The Sheila Variations

Parenting in microcosm

Need to get this down while it is still fresh.

I was walking home tonight through throngs of adorable trick or treaters. My heart cracked a million times in a 2-block radius. Small princesses twirled towards me and basically stood stock still, staring at me, waiting for my reaction. I did not disappoint. "You look so great!!" A Superman who was all of 2 and 1/2 feet tall stalked right up to me, DEMANDING in his aggressive stance that I respond. I did not disappoint. "Wow! Superman! Fancy meeting you here!"

I then witnessed (and was a part of - a "third party" to) a small scene which encapsulated all of parenting everywhere, in every era, every timeframe, every culture. It was so fanTAStic. I won't editorialize too much - just want to get it down.

I strolled towards my street. I became aware that 2 small boys, probably aged 6 or 7, were literally rolling around on the pavement in a scuffle. Rolling. They weren't throwing punches, or being too rough, they were just wrestling fiercely. One was dressed as Elvis in Elvis' bloated Vegas later years, and one was a skeleton. Standing over the two fighting boys were two mothers, and as I approached I heard one of them say - in a voice that could only be described as FLAT - she wasn't pleading, or cajoling, or scolding. She had been in this situation 5,000 times and was merely speaking the truth. She is an ADULT being faced with the absurd intensity of children - and she accepted it - but she did not succumb to it. I heard her say, "Nobody's costume is better than the other's..." which already made me start laughing. Elvis and the skeleton were rolling around due to competitive feelings about costumes. But it was her TONE that really struck me. I just fell in love with her. She was barely paying attention, actually - she was chatting with the other mother, and broke focus long enough to say, "Nobody's costume is better than the other's ..."

These seemed to be the magic words so the two little fighters broke apart and stood up - retreated to their corners, if you will. This was right as I came right up next to them and I said, "I think you BOTH look amazing."

Elvis and the skeleton stared up at me, alert, eager. I had said the right thing. I can't even describe how hysterical they both looked, especially since they both were so small.

The mothers both leapt on my comment, taking it as a teaching moment, I suppose - and one said, "See?? That's an opinion from a third party!"

We all moved on. I went on my way, and that foursome went on their way, and I heard Elvis say in a small mouse voice, the fight completely forgotten, "What's a third party?"

And I heard the mother launch into an explanation, "A third party is when someone from outside weighs in on a certain topic ..."

Their voices faded away into the dark as I turned onto my street.

Beautiful.

I loved every single moment of that exchange.

A certain special little boy

is turning 10 years old today. 10? Can it be?? My whole life changed when I morphed from regular old Sheila to "Auntie Sheila". It's a whole new part of my identity now - one that I hold so dear. I can't imagine my life without Cashel!

He has moved on to much more ambitious projects now - with his video camera. He even took a movie-editing class this last summer. But just to show how far he has come, I will link to (yet again) his earlier work.

The much beloved KUNG FOOD GUY series.

Part 1

Part 2 (Please take note of how Pasta Guy's face changes right before he is devoured. He starts out screaming in horror - and then at the last second, he becomes resigned and Zen about it. That's my favorite part.)

Trailer for Part 3

Happy birthday, dear Cashel! You're ten! I can't beLIEVE it.

Look out! Charlie's in the chimney!!

Here is a Halloween story. I have told it before, but it's too good to not tell again. A Halloween story set in the roller-coaster landscape of San Francisco, where I lived for a brief 2 months. This was right before my brief 3 month sojourn in Los Angeles (which ended when a certain Westfalia broke down.) I was all about brief sojourns for a while.

I lived in San Francisco with my boyfriend, who had gotten a job at a big corporate law firm. We had uprooted our entire lives in Philadelphia, drove across the country ... I had never even been to California. I'm an East Coaster. I'm a Rhode Islander, for God's sake. I missed my family. I was 22 years old, or something like that.

The boyfriend had been working in the public defender's office in Philadelphia, and while it was grueling, upsetting, and not-well-paid work, it was what he really wanted to be doing, what turned him on about law. But then came the massive school loans - and so he took the corporate job - and felt like he made some Faustian deal ... he worked 85 hour weeks, I had no job at the time ... he and I were also breaking up as quickly and as messily as we POSSIBLY could ...

All in all, the sojourn in San Francisco was a disaster.

In the middle of all of this came Halloween. Halloween in San Francisco is basically treated like a national holiday. I've never seen Halloween celebrated so ferociously, with such commitment. It's like the Gay Pride here in New York. EVERYONE is in costume, costumes which have been lovingly prepared for months in advance.

My boyfriend and I were invited to a Halloween party, hosted by one of the other lawyers. I would have rather just wandered the streets, staring at the spectacle, but whatever. I joined the boyfriend at the party.

Boyfriend went as Atlas. His costume consisted of tank top, sweat pants, and he carried a balloon globe on his shoulders.

I was in a bit of a, shall we say, dark mood. So I went as Squeaky Fromme (aka Lynette Fromme), one of Charles Manson's freak followers, who also attempted to assassinate President Ford, and is in prison to this day.

I like sick costumes. I like to dress up as someone who actually existed. A person from history. Someone messed up, complicated, someone I can embody. So that's what I did.

I didn't shave my head, but I wore a beret - like she did in the earlier days - and drew an X on my forehead - and wore a long flowing black cape. She and her good buddy Sandra Good (what a wack-job SHE was) would hang around outside the courthouse, the two of them wearing capes, like messengers of death with sweet little-girl faces. Squeaky Fromme is obviously insane, but Sandra Good always struck me as the more dangerous one.

But the REALLY sick part of the costume was the sign I made.

I got a huge piece of cardboard, and enlarged that wild-eyed picture of Charles Manson - the famous one. I'm sure you know it. So I made it HUGE. And then wrote under it, in red marker: "CHARLIE'S CHRIST." (That was Squeaky's whole thing.) And then on the other side I wrote in huge jagged letters: "PRESIDENT FORD - WATCH YOUR BACK."

I'd probably be arrested for such a costume today.

The responses he and I got as we walked through the streets - I wish I had a photo of it. He staggered beside me, back bent, head down, with the globe on his shoulders. Every time I looked over at him, tears of laughter would stream down my face. But then there I was, stalking along beside him, carrying this insane and violent sign - with a big black X on my forehead ... I remember people pointing and laughing at Atlas, calling out to him from across the street, "Hang in there, man!" or "Thanks for holding the world up for us!" But I got responses of much wider variety. Some people stopped and stared. One guy (who happened to be dressed as Spock, which just added to the humor of it all) came running over to me, and pretended to bow to me. But it was SPOCK. And then there were people who were downright pissed off. Or scared of me. Hysterical: some dude with a fake knife coming out of his neck, and blood seeping out onto his shirt - being freaked out by ME.

We got to the lawyer Halloween party which was a big ol' yawn. Most of the women-lawyers just had on Playboy bunny ears, or were dressed vaguely as sluts, or something - You know, the kind of costume designed to get you laid eventually.

But there was I. Little Miss Scary Freak Squeaky Fromme. Drinking wine like a lunatic, and watching all the hot young lawyer-esses hit on my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. I said to him later, "That one chick who told you she wanted to lend you a book she liked ... she's gonna be the first one to make a move on you when I'm out of the picture." He scoffed at this. "I am SO not interested in her. Stop it. No, she won't." But heh heh heh, I was right. The second I moved to Chicago, she pounced. He turned her down, but still. Do not underestimate women's intuition about other women. I'm rarely wrong.

And she was the one, too, who kind of got pissed off at my costume.

"That's not funny," she scolded me. I already could smell the competition coming off of her ... she wanted my boyfriend ... she didn't like me already ...

"I never thought it was funny," I said. "This isn't a joke to me."

"You know that that whole Manson family actually started here in San Francisco." she informed me snottily.

"Yes. A freak show like that WOULD be started here in San Fran, wouldn't it." (She was originally FROM San Francisco, so she didn't like that at all.) Meanwhile, in my mind, all I'm thinking is: It's not the costume you don't like. It's ME. You want to get your paws on my man. Well, okay, babe - I'm gonna be in LA soon, and you'll have your chance...

She kept staring at my sign, as though it were hypnotic. "That's just ... SO not funny." she kept saying.

The party was, to put it mildly, very lame. My boyfriend and I both agreed. So we left. And wandered the streets. We had a blast, doing only that.

A couple of days later - Boyfriend was trying to get his fireplace to work, in his new apartment. But the flue wouldn't stay open, or something ... not sure what was the problem - but we ended up taking my CHARLIE'S CHRIST poster off the stick, and putting it up in the chimney. I can't remember WHY we did this, or even if it was a working fireplace ... Maybe he wanted to air it all out, I don't know - but the CHARLIE'S CHRIST poster fit perfectly up there, and held the flue open, and all was well.

We promptly forgot all about it.

I moved to Los Angeles. He stayed in San Fran. I then moved to Chicago. He stayed on in San Fran. He lived in that apartment for another year, and finally met another woman (whom he is now married to) - and he moved in with her in some other apartment.

I never thought about the CHARLIE'S CHRIST poster. I was busy making a tear through Chicago, I couldn't even really remember that dark autumn when I was racing up and down the coast of California, trying to find my own life. But then one day - I remembered it. Wait a sec ... what ever happened to that poster? We put it up the chimney for whatever reason ... did we ever take it out again?

Or ... my God ... did we leave it there ... only to be found by the next tenants? Who would have had NO IDEA that this was part of a Halloween costume ... they might think it was ... real ... a relic of some kind ...

I pictured the scene. A nice young couple, moving their stuff in ... They've got their IKEA furniture, they've got pasta in glass jars, they have a cat, they have a nice stereo system ... You can see them, can't you? And he decides to open up the flue, but something's up there ... he's not sure what it is ... He reaches up, and slowly draws out my insane poster ... with the massive Charles Manson photo ... the feverish warning to Gerald Ford ...

If you found something like that in your chimney, wouldn't you be completely freaked out???

Many years later, I asked my ex-boyfriend: "Do you remember if you ever took that Charles Manson thing out of the chimney?"

Funny how memory works. He didn't know what I was talking about at all.

"Charles Manson? Chimney? What? I was Atlas for Halloween? What?"

No memory.

This tells me that that poster was left behind in that apartment when he moved out. Who knows ... maybe it's there still!

Costumes!

This is an old post. But it's a gift that just keeps on giving.

Okay. So Halloween. My Halloween costumes through the years.

Here's a photo of my brother and me. I am a bunny rabbit. He, obviously, is a clown. The height of his hat is taller than his actual body. My mom made both of those costumes.

Here I am as a flapper. This is during my junior high years, my Eight is Enough pariah years. My best friend and I were obsessed with the 1920s. We loved flappers. We had seen Bugsy Malone. We were HOOKED. So we dressed up as flappers. Sadly, though, the neighborhood mothers, opening the doors to trick-or-treaters - all assumed that we were hookers. I don't know. I think it's PERFECTLY obvious that I am a flapper!!! This was my last year trick-or-treating.

Now we move on to college, when it becomes cool to dress up again. Here I am at a party with my college boyfriend. I was a blind mute French beggar. The sign around my neck says "J'ai faime!"

My boyfriend didn't wear a costume. JUST KIDDING.

He dressed up as a nerd.

Here we are at the start of the party, costumes intact, the illusion complete.

And here we are a couple hours and many underage beers later.

Costumes not so pristine now. I love that picture.

At that same party - my friends Jackie and Mitchell dressed up as Jackie's grandparents - who were FAMOUS to all of us. Chester and Millie. It was like one word. Chester and Millie, Chester and Millie. They died within days of one another. Truly devoted to each other. Anyway, as a tribute - Jackie and Mitchell dressed up (or should I say channeled) Millie and Chester. Here they are.

This is one of my favorite pictures of all time. Look at Mitchell's EYES! He is completely in character. I am also particularly amused by Jackie's mouth. Like: what is Millie saying to Chester? Is she calming him down? I hope so, cause he looks a little worried.

A year later, Mitchell and I joined forces and dressed up as Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. Again, the expression on Mitchell's face in this photo KILLS me. He looks so bored, so arrogant, so OVER it.

A couple years after that - while we were living in Chicago - Mitchell and I got invited to a Halloween party. The whole Woody Allen-Soon Yi thing had just exploded, so we dressed up as Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Please note that:

1. Mitchell is carrying Crime and Punishment
2. He is using photos of Geisha girls as a bookmark

A couple years ago, I was invited to a Halloween party where we had to dress up as someone who was actually dead. A person from history, what have you.

I am going to hell. I have written "Helter Skelter" all over my arms and legs with red marker.

Here's the side view of my pregnant belly as I dance with Jackie Kennedy and Mrs. Al Capone. God forgive me. More hellatious fires licking at my heels.

I think my favorite costume I ever came up with, though, was when I was Squeaky Fromme. I don't have any pictures of it. I was living in San Francisco at the time. But I thought that was my funnest costume ever.

Happy birthday, John Keats!

Keats was born on this day in London, 1795. "Ode to Autumn" is perhaps my favorite of his - but today, for his birthday, I will post: "Ode on Melancholy". And below the poem are a bunch of compiled quotes - from Keats and about Keats. He brings up strong reactions in people. Many adore, many think something is lacking ... but all give him the props. I particularly love the quote I found from Robert Graves.

Ode on Melancholy

1.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolfs-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

2.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

3.

She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

"One song of Burns is of more worth to you than all I could think of for a whole year in his native country. His Misery is a dead weight on the nimbleness of one's quill ... he talked with Bitches, he drank with blackguards, he was miserable. We can see horribly clear in the works of such a Man his whole life, as if we were God's spies." -- John Keats on Robert Burns

"Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: "The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom", he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with old man's beard. He is not aware of the veteran bees whirring their frayed wings or sucking rank honey from the dusty yellow blossoms of the ivy." -- Robert Graves

"On the whole, I do not like Keats. His poems are, in reality, too full of beauty. One feels stifled in roses ... There is little in Keats' poems except luscious beauty -- so much of it that the reader is surfeited." -- L.M. Montgomery

"These are the pure Magic. These are the clear vision. The rest is only poetry." -- Rudyard Kipling on John Keats and Samuel Coleridge

"He'd planned to become a surgeon, but he realized his real vocation was poetry, and in the spring of 1818, he published his first major long poem Endymion. And then he set out on a hike through the countryside with his friend Charles Brown. Wordsworth was one of Keats's favorite poets, and he knew that Wordsworth had been inspired by walking around England, so Keats decided to do the same that summer.

Keats was a London boy. He had never seen the mountains. He had never seen a waterfall. He wrote letters back to his brother about the wonderful things that he saw, but gradually on his hike he realized he was no Wordsworth, that he did not want to write about scenery. He hated descriptions. He was more interested in the people whom he saw along the way. He was fascinated by the peasants who walked barefoot on the roads, carrying their shoes and stockings so they would look nice when they got to town. He saw an old woman being carried along the road in a kind of a cage like a dog kennel, smoking a pipe.

He came back to London and learned that the reviews of his last book of poetry, Endymion, were coming in and critics had written ferocious attacks on him. He was crushed. And his brother had come down with a serious case of tuberculosis. His brother died in December, and by the end of that year, John Keats had contracted tuberculosis himself. He would die three years later, in 1821. It was in those last three years of his life that he wrote most of his greatest poems." -- Garrison Keillor

"He ramped through [Spenser's[ Fairie Queen ... like a young horse turned into a Spring meadow." -- Cowden Clarke, a friend of Keats

"The imagery he chose was predominantly sexual. Poetry for him was not a philosophical theory, as it was for Shelley, but a moment of physical delirium." -- Robert Graves

"... miserable self-polluter of the human mind."-- Shelley

"I look upon fine phrases as a lover." -- John Keats

"Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous, but the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else." -- Matthew Arnold

"The three great narratives, rich in detail, idealized characterization, and gothic elements, inspired poets, painters and musicians later in the century. The Pre-Raphaelites in particular drew sustenance from them. 'The Eve of St. Agnes' radically reconfigures resources of tone and characterization that Keats adapted from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was not far from his hand when he wrote the poem. And his phrasing owes Shakespeare a debt. Cymbeline suggests the way Madeline's bedchamber is made solid before our eyes. Keats does not imitate his masters: he has assimilated them. The odes - 'To a Nightingale,' 'On a Grecian Urn', 'To Autumn', and the lesser 'To Psyche' and 'On Melancholy' -- are incomparable. The charge that he 'lacked experience' is fatuous; nor are they 'merely sensuous'. They are the step beyond moral romance to the romance of feeling itself, feeling as subject, the 'true voice'." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"I have loved the principle of beauty in all things." -- John Keats

" ... a sensuous mystic." -- Louis MacNeice

"Keats was short-sighted. He did not see landscapes as such, so he treated them as painted cabinets filled with interesting objects ... His habit was to allow his eye to be seduced from entire vision by particular objects ... He saw little but what moved: the curving, the wreathing, the slanting, the waving - and even then, it seems, not the whole object is in motion but only its edge, or highlight." -- Robert Graves

"Keats's yearning passion for the Beautiful is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion." -- Matthew Arnold

"Milton had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical luxury, and with that, it appears to me, he would fair have been content, if he could, so doing, preserve his self-respect and feeling of duty performed." -- John Keats

This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone
"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."
-- Keats' epitaph

"Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." -- John Keats

More on John Keats' short life here

The Books: "Because They Wanted to" - 'The Wrong Stuff' (Mary Gaitskill)

Next book on my my adult fiction shelves :

Because They Wanted to - - by Mary Gaitskill. This excerpt is from the last four-part story in the book (I could read a novel about this character - she's so well-drawn and touching and weird): "The Wrong Stuff". For the most part, Gaitskill does third-person narration - there are definitely exceptions, but the majority of her stuff has that distant voice. This one is first-person narration - and so much of first-person narration depends on the VOICE. And man, is the voice in this story arresting. I can't stop reading. It's a sad sad story - but it's not a sad voice (as you will see in the excerpt). The sadness comes unexpectedly - I don't mean to say that the character is unaware of her own sadness, and we, the reader, feel sad when she doesn't. No. She has her moments, moments of total blankness - when a guy she just screwed has left the apartment - and she says something about how it took her an hour to calm down. Not because of the sex but because of the loneliness in his wake. That kind of stuff. I'm going to excerpt the beginning of the story, just so you can see how the voice launches itself at us. It's funny, it's startling - almost scary in its aggression ... I am in love with the voice.

EXCERPT FROM Because They Wanted to - - by Mary Gaitskill - 'The Wrong Stuff'

Today the clerk in the fancy deli next door asked me how I was and I said, "I have deep longings that will never be satisfied." I go in there all the time, so I thought it was okay. But she frowned slightly and said, "Is it the weather that does it to you?" "No," I said, "it's just my personality." She aughed.

It's the kind of thing that I enjoy saying at the moment but that has a nasty reverb. I want it to be a joke, but I'm afraid it's not.

Last week a woman I have not spoken to for years called to tell me that someone I used to have sex with had died of a drug overdose. I was shocked to hear it, but not especially sorry. He'd had a certain fey glamour and a knack for erotic chaos that was both entertaining and horrible, but he was essentially an absurdly cruel, absurdly unhappy person, and I thought that, in the end, he was probably quite relieved to go. I had not seen him in ten years, and our association had been pornographic, loveless, and stupid. We had had certain bright moments of camaraderie and high jinks, but none of it justified the feelings I'd had for him. Even now he occasionally appears in my dreams - loving and tender, smiling as he hands me, variously, a candy bar, a brightly striped glass ball, a strawberry-scented candle. In one dream he grew wings and flew to South America with me clinging to his back, ribbons flying from our hair and feet.

"I know he hurt you," my friend said. "But I think he hurt himself a lot more."

"Yeah," I said. "He did."

When I got off the phone, I sat still for some moments. Then I got up and dressed for the party I was about to attend. It was a birthday party for an acquaintance, a self-described pro-sex feminist who had created a public niche for herself as a pornographer and talk-show guest. I put on a see-through blouse, a black bra, a tiny black skirt, high-heeled boots, and a ratty black wig i had found in the bargain bin of a used-clothing store.

I took a taxi to the party, and the driver, whom I had engaged in conversation, commented on my clothes. "I just wondered," he said, "why you're dressed so, well, so ... I mean ..."

"You mean like a slut?"

"Uh, yeah." He glanced in his rearview. "Not that I'm saying anything."

"It's okay," I said. "It's because I think it's fun. It's not a big scary sex thing. It's an enthusiastic, participatory kind of thing. Besides, I'm thirty-nine, and pretty soon I won't be able to do it anymore, because I'll be an old bag."

He nodded thoughtfully. "Well, that's cool," he said. "It's just that you don't seem like the type who needs the attention."

His comment was so touching that it made me feel maudlin, and feeling maudlin made me feel belligerent. "A guy I used to be involved with used to criticize me for not dressing slutty enough," I said. "He said I wasn't much of a girl. He'd probably like what I've got on, but the little jerk is dead now." I dug around in my bag for the fare. The driver's eyes flashed urgently in his rearview.

"Love" at "first" sight

Oh oh oh. A blog after my own "heart".

Just in time for Halloween

Edie Sedgwick. (Photo - and rambling quote from Patti Smith. Smith was quoted extensively in the book Edie - her memories of that whole time are vivid and very, uhm, Patty Smithian - only way I can put it. VERY specific)

And yeah. My age-old Halloween costume is still #1 in Google images, which I continue to find brilliantly hysterical. People looking for information on Edie have to get through ME and my bullshit FIRST. Ah, the Internet. I adore its absurdity.

"People ask me who was Baba, and I answer – Baba is who I'd like to be"

Me too. Wonderful interview with Edna O'Brien.

Excerpt from interview:

"I wrote The Country Girls in three weeks having blown the 50 quid advance. I was young, married with two small children, and whenever I met people, I was spouting poetry. I had this thing that writing was real – I mean other people's writing – literature, great literature, not rubbish. There's so much rubbish written now, so much garbage, and it's extolled. But writing was to me animate; it was real; it was as real as the people I knew.

"I only thought of one thing – the country, the landscape, my mother, the people I had left. Now I was dying to leave, this is not nostalgia, and I feel permanently, in life, quite isolated. I both belong very intensely to that place where I come from and I'm running from it still. So when I sat down to write, I was extremely emotional and yet the language is not emotional; it just came out. I didn't have to call on memory. To use the cliché – it wrote itself. And that is sometimes true for a first book.

"I knew there'd be a storm. I was accused of betraying my country, my locality, my sex. The nuns in my convent went bonkers with rage. But the books survived. I suppose that's what counts."

Hepburn, stage actress

A collection of letters and journals and scrapbooks from the estate of Katharine Hepburn has been donated to the NY Public Library. Awesome stuff - it all appears to deal with her career as a stage actress. And check out the slideshow of wonderful images.

Happy birthday to our second President

.. the often underappreciated (although never by the O'Malley family) John Adams.

Poor man. Anyone who came after George Washington would suffer by comparison. Gandhi could come after Washington and the collective historical record would respond with a "Eh." John Adams spent the rest of his life trying to reclaim some legacy for himself - but the Alien & Sedition Act kind of cast a shadow over everything (that lasts to this day - I have heard people bring it up NOW as a way to discount all the amazing things he did. HA.)

I love John Adams BECAUSE of his flaws. I love him for his brilliance, and his dedication - I love him for his relationship wtih Abigail - and I love the two of them for being so FREE in their correspondence with one another so that we, centuries later, can read their letters and get to know them both. I love him for defending the British soldiers in the aftermath of the Boston massacre in 1770. It gives me a chill - his ability to detach, his ability to see the larger picture. In later years, Adam said that that controversial act of his was one of the things he was most proud of. That, to me, says so much about who this man was. John Adams said that this new nation should be a government "of laws, not of men". Of course, he was a lawyer, so he WOULD say that ... but by defending the redcoats - and by WINNING - he took a stand on the side of law and order against the mob. Even though he agreed with the sentiments of the mob. Extraordinary. It was the same thing as Alexander Hamilton (Adams' sworn enemy later on) lambasting the mobbing people on the college lawns in New York, clamoring for the head of the President - known to be pro-British. Hamilton was a revolutionary by this point - and totally not pro-British - but mob violence was not the way to go, and he stood on the steps of the college and shouted at the mob to disperse. Amazing.

I love him for his fragile ego. I love him for his capacity to get his feelings hurt. Until the end of his life - he maintained that capacity. How many people get burnt by certain events along the way ... and close themselves off to future hurts? He never did. He remained juicy, alive ... read his letters back and forth to Jefferson at the very end. He is boisterous, fearless ... and then, at times, reflective, contemplative.

I love his nervousness about his own legacy and how he kind of had a sense that he would not get the props he felt he deserved (uhm ... quoting Eminem in a John Adams post, Sheila?)

I love him for his reliance on Abigail.

I love those damn LETTERS.

I love that the Constitution of Massachusetts - written by him (completed in 1779) is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world. Go, John.

Anyway. My affection for him knows no bounds. I suppose part of it has to do with the fact that he was a Bostonian - and that I have family who live in Quincy - so every time we would go to Thanksgiving dinner at their house, we would pass by the Adams homestead. He's not a historical figure. He's almost like a family member - that everyone passes on stories about. It seems like he is actually remembered. Growing up with a Boston family makes you feel like the Adams family is still alive, present, pulsing in the air around you, absorbed into the cobblestones where they walked ...

They are not dead. Not really. They are in the air we breathe, they are all around us still.

Happy birthday, John Adams. Thank you, thank you.

Here's a quote-fest from Adams ... The dude was so quotable. If you haven't read his letters (to his wife, and also the collection of letters between Adams and Jefferson) - I can't recommend them highly enough.

JOHN ADAMS QUOTE FEST ... Okay, I just threw these in hastily - these are my favorites - sorry about how the formatting is different - with some blockquotes, some not - whatever - I don't have time to iron that all out. It's the quotes that matter.

Enjoy!!!

-- "In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress." (hahahahaha)

-- "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

-- "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

-- Adams' description of the first meeting of the Continental Congress, in 1774 - in a letter to Abigail:

"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."

hahahahaha

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

-- "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

-- "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 - amazing. Romantic. Moving. "But I must forget you first."

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

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

-- "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)

-- "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

-- "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

-- John Adams to Jonathan Sewall, July 1774:

"Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish, [I am] with my country. You may depend upon it."

-- Thomas Jefferson, remembering John Adams' speeches at the Continental Congress:

"John Adams was our Colossus on the floor. He was not graceful nor elegant, nor remarkably fluent but he came out occasionally with a power of thought and expression, that moved us from our seats."

-- John Adams, in a letter to Jefferson, 1812:

"Whether you or I were right posterity must judge. I never have approved and never can approve the repeal of taxes, the repeal of the judiciary system, or the neglect of the navy. Checks and balances, Jefferson, however you and your party may have ridiculed them, are our only security."

-- John Adams, in a July 3, 1776 letter to Abigail, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 2:

The Delay of this Declaration to this Time, has many great Advantages attending it. ? The Hopes of Reconciliation, which were fondly entertained by Multitudes of honest and well meaning tho weak and mistaken People, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished. ? Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their Judgments, dissipate their Fears, and allure their Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and Pamphletts, by debating it, in Assemblies, Conventions, Committees of Safety and Inspection, in town and County Meetings, as well as in private Conversations, so that the whole People in every Colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own Act. ? This will cement the Union, and avoid those Heats, and perhaps Convulsions which might have been occasioned, by such a Declaration Six Months ago.

But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. ? I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfire and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil, and Blood, and Treasure that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet, through all the Gloom, I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means, and that Posterity will triumph in that Day's Transaction, even though We should not rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

-- John Adams, in a 1793 letter, responding to the revolution in France:

"Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots."

-- "I think instead of opposing systematically any administration, running down their characters and opposing all their measures, right or wrong, we ought to support every administration as far as we can in justice." -- John Adams

-- John to Abigail: Hartford May 2d 1775 - on his way down to Philadelphia. Adams is hoping that the disaster growing in Boston will bind the colonies together. That's eventually what happened, but at the time, he wasn't sure if it were a done deal.

"It is Arrogance and Presumption in human Sagacity to pretend to penetrate far into the Designs of Heaven. The most perfect Reverence and Resignation becomes us. But, I can't help depending upon this, that the present dreadfull Calamity of that beloved Town is intended to bind the Colonies together in more indissoluble Bands, and to animate their Exertions, at this great Crisis in the Affairs of Mankind. It has this Effect, in a most remarkable Degree, as far as I have yet seen or heard. It will plead, with all America, with more irresistible Perswasion, than Angells trumpet tongued.

In a Cause which interests the whole Globe, at a Time, when my Friends and Country are in such keen Distress, I am scarecely ever interrupted, in the least Degree, by Apprehensions for my Personal Safety. I am often concerned for you and our dear Babes...

In case of real Danger, of which you cannot fail to have previous Intimations, fly to the Woods with our Children."

-- JOHN ADAMS, journal entry, 1770:

"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 ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

And lastly - one of my favorite Adams anecdotes. I love it because it came straight from his journal - so it's a first-person account - and it feels like I actually can hear Adams speaking, I can feel his humor, his emotions ... in a way that I never get with Jefferson or Washington - also great men, but just not personable writers. They had much more formality in their language. Adams had almost none, at least not in his journals and letters:

John Adams is sent as a delegate to France, to join Ben Franklin and Silas Deane (the stories of Silas Deane in France are hysterical - trying to be "undercover" - and yet barely speaking a word of French, etc.) Ben Franklin is living the high life (John Adams describes in his journal Franklin's leisurely schedule with haughty scorn). John Adams was more stern, more simple, more "republican", as he called it. He was talking as an anti-monarch.

Adams was overwhelmed by the politeness of the French, and by how eager they were to please the Americans. John Adams keeps all of his impressions of France, and the French people, in his journal, and in letters home to Abigail.

On his second or third night in France, he is at a dinner - and has the following exchange with a French woman, who asks him a particularly "brazen question". John Adams blushed his way through the conversation, not being used to women with open and free airs, but his ANSWER to her question - how he ANSWERS the French woman's question ... It kills me.

It's a perfect description of sexual chemistry.

John Adams' Journal, 1778 April 1 Wednesday

One of the most elegant Ladies at Table, young and handsome, tho married to a Gentleman in the Company, was pleased to Address her discourse to me. Mr. Bondfield must interpret the Speech which he did in these Words "Mr. Adams, by your Name I conclude you are descended from the first Man and Woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition which may resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first Couple found out the Art of lying together?"

Whether her phrase was L'Art de se coucher ensemble, or any other more energetic, I know not, but Mr. Bondfield rendered it by that I have mentioned.

To me, whose Acquaintance with Women had been confined to America, where the manners of the Ladies were universally characterised at that time by Modesty, Delicacy and Dignity, this question was surprizing and shocking: but although I believe at first I blushed, I was determined not to be disconcerted. I thought it would be as well for once to set a brazen face against a brazen face and answer a fool according to her folly, and accordingly composing my countenance into an Ironical Gravity I answered her.

"Madame My Family resembles the First Couple both in the name and in their frailties so much that I have no doubt We are descended from that in Paradise. But the Subject was perfectly understood by Us, whether by tradition I could not tell: I rather thought it was by Instinct, for there was a Physical Quality in Us resembling the Power of Electricity or of the Magnet, by which when a Pair approached within a striking distance they flew together like the Needle to the Pole or like two Objects in Electrical Experiments."

When this Answer was explained to her, she replied, "Well I know not how it was, but this I know it is a very happy Shock."

I should have added "in a lawfull Way" after "a striking distance," but if I had her Ladyship and all the Company would only have thought it Pedantry and Bigottry.

Happy birthday, Mr. Adams, dear Mr. Adams. You are obnoxious and unpopular, it can't be denied ...

Or, another quote from 1776, a favorite musical (whoda guessed):

"SIT DOWN, JOHN
SIT DOWN, JOHN
FOR GOD'S SAKE JOHN, SIT DOWN!"

And for fun - here's the song lyrics to "But Mr. Adams" - where it is hashed out who will write the Declaration. Naturally, it is quite a self-serving story Adams told (he's the one who suggested Jefferson) - but still: SO funny. I love this song. I'm listening to it right now.

Franklin:
Mr. Adams, I say you should write it
To your legal mind and brilliance we defer
Adams:
Is that so? Well, if I'm the one to do it
They'll run their quill pens through it
I'm obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir
Franklin:
Yes, I know
Adams:
So I say you should write it Franklin, yes you
Franklin:
Hell, no!
Adams:
Yes, you, Dr. Franklin, you
but, you, but, you, but
Franklin:
Mr. Adams, but, Mr. Adams
The things I write are only light extemporania
I won't put politics on paper; it's a mania
So I refuse to use the pen in Pennsylvania
Others:
Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, refuse to use the pen
Adams:
Mr. Sherman, I say you should write it
You are never controversial as it were
Sherman:
That is true
Adams:
Whereas if I'm the one to do it
They'll run their quill pens through it
I'm obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir
Sherman:
Yes, I do
Adams:
So I say you should write it, Sherman, yes you
Sherman:
Good heavens, no!
Adams:
Yes you, Roger Sherman, you
but, you, but, you, but
Sherman:
Mr. Adams, but, Mr. Adams
I cannot write with any style or proper etiquette
I don't know a participle from a predicate
I am just a simple cobbler from Connecticut
Others:
Connecticut, Connecticut, a simple cobbler he
Adams:
Mr. Livingston, maybe you should write it
You have many friends and you're a diplomat
Franklin:
Oh, that word!
Adams:
Whereas if I'm the one to do it
They'll run their quill pens through it
Others:
He's obnoxious and disliked; did you know that?
Livingston:
I hadn't heard
Adams:
So I say you should write it, Robert, yes you
Livingston:
Not me, Johnny!
Adams:
Yes you, Robert Livingston, you
but you but you but
Livingston:
Mr. Adams, dear Mr. Adams
I've been presented with a new son by the noble stork
So I am going home to celebrate and pop the cork
With all the Livingstons together back in old New York
Others:
New York, New York, Livingston's going to pop a cork
Jefferson:
Mr. Adams, leave me alone!
Adams:
Mr. Jefferson, dear Mr. Jefferson
I'm only 41; I still have my virility
And I can romp through Cupid's Grove with great agility
But life is more than sexual combustibility
Others:
Combustibility, combustibility, combustibili...
Jefferson:
Mr. Adams, damn you Mr. Adams
You're obnoxious and disliked; that cannot be denied
Once again you stand between me and my lovely bride
Oh, Mr. Adams, you are driving me to homicide!
Others:
Homicide, homicide, we may see murder yet!

BRILLIANT!

Culture Notes

-- Today is finally here. I thought it would never arrive. Britney's new album is now out. I am DYING to hear it. I am not even kidding.

-- Still working on Bleak House. I adore it, and actually shed tears over it a couple days ago. A touching reunion scene between Esther and her you-know-who. I have also laughed so loud in public while reading it that I scared passersby. Loving the book.

-- Thoughts on The Darjeeling Limited to come. I felt alone in my deep love for it - faced against the entire planet who did not like it - until I talked to Siobhan - she loved it, too.

-- Speaking of The Darjeeling Limited, I cannot get enough (literally) of the song that plays over the end credits: "Les Champs Elysees" - by Joe Dassin. A happier song you've never heard. It has the same effect on me that "Fields of Joy" by Lenny Kravitz has. I just feel little bursts of pure happiness throughout - why??? I don't know. I am now in the autistic phase of playing "Les Champs Elysees" over ... and over ... and over ... and over ...

-- Dear Simon Callow: when is volume 3 of your Orson Welles biography coming out?? Soon? I beg of you? You're a marvelous writer -volume 2 ends in 1948 - so we have quite a ways to go until "we will sell no wine before its time." GREAT accomplishment, Mr. Callow - it's stunning. More, please, more!!

-- Here's some photos of Dean Stockwell's collages and dice sculptures from his current show in Taos, New Mexico. He also has created (Stevie and I drooled over them) an entire Tarot card pack - original collages for each card - I think the whole set (arcana) was 1200 bucks - and they were fantastic!!!

-- Kate left me a message the other night. "So ... I am calling you from the ancien regime ..."

-- AHHHHHH!!!!!!

-- George Washington read the 101st Psalm? A series of awesome posts tracking down the source of the anecdote:
George Washington read the 101st Psalm
Another Version of Andrew Leavitt's Story
The Little Lady Who Started the Anecdote?
Meanwhile, Back in October 1775
Rev. Waldo and Gen. Washington
Another Washington's Psalm Legend

An unbelievable blog ... seriously!!

To quote Garrett Morris:

"Base-ah-ballz a-been veddy veddy good to me."

And very good to me, too!

Congrats, 2007 Red Sox. So exciting, and so well-deserved. (Beth's got the stats) It's been a helluva ride.

Uhm ... Youk? I get the sense you may be feeling a little ambivalent about the win. And I want to encourage you to come out of your shell, let your joy show a bit more openly. Thanks.

Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde ...

... and more in this wonderful post by Ms. Baroque, who may very well be my new favorite blogger. I love how she writes. I have heard a bit about the book she mentions (or one of them) - the Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture book and have been VERY curious to read it myself. I'm not a James fan, as I believe I have mentioned before - but i found the excerpt she posted from his journal after the famous failure ("failure" is putting it mildly) of his play - very very touching. Wow.

"There is a sucker ... born every minute!"

To Mitchell (whose birthday is tomorrow) - my circus-performer dear friend, heads up to you:

Wanted you to check out the following clip (it's about half an hour long, so settle in). Ernie Hilbert and Paul Fleming do a monthly show to accompany Ernie's incredibly popular poetry newsletter that he's been putting out since the dawn of time. It started out as an emailed newsletter (I've been receiving it for years) - and Ernie has recently segued into blogging and video (his newsletter - with a vibrant chatty brilliant audience - has morphed beautifully into these new forms - so cool). Once a month, Ernie and Paul sit down with a theme - say, baseball - or law - or vodka - and riff on that one theme. But to say "riff" is not completely correct, because the amount of research that goes into each one of these episodes is intense. For each theme, poems are compiled, trivia, movie clips, music clips ... Ernie's readership bombards him on a monthly basis with suggestions to go along with each upcoming theme. It's so much fun. Click around the website, you'll see how interesting it is, how much is there.

ANYWAY - preamble over. October's theme is "CIRCUS".

Ernie and Paul, seated at an ironing board with their sound equipment (because, you know, that's what you do), chat about Yeats, Monty Python, KISS, Chaplin ... the connecting thread in all of them being "circus". It's great stuff.

Mitchell (and others), you'll love it. Check it out!

Collaborators

Great photograph.

Great night

-- Party up in Westchester at my friend and agent's house. It was her birthday.

-- I drove, yo!!

-- Picked up Jen - which meant I had to drive into Manhattan - my first trip (I mean, I've driven in New York before, but years ago) - and it was hysterical. LIke: UTTER. MADNESS. Of course I come out of the Lincoln Tunnel - and had to deal with the traffic swirl around Port Authority and then 8th Avenue ... The main thing to remember is that the lines painted on the avenues to delineate lanes are merely suggestions. There really ARE no lanes.

-- Off we went. Up the Saw Mill Parkway.

-- An hour out of the city - in the darkness and beauty of Westchester. The moon was so beautiful that I had to avoid looking at it because I thought I might drive off the road in ecstasy. Huge, glowing, golden - with mountains and valleys clearly seen from Planet Earth.

-- Jen and I haven't seen each other in a while (I haven't seen most of my friends in a while!! It's been a crazy month) - so we caught up on her trip to Dallas, her film, my trip to Taos, Dean Stockwell saying, "Hit the button eeasy ...", my new car, my writing, her teaching, the men in our lives, and basically life in general. All the while: LOOK AT ME DRIVING, YO.

-- You can't park in Barbara's driveway - because it's too short, and the road has no shoulder ... so she had arranged for us who were commuting up from the city to park our cars in an empty lot across from a church - and she had a huge limo/van service shuttle people back and forth the entire night. People were taking the Metro North up, too, from the city - so he also was engaged to go pick people up at the trains, etc. So Jen and I successfully find, in the middle of nowhere, the empty lot. It was a chilly autumn night. We had to just stand there and wait for the limo dude. It was night. Across the lot was a white picket fence and beyond it was an old country cemetery. It was so beautiful to be out in nature, especially with that spectacular moon soaring over everything! Jen and I spent our time waiting howling with laughter about our voice class, and our crazy wonderful teacher Nova - who has to be experienced to be believed. Snapping at a fellow student, in her operatic Southern accent: "Kara, you are gonna stop your whirlin' and you're gonna stop your twirlin'. That is not work, that is a nervous breakdown!"

-- A couple other cars pulled up - obviously Manhattanites who were also going to Barbara's party. Then finally: the huge van shows up. In we all get and off to the party.

-- Barbara and Dana (her husband) have a gorgeous house surrounded by woods. Jack-o-lanters glimmered on the front porch. The party was already raging - and we walked into the warmest most wonderful atmosphere possible. Barbara - her hair platinum, long, fantastic - was greeting everyone - we were all just laughing and hugging - so excited! There was so much booze that it looked like a high school kegger. Barbara had put up signs everywhere: COATS THIS WAY. BEER IN FRIDGE. On the table was a huge spread of food. Also with signs: CHOCOLATE IS TOXIC TO DOGS. Molly (the dog) with an adorable yellow kerchief around her neck strolled around the party, padding by on her big fat paws, on a mission to eat anything that dropped from anyone's plate ANYWHERE. But remember: chocolate is toxic to dogs!!

-- Barbara is the kind of person who has dear friends from every phase of her life. There were people there who knew her when she was 6. Her childhood piano teacher was there. Her friends from publishing were there. Her actor friends were there. Her friends from church were there. I love people who maintain connections like that. I am similar ... and I feel really grateful. It's the old old friends who really have your back, who you never have to explain things to ... They're just THERE.

-- Barbara said to me and Jen, "There's someone in the living room you're going to want to see."

-- We made our way over there - and were absolutely GOBSMACKED - to see Shelagh standing there. Shelagh: who lives in Canada, one of my dearest friends ... Shelagh, whom I have to accept that I am only going to see once a year, IF THAT. Shelagh: who was supposed to be teaching in Canada at this very moment!! And yet: here she is! She had flown in - and asked Barbara to keep it a secret. Jen and I were out of our minds. WHAT? What are you DOING HERE????? It was so freakin' exciting!!! What a treat. I last saw Shelagh in May, I think ... she came to New York for a couple of days ... Anyway, it was SUCH a surprise - I am amazed at how well the secret was kept, and it just made the night. I mean, it would have been awesome anyway - but to get to spend a couple of hours with Shelagh was just so awesome. We were chatterbox motormouths - we sat on the stairway with our plates of food and drinks - and caught up like maniacs. I love Shelagh. God. Great great to actually SEE her.

-- There was a couple there who had been in a 5 car "pileup" on the damn Saw Mill Parkway on their way to the party. Some little old man had entered the parkway going south on the north side of the parkway. Terrifying. No one was seriously hurt - although 5 cars were pretty much totalled. And they still were at the party. I loved this woman - she was Miss Party Trick - and kept showing everyone all these crazy things - "Put two corks in your hand like this ... then go like this ... the trick is to switch the corks without having to blah blah blah ..." So at times you'd look around and see 15 people, in the kitchen, maneuvering corks through their twisted-up hands. It was awesome.

-- We drove back to the city eventually - Shelagh was staying in a B&B in the heart of Times Square - so she caught a ride back with us, which again - was such a treat!! We careened down the Saw Mill Parkway (having visions of the 5 car pileup floating through our brains) - catching up, gossiping, telling stories, reminiscing. And along the side of the Parkway - the entire way down - we saw probably, all told, 30 deer. They were everywhere. Huge groups of them, some of them were by themselves, some were nearly on the road - which was scary - but it was quite amazing to see. We were "over" them after about 10 minutes - because there were so many of them.

-- Oh, and I gotta give the props to Jen: who was "navigator". As Allison and I discovered on our trip to Ireland, it is extremely important to have a driver and a navigator. The driver must focus on her job. The navigator must calmly and unemotionally tell the driver what to do next. The navigator must never panic. Jen - who grew up in Westchester - and knows all of those parkways like the back of her hand - just let me know, calmly, "Okay, you're gonna want to get in the right lane soon ..." etc. Much appreciated. But all told: I was proud of my mad driving skillz.

-- Dropped Jen off, then dropped Shelagh off - but of course we had to sit in the car for a while, really catching up. God, God, it was so good to see her!!!!

-- Then, of course, after dropping her off - I thought: "Okay, I'll just go to the end of the block, take a right ... and make my way back to the Lincoln Tunnel." It was 1:30 in the morning. This meant I found myself smack-dab in the middle of Times Square ... which I perhaps would have wanted to save for when I am more at ease with the mad driving skillz - but there I was - nothing to do now but figure it out. The mayhem is difficult to describe. The crowds - the double parked cabs and limos - the pedestrians ruling the roost, the horse and buggies, the bikes, the throngs - My GOD, what a sight!! (Photo below) I remained calm, and got out of there as quickly as I could. Back to the Lincoln Tunnel, and finally back home.

-- I love my car.

-- Awesome night.

And so I ask you.

No, seriously, I ask you.

In the immortal words of Madonna:

What are you looking at??

Happy birthday, er, Sylvia Plath

"Death opened, like a black tree, blackly."

Today is Sylvia Plath's birthday.

That's a sketch she did of her own hands. She found drawing very relaxing. She would lose herself in it, and spent most of her honeymoon in Spain (a place she found almost unbearably upsetting - Ted Hughes, her husband, wrote a poem many years later called "You Hated Spain") - anyway, she spent most of her honeymoon huddled over a sketch pad. She drew the streets, the fruit baskets, the fishing boats. Was there pleasure in it for her? I don't know. I think it was a way to unhinge her brain for a moment, lose herself in the moment - where all she could do, all she was able to do, was just copy what she saw. She didn't have to find the right word, or struggle with the poetry muse ... she just had to sit down and copy what she saw. Ted Hughes wrote a poem, too, about her drawing.

I haven't yet written a real piece on Sylvia Plath - because I know when I finaly get to it, it'll be a doozy. It'll take me hours of research, and compiling quotes, and snippets, and poems, and yadda yadda. I need to have the time to invest. That's just the deal with certain topics - and Sylvia Plath is one of them.

In honor of the birthday of this eventually astonishing poet (she didn't start out that way, although she was certainly precocious - but NONE of her early work could prepare you for what her work became in the last 2 years of her life - it's like another PERSON came out of her ....) - I have dug up some wonderful old photographs of her. She was a chameleon. She was an all-American girl. She was a bleached blonde beach-blanket-bingo girl. She was an intense prodigy. She was a depressive who had survived a suicide attempt her junior year in college. She was the woman who married the big brash English outdoorsman, and suddenly found herself fishing, and hunting, and tromping through the woods in galoshes. Who was she? I have no idea. But you can take a look at all the photographs and see how startling are the transformations. This is not just about the passage of time, and someone looking different as they grew older ... this really seems to be about a shedding of selves (like she writes in Lady Lazarus, in one of my favorite lines: "my selves dissolving, old whores petticoats") -

I look at the picture of the bodacious blonde at the beach:

This was from her summer of recovery from her suicide attempt in college. She spent months in an institution - and then went back to Smith to finish out her education. When summer came - she bleached her hair. Her mother - the controlling prudish Aurelia Plath - and yes, there's enough information out there on this woman for me to feel completely comfortable labeling her as that - was shocked. She pretended to be supportive - but deep down, she wanted a conventional daughter. Well, sorry, Aurelia, ain't never gonna happen. Sylvia tormented herself trying to be conventional (many of her problems arose from what she felt was expected from her - as a daughter, as a wife, as a woman, in general) - and bleaching her hair was part of a necessary rebellion. Also, she started having sex. Left and right. Willy nilly. No more good 1950s girl. That "be a good girl" thing had nearly killed her. Her doctor at the time encouraged this rebellion, and taught her about birth control, so she could at least have sex safely. This was a revelation to Sylvia. She was a very sexual person, passionate, kind of wild actually - even with all that "ooh, I'm a poetic prodigy" thing - and you know, the thing is - any type of artist will always be on the fringe of polite society. If an artist tries desperately to fit in to some mainstream - if an artist really worries about what an uptight person thinks of how he or she lives ... then that artist just won't survive. The strict rules on women at that time were fetters around Sylvia's wrists. NOT CARING what people thought of her - was one of the biggest breakthroughs in her life. NOT CARING if people whispered, "She's a slut." And they did. Especially when she got to England on her Fulbright. Tapping into her REBEL, into her "I just don't care" persona ... was really important - but ultimately, it didn't matter at all. Because once she got married and once she had kids - these old conventional "roles" started constricting her again (she writes about it extensively in her poems) ... It seemed that there was an incompatability: between the poetess and the woman. Could she be a wife and ALSO a poet? What were the expectations of her? It did not help matters (although she might have thought it would) that she married not just another poet - but one of the most important up-and-coming poets in England - a man who eventually (years later) would be Poet Laureate. Like - Ted Hughes was a big deal. And he was on his way to becoming a big deal when Sylvia met him. How can two poets tryiing to make their names - live together? Was Sylvia expected to be a good 1950s wife? Ted Hughes insists (and he has also written extensively about it) that he did not expect that at all. When he first met Sylvia at a party - they both were drunk - and they basically found themselves in an empty room - making out ferociously. Sylvia bit his cheek so hard she drew blood. They were married 4 months later. THIS was their beginning. There was no nice good-girl 1950s courtship. They didn't go out for sodas and a drive-in. No. They were bohemians, for God's sake. They were poets. People like that don't live by society's rules, nor should they. (Especially if the rules are stupid.) But Ted, in some of his later poems, has described how baffled and hurt he was - after their marriage - when Sylvia suddenly got writer's block. She had writer's block for an agonizing year, year and a half - directly after their wedding. Hmmmm, coincidence? I think not. It seems apparent that Sylvia was so terrified of doing BETTER than her husband that ... everything shut down. She then tried to be the perfect housewife - and ... Ted, again, was hurt and confused by this. Where is that wild poetess? Where is my crazy American girl who shouts out lines of Chaucer to the cows? Why is she in the kitchen, tears running down her face, trying to bake pies? I mean ... what has happened??

Then I look at the picture of her with her two kids (taken a month or so before she committed suicide) -

Actually, I believe her mother took that photograph during her fateful visit to her daughter. Sylvia was living in England - and her husband Ted Hughes had just left her for another woman. Comparing that photograph to the blonde bikini one - it;s hard to believe it's the same person. Perhaps there's something similar in the smile - there's something phony in both smiles, to my eye. Anyway, I find it fascinating - perusing the photos of Sylvia Plath.

Not nearly as fascinating as her poems themselves which have never lost their power - no matter how times I have read them.

I have gone through a bunch of Plath phases - and I am sure I will go through more. I continue to re-visit her work, every couple of years ... and re-read all those 1960-1963 poems again - sometimes in order - sometimes muddling it up - and every single time, even though I always have different responses, and sometimes one poem suddenly seems THE BEST when a couple years before it was another poem that was obviously HER BEST - but anyway, every single time I read those poems from her last 3 years, they take my breath away. They're no picnic - they are bleak bleak bleak - especially if you read them chronologically. If you read them chronologically - you can feel herself get manic - in October of 62 - and she starts cranking out 2, 3, sometimes 4 poems a day. These were not pot-boilers, folks. These poems are now taught in colleges. These are the poems that would make her name. She wasn't just scribbling out insane manic fantasies - these are highly intricate, passionate, unbeLIEVable poems. Obviously manic - when you see how many she was putting out a day ... and then there is a brief falling away for a month - December ... she was still writing, but obviously it was the calm before the storm. Then January and February 1963 came along - and I believe it was the coldest winter London had ever had - and her pipes froze - and she had no help, and two young babies - and things started getting worse and worse in her mind. And her art kicked in yet again - with ferocity and power. She would write these poems at 4 in the morning - her only time to herself. So you can feel the wheels start cranking again - in January, February - she wrote some of her best poems then. They are more frightening, however, than the October poems. She is staring at death, she is beginning to embrace the idea of death ... Death is always a factor in Plath's poems, but it takes on a new form in those last couple of poems. It is no longer just a fantasy, death is no longer a dream-lover in the night ... she is now making plans. The rage of October (which gave us such poems as Daddy, and Poppies in October, and the entire fanTASTIC bee-keeping sequence) is now gone. And you can feel a chilling resolve creep into her work. She is getting ready to go.

I have interspersed the photos of Plath I found with some of my favorite of her poems.

I still need to do a big old Plath fest one day - I have too much to say about her, and need to get my thoughts together better.

In honor of her birthday, here's one that she actually wrote about her upcoming birthday - in 1962. She wrote this poem, now one of her most well-known, on Sept. 30 1962 ... right before the blast of creativity and rage that would fuel her through that painful next month. Sylvia always had a fatalistic thing with birthdays:

A Birthday Present

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.

That's a picture of Sylvia from 1953 - right before her first suicide attempt. She was living with her mother - and her mother made her take shorthand classes and typing classes (again: there is something evil about that. That very same attitude is why Barbra Streisand has always had such long nails. People laugh at those nails, or make fun of Babs for them ... but I see them, and I love them. Because to her - those nails meant freedom. Her mother was pretty much totally negative about Barbra's actual goals - she wanted to have a normal daughter - so she signed her up for typing classes. In rebellion, Babs grew her nails to extraordinary length so that even if she wanted to learn how to type - she couldn't. The nails got in the way. So when I see those nails now - on a 60 something year old woman - I smile. It's a reminder.) There is a story here - of the mother who truly DOESN'T love her daughter. She doesn't. Otherwise - she would love her for who she actually IS, not who she wants her to be. Aurelia Plath never got that. Sylvia, at the end of her life, was starting to come to terms with that. She writes, quite blatantly, in her journal, "I can never live near my mother again." And her mother comes to visit in Oct. 1962 - right after Ted has moved out - to be with Assia Wevill - the woman he was having an affair with - and Sylvia was absolutely tormented by having her mother see her in such a weak moment. To her, it was unforgivable. She wrote her poem "Medusa" about that experience - which is, you know, shocking in its hatred, and anger. But again: poets who live by society's rules and play well with others are usually not poets to be reckoned with. Sylvia coming to terms with her rage was part of her finding her voice.

"The Moon and the Yew Tree" was written in 1961 - and is considered a breakthrough - by those who have studied Plath's work. In it - she finds some of that cold clear eerie imagery - that she will write about until the very end. She looks out her window and sees a moon, a church, and a black yew tree. It is a beautiful image - and yet ... in the poem ... it becomes a harbinger. Of death, doom.

And personally - I think the first line of this poem is one of her best lines ever.

The moon and the yew tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky ----
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness ----
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness -- blackness and silence

Little Fugue

The yew's black fingers wag:
Cold clouds go over.
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored.

I like black statements.
The featurelessness of that cloud, now!
White as an eye all over!
The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.
He felt for his food.
His fingers had the noses of weasels.
I couldn't stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:
Black yew, white cloud,
The horrific complications.
Finger-traps--a tumult of keys.

Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I envy big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.
Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood.

A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.

The yew my Christ, then.
Is it not as tortured?
And you, during the Great War
In the California delicatessen

Lopping off the sausages!
They colour my sleep,
Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!

Great silence of another order.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.

I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

I survive the while,
Arranging my morning.
These are my fingers, this my baby.
The clouds are a marriage of dress, of that pallor.

The Bee Meeting (this is one of the poems in her famous "bee sequence" - which she cranked out at 1 or 2 a day, during October of 1962.)

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers ---
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.

Their smiles and their voces are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthon, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted ---
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

Fever 103 (another Oct. 1962 poem)

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ---

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise ---
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.

Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ---
To Paradise.

The Couriers (written in Nov. 1962)

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?
It is not mine. Do not accept it.

Acetic acid in a sealed tin?
Do not accept it. It is not genuine.

A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.

Frost on a leaf, the immaculate
Cauldron, talking and crackling

All to itself on the top of each
Of nine black Alps.

A disturbance in mirrors,
The sea shattering its grey one -

Love, love, my season.

I think the following poem is the saddest she ever wrote. Now who can ever say what is in the mind of another - and it is always a dangerous thing to read too much into these poems (at least in a biographical way). They are, after all, art. But I believe that one of the reasons she killed herself is to spare her children a mother whose face was "a ceiling without a star". Not that that excuses her actions. But she wrote this poem in January of 1963, 2 weeks before she put her head in the oven. I find this poem nearly unreadable in its sadness. Yet - wonderful writing as well.

Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate ---
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - newlyweds. Happier days. What a gorgeous couple they were.

And this is the last poem that Sylvia Plath completed. It's chilling, yes, but standing alone - as a poem - I think there's a lot to talk about here, a lot of stuff - not just biographical.

And I'm sorry - but the line "her blacks crackle and drag" is ... I mean, it's just fantastic genius-level imagery with major staying power, that's all. "Her blacks crackle and drag." (And yes ... let me just throw a shout-out to Paul Westerberg - who has also recognized the genius imagery in that line.) It's scary. "Crackle"? "Drag?" All kinds of very frightening images come to mind in those two simple words ... and the internal rhyme of "blacks" and "crackle" make it seem even more eerie. I'm not a literary critic but I will NEVER be done reading this last poem. She completed it on February 4, 1963. She killed herself on February 11.

Edge

The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Let us not do a disservice to this great artist and see her only in terms of her self-inflicted end. Let us look at her art, please. Let us focus on that. If we can remove the context of her life from the poems; what is left? What do we see? What about those words, huh? What about her WORK?

Other posts I have written about Plath:
The so-called villainy of Ted Hughes

Plath's writer's block of 1959-1960

On the re-issuing of "Ariel"

The Plath/Hughes exhibit

On Assia Wevill

My good friend RTG took Plath obsession to a new level - Here's a post she wrote about it ... and another one ... We maintain a fantasy that one day we will meet up at the Lilly Library to go through Plath's papers together. It will happen!!

Today in History: October 26, 1776

On October 26, 1776, Benjamin Franklin set off on a diplomatic mission across the Atlantic - to get the French governments financial backing for the Revolution. As is well-known, he was a huge HIT with the French (that's him in the royal court above) ... and he wore little fur caps which became all the rage - and there was a certain breath of freedom and independence in his attitude which really appealed to the French. This was not an easy mission for Franklin. France was still a monarchy. I mean, it only had a couple years to go before heads began to roll (ahem), but it was, in 1776, still a monarchy - and so wasn't too wacky about supporting this "experiment" in democracy across the water. However, wouldn't it be fun to stick it to the Brits??? Benjamin Franklin's success in France is now widely recognized as one of the main reasons that we were able to win the war at all. Not only did he win support for his cause - but he also won over the hearts and minds of the French people. He loved it - he loved the wining, the dining, the free and easy ways of the rich French ladies - he was a social animal. He became the darling of the artistocratic set.

A wonderful example of how he operated is here, in this perhaps apocryphal story (I love how many anecdotes about Franklin are 'perhaps apocryphal'):

During his sojourn in France - Franklin, always the ladies man, was playing chess with the Duchess of Bourbon, and she didn't really know what she was doing, or how to play. She placed her king in check. Franklin, not following the rules either (but he KNEW he wasn't following the rules) captured her king. She knew enough of chess to know that this was not right and scolded him. She said, "In France we do not take kings."

Franklin replied, "We do in America."

Ba dum CHING.

But today was the day that his ship sailed.

Here's an excerpt from The First American - something which, I think, gives great perspective on the enormity of what Franklin was attempting - just on a personal level:

For a man of seventy, suffering from gout and assorted lesser afflictions, to leave his home in the middle of a war, to cross a wintry sea patrolled by enemy warships where commanders could be counted on to know him even if they knew nary another American face, was no small undertaking. John Adams declined nomination in Franklin's commission; Thomas Jefferson rebuffed election. Yet Franklin had made his decision that America must be free, and he