The Strawberry Blog

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 18, 2006

As much as I’d like to put to rest Mayor Nagin’s unchecked spouting; as much as I would like to think that, two days later, I am over it and that I am mature enough to see the error of his vocal ways, that he’s tired and we should just move on…I’m only human—with foibles as many as C. Ray.

Maybe.

First, let’s look on the bright side of Spouting Mayors: at least C. Ray wasn’t caught with a couple of hookers, a vial of crack and the audacity to retort: “Bitch set me up,” like Mayor Marion Barry, of the Original Cité du Chocolat. Instead, Nagin just invoked Willy Wonka and the Jesus Factory. Former D.C. Mayor Barry poisoned the wells of so much water that, despite allowing such crimes as a sum total of four dictionaries per school in Anacostia elementaries, Barry went on to be elected City Councilman of the Eighth Ward. So much for hookers, substance abuse, and being soft on education. A friend of mine who irregularly comments on NPR, calls this American phenomenon “upwardly failing.”

Let us not continue that particular American Phenomenon, please. Let us not say to our children, “thou shalt fail to meet your highest expectations and so ye shall reap the rewards of great failure—American Success!” Let us not—because I have not forgotten the first paragraph of this essay—go easy on elected officials and hold them to lower standards. As much as C. Ray wants to forget about his lexical trespasses, as much as he thinks he was possessed by lack of sleep (or just requires a new PR girl), the fact remains that our elected mayor spewed instead of remaining dignifiedly silent; belched uncontrollably instead of gathering the words of his frustration into graceful cohesion. Instead, C. Ray seemed to have taken a page out of Barry’s book, refusing to consult a dictionary much less a thesaurus.

And all of this disgorging…on such a winter’s day. Could it have been a more ironic situation in which Ray Nagin let loose and foul his diatribe? Of all days, C. Ray—Martin Luther King day. If King was known for one principle, it was inclusion. So fervent was King’s desire that all of God’s children play together on one tarmac that not only did some younger lions of his Southern Christian Leadership Council revolt and split, he was killed for it. Of all principles to rant against by way of sloppy oratory, Mayor Nagin. Of all times to rail against the healing of our city.

Instead, let’s look to the carefully wrought words of someone who knows a thing or two about timing, about measure and tone—musician, scholar (and gentleman) Wynton Marsalis, who delivered the Tulane/Xavier/Loyola/Dillard Universities’ (inclusive) keynote address Monday night. Marsalis appealed to MLK day itself as an honor, “because it was Dr. King’s tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another…empowered with the feeling that if we want to we can speak truthfully to one another.”

The day itself, a reopening of four universities—two historically black—now commingling under two academic roofs—was one powerfully demonstrated by doing (thank you, Tulane President Scott Cowen). In fact, Marsalis’ speech could best be described as an impetus to do. To not simply whine and complain in dorm rooms and bars but to take the baton passed by another generation and continue its principled and spiritual drive. “We can work together, ” he said. “We can rely on one another because Dr. King’s actions made his dream our reality, and this rebuilding of New Orleans gives us the perfect opportunity to see if we’re ready to extend the legacy of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement. Look around this room and realize that the final chapter of that movement still waits for a generation with the courage to write it.”

Marsalis even quoted Ben Franklin’s, ‘We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.’ He reminded us that, “a few hanging together can lead a nation to change.” And in one gracefully segued paragraph to the next, Marsalis eschewed the hackneyed and frustrated for the well wrought and measured. At one point he challenged the young generation in his audience to “[push] an older one to a higher standard.” That it’s been a long time since that notion was turned on its head.

I could go on—and he does, beautifully—but this essay is not an academic reading of Wynton Marsalis’ keynote address. It is simply a critical look at a day solemnized for a man gifted in oratory, in which two contemporary men delivered speeches aimed at higher ground.

And only one reached it.

Upon comparing the two speeches, the history books and future scholars will lament the irony but praise the honor by Marsalis for King. Hopefully, for Nagin’s sake, they will forget his ill chosen phrases and vernacular back peddling.

Then again, it’s been almost 16 years and I still remember Barry’s infamous crack/hotel room words. Why? Because words are mighty; they are powerful. They can be hands by the whirlpool and grist for the mill. Witness these last few that Marsalis spoke and then tell me just how mighty that sword can be:

“I’m here to tell you, when young folks are motivated to action, when they act with insight, soul and fire, they can rekindle the weary spirit of a slumbering nation. It’s time somebody woke us up.”

Sssshhhh. Just don’t wake up C. Ray. He clearly needs the sleep.

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.