The Strawberry Blog

April 27, 2006

Saturday night we had dinner at a remarkably authentic French restaurant at the pseudo-Paris casino. And maybe it was the French-born, New York Times photographer (responsible for many of the post-hurricane disaster photos that broke our hearts last year) who said to me, “What? You really think your absentee vote was counted?!” Maybe it was the lingering effects of that statement—at which the entire table cracked up, including me, ever so nervously. Whatever the cause, I was up at 5:00 Sunday morning.
At the time my eyes startled awake, the little red light on my Blackberry was flashing with non-mayoral election information from my neighbor friend. I answered and she texted back, “Damn girl, don’t you sleep? I have an excuse…kids : ). Go to bed so we can have an intelligent conversation later.” And I heeded her advice—with difficulty. Great difficulty. The mind races, nay, relays, baton in hand. I’m every racer, super fast. Flying, dervish minded.
Just before noon we had that intelligent conversation. Then, against my better judgment—I came to Vegas to take my mind off the fact that I was missing Wynton Marsalis & Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra’s music début and second line—I called my good friend, Bob. I knew where he was; where I wanted to be, at Congo Square, at the concert. I wanted to hear a comforting voice. He answered immediately.
“Hey! Can ya hear it? It’s Wynton. Best damn thing I’ve heard in years.”

Bob’s a bandleader; he doesn’t dole out compliments like that very often.
“Yes, yes! Keep the phone on, please—it’s beautiful.” I was referring to what I could make from the melody and percussion; it certainly wasn’t the sound quality I was talking about, courtesy cellular.

Bob continued to hold that phone up and I, lying prone, alone in a darkened Las Vegas hotel room, listened. And dreamed. Closed my eyes and danced in my head, in the bed no less, felt the temperature and warmth of the park; saw the people, was one of the crowd. Broken footed, shattered bones. No pain, no progress, no elevation. No spirit, no light, now with no hesitation I danced. For nine minutes and eighteen seconds everything—the absentee ballot and the absence, the unquiet mind and quiet tears —the unrelenting desert depression, vanished, like a mirage up close.

“I’ll call you later, baby.”

And personal.

April 25, 2006

The first—and last—time I visited Las Vegas I stayed at a four-star resort outside of town, pleasantly surreal, a getaway for the Zen Set. And while I couldn’t say that I loved Vegas—I thought it was an unnervingly ersatz experience disguised uncleverly—I never said I’d never return…it just wasn’t especially high on my list. I appreciated it for what it was, in the way one appreciates cotton candy. So that when I was invited again it had been five years since that initial foray and, really, there was no reason to say no.
And I assumed, given the nature of the invitation, that we would stay in the kind of hotel in whose lobby I do not fear for the safety of my luggage. A hotel throughout which permeates a wholly unnatural sense of high end conspicuous consumer calm. A hotel for the Veblen Set. A hotel where I am not instantly put off by the sheer quantity of ill-behaved children and their cursing, smoking, illiterate parentage. A hotel, in fact, where grown men do not roam the lobby in wifebeaters and white socks, drinking cheap Mexican beer.
I do not recall the last time I slept on sheets containing polyester much less comprising 50% of them.
Perhaps there was a mix-up, some terrible mistake, a cruel joke. Because this is not how I envisioned spending three days of my Birthday Week, in a hotel whose ancient, squared name actually mirrors the three-ring chaos of its modern-day lobby. I’m sure Circus Circus was a hell of a swingin’ time in ‘72 but now it is an ungentle reminder that in its shameless appeal to attract families to its tent of iniquity it has fallen to the depths of seediness. In every way it is outdated, outmoded, underdone and plain dirty. Sure, the rest of the Strip is horrifying in its nouveau riche-ness—and I swear there’s a good reason to use the phrase ‘in cahoots with’ when referring to the shocking lack of easily attainable internet access anywhere here—but Circus Circus is just scary.
I sit in abject horror amid the badly dressed, hardly attired and vocabulary challenged. Call me old fashioned but I still get dressed—evacuations aside—for travel. In effect, when in plain view of other people. I think it is the only respectful way to be. I have repeatedly been told, since those first years in that last rung of hell called junior high school, that I was born too late. Much too late. And it only seems to be getting worse in America. In the spirit of British writer Lynn Trusse, I correlate this dreadful public attire with the Decline of Decent Manners. And here, once more, this claim is warranted.
Exiting the Circus Circus lobby bathroom, I laughed uncontrollably. At my sad, sorry, but ultimately kind of funny predicament. That a woman who most definitely dislikes snobbery but likes very much the finer things in life was doomed to spend a weekend…here. But because this is my birthday month, and to honor the traditions of Spring, I will land on a bright and positive note; I’ll wrap a premature ribbon around the May Pole: at least this Circus will prove fodder for days, if not seasons!, I try to reason.
But after one day of “Cold Beer and Dirty Girls,” (at the seedy end of the Strip) and the unabating parade of Middle American freaks (all over), I’ve had enough. And, not least depressing for those struggling with the delicate art of living by their creative wits, the news from my 27 year old stripper pal is that she has paid off her student loans in their entirety and imperturbably drops $700 on “little Dior purses.”
All of which does little to strengthen my resolve to face editor rejection, more insurance bureacracy, and Scientology Stress tests on every corner when I return to Hollywood Monday.
I am, however, very ready for my 380 count Egyptian cotton linens. And no one can take those and my education and this chair and…and…my incredible urge to not get breast augmentation away from me.

April 17, 2006

My friend, Ms. J., is sassy, beautiful and, thankfully, a little less stringent these days about the Things Men Must Be In Order To Date Them. For one, she is still a pretty ardent Christian and…she’s in love with a Jewish guy. I like that she’s relaxed her style but hasn’t compromised her principles.
For Easter this year I found myself 1,900 miles away from St. Augustine in New Orleans, so after people watching at the Farmer’s Market—enduring the Impossibly Bad Japanese Singer and marveling at the Jamaican conga player teaching rhythm to a toddler nation—Ms. J. and I headed to the Hollywood Bowl. Rather an odd choice for church, I thought. The Hollywood Bowl? Isn’t that where you tote wine bottles and picnics while Esa-Pekka Salonen, The World’s Only Ubiquitous Finn, conducts your dreams under the stars?
Apparently, Essa-Pekka doesn’t actually own the Bowl. This year Ms. J.’s Bel Air Presbyterian Church snagged the coveted Easter slot there, and that’s precisely where we were going—with 6,500 other people—to celebrate. Nestled at the base of the Hollywood Hills, the Bowl is a white, domed, Modern amphitheatre the Greeks would have been proud of (the only one of its kind here where packing bottles of your fave vintage is encouraged—at evening performances, not necessarily Easter morning). And it’s true—there ain’t a bad seat in the house.
The program was an expensively designed four-color glossy, easy to follow—like one you’d find at the Ahmonson Theatre. I liked the chorus and I liked Pastor Brewer’s easy, grounded humor (He said his people are not terribly emotional creatures; that great excitement might elicit an “Indeed”). Not a “Yes, indeed! Amen!” Just a sober, simple, (Presbyterian) “indeed.”
Sounded suspiciously Episcopalian to me. However, unlike Episcopalians, I was thrilled to witness that most, if not all 6,500 people, clapped in unison.
The pop songs were so catchy it felt like they were auditioning for one of Jeff Berg’s people but, truly, I could’ve done without four guitars (I yearned for a lone trumpeter), keyboard and the contemporary uptempo music. It was good for what it was but it wasn’t, well…soulful. For me, appropriating the pop-py tastes of the mainstream for church doesn’t cut it—and certainly doesn’t bring my heart closer to God. Ms. J. says I might prefer the early service—the traditional hymns—the one that puts her right back to sleep.
Apparently, judging from Pastor Brewer’s gentle mantra and the program’s declaration, they are on a mission to “make Los Angeles the greatest city for Christ.” Hmmmm. That’s odd. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a church that openly announced its competitive spirit for Jesus. I’ve attended tiny southwestern Mississippi services, grand and hallowed halls in New York City, London, and Rome, and none ever openly competed with the rest of the Christian world to be The city for Christ. Though I understood Pastor Brewer’s sentiment later on (“Wouldn’t it be amazing to watch people let other people in on the freeway and wake up to find that some kind person waxed your car in the middle of the night?”)—that what they’re striving for is a kinder, gentler, model city—at first I kept thinking, Christianity’s Greatest Star Just Bought a Spanish Colonial in the Beverly Hills and Drives A Beamer To Work! Maybe it’s the syntax that makes it read hyperbolically. Maybe the program should read, instead: “Making Los Angeles a Great City For Christ.” Often superlatives just get in the way of good intentions and pure meaning.
Apart from Pastor Brewer’s sense of humor and shared depth of experience, the most beautiful part of the service was the setting. Outside, banked against variegated green hills and squat, desert trees, the sky drifted from slightly overcast to bright sunshine. It was as different from St. Aug as night and day. There were a lot of visitors; I suspect that no one’s family had belonged anywhere in Los Angeles for over 150 years.
God, or the universal spirit, can be anywhere, not necessarily inside a church, and my eyes and heart drifted toward the sky, to those stunted, parch-leafed trees so different from the ones on Governor Nicholls Street, alien cousins to the two century-old live oaks in 19th century city parks. It was like the time when they buried my father’s ashes in the ground and I couldn’t stand the thought of his ashes trapped (it’s anathema to the idea behind cremation); it was the trees that beckoned my eyes upward so as not to look down in the ground, so as not to believe that my father would be stuck in that place. It wasn’t surprising that it was the trees swaying that grabbed my attention: my father was the kind of man who might overlook a rose garden but marveled at the sight of a tall, sturdy city tree.
I liked being a visitor but, unsurprisingly, I didn’t connect with Bel Air Pres. Ms. J. said she’s more than willing to church hop with me. As we left the Bowl, en route to the pedestrian underpass and skirting through parked cars, she asked what it was that I loved so much about St. Aug.
In a word, spirit.
Next week: Us. Coming To A Church Near You.

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.

April 6, 2006

I am always happy to travel, and if that travel brings me to the District of Columbia, Le Cité Originale du Chocolat (“What’s up, C.C.?”), the green on the Potomac, bring it on. The District has that mix of gentility and grit, vestiges of its storied past, its mix and its mash. Most visitors don’t see much beyond the grand marble museum walls, the regal Capitol, the de riguer destinations; and, like most cities, it really does have a different face for locals and those in the know (former locals and hipsters alike). Now that I am the latter (former local), I remember the Way it Was (never allowed to venture much beyond 16th Street—though I did), and hold both high hopes and deep reservations about What It Can Be. In just over a year, I’m seeing changes for its good and shifts toward its detriment.
In January 2005 I was sitting at a corner café with my brother and a few friends when it struck the only two of us who might have remembered What This Corner Was…that we were actually sitting there.
“Kyle!” I said, sipping my mocha. “Wasn’t this…this…the notorious 7-11 back in the day? You know, the homicides, the hookers?”
“Yep,” said Kyle. “Bad coffee 24/7 and murders weekly.”
When I came upon a corner virtually unrecognizable (it was a garage or paint store; it is now a Wholefoods), I ducked into the barber shop, thoroughly disrupting the twelve people engaged in cultural and social arts.
“Excuse me, but I’ve lost my bearings. Who’s been here the longest?” I asked. To which I was humored down the serried row of chairs and hair:
“Five years.”
“20 years.”
“34 years….”
The man with the longest tenure helped me gain my sense of place, and I was on my way again, down T Street, baby brother in tow. I said to him, “if that barber shop—which has stuck it out through the aftermath of 1968, the detritus of the 1970s and the 1980s crack boom—if it can stay, if it is allowed to be here among the overpriced furniture stores cropping up…then D.C. will have done a decent job of revitalization. I think.” I went on, boring my poor brother to tears, I fear: that barber shop is more crucial to this community than you know, blah blah blah, cultural, social pulse point, etc. etc.
My poor brother always gets an earful of my D.C. Observations every visit back home. Sometimes I bet he wishes I’d notice nothing and just have fun without thinking all of the damn time. No such luck. I have fun thinking.
On my latest trip back—to see him and catch The Pogues’ original lineup and first U.S. tour in 13 years!—there were ever more changes. Seems that now all of the Ethiopian restaurants of our youth have uprooted from High Rentville 18th Street and replanted themselves along U Street. Ah…U Street. Where, in the 1930s and ‘40s the late Gordon Parks documented ordinary lives and everyday living.
I was never allowed on U Street growing up. My father, an inveterate dancer unrequitededly in love with Sarah Vaughan, spent most of his time there. He went everywhere—Howard Theatre, Lincoln Theatre, Tivoli—and swore that no place on earth was peopled with a more stylish, well-coiffed crowd. No sir, not even New York. And now here I was, walking along the fabled U Street corridor, snapping shots of where Louis Armstrong played, the latest old jazz spot reopened, the new condo building called The Ellington…
But for all of the warm fuzziness I felt, there was the reality of what you couldn’t see. I got to talking with a theatre operator who said that, while the barber shop is still holding on, they’re kicking the old folks out. And the two of us, like old girlfriends who might’ve grown up on the same block, lamented how the newest Washingtonians (the babies, the children) would grow up with…no old folks. No grandparent types sitting on porches to survey the scene (including them!). No elderly people to tend to, to make a grocery run for, to chat with. And that got me to thinking: what is urbanity coming to these days? Is it really just a more convenient, inverse suburbanity?—where the mix of a real urban center is replaced with a socio-economically homogenized one? It certainly seems that way; that the new, “revitalized” urban centers are becoming playgrounds for the multimillionaire developers who nurture them. And where are they from?
The Suburbs.
Cities are fluid, ever changing, a geographical language. I don’t discount all of the good change that is taking place (and I understand that the definition of good is subjective here). I know that the clubs in southeast had to be razed for the future baseball stadium and that when the stadium goes in my brother’s place will double in value; that when the drab, overwhelmingly beige wharf is completely renovated, southwest denizens will finally have an identity along the river; people will attend Arena Stage in greater numbers and with greater vigor.
Yet, it seems that all too often—in D.C., in New Orleans even—that when revitalization finally happens, it happens too quickly after decades of neglect—foisted upon those, like the barber shop, who have stuck it out during the worst years. It’s as if the city won the big lottery and could finally start rebuilding. But in its nouveau riche enthusiasm it often loses sense of its history, its culture and ultimately, trades a rich identity for one steeped only in new money.
I’m not losing hope. There’s still a lot of good here. I just think that, culturally, America’s nasty habit of trading in the old for the new model, of worshipping youth over experience and age, has rather insidiously made the thematic leap to its urbanism, too. Perhaps, like a former trophy wife scorned, D.C. will find a way to integrate its greatest assets upon the latest acquisition.