It was a perfect day in New York, probably one like Vernon Duke might have experienced that inspired 'Autumn in New York,' a song that outdid the reality except on a day like today. Soft warm winds blew across my cheeks like baby's kisses, coming to rest on the crowds that huddled and tour-bussed and pointed across the street to the Dakota, where John Lennon was shot. It would have been his 70th birthday had it not been for Mark David Chapman who made him even more immortal than his music might have, elevating to myth his celebrity, one of the last true celebrities before the Crappy Age of In Touch and the obsessed American public who follow the Snookis and Shtunkies and any of the eeeeees(who ARE these people?) who waft across their TV screens and into their empty lives. I do hope there is an Afterlife, so John can see how loved he is, how much he contributed, and how he is celebrated in the true sense, without having to Dance with the Not-Really Stars, There are events all over New York to honor him, which we can all do by trying to be better human beings, use our gifts to the max, and try not to get shot.
I met John Lennon in LA when he was in his most melancholic/alcoholic pit, separated from Yoko and suffering visibly. He was at a party at Jack Haley, Jr.'s with Harry Nillson who was playing pool and also drinking a lot, on one of those Saturday nights when the bright people(which there actually were some of in the borderline-and-full-celebrity set) would gather in the hilltop house of Jack who was a quick wit and smarter than most people knew, in spite of his later marrying Liza, and sit around a hugh felt-covered table and out= wisecrack each other, kind of a West Coast would-be Algonquin. There were a lot of laughs and plenty of grass rolled into joints by Jack's butler, Clarence, and whoever was in town and had no place better to go, which a lot of smart and semi-glittery people didn't, would come and enjoy the evening, And there, very drunk and 'morose, but unmistakably special was John.
Overcome with admiration and wanting to lift him, I told him how much he had given the world, what his music had meant for everyone(naturally I represented everyone) and and and and and. With hooded eyes he looked at me after my loving barrage, and said "Gwen, if you really loved me, you'd stop talking.' (That's my son's favorite story.)
Not long after John disgraced himself at Tommy Smothers' opening as a single at the Troubadour, drunk and heckling him in a venue stocked with Tommy friends and admirers, wearing a Tampax under his hat that drifted down whitely over his nose. Tommy was tolerant, but not so Tommy fans, who erupted finally with rage, and passed Lennon out on a sea of uplifted arms, like a cork bobbing on the ocean, dumping him on the sidewalk outside. It was a very sad moment, one I hoped he wouldn't remember.
I'm glad he got back with Yoko because he really did adore her, no matter what the rest of us thought. And she has done a great job of keeping him alive. What a shame the world didn't.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
TIME FORGOTTEN
The bitch about living in the present is you have to keep doing it or you don't remember what made it so wonderful. Having fallen pitiably behind in expressing my joy at where I was (Paris and St. Tropez: it already sounds like a fiction) I have missed my own breadcrumbs on the trail, so do not even have to wait for the birds to come to feel lost. It was so filled with joy, everywhere I was, but am now hopelessly brain-dead and jet-lagged, hearing only the sounds of the sirens as various UN dignitaries make their way around our city, and Obama loses his wheels. It is hard to see him struggling so, when the dream seemed so lucid.
Anyway, there I was. Three glorious days at the Crillon, then three days at Villa Marie, which was once the Bergerettes, where I took my still young family after Robert's(Bob he was then) Bar Mitzvah, because my beloved friend Sandy, who was with Time at the time in Paris, said "Everyone says St. Tropez, c'est finis, but I think you'll like it," and we did. After Don died too soon, expressing only denial on his way out of this planet, except for saying "I want to go back there," I took his cufflinks and buried them beneath one of the maritime pine that adjoins the property, going back to visit them (and him) during several Mays or Septembers, the best time to be in the South of France, the foule having gone. I know that's the French word for something that means the too-many tourists, or at least I think. But this time when I went back my heart was heavy, as the dentists say when they are retiring, because there have been so many losses. Prime among those is Sandy, whom my close friends and even some distant ones know died under mysterious circumstances in Bali, the great irony being that this storied investigative reporter was killed and nobody does anything about it, because the evidence is not in hand, and can't be gotten without a court order, although the details of the autopsy were available in the Jakarta Post, a newspaper that apparently can't be believed. But the case is on file as "an unsolved homicide," and as I loved her more than any other friend, I have been struggling with trying to write about it for all the years since her death, which are now six.
I thought to begin and end it in Bali, and have started several times. But this time I went up to the room where she stayed at what was once 'Les Bergerettes', and reaching out the terrace window was traveled into the beginning of 'Wuthering Heights' and thought I felt a ghostly hand. All terribly moving and dark, which the trip wasn't at all. It was sunshine and filled with light, internal as well as what Nature afforded, so I had a glorious time when I wasn't being haunted.
I had one funny day in-between luxury hotels when I couldn't get out of the bathtub in a little place I had found, it being slippery and small(the tub, not the hotel) with nothing to grab hold of, followed by lunch at the Graniers, a small beach near Byblos that tourists don't know about and guests at Byblos don't go to, because it isn't chic, then a swim in the quiet waters of the Gulf of Grimaud, which I couldn't get out of either. The whole shore just inside the final hardly-even rippling of the water is made up of very insistent pebbles and rocks; I was waiting to find a soft place and there wasn't one, so I just floated there for a while, when one of the very smart(bikini-wise) women on the beach asked me if I needed help. So I got up and out, not wanting to seem helpless, and just sat on my matelas for a while, bleeding a little from just below my knee. Not wanting to seem in any way impaired, I paid no attention to it until one of the pretty young women brought me some ice in a napkin, so I could wipe it off. It was my intention to go back there the next day and repay her kindness by begging her to stop smoking, but Europeans do not look kindly on our propagandizing against cigarettes
especially as they are all still puffing away. Anyway, by that time I had connected with The Ladies.
The Ladies: a really visually impressive group of women of a certain age, not quite as certain as mine, who were there on a yacht, I mean really, from Jersey, the place where the Brits go to hide their money, as our people do the Cayman Islands. Most adorable among them was their mascot, Gemma, just turned 21, half hidden by her T-shirt which she had made into a tent over her head and upper body so she could text, which of course made me crazy, as she was missing where she was, texting being the disease that I feel will wipe out all our young, whether or not they are driving. Mum, a beautiful woman named Fiona, one of my favorite names, owns the yacht, father being tragically gone, a fiercely charming dark-haired ringleader (I suspect) being Pia, whose third husband it is she is now living with in Jersey, Joy, who has four children, and is herself enhanced by her sisters, who apparently travel often and everywhere in a group, and Sian, the most business-like among them, apparently the Brit equivalent of an event planner, I think. Anyway they were at the next table at Graniers, suffering over which wine to order, so I gave them a taste of my Rose (accent) which was good enough, as is any rose in the South of France, and they liked it, and apparently, me. So we all got together the next day for my last lunch in Saint Tropez at Club 55 which I usually avoided because it seemed to me so phony, but it isn't if you are there with delightful people for long enough, which was the stretched-out final afternoon. I had the best time. The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as queens which we need to realize we are, whether or not we have had the luck to connect with kings.
It was a fabulous finale, marred only by the fact that I was so overstimulated I could not sleep all night, (it was Sandy's old room, the moon shone silver high in the heavens which they really are in the south of France, and I was afraid to reach out the window for the touch of that ghostly hand,) I had to drive into the glaring early morning sunlight and was frightened the whole time as I could hardly see where I was going, made my plane, didn't sleep on that either, and have been five days trying to right my place in time.
It is seven days now, my having slept for much of the two days since I lamented not sleeping, and I have remembered most of it in sequence: my three queenly days at the Crillon, where I semi-rescued my agent whose luggage had been sent to Stockholm, so I let him shower in my suite preparatory to meeting up with his coeur-throb, a wonderful dinner with my darling friend Suzie whom I met when we both crashed the pool at the Bristol, all those years ago, then only one disappointment when my once editor from the WSJ whom I deeply admire and always sets me straight, vision-of-the-worldwise, on which empty evening I roamed the streets alone which is never a hardship in Paris, had a meal by myself and wrote pomes, then Sunday with my beloved petite famille francaise, the people who lived upstairs from me when I headquartered in Paris and fell in love with Gaspard, their two-year old golden child, whose 14th birthday we celebrated over paella and his first cell-phone. It seems a staple of French life at 14, a coming of tech-age equivalent of our 16 year old car in Beverly Hills. Then Sunday night with the gorgeous widow of Monsieur Grimaldi, late president of Figaro, at Buddha something, a restaurant adjacent to and underneath the Crillon. Then to Saint Tropez, and the Usual Magic.
I chronicle this because I have developed a devoted readership of at least one, and it's good to remember one's history while one still can. My love to all of you who have stayed on board, haven't fallen off, and the new friends. Life is a ... what? Pilgrimage? Sure. Certainly a challenge. But unquestionably a privilege, no matter what the New Yorker says.
Anyway, there I was. Three glorious days at the Crillon, then three days at Villa Marie, which was once the Bergerettes, where I took my still young family after Robert's(Bob he was then) Bar Mitzvah, because my beloved friend Sandy, who was with Time at the time in Paris, said "Everyone says St. Tropez, c'est finis, but I think you'll like it," and we did. After Don died too soon, expressing only denial on his way out of this planet, except for saying "I want to go back there," I took his cufflinks and buried them beneath one of the maritime pine that adjoins the property, going back to visit them (and him) during several Mays or Septembers, the best time to be in the South of France, the foule having gone. I know that's the French word for something that means the too-many tourists, or at least I think. But this time when I went back my heart was heavy, as the dentists say when they are retiring, because there have been so many losses. Prime among those is Sandy, whom my close friends and even some distant ones know died under mysterious circumstances in Bali, the great irony being that this storied investigative reporter was killed and nobody does anything about it, because the evidence is not in hand, and can't be gotten without a court order, although the details of the autopsy were available in the Jakarta Post, a newspaper that apparently can't be believed. But the case is on file as "an unsolved homicide," and as I loved her more than any other friend, I have been struggling with trying to write about it for all the years since her death, which are now six.
I thought to begin and end it in Bali, and have started several times. But this time I went up to the room where she stayed at what was once 'Les Bergerettes', and reaching out the terrace window was traveled into the beginning of 'Wuthering Heights' and thought I felt a ghostly hand. All terribly moving and dark, which the trip wasn't at all. It was sunshine and filled with light, internal as well as what Nature afforded, so I had a glorious time when I wasn't being haunted.
I had one funny day in-between luxury hotels when I couldn't get out of the bathtub in a little place I had found, it being slippery and small(the tub, not the hotel) with nothing to grab hold of, followed by lunch at the Graniers, a small beach near Byblos that tourists don't know about and guests at Byblos don't go to, because it isn't chic, then a swim in the quiet waters of the Gulf of Grimaud, which I couldn't get out of either. The whole shore just inside the final hardly-even rippling of the water is made up of very insistent pebbles and rocks; I was waiting to find a soft place and there wasn't one, so I just floated there for a while, when one of the very smart(bikini-wise) women on the beach asked me if I needed help. So I got up and out, not wanting to seem helpless, and just sat on my matelas for a while, bleeding a little from just below my knee. Not wanting to seem in any way impaired, I paid no attention to it until one of the pretty young women brought me some ice in a napkin, so I could wipe it off. It was my intention to go back there the next day and repay her kindness by begging her to stop smoking, but Europeans do not look kindly on our propagandizing against cigarettes
especially as they are all still puffing away. Anyway, by that time I had connected with The Ladies.
The Ladies: a really visually impressive group of women of a certain age, not quite as certain as mine, who were there on a yacht, I mean really, from Jersey, the place where the Brits go to hide their money, as our people do the Cayman Islands. Most adorable among them was their mascot, Gemma, just turned 21, half hidden by her T-shirt which she had made into a tent over her head and upper body so she could text, which of course made me crazy, as she was missing where she was, texting being the disease that I feel will wipe out all our young, whether or not they are driving. Mum, a beautiful woman named Fiona, one of my favorite names, owns the yacht, father being tragically gone, a fiercely charming dark-haired ringleader (I suspect) being Pia, whose third husband it is she is now living with in Jersey, Joy, who has four children, and is herself enhanced by her sisters, who apparently travel often and everywhere in a group, and Sian, the most business-like among them, apparently the Brit equivalent of an event planner, I think. Anyway they were at the next table at Graniers, suffering over which wine to order, so I gave them a taste of my Rose (accent) which was good enough, as is any rose in the South of France, and they liked it, and apparently, me. So we all got together the next day for my last lunch in Saint Tropez at Club 55 which I usually avoided because it seemed to me so phony, but it isn't if you are there with delightful people for long enough, which was the stretched-out final afternoon. I had the best time. The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as queens which we need to realize we are, whether or not we have had the luck to connect with kings.
It was a fabulous finale, marred only by the fact that I was so overstimulated I could not sleep all night, (it was Sandy's old room, the moon shone silver high in the heavens which they really are in the south of France, and I was afraid to reach out the window for the touch of that ghostly hand,) I had to drive into the glaring early morning sunlight and was frightened the whole time as I could hardly see where I was going, made my plane, didn't sleep on that either, and have been five days trying to right my place in time.
It is seven days now, my having slept for much of the two days since I lamented not sleeping, and I have remembered most of it in sequence: my three queenly days at the Crillon, where I semi-rescued my agent whose luggage had been sent to Stockholm, so I let him shower in my suite preparatory to meeting up with his coeur-throb, a wonderful dinner with my darling friend Suzie whom I met when we both crashed the pool at the Bristol, all those years ago, then only one disappointment when my once editor from the WSJ whom I deeply admire and always sets me straight, vision-of-the-worldwise, on which empty evening I roamed the streets alone which is never a hardship in Paris, had a meal by myself and wrote pomes, then Sunday with my beloved petite famille francaise, the people who lived upstairs from me when I headquartered in Paris and fell in love with Gaspard, their two-year old golden child, whose 14th birthday we celebrated over paella and his first cell-phone. It seems a staple of French life at 14, a coming of tech-age equivalent of our 16 year old car in Beverly Hills. Then Sunday night with the gorgeous widow of Monsieur Grimaldi, late president of Figaro, at Buddha something, a restaurant adjacent to and underneath the Crillon. Then to Saint Tropez, and the Usual Magic.
I chronicle this because I have developed a devoted readership of at least one, and it's good to remember one's history while one still can. My love to all of you who have stayed on board, haven't fallen off, and the new friends. Life is a ... what? Pilgrimage? Sure. Certainly a challenge. But unquestionably a privilege, no matter what the New Yorker says.
Monday, August 23, 2010
On the Road Again, and Again
For those of you, beloveds, who have expressed some degree of concern
or a minimal sense of loss at not having received a report as of late, let
me take you by the gentle hand and tell you a little of why. When I was
in Montecatini, having a very low-key fine tempo at the wedding of
Marco, handsomest and most charming of the Maccioni boys, and I am
still a fool for handsome and charming, although on occasion I am also
drawn to ugly and rude, not content to simply be having a good time,
I forced myself to write on the new book, and what I sent my master
editor elicited the response 'Not good.' So instead of walking the hills
and eating the pasta, I shortened my stay, paid extra to fly back early,
and did something on the plane, where even tripping back to NY I felt
I had to write, that killed my computer(a little spilled vino? Do I really
remember? Does if even matter, if you consider the larger lesson, which
I am trying to do?) So as soon as I hit my landline, I called Toshiba,
which as many of you know is outsourced to the Phillipines, and they
said 'Someone will call you within two hours.' That same response was
given me the next eleven days, in the same tone, so I never left my
house except to walk Mimi, and then very hurriedly.
And on the twelfth day, as the Bible might put it, when they said
the same thing, I said: "I am a writer and I can't work and I am going
to commit suicide." The Toshiba guy said: 'Thank you for your
patience.' As I could not reach through the phone to throttle him, I
went down the street to the Apple store and bought a Mac.
Since then, my life has been a learning process. First, how to use
the MacBook, and second, how to be in the present and actually enjoy
my life, without simply writing it, except for the occasional pome. As
some of you know, including the literary agent who has thus far been
unable to sell it, when in Venice last early Autumn I wrote a book
called Live the day about a woman of 'a certain age' who is trying to
learn to be in the present, and not base her happiness on whether or not
what she is writing sells. Many chewed fingernails and months later, I
spoke to my beloved Jewru Jack, who had just had oral surgery and was on
Vicodin, and asked him, as I have over the years, what to do, having
been unable to accept my own artful(I think it was) counsel. And Jack
told me, speaking from the depth of the Vicodin, as he himself said he
was doing: "Why don't you go somewhere and not write."
It seemed unthinkable. Unaccustomed as I am to listening to
wisdom, I have been doing that ever since. Going places, including boat
rides around Manhattan on the yacht(it actually is, though I was
expecting a ferry) of my health club where there are too many people in
the pool--though I rarely look back, I regret not having befriended
Leona Helmsley who lived unhappily and cruelly just down the block, so
she could have left me her lap pool, as like her I was probably royal in
a previous life, though doubtless not as abusive. Other destinations
have included Central Park, just across the street, where I breakfast on
a bench with Mimi beside me, read the news(not good) and write the
occasional pome(not bad) and try and learn to Live the Day.
Recent days included a visit to Newport, Rhode Island, where I had
never been, and imagined was North of Massachusetts(I should have
paid more attention to Mrs. Laubenheimer, my geography teacher
at PS 9) and fell very much in love with it. it is once again what my
husband, Don, called a smart little village', the kind to which I have
always been drawn: see St. Tropez and La Jolla, where you can always
visit but shouldn't make the mistake of moving to after your husband
dies too young. Anyway, I love Newport, and with any luck and a few
bucks will rent a place there next July and you're all invited.
And there I lived the day, only three, but it felt good in the
basement of Vanderbilt Hall where there's a beautiful pool with
nobody in it but me, and a fine masseuse. So I was able to luxuriate
and heal, and the townsfolk weren't bad either, especially the two
realtors at Sotheby, who made the time there pass even more
delightfully. Present also was a great and colorful rock musician,
Pete Townshend, and I am always elated at the presence, especially
when it is present, of talent. I also wrote a few pomes.
While there, though, I did have ONE bad experience, going to see the
movie of 'Eat Pray Love' which I tried to go to with an open mind, even
though my beloved Jack had expressed a variation of what my beloved LA
library friend Evelyn Hoffmann had said, that she wished I had written
it. I, too, wished I had written it, because I am equally able to eat,
pray and love and my sentence structure is better. Envy is one of the 7
deadly, and though I would not have traded my grasp of the English
language and my feeling for Whatever There Might be Out There, for her
writing I would have enjoyed her royalties. So, to the movie.
I do believe it will set back spiritual study by a few centuries.
Oh, well. I have long felt a secret dislike for Julia Roberts because
my friend Marilyn said she had a mouth like a fish, and I know she took
someone else's husband. But it took Lewis Black, on the Daily Show,
whom I have long considered smart and funny but too unfettered in his
rage to rage against the movie enough. He pointed out that the shopping
network is full of Eat Pray Love merchandise, twenty hours a day. As if
that were not offensive enough(Eat Pay Love?) Julia to show her
dedication explained that she has actually been practicing Hinduism for
several years.
Huh? I said to myself, as a sometimes student of religion without
its orthodox strictures and entanglements. Huh? And again, Huh?
So going to the Internet, now that I know how to use my Mac and
understand I will never again have to ask anybody a question except
maybe Jack, I wrote in 'Hinduism' to see what exactly it required or
consisted of. I like the meditation, the belief that everything has a
spirit-- in Bali they have a day to honor the engine gods, especially
the ones in cars, a bit too over the top or under the hood, but
harmless-- but I draw the line at worshipping Vishnu the god of
violence-- and understand now why I loathe even more deeply than I
thought, Julia Roberts, since she's trying to add gravitas to her
excessive salaries by her claim. i have defined myself for the old Bryn
Mawr register as Quaker-Buddhist-Jew(at Don's urging:"that'll really
confuse them," he said.)
Anyway, on to the positive, speaking of Bryn Mawr. They are
putting on my play, The Women Upstairs, about what the wives were doing
during Plato's Symposium, while all the big guns, Socrates,
Aristophanes, Alcibiades and the rest of the gang were partying (the
actual word Symposium means 'Drinking Party' which if they would put on
it maybe more people would read) on October 29th, in the newly renovated
Goodhart Hall, where Katharine Hepburn spoke her first marbled words
onstage. You're all invited. And on the 16th of that selfsame month,
we are doing a reading of my musical, with the wonderful Tyne Daly
reading the star part which is almost joy enough to take care of my not
hoping it materializes on Broadway, but not quite. None of you is
invited to that, as we're doing it just for us to see how it sounds.
But as my wise and wonderful cousin Ruth-Anne told me once,
'Freedom is knowing you have options.' So I am filled with a great
sense of relief that I have avenues besides the one I barreled down
trying to finish the new book which I have now set aside to see what
happens with the career I really wanted all along, even though the
detour I took was being a novelist.
That's why you haven't heard from me. It felt good. Being in the
present I mean.
or a minimal sense of loss at not having received a report as of late, let
me take you by the gentle hand and tell you a little of why. When I was
in Montecatini, having a very low-key fine tempo at the wedding of
Marco, handsomest and most charming of the Maccioni boys, and I am
still a fool for handsome and charming, although on occasion I am also
drawn to ugly and rude, not content to simply be having a good time,
I forced myself to write on the new book, and what I sent my master
editor elicited the response 'Not good.' So instead of walking the hills
and eating the pasta, I shortened my stay, paid extra to fly back early,
and did something on the plane, where even tripping back to NY I felt
I had to write, that killed my computer(a little spilled vino? Do I really
remember? Does if even matter, if you consider the larger lesson, which
I am trying to do?) So as soon as I hit my landline, I called Toshiba,
which as many of you know is outsourced to the Phillipines, and they
said 'Someone will call you within two hours.' That same response was
given me the next eleven days, in the same tone, so I never left my
house except to walk Mimi, and then very hurriedly.
And on the twelfth day, as the Bible might put it, when they said
the same thing, I said: "I am a writer and I can't work and I am going
to commit suicide." The Toshiba guy said: 'Thank you for your
patience.' As I could not reach through the phone to throttle him, I
went down the street to the Apple store and bought a Mac.
Since then, my life has been a learning process. First, how to use
the MacBook, and second, how to be in the present and actually enjoy
my life, without simply writing it, except for the occasional pome. As
some of you know, including the literary agent who has thus far been
unable to sell it, when in Venice last early Autumn I wrote a book
called Live the day about a woman of 'a certain age' who is trying to
learn to be in the present, and not base her happiness on whether or not
what she is writing sells. Many chewed fingernails and months later, I
spoke to my beloved Jewru Jack, who had just had oral surgery and was on
Vicodin, and asked him, as I have over the years, what to do, having
been unable to accept my own artful(I think it was) counsel. And Jack
told me, speaking from the depth of the Vicodin, as he himself said he
was doing: "Why don't you go somewhere and not write."
It seemed unthinkable. Unaccustomed as I am to listening to
wisdom, I have been doing that ever since. Going places, including boat
rides around Manhattan on the yacht(it actually is, though I was
expecting a ferry) of my health club where there are too many people in
the pool--though I rarely look back, I regret not having befriended
Leona Helmsley who lived unhappily and cruelly just down the block, so
she could have left me her lap pool, as like her I was probably royal in
a previous life, though doubtless not as abusive. Other destinations
have included Central Park, just across the street, where I breakfast on
a bench with Mimi beside me, read the news(not good) and write the
occasional pome(not bad) and try and learn to Live the Day.
Recent days included a visit to Newport, Rhode Island, where I had
never been, and imagined was North of Massachusetts(I should have
paid more attention to Mrs. Laubenheimer, my geography teacher
at PS 9) and fell very much in love with it. it is once again what my
husband, Don, called a smart little village', the kind to which I have
always been drawn: see St. Tropez and La Jolla, where you can always
visit but shouldn't make the mistake of moving to after your husband
dies too young. Anyway, I love Newport, and with any luck and a few
bucks will rent a place there next July and you're all invited.
And there I lived the day, only three, but it felt good in the
basement of Vanderbilt Hall where there's a beautiful pool with
nobody in it but me, and a fine masseuse. So I was able to luxuriate
and heal, and the townsfolk weren't bad either, especially the two
realtors at Sotheby, who made the time there pass even more
delightfully. Present also was a great and colorful rock musician,
Pete Townshend, and I am always elated at the presence, especially
when it is present, of talent. I also wrote a few pomes.
While there, though, I did have ONE bad experience, going to see the
movie of 'Eat Pray Love' which I tried to go to with an open mind, even
though my beloved Jack had expressed a variation of what my beloved LA
library friend Evelyn Hoffmann had said, that she wished I had written
it. I, too, wished I had written it, because I am equally able to eat,
pray and love and my sentence structure is better. Envy is one of the 7
deadly, and though I would not have traded my grasp of the English
language and my feeling for Whatever There Might be Out There, for her
writing I would have enjoyed her royalties. So, to the movie.
I do believe it will set back spiritual study by a few centuries.
Oh, well. I have long felt a secret dislike for Julia Roberts because
my friend Marilyn said she had a mouth like a fish, and I know she took
someone else's husband. But it took Lewis Black, on the Daily Show,
whom I have long considered smart and funny but too unfettered in his
rage to rage against the movie enough. He pointed out that the shopping
network is full of Eat Pray Love merchandise, twenty hours a day. As if
that were not offensive enough(Eat Pay Love?) Julia to show her
dedication explained that she has actually been practicing Hinduism for
several years.
Huh? I said to myself, as a sometimes student of religion without
its orthodox strictures and entanglements. Huh? And again, Huh?
So going to the Internet, now that I know how to use my Mac and
understand I will never again have to ask anybody a question except
maybe Jack, I wrote in 'Hinduism' to see what exactly it required or
consisted of. I like the meditation, the belief that everything has a
spirit-- in Bali they have a day to honor the engine gods, especially
the ones in cars, a bit too over the top or under the hood, but
harmless-- but I draw the line at worshipping Vishnu the god of
violence-- and understand now why I loathe even more deeply than I
thought, Julia Roberts, since she's trying to add gravitas to her
excessive salaries by her claim. i have defined myself for the old Bryn
Mawr register as Quaker-Buddhist-Jew(at Don's urging:"that'll really
confuse them," he said.)
Anyway, on to the positive, speaking of Bryn Mawr. They are
putting on my play, The Women Upstairs, about what the wives were doing
during Plato's Symposium, while all the big guns, Socrates,
Aristophanes, Alcibiades and the rest of the gang were partying (the
actual word Symposium means 'Drinking Party' which if they would put on
it maybe more people would read) on October 29th, in the newly renovated
Goodhart Hall, where Katharine Hepburn spoke her first marbled words
onstage. You're all invited. And on the 16th of that selfsame month,
we are doing a reading of my musical, with the wonderful Tyne Daly
reading the star part which is almost joy enough to take care of my not
hoping it materializes on Broadway, but not quite. None of you is
invited to that, as we're doing it just for us to see how it sounds.
But as my wise and wonderful cousin Ruth-Anne told me once,
'Freedom is knowing you have options.' So I am filled with a great
sense of relief that I have avenues besides the one I barreled down
trying to finish the new book which I have now set aside to see what
happens with the career I really wanted all along, even though the
detour I took was being a novelist.
That's why you haven't heard from me. It felt good. Being in the
present I mean.
Monday, July 05, 2010
Who's been sleeping in my Hat?
I had some doubts about coming on this trip. I am a victim of the Protestant Ethic, a day’s work well done, compounded by Jewish Guilt—or I feel terrible. So as I have no new achievement under my belt, written books not counting for anything in my mind unless published, and being only a few chapters into the new one, I felt I was not entitled to take a vacation. From what? my Jiminy Cricket would say.
Still, I was happy to be asked to this formidable wedding, details about which it would exhaust me to list, since I have already writ about it as a loving courtesy to my hosts. But once invited, I passed a hat on Madison Avenue, and had no choice but to buy it, it was so simply splendid, so splendidly simple, and yet coolly elaborately chic. They wanted a lot more, but I was able to talk them down to $200, promising they would be part of the article I intended to write about the wedding. Then I got cold feet, just like brides do, and started to cancel, but my darling friend Pam said “Buy you got the hat.”
So I made slow haste to come, calling ahead to Delta airlines to make sure I would be able to take the hat on board in its spacious box, and the agent on the phone held while I measured, and it just made the 18” diameter. And then I called Sky Magazine, the Delta in-flight thing to try and get an actual assignment to write about the journey of the hat, figuring it would be much to their advantage since probably the people who know there is a direct flight from JFK to Pisa are fewer than legion. But they called me back and said it wasn’t funny enough, as for that kind of feature, on their back page, they prefer using comedians. Oh, well.
Still I came, and wore the hat to the church part of the wedding, where the bride arrived gorgeously arrayed in white crocheted lace in the black sidecar of a motorcycle driven by her father, and the groom wore Emiliano Zegna gray silk, and I was one of three women out of hundreds who wore a hat. The others were another New Yorker and Georgia, three times Miss Montecatini, but her beauty queen career ended there. Still, she looked cute in her hat.
I, on the other hand, looked very much the matron in a really nice hat. But what the hell. I left the hat in the car for the beach part of the celebration(groaning boards, infinite champagne, suckling pig) giant grapes and prosciutto sliced by two brothers who had taken three years to cure it(I hope of everything.)
Then today, finding that once again I have brought my currency curse on myself—that is to say, the minute I travel the dollar sinks, so even as the euro is in the toilet, my very coming makes it expensive again, and the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are in better shape than they would have been had I not made the voyage, so decided to go home before it gets even worse.
Still, I did have to make one last swing to the open market for some sunglasses—the woman in the really good store was amazingly rude, very un-Italian, I could have been in Paris—so I saved 170 euros which by tomorrow will probably be worth twice what the dollar is if I stay.
So I went to the open market. And guess what was there. My hat. 7 euros. I was tempted to buy it simply to shove it down the throat of the owner of Mandara on Madison(DON’T EVER GO THERE, or if you do, say I sent you and spit on her.)
Oh well. Read somewhere today(could it have been the New Yorker? Probably not, too direct)the Zen saying Live as though you were dead. So walking back to the hotel I passed a beautiful mirrored and fairy-tale decorated carousel, like the one in Bordeaux that Happy had his first and last merry-go-round ride on on what was to be his final holiday, before he had his heart attack in Paris, where his jeweled collar, the one he wore on Oprah but she didn’t show the book, the bitch, hangs in La Cimitiere Pere LaChaise next to hippy bracelets on the headstone of Jim Morrison, since they both died in the same way, in the same place, although Morrison wasn’t at the Plaza Athenee. Anyway, I took a picture of the carousel, and remembered Happy, and our trip with Betsy. A little girl about 18 months, Maria-Luisa, just perfecting her stagger, came and rode a miniature auto, and I took her picture because she was almost as beautiful, eye-wise, as the boys last night looking up at the World Cup.
Then because I know what it is to have been cheated but not by an Italian, I forced myself to have a gelati, three flavors, chocolate, bacio, and something toasted with berries in it. Raging, even as I enjoyed, I ate it all up. Soon I will be in a bed that is JUST THE RIGHT SIZE.
Still, I was happy to be asked to this formidable wedding, details about which it would exhaust me to list, since I have already writ about it as a loving courtesy to my hosts. But once invited, I passed a hat on Madison Avenue, and had no choice but to buy it, it was so simply splendid, so splendidly simple, and yet coolly elaborately chic. They wanted a lot more, but I was able to talk them down to $200, promising they would be part of the article I intended to write about the wedding. Then I got cold feet, just like brides do, and started to cancel, but my darling friend Pam said “Buy you got the hat.”
So I made slow haste to come, calling ahead to Delta airlines to make sure I would be able to take the hat on board in its spacious box, and the agent on the phone held while I measured, and it just made the 18” diameter. And then I called Sky Magazine, the Delta in-flight thing to try and get an actual assignment to write about the journey of the hat, figuring it would be much to their advantage since probably the people who know there is a direct flight from JFK to Pisa are fewer than legion. But they called me back and said it wasn’t funny enough, as for that kind of feature, on their back page, they prefer using comedians. Oh, well.
Still I came, and wore the hat to the church part of the wedding, where the bride arrived gorgeously arrayed in white crocheted lace in the black sidecar of a motorcycle driven by her father, and the groom wore Emiliano Zegna gray silk, and I was one of three women out of hundreds who wore a hat. The others were another New Yorker and Georgia, three times Miss Montecatini, but her beauty queen career ended there. Still, she looked cute in her hat.
I, on the other hand, looked very much the matron in a really nice hat. But what the hell. I left the hat in the car for the beach part of the celebration(groaning boards, infinite champagne, suckling pig) giant grapes and prosciutto sliced by two brothers who had taken three years to cure it(I hope of everything.)
Then today, finding that once again I have brought my currency curse on myself—that is to say, the minute I travel the dollar sinks, so even as the euro is in the toilet, my very coming makes it expensive again, and the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are in better shape than they would have been had I not made the voyage, so decided to go home before it gets even worse.
Still, I did have to make one last swing to the open market for some sunglasses—the woman in the really good store was amazingly rude, very un-Italian, I could have been in Paris—so I saved 170 euros which by tomorrow will probably be worth twice what the dollar is if I stay.
So I went to the open market. And guess what was there. My hat. 7 euros. I was tempted to buy it simply to shove it down the throat of the owner of Mandara on Madison(DON’T EVER GO THERE, or if you do, say I sent you and spit on her.)
Oh well. Read somewhere today(could it have been the New Yorker? Probably not, too direct)the Zen saying Live as though you were dead. So walking back to the hotel I passed a beautiful mirrored and fairy-tale decorated carousel, like the one in Bordeaux that Happy had his first and last merry-go-round ride on on what was to be his final holiday, before he had his heart attack in Paris, where his jeweled collar, the one he wore on Oprah but she didn’t show the book, the bitch, hangs in La Cimitiere Pere LaChaise next to hippy bracelets on the headstone of Jim Morrison, since they both died in the same way, in the same place, although Morrison wasn’t at the Plaza Athenee. Anyway, I took a picture of the carousel, and remembered Happy, and our trip with Betsy. A little girl about 18 months, Maria-Luisa, just perfecting her stagger, came and rode a miniature auto, and I took her picture because she was almost as beautiful, eye-wise, as the boys last night looking up at the World Cup.
Then because I know what it is to have been cheated but not by an Italian, I forced myself to have a gelati, three flavors, chocolate, bacio, and something toasted with berries in it. Raging, even as I enjoyed, I ate it all up. Soon I will be in a bed that is JUST THE RIGHT SIZE.
Leaving Tuscany
So it is that as the sun rises softly in the east, we bid farewell to beautiful downtown Montacatini. The best part of that village, besides the kind and merry people in it with the notable exception of the unpleasant woman in the pricey eyeglass store next to Benetton, so you’ll know which one to avoid, is Montecatini Alto, which I never knew was there. Not that I have been in Montecatini that often, but had I known about Alto I might have come more often, or at least tried the adventure before. There is a truly ancient finicular(about 1895, I think it said at the bottom by way of informarion) that goes up that great Tuscan hill—a mountain it must be, really—every half hour, at the cost of 7 euros round trip. It is as scenic an adventure as you can have anywhere in Europe, including the great finiculars of Switzerland that everybody knows are there, which distinguishes them from this one, besides that the Swiss ones sway in the wind and at the top of them, when there is a celebration which there wouldn’t be if you weren’t going up there, you will usually find a banker or twelve, which I myself did when I visited Luzern, and thought to interview a jovial(for a Swiss)banker I met atop that mountain, very prominent, for my then gig with the Wall Street Journal Europe, except he was shortly afterward indicted or arrested, I can’t quite remember which, before I could go shopping with him, the cover I used at the time for getting people to relax, and/or tell the truth about themselves. I imagine had he not been on his way to jail he might have told the truth about himself, as even Sir Richard Branson( a combination of P.T. Barnum and an anxious 12 year old) did, so caught up was he with the toys he played with at Sharper Image when I went shopping with him.
Ah but the Montecatini funicular led up not to a pageant of bankers, some of them crooked even though Swiss, but a restaurant hostessed by a cousin of Egi’s, the amazingly loving Mrs. Maccioni, mother of the groom whose wedding I had just attended, wife of the restaurateur. Her good nature is so vast it goes all the way up the mountain, where her cousin, Mirelle, I think it iis, but it may be different in Italian, runs a restaurant. A fine thing about Mirelle, if that is her name, is her sister or cousin Silvia, whom I met at the wedding and loved at once,pailleted as she was in black sparkles, as that is my favorite name. It belongs to the heroine of my musical, which may or may not ever get on, but I still have hope. When I first wrote it, Irving Berlin, whose same birthday I have(May 11,no need to send flowers) was still alive and I hoped to get it on in his lifetime. He lived past a hundred, held on as long as he could. Then I wanted to get it on in my mother’s lifetime, as, if you’ve read any of my novels(The Motherland and Marriage being the best of them,) you will know what a ferocious and funny character she was, as you also would if you saw the studio she left me in the Hampshire House, on its walls a badly restored, cracked in the middle Picasso she had broken over my stepfather’s head. Anyway, towards the end of her life, stunning woman she had been, with great legs a dazzling smile, and irresistible charm, she decided rather than grow old, she would crash parties. Sp she printed up press credentials, phoned ahead to inform them that Helen Schwamm of Gannett Press or Diplomatic World(whichever her cover for the event) was coming, always flawlessly chic in black with diamonds, inevitably ending up an honored guest. When New York celebrated its 100 most important people, under Mayor Koch, Mother was among them. So that is why I loved Silvia, and by connection her cousin, delighting in the lights far below as we looked down from our station in the clouds and had a fine dinner, though I cannot remember the name of the restaurant. If you get to Montecatini, I’m sure everyone can tell you.
There is a great faded glory to Montecatini itself. Knowing little of it history, although I knew more when there were pictures of Princess Grace and the glories that had been that were once posted in the elevators, the elevators at La Pace have been modernized, which little else has. I do, however, remember the day that Grace Kelly died, when I was in Saint Tropez and and the news came through, and the woman at the desk in my hotel said :”Il faut profiter de la Vie.” You must enjoy life.”
Damned straight. The path you walk to the pool at La Pace, its water so pleasantly warm even though it is lined in what seems to be plastic, is the same pathI walked with that sweet, stylish woman who likened the place to ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’ where “nothing ever changes.” The hotel had actually changed a little, primped and polished during the time the Communists were in charge of Monetcatini, so proud were they to have a 5 star hotel, they fixed everything. Even at the time the brothers who run it, Francesco and Stefananino, so kindly rescued me, in 1998 or 9 it had to be when I was Swimming Through Europe, there was a sadness to it, a faded grandeur, that I, in my more skeptical, fractious and facetious self might have looked at with a captious eye. But my beloved and loving friend George, the artist who lives in Radda in Chianti, had come to visit me, and pointed out the aspects of the hotel that existed nowhere else anymore: the unobtrusively beautiful stained glass you might not even notice unless you lifted your eyes, which I understand now you need always do. It’s only our own bellybuttons that have lint in them, so that’s not a place we need to spend a lot of time examining.
Giorgio taught me to be merciful; not easy when you have a tendency to be a smartass. I don’t know why it is that when we are young we think being a smartass is such a good idea. It is one of the benefits of age (how is this possible? Wasn’t I just 20? The youngest one in the class, the youngest one everywhere, the youngest to imagine she could get a musical on and everybody actually encouraged and seemed to agree witn her) that you understand, finally, that, as Aldous Huxley said. “What matters is to be kind.”) The other benefit of being older is that we will not have to live in the world that Greed has made, out whole history washed up in oil on the shores of the Gulf, where there is no Alto, as there is in Montecatini.
Ah but the Montecatini funicular led up not to a pageant of bankers, some of them crooked even though Swiss, but a restaurant hostessed by a cousin of Egi’s, the amazingly loving Mrs. Maccioni, mother of the groom whose wedding I had just attended, wife of the restaurateur. Her good nature is so vast it goes all the way up the mountain, where her cousin, Mirelle, I think it iis, but it may be different in Italian, runs a restaurant. A fine thing about Mirelle, if that is her name, is her sister or cousin Silvia, whom I met at the wedding and loved at once,pailleted as she was in black sparkles, as that is my favorite name. It belongs to the heroine of my musical, which may or may not ever get on, but I still have hope. When I first wrote it, Irving Berlin, whose same birthday I have(May 11,no need to send flowers) was still alive and I hoped to get it on in his lifetime. He lived past a hundred, held on as long as he could. Then I wanted to get it on in my mother’s lifetime, as, if you’ve read any of my novels(The Motherland and Marriage being the best of them,) you will know what a ferocious and funny character she was, as you also would if you saw the studio she left me in the Hampshire House, on its walls a badly restored, cracked in the middle Picasso she had broken over my stepfather’s head. Anyway, towards the end of her life, stunning woman she had been, with great legs a dazzling smile, and irresistible charm, she decided rather than grow old, she would crash parties. Sp she printed up press credentials, phoned ahead to inform them that Helen Schwamm of Gannett Press or Diplomatic World(whichever her cover for the event) was coming, always flawlessly chic in black with diamonds, inevitably ending up an honored guest. When New York celebrated its 100 most important people, under Mayor Koch, Mother was among them. So that is why I loved Silvia, and by connection her cousin, delighting in the lights far below as we looked down from our station in the clouds and had a fine dinner, though I cannot remember the name of the restaurant. If you get to Montecatini, I’m sure everyone can tell you.
There is a great faded glory to Montecatini itself. Knowing little of it history, although I knew more when there were pictures of Princess Grace and the glories that had been that were once posted in the elevators, the elevators at La Pace have been modernized, which little else has. I do, however, remember the day that Grace Kelly died, when I was in Saint Tropez and and the news came through, and the woman at the desk in my hotel said :”Il faut profiter de la Vie.” You must enjoy life.”
Damned straight. The path you walk to the pool at La Pace, its water so pleasantly warm even though it is lined in what seems to be plastic, is the same pathI walked with that sweet, stylish woman who likened the place to ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’ where “nothing ever changes.” The hotel had actually changed a little, primped and polished during the time the Communists were in charge of Monetcatini, so proud were they to have a 5 star hotel, they fixed everything. Even at the time the brothers who run it, Francesco and Stefananino, so kindly rescued me, in 1998 or 9 it had to be when I was Swimming Through Europe, there was a sadness to it, a faded grandeur, that I, in my more skeptical, fractious and facetious self might have looked at with a captious eye. But my beloved and loving friend George, the artist who lives in Radda in Chianti, had come to visit me, and pointed out the aspects of the hotel that existed nowhere else anymore: the unobtrusively beautiful stained glass you might not even notice unless you lifted your eyes, which I understand now you need always do. It’s only our own bellybuttons that have lint in them, so that’s not a place we need to spend a lot of time examining.
Giorgio taught me to be merciful; not easy when you have a tendency to be a smartass. I don’t know why it is that when we are young we think being a smartass is such a good idea. It is one of the benefits of age (how is this possible? Wasn’t I just 20? The youngest one in the class, the youngest one everywhere, the youngest to imagine she could get a musical on and everybody actually encouraged and seemed to agree witn her) that you understand, finally, that, as Aldous Huxley said. “What matters is to be kind.”) The other benefit of being older is that we will not have to live in the world that Greed has made, out whole history washed up in oil on the shores of the Gulf, where there is no Alto, as there is in Montecatini.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Prosecco per prima collazione
So I think as of breakfast this morning, I have abandoned my search for truth and beauty and decided to go in for pure pleasure. Ever since coming here, albeit for a joyous and festive occasion, I have tried to practice moderation, except for prosciutto which has wormed its way into my soul, I hope without the accompanying trichinosis. When I gave up meat last year, living in Venice, there was still this hunger for prosciutto and as it has been everywhere here in Montecatini, I have buckled under the weight of my own discipline, and said Fuck it. Though I did not partake of the suckling pig, the star of the beach celebration of Marco’s wedding, I prosciuttoed out, and decided, as I took my swim this morning, and saw from my arms I would never grow young again, that I might as well live out my days enjoying them. So it was I added prosecco to my pink grapefruit juice(for health) and gave up my plan to write immortal prose whilst(a little touch of Keats there) I was here in Montecatini, and instead just, as I wrote last year in Venice, albeit still unbought by a publisher, Live the Day.
All the same I had a bowlful of ripe cut tomatoes for my lycopene, a trick I learned from my gifted and crazy friend Emily, who always looks bright-eyed and eats pomidori fresco at the Cipriani where I can never go again because Natale is gone, but I can carry her inherent diet wisdom with me and eat the tomatoes. Beside them, though, I had a touch of the smoked salmon(a fat touch, actually) and the end of the brown bread with seeds and a splatter of scrambled egg. There were very thin women at the next table eating breakfast cakes and putting rolls in their purses so I must not think of the inequities of life, but only how lucky I am to not explode. One of them had Brigitte Bardot’s old upper lip, and a ghastly stripe of white above it that trumpeted collagen recently injected, or maybe it’s Restalyn. It has been a long time since I worried about little wrinkles as my arms started to fall off. I can remember when I returned from the south of France in my late what I still regarded as my youth, and Arnie Klein, the famous dermatologist and alleged possible father of Michael Jackson’s baby but certainly the one who lightened Michael’s skin, including that on his member when the little boy’s parents sued, said of my upper lip “I can fix that,” and did, for a while anyway.
But like literary immortality, smooth skin is never to be mine, and I am resigned to it, especially seeing the ghastly pallor where would more normally, since this is Italy, be a mustache on a woman.
As for the literary life, as Gay Talese that major phony would title it, I have also decided to set it aside, my efforts on the book I am engaged in writing now having been dampened by my favorite reader’s (there’s only one) tepid reaction to the latest chapter, the writing of which required more than focus, as everyone else here has been devoted to having a good time. George, my beloved friend from my true youth (Rome, in the late 50s) had to cancel our proposed lunch in Florence, because as noted his wife is failing and their car did, too, so I had to drink of his wisdom over the phone, which crackles the line. The big question I had to ask him, already indicated in these posts, was how to let go of what you consider your art, since I suffer daily if I don’t write something, a poem, a report to you, a book. Helmut, the Nazi therapist I had in Berkeley right after Don died and I was truly insane, desperate for a man because I hadn’t realized how partnered I was until he was with me no more, my deep strain of masochism pulled me back to Helmut even after I left San Francisco, and I called him and said I wanted to learn to love myself unconditionally and not just because I produce something, and Helmut said “Too late.”
Georgie, though, having set aside his paints to tender to Anne, said the mistake we make is thinking we have to do all our work and then we will be happy, when it should be the reverse. We should be happy first. Easy for him to say. There is, he tells me, no Italian word for ‘workaholic’, but he has seen too many of them, even in Tuscany, hard to believe, and then they die. Well the really bad news is we are all going to die anyway, which they don’t tell you at the get-go, because who could go jaunting merrily on that road thinking about how it would end. He also told me once there was no word in Italian for ‘loneliness.’ There is only ‘solitudine’ which means solitude, and that for them is enough because Italians never leave each other alone so they are never lonely.
I could see that last night at the Maccionis, where Mama Egi made dinner at her really warm home for all the veterans of the wedding, family and friends, still here. Included among the guests were the parents of the woman youngest son Mauro had married who recently dumped him, so I guess there is no Italian word for grudge, either. There were many varieties of meat, filets, chicken, rabbit(again) and sausage, but I stayed with my obsession and ate only the prosciutto and salad and asked her for a tomato from a gleaming bowl of them that was on the island stove. She took it and rakishly polished it on the back of her dress where her butt was, shooting me a mischievous glance, so I could see the fun-loving, darling young girl she must have been, before she was everybody’s Mama, including Sirio’s. The table was long and festive, all the men on the other side so they could watch the World Cup and shout ‘Vai, Vai!’ to the Italians who did not vai quite enough, the excuse being that the field was so wet and the ball was slippery. But I wished I had had a camera so I could fix a memory of all those beautiful dark eyes, including the twins’, the eleven year olds who said Justin Bieber is gay, up and over our heads, fixed on the screen.
This is an exceptionally long report—the wedding itself, for those of you who wish to know details, might or might not be in the Observer this week, or if not, I’ll send you the piece if you ask. But the e-mail here is difficult and I have to log in to write it by putting in a code and I didn’t want to waste my time that I had to buy by writing this so used my Word, which I am as good as. Oh, if only we didn’t judge ourselves. It’s easier not to when you have prosecco for breakfast.
All the same I had a bowlful of ripe cut tomatoes for my lycopene, a trick I learned from my gifted and crazy friend Emily, who always looks bright-eyed and eats pomidori fresco at the Cipriani where I can never go again because Natale is gone, but I can carry her inherent diet wisdom with me and eat the tomatoes. Beside them, though, I had a touch of the smoked salmon(a fat touch, actually) and the end of the brown bread with seeds and a splatter of scrambled egg. There were very thin women at the next table eating breakfast cakes and putting rolls in their purses so I must not think of the inequities of life, but only how lucky I am to not explode. One of them had Brigitte Bardot’s old upper lip, and a ghastly stripe of white above it that trumpeted collagen recently injected, or maybe it’s Restalyn. It has been a long time since I worried about little wrinkles as my arms started to fall off. I can remember when I returned from the south of France in my late what I still regarded as my youth, and Arnie Klein, the famous dermatologist and alleged possible father of Michael Jackson’s baby but certainly the one who lightened Michael’s skin, including that on his member when the little boy’s parents sued, said of my upper lip “I can fix that,” and did, for a while anyway.
But like literary immortality, smooth skin is never to be mine, and I am resigned to it, especially seeing the ghastly pallor where would more normally, since this is Italy, be a mustache on a woman.
As for the literary life, as Gay Talese that major phony would title it, I have also decided to set it aside, my efforts on the book I am engaged in writing now having been dampened by my favorite reader’s (there’s only one) tepid reaction to the latest chapter, the writing of which required more than focus, as everyone else here has been devoted to having a good time. George, my beloved friend from my true youth (Rome, in the late 50s) had to cancel our proposed lunch in Florence, because as noted his wife is failing and their car did, too, so I had to drink of his wisdom over the phone, which crackles the line. The big question I had to ask him, already indicated in these posts, was how to let go of what you consider your art, since I suffer daily if I don’t write something, a poem, a report to you, a book. Helmut, the Nazi therapist I had in Berkeley right after Don died and I was truly insane, desperate for a man because I hadn’t realized how partnered I was until he was with me no more, my deep strain of masochism pulled me back to Helmut even after I left San Francisco, and I called him and said I wanted to learn to love myself unconditionally and not just because I produce something, and Helmut said “Too late.”
Georgie, though, having set aside his paints to tender to Anne, said the mistake we make is thinking we have to do all our work and then we will be happy, when it should be the reverse. We should be happy first. Easy for him to say. There is, he tells me, no Italian word for ‘workaholic’, but he has seen too many of them, even in Tuscany, hard to believe, and then they die. Well the really bad news is we are all going to die anyway, which they don’t tell you at the get-go, because who could go jaunting merrily on that road thinking about how it would end. He also told me once there was no word in Italian for ‘loneliness.’ There is only ‘solitudine’ which means solitude, and that for them is enough because Italians never leave each other alone so they are never lonely.
I could see that last night at the Maccionis, where Mama Egi made dinner at her really warm home for all the veterans of the wedding, family and friends, still here. Included among the guests were the parents of the woman youngest son Mauro had married who recently dumped him, so I guess there is no Italian word for grudge, either. There were many varieties of meat, filets, chicken, rabbit(again) and sausage, but I stayed with my obsession and ate only the prosciutto and salad and asked her for a tomato from a gleaming bowl of them that was on the island stove. She took it and rakishly polished it on the back of her dress where her butt was, shooting me a mischievous glance, so I could see the fun-loving, darling young girl she must have been, before she was everybody’s Mama, including Sirio’s. The table was long and festive, all the men on the other side so they could watch the World Cup and shout ‘Vai, Vai!’ to the Italians who did not vai quite enough, the excuse being that the field was so wet and the ball was slippery. But I wished I had had a camera so I could fix a memory of all those beautiful dark eyes, including the twins’, the eleven year olds who said Justin Bieber is gay, up and over our heads, fixed on the screen.
This is an exceptionally long report—the wedding itself, for those of you who wish to know details, might or might not be in the Observer this week, or if not, I’ll send you the piece if you ask. But the e-mail here is difficult and I have to log in to write it by putting in a code and I didn’t want to waste my time that I had to buy by writing this so used my Word, which I am as good as. Oh, if only we didn’t judge ourselves. It’s easier not to when you have prosecco for breakfast.
KEEP THAT UNDER YOUR HAT
I had some doubts about coming on this trip. I am a victim of the Protestant Ethic, a day’s work well done, compounded by Jewish Guilt—or I feel terrible. So as I have no new achievement under my belt, written books not counting for anything in my mind unless published, and being only a few chapters into the new one, I felt I was not entitled to take a vacation. From what? my Jiminy Cricket would say.
Still, I was happy to be asked to this formidable wedding, details about which it would exhaust me to list, since I have already writ about it as a loving courtesy to my hosts. But once invited, I passed a hat store on Madison Avenue, and seeing the wonderful one in the window, had no choice but to buy it, it was so simply splendid, so splendidly simple, and yet coolly elaborately chic. They wanted a lot more, but I was able to talk them down to $200, promising they would be part of the article I intended to write about the wedding. Then I got cold feet, just like brides do, and started to cancel, but my darling friend Pam said “Buy you got the hat.”
So I made slow haste to come, calling ahead to Delta airlines to make sure I would be able to take the hat on board in its spacious box, and the agent on the phone held while I measured, and it just made the 18” diameter. And then I called Sky Magazine, the Delta in-flight thing to try and get an actual assignment to write about the journey of the hat, figuring it would be much to their advantage since probably the people who know there is a direct flight from JFK to Pisa are fewer than legion. But they called me back and said it wasn’t funny enough, as for that kind of feature, on their back page, they prefer using comedians. Oh, well.
Still I came, and wore the hat to the church part of the wedding, where the bride arrived gorgeously arrayed in white crocheted lace in the black sidecar of a motorcycle driven by her father, and the groom wore Emiliano Zegna gray silk, and I was one of three women out of hundreds who wore a hat. The others were another New Yorker and Georgia, three times Miss Montecatini, but her beauty queen career ended there. Still, she looked cute in her hat.
I, on the other hand, looked very much the matron in a really nice hat. But what the hell. I left the hat in the car for the beach part of the celebration(groaning boards, infinite champagne, suckling pig) giant grapes and prosciutto sliced by two brothers who had taken three years to cure it(I hope of everything.)
Then today, finding that once again I have brought my currency curse on myself—that is to say, the minute I travel the dollar sinks, so even as the euro is in the toilet, my very coming makes it expensive again, and the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are in better shape than they would have been had I not made the voyage, so decided to go home before it gets even worse.
Still, I did have to make one last swing to the open market for some sunglasses—the woman in the really good store was amazingly rude, very un-Italian, I could have been in Paris—so I saved 170 euros which by tomorrow will probably be worth twice what the dollar is if I stay.
So I went to the open market. And guess what was there. My hat. 7 euros. I was tempted to buy it simply to shove it down the throat of the owner of Mandara on Madison(DON’T EVER GO THERE, or if you do, say I sent you and spit on her.)
Oh well. Read somewhere today(could it have been the New Yorker? Probably not, too direct)the Zen saying Live as though you were dead. So walking back to the hotel I passed a beautiful mirrored and fairy-tale decorated carousel, like the one in Bordeaux that Happy, my little Yorkie, had his first and last merry-go-round ride on on what was to be his final holiday, before he had his heart attack in Paris, where his jeweled collar, the one he wore on Oprah but she didn’t show the book, the bitch, hangs in La Cimitiere Pere LaChaise next to hippy bracelets on the headstone of Jim Morrison, since they both died in the same way, in the same place, although Morrison wasn’t at the Plaza Athenee. Anyway, I took a picture of the carousel, and remembered Happy, and our car trip through the Dordogne with Betsy Hailey, a soft-spoken writer who learned to shout ‘Happy, SIT DOWN!; == he was always standing on his hind legs trying to look out the car window.. Maybe he knew ir was his last view of the world.
Italy is as good. Maybe better. A little girl about 18 months, Maria-Luisa, just perfecting her stagger, came by the carousel and rode a miniature auto, and I took her picture because she was almost as beautiful, eye-wise, as the boys last night looking up at the World Cup.
Then because I know what it is to have been cheated but not by an Italian, I forced myself to have a gelati, three flavors, chocolate, bacio, and something toasted with berries in it. Raging, even as I enjoyed, I ate it all up. Soon I will be in a bed that is JUST THE RIGHT SIZE.
Still, I was happy to be asked to this formidable wedding, details about which it would exhaust me to list, since I have already writ about it as a loving courtesy to my hosts. But once invited, I passed a hat store on Madison Avenue, and seeing the wonderful one in the window, had no choice but to buy it, it was so simply splendid, so splendidly simple, and yet coolly elaborately chic. They wanted a lot more, but I was able to talk them down to $200, promising they would be part of the article I intended to write about the wedding. Then I got cold feet, just like brides do, and started to cancel, but my darling friend Pam said “Buy you got the hat.”
So I made slow haste to come, calling ahead to Delta airlines to make sure I would be able to take the hat on board in its spacious box, and the agent on the phone held while I measured, and it just made the 18” diameter. And then I called Sky Magazine, the Delta in-flight thing to try and get an actual assignment to write about the journey of the hat, figuring it would be much to their advantage since probably the people who know there is a direct flight from JFK to Pisa are fewer than legion. But they called me back and said it wasn’t funny enough, as for that kind of feature, on their back page, they prefer using comedians. Oh, well.
Still I came, and wore the hat to the church part of the wedding, where the bride arrived gorgeously arrayed in white crocheted lace in the black sidecar of a motorcycle driven by her father, and the groom wore Emiliano Zegna gray silk, and I was one of three women out of hundreds who wore a hat. The others were another New Yorker and Georgia, three times Miss Montecatini, but her beauty queen career ended there. Still, she looked cute in her hat.
I, on the other hand, looked very much the matron in a really nice hat. But what the hell. I left the hat in the car for the beach part of the celebration(groaning boards, infinite champagne, suckling pig) giant grapes and prosciutto sliced by two brothers who had taken three years to cure it(I hope of everything.)
Then today, finding that once again I have brought my currency curse on myself—that is to say, the minute I travel the dollar sinks, so even as the euro is in the toilet, my very coming makes it expensive again, and the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) are in better shape than they would have been had I not made the voyage, so decided to go home before it gets even worse.
Still, I did have to make one last swing to the open market for some sunglasses—the woman in the really good store was amazingly rude, very un-Italian, I could have been in Paris—so I saved 170 euros which by tomorrow will probably be worth twice what the dollar is if I stay.
So I went to the open market. And guess what was there. My hat. 7 euros. I was tempted to buy it simply to shove it down the throat of the owner of Mandara on Madison(DON’T EVER GO THERE, or if you do, say I sent you and spit on her.)
Oh well. Read somewhere today(could it have been the New Yorker? Probably not, too direct)the Zen saying Live as though you were dead. So walking back to the hotel I passed a beautiful mirrored and fairy-tale decorated carousel, like the one in Bordeaux that Happy, my little Yorkie, had his first and last merry-go-round ride on on what was to be his final holiday, before he had his heart attack in Paris, where his jeweled collar, the one he wore on Oprah but she didn’t show the book, the bitch, hangs in La Cimitiere Pere LaChaise next to hippy bracelets on the headstone of Jim Morrison, since they both died in the same way, in the same place, although Morrison wasn’t at the Plaza Athenee. Anyway, I took a picture of the carousel, and remembered Happy, and our car trip through the Dordogne with Betsy Hailey, a soft-spoken writer who learned to shout ‘Happy, SIT DOWN!; == he was always standing on his hind legs trying to look out the car window.. Maybe he knew ir was his last view of the world.
Italy is as good. Maybe better. A little girl about 18 months, Maria-Luisa, just perfecting her stagger, came by the carousel and rode a miniature auto, and I took her picture because she was almost as beautiful, eye-wise, as the boys last night looking up at the World Cup.
Then because I know what it is to have been cheated but not by an Italian, I forced myself to have a gelati, three flavors, chocolate, bacio, and something toasted with berries in it. Raging, even as I enjoyed, I ate it all up. Soon I will be in a bed that is JUST THE RIGHT SIZE.
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