find myself sobbing in Whole Foods, and try to walk in the park, unable to lift my eyes, and often my feet.

The Animal Medical Center, where Mimi went, has been kind and helpful. Her very smart vet, when I called with the symptoms, immediately told me to make an appointment with neurology, saying very succinctly, and odiously, "Little white dogs." Everyone treated me more than kindly from the moment I arrived, as they all apparently knew even before we got there that this disease has a very rapid onset, and she was doomed. Such an Edgar Allen Poe word, for such a sweet, happy creature. It doesn't seem fair, but then, how much of life does?

It was all over so fast I haven't had time to process. The Center has a Pet Loss Support group, so I went the night after I picked up her ashes, hoping to find some kind of sustenance. Instead, the group, fifteen women and one man who said he had been a female in a previous life and wasn't exactly closeted in this one, was, to a woman, inconsolable. One woman carried a framed 8x10 picture of her little dog, a beauty, that she slept with every night, another could not forgive herself for nodding off, convinced if she had stayed awake her sick dog would not have died, another still put water out for her pet a year after its death, a cat owner who thought God had sent her her cat because there was no love in her life, and few relationships, had stopped believing in God. There was a sweet and intelligent social worker, but she was tiny, not built to stand against all the grief in the room.

When 9/11 happened, and like all New Yorkers, I was in shock, because I understood the world as I had known it was over, ambition, hope, joy, were forever compromised, I went at six in the morning to take my place outside Carnegie Hall for tickets to the memorial concert they were having, as a healing gift to New York, featuring Leontyne Price and YoYoMa. I sat on the sidewalk like the student I had long ago been, and was rewarded with tickets so good I could hear Yo Yo Ma breathing as he played. So now once again bereft, irrational and inconsolable, I went early in the morning to the theater where Book of Mormon was playing, and sat on the sidewalk, hoping for a cancellation at the matinee, as I didn't want to die, which event felt imminent, before seeing it. One of the producers, a very smart, witty woman, more empathetic to dogs than people, had been unable to get tickets for her lawyer or any number of friends who were mad at her, and asked me please to tell her if I was successful getting in.

The line for Standing Room already had thirty people waiting at nine A.M., and I was third in line for cancellations, preceded by a Bette Midler look-and-sound-alike who'd come with a folding chair, and a theater arts major from Michigan. Once again I sat on the sidewalk, this time on a cushion I'd brought, as the years have hardened my ass if not my heart. I got a ticket, and went back home to nap before the matinee, trying not to note how empty my apartment was.

Returning to the theater for the show I re-encountered faux-Bette and she told me after I left there had been a fist fight between a few people hoping for cancellations, accusations of cutting in line, threats. The lights dimmed. The show began to cheers, actual 'Huzzahs,' as if we were all part of an Evelyn Waugh novel, everyone in the audience apparently overjoyed at their luck at actually being there.

I had heard Andrew Rannells, who plays the Mormon Elder Price, sing "I Believe," on the Tonys, and had been moved by the purity of his voice and the sweetness of the music, in spite of the satirical nature of the song. So I was disappointed when I saw he was out for the matinee, replaced by Kevin Duda. But a pretty young usher assured me he was very good, and I slogged to my seat, last on the farthest aisle in the almost last row. But what the hell, I was there. Scalpers were getting $750 a ticket, and American Express had just run a double-paged ad in the Sunday Times saying their members, acting within the next ten days, could buy tickets for April. It was today, and I had paid only(gasp) $155. (Everybody's getting rich on this one: a coke to settle my stomach was $7.00, Junior Mints to rouse me from my torpor, $5.)

As one might have guessed from the elation of the reviews, the book was extremely rude, vulgar and funny, the brief send-up of The Lion King appropriate(I was not a fan of Julie Taymor's even before she hurtled out of favor, as if her very public downfall was a metaphor for what happened to several of Spider-Man's players.) Josh Gad, who plays the misfit schlub in Mormon is predictably Loser-Endearing, and Nikki James, the bright Ugandan in the village is adorable, and her love song to Salt Lake City musically fine and oddly touching.

But I wasn't really having a good time. A couple two rows ahead of me kept leaning their heads in towards each other so I couldn't see the stage, and Mimi was dead. I thought about leaving at intermission, but instead spoke to the husband who was wearing a baseball cap, something that makes me want to punch tourists even when I haven't just lost my dog. I asked him if he and his wife could stop leaning towards each other; he apologized, telling me his wife could see only out of one eye, so he would change seats with her, and that would help. I was immediately ashamed, because that was one of Mimi's symptoms: she had suddenly gone blind in her right eye. So I returned to my seat, chastened, and watched the second act, which was deeper and better, full of good points as South Park episodes always are underneath the outrageousness. And then came the song, the one song in the show that is truly, fully a song, because of the music: I Believe, what I had heard on the Tonys. And I started to cry, soundlessly and long, because the melody was so true, and when I had last heard it, Mimi was alive.

Theater as it originated in ancient Athens was supposed to be cathartic. But I don't believe this was exactly what the Muses had in mind. I am weeping even now, writing this. The show was good, though not all that it was cracked up to be. Mimi might not have been all that I felt she was. For those who have never owned one, she was just a dog. But grief, man. Grief is a bitch.

OSCARS: Life After Death

So as it turns out, youth is not everything. The 83rd Oscars, revitalized as it was supposed to be, so the young would feel the same attachment to it as the older, was arguably as boring an Awards show as has hit, or, rather, leaned against the airwaves. Anne Hathaway was charming and showed she had physical grace, the ability to wear many dresses and even a tux, and sang impressively well. But James Franco seemed as though he would rather be at Yale, and the moments of deadness on air were... what?... well, what's the opposite of breathtaking?
The arrival of Billy Crystal reminded you what it was to have a wit picking up on dropped opportunities, and the ghost of Oscars past materialized with a sharp vengeance with the clip of Bob Hope, who, much as some of us thought we didn't love him when he was still here, knew how to keep a show a show.
A ton of years ago, the 42nd Annual Awards were celebrated at our house in Beverly Hills, an event covered by Time Magazine, in those halcyon days when both that magazine and the evening meant a great deal. The Vietnam war was on, so everybody we knew of a liberal persuasion, many of the truly glittering, was mad at Bob Hope for his politics, and knowing John Wayne, a rabid Republican, was probably going to win for the first 'True Grit', rather than go to the actual ceremony, came to our house. Lee Marvin who'd won best actor the year before was there, and Zsa Zsa, still with her wit intact, and Shirley MacLaine yelling at the screen("Oh, shut up, Bob Hope!" she cried, duly noted by the Time Magazine reporter, Sandra Burton, who was discreet and kind enough not to print the rest of what Shirley said, which was plenty.) Our house was divided into three rooms, Orthodox, Conservative and Reformed, (you couldn't speak in the first, the middle you could watch and talk, and the last was out of control.) Hors d'oeuvres made by the hostess(me) were constantly passed, along with drinks, and there was a Sabrett stand in the back yard so everybody could feel they were in New York while they ate their hot dogs. Everybody got prizes(Ruth Berle, the witty wife of Milton, brought a framed, autographed picture of Ruth Roman) and humor and fellowship reigned. It was a real party.
Last night, though, was an ordeal. Mostly it was about the clothes, with jewels and shoes that seemed obvious product placement. All the right people won, I think, though I was rooting for Annette Bening, who seems that she will never be rewarded for all her good work and reforming Warren, but all in all who won almost seemed beside the point. To have Eli Wallach at 95, and Francis Coppola, who absolutely transformed the storytelling capacity of motion pictures, and not invite them to say a word was as painful as having Kirk Douglas say too many. And breathing the same air as... WAIT FOR IT!... Oprah? You were expecting maybe Mother Teresa? What were they looking for, a spot on OWN?
Oh, dear. Was anybody really in charge who had any sense of movement, and comedy?
Nothing is sadder than people talking about the good old days. But hey... weren't they really?

SPIDERFREUDE

As one whose childhood was brightened by what seemed the great original American art form, my heart lifted by the brilliant lyrics of Frank Loesser, Yip Harburg and Cole Porter, my soul tintinabulated by a sense of personal destiny because I had the same birthday as Irving Berlin, I have watched and listened with great dismay to the devolution of the musical comedy. When Lincoln Center had its brilliant revival of South Pacific, I wept all through the overture: hearing real songs, feeling true sentiments, not just squishy things, but a modicum of wit that made you smile, and occasioned bursts of true joy. So it was with some alarm that I experienced Phantom, and the mawkish music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and grieved for what was doubtless going to be downhill from Lerner & Loewe.
But I had NO idea. Only as a vague sense of terror descended on me with the mounting cost of musicals, and the success of mirthless unfrolics like Spring Awakening, as my ears strained for real music, did I begin to feel what I loved was lost forever. So when the announcements started coming about Spiderman- Turn Off the Dark, that a theater was to be renovated to make room for the areial acrobatic, and a show was to cost $65 million i threw in my spiritual musical towel.
Having lived many years in Hollywood, the capital of Schaadenfreude, where one is mostly sustained by the failure of others, it is with a heart full of song that
I read today Ben Brantley's wittily negatived and admittedly early(although in terms of original scheduling, late) review of Spiderman, Turn Off the Dark. Any bad advance feelings I had towards the show had been exacerbated by the positive enthusiasm lately exhibited by the hysteric Glenn Beck, who endorsed it as if it were the musicalized philosophy of Sarah Palin. So to have a genuine theater critic from The New York Times see it at last, and express his tasteful disdain gave
a lilt to the day. The Gershwins hummed in my ears. Jerome Kern flooded my veins. I think the song he played was "Look for the Silver Lining."
Is it possible in this horribly confusing world where daily the values we once clung to are swept away, that virtue can still triumph? That Good-- that is to say not the comic book victory of masked hero over masked villain, but something of actual value, like a melody you can actually hum and words you can understand-- can prevail? Oh, God, I hope so. Are You there? Are You watching this? Or are you just trying to get out of the way before some more scenery falls?

THE BRAIN

Continuing my ongoing quest to ascertain that I haven't lost my mind, I made my way to the Museum of Natural History today, which is featuring a new exhibition, THE BRAIN. The Museum was the favorite of my childhood, probably the only one as I can't remember my mother's taking me to any, and this was a regular excursion from PS 9, and we got to eat in the cafeteria, a real treat. The windows I passed by with stuffed wolves and rhinos and Whooping Cranes(endangered) were all of them madeleines, throwing me back to that more than innocent time, when I would experience all I knew of perfect peace in the planetarium, as it was before I fell in love with classmates(the lizard brain, which deals only with feeding, mating, and defense) and I could lose myself in the stars projected on the ceiling.

Today's experience was close to monumental, as trying to extricate myself from some of the emotional turmoil of the past few weeks, I went to the cafe and bought a tea waiting my admission time(4:30) I saw how many people there were who actually loved their children, and, more important, remembered my first seated exchange with my Jewru Jack at Estes Park, Colorado, where he said to me "Experience your tea." So I did, and the half-hour wait went rather quickly, till I could join the line on the 3rd floor, which was let in in increments, which I couldn't understand until I got in myself, as it is all experiential, and you need time for every single point the exhibition and probably the brain itself are making, with wonderfully dazzling ribbons of light at the beginning that demonstrate everything that's going on in our heads, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin's.
The pre-frontal cortex is what we use to plan, predict and use language, which has always been my favorite thing(I didn't even look at the part of the brain that does math, as I know it does not function in me, if it is there at all. The Broca area is for putting words together, and then there is the part(I didn't note where it is exactly,) that produces social emotions, shame, guilt and pride, and then there's the cortex, which controls emotions and makes complex decisions, all of these rendered larger than life, dazzling to the eye which is also explained in another section, along with how we put pictures together, so we can recognize Hillary Clinton even if we don't see her clearly. The smile, which exists only in humans is a laugh that didn't quite happent, a fact that resonated deeply because my girlfriend Taffy sent me a quote yesterday from Auden talking about people he liked, but that the one universal characteristic of those he loved was they made him laugh, which made me think even more highly of Auden. And miss Don, of course, since nobody ever made me laugh as much as he did, with the exception of Hal Dresner who also went to PS 9 but wasn't that funny yet.
There are buttons you can push at various stations to see how reactions affect what portion of the brain, and a section on anti-depressants artificially upping your serotonin, the reason I never wanted to take them no matter how sad I felt because I thought it might affect other things that are important to me besides my dopamine and endorphins, like writing. A really fantastic experience which ended much too soon because I was so absorbed in studying absolutely everything.
So when the guard said "The museum is closing," I said "My brain cannot process that information," and those who were still there laughed, which is a smile fulfilled.
Not really that mellow, as I hadn't had the chance to see everything, I experienced a light jolt of anger, coming from a section of the brain I hadn't visited yet, but certainly have. But instead of acting from one of the urges that drive us, I went to the portion that invents new strategies to reach goals, and going to the guard to say I hadn't seen as much as I wanted, and wished to come back. She sent me past the overhead canoe, told me to turn left at the giant mosquito, and keep on past the Christmas tree. The only security guard left on duty who is head of his union(we had a moment to exchange pleasantries) sent for someone from services, and she said all she could do to help my situation was offer me a voucher to return another day. Well, that's all I really wanted, even in my lizard brain. I have a year to use it. Let me know if you want to come along. It's a great exhibition.

KURT VONNEGUT'S BIRTHDAY

There seems to be cosmic design in the fact that today is not just Armistice Day, but also Kurt Vonnegut's birthday. I celebrated it as such for all the years (not enough) that I knew him, and until he died a couple of years ago. I see no point in not celebrating it now.
Kurt hated war more than he hated anything except maybe what was happening to this country he loved. His novel, Slaughterhouse Five was the best anti-war screed ever written, its inimitable passage of reversing the film so the bombs instead of landing and destroying, went back up into the bellies of the planes they were dropped out of, all the way back to the factories where workers assembled them, so no harm was done. Jack Kornfield, my Jewru, read that passage as he would read the poet Rumi, at one of his retreats. I hope I told that to Kurt, -- I can't remember--though he probably would have been uncomfortable at the thought of being part of spiritual teaching, If there is design to this universe, then it was no accident that he was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was fire-bombed, so he could write in his searingly sardonic fashion first hand of the stupidity of war.
When the husband of my classmate, Laura Maoglio, Gunther, a scientist, won the Nobel prize, he put it to a fund to rebuild the Dresden cathedral, and asked Kurt to contribute. But he wouldn't. When I asked him why, he said he didn't think it should be rebuilt, that it should be left in ruins, so people could see what war did. He was a sad man, brilliant and darling, and it is one of my greatest joys
that I could actually count him as friend.
We met after he publicly defended me without ever having met me during the ordeal of my libel suit, when he stood in an auditorium and said "Today is a very sad day: a publisher has turned against a writer," so my editor at Doubleday, whose forum it was, (and who sued me after the Supreme Court declined to hear my case so Doubleday had to pay the oaf who sued me) had to be helped from the stage. I read about that incident in The New York Times, (I was living in LA) and all the agonies I had been through when noted authors refused to support me(a lot did, but Bellows, Roth, et al. declined) were softened. Vonnegut. A literary hero. And he'd put his mouth where his words were.
A few weeks later Gay Talese invited me to a party in New York for Jerzy Kozinski and Kurt was there. He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, and marveled at my having been able to remember so much of the real dialogue that occurred at the nude marathon I'd attended, and subsequently fictionalized(YES! It was FICTION!) in Touching, the novel that was the source of all the grief. "How did you do it?" he asked me. "Did you have a microphone under your blouse?" "Kurt," I said, "I didn't even have a blouse."
After that, when I came to New York, we would have lunch. They were always long and desultory, with little of the stimulating conversation you would expect from tales of the literati. But always there would be one sentence or a thought that lifted me, and gave me the courage to continue through bleak times. "Women are very resourceful," he said, with his drooping, graying red mustache like a canopy over the careful words. "You're resourceful." So even though I had lost a chance in the community, such as it was, to be taken seriously as a writer, I had a champion. The best. When Don Fine, my last editor, was in the hospital at the end of his life, wanting to see no one, Kurt said "Go see him anyway. It will do him good to see a pretty woman." That was the first time since the death of my husband that I'd felt pretty.
His wife, who'd abandoned him for another man and then came back, thought we were having an affair, and intercepted my letters to him, innocent notes that expressed concern after his heart attack. But before she'd changed her mind and returned, we'd had a chance to spend time together in the Hamptons, where I was desperately trying to write another novel, so I could have a ticket back to a career. That was a particularly hard time for me and my son, who was off-center and angry, alienated from me at losing his young father, but agreed to visit me in Springs, where I was living that autumn. "Bring him around, we'll have dinner," Kurt said, generously.
"I have a surprise for you," I said to Robert, when I picked him up at the airport.
"We're going to have dinner with Kurt Vonnegut," he said.
I was stunned. "How did you know?"
"Well, I knew he was around here and if anyone could smoke him out, it would be you."
I am so happy I smoked him out. I did not get to see him much once she was re-installed.. But I did call him the last November 11th he was still here, to wish him Happy Birthday.
"That's very neighborly of you," he said. Neighborly. What a fine fellow. He told me once when I lamented the lack of a real community, "Go to the drugstore and introduce yourself to the pharmacist, then the drycleaner. The checkout stand at the grocery guy. And you'll have your community."
"I meant a writer's community," I said.
"Well, next time you're in New York, go to Elaine's."
Happy Birthday Mr. Vonnegut.