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!

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.

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 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.

May 13, 2006

Today’s topic: morons. I was having a perfectly nice Saturday morning. I’d already received an early AM missive about the latest fire in my New Orleans neighborhood, and paid a visit to my foot specialist who inserted a long needle into my flexor hallucis brevis, when the front page of The Los Angeles Times landed in my palms. (Thanks to staff writers David Kelly and Gary Cohn for encouraging morning cheeriness).
The theme: Stupidity.
The story was about members of a secretive polygamist sect living in a rural enclave on the Utah-Arizona border. More specifically, it was about those particular members who have left it, but not without suffering the wrath of having been stupid enough to join (and subject innocent children to) this cult community headed by a pedophile, in the first place. You feel sorry for the woman on the front page of the paper—all frumpy, stupid, tattered-coated 38 years of her. She decided to leave the cult because she was afraid that the sect leader would marry her 13 year old daughter.
I wonder why it didn’t occur to her earlier that it also might not be a brilliant idea to allow her 12 year old son to be removed from school so that he could pursue a thrilling, liberal arts education in construction. There’s nothing wrong with construction. My uncle did it, and I thank God for people who can do it. But they weren’t forcibly removed from the 6th grade to do it. One questions this mother’s logic. Was the imminent rape (call it what it would be) the final straw? If so, then good—at least it was an impetus scary enough to shake her from her stewed density and move the hell on (with her brood of eight and twenty dollars in her pocket).
Let’s first take a look at the group and its leadership. All of this stupidity has got to have a tenet on which to grasp its tiny little collective mind. The group, an obscenely patriarchal, racist sect, is the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or FDLS. And as hard as this is for the average American voter to believe, about 10,000 of these amazing Mensa candidates live in an enclave in a remote place in the desert, led by…a pedophile.
Here’s a little run down of the sect’s beliefs. Incidentally, absolute adherence to these beliefs is what gets you in to heaven. Remember that:
1. Man belongs to the prophet [and apparently the prophet changes according to death and the next megalomaniac quick enough on the draw to take his place]. In this case, since 2002 when his daddy died, Warren Jeffs is the prophet.
2. A woman, says self-described prophet, should concentrate solely on her husband, praying each morning, “I want to do your will, Father, through obeying my husband or my father or my prophet.”
3. Women are encouraged to give birth once a year [this is, of course, great for body, mind, and population control].
4. You cannot reach the highest levels of heaven without having at least three wives [this is insanity, but, hey Brigham Young said it].
5. No one marries without the prophet’s permission, and you are subject to his whims.
6. There is no television or movie viewing, and no listening to music.
You get the idea. A man with a huge ego, a very small heart, and carte blanche to further sweep his brainwashed community into the folds of his unsavory manipulation. We’ve seen it all before.
But what struck me first was just how upset I was with the women, the mothers who allowed their minds to deflate, to subject children to the perversities of one tall, acne-riddled, pallid, scrawny little male—a scrawny little man accused of repeatedly raping his 5 year old nephew. Subject themselves to the fancies of a scrawny litte man who would say in a 1995 lecture that the only way for womanly happiness is by allowing “her husband, a faithful man, rule over her.” A pathetic and ignorant little man who proclaimed that “through the Negro race, the devil has kept evil alive.” A little nothing of a man who talks big invective…and travels with an entourage larger than Busta Rhymes’s, surrounds his compound with surveillance, and must pay a dear retainer fee for his lawyer to issue statements such as, “Warren is charismatic. He is an intellectual. He is not crazy…he is trying to meet the expectations of God.”
And then I wondered about what kind of man would allow this scrawny pedophile to forcibly remove his own family from him—and give them away to another man? What kind of man allows that?
Not a man.
Just another moron.
And all the while this travesty of human rights was in full swing, the travesty of justice was commensurate in their scrawny little towns.
So the next time someone ribs me about Louisiana crime and corruption, I will laugh the requisite laugh. Then I’ll tell them, Hey, have you heard about Colorado City, Arizona and Salt Lake City, Utah? They’ve harbored police who would rather throw “rebellious” FLDS women into mental institutions than enforce the law. They would tip off their pedophile leader (now on the Top Ten Most Wanted list) to save him from facing the law. To save them from facing him and—gasp!—risking not getting into heaven with their interchangeable families. How about that for insidiousness? I think I’ll take my corruption in the open, thank you.
Some of these children will escape their torment; others will be subjected to it until they awake from their own stupor—which may never come. It is painful to see repeated the same old habits attributed to brainwashing and abuse. I think that more of these women are capable of using their minds, hearts and, yes, their animal instinct, to tell them what they’re doing is wrong for their children and for themselves.
So, Happy Mother’s Day. I wasn’t going to allude to it because I’ve been pretty tough on these mothers. But, even though I never much cared for the Hallmark-stamped holiday, my mother did—and since she’s not here anymore, I owe her a nod. Besides, Mother’s Day was created in the early 20th century to pay homage to someone’s dead mother.
Thank your mother for everything she’s done for you—especially the part about not raising you in a cultish sect.
And don’t forget her the rest of the year either.

April 7, 2006

My beloved is a self-described recovering Catholic; the people I call my extended family are fiercely Italian and unalterably Catholic. When last we got together in Washington D.C. last month, I expressed my interest in doing what is, to them, the unthinkable: being Catholic without taking the time, energy, and classes to become Catholic—as in recognized by the church as Catholic. Even my mother—by her own admittance no great student—even she became a proper Catholic. I’ve just been around it for so long—all my life—that it feels right to be Catholic by circumstance. I feel entitled to it. Like being guilty by association.
(For the record, I harbor none of that guilt stuff and won’t when I do become Catholic).
My beloved, an expert in such matters, doesn’t think that I should spend the time to become what he has summarily taken half a lifetime to reject. Before I returned home to New Orleans last month he said, “What’s God gonna do if you take a little biscuit and vino while you’re there?—strike you down?”
My nephew is the president of a prominent Scottish university’s Catholic Society. He neither owns nor drives a car but since the new pope arrived (yes, he went to Rome to be there for the historic occasion) he possesses a bumper sticker that says: THE CAFETERIA IS CLOSED.
I wouldn’t be wrong to assume that he is talking directly to me. To my kind of people—the buffet crowd, picking and choosing what appeals, rejecting what offends. I appreciate the cleanliness to which he approaches his religiosity. However, in my world nothing has ever been so black and white that I would or could boast the kind of bumper sticker philosophy to which he is so clearly affixed, able, and ready. I’ve lived in a world of gradations; my nephew’s world has been one of sheer, polished black granite and alabaster. It is no wonder that he is an excellent ballroom dancer, filled with the kind of preternatural grace that we associate with Fred Astaire or Mr. “Bojangles” Robinson. It is no wonder that it was he who taught me how to waltz on Christmas Eve.
So, with that in mind, what follows might make them reel in horror. However, once they recover (if they’re still talking to me), my family will hopefully recognize that, if I can’t go through with a year’s worth of classes at this time (especially since my fave parish is only physically extant right now), at least I’m moving in the right direction. I felt the spirit and it lifted me to the salty confluence of joy and sorrow.
My friend, Dr. A., was late picking me up but Mass at St. Augustine (in Tremé, New Orleans) is a fairly protracted affair of words and music and, despite the slew of press and the compactedness, we found a seat toward the back. Father LeDoux elicited laughter, Amens, encouraged rises and falls, singing…I was pleased to be back at the only church I’ve ever felt truly comfortable in. And I happily proffered what crumpled cash I had left over from Los Hombres Calientes the night before—an entirely different kind of spiritual experience—and before I knew it, it was time for standing in line with the rest of the congregation.
In line to receive the holy spirit of Christ through a biscuit and a little vino.
Something I’d never done, not in my life, despite countless opportunities to sneak in unbaptized, un-Catholicized, (definitely uncircumsized), and I suppose, because it was pure spirit that moved me, there was no wrath of God in the form of lightning striking me down.
And I wasn’t the only one.
When I returned to my seat, Dr. A confessed in a whisper that she’d “never done that before!” and we both giggled—spiritually reverent of course—like regular schoolgirls who’d just done something naughty for the sake of being good. We’d gone against the grain (hello…Christ?) as dictated by the blood in our veins and the reverberations in our hearts and—I kid you not—we giggled. And we looked up and down and all around for any sign that we had committed a wrong, a sin. Nothing. Not even a deep, barely audible, bass-y sound from the pulpit. Nothing. Niente. We sat in our pews, in our Thirties, schoolgirls with the blood and body of Christ that we’d always wanted but hadn’t had the courage to take for fear of everyone knowing we were frauds.
But spiritual Love is never fraudulent.
It was Father LeDoux’s final mass: March 19, 2006. Though I didn’t tell him later that day that I wasn’t really a Catholic, I did confess (in good fashion, in preparation) that I wasn’t a regular member but I wanted to be. We embraced.
For some reason—officials say it is simply economic, others say it is a surreptitious bond between money and politics—they closed St. Augustine parish and shipped the inimitable Father LeDoux off to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi with nary a laptop to keep him connected to the congregation that loves him. But before you can wag your finger and blame this on me, know that these machinations began long before the good doctor and myself received the body of Christ. The Bay St. Louis relocation had nothing to do with our biscuits and vino.
But Heaven hath no fury like a parish scorned.
UPDATE April 9th: Breaking news. As of yesterday, after much debate the archdiocese of New Orleans has agreed to reopen St. Augustine parish on a trial run for 18 months.

January 24, 2006

I have an animal in mind. What is a stout kangaroo that is neither lithe nor particularly athletic—a bird that soars in water only?
His is a most remarkable anatomy/Not drawn at any academy/
Just waddles and flops/Not chainés and drops/A most remarkable anatomy.

These are the beginnings of my song, “Ode To A Penguin” (there! I’ve given the answer away), written while screening the French documentary, March of the Penguins. If you have ever wondered how best to explain life, death, sex and birth to a child, then you have these French filmmakers to thank forever more. Penguins don’t have taxes (arguably, theirs is a much longer, harsher season) but everything else is covered here in under 80 minutes.
At first, this ancient lot in trademark tuxedos are an amusing sight. But it is too easy to call our reactions to the films’s stars anthropomorphism. It is also, perhaps, simply too inaccurate. Rather, I think that it is more a case of seeing us in them—of seeing our animality—than the other way around. Watching the penguins, sated to bursting, start their annual mating trek—over 70 miles of the toughest, coldest terrain imaginable—I am reminded of a friend meeting Mr. Hottie in Vegas one weekend only to board a plane to London the following week to reunite. The parallels between us and penguins are painfully obvious: bitter U.S. air travel methods, replete with brutally scarce in-air food supply and—egads!—probably a layover in Cleveland. In winter.
The penguins travel with full, distended bellies because, when they do arrive and sniff out a mate, the males will not eat again for four months, the females for three—during which time they will have choreographed their mating dance, sounded their fondness for one or the other, and mated Greek style (or do we do it Penguin style, hmmm?). Oh, and endured several cruel winter storms that claim the lives of at least one of their clan. Couples are limited to one monogamous year during which we are told, at other points in the season all bets are off. I can’t imagine one would have the energy to bet at all after going without food for a quarter of the year while trying to keep an egg warm.
And that’s the Male Problem.
Once a female penguin is [ahem] with egg, she passes it along to the father for safekeeping because, after all, she has gone plenty long without food during gestation and must return the 70 miles to fishy sustenance if she is to take over the next leg of parenting. This is no simple task. We’re talking about rotund birds more at home in water than on the icy terrain—despite spending most of their time walking it or flopping to their stomachs. The Dance of The Egg Switching—really just a more logical way of being pregnant—is at times a painful choreography. Let’s just say that neither a Fosse nor an Ailey resided among those first Emperor Penguins; so that the ancient dance ritual, embedded in their DNA, is a clumsy one at best. Their rehearsal process is proof that another’s pain—anyone’s pain, even a penguin’s—is often the best humor.
It’s something like watching people who can’t dance…dance. Or watching people who are too embarrassed to dance, who have no cultural tie to dance, tie one on instead, mocking dance while making dancing fools of themselves. But the Penguin Dance of the Egg Switching, while agonizing at times—truly agonizing because some couples get this far only to lose the egg in the dance process—is after all an ancient ritual. They rehearse it ad nauseum; then, if lucky, the male gets the egg while the female hoofs it to the sea for feeding.
After she is gone, the males look suspiciously like a Wintry Million Man March, huddled football style, taking turns to be in the center of the greatest warmth—all the while keeping their eggs safe from the elements—wordlessly ensuring that everyone gets a shot at the best circumstances…under perhaps the worst circumstances possible. Didn’t socialism make this claim, too? Well, it actually works here in the arctic.
We all know that human newborns are rarely aesthetic beauties, but that kittens and puppies and bears are categorical cuties. I daresay that the baby penguin has few rivals for sheer charm. But it wasn’t just because they’re cute that the sniffles and tears at the sight of a frozen egg or a dead baby were audible at the DGA. I remembered what my father said and what a friend said recently, too—that all other death is natural, can be handled…but that of a child. My father said that if I had died he couldn’t go on. My friend echoed the same thing. Lucky for the penguin race, as sad as their parents are at the sight of one of their young dead—and they do trumpet mournfully—they do go on. Amazingly so—given that their entire year, save three months of jocular water play and gorging, is geared toward making new penguins in an unutterably savage climate. It is perhaps the greatest surprise of all that the penguin has survived this long.
It is even more shocking that they haven’t figured out that they should move. One wants nothing more for them than for some enormous environmental real estate shift so that life’s a little less harsh for these poor birds; to fill their short lives with a little more fish and fewer biblically proportioned storms.

In short, these birds need more rehearsal time. More dancing, please. An arctic second line.

January 13, 2006

You should always feel special when octogenarian strangers feel compelled to share intimacies with you. I was in San Francisco this afternoon, minding my own business at one of those church thrift shops that actually smell good (and remind you of the Episcopalian ones on the upper East side—the kind of thrift store your snooty aunt Gertrude might actually be caught dead in; the kind that have size 6 Prada shoes). But when I reached the counter, ready to plunk down two dollars for a 1924 poetry collection, upon hearing that my home was New Orleans the petite maven was struck by a single, southern chord (“I knew there was something I liked about you!” she said, a native herself) and like a good southern lady, the time was right to impart a story—hallelujah! Amen.

Not that kind of story, though—no lambs or Jesus here.

Instead, she told me that since her husband passed away some years ago, her sex life had been put on permanent hold and, not having seen a penis in years, she decided to rent “an adult video.” But after a few anxious moments with the tape in the privacy of her home it was apparent that, despite its titular promise, there would be no sex in it. Disappointment reigned and she returned the video at once.

“Where’s the sex?” demanded my otherwise diminutive friend.

“What ‘sex?’ ” replied the clerk.

“It states blatantly that I should see ‘sex’ and most importantly…penises,” she whispered.

“Oooh,” realized the clerk. “Don’t be fooled by the name. The Sex Pistols weren’t a sex act, ma’am…they were a punk rock band.”
***

“So you see,” said my 84 year old friend, “you’ve got to be careful with us old folks. We take things so literally. I see ‘pistol’ and think ‘penis.’ ”

But of course.

At which point I politely pointed to my book with terrific grace, murmured something like, “Oh yes, indeed” and thought I’d head for the door.
But it was not to be. Her 80 year old friend
Henry had just joined me at the counter, intent on paying a five dollar purchase with a one hundred dollar bill, and telling me the sweet, tragic tale of Why He Should’ve Learned How To Ice Skate. You see, he’d lost his first wife—an actress—to a Hollywood hunk who knew the ways of glassy seduction…

And so I carried on through the streets of San Francisco, content that the West, too, has some community to offer, some semblance of reality, a kind of amusing—New Orleans-esque—charm to it.

Or maybe it’s because I talk to strangers.

October 10, 2005

“Now when he was a young man / He never thought he’d see / People stand in line to see the Boy King…”

Last week I did not stand in line to see the King Tut exhibit at Los Angeles’ venerable Museum of Art; rather, I made reservations a few days ahead, advancing through the exhibit at a leisurely pace. I re-learned that King Tut’s daddy had put an end to that fussy, confusing multiple deity belief, insisting that there should be just one God, a sun god: Aten. Much simpler. Much better (must resemble him however). And discovered that, though married to Nefertiti, probably had Tut by favored wife, Kiya. This was all good information and while I liked the pretty rows of blue canopic jars carrying the remains of the deceased, and the bright faience…

Oh my Aten, the tombs! They made me feel like a natural, low-maintenance woman. All I really want when I die is a good jazz funeral with a second line. But these women were demanding. The first was one of Akhenaten’s wives (or sisters or in-laws)—an outstanding example of pre-Raccoco…mess. So opulent, so excruciatingly detailed that it had to have been started from the moment its occupant was born. I knelt down and squatted next to an eight year old whom I realized had a much superior vantage point, and together we examined the tiny animals, birds, symbols in gold relief. Together we marveled in silence at the work. And I wondered, in light of our speed-crazed, time-crunched world if the Egyptian slave artisans thought, too, “Isn’t it great to have all this time on our hands? I love it! Aren’t we lucky.” The tomb was so cluttered with beautiful gold things that you could barely see the forest for the trees. It reminded me of all that shiny gold leaf the Byzantines were so fond of. Oddly, it’s great ancient art but to the contemporary eye it smacks—just a little—of 1980s vulgarity.

“Buried with a donkey / Funky Tut / He’s my favorite honkey / Born in Arizona / Moved to Babylonia / King Tut…”

Despite the glitter, glamour, swords and sarcophagi, though, the most gripping part of the exhibit wasn’t even there in 1978 when Tut first rolled around the world, inspiring Steve Martin’s song. It was the final exhibit, the one simply entitled, What Did He Look Like?, providing the first real reconstructive images of how the Boy King might have appeared. Several countries had a hand in its making: The U.K. rendering is handsome, medium brown skinned with a full, downturned mouth. The French reconstruction is graceful, feminine, café au lait—a pretty transvestite without her wig. Both are noble looking but the French image begs to be called Tutette. The Egyptian scientists came up with an even featured model with high cheekbones but, strangely, they couldn’t figure out an eye color so they left him orb-less. Without a view to his soul, he resembles something you’d find on a fashion runway—humorless, dull, but striking. And the American reconstruction is a profile with a receding chin. So much for dynastic good looks.

I just like the idea that he was flesh and blood. Real, complex, he suffered the tragic death of twin sons, carried a sword and even—perhaps?—according to the Gallic model, sported a tight dress. According to Steve Martin, he probably wore platforms, too:

“Dancin’ by the Nile / Funky Tut / The Ladies love his style…”