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.

At the Arclight I sat through a number of trailers, one of them a documentary-as-cuddly-feature called “Babies.” Could it be that I was the only person who didn’t coo myself to nap time or dribble “aaaawwws” all over my shirt for Thomas Balmès’ trailer of what should be tears? (or, at the very least, a parity of emotional reels?–sorry for the out of hand double entendres here, equally sickening, I know). I could barely contain myself–or, more specifically, my dread of each impending frame of adorable-ness. Los Angeles Times film critic Betsey Sharkey describes it “a joyous and buoyant new documentary that has been charming audiences for months.” But some of us in the audience could barely stomach the trailer, contorting this viewer into an angry fetal position despite her comfy chair. At least Sharkey also (partially) saw it for what it was: a work of high-gloss infant air-brushing. How thrilling. Downright antsy, I couldn’t wait for it to end its slobbering screen smiles and cap the heartstrings-plucking. What was Sharkey & Company’s Bundle of Joy was yet another case of Cute porn to me–the visual equivalent of almost any John Williams-for-Spielberg score. It ended, much to my relief, after what felt like 15 minutes of Stage Parent as Important Artist, seguing into another French offering that was (thank you, Jesus), an actual piece of creative celluloid.

It was Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Micmacs” that served as instant posture relief. It was sheer rompy, whimsical delight, and I don’t care how many people describe it thus–it was genius compared to the treacle fest of the infantapalooza before it. I couldn’t wait to order my tickets and assert my imaginative adult self. Hooray! Filmmaking lives! I wanted to shout.

And then…the trailer for ”Letters To Juliet” appeared in all its Veronan glory–a movie starring the luminous Amanda Seyfried in what felt like a “Babies” for Young Adults. But here I was stupidly smitten–and self-berated, I can assure you. Smitten not exactly for the predictability of the storyline but for the embrace between Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave (and…well, yes, despite the heavy-handed tone, the part about long-lost loves and second chances in Italy also did it).

But I quickly gained my composure, falling head first into “Please Give,” in which a slight embrace between an unrelated mother and daughter nearly left me drowned. Holofcener’s pitch perfection (and lack of bombastic score), complete respect and trust in her actors is the tonal difference between this and, say…almost everything else I saw this week, whether trailing before me to titillate or unfolding before me to contemplate. It is also the difference between art and artlessness. Between art and sincerely trying.

A couple nights later, I attended a screening of Rodrigo García’s “Mother & Child,” another film about wanting. García’s “Mother & Child” was at times heart-wrenching, nauseating, and perfect. Los Angeles Times film reviewer Michael Phillips and I disagree as to the amount of suds this “classy, well-acted soap opera” dispersed. The essential difference between it and Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give” was the restraint each director possessed. Holofcener clearly owns her films; García, while so damned satisfying and tonally correct most of the time, seems to have given in to some Hollywood executive who chose to prolong the movie well past its natural ending and wrap it in a pink bow.

All of these films and trailers, I realized, were viewed during the week before that most Hallmark of holidays, Mother’s Day (I know its honorable history; it’s the present-day transmogrification of which that I am referring). “Babies,” I might add, is just the sort of trailer my mother would have fallen for; “Please Give” is the film she might have loved…and not known why.

“Hey, what’s up with the Dachau t-shirt?” I asked him, lightheartedly, because on his green background was in fact a white barbed wire pattern, repeating itself past his ample navel.

“Oh, no…Look!” he countered with enthusiasm. “It has barbed wire on it. See?”

As I said, I’ll leave the blank door open for you. It’s what I get for asking.

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!

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

Last week I attended a Jewish Sabbath dinner on Friday (a seder) and went to my first Los Angeles church service on Sunday. At The Forum. That’s right—the arena where the Lakers used to play; where Madonna rehearses for world tours.

I was a little skeptical about The Forum: how would the music fare at this non-denominational church-arena? How could it compare to New Orleans? Would there be brass? How could there not be brass? If Glenn David isn’t singing, then do I really want to be there? I had a litany of questions for my poor friend. I was such a pain in the ass about it, anyone else would have said, “You’re so concerned about the music? Stay home with Johnny Coltrane then.” But Nicole is a patient friend—a virtue with which I am unfamiliar. Spiritual and fairly regular about her bible study, she’s far too kind to let a little music snobbery get in the way of soothing my soul.

In the same way that my Jewish friends would never serve sweet traditional wine at their sabbath dinner because (A) They’d be celebrating alone, which means that B) in effect, it would get in the way of the communal spirit. My lovely friend, who actually hates chicken but felt compelled by tradition to make her maiden cooking foray into that pedestrian bird, blessed the garlic-spiked fowl in Hebrew—a language almost as unmusical as Kevin Federline. An unfortunate mix of spitting, choking, and complaining, it is jarring to the senses seeing a beautiful woman speaking such gutteral words. Like using expletives in the nave. At least German is…funny. I always laugh at the thought of myself barking German orders to my late (incredibly German) Shepherd. But Hebrew isn’t funny. It’s depressing. The seder—which was only religious in the sense that the chicken was baptized, kosherized and otherwise sanitized—was beautifully scored with iPod shuffled spirituals including The Harmonizing Four’s “Motherless Child,” a rendition that remains unparallelled. It’s like a world record in dulcet harmony, The Guinness Book for bass. How low does he go? How can he go that low and still sound like God?

Doesn’t matter; at least it offset the Hebrew. There was all kinds of good music that night while we downed Spanish and California bottles and tore the flesh of figs. As I marveled at their rice, I wondered too—perhaps to the point of blaspheme—how Christ got his word across if he was speaking Aramaic? It’s not exactly Italian. The rest of dinner was Hebrew-free, free-range fowl and free-flowing bottles and conversation, while my beloved wowed them with a limited but impressive Yiddish vocabulary. Impressive because his people hail from Acadiana, South Louisiana–essentially, they’re all from Spain.

How could the Forum on Sunday beat the seder score?

Forty minutes of song and praise lifted my eyes to the rafters where sodium lights threatened to make me squint, so I blocked them with my hands—which made it look as if I were prematurely raising the roof instead of protecting my vision. And high in the stands were flag draped liturgical dancers, little boys and girls, grandmothers with bellowed fabric. Sure, the music was amplified, I didn’t recognize a soul, and I couldn’t make out the faces except when I looked at the giant screens, but the gospel was good, the people were lively, the spirit manifest. After a chorus or two, in good spirituals style, you picked it up and carried it along… with the 5,000 other churchgoers. L’Chaim!

I have a small suitcase with three changes of clothes, all uncarefully packed around a scrapbook. I have my computer; my bag. That’s when I see him cycling aimlessly—really, it’s too aimless, unliterarily so—in a teeshirt. Around and around across the street from my house, at the edge of the park. I hate when he cycles in the dark. When he spots me he wheels over and we embrace until it feels like the stickiness of August won’t ever separate us.
There was never a time we had trouble saying anything. Words came easily, affection naturally. “Baby,” “sugar,” “sweetpea,” roll off the tongue like Italian. There are some people who, out of proximity and instinct, know they’ve got another soul to count on.
Flowers underscore our parting. The sweet olive is all but dormant so, like a dutiful understudy, the slightly overdone, nightblooming jasmine steps in. The stray brother cats loll in the front yard—the brave one slipping under the wrought iron fence watching us under the sodium lights at the curb where I wait for my ride.
I think about taking him with me. Every time I look back at the stray cats I think of taking him and them, with one front seat and no carriers for wild domestic animals. In thirty seconds I make up my mind: I run through all of the scenarios—unwarranted jailtime, unwarranted death.
There is everything to say and no time to say it, so we speak every word silently, and the embrace substitutes for what every other bone, muscle, and organ is helpless to communicate. I ask him to please go home. Safely. Without incident. Now. But to go home to his home safely and without incident is to ask a drug addict to go home via the dealer on the corner who’s open for business. His home is not without incident; I fear that, in his mother’s Section Eight state of mind, he might not make it. I take mental snapshots of my house and neighborhood, stray cats, trees, the stillness. His face. Everyone left hours before. I feel like I’ve overslept.
“Go home, baby. Please. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” We look at each other a long time. I want to say it but I don’t want to worry him.
Then, as if a director cued the red truck, my ride appears. And August pries us apart.
***
One year ago tonight, he was eight and a half years old. We’ve spoken once since then and I wonder how he’s navigating Texas when all he told me in February was how much he missed home.
The other three boys who went to private school I can’t reach at all, no matter how many times I drive by their house. The girl across the park is gone—mom sold the house before Mardi Gras—and I don’t remember her name so I doubt that I’ll ever find her again. She had a hell of an arm; we liked playing football. The last time I saw her we got good and sweaty playing ball, then had the nerve to eat at the Night Out Against Crime picnic with caked on dirt and flushed faces.
One year anniversaries are hard whether it’s a tough first year at marriage or 365 days after death. What is it about a year, about marking time? On the one year anniversary of leaving, and closing in on the one year anniversary of the flood disaster, it doesn’t appear that places fare too much better than we do.

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.

Considering my recent return to Hollywood from New Orleans, you were probably expecting the requisite entry on what it was like being back home in Louisiana after four months away.
Not so fast, buddy. We’re not that predictable.
Instead, waxing about visiting home is usurped by a Hollywood institution: a film. Ahem—a movie. Perhaps one of the most irredeemably awful movies I have ever seen. So bad it was…worse. Nothing to save it except as an excellent means for compare and contrast sessions in college film courses.
The steaming turd? Miami Vice. It’s a puzzler, this one. Though I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing it—it was another DGA screening so, though it took two hours of my life it didn’t take my money—I was up for a silly, flashy piece of light entertainment. It had all the elements of Collateral (incl. Jamie Foxx and and director Michael Mann), yet absolutely none of its success. It had name recognition, yet chose to muddle the Miami palette. No displays of sleek, Art Deco chrome and sculpted derrières beachside. Where were the pastels and sundrenched mojito bars? Instead, we got white supremacists in dark, dingy trailer parks that looked like Ohio. The only time I knew I was somewhere was when we were obviously in Cuba and South America. Otherwise, it may as well have been called Cleveland Vice.
And as for the jittery handheld camera/ Michael Mann trademark? How about using it for a reason, an artistic call, as character psychology—as they did in Collateral. Here it was just annoying. Dark, muddy, and reverberatingly hand held now just equals I Grow Weary of This Filmmaker.
Despite the production design misfire, I was hoping for some witty repartée, or at least some good looking male leads being good looking and snappy. Instead, what we got were a couple of la-con-ic actors saying some of the worst lines heard on screen since I sat at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre for Titanic, audibly groaning. This audience (mostly SAG actors) laughed aloud at unintentionally funny lines. I’d like to say that the women were strong but they weren’t; they were just one-note angry in that cartoonish fuming-from-the-orifices sort of way. And you couldn’t understand half of what the Japanese woman said. Therefore, I hated her.
Midway through this torture, I finally realized why Colin Ferrell’s character seemed so ill at ease. Wouldn’t you feel out of place in the 21st century…in a mullet? Jamie Foxx, well after delivering the funniest line in a sex scene (replete with let-me-lick-you-up-and-down contemporary R & B) also delivered the most unintentionally funny line of the whole, painful evening:
“Let’s take it to the limit…one more time.” The audience half expected Glen Frey to cut in for a solo. Patently ridiculous. But it gave us the first reason to be freely uproarious.
Colin Ferrel got the other line. With zero irony, he cocked his gun and said, “Let’s do this thing.”
Nobody says that. Not even in a movie.

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.