The Sheila Variations

Basically, I rock

My show was incredible last night. A real turning-point in my life. Thank you EVERYONE who wrote to me, asking me how it went, including one blogger who emailed me in the middle of the night, "smashed", demanding an update. I LOVE THAT.

There is so much to say, and I had a hard time getting to sleep last night, my mind was buzzing about.

This is a new thing for me: performing my own words. It has been something I have considered doing, in a "maybe someday" (ie: LAME) way for years. And last night was the first time.

When I heard the first laugh from the audience (and they laughed as a whole - it sounded like a thunderclap - Ahhh - there is NOTHING like that sound!), I relaxed. I felt them with me.

This is just a beginning. I am already looking into more venues. This piece must be developed. It has already found an audience. I was bombarded afterwards with requests that I email it to people ... I don't say this to brag. I just say this because: the life of an actor can be one of toiling along in obscurity, obviously ... that is part of the gig. But when something comes along that makes an impact, you MUST take a moment to stop and smell the roses. Because time is cruel, and "nothing gold can stay".

I am particularly pleased because of how people responded to my writing. That is a whole new thing for me (at least in terms of my life as an actress), and I feel quite pleased.

I feel like my posture is better today, even. I am filled with a glow of happiness.

And after the show, me and my ENTOURAGE (all my siblings, my O'Malley cousins, their spouses, my friends, 2 of my former bosses) went out to a nearby drinking establishment, and talked the night away. We also did karaoke.

My cousin Liam did a rousing rendition of "Act Naturally", and I followed him with a wailing version of "Oh Darlin'".

All in all, a beautiful evening.

One for the books.

Kipling's Cat

This post is a companion piece to the one below.

The dream-palace idea got me to thinking. About labels in general.

No label is (or should be) a monolith. Humanity is too diverse. If you feel you must accept every single precept set down by any ideology, then you clearly are involved in a cult, and need to de-program your brain.

One of the most important aspects of being human is our ability to use critical thinking. Too many ideologies (conservatism, liberalism, feminism, communism, whatever) demand that we give up this crucial aspect ... demand that we be obedient, that we stop using that critical-thinking side of our brain, and just submit. Accept the ideology unthinkingly.

"Here is what we believe."
"But ... well, this seems to make more sense to me..."
"Nope. Sorry. This is what we believe."

I hate the use of "we" in that context. It smacks of exclusivity, as in: excluding those who do not agree.

I do not accept any monolith. I am like Kipling's cat. You know, the one who "walked by himself". I memorized the closing sentences of Kipling's short story (I first read it when I was 17 or something like that - not knowing at the time what a rabid Irish-hater the guy was - I probably wouldn't read Kipling NOW, which would be a shame. That's my own monolithic ideology running the show there).

Anyway, I memorized the closing sentences because they seem to so completely describe my personality. And not just my personality, but ... how I experience my journey through life. I feel like I could have written the lines myself; they seem to have come from me:

The Cat keeps his side of the bargain too. He will kill mice and he will be kind to Babies when he is in the house, as long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, he is the Cat that walks by himself and all places are alike to him, and if you look out at nights you can see him waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone---just the same as before.

I like to recite that last phrase ... it sings: "you can see him waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone" -- beautiful.

Kipling's Cat would not submit to any monolithic ideology, and neither will I.

Re-visiting the Dream Palaces

This is not exactly a timely piece, but it's something worth re-visiting, and worth mentioning.

At the end of April, the phenomenal David Brooks had a piece in The Weekly Standard, called "The Collapse of the Dream Palaces". He used the phrase "dream palaces", echoing the title of Fouad Ajami's wonderful book called Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey.

Brooks, writing in the direct aftermath of April 9, was reacting to the immediate and knee-jerk Bush-hatred flowing about the airwaves, the defeatism, the pessismism, but he also tackled the psychological "dream-palaces", erected not just by the Arabs, but by all of the ideologists screaming around at the time. Well, obviously, that war of ideology is still going on right now, which is why I wanted to bring up Brooks' incredible article again. Read it, if you didn't do so the first time around.

But more on the dream-palace concept.

Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese journalist, wrote in his book about the Arab nationalist movement of the 20th century ... the hopes of the Arab intellectuals and poets, the true thinkers of these societies, fighting for Islam to grow up, to expand, to let in social change. Arab nationalism, of course, was hijacked by Islamism. I found Ajami's book to be very sad. The intellectuals are still out there. They are still trying to initiate change. Most of them are in jail, or persecuted. Or, they write from the safety of Western countries.

The thesis of Brooks' piece in The Weekly Standard is:

Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are.

He identifies a couple of different "dream palaces":

The dream palace of the Arabs, the dream palace of the Europeans, and the dream palace of the "American Bush haters".

People refuse to deal with reality. They see the world through a filter. Different filters, all. I mean, this is a very human thing. I do not set myself apart from that statement. If we did not have filters for reality, we all would be vacant hollow shells tooling around, with no opinions. I look at the world through my own Sheila-Irish-American-Catholic-artist filter. This is how I process information.

But!

When the filter turns into a dream palace, a rigid construct of an ideology which brooks no self-criticism, no growth ... you are done for. You have stepped OUT of the dialogue, you have removed yourself from the conversation, and you have removed yourself from the possibility of being a part of any kind of workable solution.

You are unable to even contemplate that the "other side" may have anything to say, that "the other side" may ALSO be coming from a place of integrity, of true belief.

Eventually, what happens is: you have put your hands over your ears, to block out these unsettling voices, voices which you cannot recognize, voices which you cannot even allow yourself to hear ... because if you DO, then the house of cards will come crashing down.

Most people have beliefs, opinions, standards they try to live by. This is good.

I myself, while definitely a hot-head, and definitely opinionated, try to take a live and let live approach. I do not want to live in a dream palace. I read a ton of books, on all different topics, I have vehement opinions which I will express, I believe in things. I believe in things firmly. But I never ever want to be closed to growth, to development, to being able to LISTEN. Being able to actually hear the validity of what someone else might be saying to me. I also have no desire to live in a fantasy world. A world of pure ideology, of untouched conviction. No. That is spiritual death.

Brooks describes the "dream palace of the Arabists":

In this dream palace, it is always the twelfth century, and every Western incursion into the Middle East is a Crusade. The Americans are always invaders and occupiers. In this dream palace, any Arab who hates America is a defender of Arab honor, so Osama bin Laden becomes an Arab Joe Louis, and Saddam Hussein, who probably killed more Muslims than any other person in the history of the world, becomes the champion of the Muslim cause.

In this dream palace, the problems of the Arab world are never the Arabs' fault. It is always the Jews, the Zionists, the Americans, and the imperialists who are to blame. This palace reeks of conspiracies--of Israelis who blew up the World Trade Center, of Jews who put the blood of Muslim children in their pastries, of Americans who fake images of Iraqis celebrating in Baghdad in order to fool the world. In this palace, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi information minister, was taken seriously because he told the Arabists what they wanted to hear.

Then Brooks tackles the Europeans:

In this palace, America is a bigger threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein. America is the land of rotting cities, the electric chair, serial killers, gun-crazed hunters, shallow materialists, religious nuts, savage capitalists, the all-powerful Jewish lobby, the oil lobby, the military-industrial complex, and bloodthirsty cowboy-presidents...

In the European dream palace, Americans are terminally naive, filled with crazy notions like the belief that Arabs are capable of democracy. In this vision of reality, Americans are at once childish, selfish, and trigger-happy, but Arabs live just this side of savagery. Any action that might rile them will cause the Arab street to explode, and will lead to a thousand more bin Ladens.

And the last dream palace? Reserved for the Bush/America haters:

In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

Brooks goes into much more depth, but that, pretty much, is the basis of it.

Brooks then talks about the many many many people who do not live in dream palaces, who do not have fiery beliefs or convictions, and who also may not read 10 newspapers a day, who are not addicted to being completely informed, but who definitely want to participate, who want to know what our leaders are up to, what is really going on:

BUT THERE IS ANOTHER, larger group of people whose worldviews will be permanently altered by the war in Iraq. Members of this group were not firm opponents of the war. Indeed, they were mild supporters, or they were ambivalent. They were members of the vast, nervous American majority that swung behind the president as the fighting commenced.

These people do not have foreign policy categories deeply entrenched in their brains. They don't see themselves as hawks or doves, realists or Wilsonians. They don't see each looming conflict either through the prism of Vietnam, as many peaceniks do, or through the prism of the 1930s and the Cold War, as many conservatives do. They don't attract any press coverage or much attention, because they seldom take a bold stand either way. Their foreign policy instincts are unformed. But they are the quiet people who swing elections.

(emphasis mine)

Brooks talks about the hatred of Bush. He sees it as pathology.

The conservatives who hated Clinton also seemed pathological to me, at the time. As more comes out about Clinton's behavior in the White House, the more I am horrified by him, and horrified that I voted for the guy. But the vehemence, the gut-level HATRED people had for him ... seemed very unbalanced to me at the time. It seemed insane. Personal. It was like they did not care how much their persecution of their own President made him look bad and weak in the eyes of the world. If our President looks bad and weak, then we look bad and weak. We always must hold our public officials to account, it is our duty as citizens to keep our top guys in line. Our system is set up that way. But the hatred for Clinton, and now the hatred for Bush, felt (and feels) PERSONAL. It's nasty.

Please don't write to me and tell me that politics is a dirty game. That is not what I am talking about here. I am not saying: "Why can't we all just get along? Why can't everyone just be NICE?" I am talking about insane and pathological hatred. Hatred which blurs the sight, and makes people behave like Cookie-Monster on crack.

Those people live in dream-palaces. Dream-palaces constructed of absolute rights and absolute wrongs. They literally cannot HEAR anymore.

Brooks makes some very good points:

The Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

That last sentence about claiming they "always accepted certain realities" we saw come to pass, post the EASY initial roll-into Baghdad. Vocifeous Bush-hating op-ed columnists, who had been be-moaning the upcoming quagmire, and the rising up of the Arab street, and the destruction of Israel, blah blah blah, (the same ones who were warning all of us trepidatiously about that "brutal Afghan winter") suddenly started saying, "We always knew we would win this war. But the problem now is _______" (insert some random complaint).

Not even admitting that their dire predictions were a bit off. True, there were a couple of courageous columnists who owned up to their error, and I applaud them. They aren't holed up in a dream-palace (a palace which is actually made of paper-thin glass, ready to shatter at the least evidence that perhaps their entire belief structure may be built on sand.)

I am very very concerned about all of this.

I am very concerned about ideology trumping critical thinking and rationality.

Democracy, federalism, representative government: none of this stuff has anything to do with creating a dream palace. None of this has to do with purity, or perfectability. The founding fathers knew that man was "irredeemable". Nobody is perfect.

The rules of impeachment were already in place when George Washington was inaugurated.

I love that fact, because, if you really think about it, it's so cynical. But it is also highly logical. Man (and society) must be protected against his man's own irredeemability.

There is a truism about human nature, and I heard it once described somewhere in the analogy of building a new town:

You go out into the wilderness and you start to plan out the town that you will build. It's going to be a great town, filled with happy people, happy people who have jobs, and who enjoy living there. This town will be a blazing success. But you immediately and instinctively allocate space for a cemetary and space for a prison. No questions asked. No conversation of: "Well, in THIS town, we won't NEED a prison."

That's not a dream palace. That's reality.

I highly recommend Fouad Ajami's book, for those of you inclined. It describes a tragedy. The tragedy of Arab intellectuals. The ones trying to live in the real world, trying to build a real society. Instead, they are now trapped in a rigid (and because it's rigid, it can shatter at the least provocation) dream palace.

Redheaded Reminder

If you live in or around New York, heads up:

Save the date, Tuesday, July 29. That's TOMORROW.

I will be performing a piece I have written (called "74 Facts and One Lie") in an evening of autobiographical performance pieces.

Here are the details:

432 West 42nd Street, 3rd floor (that's on 42nd Street and Dyer - one block west of Port Authority) - it's a building with a bright red door

Tuesday, July 29 8 pm

It's free!

Diary Friday

All right, so here is my latest Diary Friday, for those of you who have been asking me (and you know who you are!) I came across this entry this morning, and first of all: it made me LAUGH. I had forgotten most of it ... although, oddly, a bunch of it ended up in a short story I recently wrote, almost word-for-word. So obviously I hadn't forgotten it at all.

It is from a very crazy and fun time in my life: the summer after I had first moved to Chicago, I was single for the first time in 3 and a half years, and I basically was wreaking havoc up and down the lake shores. I met a guy that summer who is still a great friend today. I will call him "Max" in this entry. We began "hanging out" that summer. Everything was brand new, very exciting, and he was completely WACKED.

But what I found interesting about this entry is that: all of the elements which contributed to he and I lasting BEYOND just a summer fling are evident in this absolutely insane (and mildly mortifying - to me, anyway) entry. Everything I liked about him I wrote about here.

He is one of my favorite people on the face of this earth. Very glad we are still friends. And the tale of this crazy night in Chicago, to my taste, explains why.

July

It was 11 at night. I put on some music. I sat in my brand-new kitchen chair. Put the lights on low. I was kind of - sleepy. And - I felt kind of fragile actually. Breakable. I was ready to doze off -

Then the phone rang. (Here comes the Wrench) I really was half-asleep in my chair, because it rang 4 times and my machine picked up before I figured out what was going on. And I really hate to sound like a broken record - but - it was M. and I COULDN'T BELIEVE IT.

This has totally been my "bimbo book". A bimbo from beginning to end. I truly thought and believed that I would never hear from him again. And that would have been okay - I was completely unprepared for this Wrench. I was awake in a second.

He was obviously calling from a bar: loud screams and music in the background. Of course, I leapt like a cheetah to pick up the phone. (I am an absolute BIMBO)

So all he got out before I picked up was: "Uh - Sheila - this is Max..."

"M.?"

He is a crazy man. He is a lunatic.

Turns out, he was at Lottie's, assuming that Tuesday nights were open mike nights. Now, I do not know where this crazy boy got it into his head that Lottie's has an open mike on Tuesday. He has mentioned it a couple times, and I always say, "M. - Lottie's doesn't have an open-mike night."

"It doesn't?"

And I explain it all to him again. But he doesn't retain it. We have had the same conversation about 4 times now.

I told this to Jackie and she said, "Why does he keep doing that?" And then we laughed hysterically at M., fixated on there being, of all things, an open-mike night at Lottie's on Tuesday nights.

So he called me from the pay phone at Lottie's, bellowing at me over the din: "Hey - where are you guys? Isn't there an open mike on Tuesday nights? I was just in the neighborhood-"

(He lives in Oak Park. He doesn't even live in Chicago. How could he just have been in the neighborhood? I told Jackie that he had said this, and she said, "Was he joking or was he seriously saying 'I was in the neighborhood'?" I said, "Jackie, he was serious." And we laughed at the poor boy again.)

He kept talking, "So I went downstairs, and I was the only one there..."

I spoke very patiently. "M.. There is not and there never has been an open mike at Lottie's. On Tuesday or any other night."

We argued over this detail for some time. He insisted that I told him I sang at Lottie's on Tuesdays. I could not have told him this, because it is not true.

He challenged me with the gig Jackie and I had there on July 4th: "July 4th was a Tuesday."

I said, "No, it was a Saturday."

Then we argued about that. He insisted that July 4th was a Tuesday. It was ridiculous, I was looking right at my calendar, right at the July 4th falling on a Saturday and he still argued with me.

I said, "So what's up? What are you gonna do?"

He said, "Well - I'm all about gettin' together with you tonight."

"Well all right, honey." I said.

He just is not a small-talk beat-around-the-bush kind of guy.

I said, "Well, you want to meet at a drinking establishment in my neighborhood?"

"Yeah, okay-"

I couldn't think of one. And he said, "What's that pool bar one block south of Belmont?"

I could only think of The Lakeview, a place that looks so dangerous and threatening that Jackie and I have said to each other, "You could not pay me enough $ to go in there alone." The place gives me the creeps. I said, apprehensively, "The Lakeview?"

"Yeah. The Lakeview."

I can't believe my own life. I am involved with a guy who invites me to THE LAKEVIEW at 11 pm.

I said, "That place looks horrible." I described to M. the maniac lurching out and barfing right in front of me, one morning at 11 am. Charming. "I swore I'd never go in there after seeing that."

He said, laughing, "Well, now you have to go."

The Lakeview has become a kind of symbol to me and Jackie. We compare the scariness-level of bars by comparing it to The Lakeview.

"I was in a scary bar last night."
"As scary as The Lakeview?"
"Oh, definitely not-"
"Oh. Okay."

But I feel safe with M.. Believe it or not, I do. So I said, "Yeah. Let's meet at The Lakeview."

So we hung up. I was amazed that 10 minutes before I was asleep, having NO CLUE that in an hour I would be swilling beer with a wild man in the scariest bar in town. But nothing about him, in general, is threatening or weird to me. I showered, got dressed. I kept bursting into laughter at the thought that I was going to meet him at THE LAKEVIEW at midnight.

So I set out for The Lakeview, 2 blocks away. I actually kind of felt like I was going into cardiac arrest. I murmured to myself, and to M., "Please be there, M., please be there - I don't want to walk in there alone-"

To sit alone at The Lakeview was something not to be contemplated. I could not do it. M. has no clue what that feels like, for me. Walking through a world, where, suddenly, you are not welcome. Or - you are threatened, you are scared, you are prey. The doorway to The Lakeview looks like the entrance to hell.

I breathed a prayer "M., please be here..." and I entered, scanning the bar, desperately avoiding eye contact, looking, looking, looking. I felt the eyes on me. Do men understand how threatening it can be to JUST be looked at? A look can be a threat. Do they get that? Well, of course some men do.

I was getting comments from every side. "Oooh, baby..." "Hey, redhead, over here-" Thank God I spotted M. instantly. Playing pool in the back. I only had a second of being lost and scared in the doorway. So there he was. Everything changed. I walked through the gawking crowd, and I was okay. M. was here. Wearing his bandana around his head. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but I did walk towards him as though I were tiptoeing through a minefield, keeping my eyes riveted on the safety over there, with him.

It appeared to me that M. had formed intense life-long bonds with his fellow pool players. They were all on a first-name basis. Acting as though they knew everything about each other. M. reminds me so much of the fictional Claude Collier, in Lives of the Saints. The desperately honest but constantly joking messed-up sweetheart.

It turns out that M.N., the guy he played with, was a friend from 2nd City days. So there was a reason for the familiarity. It took M. two hours to introduce us. Finally, M.N. and I took care of it. M. noticed us talking and came over, saying hurriedly, "Oh, I'm sorry. M.N., this is Sheila. Sheila - M.N.."

M.N. gave him this look like, "Save it", and I said, "We just took care of things, M.."

M. said, "I'm all about bein' rude tonight." He was on an "I'm all about" kick. He prefaced many sentences throughout the evening with "I'm all about". He'd go to set up a pool shot and he'd knock some girl with his cue by accident. He would profusely (and sincerely) apologize and then say, "I'm all about poking you with my cue."

"I'm all about bumping into you."
"I'm all about bein' loud and obnoxious tonight."

I don't need this thing with M. to be anything other than what it is. I have this odd feeling of unconditional contentment with him - it's pretty hard to come by.

When he first saw me he said, with that surprising shyness, "Hello."

I said, "Hello."

It was like we had just been introduced. We didn't quite know what to say to one another.

We then proceeded to go on a bacchanalian binge.

He played pool. I sat back and watched. Like a bimbo. He had on this big floppy sweatshirt, a black bandana, sneakers, cigarette dangling from his lips, serious eyes, leaning over the pool table, inspecting the lay-out, thinking over what to do.

He had a couple of phrases that he was into the whole night. One was the "I'm all about" phrase. Then there was: if he made a brilliant shot (and he is a brilliant pool player), he would start raving like a maniac: "Oh, I'm a pretty man. I'm a very very pretty man. I'm the prettiest man. I am a PRETTY PRETTY MAN." (On and on and on.) Then, if he'd fuck up a shot, he would launch into the darker side of things, "Oh, I'm an ugly man. I'm an ugly ugly man. I have a lumpy head. I have bad complexion. I am the ugliest man."

He was playing against a bunch of strangers, many of whom did not speak English, and they were looking at him like he was an alien from another planet.

I don't think the Lakeview is often populated by people like M.

M. said later, "I probably would have gotten my ass kicked if I'd been there alone."

But he's such an amazing pool player that people started gathering on the sidelines, drinking beer, silent, watching.

But also: he's this big guy, this big jocky-looking guy, yelling about how he is an ugly man, or a pretty man. At The Lakeview, no precedent has been set for how to deal with such behavior.

But THE phrase of the evening was "That's GOOD GUMBO."

Everything became "good gumbo." It applied to everything.

He'd make a good shot. "That's GOOD GUMBO."

He'd take a sip of beer. "Now that is some GOOD GUMBO."

He'd kiss me and then say, "Yum. GOOD GUMBO."

It was a broken record. At around 2:30, T said, in this dry dry calm voice, "Did you hear that word earlier today or something?"

M. said, "I just love the word. Mm-MM. That is GOOD GUMBO."

I said, "I suppose it can mean anything you want it to mean."

M. said, "Exactly. It can mean a good beer."

"Or a good woman." I chimed in, with gusto. (Or gumbo, I suppose you could say as well.)

"That's right, it can mean a good woman, too." M. said, kissing me on the forehead.

It is complete anarchy hanging out with this man. I like it. I am flourishing where there is little or no structure. M. is anarchy personified.

So what with the gumbo, the "ugly/pretty" controversy, the "I'm all about" statements, and the pool-playing, there wasn't much personal information exchanged between us. Which is fine with me. I feel no need to kind of wrestle this M. thing into some definable phenomenon. That would wreck it. At least now it would.

I can see how this whole anarchic thing would make some people crazy. It's too much of a free-fall. I mean, I've been there. You want to define things, you want to know where things are going. But with M., I know what this is. IT IS WHAT IT IS. I was perfectly happy perched on my stool, laughing at him, talking about gumbo until the sun rose in the East.

In a bizarre way, I find it restful. Or, not so bizarre. It is extremely restful.

He's inclusive with me. He is never ever hostile or distant. It is not in his nature to be either of those things. So I am free to just sit back and enjoy myself. I never worry what he thinks of me. There are no hidden messages, no games. And - like I said before - he never seems to be over-compensating (screams about "good gumbo" notwithstanding), or peacocking, or macho. He's not trying to prove a damn thing. He is the opposite of "cool".

I really don't know him at all.

All I know is is that the - 4 (or however many times it has been) times M. and I have gotten together - I do not CARE that we don't have conventional conversations where biographical information is exchanged. I don't CARE. We are connected. Somehow. The magic of human relationships. It just happens. There's a connection. And there is a comfort in our being together.

He'd wait for a pool table to open up, and he'd come over to stand with me, he'd squeeze onto my stool with me, half-standing, half-sitting. He sweats a lot. I'd wipe the sweat off his forehead. I don't know how much tenderness he has in his life. He would just - kind of stand there - taking my touch. He was a non-stop stream of banter the entire time.

He and M.N. were both waiting for a table, talking about auditions, and how fucked up things can be. There was an understated affection in their conversation. They seemed to be very much in agreement on the essentials. There was respect between them as well. No jostling for power, or the upper-hand. These two were really talking and really listening. I liked watching them. I liked watching M's' serious face, listening to M.N. talk. Nodding, interjecting, disagreeing, agreeing, asking questions. I liked it. His face reveals who he is to me. His face reveals his inner life. All the nuances of it show up on his features and in his eyes. Especially his eyes.

Had some of those heart-leaping-out-of-my-chest-towards-him moments.

Oh, and this was interesting, too:

The two of us were hanging out off to the side. He was screaming about "GUMBO" every other second. Then he said spontaneously, in a "normal" conversational tone - (God, I find him poignant. All of his changes and mood swings, and when he giggles, and when he was concentrating at the pool table - all of this I find to be so poignant. Sweet and sad. It touches me.) Anyway: he started to say, with this very open-faced expression: "Oh, I had the most humiliating experience today--" Then he stopped himself, looking at me in this very strange way. Kind of - contemplative, I guess. Pensive. He was weighing me in the balance. Testing me. I felt like he was really taking me in. It was only for a second. Then he said, blowing himself off, "Oh, you don't want to hear about it."

Now: this was not bullshit. I have never seen him be passive-aggressive. This was sincere. He was really not gonna tell me the story. It wasn't a ploy, or one of those annoying lead-ins.

What it seemed to me was: He, in typical sky-diver fashion, plunged in to tell me this story, and then immediately got shy. I make him shy. We haven't learned that much about each other. And: I saw him hold back, like: Am I ready to start telling her stories about my day? Does she want to hear about all that stuff? So he got shy, and pulled back. And of course, I found his shyness to be incredibly poignant. I find the whole damn THING to be unbeLIEVably poignant.

(He rambles about "gumbo", I ramble about "poignancy".)

But anyway, I wanted to hear his humiliating story. I said, "Well, you have to tell it to me now."

So he told me this HYSTERICAL story about an audition he had had for a commercial. Months ago, for about 10 seconds during an improv show, M. became Mick Jagger. Then, yesterday, a team member called M. to tell him the agency was looking for Mick Jagger imitators. M. could barely remember the 10-second imitation he had done, but he said, "What the fuck" and called his agent. They said, Yeah, come on down.

So M. decided ahead of time: "I am going to make this the most humiliating and degrading audition of all time so that I can get it out of the way and never have to be so humiliated again." So he dressed up like Jagger: big shirt, Union Jack T-shirt underneath, SPANDEX pants (Oh my God, I want a photograph), tall boots, and went to the audition.

The panel of people made him dance and strut around in front of the camera, and he had to say this one line over and over and over again, as they did a close-up of his mouth, and he was doing this Jagger-like mouth thing, but on the 4th or 5th time he had to say the line, he started laughing, and then he couldn't stop, he couldn't get the words out at all. Then they made him dance, and he described dancing around for them, and suddenly, he said that he "felt like this hollow shell." He felt horrible. Like a prostitute. And he wanted to stop and just END it all, but then this fat casting director kept screaming at him: "KEEP DANCING." And he felt deep deep deep humiliation, and self-loathing, but he kept dancing - After all, he had come to be humiliated.

(I am laughing out loud as I write this. "KEEP DANCING" Ha ha)

And then - this fat woman screamed at him: "WE NEED A BUTT SHOT."

So M. turned around, lifted up his shirt, bent over, and wiggled his Spandex-clad ass at the camera. He imitated himself doing this, for me, the slow turn, with this wince on his face, this kind of frozen pained expression. I laughed until I was in tears. I made him do it 10 times.

"We need a butt shot" was the nadir, for him.

He said, "I felt like Coco in Fame." That analogy made me ROAR.

He said that as he wiggled his butt for the panel, he thought to himself: "I have no soul. I have lost my soul. I HAVE NO SOUL."

I was snorting with laughter. Coco in Fame.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy of total humiliation.

He left the audition, only to find that he had left his car keys in the room. So he had to go BACK IN. One of the panel said, "Did you leave something behind?"

And M. said, point-blank to the entire group, "My integrity and my soul."

I was literally crying. My favorite part was the LOOK on his face when he turned around to give them a "butt shot". Classic. Also: his agony over having no soul and becoming a "hollow shell". Coco in Fame.

I would guess he didn't get the job. But he didn't go to get the job. He went to relish in his humiliation.

M.N. and I started talking. He asked me how I met M.. He said to me, "M. is a very good improviser."

"I know he is."

M. grilled me later: "You and M.N. were talking about me. I heard my name. What did you say?"

"Nothing. Just that you were a fabulous improviser."

"Fabulous? M.N. said fabulous?"

"No, I did."

Oh, and here's something amusing:

M. was playing pool. He has this total bad-boy look. The bandana, the cigarette, the paleness of him. And this cute black guy comes right over to me, and murmurs to me, very close to my ear:

"You cute. Who you with?"

I said, "The boy in the bandana."

He turned around to check M. out. His comment: "Lucky him."

I think I might have laughed. Then the guy informed M.N. right in front of me (it was for my benefit) that his girlfriend had broken up with him, he hadn't had sex in a week, and was dying from how deprived he felt. I felt uncomfortable for probably HALF a second, which was enough for M.N. to pick up on the entire situation, and so M.N. said, in his dry dry deadpan, "I'll give you a buck. Go buy a magazine and leave this girl alone."

I told M. about it later. Word for word. "Lucky him."

He said, "Where is the guy? Which one?" I pointed to him. M. kept murmuring to himself, proudly, as he set up his pool shots, "'Lucky him - lucky him'." Then he would burst out like a bellowing maniac, "I AM lucky! Look at my woman over there!" Pointing at me. "Isn't she some good gumbo?" For God's sake.

Then, late in the night, our evening was winding down, (the place was PACKED), M. came over to me and hugged me, randomly, for the longest and strangest time. We aren't big huggers yet. We just kind of stand around side by side, making each other laugh. But this hug was different, out of nowhere. It was quiet. It was poignant. Have I mentioned that everything about him is poignant?

He stepped back. And his face had this wonderful expression on it, compounded of what seemed like 100 different things.

First of all, he has this recklessly open face anyway. But the look: it was intrigued. It was tender. There was a fondness in his face. A sudden fondness for me, specifically. And all of this was mixed in with a very puzzled expression. His eyes had this mix of curiosity and confusion. He obviously wanted to say something, but he didn't know how to say it, or something, so I just waited.

He said, openly, but still - shy: "I like being with you." He squinted at me, literally trying to see behind my eyes, it felt like. "I'm beginning to see what you're about - I think I can see a little bit of what you're about - I'm not sure, but I think I can. And I like what I see. I like what you're about. A lot of people - well, people have problems for all kinds of different reasons, but ..." and then, in this tone of wonder, perplexity, confusion, "You don't seem to have a problem with me."

As though he couldn't understand himself how easy it is with me, why I don't give him grief, or whatever.

I said, "You suit me just fine."

He kept looking at me, perplexed. Completely perplexed that he suits me just fine.

So I can picture now exactly where he is coming from. A girl gets a crush on him. For obvious reasons. The man is hot, the man can play pool, the man is funny, the man wears a bandana around his head. So obviously the girl wants to have conversations, she wants him to behave like a normal boyfriend, she wants him to angst out about her, be possessive, ask her questions about herself - all that stuff, all that stuff from the civilized dating world. Where men ask the girls leading questions about their lives, where men say stuff like, "So tell me about what you were like in high school", and then listen to the answers. M. is not that man. M. will never be that man.

In that split-second at The Lakeview, when he looked down at me and said "You don't seem to have a problem with me" - it was the first time he seemed to want to get a line on me. It was the first time it seemed that he was trying to figure out who, exactly, was this girl in front of him. And that's fine, for me right now, that he doesn't ask me questions about myself. It is just fine.

But if a girl goes into a thing with M., expecting that he will do that, that he will ask her about herself, and be normal, then she will be bound to "have problems" with him. He will drive her crazy. She will not understand why being called "good gumbo" is a compliment. She will not pick up on his weird random mating signals, because they are bizarre and unconventional. She will always feel unsatisfied, and a step behind. She will realize that she can't "have" him. There is so much of him that she can't "have", and that will drive her crazy. So she will start pushing him, and clinging to him. Making demands, trying to get him to be personal, vulnerable, open up, share his feelings. And I can feel already that he will have none of that. It is not an aloofness with him, or that intentional 'tude that some guys wrap around themselves like impenetrable cloaks. M. couldn't be aloof if he tried. ("WE NEED A BUTT SHOT") Or maybe M. can be aloof, I just haven't seen it, because I don't push, and I don't cling.

He is probably very blunt with women. He probably doesn't ever play games. I can see him saying point-blank to some poor girl, "No. Okay? No." She will want him to pay attention to her, but there he goes, doing dinosaur imitations, making up rap songs, and yelling about "Gumbo". He doesn't sit down with her and ask her questions and study her and nod with understanding. M. is a different animal.

And like I said before, and what I said to him: What he IS suits me fine. He gives me what I want and I would change nothing.

When he turns into a stegosaurus or a T-rex right in front of me, I know what it means. He must make me laugh. That is his goal. Must. Make. Sheila. Laugh.

So anyway. I would change nothing. I like how he raves about gumbo. I like how he wrestles with me. I like how he laughs, how he staggers about holding a pool cue. I like his sudden flashes of openness. His sincerity.

With other guys, I have been that un-satisfied un-easy girl, scrounging around for scraps, trying to figure out how they feel about me, always wanting more - Whatever they gave me was NEVER enough. I never felt secure. I never felt like I "had" them. It was never restful, or comfortable. I was a couple of steps behind. It's a horrible feeling. That's how women lose themselves.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is is that I have no problems with M. and I don't think I ever will. Because I see with such clear eyes what he is and what it is.

What a shame it would be if I started pushing for some idea, calling him all the time, trying to push him into definitions, labels. It would ruin it.

There is an uncannily right mixture between us. And it works on the simplest level. There is no friction. NONE. It's also like we're little comrades, a feeling of being conspirators - conspirators in anarchy.

Finally, we left the Pit of Hell otherwise known as The Lakeview. M. had yelled at me for walking the measly 2 blocks there - "That is dangerous, Sheila. You should have called a cab." So he was gonna give me a ride. We emerged onto deserted Broadway at 3 am. We lurched across the street. He put his hand on my lower back as we crossed, and he said gallantly, "Here. Let me help you across the boulevard."

He's such a jag-off. I laughed at his tone, which made him start giggling. He had said a couple of times over the evening, "I am parked very illegally."

He led me to the lot where he had parked. I asked him to do his "butt shot" imitation again. We were falling all about, laughing, staggering, loud, M. was screaming into the night: "GOD! I have NO SOUL!" And I also kept laughing about "the boulevard."

We came to the lot, and his car had SO been towed. He had parked behind a dumpster, so we couldn't tell right away. As we circled around it, M. started murmuring to himself, "Please let me car still be there, let it be there."

And it just was not there.

We stood slackly in the spot where he had parked.

What does one say?

M. seemed totally defeated by the whole experience. He had a hard time accepting reality. "I wasn't in anyone's way! It's the middle of the night! I'm behind a dumpster! No one's parking on this side of the lot anyway!" On and on and on -

We were stuck.

"I spent all my money today." He said flatly.

He was very vulnerable suddenly. So we talked for a while about how horrible it was that he had been towed. We just talked about the emotional implications of the event, because he seemed unable to come up with solutions. So we stood in the vacant lot, discussing emotions. At 3 am.

Then I said, "Well, listen, we can go back to my place, I'll get my cash card, take out money to get your car back, and you can pay me back later."

He looked at me. He was paralyzed, stuck. At a loss. He said, "Where's the nearest cash station?" as though that were a pertinent or relevant question at all. What does that have to do with anything?

I said, "I have no idea. But we'll figure it out, I suppose. I do have money to lend you right now."

But, apparently, it was still too soon for M. to take some action. So we talked some more about how horrible it was that his car had been towed. We talked some more about his emotions. He talked about how he was going to find out who towed his car. "He's gonna have some problems. I'll see that he has problems."

We stood in the lot, brooding. I nodded along with him. Sympathy? Condolences? Who knows. I broke the silence again. "Okay. So what do you want to do."

M's eyes were so - he was very bummed out. He held his hands out kind of helplessly, a half-shrug. "Well - I have to get my car back."

"Okay, then. So that's what we're going to do right now then."

If I hadn't said that, in such a firm butch way, I got very butch with him all of a sudden, M. would have stood in the vacant space where his car once was parked, raving about how horrible it was that his car had been towed, and making vague threats about giving the tower "problems", until the cows came hom. So we walked to my place to get my cash card. I had to slow myself down, so M. could keep up with me. Isn't it funny? This big tall guy. But I am a little speed-demon.

He had grown very morose. And very ominous. Later, when we talked about it, he said, "For 2 hours, I acted like I was a member of some kind of towed-car Mafia. Prophesying doom for the tow-trucks of the world."

Finally, he tried to shake off the gloom. "Okay. I'm not gonna talk about it anymore."

Thank CHRIST, I thought.

He forced himself to not say, "He's gonna have some problems" one more time. He forced himself to not say, "How could they have towed my car?" one more time.

I took him to my room. Sammy the cat cowered in fear at this big lumbering strange man. I got my money, and out we went again. We had to catch a cab uptown to the tow-place, and it was past 3 in the morning. We walked down to Sheridan. M. cannot walk fast. I raced out into the street, and, like an absolute warrior, grabbed a cab for us.

M. had become quiet, silent, passive. He totally let me boss him around. I gave the dude the address. It was way north in a godforsaken neighborhood. We sat there in the back seat. I was staring out the windows, M. staring ahead, filled with thoughts of the tragedy that had befallen him so unfairly. The whole situation was a total drag for HIM, obviously, but I was having a great time. An absolutely tremendous time.

I remember when I first saw him perform. I remember being struck by his obvious genius. His very very obvious talent and charisma. Jackie had told me about him, before we went: "There's this one guy who is SO great, Sheila-" And now here I was, in the back of a cab at 3 am with him.

We were completely silent during the ride north, after 3 hours of constant nonsense-chatter. M. reached out and took my hand. We are not huggers. We are DEFINITELY not hand-holders. I looked over at him. He said, looking right at me, "Thanks." He looked sad and vulnerable. (I'm sorry. I don't mean to laugh. M: your CAR got towed. Your DOG didn't die! But since I treated it seriously, and didn't laugh in his face, I think he trusted me. Or grew to trust me more. Whatever.)

Why do I find him poignant? It makes no sense. It is totally irrational. But it is true. Like the ending of What's Up Doc: "Listen, kiddo, ya' can't fight a tidal wave."

I nodded over at him. Signifying, "No problem."

He's become more of a person to me now, after this night. He really wasn't before. He was more of a burning icon in the Chicago sky. And now he's real to me. The same is true for him, with me, as well.

We got to the lot. I took one look at where we were being dropped off, and thought, "My life is in danger. This is a HORRIBLE neighborhood and my LIFE is in danger right now."

We meandered over to the office. I was glued to M's side, holding his hand, clutching his arm, trying to meld myself into him. There were all kinds of black cavernous alleys, inky shadows containing possible dead decaying people. There were no lights, no people, no sounds.

We came to the bleak flourescent-lit hole-in-the-wall office. We were separated from the guy by a thick window. He was very fat, he had a tiny black and white TV on. Me, M., and this man were the only people awake in the city of Chicago. Or it felt that way.

I felt like we were in Taxi Driver. The people who only come out at night, who work graveyard shifts, who have surreal lives in the underbelly of the city, and see all kinds of bizarre things. The people this man must see! And in WE come: me in my black, with the plunging neckline, my red lips, my big red curls, and M. in his bandana, and his youthful beautiful face, with the eyes full of light. What a weird job this dude has.

M. started questioning the guy. M. was still in Mafia-mode, apparently, trying to find out who was responsible for towing his car. I kept interjecting him, like a peace-making wife, suddenly. "It's okay - he knows he was parked illegally-" I'd try to slide that in there, but M. kept going on his Mafia-track. He told the guy that he wasn't blocking anyone, that the tow truck would have had to follow him into the lot to tow his car when the receipt said it was towed, and on and on and on ...

I kept throwing in my two cents, which both men ignored. "No, it's okay - we'll just pay and go - how much is it now?"

The guy behind the glass was unimpressed with M., and unimpressed with me. He said, "I don't know what to tell you, buddy. You were parked in a Permit Parking Only lot. And that's illegal."

M. tried to ask one more pointed question, make one more point, and the guy behind the glass finally said, "The driver's registration number is on your receipt."

M. then completely transformed, became happy again. "Oh, it is? Okay! Thanks then!" 15-minute altercation over.

I paid the money to get, as M. put it, his "car out of hock."

We went back out into the lot, a pitch-black place. Full of quiet waiting depressed cars. A car jail. I felt like a spotlight was following me and M. around.

We got into M's car, and off we went. We rolled down the windows. We careened through the empty streets of Chicago, with the lights going red-green-yellow for no cars. Or, at least, no cars but ours. We plunged south towards my friendlier neighborhood, with the car filled with wind. We didn't talk to each other. I let my hand fall out the window, feeling the air on my arm. I sat there, with my hair blowing back, and I felt - AWAKE. Despite the hour. Completely and utterly wide awake. I felt like I could keep going, as we were, forever.

We share space, but we don't speak.

The whole night was a great adventure. I was afraid of him driving home at that hour, but he said he was fine. He whirls through my existence, knocks over my chess pieces, and whirls on out. I love that. I need that. He makes me laugh. He is spontaneous. He is a big, happy, troubled, crazy, gorgeous jock from Oak Park who compares himself to Coco in Fame. Gotta love it!

I loved the unexpectedness of the night. The spontaneity, the way it took me to places I'd never dream of going (I couldn't wait to tell Jackie I had actually hung out at The Lakeview and WASN'T attacked or mugged), how it got me out of my apartment. I didn't feel fragile, or breakable, or lonely anymore. I felt wide awake, and ready for whatever would come next.

Zooming through the empty streets of Chicago, with M.

Euuu.

I apologize for not being more articulate, but I read this (found via Rachel Lucas), and my primary response was: Euuuuuuu.

Something inside me cringed with embarrassment when I read it, and felt: Euuuu.

Here's what it reminded me of:

Being a breathless melodramatic 9 or 10 year old, chasing boys around the playground, and then ... let's say the boys ganged up, and a group of them, 4 or 5 of them, started chasing me, as retaliation. In my little-girl journal that night, THRILLED that I had been chased, THRILLED that people had WATCHED me get chased, etc. etc., feeling very very important, I scribble: "25 boys were chasing me around the playground today!" 25 sounds better than 5. It maybe FELT like 25 boys. Also: one of the essentials of being a breathless melodramatic little girl is that you PRETEND things bother you (like being chased by 5 boys) when really you are pleased as punch. And so, the evolutionary mating dance has begun.

It's the kind of harmless over-exaggeration that all little kids do.

"And then EVERYBODY laughed at me."

"And then the WHOLE SCHOOL knew about it."

Or whatever.

Michael Moore is a grown man, turning an expired-permit into a "raid", and then breathlessly and dramatically posting it onto his website.

There's something seriously wrong with that man.

Eu.

Beating a Redhead Horse...

If you live in or around New York, heads up:

Save the date, Tuesday, July 29.

I will be performing a piece I have written (called "74 Facts and One Lie") in an evening of autobiographical performance pieces.

Here are the details:

432 West 42nd Street, 3rd floor (that's on 42nd Street and Dyer - one block west of Port Authority) - it's a building with a bright red door

Tuesday, July 29 8 pm

It's free!

Bonds vs. Babe

I love this post about Barry Bonds' recent infamous outburst:

"I wiped him [Babe Ruth] out. That's it. And to the baseball world, Babe Ruth is baseball, am I right? I got his slugging percentage and I'll take his home runs and that's it. Don't talk about him no more."

Oh, shut the f*** up, Barry.

And you don't want to be in the Hall of Fame with all the white players? Fine. Be a big freakin' baby, then.

I haven't encountered Tainted Bill before ... I really enjoy his blog. Good stuff.

(I found him via Emily Jones, one of my idol-bloggers.)

The Redhead's Performing ... calling all New Yorkers

If you live in or around New York, heads up:

Save the date, Tuesday, July 29.

I will be performing a piece I have written (called "74 Facts and One Lie") in an evening of autobiographical performance pieces.

Here are the details:

432 West 42nd Street, 3rd floor (that's on 42nd Street and Dyer - one block west of Port Authority) - it's a building with a bright red door

Tuesday, July 29 8 pm

It's free!

Battlefield Earth bad reviews re-run

Okay, so many of my readers are relatively new to my blog.

For those of you who have already experienced my compilation of "Battlefield Earth" reviews (some of the worst reviews for a film I have ever seen in my life - and when read all together, create a panoply of comedy ... these reviews are comedy GOLD), please feel free to skip. Or who knows, you may need a REALLY good laugh, and re-reading these always gives ME a good laugh! This random compilation was really the first time I got tons of traffic, due to a couple of highly-placed links (I've got friends in high places)...

Anyway, I thought it was a shame that these gems were pining away over in "Blog-spot" purgatory, so I will re-post them here, for your reading enjoyment. I got letters from people like: "I was laughing so hard that my daughter came into the room, thinking I was dying."

Here we go:

Movie reviews of bad films are one of life's greatest pleasures. I don't even have to have seen the film to get a kick out of a one-star review, if the review is wittily written.

I remember a couple of years ago reading the reviews of "Battlefield Earth", and there wasn't one good review to be found, and it was like CANDY. Especially when the reviewer is a good writer and can scathingly pick apart why the film didn't work, why the whole thing was a disaster. So I went and tracked down some of these heinous reviews. Read in cumulative fashion is unexpectedly hilarious.

From Roger Ebert's review:

-- "Battlefield Earth" is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way. -- THAT IS THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE REVIEW....

-- This movie is awful in so many different ways. Even the opening titles are cheesy. Sci-fi epics usually begin with a stab at impressive titles, but this one just displays green letters on the screen in a type font that came with my Macintosh.

-- Hiring Travolta and Whitaker was a waste of money, since we can't recognize them behind pounds of matted hair and gnarly makeup. Their costumes look like they were purchased from the Goodwill store on the planet Tatooine. Travolta can be charming, funny, touching and brave in his best roles; why disguise him as a smelly alien creep?

-- The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why.

-- Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in "The Fugitive." I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.

Review by James Berardinelli

-- 30 minutes into this wreck of a motion picture, with thunder crashing in the sky above, the power went out, mercifully relieving me of my immediate responsibility to endure the rest of the movie.

-- Battlefield Earth makes movies like "Supernova" and "Sphere" seem like models of coherence.

-- [The director] probably has no better idea than I do of why he occasionally tilts the camera or uses slow motion. Maybe he thinks it looks cool.

-- There is no evidence that anyone involved with this project can act.

-- Looking back on this film, I can't find anything nice to say about it. I despised the experience of sitting in the theater while the movie was unspooling. It is an instant front-runner for worst feature of the year, having separated itself from its nearest contender by a wide margin.

Review by David Edelstein:

-- Only alien DNA could account for instincts so paranormally terrible. (HAHA)

-- Here is a picture that will be hailed without controversy as the worst of its kind ever made.

-- This is the kind of bad guy who strokes his beard with long (Lee Press-On?) talons, gloats over the imminent extermination of the human race, then adds, "Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!" Fu Manchu would roll his eyes. Ming the Merciless would politely excuse himself.

-- He zaps Jonnie with a knowledge ray and then, for some reason, lets him read the Declaration of Independence. I'm not sure what happens next because I went out for malted milk balls and then remembered I owed my mom a phone call. When I got back, Jonnie was leading some cavemen on a tour of Fort Knox, various decadent Psychlos were arguing among themselves, and Travolta was going, "Hah-hah-hah-hah!"

-- Visually, "Battlefield Earth" is a bewildering procession of non sequiturs, held together by the most assaultive soundtrack in cinema history. That is not an overstatement. A horse hitting the ground sounds like a bomb going off. A bomb going off sounds like a planet exploding. A planet exploding sounds like—I'm out of hyperbole. People in the audience dig their fingers into their ears and howl in agony—it's a wonder the roof doesn't come down. Is this a Scientology strategy to drive the aliens out of their bodies?

Review from The New York Times:

From the bottom of the review - (this made me laugh out loud, especially considering the last comment above, from Edelstein): -- "Battlefield Earth" includes astonishingly loud violence and intimations of alien sexuality.

-- "Man is an endangered species," announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump "Battlefield Earth." And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Sitting through it is like watching the most expensively mounted high school play of all time.

-- It may be a bit early to make such judgments, but "Battlefield Earth" may well turn out to be the worst movie of this century.

-- Mr. Travolta throws back his head and delivers a stage laugh that would embarrass the villain from the shoddiest Republic Pictures serial or an episode of "Xena: Warrior Princess."

-- The only professional thing about the movie is the sound: it's so loud you feel as if you're sitting on a runway with jets taking off over your head.

Review from Jam Showbiz:

-- There's a scene in "Battlefield Earth" in which a visiting alien commander scopes a prison facility and says..."This is one of the biggest crap houses I have ever seen". How right he is.

-- At about the one hour mark, a portion of the audience split the scene and I don't blame them. They were fed-up with being taken for complete and utter morons.

-- Battlefield is so stupid it defies explanation.

Review from San Francisco Examiner:

-- A rebellion ensues, as does a relentless supporting performance by flying debris, which, after so many explosions, gave me a headache and invaded the camera frame enough to prevent me from keeping track of which character with hair extensions was running through the underlit production design.

-- A Scientology recruiting film would be more fun, and they're shorter.

-- If filmmaking has ever been less thrilling and more disengaging, I'd like to see it. Subliminal messages would have made it more endurable. The only real amusement the film can hope to stir will be if a rash of American moviegoers actually exits the theater and heads to their local Scientology headquarters. "Yes, I've seen the film, now I'd very much like to achieve the State of Clear, please."

From Ruthless Reviews:

-- We learn that aliens have taken over earth and other planets in order to strip them of precious metals which they teleport back to planet Phsyclo. Seeing the problem with that requires a high school education. See, simply hording metals, jewels or what have you does not really add much to an economy. That's why the Spanish empire fell from prominence. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but given the infinite number of reasons one planet might conquer another, why not pick one that makes sense? Just give the gold some practical use for crying out loud.

-- Travolta behaved like a second year drama student doing Richard III. Over the top to the point that you wanted to slap him. Barry Pepper meanwhile, was so horribly earnest and "Goodboy", that you really wanted to beat his ass, too.

From the Apollo Guide:

-- Never has the future of humanity seemed so dull, as John Travolta confronts Barry Pepper in a sci-fi confrontation that inspires nothing but boredom. The script is dull, acting forgettable, story predictable and derivative. It's also implausible, but at least noticing that breaks the monotony.

Review from Flipside Movie Emporium (I must excerpt from this one extensively ... it's too funny to chop it up):

--After a week of listening to the universal drubbing of "Battlefield Earth", there's a temptation to go against the grain. Everyone has had a chance to tee off on the film, and the unflinchingly bad reviews have said just about all there is to say. Why not make a stand, then, and present the other point of view? Why not defend a friendless production when all the world is intent on pillorying it? Why not be an iconoclast -- just for the sake of debate -- and say, "No, this film really isn't as bad as all that?"

Because then I would be lying.

Battlefield Earth is the most horrendous, dreadful, corrosive, rank, foul, rotten, noxious, wretched, irredeemably BAD movie to come along in decades. This isn't a movie: it's a crime against celluloid. You don't so much watch it as stare at it in gape-jawed disbelief. Somebody made this. Somebody raised money to put this on screen. Somebody sat there and watched this happen without once screaming, "You fools! You mad, mad fools!" For that, and for so many other reasons, it deserves every bit of scorn that we can possibly heap upon it.

One look at John Travolta as the evil Psychlo security chief Terl and you know there's big problems. Sporting dreadlocks as worn by the Amish and brandishing weapons that the cast of Star Trek abandoned as too cheesy, Terl looks less like a conquering alien than Rob Zombie on a bender. When not chewing on the scenery or shooting the legs off cows, he inexplicably provides the human slaves beneath him with everything they need to foil his evil schemes. Mankind is an endangered species, you see, subjugated centuries ago and now worked to death in Psychlo mines or living a tribal existence in the irradiated outlands. Not to worry though: once Terl captures primitive leading man Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper), he promptly hooks the savage up to a learning machine in order to assist in a preposterous scheme to steal gold. Apparently there's no off switch, because Jonnie learns everything from the machine, including history, mathematics and how to organize a grassroots guerrilla war. But Terl isn't concerned. Jonnie can't possibly find anyone to help him, right? And even if he could, he doesn't know where any weapons are, right? And even if he did, they'd all be a thousand years old and inoperable, right? And even if they weren't, the Psychlo technology was advanced enough to crush them before, and they've had a thousand years to improve upon it, right? Right?!

Glaring plot holes like these are easy to point out and "Battlefield Earth" is rife with them. The trouble, however, is that a plot hole implies a solvable problem: to wit, "if only they'd address this nagging inconsistency, the film would be better." NOTHING you could do to this train wreck could possibly make it better. Every single element, every single frame, reeks of abject incompetence. The acting is terrible, the special effects are embarrassing, and the sets look like a fourth-grade production of "Logan's Run". The camerawork is shoddy, the costumes beyond ridiculous, and the directing could give Ed Wood a run for his money. No script tightening or casting change could dent this abomination, no talented individual could find a silver lining. It's like a perfectly woven asbestos blanket, smothering all hope beneath it. The only thing to do is destroy it and try to build something beautiful in the ashes.

I suppose "Battlefield Earth" can be useful as a cautionary example or as a strange testament to Travolta's progress as a star. Ten years ago, he made films like this because he had to; now he makes them because he can. The film was based on a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, and you would assume that scientologists like Travolta would have a vested interest in turning out a good adaptation. Guess not. It's tough vilifying "Battlefield Earth" because, as I said, everybody and their grandmother is doing it. But no film in recent years deserves it more and few films fail so exquisitely as it does. The louder we condemn it, the better the chance that it will never happen again.

The Nightmare of the Bridesmaid

Found this hilarious site via Oxblog: Ugly Dress. It is dedicated to heinous bridesmaid dresses ("archive of the world's ugliest bride's maid dresses"), a near-universal topic of disgust and contempt among all of the women I know. If you're a bridesmaid, and you are pissed off at what the bride has made you wear, you can take a picture of yourself and send it on into this site. I've only been a bridesmaid twice, and both times I lucked out primarily because of :

Low-maintenance chilled-out brides

Let me say it again:

Low-maintenance chilled-out brides

Here are the common denominators of low-maintenance chilled-out brides:

They want their wedding day to be a fun day for all.
They want their bridesmaids to be comfortable.
They want to make sure that everyone has a rocking good time.
They themselves want to have a rocking good time.
They do not want to have a nervous breakdown because the flowers are salmon-pink instead of fuschia.

Low-maintenance chilled-out brides will not stuff their 6 bridesmaids into teal-green frilly nightmares, which only look good on Kate-Moss body-types or J. Lo body-types.

The first wedding in which I was a bridesmaid was Meredith and Jacques'. Meredith is one of my best friends from high school. It was a December wedding, there was a snowstorm. Our dresses were made by a local seamstress, they were black velvet on top, with a deep wine-colored satiny skirt. Gorgeous. Comfortable. The dress also looked good on all body-types. They were made to fit each of us. Our shoes were black velvety PayLess shoes. Perfectly functional, looked good, comfortable, cheap. We all had French braids with holly in our hair. We looked terrific. Like a bunch of Lady Macbeths strolling down the aisle. No, just kidding.

The preparations for the wedding were very chilled (at least for us, as bridesmaids).

Thank you, Meredith. Your wedding was gorgeous, we all felt comfortable, and I still have my dress. Lovely.

The second wedding in which I was bridesmaid was the wedding of Jackie and Stuart. Jackie wanted all her bridesmaids in black, but she let us pick out our own dresses. "Just pick out a nice black cocktail dress. Whatever you like best."

Uhm: Jackie is a HERO among brides!

I bought this little sleeveless black slip-type dress, I had on strappy black sandals, I sang in the wedding, I jitterbugged like a maniac, I had a blast.

So these have been my two bridesmaid experiences. Lovely, through and through.

But I have heard stories. Man, have I heard stories.

Women I know who were bridesmaids are NO LONGER friends with "the bride" because of what a high-maintenance bitch "the bride" was. Forcing bridesmaids to travel far and wide to get to the wedding, broke bridesmaids charging plane tickets, resenting every penny, hating the $600 bright-blue dress they are forced to buy, and the $150 matching bright blue shoes, that no one in their right mind would EVER WEAR AGAIN.

And I have been in attendance at those nightmare weddings, where the bride is a shrieking type-A lunatic, and the poor groom is hungover and pussy-whipped already, the dude already can never match up to the bride's perfectionist expectations, and all of the bridesmaids (fat, slim, whatever) are wearing saffron-yellow sari-type dresses, or pouffy lavendar lampshades, with sweat stains showing gloriously through, everybody in a fight with each other, the bride universally despised. Miserable pissed-off sweaty bridesmaids.

Jackie was in a wedding-party like this. She was forced to purchase a silk dress which looked like a prom-gown gone wrong. It would fit in quite well on Ugly Dress.com. Jackie hated the dress. She said that the bride said to the resentful bridesmaids: "It'll be perfect to wear again on New Year's Eve or whatever." The typical bride's excuse. As though normal people go to formal BALLS on New Year's Eve. Who does that? If you're going to a party on New Year's Eve, who the hell would wear a blazing blue silk prom gown with matching blazing blue spike heels? What??

Jackie lived in a little cottage in Snug Harbor, a place where we all, in college, would convene. To drink wine, play Trivial Pursuit or $20,000 Pyramid, walk along the docks, and laugh our asses off.

Jackie, one evening, disappeared upstairs for a while. No explanation. The party continued on downstairs. Suddenly we heard, from the 2nd floor, Jackie burst into song.

"Hit the road, Jack
And don't you come back no more no MORE NO MORE NO MORE
Hit the road, Jack
And don't you come back no more...."

She sang in a cheesy Las Vegas Lounge-act voice, and slowly, she appeared .... step-touching her way down the stairs, dressed in her blinding-blue bridesmaid dress and bright-blue spike heels. We, of course, downstairs, all completely dissolved into hysterics, and she continued on with her lounge-act, smoking cigarettes, taking a sip of wine in between numbers, telling inappropriate stories, sashaying around in her BRIDES MAID dress.

If so-and-so, the bride, could have seen Jackie ... she would have been devastated. Can you imagine? Knowing that the dress you chose for your wedding was being used as a SPOOF by one of your bridesmaids?

Another friend of ours was also in this infamous wedding, and had the same dress, so the following Halloween, Jackie and I wore the identical dresses to a party. We went as the Sweeney sisters.

Motherhood, Jean-Kerr style

Jean Kerr, author of the classic Please Don't Eat the Daisies, died in January.

Here is a tribute to her.

I haven't thought about Kerr's writing in years. God bless Jean Kerr, and all that she gave us, her contributions to the literature of motherhood. In particular, the literature of how to balance motherhood and work. And she was way ahead of her time, writing about these issues in the 50s. This article made me miss Jean Kerr's voice ... forgotten now in the "Oh my God, how am I going to balance it all and be the perfect everything?" tone which has hijacked the genre. Jean Kerr, an enormously successful playwright and essayist, who had 6 children, never believed she could do it all. And never ever thought that she was perfect. Which is why her books are so damn FUNNY.

I highly recommend Jean Kerr's work to all of the mothers that I know. Here is an example of her tone. This excerpt is taken from the book Please Don't Eat the Daisies, her memoir, written in the 1950s, about what it was like to be a writer (extremely successful, remember ... we are not talking about trying to get poems into teeny literary journals ... we are talking about the author of some of the biggest Broadway hits of the day) and the mother of 6 children. Please Don't Eat the Daisies was made into a cheese-ball Doris Day movie, which I saw, but if you've seen it, and thought it was a big load of CRAP, then just go out and read the book. Do yourself a favor. It will make you laugh.

The following quote is Kerr describing how the book got its name:

My real problem with children is that I haven't any imagination. I'm always warning them against the common-place defections while they are planning the bizarre and unusual. Christopher gets up ahead of the rest of us on Sunday mornings and he has long since been given a list of clear directives: 'Don't wake the baby,' 'Don't go outside in your pajamas,' 'Don't eat cookies before breakfast.' But I never told him, 'Don't make flour paste and glue together all the pages of the magazine section of the Sunday Times.' Now I tell him, of course.

And then last week I had a dinner party and told the twins and Christopher not to go in the living room, not to use the guest towels in the bathroom, and not to leave the bicycles on the front step. However, I neglected to tell them not to eat the daisies on the dining-room table. This was a serious omission, as I discovered when I came upon my centerpiece--a charming three-point arrangement of green stems.

A couple of years ago, I found a beat-up old copy of Please Don't Eat the Daisies at the Strand and pounced on it like a starving woman. Kerr is a bit of a treasure. She really is.

Elizabeth Austin, author of this tribute, articulates exactly her appeal. Which, perhaps, is a bit sugar-coated. Or not even sugar-coated ... just not the whole truth. As in: Jean Kerr left out the more unpleasant and worrisome aspects of being a mother and a working woman. But Austin says:

Once I'd gobbled my way through Kerr's slim oeuvre, I went looking eagerly for another writer just as good. Decades later, I'm still looking. No one since has managed to write about the domestic scene with Mrs. Kerr's pitch-perfect balance of wit, warmth, and intelligence. Instead, the mother/writers of the half-century have focused on the anxieties and stresses of parenting. Personally, I don't need anybody to tell me how hard it is to bring up a child; trust me, I already know.

Austin compares Jean Kerr, a writer from the 1950s, with Erma Bombeck, a writer who tackles the same issues, only in the 1970s. Erma Bombeck is, of course, hysterical ... but it's a question of attitude, the attitude one takes towards the chaos of family life. And about yourself, trying to juggle all of these different roles.

Read:

Although Erma Bombeck was just five years younger than Kerr, her career peaked in the '70s with such dismally titled bestsellers as The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank; If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?; I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression. Her wisecracking, oy-vey approach to life guaranteed her a huge audience, although it didn't do much for the psyche of the American mother. It's downright dispiriting to read much Bombeck. Her world is one of unappreciated, unfulfilled wives and mothers drudging away year after year, hoping to receive that one glimmer of recognition that will make it all worthwhile ...

Kerr never lets us that far inside. She writes mirthfully about raising a bumper crop of children spaced erratically over a couple of decades; there's never the tiniest hint that a 40-ish woman who has spent half a lifetime in the maternal trenches might entertain some mixed feelings about starting over with an infant. When she writes about her lastborn baby daughter, all we hear is bemused delight: "She smiled the kind of smile that would give you hope in February. Then she held up her arms and said, very distinctly, 'Hi, little fella.'" We'll never know whether Kerr was guilty of a little retrospective sugar-coating. But I do know which book I'd recommend to an overwhelmed friend facing an unexpected pregnancy post-40.

I loved the following section of the tribute to Kerr:

Austin takes on Salon's series of essays called "Mothers who Think" (a title which always bothered me for some reason ... and now I know why.) Here is what she says:

I sometime wonder what Kerr would have made of Salon's long-running feature, "Mothers Who Think." Did that title refer only to the authors? Or was it a device allowing homebound, cranky readers to feel intellectually superior to those morons on the kindergarten fun fair committee? Sure, MWT offered a good number of interesting and well-written pieces. But the title--like many of the essays in the series--had a chip on its shoulder, as illustrated by the flap copy of the collected MWT essays, which calls them a "testament to the notion that motherhood gives women more to think about, not less." Of course it does; you just have less time to write it all down.

Jean Kerr completely lacks the sense of self-important grievance which so dominates the dialogue about balancing motherhood and work these days. She acknowledges the problems, yes. But she treats the entire topic with humor. And WIT. A fresh breeze of wit. Jesus, I don't have kids yet, but all of the books out there seem designed to scare me, warn me off, tell me how BAD it is, how HARD it is, how IMPOSSIBLE it is to have it all. But Kerr does not go that route. She takes a bemused attitude to the entire thing. It is not the end of the world that your children ate the daisies, it doesn't mean you have failed as a mother and a homemaker, it doesn't mean you are not living up to all of the expectations you heaped on your head ... It means that now you have to remind yourself to say to your kids, "Please don't eat the daisies."

Perhaps it is an over-simplification of all the stresses women face. I am sure it is. But I believe we can make things worse by over-thinking things, over-worrying things, and completely taking on the idea that society expects you to be perfect. If somebody expects you to be perfect, then that is THEIR problem, not yours.

This is an idea I have struggled with my entire life. There have been years in my life when my struggle to be perfect, to live up to the imagined expectations of others, has completely RUN my entire existence. It is a terrible thing. I still do not have a handle on it. I am still a Nervous Nellie. If I "fail", I still am apt to take it on in some sort of global way. ie: I burnt the toast = I am a terrible person, and barely a woman at all. I am not fit for relationships and no man will ever love me. I will not be able to raise children effectively, I will ruin their lives.

STUPID, but very human. Everybody has this to some degree.

Jean Kerr, as well. But she laughs it off.

Here's what Austin has to say about that:

The thing I most love about Kerr, and the generation of women who were her most loyal readers, is that they seemed to be taking motherhood on a pass-fail basis. They weren't competing desperately for straight A's on the homefront--nor were they "surrendered" wives and mothers, submerging their identities into the giant gaping maw of family life. They were active and energetic but never "busier-than-thou," and they seemed to be having more fun than any grown-up woman I see around me today--myself included.

It reminds me of some of my earliest memories of childhood.

Early memories come through the senses. We add meaning to them later.

So for me: here is what comes up from those long-ago days:

Bright sunshine. Hot flagstones. Fisher Price people all set up. Hilarious fun being had with siblings and cousins. (This is a memory from our summers at Lake Sunapee.) Sun on the birch trees. Blue lake through the trees. Cap'n Crunch cereal. The world of childhood. Fun, fun, fun.

But on the outskirts of all of this, were my aunts and uncles (many of them younger than I am now), and my parents. This is the early 70s. So I remember my mom's fabulous white pants ... her Dr. Scholls shoes (we called them "clackers") ... the sound of adult voices and laughter on the edge of our childhood world. We were separate. Adults over there, children over here. We did not need to be occupied, or have activities planned for us. The grownups did not bend over backwards to entertain us, to keep us happy.

They stood over on the side, smoking cigarettes, wearing bikinis, drinking gin and tonics, talking, laughing, and, I am sure, having a blast on an adult level.

Then something would happen in the child-world which would demand notice from the adults. A fight breaking out. A child skinning his knee. Tears of pain. And the mothers, gin and tonics in hand, would click-clack over to us, and soothe the wounds, kiss it better, make us make up, etc.

I remember one moment vividly from these Sunapee summers, I must have been ... 4? I was in the water, beside the dock, flopping around on a piece of styrofoam. I had no life-preserver on. I don't think I could swim. But all the adults were right there, up on the dock, sitting in deck chairs ... again, with little cups in hand, the clinking of ice. Summer vacation. And I fell off the piece of styrofoam and began to sink. I remember all of the bubbles. The light coming through the bubbles. Sinking down. (Remember, the water was only 3 feet deep or something like that.)

And suddenly, there was a crash from above ... a mighty roar of blinding white ... a tsunami of water, and within a moment, I was up on the dock, heaving for breath. Heart pounding. My mother, dressed in the white bell bottom-y pants (which she probably made), and her clackers, turned, saw me sinking, and leapt into the lake, fully clothed, to save me.

I have tears in my eyes. Mothers!!

What does all this have to do with Please Don't Eat the Daisies? I'm not sure.

But I do know I grew up with a mother who had that Jean Kerr thing going on. It was not easy for her, I am sure. There were four of us. My mother is an incredible woman, with a lot of gifts, a lot to contribute to the world. Her only accomplishment is not her children. She has a lot going on. But she never seemed to get caught up in the stressed-out perfectionist brand of mothering. She was much more matter-of-fact. At least in my memory. She cared about the RIGHT things, and let all the other stuff go. She, to quote somebody else, did not "sweat the small stuff".

I also got the sense that my parents were friends ... their only bond was not US. They talked to each other about grown-up stuff, and we had to fend for ourselves. WHICH IS NOT A BAD THING. I loved knowing my parents had a relationship ... where they talked to each other. I didn't know it was rare and weird until I encountered other families. My mom did not sigh like a martyr, or huff and puff, fuming in silence about things. I don't think my mother has an "Oh, poor me" bone in her body. She may have had her darker moments, when she was by herself, but I did not pick up on that sort of anxiety and anger from her as a child, and for that I am very grateful.

My memory of my mother from those early early years is of a benevolent freckled watching woman on the sidelines, talking with her friends, or her sisters, wearing clackers, looking fabulous, enjoying her life for the most part. And also completely ready to throw herself into the lake at a moment's notice to save my drowning ass!

Remember....

"What if [Saddam] fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? ... Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal."

-- President Bill Clinton, 1998.

Getting directions from a Rhode Islander

I am from Rhode Island, originally, and read a quote somewhere: "In Rhode Island, everything is local".

Rhode Island is the kind of state where you ask for directions, and this is what someone will tell you: "Okay, so you go down this street and you take a right where the A&P used to be ... then you stay on that road, and when you come to the end of it, take a left where the Bess Eaton used to be ... and what you're looking for is on Rt. 138 where that Tae Kwan Do studio used to be."

Local Rhode Islanders like myself will nod knowingly at these directions suffused with the past, and newcomers will be completely lost. "Tell me what is there NOW, please."

And when the direction-givers say stuff like "where the A&P used to be", sometimes they are talking about what hasn't been there for 30 years!

I love that.

My sister Jean pointed out, as well, that all directions given in Rhode Island usually contain the words "Dunkin Donuts". The moment she made that observation, of course I started hearing it all over the place.

"Take a left at the Dunkin Donuts..."
"And then you pass the Dunkin Donuts..."
"There's a stoplight, and a Dunkin Donuts on your right..."

Or sometimes the two particularities of Rhode Island directions will happen in the same sentence: "Take a right where the Dunkin Donuts used to be..."

Cashel Chomsky

Nephew Cashel bluntly told my brother Brendan (his dad), "I have informed a new language. Which is part Chinese, part French, part Italian, part English, part German, and part sign language. It's called Papahcoahlo." (Or something like that. The name of the language sounded distinctly Hawaiian, and Cashel had "informed" this language out of all other languages, including sign language.)

The thing that impressed Brendan the most was Cashel's word choice: "I have informed a new language."

Brendan's response to me about this was: "Woah. Okay, Chomsky."

Cashel and the Dead Composers

For Christmas he was given a little interactive book about famous dead composers. You press on the page, and certain facts are spoken out by a narrator, and you can also hear snippets of the music. Cashel has decided that he wants to be Mozart for Halloween next year. His mother said to me that she feels the dead composers have become the new "Star Wars", in Cashel's mind. One obsession replaced by another.

So he will randomly declare facts about composers to his mother, quoting the narrator. "So-and-so could read music by the time he was 3 years old."

He also said to Maria (and I quote): "A man named Holst wrote some music about the planets. The music for Neptune had a soothing harmonic sound, and the music for Mars was a fierce and martial sound."

Cashel is 5. He said the words "soothing harmonic" and "fierce martial sound" right to Maria.

The Universal Plots

Justice does not come easy. Sometimes you have to fight for justice. Sometimes peace has to be defended, guarded, fought for. You don't get peace by, in the words of Sheryl Crow, "not having enemies". That's an incredibly stupid way to look at the complexity of human conflict. Of human beings, in general. Without the Allies bombarding Germany, the Jews would not have been freed. That is a fact. War set those people free. Violence set those people free. Five years too frigging late, in my opinion. Everybody appeased the Nazi regime for years, while Jews died by the millions.

I prefer to take a more common sense view to human affairs and people. I know that man is capable of the worst horrors. Man has the hugest capacity to SUCK.

I am afraid of utopias. I am suspicious of people who believe in utopias. Any ideology is utopian, and does not take into consideration human nature, which is messy, troubled, power-hungry, corruptible.

The Founding Fathers were brilliant, in this regard. Yes, they had an ideal for their new country. They wanted to be a "city on a hill". But it wasn't just an idea. They put into the constitution all of the myriad checks and balances which keep us in line today. No, it is not perfect. Nothing is perfect. Anyone who dreams of a perfect society is a tyrant in the making. Someone saying, "Follow me ... I know the way to perfection" is the cue for you to run for the hills. Run screaming for your life.

John Adams wanted the new country to be a "rule of laws", not a "rule of men". He said that over and over and over and over again. Men are fallible. Power can corrupt. (Power does not ALWAYS corrupt, like many people shriek, latching onto the cliche as though it is a lifeboat, as though the second you have power you are corrupt ... this is not necessarily true). Power CAN corrupt. The Founding Fathers understood that man is corruptible, by his very nature, so let the LAWS be the rule of the land, not men. There is no such thing as a "president for life" in this country. The Founding Fathers were terrified of even the possibility that that could occur.

You learn in high school English (at least I did ... thank you Mr. Crothers...) the universal plots in literature.

Man Against Himself. Hmm, let's see. Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Although that would probably also be under Man Against Society...

Man Against Society. I would put Portrait of a Lady here. Also The Scarlet Letter. Obviously.

Man Against Nature. Pretty much anything by Jack London. To Build a Fire is probably the greatest example of this type of plot, in my opinion.

Man Against Fate. Sometimes this is categorized as a sub-set of Man Against Nature. Man struggling with something he cannot control. Moby Dick? Captain Ahab, struggling with the loss of his leg, the loss of his control, battling with the fate the universe has in store for him. His date with the whale. Written in the stars. This book, all the great books actually, have elements of all of the plots.

and then, of course:

Man Against Man. This is such a universal plot that it doesn't even need to be described.

There is no room for a utopian view of the world the second you have TWO people in the picture. Fine, you have a vision of a perfect universe ... great for you. Go sit on a mountaintop by yourself and create it, because the moment you have another person beside you, you will have conflict:

"I think we should only eat berries and make our own clothes and play the autoharp every day from 10 to 11 am."

"Well ... actually ... I definitely need to have a cup of coffee and I'd like to bring my platform shoes along, because I love them so."

"NO. Platform shoes? And autoharps? Those two things DO NOT GO TOGETHER."

You get the idea.

Sheryl Crow, preaching to us not to have enemies, doesn't get it. She doesn't get that man against man is one of the most universal things about being human.

This is a struggle. I am not talking about accepting horrible things as inevitable, so why fight them. Not at all. This is not like Anne Morrow Lindbergh's book The Wave of the Future, where her basic message was: "The Nazis are an inevitable part of history. They are the wave of the future. We should succumb, and let them take over ... because eventually they will burn up and burn out ... but we must accept that they are the wave of the future." The woman was rightly criticized for her defeatist views, based on nothing but her "feelings" about it all, her "feelings" of fear about war and violence. (Not to mention her husband's clear anti-Semitism.) Anne Lindbergh did not have the comfort of hindsight, of course, and she paid dearly for that book, but her basic view of Nazism and totalitarianism is that we just have to wait it out, because war, in general, is wrong and violence is NOT GOOD. EVER.

Well, violence wiped out the Nazi scum, and opened up the gates of Auschwitz. The Nazis were not the wave of the future. They were a plague on this planet that needed to be eradicated. By force. No way would they give up and say, "You know what? You guys are right. What the hell have we been doing all these years? We love the Jews! We embrace the Jews! Let them BE FREE."

Anyway, all of this rambling on was spurred for me by the reading I have done recently, in re: the Kurds of Northern Iraq. This issue, to me, is what we are talking about when we talk about justice, and peace. Knowing that, actually, there are some things worth fighting for.

For me, "justice" in this situation, means that we, the West, are willing to fight for these people to have peace, and live lives of dignity. The Kurds are not concerned about "collateral damage", innocent civilians dying because of the West invading ... For them, the collateral damage caused by an invasion of Iraq is PEANUTS compared to the thousands and thousands of people who have perished at the hand of Saddam Hussein. Yes, people will die. Civilians will die. But they were dying ANYWAY, being gassed and murdered and tortured by their own leader.

Peace doesn't come easy. Man is corruptible. What is worth fighting for? Turn away from utopias, reject utopias, and ask: Okay. What do I believe in? And when you can answer that question, you must then ask the next question: What can I DO? What the hell can I do? Because there is ALWAYS something to do.

One if by Land, Two if by Sea

Hanging with the nephew ... We colored for a while. As we waited for the pizza to arrive. Cashel commanded me to draw a house. So I did. Cashel was basically the architect and the interior designer. Telling me what he wanted to see.

"Put a playroom in the attic."

"But Auntie Sheila -- where are the stairs??"

I drew the bathroom, and the mere sight of the toilet caused Cashel to dissolve into mirth. Yes. Toilets are hilarious.

I drew a spiral staircase which blew Cashel away. "That's so COOL." Then I drew the living room. I said, "I think there needs to be a picture on the wall. Or a portrait. Whose picture should be on the wall, you think?"

Cashel said bluntly, "Einstein."

Okay, then. Einstein. So I drew this little cartoon of Einstein, with the crazy hair coming up, and Cashel said seriously, with all of his knowledge, "That really looks like Einstein."

We ate our pizza together, talking about stuff. Star Wars, Ben Franklin. Cashel informed me, "Ben Franklin discovered lightning."

Cashel is a wealth of information. Randomly, he told my parents that Vincent Van Gogh never sold a painting while he was alive, but that after he died, he became famous.

I read him a story. It was from the book of "Disney stories" which I had given him for his birthday. He loves it. He pulled it out of the bookshelf, and I said, "Oh! I gave that to you!" Cashel said, a little bit annoyed, "I know that."

He had me read the story of the little mouse who hung out with Ben Franklin, and basically (in the world of Disney) was the inspiration for all of Ben Franklin's famous moments. Cashel would shoot questions at me. "Why is Ben Franklin's hair white?" "Well ... he's old now. But also, in those days, men wore powdered wigs. I think." Cashel's little serious face, listening, sponging this all up. Probably the next day he informed his friends that men in the olden days wore powdered wigs. He's that kind of listener, that kind of learner.

Then he put on his Obi Wan Kenobi costume which Grandma Peggy made him for Christmas. A long hooded brown cloak ... and he hooked his light saber into his waist, and galloped off down the hall. Making me laugh. A mini Jedi knight.

I had him pick out three stories to read before bedtime. He sat beside me, curled up into me, looking at the pictures as I read to him. The last one we read was Longfellow's poem "Paul Revere's Ride". This poem was a favorite of ours, when we were kids. My dad would read it to us, and even now, when I read the words, I hear them in my father's voice. A magical poem. Really. The way my dad read it to us (along with Longfellow's help) made us SEE it. The clock tower, the moon, the darkness ... the sense of anticipation, of secrecy, of urgency. It was thrilling. So I love that this is being passed on to Cashel! I've never read the poem outloud before ... so I had one of those strange moments of the space-time continuum bending ... me stepping into my father's shoes, Cashel 5 years old beside me, feeling the ghost of my own 5 year old self listening.

I also remember how Brendan and I used to chime in gleefully: "ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SEA!" And Cashel did the same thing. I paused before that moment in the poem, glanced down at him, and he screamed it out.

There was also a subtlety of understanding in Cashel ... I read this section:

And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

And Cashel exclaimed, in a sort of "Uh-oh" tone, "They're comin' by sea!!" Now the words don't actually SAY that, but he remembered the "one if by land two if by sea" signal, and puts it all together. That's my boy!

I remembered the first lines from memory:

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Again, those are just words on the page. But to me, they are filled with the echoes of my father's voice. I have tears in my eyes.

Cashel and I, as we went through the poem, had to stop many times for discussions.

There was one illustration of all the minute-men, hiding behind the stone walls, with a troop of Redcoats marching along, walking straight into the ambush. Cashel pointed at it, and stated firmly, "That's the civil war."

"Nope. Nope. That is actually a picture from the American Revolutionary War."

Cashel pondered this. Taking it in. Then: "The minute-men were in the civil war." But less certain.

"Nope. The minute-men were soldiers in the American Revolution. Do you know why they called them that?"

"Why?"

"Cause they were just farmers, and regular people ... but they could be ready to go into battle in a minute."

Again, a long silence. As Cashel filed this away for safekeeping. He forgets nothing.

"So ... Auntie Sheila ... what is the difference between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War?"

Woah. Okay. This will be a test. How to describe all of that in 5-year-old language. I mean, frankly, Cashel is not like a five-year-old at all. But still. Everything must be boiled down into its simplest components.

"Well. America used to be a part of England, and the American Revolutionary War was when America decided that it wanted to be free ... and Americans basically told the Brits to go home." Uh-oh. Brits? This is an inflammatory term. I corrected myself. "America told Great Britain that it wanted to be its own country. And the Civil War ... " Hmmm. How to begin ... what to say ... I know it was about more than slavery, but I decided to only focus on that one aspect. Economic theory would be too abstract. "In those days, Cashel, black people were slaves. And it was very very wrong. Can you understand that?"

He nodded. His little serious face.

"And the people in the South wanted to keep their slaves, and the people in the North said to the people in the South that they had to give up their slaves because it was wrong. And they ended up going to war. And eventually all the slaves were free."

Cashel accepted this explanation silently. Then he pointed back to the Paul Revere poem. "Read." he commanded.

Cashel's Dream

Just heard this story last night about my nephew, Cashel. He was explaining to my parents what Martin Luther King day was all about. He said:

"Back then, black people and white people couldn't do the same things. But then Martin Luther King's dream came true."

Cashel was being quite literal. Martin Luther King actually had a dream one night, while he was asleep, and then it came true.

Wisdom.

A John Adams fest

-- "Fire them with ambition to be useful." -- John to Abigal, in regards to raising their children

-- "It is my destiny to dig treasures with my own fingers." -- John Adams

-- "If the way to do good to my country were to render myself popular, I could easily do it. But extravagant popularity is not the road to public advantage." -- John Adams, after becoming President by only three votes

-- "I never shall shine, 'til some animating occasion calls forth all my powers." -- John Adams, 1760

-- "There must be, however, more employment for the press in favor of the government than there has been, or the sour, angry, peevish, fretful, lying paragraphs which assail it on every side will make an impression on many weak and ignorant people." -- John in a letter to Abigail (I couldn't agree more, John.)

-- "The story of B. Bicknal's wife is a very clever one. She said, when she was married she was very anxious, she feared, she trembled, she could not go to bed. But she recollected she had put her hand to the plow and could not look back, so she mustered up her spirits, committed her soul to God and her body to B. Bicknal and into bed she leaped -- and in the morning she was amazed, she could not think for her life what it was that had so scared her." -- Journal entry of John Adams ... I love that little story

-- "Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable ... There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government outght to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." -- John Adams

The following quote is Adams' description of the first meeting of the Continental Congress, in 1774:

-- "This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man -- an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, his political abilities. The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative."

-- "We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it." -- John Adams, in a letter to Abigail

-- "If we finally fail in this great and glorious contest, it will be by bewildering ourselves in groping for the middle way." -- John Adams

-- "I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or few is grasping ... The great fish swallow up the small and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances. -- Abigail Adams, in a letter to John

Oh, and this one gave me chills:

-- "It has been the will of Heaven that we should be thrown into existence at a period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live ... a period when a coincidence of circumstances without example has afforded to thirteen colonies at once an opportunity of beginning government anew from the foundation and building as they choose. How few of the human race have ever had an opportunity of choosing a system of government for themselves and their children? How few have ever had anything more of choice in government than in climate?" -- John Adams

And of course, this one from Abigail is kind of famous, but nevertheless here it is:

-- "--and by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands ... If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of yours as wish to be happy willingly to give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend." -- Abigail Adams, in a letter to John

Their love story brings a lump to my throat. The correspondence between the two of them is incredible. Here's a part of one of his letters to her.

-- "Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together, although the bodies are 400 miles off. Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think, or to see your thoughts. The conclusion of your letter makes my heart throb more than a cannonade would. You bid me burn your letters. But I must forget you first." -- John Adams to Abigail

-- "A people may let a King fall, yet still remain a people, but if a King let his people slip from him, he is no longer a King. And as this is most certainly our case, why not proclaim to the world in decisive terms of our own importance?" --Abigail Adams, in a letter to John

-- "In general, our generals were outgeneralled." -- John Adams' comment after the disastrous battle on Long Island

-- "His understanding lies, I think, rather in seeing large things largely than correctly." --William Alexander describing John Adams' particular political genius

-- "Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right." -- John Adams

-- "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, artchitecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." -- John Adams

-- "He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise man, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." -- Ben Franklin, 1783, about John Adams (in a letter to Robert Livingston)

-- "If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subject than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book but it has been supplied to you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been iin you to have been a blockhead." -- Abigail Adams in a letter to son John Quincy Adams, during his first semester at Harvard

-- "You are afraid of the one, I, the few. We agree perfectly that the many should have full, fair, and perfect representation [in the House]. You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate." -- John Adams to Thomas Jefferson

-- "Gentlemen, I feel a great difficulty how to act. I am Vice President. In this I am nothing, but I may be everything." -- John Adams

-- "I firmly believe if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states, unless more candor and less intrigue, of which I have no hope, should prevail." -- Abigail Adams, 1792

-- Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists. -- Abigail to John, 1793

-- Your letter is like laudanum. -- John to Abigail

-- You apologize for the length of your letters. They give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week. -- John to Abigail

-- I am warm enough at night, but cannot sleep since I left you." -- John to Abigail

Editorial: All of those last quotes are from letters written when the two of them were in their 60s.

Gender Wars in the Video Store

Cliches are cliches because they are very often true.

I was in the video store last night, browsing. (Avoiding the clearly insane man who was wandering around the "adult" section in the back, muttering obscene things to himself.) There were two guys, two nice-looking preppyish guys (such Hoboken types), standing by the "New Releases", trying to pick something out. I wasn't paying much attention to them.

Suddenly two girls entered the store. "Hey..." "Did you pick something out yet?" Clearly, they were girlfriends of the two guys. And they were ALSO such Hoboken girls. Hard to explain, but once you live here, you know the type.

The two girls looked at whatever videos the guys had in their hands that they were considering, and immediately mocked them.

"What??"

"What movie are you looking at?" She glances at it and states: "No. No. I am NOT watching that."

Laughing, as though he couldn't possibly be serious, and was only holding the video as a joke.

Basically what I saw was that the two girls came in, and immediately cut these guys off, made them into little kids, mocked their choices, emasculated them. The whole vibe changed. The girls had been sent to park the car, and the guys had been sent to pick out the movie ... but clearly the girls did not trust the guys to do the right thing and had to come back and check.

I know I'm being vaguely hostile, but I don't care. I can't stand women like that. I really can't.

So then the two girls took over the job they had given the guys, cause clearly the guys were such dolts that they couldn't handle the task ... (If they're such dolts, then WHY ARE YOU WITH THEM??). And the girls made three suggestions for movie rentals, and by the third one, I almost laughed out loud.

You hear conversations in video stores all the time between couples: "No ... I don't want to watch Safe Passage with Susan Sarandon. I want to watch Blade II." Couples trying to come to an agreement. It's a cliche (chick flicks vs. action films), but there is much truth to it. But here's the deal: I feel like I would never expect any boyfriend that I have to absolutely adore The Bridges of Madison County. I don't need to convert men over to be chick flick fans. No.

I'm barely a chick flick fan myself.

The first movie suggested by one of the girls was The Majestic. I never saw it so I cannot comment. But the reviews I read all had the word "sentimental" in it. Also "inspirational". A clear chick-flick if ever I saw one. The suggestion was greeted by an uneasy silence between the guys. I (the innocent bystander) could feel the almost-violent "NO I DON'T WANT TO SEE THAT MOVIE" vibration coming from off the guys, but neither of them said a word. No response. The two girls didn't even care that they didn't get a response, and bulldozed on.

It was then that I heard one of the guys murmur to the other: "I heard that The Majestic sucked."

I wanted to cheer. Yes! Keep your own opinions! Don't let them bully you! I heard The Majestic sucked too!

The next suggestion was also such a chick-flick, only I can't remember which one it was. Perhaps it would come back to me under hypnosis.

The guys might as well have not been there.

And then the third movie suggested was: "How about The Shipping News?" That was when I almost snorted with laughter. This was too much! Too much of a cliche. These bumbling guys in wide-wale corduroys and big NorthFace jackets, trying to be nice and polite to their nice-smelling black-clad bitchy girlfriends with nasal voices, who keep suggesting chick flicks for their Saturday evening together, an evening where clearly EVERYBODY is supposed to enjoy themselves. Not just the girls.

Here's one other thing I noticed.

The girls entered the store, peered at the video tapes in their boyfriends' hands, and immediately and openly mocked the choices being considered.

The boys never once said, "No frigging' way am I watching The Shipping News on a Saturday night. Are you INSANE?"

They had better manners than that. They definitely had opinions about every soppy chick flick suggested, but they held back the bile. Unlike the girls.

I SO wanted to know what they all agreed on. I think it was The Rookie, which I think was a very very good choice, if that is what they picked. It's definitely sentimental, and their marriage is a huge part of the story, but it is also a gripping fascinating baseball movie. Actually, come to think of it, they DIDN'T come to an agreement as a group.

The women sort of huffed out of the store, after emasculating their boyfriends, negating all of their choices, and making stupid chick-flick suggestions...and the two guys were left by themselves. One of them said, "Let's watch this." (And it was a title which was "The R----", but I didn't hear the rest of it. The Rookie was also in its own display...) And then they were off. To join their bitchy girlfriends.

I know I'm so judgmental. But I don't care. That's actually what I SAW in those moments. And maybe it's not that big a deal to them. Maybe the girls like treating their boyfriends like they're irresponsible little children who can't handle the simplest tasks, and maybe the guys like to be treated like that.

But it certainly doesn't appeal to me, I'll tell you that.

Well, the proof is certainly in the pudding. Girls like that always are in relationships, and I never am. Go figure.

But I don't want to have a boyfriend if I have to look at him like he's a little doofus kid, and treat him like he's semi-retarded.

An epilogue to this story:
I received an email from my friend Beth, responding to this post. I opened the email at 7 am, it was my first email, and it made me laugh out loud. I will post it here, and you will see why:

Those people are not in a relationship with each other. "Relationship" implies two way street. Those bitchy demanding girls are in a supply/demand sort of thing, as are the guys. And they will probably go on together, each and every Saturday night. And the guys will plan football weekends that involve massive amounts of beer to dull the pain that is their lives. And the girls will guilt them into getting married, and plan a ridiculous Cinderella event that completely and utterly revolves around the bride ONLY because she feels it "is MY day". And she will force him to dance to the "Theme from Ice Castles". And he and his friends will get obliterated on the night of his bachelor party and totally participate in lap dances with Barbie-doll boobed pole dancers. That is not a relationship that you want any part of.

Editorial comment: The "Theme from Ice Castles"!!! Too funny.

Babysitting Obi Wan Kenobi

A visit with Cashel...

Cashel arrived. Or, perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say Obi Wan Kenobi arrived. Cashel was completely in the fantasy world. Leaping about with his invisible light saber, running by us manically, making light-saber sounds, checking himself out in the mirror.

Maria said to me at one point, "I guess I have been wondering lately: .... Is there such a thing as too much Star Wars?"

This brought up a memory for me. When I was 9 and 10 years old, I became so obsessed with the movie Oliver that I was actually experiencing a semi-psychotic break with reality. I would sit in our den at the Paul Avenue house, listen to the whole thing through, pick up the needle, and place it back at the beginning again. Over and over and over and over. It bordered on being an unpleasant experience, to be quite honest. I ACHED. My heart ACHED. I would sit with my ear right next to the speaker, literally pressed up against the speaker, dreaming myself into the world of the musical. I couldn't even really have a conversation about it. Nobody could touch my level of obsession. Well, nobody except my friend Betsy Hall. We would dress up, and act it out. She was Nancy, I was the Artful Dodger. We were CRAZY.

This was the ushering in, for me, of my dream-world, my fantasy-world, which I still live with today. I am truly the greatest "fan" you will ever meet. I am as loyal as a battered wife. I don't care if the object of my desire makes a bad film, puts out a crappy album, whatever. I will wait, loyal, faithful, for them to return to greatness. But Oliver was the first. And, again, it was almost a painful experience. No matter what I did, no matter how close I sat to the speakers, I couldn't get inside. I couldn't FULLY express how that musical made me feel.

And here is a vivid memory: I was in the den, sitting with my ear pressed up against the speakers, staring at the album cover, lost to the world, listening to the musical for probably the tenth time through, and suddenly the door opened, and my mother peeked her head inside. Her face was very kind, a bit tentative, and apologetic. And she said, with utmost gentleness: "I don't think we're gonna be able to listen to Oliver anymore, okay?" She said it as NICELY as she could. Now, as an adult, I imagine her and my father sitting in the other room, and they hear the first strains of the overture start up for the tenth time in a row, and the two of them saying, "Oh my GOD, I can't take it anymore!!!"

My whole head got red. So red I felt like it would explode spontaneously off of my neck. Reality crashed into my perfect dream-world. Silently, embarrassed, I took the needle off the record. And sat there, blankly, wondering what the HELL I was going to do with myself NOW.

Ha ha ha ha.

Anyway. Cashel's obsession with Star Wars has been raging on unabated for a couple of years now, and it shows no sign of stopping. Funny: I saw the damn movie in its original release, and I have to say that MY obsession with that film pretty much continues on to this day.

I hung out with Cashel in his room for a long time. He was playing feverishly with his Star Wars action figures, letting me know what was going on, informing me of things bluntly: "This is the assassin droid." "Anakin has the dark side in him, but then he goes back to the light side." I would ask him questions and he would answer me forthrightly, after giving the matter some thought.

"Cashel, which one of the Star Wars movies is your favorite?"

Brief moment of contemplation, then matter-of-fact statement: "Attack of the Clones--" (Of course, because he just saw it!!) "And then Phantom Menace."

I nodded. "I think my favorite is Empire Strikes Back."

He glanced at me briefly, took this in, kind of couldn't deal with it, and then went back to playing.

He was singing the Star Wars theme, as he played. I joined in at one point. But I guess I got TOO into it, because he said to me, "Stop."

I said, "You don't want me to sing?"

He said, "Well ... no ... because ... I am trying to concentrate."

Aha. Good to know. I backed off.

Then would come the random questions. "Why did the Senator turn the cameras off in her room?"

I said, "Well, I think she is so used to being stared at, and watched, that she just got sick of it. She wanted some privacy so that she could sleep. I mean, how would you feel if your whole life, people were looking at you like this --" I shoved my face right up against his face, with big staring googly eyes. Cashel burst into laughter. I love how he laughs, because he literally shakes his whole body. Like that moment in "The Night Before Christmas" where Santa laughs like a bowlful of jelly. Cashel is definitely a bowlful of jelly.

I was then put through rigorous Jedi training. Obi Wan Kenobi was quite a stern taskmaster, I must say. I had a light saber, and I was practicing my moves. I was going in a very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon direction. Obi Wan Kenobi then froze me like a statue. Told me sternly to not move, because he had to go have an important conference with another Jedi master. Cashel then walked away, leaving me there. Frozen. He was outside the room and I could hear him having a pretend conversation about important galaxy matters. Which was hysterical.

He also said to me, in a tone of huge generosity and open-mindedness, "Girls can be Jedi Knights."

"Phew! Glad to hear it!"

Cashel

The continuing tale of my nephew Cashel

Coloring fest with Cashel. He sat on my lap, in his pajamas, and we colored at the kitchen table. He drew (surprise surprise) Darth Vader fighting Luke Skywalker. Cashel purposefully drew Luke to have frowning eyebrows, to show how serious the battle was. He continuously informed me, lest I should forget: "You can't be too mad at Darth Vader because he does go back to the light. He starts out light, then he goes to the dark side, but then he goes back to the light." Yes. He goes back to the light. Eventually. So I won't be too mad at Darth Vader, because, after all, he does find redemption, eventually, and that is what matters.

Cashel's got a sensitive heart. A good heart.

Malcolm X and the Loony Bin

Another import from last year - Thanksgiving time - rather an amusing and also interesting tale of Malcolm X

Fascinating discussion around the groaning Thanksgiving table (sometimes the cliches work the best) about public art. It was a table of actors and artists, so it got quite vehement. My father is opposed to public art. His reasons are quite good. But Hunter said, "You're against public art?? Why??"

I said, "Dad, tell the story about the library."

My father is a librarian at a large university library. The library commissioned a local stone-engraver to design and execute a new facade to the building's entrance. Actually, "local" stone-engraver is not the correct term at all. This man happens to live in the state, but he is the premier engraver in the country. He has done monuments in the US Capitol, etc. He is a big big deal.

So his idea for the library was quite wonderful, actually. He would engrave on the walls and on the front of the building quotes from various (unattributed) sources, quotes having to do with learning, knowledge, books. Dante is up there, Wordsworth, a ton of great people. (Nobody attributed, however ... an important thing to remember in lieu of what happened next)

Hunter said, "Did he work with an editorial board in choosing the quotes, or...?"

Dad said, "No. He had someone proofread the quotes, but no. It's public art, you see? It's his artistic expression."

I have seen the facade of the building, of course. And it is gorgeous work. Truly. But a couple of things went wrong. Very wrong.

One of the prominent quotes in the front was from Malcolm X. In order to be a good blogger, I should probably have the exact quote to share with you, but I don't. Here's the jist of the quote: "I love learning and knowledge. If I could, I'd spend all my time in the library." That is a ridiculous over-simplification. My apologies to the literate and expressive Malcolm X. But that is the idea behind the quote. I will provide the actual quote as soon as I am able, I promise!!

So the building facade is revealed when it is completed, it is highly admired, all is well.

A couple of years later, a black man (who was not a student at the school, but basically a person who hung out all the time on the campus) notices something odd. Something that makes him sit up and take notice. There was something wrong with that Malcolm X quote up on the wall.

This man looked through The Autobiography of Malcolm X, searching for the quote. Clearly, the man had to scour the text with a fine-toothed comb in order to locate it. But find it he did. Good for him! Integrity personified! And here is what he discovered:

The actual unedited quote in the text was along the lines of (and again, I apologize...I will get the real quote): "I love learning. If I could take some time out from fighting whitey, I would spend all my time in the library."

A couple of things: the artist had put no ellipses in the engraved quote, indicating that something was omitted. The stone engraver just liked the quote, but knew that he couldn't put the whole "whitey" section on the library walls. So he took it upon himself, because it is HIS artistic expression, to edit Malcolm X, to EDIT MALCOLM X, and use the quote anyway. Not only did he edit Malcolm X, but he didn't put in an "..." to show that he had cut something out. I find this disgusting. You just don't do that.

Malcolm X said what he said for a reason. I may not like it, I may not agree with it, but he is allowed to say what he wants however he wants. To take the quote, chop out the offending words, and not acknowledge that you have done this by at LEAST putting in an ellipses, is vile. Stupid. Unintellectual. (Not exactly the vibe you want to have as you enter a university library.)

It reminds me of the recent furor about the edited texts in the regional tests for high school students. Taking existant work, by well-known authors, and smoothing out anything that might offend anybody at any time. Even words like "fat", or words like "Hispanic". Even (and this one pissed me off the most): editing "California wine and seafood" down to "California seafood." Prudes!! Unintellectual scaredy-cats! My GOD, what a debacle.

I am sure that Malcolm X said other things about education which could have been completely appropriate. Use that! But you sure aren't going to put anything like "I wish I could use the library, but whitey won't let me through the door" over the main entrance at a university building! So why even use the abbreviated quote at all? Malcolm X was saying exactly what he meant with that unedited quote. "If I didn't have to spend all my time fighting whitey, then I might be able to spend more time in the library." That is EXACTLY what he meant to say. It's gross to have some stone-engraver snip out the essence of the quote (however racist or offensive it might be), and put it up on the wall, as though that was all that Malcolm X said or meant.

So this man, after having found out the truth, (God bless him) created an enormous controversy about the edited quote on the library facade. My father told me that he got a bunch of other pissed-off people, and they marched around the campus, they called the media, they made a ton of noise about what was done to Malcolm X's words.

But since this facade was "public art" ... the artist was commissioned to create the library facade, but after that, it was his own personal expression ... nothing could be done. The controversy raged, and now everybody in the state knows the truth: that the quote by the main door at the university library is actually an inflammatory racist statement by Malcolm X, edited by the artist to make it palatable for all. This is enough to turn me off public art as well!

The second issue with all of these engravings is that the artist chose to put directly over the front door the Latin word which had presided over the library in Alexandria before the fire destroyed it, lo, those many millennia ago. Again, I don't know the exact word, but the context in ancient Greece was clear. It meant: "a healing place for the soul". Lovely. A lovely way to think of a library. But of course, in modern times, the same Latin word (and the stone-engraver would have KNOWN this if he had ASKED somebody who was an AUTHORITY) means "nuthouse."

Nuthouse.

The Latin word for "nuthouse" sails above the main entrance to the university library. And right inside, is a lovely and beautiful quote about learning by Malcolm X, which left out the words: "If whitey would get off my case, I'd love to come to the library..."

What a mess.

But hey. It was only the expression of the ARTIST. Nobody is responsible for it. It is what HE felt like saying, what HE felt like creating.

Actually, we all were crying with laughter as my father and my sister Jean told this story in tag-team fashion.

CORRECTIONS

I have received an email from my father, with some corrections to my earlier post about the Malcolm X quote debacle.

Correction #1 I erroneously said that the word for "healing place of the soul" was in Latin over the library door. This is incorrect. It actually is in Greek letters.

Correction #2 The original "healing place of the soul" lettering was not at the library at Alexandria, as I so blithely stated. It was over the door of the library of Ramses II in Egypt.

(There is a question though: are these two, in actuality, the same library?)

UPDATE

I went to the following quote site to see if I could track down the "I wish whitey would let me read" quote. And WHADDYA KNOW: the "quote site" edits him, too. They do put in an ellipses to show that something was cut out, but they do not quote Malcolm X in his entirety. Am I over-reacting? I don't think so. I think it's gross. Malcolm X said EXACTLY what he meant. Trying to whitewash (pun intended) over his racism is stupid. How can we understand the past, and historical characters, if we don't allow ourselves to look at them unedited? I mean, Jesus Christ, I have to hear over and over and over and over and over and over and over again how "Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Thomas Jefferson owned slaves". If I have to put up with that, then OTHER people can put up with Malcolm X, Mr. Hero, Mr. Savior, railing on and on about whitey.

Anyway: here is the edited quote from the quote site:

The ellipses stand for "If I didn't have to spend all my time fighting whitey..."

My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

Wanna see the redhead in person?

If you live in or around New York, heads up:

Save the date, Tuesday, July 29.

I will be performing a piece I have written (called "74 Facts and One Lie") in an evening of autobiographical performance pieces.

Here are the details:

432 West 42nd Street, 3rd floor (that's on 42nd Street and Dyer - one block west of Port Authority) - it's a building with a bright red door

Tuesday, July 29 8 pm

It's free!

Victory is MINE

As many of you know, I need to find a new place to live by September 1. I posted about my existential New York area apartment search here.

Many of you out there have supported me, put comments on my post, emailed me suggestions, sent me mucho good wishes (I got an email from a soldier in the US Navy stationed in Qatar wishing me luck - now that is the beauty of blogging), and linked to my angst-y post.

In that original post, I said that I had looked at an apartment which we New Yorkers call "one of THOSE apartments".

It felt like home the moment I walked in. There is TONS of storage space (an absolute essential, and rarer than the Holy Grail), and it is a place in which I could settle in, really make a home there. Also; the rent is SHOCKINGLY low. I used to pay rents like that when I lived in Chicago (and also, of course, got so much for my money), but rents like that just don't exist in the environs of New York. (In that, I also include Hoboken, where I live now). If I got this apartment, I would be saving almost $300 a month. (If this topic is boring, please indulge me, and realize that saying "How much is your rent?" is not considered a rude question in New York. Also, when New Yorkers visit each other's apartments, we blatantly snoop. Peeking in coat closets, perusing the management of space. "Ohhhh, so that's how YOU handle this situation!")

So anyway: last night I met with the landlady, she liked me, and I gave her a whopping check then and there.

It's MINE!!

It's in Weehawken, famous for being the spot of the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton (I love that).

My apartment building is literally on the edge of a huge cliff, which drops down next to the Lincoln Tunnel (If I had rappelling equipment, I could get down to the bus-stop in 2 minutes), and so there is an absolutely breathtaking view of all of Manhattan: from the George Washington Bridge all the way down to Battery Park. I step out my front door, and see ALL OF MANHATTAN in one glance.

Stupendous.

I am very happy! This was also the only (or the first) apartment I saw. And when does THAT ever happen?

A fresh start. My own place. A room of one's own.

The creation of New York

In line with Central Park's 150th anniversary this year, I pulled out the following excerpt from Paul Johnson's superb book: A History of the American People:

He has a section in the book called "Monster Cities: Chicago and New York". Central Park, and its inception, is mentioned, but it really focuses on the organic (and also highly conceptualized) development of the city.

It's long. Read it if you feel like it.

"Monster Cities: Chicago and New York":

New York, by contrast, was circumferenced by water and chose to have its park, on a giant scale, in the middle. New York was still second in size to Philadelphia at the time of the 1810 census, with 91,874 to 96,373 people, and the plan for its development laid down the following year provided only minimum public spaces (its original Parade Ground between 23rd and 34th Streets had been long since greedily built over). But when the fashions for laying out big public parks within cities was brought from London and Paris soon after, New York still had plenty of undeveloped land in central Manhattan, and the city fathers were able to set aside an enormous area. The landscape architect F.L. Olmsted (1822-1903), from Hartford, Connecticut, that nursery of genius, together with the Londoner Calvert Vaux (1824-95), designed Central Park as an extraordinary multi-class complex of carriage drives, walks, lakes for fishing, boating, and skating, and boulder-strewn wilderness woods.

By the time the Park was in working order the City was fast growing up around it. Population was then 813,000. Forty years later, thanks largely to immigration, it was nearly 3,500,000 and still growing at breakneck speed. The rise of high buildings meant that the immense flat space of Central Park was increasingly surrounded by a periphery of stone and masonry achieving spectacular effects of precisely the rus in urbe appeal which had been the aim of the earliest town planners, like John Nash of London. No other city in the world can produce these skylines. First came four or five-story structures, developed out of British precedent for shops, factories, and warehouses, the leading spirits being two brilliant iron-founders of the 1850s, Daniel Badger and James Bogardus. From this emerged cage-constructions, whose interiors were self-supporting metal frameworks reinforced by independent masonry walls. Next was skeleton-type construction, in which even the external walls hung off the metal frame. The Equitable Building of 1868-70 is often regarded as the first New York skyscraper: it had a frontage only five bays wide but it rose to 142 feet in eight stories and was serviced by two elevators. (Its replacement, the Equitable Building of 1913-15, was an entire block, reached forty stories and 542 feet, and had forty-eight elevators making 50,000 trips a day, giving some idea of the leap from large to gigantic in New York City in these four decades.

Evidently the New York skyline was beginning to assume its characteristic form, and to promote deep thoughts in visitors, as early as 1876, when T.H. Huxley, the leading promoter of scientific ideas in Europe, made his first visit. His verdict was: "Ah, that is interesting. In the Old World, the first things you see as you approach a great city are steeples; here you see, first, centers of intelligence." Huxley was in a sense right: the skyscraper represented the application of science at its frontiers and imaginative intelligence in the art of building in precisely the way a great Renaissance architect like Michelangelo would have instantly appreciated. But the men who devoted huge creative intelligence and engineering and mathematical skills to making New York a "scientific city" did not share Huxley's atheism. Rather the contrary. A characteristic American religiosity tended to enter even the field of the high-rise and the structurally gigantic. John Roebling (1806-99), the German-trained immigrant who designed the Brooklyn Bridge (it was completed by his son Washington in 1883), then the longest suspension bridge in the world, said it was "proof positive that our mind is one with the Great Universal Mind."

New York differed from Chicago in key respects. Though less innovative, it was richer in the sense that it was the source of the capital for Chicago as well as itself, and most major firms with immortal longings, who wished to commemorate themselves with the tallest, largest, most expensive skyscraper, had their headquarters in New York. So ultimately New York skyscrapers were not only taller but more decorative. The ten-story Western Union headquarters was put up in 1873-5, followed quickly by the eleven-story Tribune building, then the sixteen-story World Building in 1889-90 and the twenty-story Manhattan Life Insurance giant of 1893. New York soon surpassed Chicago in height, with ten stories or more added every decade, and it indulged in fantastic and often beautiful accretions of domes, columns, and spires. Most New York skyscrapers were permanent advertisements for their companies. Thus the Singer Building of 1902 paid for its construction by one year's extra sales in Asia alone. Equally, New York's vast insurance industry dictated the construction, regardless of cost, of headquarters buildings which vaunted strength, size, and durability (rather like banks). In the first decade of the 20th century, the Metropolitan Life had insurance in force totaling over $2.2 billion, so it built and occupied, 1909-10, an immense temple in the sky which was 700 feet high, the world's tallest for a time. Another example was the spectacular Woolworth Building of 1911, which for long represented the skyscraper. Frank Winfield Woolworth (1852-1919), who established his first five-and-ten-cent store in 1879 and by 1911 had over 1,000 worldwide, told the contractor who put up his building that though it could never make a proper return on capital it had an enormous hidden profit as a gigantic signboard.

By 1903 office rents were four times higher in Manhattan than in central Chicago and that was one reason buildings were taller. High rents also determined the cluster of skyscrapers within easy reach of the Stock Exchange: by 1910 they could be as high as $24,750 a square foot in Wall Street but only $800 in South Street a few blocks away. Then in 1916 came the New York Set-Back ordinance: so long as your architect worked out the set-backs correctly, you could go to any height you liked. Grandeur and display raised the height well above the economic optimum and by 1930 it was averaging sixty-three stories in the best area around Grand Central, with the Chrysler Building (1929-30) pushing up to seventy-seven stories, the extra being the advertising element. The sensation of the 1920s, indeed, was the development of the Grand Central area as an alternative to Wall Street, and New York skyscrapers are still to this day grouped around these two foci.

But we are getting ahead of our story, and above it too, for beneath the towering New York high-rises were the clustering tenements, themselves also multistory, of the burgeoning metropolis of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. New York had begun as a Dutch city, then had expanded as a mainly English city, then in the 19th century had broadened into a multiethnic city, much favored by Germans and, above all, by the Irish. Then came the turn of the Italians, the Greeks, and the Jews from Eastern Europe. The outbreak of savage state pogroms in Russia from 1881 had dramatic consequences for New York. In the following ten years Jews were arriving in the city at the rate of 9,000 a year. In the 1890s it jumped to an average of 37,000 a year and in the twelve years 1903-14 it averaged 76,000 a year. In 1886 the Grench people commemorated the centenary of American Independence by having their sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi fashion a gigantic copper statue of Liberty, which was placed on a 154-foot pedestal on Bedloe's Island in New York Harbor, the whole rising to 305 feet, making it the highest statue in the world. A local Jewish relief worker, Emma Lazarus (1849-87), whose talent had been spotted by Emerson, grasped, perhaps better than anyone else in America at that time, the true significance of the open-door policy to the persecuted poor of Europe. So she wrote a noble sonnet, "The New Colossus," celebrating the erection of the statue, in which the Goddess of Liberty herself speaks to the Old World:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-toss'd to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The refugees and the huddled masses crowded not just into Manhattan as a whole but in particular into the Lower East Side, one and a half square miles bounded by the Bowery, Third Avenue, Catherine Street, 14th Street, and the East River. In 1894 the density of Manhattan reached 142.2 people an acre, as opposed to 126.9 in Paris and 100.8 in Berlin. They were much higher than the Chicago tenements, perhaps safer -- fire escapes had been made obligatory in 1867 -- and far more crowded. The most infested were the Dumbell Tenements, which get their name from a shape determined by the 1879 regulartion which imposed airshafts. They were five to eight stories high, 25 feet wide, 100 feet deep, and with fourteen rooms, only one of which got natural light, on each floor. Over half a million Jews were crowded into the Lower Easy Side, and the heart of New York Jewry was the Tenth Ward, where, in 1893, 74,401 people lived in 1,196 tenements spread over six blocks. Five years later the population density in Tenth Ward was 747 persons per acre or 478,080 per square mile. By comparison, the modern density of Calcutta is only 101,010 per square mile (1961-3). The New York buildings had more stories of course; even so, the Tenth Ward was probably the most crowded habitation, in the 1890s, in the whole of human history. By 1900 there were 42,700 tenements in Manhattan, housing 1,585,000 people.

So here were luxury skyscrapers surrounded by slums, an image of rich-and-poor America. And the poor were, in a sense, sweated labor, most of them in the 'needle trades'. By 1888 no less than 234 out of 241 New York clothing firms were Jewish. By 1913 clothing was New York's biggest industry, with 16,552 factories, nearly all Jewish, employing 312,245 people. But the apparent rich-poor dichotomy concealed a huge engine of upward mobility. The whole engine of America was upwardly mobile, but New York, for the penniless immigrant, was the very cathedral of ascent.

Posted by sheila Permalink

This year...

Central Park turns 150 years old. Amazing!

Happy birthday, Central Park. This city would not be the same without the acres and acres and acres (843 to be exact) of lush green (with lakes, and lawns, and woodsy paths, and even a castle!) without you!

Some facts:

25 million people visit Central Park every year.

There are 6,000 benches in Central Park. If you put them all in a row, it would be 7 miles long.

Of the 843 total acres, 150 of that is water.

It took almost 20 years to "build" the park.

In 1811, when "New York" basically consisted of lower Manhattan, the leaders of the city began to plan out the rest of the island, constructing the famous grid layout, which now makes New York one of the easiest cities to find your way around in (if you can do simple arithmetic, that is.)

In 1850, talks began about creating a "central park". An oasis of green.

The location (way off in the wilds of the north) was blocked out. Residents of that area (Irish farmers and black tenants) were moved.

A competition was held amongst designers and Vaux and Olmstead won. Their idea was to create the space like a formal garden, putting in artificial lakes and artificial hills covered with trees, so that when people entered the park, they truly felt as though they were entering nature. A refuge from the noise and grit.

So the work began.

Construction was done in 1870.

The original idea of the park was that it would be a pastoral playground and get-away for the rich. All the poor folks lived downtown, so Central Park was too long a hike. The apartments built on the outskirts of Central Park were (and still are) for the rich.

But by the time the park was completed, the population of New York had already changed dramatically, with enormous waves of immigrants pouring into Manhattan, more and more every year. As the city's population exploded, city planners continued to work on the development of Manhattan to accommodate all these new people. Subway fares were extremely cheap from the beginning, on purpose, and by the turn of the century, the millions of new immigrants in Manhattan were using the cheap-ness of the subway fares to travel uptown and escape the drudgery for a while, hanging out in the park.

As the 20th century moved along, different Parks Commissioners continued to develop the park, and these developments point to the overwhelmingly democratic and non-elitist feel of the park.

Baseball fields built, playgrounds, the reservoir, the Great Lawn, the zoo... all free. Everything free.

Joe Papp, the theatre visionary, created the Public Theatre, which performs Shakespeare in the Park for free, at the Delacourt. Anyone can go. You just have to wait in line for the free tickets. And this is not community theatre in the Waiting for Guffman sense (although community theatre is essential!) Kevin Kline, Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep, Patrick Stewart-you can stand in line, and see luminaries of the stage and screen, live, romping about in various Shakespearean plays. And the Delacorte Theatre is an outdoor amphitheatre. You are outside, at night, trees overhead, sounds of the city, planes going by- If it rains, the show is cancelled. Going to see shows at the Delacorte is one of my favorite things to do.

I saw Garth Brooks' concert in Central Park. For free! There are free concerts, all the time.

It is a privilege to live near such a special piece of ground as Central Park. I take it for granted.

Happy 150th Central Park!

An "Ugly Incident"

From Nov. 25, 2002

I'm sorry, I know it's trite, but the whole damn world is losing its mind.

Nigerian Information Minister, Jerry Gana, says: "I salute the courage of the [Miss World] contestants. They came all the way here despite the conspiracy of the international press... particularly the British press ... There's an international conspiracy just to show that an African country like Nigeria cannot host this thing. I think Nigerians should be really angry with the international press."

Way to pass the buck, dude. "CONSPIRACY?" Listen, man, I know the white-hot light of the spotlights have been on Nigeria lately, because you were going to stone a woman for having a child out of wedlock. That must have sucked for you. But that is the job of the "international press". To call stuff out. And now it's Nigeria's turn. Because stoning a woman is medieval. And if you want people to come to Nigeria, and be curious about Nigeria, then you can't go around being all medieval. So the "international press" has a "conspiracy" to show that "an African country" can't host something like a beauty pageant, huh? NO. Stop the pity party. It's nobody's fault but your own.

Secondly: "I salute the courage of the contestants." Well, that is lovely but I, personally, salute the courage of all the Nigerian women who have to live in your tyrannical country.

And thirdly: Unfortunately, the riots and mayhem DO prove that Nigeria is NOT up to the task of hosting a beauty pageant. (Okay, that is a ridiculous sentence. As though hosting a beauty pageant is a highly specialized activity, requiring years of experience and expertise.)

Michele, at Small Victory, tears the whole thing up. She even goes to the Miss World website to see if there is ANY acknowledgement AT ALL of the trail of bodies this pageant has left in its wake, and there is nothing. Just one small message on a buried page: "The pageant will go on, as planned, in London."

I guess I find every single person in this entire story to be despicable. The vapid contestants, the hairdresser who described (as though he thought it was endearing and funny) how all the girls wanted to crowd into the bathroom on the flight from Nigeria to London so that they could make sure they looked "their best" (as Nigeria was in FLAMES beneath them), the rioters and murderers who basically have no sense of reality and are too "sensitive" to live on this planet, the newspaper editor who caved in to pressure and resigned (after writing kiss-ass apology letters for all the PAIN she has caused), the organizers of the pageant who referred to over 200 deaths as an "ugly incident", the point-the-finger-at-others Nigerian officials ...

The only person who is walking out of this with any sense of dignity and humanity is Miss Canada (Lynsey Bennett), who came home rather than move on to London with the rest of the contestants.

Bennett said, "As soon as I found out that 105 people had already died due to the triggers of the Miss World, I said, 'You know what? This is not why I'm here. This isn't right. I'm going home.'"

Phew! Now there's something I can actually relate to in all this mess.

A week of talk

My entire week has been filled with vigorous and interesting conversations:

1.
With my mother, about what happened in her painting class. She had spent one class, kind of standing next to who she thinks is the "best painter in the class", and instead of going right ahead and painting what SHE wanted to paint, she semi-copied what the other woman was doing. They were all painting the same building, but of course, every single painter will see different aspects, focus on different things, use different colors. Mum didn't trust, yet, that her view, her vision, is okay. And not just okay, but GREAT. Essential to her becoming an artist. She said, "And my painting STUNK." I love Mum. So she learned a beautiful lesson through that experience. I love people's self-awareness. Being able to see what might be missing.

It's like that AWESOME story about Michael Jordan. (Well, one of the many awesome stories about Michael Jordan.) After every single game, he watches a playback of the whole thing. Not to glory in his talent, not to curse himself for errors he might have made ... No. He watches it to see what might be missing. The greatest basketball player the world has ever seen still knows that there is much to learn about his game. Still knows that there is probably stuff he is "missing".

That's the lesson Mum learnt, and I loved that she shared it with me.

2.
With Jen, yesterday morning, on our brisk FREEZING walk. We vigorously re-hashed the entire party of the night before, telling stories, filling each other in ("Well, Rich said to me..." "I loved watching David and Joey..." And also: we had to discuss in exquisite detail Brooke's fabulous and radical new haircut...) Then, for some reason, I regaled her with the tale of my frightening experience on an L platform in Chicago, one cold winter night, years ago. Jen and I have lived together for EIGHT YEARS. It is the longest most successful relationship I have ever had. It is literally like we are married. But Jen had never heard that story. Maybe I'll tell it, later on.

3.
With Hunter, last night. We sat in Dempseys. (My God, it's pathetic...We practically live there now. We don't even have to say, "Let's meet at Dempsey's tonight". We just show up and there we both are. Siobhan works there, so it is a way to see my sister almost on a daily basis as well.) I ended up talking Hunter's ear off and I told him "the story of ******* ". (Cannot say his name. Must protect his identity.)

This is not something I talk about in any normal way. I was saying stuff like, "I do believe in invisible forces of good in the universe ... and that is who ******* is for me..." Or "Being his muse, it is probably best that we never see each other ... " When I start to talk about ******* I start to sound like a total freak. It, so far, was the most important love affair of my life, but I never talk about it. Why bother? There is a reason why I never speak of *******. It's best to just let it go. Like the tide going out.

4. With Siobhan, on the phone, yesterday afternoon. My precious sister.

5. With Brendan, my precious brother, a couple of days ago. He called me at work to tell me he had just finished reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , a book I had given to him. I cannot recommend the book highly enough. It gives me hope for the future of the American novel (sorry Jonathan Franzen!! I believe Michael Chabon beat you to the punch!) Michael Chabon creates characters who LIVE. They live on in my mind when the book is done. I forced myself to read the ending slowly, because I did not want it to end. It hurt to say goodbye to those people. It is an EXPERIENCE. So Brendan had to call me to talk about it. He was blown away, and actually kind of upset about it. I had the same experience when I finished the book, too. At the end, I had an overwhelming sense of: "Wow. People really are good at heart." (Thank you, Anne Frank...)

I don't need literature to be uplifting, or to enlighten, or be positive. No. But the love that Michael Chabon has for his characters, the love he feels, actually, for EVERYBODY, pulsates on the page, and you MUST participate in it. You must fall in love with humanity, too. It is a rare rare book that can do THAT.

6.
With Nate, a good and old friend of my sister Siobhan. We met for drinks at The Triple Crown, and talked our heads off for 2 hours. I haven't seen him in a long time. There was a lot of territory to cover.

We got talking about Eminem and 8 Mile. Oh my Lord, the DEPTHS we reached. We talked about Eminem as though we were talking about the situation in Nigeria. But we were in sync about it, enjoying ourselves. I said a very assholic thing with complete seriousness: "Eminem has tapped into the zeitgeist..." SHUT UP, SHEILA.

All I know is is that at the end of 8 Mile, the credits start to roll, and "Lose Yourself" begins. The grating hard-rock intro does something to you when the song starts. It is one of THOSE songs. It is above and beyond pop culture, it soars above any other song of the moment, it makes trivial any other music you may hear currently on the radio. It is akin to what happened to people when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" debuted. Everyone realized: "Oh. My. God. THIS is what I have been waiting for. THIS is music." In one moment, the entire decade of the 80s was trashed and forgotten. A new world began. We still live in that world. That Kurt Cobain created.

Eminem stands alone, in that respect. It is his moment. Also, weirdly, when that song starts, at the end of the film, I felt like: Wow, this is actually just the BEGINNING of this movie.

So anyway: Nate and I talked in this manner for two full hours. It was gloriously fun.

7.
With Ruben, my friend from Baltimore, in an Instant Messenger capacity, yesterday afternoon. The man is hilarious. I have a date on Monday, and I want to buy some nice shoes for it. Girlie shoes. I said to Ruben, (or, I "typed" to Ruben), "All I have are combat boots and Converse sneakers. I need some PUMPS."

Almost immediately, he starts sending me links with pictures of different shoes. The man is phenomenal. "How about this? Or this? I'm thinking this might look good." Shoe after shoe after shoe.

We also were talking about the whole goth scene in Baltimore, or lack thereof. Ruben told me that yeah, there are goth clubs, but it's all just rich kids from the suburbs, trying to be radical, using their huge allowances from their parents to get another piercing, or whatever. It's phony goth. But here is how Ruben boiled it all down, and I just BURST into laughter: "Count Chocula is more goth than these frowning brats." Brilliant. The man should have a column. In my opinion.

8.
With the cab driver from Bangladesh who took me home to Hoboken at 5 in the morning after my birthday party.

Here's how that happened:

We began talking about the upcoming fare hikes. WHERE WILL IT END?

Then I asked him where he was from, and he said, "Bangladesh." I began interrogating him about his country. Eventually, Bangladesh will be my "Country of the Week", so this was the start of that inquiry.

His whole family is in Bangladesh. He is here alone. But he is going home in a couple of months to meet the woman his mom picked out to be his wife. He has never met her. He is very excited to meet her and also very excited to be a husband. He's 28.

"I am ready to get married."
I said, "And you trust your mom to pick out a good person for you?"
He said, "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. My mom knows me so well. She knows what I like."
I said, "Wow. That is so terrific. Good luck!"

He will go back to Bangladesh, and then return to America with his brand-new wife. He has one day off a week, and goes to the movies, and has a couple of beers at a local pub. This makes him happy.

He told me that Bangladesh is a democracy, a new democracy, and on its way to be a functioning one. "We are not like Pakistan."
"What's different between you guys and Pakistan?" I asked.
He said, "Well, Pakistan is HARD Muslim. We are not HARD Muslim."
"What do you mean by hard?"
"Well ... they are illiterate. They only are interested in religion. They don't care about anything else. They don't believe women should be educated. [I refrained from asking him about the propensity of Bagladeshi men to throw burning acid on their wives and daughters...] We aren't like that. We are soft Muslim. Also, in Pakistan, the military is in everything. The military controls everything."
I said, "Well, yes. I mean, Musharraf is an army guy!"
"Yes! Musharraf took over the country, backed up by the military. Bangladesh isn't like that."
"So ... what is going to happen with Pakistan, do you think? Is this just going to go from bad to worse, you think?"
He said, "Miss, it is not a good situation. They do not know what they are doing. They have no qualifications to run a country. It is a country full of lunatics."
I said, "It's interesting to me that when Pakistan was formed ... people thought that religion would solve everything. Like: as long as everyone here is Muslim, then all else will follow. But it hasn't worked out there."
"No. It is a very bad situation."

By this point, we were turning onto my block.

I said (also, by this point, I was sitting on the edge of the back seat, leaning over the front seat, with my head through the little glass window.) "So can you tell me why Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan in 1971?"

At that moment, the absurdity occurred to me, and I started laughing. "Can you boil the entire situation between Bangladesh and Pakistan down in ONE BLOCK?" Ha ha ha. We both laughed.

And then, we actually sat in the parked taxi outside of my apartment for 15 minutes, and he told me what had happened. The Cliff Notes version, but it was good enough. It was a beautiful connection. After I paid him, he turned around and held his hand out for me to shake. We shook hands.

I said, "God bless you, my friend. And good LUCK with getting married!"
He said, "God bless you too, miss."

It was like we were cultural ambassadors. There is an enormous cultural divide between us, but we communicated very very well. I'm Irish-American Catholic. He is a Muslim from Bangladesh. It was 5 in the morning. And he told me all about the relationship between Bangladesh and Pakistan. Beauty!!

9.
With Rachel, the night of my birthday party. She told me about her theory of "love and fear". Every interaction in our lives, every single time we run into anybody, stranger or friend, we are faced with a choice: Love or Fear. She lives her life that way. I found it completely thrilling. "See, when I sit down and talk with so-and-so ... it's Love. Clearly." It's as simple as that. Love or Fear. Choose.

It has been a week of talk. A week of connection. I am blessed.

The Awfulness of Jewel

I came across the following Jewel quote and had to post it for those of you out there (Brendan ... Jean ... ) who hate Jewel with a passion that moves beyond my understanding. I don't like her music at all, but I do not HATE her as you both do, I do not share your schadenfreude-ish attitude in regards to her foibles, yet I support you fully in it because I think it is amusing, and supply you with this horrifically awful quote attributed to Jewel. Apparently she announced this to a concert audience:

"Obviously Bob Dylan is gay if he's not interested in me. I mean, look at me. Who would have guessed that Dylan is a fag? That's going to get me in trouble. It's going to be in all the papers tomorrow."

I would like to give her the benefit of the doubt, and so I am trying to hear her say it with an ironic tongue-in-cheek tone, but it's not ringing true. Especially with suddenly throwing "fag" in there.

Her statement is obnoxious on every level. Vain, stupid, cruel.

I hate her now too. Bob Dylan is a LEGEND, okay?

Living between two poles

I was clearing out my AOL Filing Cabinet today (long story), and came across an email I sent to a dear friend this summer. I read it, uneasy, with an odd feeling of nostalgia. It was only two months ago. Why this yearning sensation? I had forgotten, almost, the Joycean obsession which fired up my June and July. So much has happened in the intervening months, so much personal and world-events darkness, that the innocent burbly ramblings in this email seem as though they were written by another woman.

Here it is:

James Joyce has ruined other writers for me. I am reading Ulysses for the first time aided by my dad and 2 literary guidebooks -- without which the damn thing would be impenetrable But once I cracked Joyce's code just a little bit, the book would suddenly, oddly, open up to me. Showing me only glimpses of the genius, but glimpses nonetheless.

It's like those moments I used to have in math class, where I would be completely confused, all the numbers blending together on the board, having no idea what was going on, what I was supposed to be doing, how to do it...and then, in a flash, out of nowhere, the concepts made sudden breathtaking sense, and I could "see" exactly how I was supposed to get the right answer. That's what reading Ulysses has been like for me: slogging through seemingly meaningless stream-of-consciousness prose, when suddenly...light breaks in and I realize that NOTHING is random in the book. There are connections and inter-connections EVERYWHERE.

It is, hands down, the most exciting reading experience I have ever had.

And it is KICKING MY ASS. It is hard hard stuff. (James Joyce said to a friend who complained to him about how difficult the book was: "Well, it took me 7 years to write it. It should take you 7 years to read it.")

Reading it has brought me and my dad even closer together. I call him up and read him one sentence, asking for clarification. One sentence out of a 900 page book and he will automatically say, "Ah yes. That's from the Cyclops episode. Joyce is referring to the editor of The Irish Times at the time." My dad is a lunatic, and I couldn't get thru Ulysses without him.

I'm becoming a lunatic myself. I am living more and more completely in my mind.

A stranger on the street saw Ulysses under my arm and stopped me to have a conversation about it. "So are you reading it unaided, or are you following the guidebooks?" So funny. It was like we were 2 members of some weird cult. Huddled away in a thatched hut, drinking Guinness, reading Joyce. Thinking to ourselves, "Jesus, what the hell is Joyce going on and on about?"

And on the flip side, in the physical side of my life which I pretty much willfully ignore: I went out with Jen last night to a club in the village, to hear an absolutely phenomenal cover band of all things, and danced like a complete and utter maniac until 4 in the morning. 4 in the morning??

They did a cover of "Lithium", my favorite Nirvana song, and I basically felt as though Kurt Cobain were ACTUALLY there. We all did. Everyone was screaming and thrashing like complete banshees, losing their friggin minds. I haven't slamdanced in 10 years. There was an exhilaratingly cosmic element to the group-dance-fest. For one bright moment, we felt that Cobain had not died. He LIVED in that song. I lost myself in it. Everybody did.

Today I am exhausted. Hence this long bizarre monologue.

James Joyce and Kurt Cobain. The two poles of my life.

Being pro-actively amusing

I was describing to Mitchell an amusing and satisfying encounter I had with a guy last week, in which I regaled said guy with funny stories, and where I truly felt I had a captive audience.

But the way I expressed this to Mitchell was: "I was being pro-actively amusing, and he was really getting that."

There was a long pause, and then Mitchell said, "What??"

From that moment on, "pro-actively amusing" was the catchphrase of the weekend.

"Oh don't mind me, I'm just being pro-actively amusing."

"Was that supposed to be a joke?" "Yes, I was attempting to be pro-actively amusing."

Why couldn't I just say: "The man laughed at every single one of my jokes. We have the same sense of humor."

No, no, no. That doesn't quite describe it at all ...

AN UNEXPECTED RANT ...

From Nov. 1, 2002

There is nothing new under the sun. There is no grand and perfect utopia out there. Everything has been tried. Some things have worked, others have led to complete and utter disaster. There is nothing to "go back" to, no perfect world ANYWHERE. All we can do is stay in the moment and work with what we PRESENTLY have. Sort of like what I was saying yesterday about the love story in Punch Drunk Love. At a certain point in life, bad things happen to you, and bad things leave their mark on you (unless you live in complete and utter denial) . Some people give up. They yearn to go back to when they were 5 and everything was perfect. I can think of a number of politicians, in both parties, who fall in this category. Their eyes are in the rear-view mirror, they are not watching the road.

I got Alanis Morrisette's new CD a while back. Here is my experience of listening to it: The first song is a song called "21 Things", or something like that. It is a hard-rock shrieking GREAT song. I could not ((and still can not) stop listening to it. My room became my own personal music-video set. It's that kind of song. The first couple of bars are, as my friend Mitchell would say, "sheer liquid joy". Fantastic. Makes you want to throw yourself about and bang some heads. The rest of the CD is ... tepid. Pale. Boring. Her counterintuitive syntax and wording finally get on my damn nerves. But why I am bringing up Alanis is that the final song on the CD is called "Utopia". I suppose if it had a hard-edged sound, and some wailing electric guitars, I might overlook the nonsense of the lyrics, but since it is a slow ballad, it is clear that Ms. Morrissette wants it be ABOUT the lyrics.

Anyway, cannot list the lyrics right now (CD not with me), but the title says it all. "Utopia".

Alanis, here is a little history lesson. Any leader who comes along promising Utopia if only you follow him (it's always a Him), RUN. RUN FOR THE HILLS. DON'T LOOK BACK. RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

It's all about (and because it is Alanis, you will know that her lyrics actually often read like this):

I dream of a world where there is no more hatred and where conflict is resolved by sitting down and starting a dialogue
I dream of listening, of sharing, of validating, of honoring
I dream of a world where every single person will feel loved and important and beautiful
I dream of loving, of laughing, of peace
I dream that we all will join hands and there will be no more war, no more hunger, no more anger, no more hatred

Okay, you know what??? I've had enough. I mean, all of these things are great. It's not like I would write a song with lyrics like:

I dream of a world where nobody listens to each other
I dream of anger, of darkness, of pride, of rage
I dream of a world where wars are fought every year, and only the strongest and best organized wins
I dream of a world where the hawks outnumber the doves

You get my point. I am sick to death of people, Alanis included, calling for a "dialogue". I want to know what exactly that word means to people. I am not sure what they are referring to when they keep saying that at least they want to have a dialogue. Do these people read the Op-Ed columns I read? Do these people watch the news? Flipping back and forth between Fox, CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN? No dialogue? Are you crazy?? I wish the dialogue would STOP, quite frankly, and we'd start seeing some action. Some bold moves, some risks taken. Stop talking. Start acting.

Blair again...

On our way down here, Senator Frist was kind enough to show me the fireplace where in 1814 the British had burned the Congress Library. I know this is kind of late, but: Sorry.

-- Tony Blair, yesterday

Diary Friday

Well, unfortunately for my own dignity on this planet, I have unearthed the dreaded high school journals. They are filled with gossip, scandal, and intrigue. Half the time, it sounds like I'm in an adolescent version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Much of it I will NEVER SHARE. But some of it ... I was reading through one on my weekend home, guffawing with laughter, all by myself.

Anyway. No more qualifying... This entry is from my junior year. I was deeply deeply in absolutely unrequited love with a guy named David. It is astonishing how much I wrote about him. Also deeply mortifying.

So... before I change my mind, here is the next installment of Diary Friday: (Oh, and if you're curious, I blanked out one of my high school friends names below...not for any nefarious reason, but because her name is highly unusual and she has since gone on to become very very famous. I don't want some kind of freaky freakin' lawsuit on my hands cause I put her name into some dumb Diary Friday.) Okay, onward:

Feb. 8, 1984

We went bowling today. Great! I broke all my previous scores and got a 73! *****, Kate, April and I were all in the same section. Dave and Jeff were right beside us. As we were all putting on our shoes, April groaned and said, "I forgot my glasses again!" So far, she's forgotteen them every time we've gone. We started jokingly making fun of her. Dave and I were sitting back to back and suddenly he turned around, grinning. "Why do you speak to April in this manner?" I can't even remember what I said.

The class was great. I'd go up there to bowl, and once I sent the ball heading straight for the pins, I heard Dave call, "That's the way!" He was WATCHING ME!! [Editorial note: I must interject. This is way too embarrassing to post without interjecting. I have nothing to SAY, exactly, but I just needed to interject and acknowledge that I KNOW how ridiculous I sounded. Thanks. Read on, Macduff.] I got a strike, too, and he was clapping and smiling. I'll admit it in here to you--you're just a diary-- I really think there's a chance. I know there is. [Editorial comment: The first of 5,498 times I will say that in my life thus far. And, like all 5,495 times, I will be WRONG. You do the math.] He talks to me all thetime, he goes out of his way to talkto me.

When we got back to the gym, we were early and had 15 minutes left. I was sitting on the bleechers with Kate, *******, and April. Dave was off somewhere talkig but then he strolled over and I just knew he was coming over to us. [Ed: wow, what was your clue, Sheila? That he was WALKING TOWARDS YOU?? Oh my GOD, what does it all MEAN???] He leaned on the bleechers behind me. Behind ME! [Oh, for God's sake, we heard you the first time.] He rested his forehead on his fist. I had to crook my neck all the way back to look at him. He said, with a sighing voice, "Wait till you guys are seniors-- second semester--"-he groaned, a real live groan [I can't resist jutting myself in here - I am not sure what the significance to me of "real live groan" was. A "real live groan" as opposed to a "completely counterfeit groan"...] "I don't care anymore! Either I'm in or I'm out - just get me out of here. I have the worst case of senioritis."

Then, almost as one, all four of us said something like, "It's settling in early!"

He smiled. "Really? Well, your junior year should be your peak. Everything you do should be the best."

I said, "If this is the peak of my life, I'd really like to see my depressed moments."

******* burst out laughing.

I laughed too and looked up at Dave. He was grinning down at me in this way - I don't think I'm tricking myself here. It seemed like a very fond grin. Does he look upon me fondly? [Omigod, this is so embarrassing.] When I was sitting there, did he glance down at me when I didn't know? I'm going crazy.

The bell rang. Dave kept talking to me as we picked up our books. Of course, all my friends drifted subtly off, leaving the two of us alone. What great people they are! Anyway, Dave was saying, "If you're in sports, you're the best. In your cas, if you're in drama, you're a smash hit!"

Oh!! I forgot! I'm so dumb! Judy quit about 2 weeks ago, I am now in the play! Mrs. Stanley!

So, I smiled sort of sarcastically as we walked along, and said, "I have two lines in the second act. Count 'em: TWO."

He shrugged and smiled -- This is the best part. "Better than I have." In fact -- he said it TWICE. Count it - TWICE. [2003: Oh, Jesus Christ. Wow, Sheila, he said it twice! He must be utterly and hopelessly in love with you.]

I wonder if he'll come to see the play. OH GOD. I get to faint in it, and burst into tears. I play a real wimp. I like her, though.

Before I close, I have a tres tres tres hysterique story. I almost lost control in French class.

Tor B. --a kid in class - is moving. Too bad. I don't know what his problem is. He is getting Fs in everything. We had an open book test in English, and he failed it. Mrs. Franco was saying to all of us, "Well, when I'm looking over your grades and I see that you have a stream of 100s and then a freak 40, I'll just drop the 40." Tor then raised his hand and said, "Uh ... could that work in the opposite way?"

Anyway, he's moving to North Carolina and he was absent a few days ago to go down and see the house. So in French (Mr. Hodge has a discussion time every class in French), Mr. Hodge was asking Tor questions about the house. Simple questions. This is our THIRD YEAR OF FRENCH, after all. Mr. Hodge was asking: how many bathrooms, bedrooms, big or small yard. Tor didn't understand a word of it. I swear, too: the sun rose on his face. He was turning purple! He stumbled along. Dave, who sits right beside him, became the interpreter. It was so so funny.

Mr. Hodge would ask the question. There'd be a long silence, and then Dave would mutter under his breath, "How many bathrooms?" All eyes were on poor Tor. I, personally, was watching Dave, who kept grinning over at me, slightly, like, "Get a load of this guy..."

Then, Mr. Hodge asked him if the house had a cellar. Tor sat there, silently, face like a beet. Dave interpreted, and then Tor said, with conviction, the only word he knows for sure in French, "Oui." Extended vocab there. I'm sorry, I shouldn't make fun, but this story is so hysterical.

Mr. Hodge then asked if it was a wine cellar. Tor's face was a total blank. He nodded anyway, without Dave interpreting, which was a dumb move. He got trapped. Mr. Hodge then asked what color wine they stored down there -- blanche, rouge, rose. Tor, in his panic, only heard the word "coleur", only understood the word "coleur", so he said, in English, obviously thinking that Mr. Hodge had asked him what color the HOUSE was: "Uh ... greenish..."

Oh my God, I thought I was going to have to leave the room.

Everyone BURST into laughter. I laughed so hard my stomach ached. Davide's face at that moment will be engraved in my brain forever.

****** and I kind of could not stop laughing about the green wine all the way thru class and on into lunch.

After school, I went over to Betsy's so we could practice Guys and Dolls. She had gotten a letter from a guy she really likes ...he was telling her about hmself, he was like, "I am a Christian. Perhaps a stumbling one, but a Christian." Isn't that so sweet? Not every guy would come out and say that.

We had a really good talk on her couch and then we watched Little House on the Prairie. Oh my God, Carrie fell down the well. Betsy and I were laughing so hard at Michael Landon trying to cry. But at the end of the show, when they saved Carrie, tears were streaming down my cheeks. Betsy laughed SO HARD at that, because we had been making fun of it all along, and suddenly I succumbed. They got me.

I'm crying a lot, lately. Not about me,but at movies, TV shows, awards ceremonies, ballet, certain commercials. I get a lump in my throat about practically anything.

I think I may be sensitive to a fatal extreme. I hope not.

True Stories of a Pr0n Clerk

So Ali Davis, who began an online journal called True PrOn Clerk Stories in early 2002 (you may have heard of her - she was on NPR, and for a while there, there was a huge buzz about her hilarious online journal), has turned her stories into a one-woman show which I saw two nights ago. Here is her website, for more information.

A bit of background for those of you who missed the original PrOn Clerk excitement: Ali Davis is a comedian, an actress, an improviser. To make ends meet she got a job in her local video store, a store known for its huge collection of "dirty movies".

First of all: if you ever see that Ali Davis is performing in your 'hood, you must check her show out.

There are many levels to these stories: Most importantly, they are HILARIOUS. The things she chooses to highlight, the behavior she notices, what it is like being around X-rated movies all day long, etc. There is also the what I would call anthropological level. She learns a ton about human nature from working in a prOn video store. All of this is presented in a non-strident and absolutely rollicking way. The house was packed the other night, and there were times when, helpless with laughter, I glanced around, and saw the entire audience rocking back and forth with laughter, a sea of open laughing mouths. Gorgeous.

In lieu of Ali Davis coming to a theatre near you:

If you have some free time, and want a FUNNY FUNNY read, here are her journals called True PrOn Clerk Stories.

(Changed the spelling for obvious reasons. Don't want to come up on Google when people do a search...)

Revisiting Gatsby

The last time I read The Great Gatsby was in 10th grade. We had to read it. This book did not go the way of some other books I had to read in high school (The Red Badge of Courageis one example that comes to mind): books which I read merely because I had to, and have not retained one single word of. I remember Gatsby. There are a couple others I remember as well - A Tale of Two Cities is another - but Gatsby is the main one.

I was always a huge reader. So being introduced to great books was not a daunting prospect. I was also an advanced reader. I read Oliver Twistat the age of 10. I read All the President's Men at the age of 11. And understood it. In looking back, even I can recognize that that last example makes me seem a bit loony. But I loved that book then, and I love it now.

Anyway: other books I was forced to read in high school, books which ended up changing my life, books I still own to this day:

The Catcher in the Rye
Moby Dick
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter
The Great Gatsby

So. Prelude over.

I just picked up The Great Gatsby again and read it in three days. (It felt much much longer in high school. But it's a tiny book in actuality!) I was shocked and moved by how much I had remembered. The huge eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleberg ... I remember the intense class discussion about what those eyes symbolize. The green light at the end of the dock, obviously. And there were parts that I actually remembered word for word, because of how, exactly, Mr. Crothers (my teacher) taught the book.

I remember the huge discussion about the following part of the book:

Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the carpet.

"Oh, you want too much!" she cried to Gatsby. "I love you now -- isn't that enough? I can't help what's past." She began to sob helplessly. "I did love him once -- but I loved you too."

Gatsby's eyes opened and closed.

"You loved me too?" he repeated.

I remember Mr. Crothers pointing out that section to us, and talking about how that was the snap in Gatsby, that was the dream dying in Gatsby, that was the inner conflict of the entire book encapsulated in two sentences:

Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. "You loved me too?" he repeated.

Fitzgerald does not describe the snap. He does not have to. Fitzgerald does not talk about Gatsby's dream of Daisy, his fantasy of Daisy, at least not in that pivotal moment. All he does, all he does, is tell us that Gatsby's eyes opened and closed. And in that moment, a man's dream dies.

Phenomenal.

I would have missed that, in high school, if Mr. Crothers hadn't dwelt on it so specifically, and it all came back rushing back when I re-read it.

In re-visiting Gatsby, Mr. Crothers - my 10th grade English teacher - has been so much on my mind. I might say that Mr. Crothers was the best teacher I have ever had. Period. He taught me how to write. Or at least: I could write, but he taught me how to write a paper. A good clean proper paper. Plain and simple. And you know how he taught me? I wrote a paper in his class. I got a D. My first D in my whole life. Panic ensued. Deep depression. Writer's block. I wrote another paper. I got a D+. A D+??? I had always SHONE in writing. I had always been used as an example for the rest of the class. A D+? I totally lost my bearings. I forgot how to write. It was terrible. I realized how much I had to learn. I could write creatively. I could write short stories. But a paper on a book? Setting up my thoughts? Backing up my points? No idea what I was doing. I kept plugging away. Horrified the entire time. Next paper: C-. Holy shit. A C-?? Next paper: I got a straight C. It was a very proud moment. And with every paper, agonizingly, I got better and better and better. Until finally, light broke through, and I was able to construct a damn paper. It's a skill. I wrote consistently A-level papers in college directly because of what Mr. Crothers taught me. I totally credit him.

Mr. Crothers, if he read this post [Update: Oh my God! He did! He commented below!!], he would say: "Sheila, where's the thesis statement??"

Let me get back to Gatsby and my thoughts on reading that book again.

I had forgotten its stature, I guess. I had forgotten how superb it was. Or: if I remembered it, it was in a taken-for-granted kind of way. Like: "Oh yeah, that's a great book. One of the best books of the 20th century. Whatever." I had forgotten the level of the accomplishment. I read it when I was 15. I grew up in a book-heavy house. I knew that Gatsby was important, but you know, I had no perspective. Now I do. In reading it again, I truly get it.

Also, it was funny: I remembered my teenage self reading it, and I remembered having emotional responses to it. As I read it again this past time, I had emotional responses as well ... but it was interesting to see how they had changed, shifted.

When I read it at age 15, I was completely on the side of Nick, the narrator: the relatively innocent and honest bystander, looking on at the decadence of Daisy and Jordan and Gatsby, trying not to judge (like he says on the first page of the book), and trying to come out of the situation unscathed. But by the end of the book, Nick is changed. And so are we, whether we like it or not.

I read it through Nick's eyes as a kid. I felt the same way he did.

But now, reading it as a grown woman, with a couple of failed love affairs in my rear view mirror, I found myself entering the story through the eyes of Gatsby. I could see myself in parts of him. I understood him. I understand carrying a torch, infusing everything with significance, poetry, import, choosing the dream-world over reality.

It is only NOW, after reading it from an adult perspective, that I can truly understand why the book is seen as such an epic human tragedy. An American tragedy.

Now I understand. Now I understand.

Those first pages are so extraordinary, so exquisitely written, they cannot be improved upon.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought -- frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that any intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament" -- it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No -- Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

HOLY GOD.

Reading that makes me want to put down my pen forever.

Finished it on the bus this morning, and spent the rest of my commute acknowledging the ghost of Fitzgerald in my mind, over and over and over:

You're amazing, what a book, man you can write, just beautiful, unbelievable, your words live, your characters live, you're amazing you're amazing you're amazing ...

until the bus pulled into the fumey garage of the Port Authority and I got off and began my prosaic day.

Tequila at Estelle's

First off: I want to thank everyone who has written to me with support and suggestions in re: my apartment hunt.

Second off: Thank you to Mr. Vodka Pundit for linking to me, and for also adding me to your blogroll. I have been reading Vodka Pundit since I first became aware of blogs. He's amazing. He also wrote, to my taste, the best "in memorium" piece for Katherine Hepburn out there.

I particularly relish the fact that he added me under the heading "Tequila Shots", along with such luminaries as Mean Mr. Mustard, Tony Pierce, Gut Rumbles, and Captain Scott's Electric Love Bunker. These guys are some of my blog-idols and it is an honor to be under the same heading. To me, "tequila shot" means "total freakin' badass". Am I wrong on that?

I don't drink tequila myself. Well, sometimes I have a margarita, tis true, tis true. But tequila shots are another story.

Tequila Memory Lane

The last time I drank a succession of tequila shots was in 1992, I think in April or May, a rainy night, at a once-upon-a-time strip club called Estelle's in Chicago. The review I just linked to mentions that it is "completely renovated", and also that it is now a "yuppie hangout". In 1992, it was a grungy dirty dive, located beneath the L tracks. A hang-out for off-duty firemen, raging alcoholics and improv comedians . The bartender there was a fabulous woman named Carla, a woman who I ended up being in a band with. Briefly. My friend Jackie and I had a regular gig singing at Estelle's. Because it was once a strip-club, in long-ago days, there is a stage behind the bar. Which is where we stood to sing.

People loved us. People came to see us, specifically. We had a small following.

One night I did some tequila shots. And later that night, I was involved in my one and only "bar fight", with a crazy woman named Caroline, who wore a bandana as a headband (a la Jon Bon Jovi in circa 1986), tall white boots, and who was incredibly disturbed and angered by the presence of Jackie and myself. She began to heckle us. Loudly. Screaming inappropriate things up at us. At one point, she began to weep. Uncontrollably. Sitting at the end of the bar, sobbing like a banshee. Jackie and I kept trying to make our way through our set, with random shrieked interjections from the miserable Caroline: "Take your pants off, you bitches!" (Jackie burst out laughing at that one ... and then tried to keep going.) "Ahhhh, this is BULL sh**!!" moaned Caroline.

Later, Jackie and I came up with the theory that Caroline was an in-the-closet lesbian and somehow took out all of her latent aggressions on the two singing straight girls wearing lipstick and getting male attention up on the stage. Who knows what was actually going on. Kindly firemen tried to shut Caroline up, which pushed her over the edge even more.

To make a long story ... well, longer ... Caroline ended up locking herself in the bathroom and smashing all the mirrors. Jackie and I were perched up on the stripper's stage, singing along, hearing these wild CRASHES coming from behind the locked door. Occasionally, a howl of agony from the distraught Caroline would make it to our ears. I cannot describe how challenging it was to keep singing, when all we wanted to do was break down and LAUGH.

At one point (and this was the major error of the evening), Jackie, a gorgeous blonde, one of my dearest friends in the world, leaned into the microphone, while Caroline was mirror-smashing her way into oblivion, and said in a sweet sugary voice, "Come on out of the bathroom, Caroline ... Everybody loves you ... Come on out ... "

Caroline, in the middle of her nervous breakdown, obviously heard this and thought (rightly) that everyone out in the bar was making fun of her. Rage began to smoulder beneath that headband. Grief and loss bubbled up in her latent heart. All of her problems in life, all of the people who had ever rejected her, became embodied by me and Jackie. We were her problem.

Our set ended ... finally, management got Caroline out of the bathroom ... but they did not throw her out, for an inconceivable reason. She was still sizzling with rage, waiting for her moment.

I had just gotten new headshots done, so Jackie and I went into the now-cleaned-up and mirror-less bathroom to look them over. We huddled over the contact sheet, talking. Then - suddenly - BOOM. The door to the bathroom slammed open and there stood Caroline. Blocking our exit. Jackie and I stood frozen, petrified, trapped. We felt guilty. For some reason. She glared at us. We were her nemesis. (Nemesees? Nemesei?)

I decided to make a break for it. I grabbed Jackie's hand and shoved my way past Caroline. We literally had to push her out of the way to escape the dreaded bathroom where Caroline was about to kick our asses.

Our autonomy, our independence, our unconcern for her rage (we could not take her pain away) caused a crack to open up in Caroline's psyche. And she smashed her pool cue against my back, cracking it in two.

I have never been attacked in my life. I felt no pain. Adrenaline raced in and covered up any physical agony. I turned on Caroline and pushed her up against the wall, screaming in her face, "Don't you EVER friggin' touch me again, bitch -- you hear me? Don't you EVER lay a hand on me again! You freakin' crazy BITCH!" (You get the idea. It was a rant along those lines.) The firemen playing pool raced over and pulled me off of her, and at that moment Caroline started freaking out, trying to punch me, reaching out to pull my hair ... The firemen had to restrain her. I continued to scream throughout all of this. "You're CRAZY, woman. You're CRAZY! You don't TOUCH ME. You got that? YOU. DON'T. TOUCH. ME."

Caroline, being held back by the firemen, did a karate kick at me, with her big white 1986 boots.

And it was then, finally, that Caroline was kicked out of Estelle's. After she had relentlessly heckled the entertainment, ruined their bathroom, attacked an entertainer, broke a pool cue ... Hmmm. What's your clue that this woman needs to be shown the door?

I stood, surrounded by concerned firemen, my heart pounding through my body, my hands trembling. The firemen took care of me. They made me sit down. They sat with me until I calmed down. Firemen. Salt of the earth, I tell ya.

The last I ever saw of Caroline was 20 minutes later. She stood in the middle of North Ave, in the pouring rain, trying to call a cab, in a state of frenzied rage and grief. Occasionally she would turn and scream at the top of her lungs in the general direction of Estelle's.

What?

What the hell was going on with that woman? She hated us SO MUCH that her personality (if she ever had one) appeared to dissolve in a 40-minute time period.

The next day my friend Jackie, quite a funny cartoonist, drew a caricature of Caroline, with the headband, the boots, a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other, with glowering furious eyes, and FAXED it to me at my temp job. Unfortunately, the boss got to the Fax before I did, and watched the drawing emerge from the Fax machine. He placed it on my desk with a note, the epitome of understatement: "I think this is yours."

Anyway. I was drinking tequila shots on that memorable evening. Even though I do feel somewhat blameless about what happened, that somehow Caroline projected onto Jackie and I her own disappointments in her life, I associate that evening with doing tequila shots, and so I have stayed away from the stuff ever since.

Long long story over.

Okay, I'm distracted

I am distracted from my normal blogging pursuits because of actual real-time events. I need to find a new apartment by September 1. This is a challenging and stressful event in any geographical region, but five thousand times more challenging in the New York City area. It is ridiculous. The rents are FRIGHTENING. The city seems to be an organism created to deny you entry. Or at least to make entry a very very very very very daunting prospect. Man, you have got to WANT to live here. And I, obviously, am not a rich woman. I have been to the apartments of the rich in Manhattan, and life is a whole different ballgame if you've got a couple more zeroes in your salary. Freedom! You don't have to live in a closet! Or crammed into a "two-bedroom" (yeah, right - two bedroom - in WHAT UNIVERSE is this teeny space a two bedroom??) where your bedroom has a curtain for a door, and you have to build your own closet in order to hang up your damn clothes. Where your roommate, whom you have never met before, (you are only living with this person because you are DESPERATE), is a 20 year old gay ballet dancer, who brings all of his shrieking ballet dancer friends home at 2 in the morning, while you are sleeping the sleep of the virtuous.

So I am too old to go backwards. I am too old to suddenly be living with immature gay ballet dancers who I don't know and love. I am too old to think that a curtain is a fine stand-in for a door.

So here is who I am right now: I want to live by myself. I am not rich. I am not willing to sell all of my books, and downgrade to a single bed in order to save space. So this makes my needs extremely specific. It is stupid to be picky, and stupid to try to have any standards whatsoever, when you are apt. hunting in New York. You have a vague sense of principles, of what you will and will not put up with, but once you actually begin the search, and once you actually see what is out there, your principles dissolve in an alarmingly short amount of time.

"There's no stove? Bah, who cares. Cooking's over-rated anyway!"
"I have to share my room with an elderly couple from Peru? No biggie. It'll be nice to have some company."

It's incredibly disheartening. You have existential moments of dread. Like: What the hell am I doing with my life? Why am I trying to live in this city? What is my purpose again, exactly? Waves of despair wash over the landscape. I will never have a home I love. I will never make enough money to live the way I want to live. I am a complete and utter loser.

The city is designed to keep the dilettantes OUT. You must hard-core want to live here (or near here) ... It is not kind. It is not open to your problems. It does not give a crap about your space and storage issues.

Anyway.

Obviously I'm a little bit obsessed. It is hard not to be. Apartment hunting in Manhattan (or anywhere in a 50 mile radius) is no joke. It is a full-time gig. You must be ruthless. You must call people 10 times. You must not miss a moment. The search takes over your WHOLE LIFE.

I saw an apartment last night which ... is too good to be true. It is, as we New Yorkers call such gems, "one of THOSE apartments". You hear about them, some of your friends may even live in "one of THOSE apartments", but ... finding such a gem is so far out of reach that you cannot even bear to hold out hope. Usually "THOSE apartments" are rent-control. Of course. And you would be the 20th subletter of the original lease, which was originally drawn up in 1943. You pay $175 in rent, and you have a massive windy apartment on the Upper West Side, with a cool eat-in kitchen, and neat old ceilings, and 3 bedrooms, and blah blah blah. Those apartments DO EXIST and the fact that they DO exist make normally mild-mannered people want to murder their fellow citizens who have better fortune than they do. You must inherit such apartments. You must agree to not put your name on the mailbox, and get a PO box. But the rent is unbelievably low, and there you have it.

Everybody dreams of finding "one of THOSE apartments" ... and it is a hopeless dream. No sense in planning for it. "THOSE apartments" only come along by total fluke. And you must immediately say YES to such an opportunity, should it knock on your door. If you wait for, literally, more than 30 seconds, 150 people will be in front of you in line.

So RANDOMLY, on my first apartment-open-house, I came across an apartment which is "one of THOSE". I want it so bad that it's made me in a bad mood. I feel nervous. I am literally praying. Like God would ever bother with this level of micro-management. I will do anything to get that apartment. I don't even want to describe it, because if, for whatever reason, I don't get it, I will have to let my dreams go. I will have to watch them float away into the mist, and force myself not to live in a dream-world, a dream made of castles in the past.

This is what happens when a not-rich person tries to find a satisfying space in the environs of New York. You lose all grip on reality.

You also lose any sense of shame. So I ask my readers:

PRAY FOR ME. KEEP YOUR FINGERS CROSSED. Send me all the good energy you can muster!!!

Diary Friday

And we're back, with another addition of "Diary Friday". I found this entry from November 21, 2001, and read it over this morning, guffawing with laughter. It's interesting: at that time, I was still pretty much in shock from what had happened two months earlier. New York was still in chaos, time had stopped on September 11. But I went home for a weekend with my family in November, and this entry is from that trip home. I had completely forgotten about this, until this morning.

The entry describes me, my father, my mother, and my sister Jean playing Trivial Pursuit. And so we begin:

Nov. 21, 2001

Trivial Pursuit - me, Jean, Dad, Mum. The lame millenium version. But it provided us with MANY laughs.

I frigging GUESSED all the languages represented at the United Nations. I am pretty amazed by that. English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French. Jean said that she could tell when I started to "think politically", and then, off the top of my head, I rattled them all off. And I was RIGHT.

I was stretching casually from my run at the beginning of the game. The question had to do with a "South Central Asian Republic". I went thru them in my mind, deductive reasoning, as I stretched: "It can't be Kazakhstan because of this this and this ... Could it be Uzbekistan? Now, let me see..." Finally, I decided it had to be Tajikstan, which I said casually, no big deal, stretching my leg out behind me, and of course it was right and everyone FLIPPED. It was so hilarious. Jean was screaming: "SHEILA. I've never even HEARD of Tajikstan!"

Mum - trying to think of DaVinci's most famous painting. Completely blanking. And Mum's an artist! We all were horrified. "Mum! You know this!"

She said, "All I can think of is The Pieta."

There was a pause. Dad's FACE. He said, sort of flat, contemptuous, "That was a statue, Sheil, by Michelangelo."

Jean, trying to guess which Celtic player looked like Herman Munster (that was the question. I hate the millenium version).
Jean: "Kevin .... " Long pause.
Dad: "They named a Navy after him."
Jean's flat annoyed face. "MCHALE? Can I PLEASE be given the chance to guess stuff ON MY OWN?"

We kept ruining her chances by giving her hints, we couldn't help ourselves, or whispering stuff to each other which she would overhear. We went through three Science & Natures with her, because we kept giving it away by mistake.

I was mouthing to Dad in a very exaggerated way: "Persian Gulf" - Jean glanced my way, and clearly saw my mouth forming "Ulf" - which ruined it for her.

We had had one question about Iceland: that they coined the name "geyser" because there are so many of them there. Later, I got a question: "Which island nation is a member of NATO even though it doesn't have a standing army?"

I was very stumped. Racking my brains. I so lost the track that I murmured tentatively, "Japan...?"

Dad said to me, overenunciating, "North Atlantic Treaty Organization."

"I know! I know!"

Mum went to give me a hint. "Think island nation..."

Pause.

Dad added, "With geysers."

HAHA Oh my God. We roared. Suddenly we had become Iceland experts because of one question.

Oh, and I commented during my thought process for that one, "None of the countries I study have anything to do with NATO." Which got a huge laugh, and then Dad said, "You need to come over to the winning side, Sheila."

Which then was completely obliterated by my casual "Tajikstan" moment. You really can't get any more on the losing side than those "stans"! Who is more of a "loser" globally than Tajikstan?

Jean, trying to guess the series of questions which me, Mum, and Dad kept ruining. We were so badly behaved. One question was about what body part is affected by cholera. A discussion ensued, as Dad, Mum and I started to hash this out. (Guys, pipe down. It's not your question.)

Dad: "Hm. I would say it's the lungs."
Jean: "Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Respiratory somehow."
Mum: "I actually would say the intestines."
I shot Mum a warning look, a look of import, which Jean completely saw. Jean's face went completely flat.
Jean: "Next question."

The ongoing theme of "Multiple Intelligence", which Trivial Pursuit has worked into the lame millenium version, with pictures standing in for the actual thing ... because different people's brains process information in different ways. (Oh, just shove it up your ASS.)

Jean would hold up a card with a picture on it, as Dad was trying to answer a question, and intone at him, "MI, Dad, MI..."

So dumb. As though a picture of a plane or Chairman Mao will spark something, due to the existence of Multiple Intelligences. So stupid.

Lots of fun later with Jean and Siobhan, sitting at the Carriage Inn by the fire. Jean and I told Siobhan every detail of the Trivial Pursuit game, laughing hysterically.

"That's a statue, Sheil, by Michelangelo."

Another question:

"What organization's launch did FDR miss because he died?"
Jean wanted to say the FBI, but Dad gave her a hint ... to show her she wasn't on the right track.

Jean said, "Oh. Okay ... so ... it's not political then ... Okay. So ... Uh ... is it the NBA?"

Oh my God. Dad's FACE.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha

(The answer was the UN, by the way.)

Creed losing cred

So Creed is being sued by some of their own fans because they felt a recent concert wasn't up to par:

The suit contends that "during the Creed concert, Stapp left the stage on several occasions during several songs for long periods of time, rolled around on the floor of the stage in apparent pain or distress and appeared to pass out onstage during the performance."

Now I am not a Creed fan. I am not a big fan of earnest uplifting music, in general. Just my taste. I like loud pounding heavy music, filled with angst, anger, and head-thumping joy. So I cannot comment on what Creed normally is like in concert, and what happened in Chicago (I typed in Florida originally - that's a mistake - it happened in Chicago). Scott Stapp is having marital problems. (I'll say! "His estranged wife Hillaree" just beat him about the head and neck with a cell phone.) Problems indeed.

It is a lot of money to pay for a lack-luster concert. Yes.

But: THAT IS THE RISK YOU TAKE WITH LIVE-PERFORMANCE.

This kind of customer-running-the-show mentality is what is killing Broadway. Nothing has a chance to live. Things must be allowed to have off-nights, people must be allowed to fail ... Not ad nauseum, of course, but when you go to see a PLAY, as opposed to a MOVIE, you have to factor in the fact that these are human beings, live, in front of you. That is part of the thrill.

I saw Rickie Lee Jones years ago. Lyle Lovett opened for her. Lyle Lovett was incredible. Absolutely riveting, his entire band in grey suits, like the guys in the Matrix. Rickie Lee Jones seemed to have slipped off into an alternate reality. Rickie Lee Jones also slipped off her stool at one point. Rickie Lee Jones berated her own guitar player in front of the entire crowd. My boyfriend and I held hands in terror, watching the woman disintegrate. We both got the giggles, finally, because the atmosphere was so strained. As Rickie Lee Jones swayed and staggered her way about the stage, bursting randomly into song, making snarky comments at her band, and then, at one point, turning and YELLING at the audience, telling us to "SHUT UP", my boyfriend and I sat there, snorting with laughter, crying, making a scene. Rickie Lee Jones kept acting insane. And we KEPT trying to stop laughing, and get it together, but she just KEPT acting insane.

Anyway. I didn't freakin' SUE Rickie Lee Jones. Her wacko behavior was actually kind of the fun of it.

Nobody wants to take a risk anymore. And the prices are so damn high that I can't say I blame them. I'm not gonna go see stuff on Broadway unless I absolutely know I will have an amazing time, because I don't have 100 bucks to burn.

Alexis Petridis comments on all of this in The Guardian. There are a couple of (of course) huge generalizations about Americans in the piece (WHATEVER, dude) - but his points are well taken, I think.

On the other hand, however, it sets a frankly terrifying precedent. If the lawsuit is successful, where will it lead? Every band has their off nights - will any dissatisfied fan then go rushing to court? Who will decide what constitutes a substandard show? How? And will the Vines spend the rest of their lives being hauled before a succession of judges?

And I LOVE this sentiment:

The whole notion of audiences suing bands is predicated on the old cliche that the customer is always right. But in rock and pop music, that is simply not true: the customer is frequently cloth-eared and obdurate. The evidence is all around us. Cowed by tumbling sales figures and declining profits, the music industry has become so reactive to public opinion that it is having a detrimental effect upon the music it produces. In 2003, no self-respecting big label would think of launching a pop act without recourse to market research. And artists get only one shot at success. If a band's debut album fails to sell enough copies, they are almost guaranteed to lose their record deal.

If the same logic had been applied in the early 1980s, U2 would have been dropped after their disappointing second album. Rock history is filled with bands that failed to please the public during their own lifetimes, yet proved to be vastly influential.

Make sure you read to the bottom of Petridis' piece, where he lists "6 crowd-displeasers" - concerts through the 20th century where fans revolted, or where rock stars lost their minds, on stage, in front of thousands of people.

Rickie Lee Jones, alas, is not on the list.

It's a funny memory, though. Rickie Lee swaying alarmingly as she goes to get a sip of water. (My boyfriend barks out a loud laugh.) Rickie snaps at the crowd: "You guys all just need to shut up!" (I guffaw. Inappropriately.)

Added editorial note: I suppose some of Creed's music could be termed "heavy", with the throbbing guitars during the break in "Higher", that one weird chord change (which, I do admit, is pretty cool - that's the only part of that song I like - that one weird chord change in the middle of the guitar break), a wall of sound, but, for me, there's something lacking. It falls flat to my ears. There's something general about it. Or recycled. I listen to "Monkey Wrench" by The Foo Fighters, or "Lithium" by Nirvana, and I have to hold myself back from wrecking my own house in utter delirium. The music is transportive.

I'm just writing this to acknowledge that yes, some of Creed's stuff could be qualified as "heavy", if we wanted to battle about definitions, but it doesn't generate the same "Oh my God, I am going to FREAK OUT" response in me as other heavy stuff does.

I realize that this is completely subjective.

Well. Maybe not completely.

Iran

As I'm sure everybody knows by now, the students in Iran canceled today's planned protests, for fear of a Tienamen-like response.

OxBlog has a great post up about demonstrations today (maybe in your area) - to show your support to the people of Iran.

All I can think of to say is: I remember seeing this photograph everywhere, during the demonstrations in 1999, and then hearing later that this boy was eventually found and jailed as a result of this photograph - and I remember how helpless I felt. Frustrated. Look at his face. The humanity there, the strength. The loss. The anger.

Again, I say: I truly believe that none of this, even today's thwarted strike, will be in vain.

The mullahs won this round. They won by utilizing the normal tactics of tyrants. They arrested people. They confiscated satellite dishes. They jammed the phone lines. They closed the university. They restricted access to the student organization's website. They cracked down, and cracked down hard. So whatever. They won. Today.

But yesterday's column Pooya Dayanim in the National Review, entitled "Judgment Day: July 9 and Beyond", strikes a ringing tone of triumph, strength and certainty:

Judgment Day is approaching for those who have shed the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Iranians. Judgment Day is approaching for those who have ordered the stoning of women. Judgment Day is approaching for those who ordered the bombing of the Jewish community center in Argentina. Judgment Day is approaching for those who ordered the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and the Khobar Towers in Riyadh. Judgment Day is approaching for those who started the chant: "Death to America" and everything America stands for. Judgment Day is approaching for the Islamic Republic of Iran. It may not be tomorrow, but soon this evil regime will join the other evil regimes in the dustbin of history. Judgment Day will come.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is July 9.

July 9.

Read the Iranian Girl's post today. She ends her post saying:

Tomorrow is July 9...the day that Iranians will show what they really want, & will prove that they're not a kind of people who leave alone the students & the young guys who are spending they life in prisons, just because they wanted freedom for all Iranians. I really hope that they do it well & I myself will try my best to do whatever I can as a young girl, we must also encourage each other; that's very important…

Anyway, I know that all people in the world support us spiritually, & pray for all fighters of freedom. I wish that they also show their support by whatever they can do; I'm sure that bloggers & writers from other countries will not forget us.
Oh, I feel that I'm making a will!!! You know, I can not ignore this feeling of anxiety...Ok, let's see what is waiting for Iranians in their destiny.

My heart is with this girl. This high school girl, writing a 'will' on her blog, hoping that someone will hear her. My heart is not just with this girl, but with all the people of Iran who want a better life. Who want some freedom. My heart is with the students, the courageous students, who, as we speak, are planning commemorative protests for tomorrow, knowing that they may be arrested, beaten, killed.

They make me proud to be a member of the human race.

Nothing that happens tomorrow will be in vain. I say that as a blinded optimist, I realize. But the impulse, the impulse to strive for a better life, for dignity, humanity, for some choice in how you live your life, how you worship, how you go about living, is what separates us from the beasts. Such a struggle, even if it is thwarted, can only add light to the world. People of Iran: we here in America watch with baited breath. We are, in every sense of the word, on your side in this struggle.

Know that you are not alone. We, who watch, cannot MAKE that regime fall. Obviously. But their days are numbered, regardless of when it happens. This will not stand. You know it. And they know it too.

You are a strong proud people, with a long and ancient tradition. The mullahs have hijacked your country, and you stand now on the threshold ... demanding that they give it back.

I, too, Iranian Girl, have a feeling of anxiety when I think about tomorrow. I remember all too well the euphoria in 1989, thinking: "Holy crap, those Chinese students in Tienaman Square just might pull this off!" iit was devastating, obviously, to watch them be crushed so brutally. There is much to fear. Leaders are ruthless. Leaders are most ruthless when they are afraid. And your leaders are terrified. As well they should be.

Despots never die of old age. Despots never die in their beds surrounded by loved ones. Despots are dragged, screaming, off their self-appointed thrones. Despots are murdered, assassinated.

It is time for the mullahs to listen to the people of Iran. After all, the rest of the world already is.

Take a moment to read Iranian Girl's post. Send her a note of support. Think about the people of Iran tomorrow. Send some good energy their way (to me, that means praying, but whatever works for you...) The power of the entire world watching cannot be over-estimated.

Okay, Iranian Girl, that's enough for now. God bless you, God bless your country, and I'll be looking to hear from you on July 10.

The Declaration

And here is Johnson's discussion in A History of the American People of the Declaration itself. It is my favorite passage in the entire 1100 page book. I think I like it so much because Johnson doesn't just deal with the facts, what the Declaration meant, how it came about. He also analyzes Thomas Jefferson's writing skills.

It's exhilarating.

Read on, Macduff.

The creation of the Declaration of Independence:

At this point [early 1776] an inspired and rebellious Englishman stuck in his oar. Thomas Paine [1737-1809] was another of the self-educated polymaths the 18th century produced in such large numbers. He was, of all things, a customs officer and exciseman. But he was also a man with a grudge against society, a spectacular grumbler, what was termed in England a "barrack-room lawyer". In a later age he would have become a trade union leader. Indeed, he was a trade union leader, who employed his fluent and forceful pen on behalf of Britain's 3,000 excisemen to demand an increase in their pay, and was sacked for his courage.

He came to America in 1774, edited the Pennsylvania Magazine, and soon found himself on the extremist fringe of the Philadelphia patriots. Paine could and did design bridges, he invented a "smokeless candle"- like Franklin he was fascinated by smoke and light – and at one time he drew up detailed topographical scene for the invasion of England. But his real talent was for polemical journalism. In that, he has never been bettered. Indeed it was more than journalism; it was political philosophy, but written for a popular audience, with a devastating sense of topicality, and at great speed. He could pen a slashing article, a forceful, sustained pamphlet, and, without pausing for breath, a whole book, highly readable from cover to cover.

Paine's pamphlet Common Sense was on the streets of Philadelphia on January 10, 1776, and was soon selling fast all over the colonies. In a few weeks it sold over 100,000 copies and virtually everyone had read it or heard about it.

Two things gave it particular impact.

First, it was a piece of atrocity propaganda. The first year of hostilities had furnished many actual instances, and many more myths, of brutal conduct by British or mercenary soldiers. Entire towns, like Falmouth (now Portland, Maine) and Norfolk, had been burned by the British. Women, even children, had been killed in the inevitable bloody chaos of conflict. Paine preyed on these incidents: his argument was that any true-blooded American who was not revolted by them, and prepared to fight in consequence, had "the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant." Crude though this approach was, it went home. Even General Washington, who had read the work by January 31, approved of it.

Second, Paine cut right through the half-and-half arguments in favor of negotiations and a settlement under British sovereignty. He wanted complete independence as the only possible outcome. Nor did he try to make a distinction, as Congress still did, between a wicked parliament and a benign sovereign. He called George III "the royal brute". Indeed, it was Paine who transformed this obstinate, ignorant, and, in his own way, well-meaning man into a personal monster and a political tyrant, a bogey-figure for successive generations of American schoolchildren. Such is war, and such is propaganda. Paine's Common Sense was by no means entirely common sense. Many thought it inflammatory nonsense. But it was the most successful and influential pamphlet ever published.

It was against this explosive background that Thomas Jefferson began his finest hour … On June 11 Congress appointed a committee of [Benjamin] Franklin, [John] Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and Jefferson so draft a Declaration of Independence "in case the Congress agreed thereto."

Congress well knew what it was doing when it picked these able men to perform a special task. It was aware that the struggle against a great world power would be long and that it would need friends abroad. It had already set up a Committee of Correspondence, in effect a "Foreign Office", led by Franklin, to get in touch with France, Spain, the Netherlands, and other possible allies. It wanted to put its case before the "court of world opinion," and needed a dignified and well-argued but ringing and memorable statement of what it was doing and why it was doing it. It also wanted to give the future citizens of America a classic statement of what their country was about, so that their children and their children's children could study it and learn it by heart.

Adams (if he is telling the truth) was quite convinced that Jefferson was the man to perform this miracle and proposed he be chairman of the Committee, though in fact he was the youngest member of it (apart from Livingston, the rich son of a New York judge.) He recorded the following conversation between them.

Jefferson: "Why?"
Adams: "Reasons enough."
"What can be your reasons?"
"Reason first: you are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of the business. Reason second: I am obnoxious, suspect and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. Reason third: you can write ten times better than I can." All this was true enough.

Jefferson produced a superb draft, for which his 1774 pamphlet was a useful preparation. All kinds of philosophical and political influences went into it. They were all well-read men and Jefferson, despite his comparative youth, was the best read of all, and he made full use of the countless hours he had spent pouring over books of history, political theory, and government.

The Declaration is a powerful and wonderfully concise summary of the best Whig thought over several generations. Most of all, it has an electrifying beginning. It is hard to think of any way in which the first two paragraphs can be improved:

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The first [paragraph], with its elegiac note of sadness at dissolving the union with Britain and its wish to show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" by giving its reasons; the second, with its riveting first sentence, the kernel of the whole: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." After that sentence, the reader, any reader – even George III – is compelled to read on.

The Committee found it necessary to make few changes in Jefferson's draft. Franklin, the practical man, toned down Jefferson's grandiloquence – thus truths, from being "sacred and undeniable" became "self-evident", a masterly improvement. But in general the four others were delighted with Jefferson's work, as well they might be.

Congress was a different matter because at the heart of America's claim to liberty there was a black hole. What of the slaves? How could Congress say that "all men are created equal" when there were 600,000 blacks scattered through the colonies, and concentrated in some of them in huge numbers, who were by law treated as chattels and enjoyed no rights at all? Jefferson and the other members of the Committee tried to up-end this argument – rather dishonestly, one is bound to say – by blaming American slavery on the British and King George.

The original draft charged that the King had "waged a cruel war against human nature" by attacking a "distant people" and "captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere". But when the draft went before the full Congress, on June 28, the Southern delegates were not having this. Those from South Carolina, in particular, were not prepared to accept any admission that slavery was wrong and especially the acknowledgment that it violated the "most sacred rights of life and liberty". If the Declaration said that, then the logical consequence was to free all the slaves forthwith. So the slavery passage was removed, the first of many compromises over the issue during the next eighty years, until it was finally resolved inn an ocean of tears and blood. However, the word "equality" remained in the text, and the fact that it did so was, as it were, a constitutional guarantee that, eventually, the glaring anomaly behind the Declaration would be rectified.

The Congress debated the draft for three days. Paradoxically, delegates spent little time going over the fundamental principles it enshrined, because the bulk of the Declaration presented the specific and detailed case against Britain, and more particularly against the King. The Revolutionaries were determined to scrap the pretense that they distinguished between evil ministers and a king who "could do no wrong", and renounce their allegiance to the crown once and for all. So they fussed over the indictment of the King, to them the core of the document, and left its constitutional and ideological framework, apart from the slavery point, largely intact.

This was just as well. If Congress had chosen to argue over Jefferson's sweeping assumptions and propositions, and resolve their differences with verbal compromises, the magic wrought by his pen would surely have been exorcized, and the world would have been poorer in consequence.

As it was the text was approved on July 2, and on July 4 all the colonies formally adopted what was called, to give it its correct title, "The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America". At the time, and often since, Tom Paine was credited with its authorship, which did not help to endear it to the British, where he was (and still is) regarded with abhorrence. In fact he had nothing to do with it directly, but the term "United States" is certainly his.

On July 8 it was read publicly in the State House Yard and the Liberty Bell rung. The royal coat of arms was torn down and burned. On August 2 it was engrossed on parchment and signed by all the delegates. Whereupon (according to John Hancock) Franklin remarked: "Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately."

Leading up to the Second Continental Congress

Another excerpt from Paul Johnson's A History of the American People. This is one of my favorite parts of the whole story of 1774-76. I wish I could have been there. I remember watching on television the demostrations in Tienamen Square, years ago, and taking note of the countless signs reading "Give me liberty or give me death." It brought me to tears. An American revolutionary's words held up by a Chinese college student.

Excerpt describing the lead-in to the Second Constitutional Congress:

Next to religion, the concept of the rule of law was the biggest single force in creating the political civilization of the colonies. This was something they shared with all Englishmen. The law was not just necessary - essential to any civil society - it was noble. What happened in courts and assemblies on weekdays was the secular equivalent of what happened in church on Sundays. The rule of law in England, as Americans were taught in their schools, went back even beyond Magna Carta, to Anglo-Saxon times, to the laws of King Alfred and the Witanmagots, the ancient precursor of Massachusetts' Assembly and Virginia's House of Burgesses.

William the Conqueror had attempted to impose what Lord Chief Justice Coke, the great early 17th century authority of the law, had called 'The Norman Yoke'. But he had been frustrated. So, in time, had Charles I been frustrated, when he tried to re-impose it, by the Long Parliament. Now, in its arrogance and complacency, the English parliament, forgetting the lessons of the past, was trying to impose the Norman Yoke on free-born Americans, to take away their cherished rule of law and undermine the rights they enjoyed under it with as much justice as any Englishman! Lord North would have been astonished to learn he was doing any such thing, but no matter: that is what many, most, Americans believed. So America now had to do what parliamentarians had to do in 1640. 'What we did,' said Jefferson later, 'was with the help of Rushworth, whom we rummaged over for revolutionary precedents of those days.' So, in a sense, the United States was the posthumous child of the Long Parliament.

But Americans' fears that their liberties were being taken away, and the rule of law subverted, had to be dramatized - just as those old parliamentarians had dramatized their struggle by the Grand Remonstrance against Charles I and the famous 'Flight of the Five Members'. Who would play John Hampden, who said he would rather die than pay Ship Money to King Charles?

Up sprang Jefferson's friend and idol, Patrick Henry.

As a preliminary move towards setting up a united resistance of the mainland colonies to British parliamentary pretensions, a congress of colonial leaders met in Philadelphia, at Carpenters Hall, between September 5 and October 26, 1774. Only Georgia, dissuaded from participating by its popular governor, did not send delegates. Some fifty representatives from twelve colonies passed a series of resolutions, calling for defiance of the Coercive Acts, the arming of a militia, tax-resistance. The key vote came on October 14 when delegates passed the Declaration and Resolves, which roundly condemned British interference in America's internal affairs and asserted the rights of colonial assemblies to enact legislation and impose taxes as they pleased.

A common American political consciousness was taking shape, and delegates began to speak with a distinctive national voice. At the end of it, Patrick Henry marked this change in his customary dramatic manner: 'The distinctions between Virginians and New Englanders are no more. I am not a Virginian but an American.' Not everyone agreed with him, as yet, and the Continental Congress, as it called itself, voted by colonies rather than as individual Americans. But this body, essentially based on Franklin's earlier proposals, perpetuated its existence by agreeing to meet again in May 1775. Before that could happen, on February 5, 1775, parliament in London declared Massachusetts, identified as the most unruly and contumacious of the colonies, to be in a state of rebellion, thus authorizing the lawful authorities to use what force they thought fit. The fighting had begun. Hence when the Virginia burgesses met in convention to instruct their delegates to the Second Continental Congress, Henry saw his chance to bring home to all the revolutionary drama of the moment.

Henry was a born ham actor, in a great age of acting - the Age of Garrick. The British parliament was full of actors, notably [William] Pitt himself ('He acted even when he was dying') and the young [Edmund] Burke, who was not above drawing a dagger, and hurling it on the ground to make a point. But Henry excelled them all. He proposed to the burgesses that Virginia should raise a militia and be ready to do battle. What was Virginia waiting for? Massachusetts was fighting. 'Our brethren are already in the field. Why stand we her idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have?'

Then Henry got to his knees, in the posture of a manacled slave, intoning in a low but rising voice: 'Is life so dear, our peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!' He then bent to the earth with his hands still crossed, for a few seconds, and suddenly sprang to his feet, shouting, 'Give me liberty!' and flung wide his arms, paused, lowered his arms, clenched his right hand as if holding a dagger at his breast, and said in sepulchral tones: 'Or give me death!' He then beat his breast, with his hand holding the imaginary dagger.

There was silence, broken by a man listening at the open window, who shouted: "Let me be buried on this spot!'

Henry had made his point.

On Thomas Jefferson

The following lengthy excerpt, on Thomas Jefferson, and the writing of the Declaration of Independence, comes from Paul Johnson's book A History of the American People (a spectacular read, by the way).

Read the excerpt, when you have time. It goes into Jefferson's primary influences for the document, what he stole from, what he amended, and how he transformed the arguments of others into an original AMERICAN document. It's great stuff. After I first read Johnson's chapter on the writing of the Declaration of Independence, I was unable to look at the Declaration in the same taking-for-granted way. It hadn't dropped down from the sky, Jefferson hadn't scribbled it out in a moment of revolutionary inspiration.

Paul Johnson's book provided me with context, and context is what makes the Declaration shine out as one of the most extraordinary documents ever written.

First an excerpt about Jefferson, the man:

In terms of all-round learning, gifts, sensibilities, and accomplishments, there has never been an American like him, and generations of educated Americans have rated him higher even than Washington and Lincoln…

We know a great deal about this remarkable man, or think we do. His Writings, on a bewildering variety of subjects, have been published in twenty volumes. In addition, twenty-five volumes of his papers have appeared so far, plus various collections of his correspondence, including three thick volumes of his letters to his follower and successor James Madison alone. In some ways he was a mass of contradictions. He thought slavery an evil institution, which corrupted the master even more than it oppressed the chattel. But he owned, bought, sold, and bred slaves all his adult life. He was a deist, possibly even a skeptic; yet he was also a 'closet theologian,' who read daily from a multilingual edition of the New Testament. He was an elitist in education – 'By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually' – but he also complained bitterly of elites, 'those who, rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into places of power and profit'. He was a democrat, who said he would 'always have a jealous care of the right of election by the people.' Yet he opposed direct election of the Senate on the ground that 'a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom'. He could be an extremist, glorying in the violence of revolution: 'What country before ever existed a century and a half without rebellion?…The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.' Yet he said of Washington: 'The moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.'

No one did more than he did to create the United States of America. Yet he referred to Virginia as 'my country' and to the Congress as 'a foreign legislature'. His favorite books were Don Quixote and Tristam Shandy. Yet he lacked a sense of humor. After the early death of his wife, he kept – it was alleged – a black mistress. Yet he was priggish, censorious of bawdy jokes and bad language, and cultivated a we-are-not-amused expression. He could use the most inflammatory language. Yet he always spoke with a quiet, low voice and despised oratory as such. His lifelong passion was books. He collected them in enormous quantity, beyond his means, and then had to sell them all to the Congress to raise money. He kept as detailed daily accounts as it is possible to conceive but failed to realize that he was running deeply and irreversibly into debt. He was a man of hyperbole. But he loved exactitude – he noted all figures, weights, distances, and quantities in minute detail; his carriage had a device to record the revolutions of its wheels; his house was crowded with barometers, rain-gauges, thermometers and anemometers. The motto of his seal-ring, chosen by himself, was 'Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.' Yet he shrank from violence and did not believe God existed.

Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres at fourteen from his father. He married a wealthy widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, and when her father died he acquired a further 11,000 acres. It was natural for this young patrician to enter Virginia's House of Burgesses, which he did in 1769, meeting Washington there. He had an extraordinarily godlike impact on the assembly from the start, by virtue of his presence, not his speeches. Abigail Adams later remarked that his appearance was 'not unworthy of a God'. A British officer said that 'if he was put besides any king in Europe, that king would appear to be his laquey.' His first hero was his fellow-Virginian Patrick Henry (1736-99), who seemed to be everything Jefferson was not: a firebrand, a man of extremes, a rabble-rouser, and an unreflective man of action. He had been a miserable failure as a planter and storekeeper, then found his m�tier in the law courts and politics. Jefferson was seventeen when he met him and he was presenting 1765 when Henry acquired instant fame for his flamboyant denunciation of the Stamp Act. Jefferson admired him no doubt for possessing the one gift he himself lacked – the power to rouse men's emotions by the spoken word.

Jefferson had a more important quality, however: the power to analyze a historic situation in depth, to propose a course of conduct, and present it in such a way as to shape the minds of a deliberative assembly. In the decade between the Stamp Act agitation and the Boston Tea Party, many able pens had set out constitutional solutions for America's dilemma. But it was Jefferson, in 1774, who encapsulated the entire debate in one brilliant treatise – Summary View of the Rights of British America. Like the works of his predecessors in the march to independence – James Otis' Rights of the British Colonists Asserted (1764), Richard Bland's An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonists (1766), and Samuel Adams' A statement on the rights of the colonies (1772) – Jefferson relied heavily on Chapter Five of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, which set out the virtues of a meritocracy, in which men rise by virtue, talent, and industry. Locke argued that the acquisition of wealth, even on a large scale, was neither unjust nor morally wrong, provided it was fairly acquired. So, he said, society is necessarily stratified, but by merit, not by birth. This doctrine of industry as opposed to idleness as the determining factoring a just society militated strongly against kings, against governments of nobles and their placement, and in favor of representative republicanism.

Jefferson's achievement, in his tract, as to graft onto Locke's meritocratic structure two themes which became the dominant leitmotifs of the Revolutionary struggle. The first was the primacy of individual rights: 'The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.' Equally important was the placing of these rights within the context of Jefferson's deep and in a sense more fundamental commitment to popular sovereignty: 'From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.' It was Jefferson's linking of popular sovereignty with liberty, both rooted in a divine plan, and further legitimized by ancient practice and the English tradition, which gave the American colonists such a strong, clear, and plausible conceptual basis for their action. Neither the British government nor the American loyalists produced arguments which had a fraction of this power. They could appeal to the law as it stood, and duty as they saw it, but that was all. Just as the rebels won the media battle (in America) from the start, so they rapidly won the ideological battle too.

Robert McCloskey

A beautiful bio of Robert McCloskey, who died yesterday.

I loved the quote from him, where he talks about how he started out wanting to do "great art", but "great art" has a way of not paying well, so he ended up bringing some of his work to be evaluated by an editor for children's books:

I never sold an oil painting, only a few water colors at the most modest prices, and financially my art career was a bust. I went to call on an editor of children's books in New York. I came into her office with my folio under my arm and sat on the edge of my chair. She looked at the examples of "great art" that I had brought along (they were woodcuts, fraught with black drama). I don't remember just the words she used to tell me to get wise to myself and to shelve the dragons, Pegasus, and limpid pool business and learn how and what to "art" with. I think we talked mostly of Ohio.

That one quote alone makes me think that I would have liked the man, had I met him in person. "Shelve the dragons, Pegasus, and limpid pool business" -- a smart woman, that editor! There is also a beautiful story of how he brought ducks home to his apartment, so he could draw them, in preparation for what would eventually be the classic children's book Make Way for Ducklings.

Robert McCloskey's books were the first to hypnotize me. The first in a long long line of books which captivated my heart, my mind, cracked open a door inside me, showing me other worlds, other lives, setting my imagination on fire. He was the first. He was the first.

The end of an era

I will try to be brief, although brevity is not in my wind-bag personality.

I have lived with the same woman, a dear dear friend, for NINE years. There's a lot that is extraordinary about it, so I won't go into it in too much length. We met during graduate school and, without knowing each other all that well, moved in together. That was 1996.

Since our first apartment, where we lived for 4 years, 5 years, we have moved together, to two other apartments. We are a team. There is a comfort level, an intimacy between us, which is truly rare. Especially among roommates. We are very different. Our differences are what makes the relationship so exhilarating.

I will state something, as a fact, and she will interject with, "Yeah, but I think you might be missing something there ..." I have done the same for her.

We are two relatively young actresses, sharing an apartment, and not ONCE have we gotten in each other's way in the bathroom. Now that is an accomplishment. She's a Gemini, I'm a Sagittarian. It works.

Over the past nine years, we have been through a tremendous amount of life-events together.

We went through the torturous experience of graduate school together.

Her father died.

We both have had numerous relationships and love affairs, which we have talked about endlessly, until three o'clock in the a.m.

We went through September 11th together, which is a whole story in and of itself.

I had a 5-month long depression last year. She lived with me through it, she watched me get better.

There have been times when she cried in my arms. There have been times when I cried in her arms.

We make up ridiculous characters and have long extended conversataions, in character.

We laugh like MANIACS.

We go to see each other in each other's shows. We have also been in shows together.

We were in a film together which was chosen to be screened at the Montreal Film Festival last year. We took the train up to Montreal to see ourselves on the big screen, to eat popcorn and stare up at our own massive heads. It was an unbelievable experience.

We are telepathic. We help each other out. Our voices have become so indistinguishable that even our own mothers mistake us. I answer the phone, "Hello?" and Jen's mother says, "Jen?" Our menstrual cycles have been in sync for five years. Haha ... women are crazy, but it's true!

On hot hot nights, we take a six-pack of cold beer, a blanket, and go up to Stevens Point, the most beautiful spot in Hoboken ... a windy hill, overlooking the Hudson river, and the entirety of Manhattan. We sit up there, not ever having to talk, just being together, with the night.

It is a miracle of a relationship.

And she moved out yesterday. She got an opportunity for a significantly cheaper place, and she is now gone. My apartment is EMPTY. Nothing on the walls, half the furniture gone, it is like I am a lunatic in a mental asylum. I need to find a new place by September, and although I am looking forward, in a way, to having my own digs, this is definitely a difficult adjustment. I keep thinking I hear her moving around in her bedroom.

This is what acting teachers call "sense memory". Your senses hold your life-experiences better than your brain, or your memory banks. Memory is a weird thing. It distorts. It lies. But your five senses never lie.

So yesterday I knew that I would be coming home to a weird empty echoing place. Jen called me, as I was commuting home, and she had moved, and all was well, but she basically was having a panic attack from separation anxiety. So, of course, we had to get together. We had dinner and drinks. We sat outside, at a bar on Washington Street, and people-watched like maniacs. Then we went down to Frank Sinatra park, a huge expanse of green on the Hudson, where I watched the towers collapse with my own eyes, the air filled with screaming, literal screaming, I was screaming, too, a man beside me fell to his knees ... Frank Sinatra park holds all that in its green.

We lay on our backs in the thick grass, staring up at the night falling, watching the planes pass by. We either saw the first star, or we saw a planet. A glowing bright orb way up to our right.

We talked about stuff. Somehow I told her some stories from high school (my friends Beth and Betsy both having typos in their yearbook quotes....Betsy wrote as her favorite quote:"I wanna go wild like a blister in the sun" ... and somehow, when the yearbook came out, the quote read:"I wanna go wild like a BUSTER in the sun...") and we writhed about with laughter.

Finally, it was time to go home to our now-separate abodes. It was so WEIRD.

Jen's emotions are much more accessible to her, than mine are to me. If something big and momentous occurs, I tend to freeze up, to deny. It's a delayed reaction. Big stuff always hits me later. One night Jen, tears down her face, sharing with me how sad she was that our time as roommates ended, asked me, "So how are you dealing with all of this?" I said, "I feel nothing." She looked surprised, a bit hurt. I elaborated, "Stuff just takes longer to hit me. I'll probably actually feel this in a couple of weeks. But not now." There was a long pause and Jen said, "You're like a man."

Yes. I suppose I am. That's not the first time that that's been said to me.

But coming home last night to emptiness was extremely weird. We have merged to such a degree that I had forgotten what was hers and what was mine.

I walked in the door and the phone was ringing. Guess who it was ... Jen. Wanting to talk. Say good night. We had just parted 15 minutes before.

This will be a Period of Adjustment.

It is an end of an era.

Hepburn-isms

A couple other choice Hepburn quotes I have tripped over in my wanderings today:

This one is delicious:

Barbara Walters interviewed Hepburn, and asked the penetrating question: "Kate, you always wear pants. Do you even own a skirt?"

Hepburn replied: "I have one, Miss Walters. I'll wear it to your funeral."

(via Viking Pundit)

HA

Something else comes to mind, an anecdote I heard in person:

Christopher Reeve came and spoke at my school (The Actors Studio) in, oh, 1997 or something like that. It was quite a production, with his team of medical professionals, his wife, his oxygen-tank, his rolling bed. And yet, despite all of the problems, despite his head rolling off to the side at one point, and his wife strolling on stage to put it right, despite those bumps in the road, he managed to put US at ease. Talk about a class act! Anyway, one of Chris Reeve's big breaks was on Broadway. He had a small part in a play starring Katherine Hepburn. It was quite a coup for a young unknown.

So Jim Lipton, the interviewer, asked him, "So tell us what it was like to act with Katherine Hepburn?"

There was a long pause, as Chris Reeve took in some air. Then he said dryly, "I don't think I acted with Katherine Hepburn. I acted near Katherine Hepburn."

Oh, Lord. I remember the waves of laughter rolling through the auditorium when he said that.

Vodka Pundit has a gorgeous in-memorium on his blog.

You should go and read the whole thing.

A couple of choice quotes from the Pundit himself:

"The gal had gams."

"Kate, in short, was a knockout. And not a knockout in the lazy way we've grown too used to, with boobs falling out everywhere and microskirts with a slit all the way up to the left ovary."

"She was tough before tough was cool, a feminist before feminism was cool, independent before independence was cool, and cool before even cool was cool."

And then his great description of her voice: "You'll hear whiskey and smoke poured through velvet, with a delivery that could soothe like a gin martini or burn like acid."

RIP, Robert McCloskey

Robert McCloskey, author of Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine and many others, has died.

In the blunt words of my nephew Cashel: "I'm sad."

McCloskey's books are absolutely beloved by the O'Malley family. We grew up on them. We memorized parts of them ("CLAM CHOWDER FOR LUNCH"), and I obsessed over the illustrations. They were absolute magic for me. I wanted to creep through a crack in the atmosphere, and be in that big windy house in Maine, digging clams with Sal and her father. Also, both my parents are from Boston-Irish families, so "Make Way for Ducklings", taking place in Boston's public gardens, with the swan-boats, felt, somehow, when I was little, that it was written FOR me. I rode in those swan-boats! I rode in those swan-boats! I know that place! That book is about me!

He is a treasure. His books are classic.

His books, for me, contain my entire childhood. And now he is gone.

Thank you so much, Mr. McCloskey, for your books. I never wrote you a letter or anything, and now it's too late, but wherever you are, I want you to know that your books meant, and still mean, the world to me. If I ever have children, I will continue the tradition, and read all of your books to them.

Writers like you (writers who not only are talented, and good story-tellers, but who somehow create stories that enter people's personal landscapes, writers who somehow get into the hearts of their readers forever) are a rarity. So rare.

MORE:

Here's the "obituary" piece in The New York Times, honoring this man.