The Strawberry Blog

When I was a little girl, we spent as much time at the beach off-season as on. I knew the warm bathwater of the mid-Atlantic summer ocean as well as I did its October chill. It was where I spent my first hurricane (busy saving a kitten while my mother sent out a search team for me); by no means was it my last one. In recent years I explored the Completely Renovated Rehobeth Beach and passed peaceful hours catching very few crabs at a friend’s house in Easton. But until today I had not been to Ocean City, Maryland in 20 years.

My cousins said I would be surprised; it was different. They said there was a Top 100 Golf Course near by and many more restaurant options. Sure, the cockles of my heart would still be warmed by the old crab cake standbys, Thrasher’s fries, and that taffy shop, but now there were higher end options for the sea and sand weekend crowd.

Before passing the Easton corn fields and an awful accident on Route 50, though, we made the crossing that, to many denizens of Metropolitan D.C. and Baltimore, once marked summer’s commencement and end: The Bay Bridge. Instead of murky, steely blue, the bay was thoroughly muddied–a rusty brown color suggesting the stimulation of recent storms on sediment beds (or so we surmised, as none of us are scientists and only one of us a serious boater). Strangely, traffic flowed fairly well. But oddest of all was this: the 1952 dual-span William Preston Lane, Jr. Memorial Bridge (Or Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Or The Bay Bridge)–once the longest continuous suspension bridge over water–was no longer…scary.

That’s right. No longer did its apex elicit quick inhalations (or halt breathing altogether for seconds on end); no longer did we jolt into silence, turning the radio off, making no sound, lest we startle the Bay Bridge noise police–presumably gun-toting, law-enforcement monsters created by my mother’s deep-rooted fear of crossing The. Bay. Bridge. The same monsters who might throttle the suspension, hurling us to our deaths should we giggle or peep (I am not from a family of brilliant engineers; I am from people with severe height issues). Not even Seals and Crofts’ hit single“Summer Breeze,” a 1972 work of melancholy confection, could salve my mother’s fear of superlative design in steel. It too had to go. No jaunty pop tune or soothing ballad was safe from her suppressing digits. Her long index finger and thumb conspired to dial down to zero. OFF. Nothing. The scaled, slimy Bay Bridge Noise Police lurked and we could easily have been thrown in jail! QUIET!

And this is how every sojourn to the peaceful eastern shore from our manic western confines began. Whether in stickiest August or greyed-out autumn (when the Bay Bridge Monster Noise Police were even bigger, if that’s possible), when it was mom and me solo (father-driven cars were apparently immune from the Law), it was silence over water or imminent death by loving mother. You couldn’t even hum.

When we crossed the Bay Bridge this afternoon it was loud, fast, and not nearly as high. Ocean City was already different.

The spirits may have called me to New Orleans but it was this nation’s capital that birthed me (quasi-poetic apologies to my mother) and I can’t help myself…when spring time comes, all a native Washingtonian longs for during the crucial week between frost and humidity is a peek at the cherry blossom orgy. So I caught a plane to the District and rolled into Union Station where My Brother The Harried Nursing Student met me. My birthday plans? Spy the international blooms, hang out with my brother, eat first rate Ethiopian food. My research was important but played second fiddle to the redheaded sibling I adore.

For six days I desperately sought the sunny side of the street because, while this was mid-April, climatically it was more like early March. I found myself asking everyone from subway electricians to library archivists, “Hey, when you find April would you kindly let me know?”
Despite the weather it was a bumper birthday week filled with low-key, contiguous fêting and the marvelous sight of stalwart tulips. Despite the wind, the dogwoods barked, bit and otherwise stood their ground. Despite the rain, the city shone; despite the chill, the streets were active. Despite the Wizards’ defeat, the Redskins were in training. Despite wearing mittens to and fro, I gloried in the city of my birth, greeting monuments—Reeve’s Restaurant, 12th & F Street, U Street—with a nod to the parents who made it so and an audible exhalation for the city that is both Capitol and capital, Kennedy Center and Creme Lounge, Lincoln monument and neighborhood testimony.

And as for the cherry blossom orgy? Well, let’s just say that their weaker constitution initiated grounds for an earlier close this season. The [ahem] doors of colorful, Asiatic ill repute slammed shut for Occidental Mother Nature.
And with that jumble of metaphoric, unintentional punning, I bid you a farewell from overcast Los Angeles. Stephen Colbert: I challenge you to a Metaphor Face-Off!

In one week I have been socially thwarted by a Puerto Rican banker, inadverdently dissed by Quincy Jones, and chatted to, by, and with former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky.

Pinsky and collaborator pal Michael Mazur were speaking as part of the University of Southern California’s “Visions and Voices” series (Quincy Jones will be there next month). As my professor friend and I tardily approached the lecture hall Thursday evening, we were stopped by a woman outside.
“The lecture has already started,” she said in a stage whisper and horrible skirt, “so please be quiet when entering the hall.”
Please be quiet? We took our seats and, as Pinsky and Mazur discussed collaboration on Dante’s Inferno, I stewed. Quiet? As in refrain from alerting the press, cueing the trumpets, and striking up the fanfare? Did she mean that kind of quiet? As the discussion carried on colorfully on stage I continued to ruminate on the meaning of this poorly outfitted, presumptuous nitwit, wondering why I didn’t fire back with something like “Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for an ill bred undergrad?” or “Gee thanks, I know I look like Lindsay Lohan but I promise I’ll behave myself in the auditorium.”
After these fantasized fair to middling retorts, I promptly got down to the business of listening. Listening and scribbling, which is what I do when I’m in lecture halls with brilliant minds and the palpable energy of enlightened people.
People who are in The Dante Club, as Mazur calls it, the unspoken guild to which one is automatically assigned when working on a translation or illustration of Inferno—a collaboration with every other artist in history who has ever worked on Dante.
It’s been a long time since I sat down with Dante’s Inferno and curiously, I had forgotten how, in Canto V, “Carnal Desire,” those fixated on sexual thought walk in a perpetual hurricane. And it gave me pause: what, then, might be the punishment for Gross Negligence in Engineering?

What would Dante do?

Might the punishment entail a perpetual state of coitus interruptus? Or prostatic congestion? Or would it involve drinking enough toxic concoction to make one sick—but not mortally injure? He might condemn the Army Corps of Engineers to be ignored in perpetuity. Or, confine them to a state of hopeless struggle, forever building a levee that is never strong enough—one never good enough for the people who commission it. That seems fair enough in hell, don’t it?
Dante ends the Inferno with this:
“Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
The other Pinsky, Dr. Drew, the M.D. better known for his radio show Love Line, in his recently published study cited that stars—or, more precisely, celebrities—are more narcissistic than the rest of us. No shit, Dante! The star of our evening, Robert Pinsky, very un-egotistically inscribed my book thus: “Best Wishes.”

So, maybe—just maybe—there are stars at the end of hell. If they’re Dr. Drew types and not the celestial ones, you’ll find me sipping a cocktail in Dante’s Fifth Ward—waiting for the lust filled to come in out of the hurricane

August 24, 2006

Because of my mother’s obsession with mine, friends know how much I love the derrière (various kinds, both genders), that I love a good set of sturdy shoulders (ibid.) and rippling leg muscles, and though I am not jaded when it comes to the human physique…I am embarrassed to admit that what I spied (wrong verb; you’ll see why) at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay last night almost sent me for my camera. It wasn’t the rumpshaker at Rumjungle. While hers was nothing short of stunning, mere beauty does not send me packing. I reside most of the year in a town bursting with hotties and Beautiful People (though all I really want is to meet Gore Vidal). I appreciate it; I do not necessarily want to capture it for future consumption.

When it comes to excess, Vegas has a reputation to maintain. But imagine if you will, the size of an average to large watermelon. Now imagine a petite blond woman—say, about 5’2”— in a black tank top, shorts and heels. Now take two of those watermelons (I kid you not—why would I?), but in the recesses of your mind fashion them into breasts. Yes. And if you thought watermelons were an awkwardly sized fruit…people, you have never seen anything like this. Did it get her noticed? Yes. My male companion even suggested that, because I’m a woman, she probably would have allowed me a picture. But I resisted touristy temptation; resisted, in fact, anything that would have given her another reason (one wonders what the first was) to say, “Hey, these watermelons [for there is no actual corresponding bra size] were a great idea!” As you can imagine—and my male companion is unabashedly a Breast Man—they were so abnormally tremendous, such an offense to natural anatomy, geometry, physiology, harmony, and geography that even he said they were “ridiculous.”
We’d had this argument before. I say breasts should fit the form; he says the bigger the breast, the better the form. Frenchmen have told me that the perfect breast fits in a champagne flute (which explains why I have only been with one Frenchman). In a fit of sisterly and human concern, my first inclination was to have pity on her and not stare because I thought Watermelon Woman’s breasts, which defied all laws, gravity or aesthetic, were a congenital abnormality—and no one should be ridiculed or made fun of for that (yes, I was the girl in second grade who punched a boy for making fun of the handicapped student in class—that was tomboy-underdog-workin’-for-the-people me). This watermelon syndrome was a similar concern. But my male companion assured me that it was just fine to drop my jaw and gawk with the rest of ‘em. So I did. With subtlety, sympathy, and grace I widened my eyes and uttered something completely original like, “Do…you…see…the…those?”

I’m wondering, apart from specialized porn catering to the formerly formula-fed man with a fruit obsession, just what kind of work she gets. And what do people say to her when they meet her? It wouldn’t be easy. In my history of having breasts, I have a laundry list of incidences of men on Breast Watch while I’m giving them the time (an unclever ploy of the stranger on the street), or engaging in slightly more clever cocktail conversation. Fact is, this social problem was the entire raison d’etre for my baggy sweater/trenchcoat look I sported in high school—and variations thereof later. Ask any brainy, buxom woman if she has ever been thought of as “lesser” intellectually because of her breast fullness and, sadly, she will answer in the affirmative. Why anyone would want the kind of attention that comes from surgically attaching bizarre appendages which lure the eyes of even sensitive gals like me…I am at a loss. It baffles those of us who’ve considered breast reductions who’ve merely had full breasts, not mutant gourds residing in our chest cavity.

So, Vegas. Vegas and fruit. I guess it only makes sense that, with the unholy amount of anti-indigenous tropical foliage flown in here, there would have to be an equally false mammary residing here in the desert mirage, too. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just MY World, not THE World.

August 2006

I don’t know. Sub-zero or 4-star hotel…Vegas is just inherently depressing to me, I think. Not all of it, but certainly the interiors where poorly to exceptionally poorly dressed American families and single men tend to congregate—lobbies, halls, dens of monetary inequity—especially those. Casinos. It’s the A/C on overdrive and the buzz and ring of would-be bling—of Bling! far removed, yet…”just over there, Penny. Let’s go!” And The House of Blues ensconced in a gold palace. Aawww, The House of Blues tries so hard to just be a down home ramshackle jook joint. But each time it pops up with voodoo masks on faux wood, it’s just another reminder of corporate takeover (that said, the one in New Orleans has good greens and a killer turkey burger and sweet potato fries).
Why can’t I escape the pleated khaki? They are terribly out of place here at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay, this homage to everything serenely paletted and divinely understated (except for the THE). The Khaki Mafia hound me. What next? Sleep with the fishes at Shark Reef?
However, that low, sinking, Vegas Interior feeling lifts as soon as I hit THE beach, out of doors, in search of THE wave pool.
And quickly lowers once more when one of the janitorial staff informs me that someone has just thrown up in it. And that last week someone left a little…“Miami Vice,” shall we say? We both grimaced, then she directed me to the clean pool where I surveyed it, deeming it safe. Clean. Serene. Mine. No floating turds, no last night’s meal on full display. Apart from foul play at aqua central, I feel very much at home here (from now on we’ll just refer to it as MY Hotel).
But where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and ignorance is bliss…where does that leave too much knowledge? Too much knowledge of wave pools might just keep this swimmer in her suite tonight watching Spike’s “Levees”—reminded once more that last year’s fallen water is sadder and bluer than any resort pool debris could ever be.

July 25, 2006

Southern California weather is the climactic equivalent of Henry Mancini. Ninety-five percent of the year it is mere background. To some, it serves as impetus to get up and meet the surf; for others, it is the entire reason for living in a congested maze with many a movie rat. Some view it as a most pleasant foundation upon which to pursue their dreams (approximately 3.4 million of them—mostly from Indiana); some exult its near perpetual state of arid bliss. I have noted that talking about the weather is not something that southern Californians do, other than to say, “Man, it’s beautiful. This is why I love it here!” But most of the time it is wallpaper.
Not so this week. Southern California is talking weather, baby! Straight up. Bordering on obsessive. Manic. Depressive. Impressive in its volume.
At a recent screening of “Pirates of the Caribbean” we sat behind a woman who was slumped on the shoulder of her companion. Asleep or dead, we couldn’t tell—not until a friendly face arrived next to us, at which point Little Miss-Asleep-Not-Dead rubbed the crusties from her greens and started singing the weather blues. I have never heard such whiners:
“Can you believe how hot it is? Our air conditioner didn’t even cool the bedroom—in the bedroom! We’ve been too hot to do anything. And our cat is pissed.”
“I know, I know…does anything get accomplished in this kind of weather?”
And on and on…and on it went. Fifteen minutes to wax weather before Johnny Depp swaggered, at once fay and Keith Richards. Fifteen minutes to read the same sentence in my book fifteen times because Miss Former Texan, Formerly Dead or Asleep just couldn’t over “the humidity! Ugh!” She was still slumped on her equally tired companion’s shoulder, wondering how she was going to “make it through the movie”—in which pirates fight the ocean turbulence, outrun cannibals, outwit slimey sea creatures, and do battle with imperialists.
We have become a very sad nation, indeed. I am not immune to this Urban Refusal. But I’m from places with real, regular weather patterns. Sort of.
Just as I was going to recommend “Pirates of the Carribbean” to several friends (all back, in, or from New Orleans), just when I thought, ‘What a great way to beat the heat, go see this!’ I thought better of it: So much water. So much looting.
All that water.
So I kept the thumbs up to myself. Because it’s been eleven months since the Flood and people are dying from depression. Not because their once hardy constitutions can’t take the heat, but because there aren’t enough beds in the psych wards and because there is only one public mental health facility left—located in the old Lord & Taylor department store. Because they can’t get home.
I’m concerned; selfishly so. When people are obsessed with their own nasty weather, they can’t be bothered about the havoc it wreaked somewhere last summer. War and reality tv are one diversion, but humidity where it never rains? I’m worried everyone will forget, for once and for all. I’ve been asked too many times, “So, everything’s alright there now…right?”
I return home to New Orleans this Friday, after four months away, for business and for pleasure. To revel in what is found only there—and to lament the passings and losses.
I can almost hear a second line….

July 13, 2006

Maybe it’s the flâneur in me, maybe it’s the American Studies major, but I get a kick out of living history—as in live, direct, up close history: Roman ruins, Druid stones, old theatres. I feel the same way about personal history—worn, common, and un-trumpeted. Which is why my native Washington, D.C. thrills me. I walk it for miles, finding spirits in sticks and stones, greeting new ones in concrete and tarmac. Gordon Parks also felt this way. He walked the same U Street corridor in the 1940s documenting ordinary life, as I walk today. I get a kick out of the interconnectness of people, places, and things. I guess I’m just a simple girl in love with nouns.
But I’m obsessed with verbs. I’ve been reading Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It (2005, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D.), about the palpable disquiet that develops once neighborhoods are destroyed, once the city power structure has its way with the territory. A meditation on the interconnectedness of global urban pillaging, it is also an oral history of those on whom these terrible wrongs are wrought. Terrible wrongs like much of Urban Renewal. Terrible wrongs like destroying community. Dr. Fullilove weaves seamless historical analogy between Paris and Pittsburgh; between poor French people and working class Americans (It is poetic retail justice that I bought the book at the National Building Museum after seeing the “Newer New Orleans,” and “Washington: City and Capitol” exhibits).
In the heat and humidity of Monday afternoon I walked around Columbia Heights in Northwest D.C., checking on the progress of the old Powell Junior High School where my father used to shoot hoops. Last year I’d wanted to shoot it for my mini documentary but it was razed the year before, so I’m resigned to 1948 black and whites that an unnamed photographer thought fit to make. I feel a connection to that photographer for capturing time and place for one moment so that I can use it in the many moments on screen. I was curious what went up in Powell’s place, what might serve the community better today. It is now a curvaceous, salmon bricked multicultural institute with new basketball courts. Better than I had expected.
Between the construction all around 14th Street and the bustle of people at Columbia Heights Metro Station, it feels like a lot of life has returned. But underneath, below the surface of a short row of façades preserved, is the sensation that not all of this demolition and re-construction is meant for them. How many upscale live/work shopping temples can Columbia Heights support?
I walked toward my father’s old house. I’d shot it last year for documentary B-roll, and walking along the even numbered side of the street, I noted nothing much had changed. Apartment buildings, sturdy row houses and trees line Harvard Street, privy to the boom of Gordon Parks’ day and the devastation of crack cocaine. My grandfather sold it for a song to the Davis family who’d stayed through the crack era, at least until 1998 when I took the last photograph of my father on the porch. It’s the house I hoped to one day buy, to restore, to glory in its ghosts.
But I couldn’t find it.
I paced back and forth in the brightness of mid-day, like a caged animal, searching for the numbers “1461.” I found “1458,” and “1463.” What lay in between sent me reeling, cursing, shaking my head in the heat.
“Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem…Just as the body has a system to maintain its internal balance, so, too, the individual has a way to maintain external balance between himself and the world.”
In the midst of Harvard Street’s unified dark red brick, in between 1458 and 1463, lay nothing short of a monument to Beige—a love affair with a non-color, jutting out of the street like a broken bone. There was nothing left of the old house; not one brick, not one stick, not even a stone.
Extracting my head from my hands I found Miss Pat, a longtime resident. As we walked toward her bus stop, she said, “It’s sad, it is. I could have bought that house from the Davis’s. Kick my behind. Go on! But…after you fall you got to pick yourself up again. Can’t stay down there forever.”
Her bus came. I took mine to U Street and ducked into a mom and pop for some homegrown, bootlegged, old school Go-Go.
Gonna drop a bomb on the Northwest crew/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!/ Yeah, Northwest crew, now what ya gonna do?/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!
A lot of percussion and a little brass…goes a long way to verb a broken noun.

July 9, 2006

Normally I do not attend opening days of anything. I do not seek out mobs of people in a confined space. But I made an exception for the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery on July 1st. The new best spot in D.C. is the Portico Café to sip French 75s, listen to a quintet, and enjoy a breeze and vista. For those of us who frequented the area in the Eighties and Nineties the view now is nothing short of a miracle. The building renovation, the whole presentation from architectural masterpiece to the over 5,000 works inside, is exquisite.
The same cannot be said for the crowds, however. While most were well behaved, they were poorly dressed for even the opening of an ice cream stand. Sure, it’s humid and the temperatures unflinchingly high, but can’t American men find it in their hearts, if they don’t possess an innate sense of style, to consult with a higher authority before they descend upon the republic? Can’t they show a little respect for what Whitman called “the noblest of Washington buildings” by forgoing the pleated khaki shorts with white socks and sandals? (that applies to Germans, too). Mid-length pleated khaki shorts don’t even look good on this month’s super model. Listen up, khaki shorts: as we used to say back when the Portrait Gallery was across the street from seedy peep show joints, “U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi, you ugly!”
But while pleated khaki shorts are nothing short of an affront to the senses, ratcheting down any national pride, worse perhaps is the American obsession known as Cult of the Child. On my visit it lurked in Presidential Portraits. I was minding my own business, gazing at the famous Lansdowne portrait of George Washington when a 40-something mother strolled up beside me with her three or four year old something daughter slumped on wheels.
“Look! What does George Washington have in his hand, sweetie?”
The child ignored her.
“Honey, what is the president holding in his hand? Do you know what it is?”
“Go,” said the dear thing, aglow with the thought of 18th century American history.
“What did you say?” said mother in a cloying tone.
“Go!” barked the toddler who could launch a million bars of Ivory soap if only mother had a backbone.
“This is a very famous portrait of Washington,” said mother.
And the princess with the mousy hair, captain of her stroller ship, threw her arm in front of her, ordering mommy to cross the Delaware and to just “GO!”
At which point the woman in the wide brimmed hat whose head was fixed on this sad state of affairs said, “And that is a most obnoxious American child.”
People, please: kindly remember that this is a republic and that allowing your children to rule you frightens the rest of us. So for the health and well being of this nation’s future, invest in the restoration of a national portrait by hiring a British nanny—whatever it takes—but please…resist the pleated khaki part of your parenting skills.

June 7, 2006

Remember when everyone—the media, your teacher, your neighbor the plastics executive—reminded you of The Next Big Thing and How You Should Be Part of the Information Revolution? Well, for the 14 Luddites sitting in a well appointed library in the English and Appalachian countrysides…here’s final proof: my nephew is walking to his car on Sunet and LaBrea and a homeless woman asks him for money.
“Don’t have any,” he tells her. “Well, do you have any free minutes left on a cyber card so I can check my email?” she asks, motioning to the internet cafe next door.

June 1, 2006

I’ve been getting serious about my foot lately—the foot on which I am forbidden to dance, says my Korean acupuncturist. He failed to negate the command, however, and what came out a few weeks ago was, “You have a choice. You have a choice!” So the intern, sensing that the crazy, illogical wheels in my head were wishfully creaking, quickly pointed out, “He means, You have no choice. You can’t dance.” Hope—once again dashed in TinselTown. When they lit a candle, switched on the New Age sea sounds, and closed the door, I could feel the qi (chi) moving. The mass of stagnation that I’ve been post-hurricane was finally flowing a little, with some encouragement from thin silvery pokers. It flowed right up to my eyes and a few salty drops fell down my cheeks. I couldn’t wipe them away; you’re not supposed to move with needles stuck in your meridiens.
The Chinese herbs are another matter entirely. They taste like dirt trampled by farm animals. I take them on an empty stomach, making big, dramatic farm animal noises with each swallow. But that’s not the extent of my semi-nausea. I’m almost getting used to the taste of the herbs. It’s the date that’s been getting to me lately—since December.
There’s been a daily low level stress in my bones—and everyone else who calls New Orleans or the Gulf Coast home knows it well—a mounting pressure rising imperceptibly with each day, as we move closer to the Day, to Hurricane Season. Some of us missed Christmas, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest…but no one can escape this one. If I were at home, I’d probably attend the same voodoo ceremony I went to a few years ago—to stave off the birthday “presents.” And I’d probably go to church to do the same—to pray in a hallowed place that the misfires of the Army Corps of Engineers don’t fall victim to their incompetence. I’d probably take long walks in the heat—a veritable sauna—to sweat out the impurities, to pray that the sinking feeling and by now mid-level stress isn’t commensurate with the onslaught of climactic “gifts.” NO PRESENTS, I’d say. PLEASE, NO PRESENTS. JUST BRING YOURSELF.
Today is the birthday of Hurricane Season. It is a long, diva season, longer than any other woman’s I know. And today there’s a brass band playing to mark C. Ray’s mayoral triumph and, really, there’s no other choice but to move on and ahead, upward and onward, one unified people and city. And like a good Aries whose birthday season is passed, I say move on and unify, let bygones be bygones…there is no time. No time for quibbling. No time for pettiness or beefs. Light the candles, bang the drum, and someone—I mean this—shake the mayor’s hand for me. I’m far away for a while. But I’m celebrating. I’ve got my own candles. One for my foot and one that there isn’t a hurricane junta. And one for my mother. She would have been 62 today.