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.
Monday, July 05, 2010
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.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
I KNEW HIM, HORATIO
So Dennis Hopper has left us, one of the first friends I had in Hollywood, the youngest he was of ‘Young Hollywood,’ the clique that ruled at the time, the time being the end of the ‘50s,early 60s. We never thought about death. All we worried about was whether or not we would be successes, love would ever find us, Fame would be elusive. Nobody ever considered we would grow old or, as in my case, older. And death was a dramatic surprise, Jimmy Dean having crashed his car, something that gave Dennis his big brag, his having achieved nothing yet on his own except for small parts and telling Jack Warner to go fuck himself, so his great credential was having been Jimmy’s best friend, with Dean not able to verify or contradict.
We never thought about dying as part of the life process, because we were that young. I’m sorry because I don’t think he had a really happy life, but he must have enjoyed being over-rated. There will be a piece online at Vanity Fair that I wrote about him, so read it if you want to know more and deeper and funnier, and earlier.
These have been strange weeks as I rev up to write a new book, and try to love New York. Have seen a number of disappointing plays, Fences, in which Denzel was a whole lot better as a working man in (I think it was) Pittsburgh than he was as Brutus in last year’s horrific Julius Caesar, played in modern battle costume as if it were in Turkey, with a lot of machine guns. Viola Davis was good but whole evening more a slice of life than a play, even if it was August Wilson.
Also went with my baby cousin Lori to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that I had heard someone raving about. I must be careful on whom I eavesdrop. It was painfully collegiate, something a wise-ass from Princeton might have gloried in. But the African-American gent next to me loved it, I think probably because it portrayed America as horrible to the Seminoles as we’d been to the other Native Americans, thereby giving a universality to our mean-spiritedness.
The boy who played Jackson, though, was cute with a hint of blue eye shadow, so Lori remarked that if Adam Lambert had been in the role it might have been more
To carry on about.
Went to throw my newspapers away in the recycle bin in my building, and pulled out a magazine called ‘REFORM JUDAISM’ as its cover story is ‘Unmasking Shakespeare,’ “Was the greatest canon of Western literature written by a Jewish woman?” Made me laugh a lot, though the painting of her, Amelia Bassano, is very pretty, all in Elizabethan array, mit pearls, holding a mask of Shakespeare a few inches in front of her face. I hope Erica Jong doesn’t get hold of the magazine, as her Serenisima was, I thought, an embarrassment, though I didn’t tell her that at the time, as we were friend-ish, and at the Cooking School of Umbria, an expedition I had arranged, so I read quietly in between sauces, and tried not to guffaw when the young Shakespeare, there to research The Merchant of Venice, falls in love with a nun who, I think I remember, gets pregnant and dies, and as they carry her upstairs, someone actually says—NO NO I begged aloud before I turned the page—“Good Night Sweet Princess.” God knows what Erica would do with this one. Perhaps use it as an argument for reincarnation, herself being the result of being Bassano in that previous life, and the Master herself. Jews are really funny, but I don’t think they’ll claim Dennis.
We never thought about dying as part of the life process, because we were that young. I’m sorry because I don’t think he had a really happy life, but he must have enjoyed being over-rated. There will be a piece online at Vanity Fair that I wrote about him, so read it if you want to know more and deeper and funnier, and earlier.
These have been strange weeks as I rev up to write a new book, and try to love New York. Have seen a number of disappointing plays, Fences, in which Denzel was a whole lot better as a working man in (I think it was) Pittsburgh than he was as Brutus in last year’s horrific Julius Caesar, played in modern battle costume as if it were in Turkey, with a lot of machine guns. Viola Davis was good but whole evening more a slice of life than a play, even if it was August Wilson.
Also went with my baby cousin Lori to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that I had heard someone raving about. I must be careful on whom I eavesdrop. It was painfully collegiate, something a wise-ass from Princeton might have gloried in. But the African-American gent next to me loved it, I think probably because it portrayed America as horrible to the Seminoles as we’d been to the other Native Americans, thereby giving a universality to our mean-spiritedness.
The boy who played Jackson, though, was cute with a hint of blue eye shadow, so Lori remarked that if Adam Lambert had been in the role it might have been more
To carry on about.
Went to throw my newspapers away in the recycle bin in my building, and pulled out a magazine called ‘REFORM JUDAISM’ as its cover story is ‘Unmasking Shakespeare,’ “Was the greatest canon of Western literature written by a Jewish woman?” Made me laugh a lot, though the painting of her, Amelia Bassano, is very pretty, all in Elizabethan array, mit pearls, holding a mask of Shakespeare a few inches in front of her face. I hope Erica Jong doesn’t get hold of the magazine, as her Serenisima was, I thought, an embarrassment, though I didn’t tell her that at the time, as we were friend-ish, and at the Cooking School of Umbria, an expedition I had arranged, so I read quietly in between sauces, and tried not to guffaw when the young Shakespeare, there to research The Merchant of Venice, falls in love with a nun who, I think I remember, gets pregnant and dies, and as they carry her upstairs, someone actually says—NO NO I begged aloud before I turned the page—“Good Night Sweet Princess.” God knows what Erica would do with this one. Perhaps use it as an argument for reincarnation, herself being the result of being Bassano in that previous life, and the Master herself. Jews are really funny, but I don’t think they’ll claim Dennis.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
REPORTS OF MY DEATH
Like most American writers worth or not even worth their salt, I have long been an admirer of Mark Twain. I always felt a loving sense of connection, and in one of my novels, Kingdom Come, which takes place in the Afterlife, the heroine finds him in the place in Heaven for those who didn’t believe, where they get into an argument. My American Lit professor from Bryn Mawr, Warner Berthoff, gave me an A plus for their exchange, and though it came many years after graduation, lifted my heart. That was my only deep connection with that masterly gentleman, if you didn’t count a happy friendship with Kurt Vonnegut about which my son, Robert, after having dinner with him, said “that must make you feel like you’re with Mark Twain.”.
That same young man, Robert, called me today on my cell when I was at my doctor’s office, laughing, to tell me that his office-mate had Wikipediaed me and found my life to have ended on April 21, 2010. This has been a challenging few weeks, but none of the difficulties I encountered seem so bad to me now, as I check my pulse and review the things that made them seem dispiriting. There were a few encounters with people I thought were allies who turned out not to be, the suicide attempt of Mimi, who ate a stalk of grapes and had to be Intensive-Cared in the pet hospital, as raisins and grapes destroy the renal system and cause kidney failure, a few theatrical openings and presentations that make me wonder what Broadway is coming to or going from, and why I still hanker for it, and the opposite unexpectedly upbeat discovery that I had friends I hadn’t realized were. All of it put in curious perspective by my death date, though I could not help feeling good that I had been cited, when passing. as novelist and ‘poet,’ when very few, except for you to whom I send my pomes know of the poetry. So I am given these days to examine what really matters, and review those of them when I was supposedly already gone, to find them not bad at all.
But of course I called to mind (and checked, though not on Wikipedia) the quote long attributed to that literary hero, “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” The actual letter reads “reports of my death are exaggerated,” which is good enough for me, being the same in my case. Still, I am going tomorrow for a Stress test, as my doctor was sufficiently spooked to think it was a good idea to check. But it remains an honor to be connected in any way with Mr. Clemens, so I hope if there is that heaven in which he didn’t believe he is having a chuckle, reminding us both not to take things too seriously.
That same young man, Robert, called me today on my cell when I was at my doctor’s office, laughing, to tell me that his office-mate had Wikipediaed me and found my life to have ended on April 21, 2010. This has been a challenging few weeks, but none of the difficulties I encountered seem so bad to me now, as I check my pulse and review the things that made them seem dispiriting. There were a few encounters with people I thought were allies who turned out not to be, the suicide attempt of Mimi, who ate a stalk of grapes and had to be Intensive-Cared in the pet hospital, as raisins and grapes destroy the renal system and cause kidney failure, a few theatrical openings and presentations that make me wonder what Broadway is coming to or going from, and why I still hanker for it, and the opposite unexpectedly upbeat discovery that I had friends I hadn’t realized were. All of it put in curious perspective by my death date, though I could not help feeling good that I had been cited, when passing. as novelist and ‘poet,’ when very few, except for you to whom I send my pomes know of the poetry. So I am given these days to examine what really matters, and review those of them when I was supposedly already gone, to find them not bad at all.
But of course I called to mind (and checked, though not on Wikipedia) the quote long attributed to that literary hero, “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” The actual letter reads “reports of my death are exaggerated,” which is good enough for me, being the same in my case. Still, I am going tomorrow for a Stress test, as my doctor was sufficiently spooked to think it was a good idea to check. But it remains an honor to be connected in any way with Mr. Clemens, so I hope if there is that heaven in which he didn’t believe he is having a chuckle, reminding us both not to take things too seriously.
Monday, February 15, 2010
The Ghost of SuperBowls Past
I was never one for football. The college I went to, Bryn Mawr, was near Haverford and Swarthmore, and to describe the boys(men?) who went there as effete and/or epicene was to be lavishly understated. I attended only one football game of theirs with a hefty German exchange student named Gerd who feared for the lives of those on the field if they as much as tripped, much less were tackled. When I first met my husband, who was a jock, albeit darling, he was producing the original games of the Jets, then a brand new team, but as he really loved me, I did not have to pretend interest, though as writ in other Reports, at our wedding, Stanley Kubrick, on hearing that Don was producing those games, told him not to follow the ball, but keep the camera on the line, as that was the most interesting part of the game. Don told him “Stanley, if I can roll a credit at the end that says ‘Directed by Stanley Kubrick,’ I’ll keep the camera anywhere you say.” That immediately gave rise to an idea of Don’s, to bring in other directors, so there would be one game by Billy Wilder, and so on. Of course it never materialized but it was a funny concept.
Less than funny was the price women paid for loving their men during football season. I know there are many women who actually loved football, or pretended to, but I was never one of them. As John O’Hara always waited for winter to begin one of his novels(now mostly forgotten, alas, as a sort-of friend went to buy one on the orders of her writing teacher, and the stores carried none of them) I attribute my productivity during football seasons to fleeing into the other room where I wrote, to avoid the rasping voice of Howard Cosell. One of my meditations in How to Survive in Suburbia when your Heart’s in the Himalayas was ‘Imagine Life as Mrs. Howard Cosell.’ A chilling thought, for those of you who remember.
But much as I hated football, I did love my husband, and so we hosted many SuperBowl parties, one of them a surprise for Don’t birthday which usually came around that time, where he was actually upstairs while the guests gathered downstairs, and he never had a clue. I loved surprises, especially when they were. Once I got him to go to a concert, black tie in San Francisco, to what turned out to be a sit-down black tie party in his honor at a friend’s Mansion(not showing off, that was the name of his hotel) and even though we ran into a couple who were friends at the airport, also in black tie, he thought they were going to the same concert. I also invited Cary Grant, who did not come, though we all know or at least those of us old enough to remember, how good he looked in a tux, but he did call Don at the party to wish him Happy Birthday, which added to the surprise.(Don’s birthday was Jan. 16th, Ben Franklin’s the 17th, and Cary Grant’s the 18th, so I used to have a continuum of Polish birthdays for my three favorite guys.)
Then there was little Robert, who, at six, spent a whole SuperBowl party with Steven Spielberg, and when I asked Spielberg what he had found to talk about with my son, he said “He knows more about football than anyone I have ever met.” That encyclopedic knowledge has been passed down to Lukas, now l0, and Silas, 6, both of whom can go on endlessly about stats and fiercely love the game, though the NFL website has been most remiss about sending Silas his Brett Favre jersey, so he will probably have left the Vikings or gone on to yet another team or genuinely retired by the time it arrives and I will have to send it back to exchange for Tom Brady. SO the family tradition of loving football has been passed down through the boys, and, I must admit, I realized how much I missed Don after his early death when, all alone, I actually turned on the playoffs.
But none of that prepared me for the actual joy of yesterday’s game. As you may have noted, our country is in a great state of disrepair and dysfunction, with many devoted to simply keeping anything good from happening, a whole party pledged to blocking Barack. You may have missed the news in the FT(it’s in the lobby of this hotel, so I have become global) that China bared its dragon teeth, and said it was not wise of Obama to meet with the Dalai Lama with the US in a state of economic crisis, which sounded like a not too heavily veiled threat that they’d call their notes, as you may be aware that they own us. (I am assured by Jack Kornfield, my Jewru, who is close to that spiritual leader that the meeting will indeed take place, and what Obama needs is a copy of The Prince, as he clearly lacks an inner Machiavelli, and even in the opinion of a spiritual man could use some of that.)
Anyway, as you all know, New Orleans represents the greatest glitch of that awful administration if you leave out unnecessary wars and the destruction of the economy, so to have them rise and redeem and triumph as a team is absolutely glorious. It did feel to me like redemption. Rachel Maddow, who, openly gay, is much the softest voice, not to mention the smartest on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann having too completely filled out his terrible suits and his even worse ties and Chris Matthews yelling at everybody, did a lead-up on Friday that was incredibly touching to what a victory would mean to New Orleans, already so evenhanded and proud they planned a parade even if they lost. So I wish I could be in their numbers when the Saints Go Marching in. What a day it must in that city, and tomorrow is Mardi Gras. And the best of it, the worst of it, it would have been if I went on clinging to outmoded feelings, was I really loved the game. I hope it wasn’t just because my son hates Payton Manning.
Less than funny was the price women paid for loving their men during football season. I know there are many women who actually loved football, or pretended to, but I was never one of them. As John O’Hara always waited for winter to begin one of his novels(now mostly forgotten, alas, as a sort-of friend went to buy one on the orders of her writing teacher, and the stores carried none of them) I attribute my productivity during football seasons to fleeing into the other room where I wrote, to avoid the rasping voice of Howard Cosell. One of my meditations in How to Survive in Suburbia when your Heart’s in the Himalayas was ‘Imagine Life as Mrs. Howard Cosell.’ A chilling thought, for those of you who remember.
But much as I hated football, I did love my husband, and so we hosted many SuperBowl parties, one of them a surprise for Don’t birthday which usually came around that time, where he was actually upstairs while the guests gathered downstairs, and he never had a clue. I loved surprises, especially when they were. Once I got him to go to a concert, black tie in San Francisco, to what turned out to be a sit-down black tie party in his honor at a friend’s Mansion(not showing off, that was the name of his hotel) and even though we ran into a couple who were friends at the airport, also in black tie, he thought they were going to the same concert. I also invited Cary Grant, who did not come, though we all know or at least those of us old enough to remember, how good he looked in a tux, but he did call Don at the party to wish him Happy Birthday, which added to the surprise.(Don’s birthday was Jan. 16th, Ben Franklin’s the 17th, and Cary Grant’s the 18th, so I used to have a continuum of Polish birthdays for my three favorite guys.)
Then there was little Robert, who, at six, spent a whole SuperBowl party with Steven Spielberg, and when I asked Spielberg what he had found to talk about with my son, he said “He knows more about football than anyone I have ever met.” That encyclopedic knowledge has been passed down to Lukas, now l0, and Silas, 6, both of whom can go on endlessly about stats and fiercely love the game, though the NFL website has been most remiss about sending Silas his Brett Favre jersey, so he will probably have left the Vikings or gone on to yet another team or genuinely retired by the time it arrives and I will have to send it back to exchange for Tom Brady. SO the family tradition of loving football has been passed down through the boys, and, I must admit, I realized how much I missed Don after his early death when, all alone, I actually turned on the playoffs.
But none of that prepared me for the actual joy of yesterday’s game. As you may have noted, our country is in a great state of disrepair and dysfunction, with many devoted to simply keeping anything good from happening, a whole party pledged to blocking Barack. You may have missed the news in the FT(it’s in the lobby of this hotel, so I have become global) that China bared its dragon teeth, and said it was not wise of Obama to meet with the Dalai Lama with the US in a state of economic crisis, which sounded like a not too heavily veiled threat that they’d call their notes, as you may be aware that they own us. (I am assured by Jack Kornfield, my Jewru, who is close to that spiritual leader that the meeting will indeed take place, and what Obama needs is a copy of The Prince, as he clearly lacks an inner Machiavelli, and even in the opinion of a spiritual man could use some of that.)
Anyway, as you all know, New Orleans represents the greatest glitch of that awful administration if you leave out unnecessary wars and the destruction of the economy, so to have them rise and redeem and triumph as a team is absolutely glorious. It did feel to me like redemption. Rachel Maddow, who, openly gay, is much the softest voice, not to mention the smartest on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann having too completely filled out his terrible suits and his even worse ties and Chris Matthews yelling at everybody, did a lead-up on Friday that was incredibly touching to what a victory would mean to New Orleans, already so evenhanded and proud they planned a parade even if they lost. So I wish I could be in their numbers when the Saints Go Marching in. What a day it must in that city, and tomorrow is Mardi Gras. And the best of it, the worst of it, it would have been if I went on clinging to outmoded feelings, was I really loved the game. I hope it wasn’t just because my son hates Payton Manning.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)