I looked up the word "travesty" using my Mac's built-in dictionary widget, and got this definition-cum-tale of family resentments:
noun a false, absurd, or distorted representation of something
verb [trans.] represent in such a way: Michael has betrayed the family by travestying them in his plays.
Geez, Michael, why you gotta be writing mean little plays about your momma, huh? You hurt her so much that she couldn't get it out of her mind even when sitting at the office working on computer dictionary definitions. Way to go, Eugene O'Neill.
And you, Momma! Put down the drink and get back to work!
When I was a kid I bought a book that told you how to collect autographs and included addresses for famous people, including future murderers -- oops, I mean kidnappers and armed robbers.
I'm not sure where to display this photo. Next to the ones from Margaret Thatcher and Madeline L'Engle? Under the one from Shirley Temple? In a collage with the one from Johnny Cash and the one from "let's play two!" Chicago Cub Ernie Banks?
Maybe not.
p.s. I wrote Shirley Temple a poem. A poem! Ah, childhood.
"Nightline" producers and I must read the same newspapers and magazines, because they frequently air stories about things I just read about somewhere else, like when they went to visit some of those isolated tribes in the Amazon jungle that had been pictured in Scientific American via info on Survival-International.org.
So I wasn't surprised when they did a story on how the economic crisis is affecting legal brothels in Nevada, since I had read a good article about this very thing in the LA Times at the beginning of this month.
But unlike the LA Times, "Nightline" did a crap job with the story, since it came off as more of a publicity piece for the particular brothel they profiled. The ladies are so nice! They provide a "stress relief" service! Business is fine, mostly! The Madam is a shrewd business-woman with a Suze Orman haircut and a black pantsuit who just happens to take her vicious German Shepherd with her everywhere she goes!
And Neal Karlinsky, who is usually a good correspondent, was practically giggling through the whole thing. Geez, Neal, get a room! You seemed pretty amused with the orgy room, and it is 60% off these days.
Nightline's website claims that this was a story about how "desperate woman turn to world's oldest profession during economic downturn", since job applications are up at the Mustang Ranch. But the story was really more of a PR tour of the facilities, and that's not news, that's salesmanship.
Which brings me to my pimp problem. It was a madam in this case, but a madam is just a lady pimp with better marketing. Madams need a more pimped out name, like bertha. Like "Mess with me and my Bertha will break your legs, sucker!" Tough, like that.
So Nightline followed pantsuit Bertha and dog to the airport, where she and a doppleganger colleague (matching pantsuit) greeted a new recruit, a lovely young lady who applied to the prostitute job over the internet and, good news! she got the job! The Berthas swooped in as she came down the elevator so common courtesy would keep her from ditching the whole thing, and the Berthas had a black limo waiting to take her to her exciting and glamorous new life of having sex with strangers for money. Limo = class.
Nightline also showed us how the Berthas were kind enough to supply her with her own antibacterial soap and monthly HIV and herpes tests. Glamour!
After I watched this story, I got really incensed with the airport pickup and the limo and the black pantsuit. "What'd I do?" asks the pantsuit, but really, Pantsuit, you are part of the shenanigans. Don't act all innocent. That whole charade is a psychological snare to gloss over the nature of the job. It's like being interviewed in a fancy conference room where the free coffee flows when in actuality you're going to be working two floors down in a cubicle in the basement for 50 cents a mug. Only worse, because you have to have sex with lonely truckers.
I was so mad at Bertha I and Bertha II until I realized that they are pimps, and I can't be mad at pimps or Berthas for being smooth-talking and emotionally manipulative because that is what they do. That's how you keep the ladies down on the farm (ranch, in this case).
My mistake, Bertha! But "Nightline", boo to you. You totally got teased and released.
I mean, I think I did. I probably did. My husband and I drove up to Carson City in order to volunteer for the Obama campaign in this swing state, and we weren't the only ones. The sign in sheets were separated between "California" and "Local", and they had plenty of volunteers. What I'd heard about the Obama people was true -- they were extremely organized, dedicated, efficient and persistent. They had five -- five! -- offices in Carson City alone, a city of 35,000 people. I think they considered us totally lazy Communist slackers for participating in such a small way.
We went canvassing on Monday and Tuesday to urge people to vote in neighborhoods that had already had plenty of knocks on their doors. BUT only one lady yelled at us for how many door knocks she'd gotten over the past week. Most people weren't home, but the ones who were were pretty nice, especially the people in their 80s. Everyone was voting for Obama already, since our lists were mostly registered Democrats, and the O signs in the neighborhoods we went to far outnumbered the McC signs. So we were really just harassing stragglers to get to the polls. It rained on us briefly and sprinkle-snowed briefly, and the scenery in fall was simply beautiful.
We also drove up to Reno to check it out and get a quickie divorce like women in 40s movies. We forgot to get the divorce.
The Casino up the block from the field office. Cactus Jack voted Libertarian, of course.
This is what I learned about Carson City and Reno Nevada:
1. It's Ne-vad-a like glad, not Ne-vahd-a like "Ah, I got a vahse in Nevahda". "I'm glad I'm in Nevada". Or Aaaaa! There's a neon sign after me in Nevaaaaada! 2. There are slot machines in the supermarket. 3. Everyone has a dog. I'd say 80% of the houses we went to had dogs viciously slamming their bodies against the locked doors (all dogs are non-partisan). The lady who yelled at us had a cat. 4. The USA Today that I read the morning we went canvassing said the high school graduation rate in the state is 45%. 5. I think kids maybe aren't seeing the importance of graduating high school when there are slot machines in the supermarkets. 6. It's beautiful. The Sierra Nevadas are amazing. Want to see a beautiful view? Look up. 7. There are 25 legal brothels in Nevada. The laaads come to Nevaaada. I learned this from a LATimes article I read on my blackberry while driving around there -- looks like the economy is hitting them hard, too. 8. Carson City does not have a lot of frills, lifestyle-wise. Reno, in contrast, has more cute little stores and coffee shop cafes and pedestrians and is just more swinging in general. It has bigger casino resorts and is more touristy. 9. We never did locate Carson City statehouse, and there just aren't that many possibilities of where it could be. Bonus California 10. We spent a night in Death Valley and no one died. Letdown!
View from the roof of the very nice and worth-a-visit Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
Not all Nevada forests are on fire, just this bit around Lake Tahoe. WL wanted to take my picture, but I wasn't sure of the proper expression to have even in front of a natural and harmless fire. It just seemed rude to smile, you know?
Natty when we got home. Pretty sure she voted for McCain; she looks pissed.
I went to the vet today and there was a lady there with a cat and she said the cat's name was Roscoe P. Coleslaw.
"Ross" was a white cat, but he looked gray today because yesterday she found him playing around in the chimney. He was there for a bath. His lady had an injured arm stuck out in an L shape with an ace bandage wrapped all the way from her wrist to her armpit.
There was also a lady there with two cute, yippy little dogs who were very friendly. There were just like the lady, who was a cute little lady wearing tiny shorts who kept her cell phone glued to her ear the whole time. She told the person on the phone that some third person was "an-noy-in-GUH!" and also told that person on the phone, who was apparently a co-worker, that she LOVED her and that she LOVED working with her and NEVER wanted to not work with her.
I like people like that because they are loud and talkative and energetic and think everyone wants to pet them on head, and they are so certain of it that you can't help but do it. I like dogs like that, too.
I myself am more like Roscoe P. Coleslaw, sneaking around the chimney.
According to this NY Times article Eliot Spitzer believes himself to be living a Greek tragedy.
Perhaps this means he stands in front of the bathroom mirror with the shaving razor in his hand saying, "Et tu, Joe Bruno?"
Eliot. You were not brought down by wrathful or fickle gods. You were not the victim of the cursed House of Spitzers. You seem to think running Daddy's business is some kind of exile from the kingdom, but you still have both of your eyeballs and all of your family members, and you haven't been hung upside down and flayed in even the most modest of areas, like an elbow or the top of your bald head.
You can argue that you were the victim of hubris, but it's more accurate to say you were the victim of penis. You like to rent young snatch while prosecuting others for doing the same. That's hypocrisy, fool, not poetry.
Though you'd better hope the missus never heard of Clytemnestra.
Paul McCarthy paints with his face. He once plastered his head inside a wall. He made a sculpture of a man with his pants down, humping a tree. He dipped his penis in a paint can and painted with it. He created a sculpture called "Santa Claus with Buttplug", which was displayed in a public park in Belgium.
What's not to love?
His work is corporeal and messy and comes from that impulse that makes you smash your fork into your mashed potatoes and fling it around the room. It's a reminder of the human animal and the fact that all this stuff we have built around us doesn't change our animal nature. While other artists are inside playing Boggle, he's going face-first down the Slip-n-Slide.
It's also fun. I saw his current installation at the Whitney Museum, which has an open staircase leading from one gallery level to the next. His gallery was full of stuff playing with rooms, so for example a life-sized video of the camera view spinning around a room. You stand still but your viewpoint spins.
There was also a small enclosed room with an open doorway and a rolling executive leather office chair bolted in the center. The room turned around like a carousel at various speeds, speeding up and slowing down, and the chair spun with it. The drawings of the project on the wall showed a person in the chair; I wonder if it was ever tried out that way. It was fun to picture that.
But this was the best part -- there was an installation called something like Bang Bang Room or Bang Door or something. A four-walled room, each wall with a door in it. The room starts closed up, closed doors. Then each wall swings out on right-mounted hinges. Then each door opens and closes with a bang. This keeps happening, at various speeds, until the room closes back up and the cycle resets.
Do you know how pleasant the sound of a four banging doors is? In an echoing gallery space, with an open stairwell at one end that carries the sound to the galleries above and below?
The poor museum guards. There's only one way to make that job worse than boring, and this was it.
But wait! There was an elderly white male guard at one end of the bang room. He stood looking at the room. There was another guard on the opposite end, a young black lady. When the door flung open, the old guard could see through to the young guard. Then they'd slam shut, and he couldn't see her.
Every time the doors flung open, he grinned widely, raised his arm, and waved at her. Slam. Fling, grin, wave, slam.
The young guard just looked at him bleakly.
That whole scene made my day. Thanks, Paul McCarthy!
I love that he forced this museum to install such an annoying piece, and that you were reminded of it even if you went upstairs to look at the amazing Buckminster Fuller exhibit because you could still hear it when you stood near the stair side of the room. McCarthy one up on Fuller in this one.
There's no better way to unwind after ninety minutes of asanas than blowing your wad at OTB. Clearly I need to move to NYC to efficiently integrate the parts of my life.
p.s. I took a stroll through the Ramble in Central Park, and I came around a bend of a narrow path beside an algae-covered lake. I was looking around, watching birds bouncing around in the trees, seeing the sights, and oh, yes, here came a guy wearing a black backpack, a white shirt, and white pants with his penis hanging out of the zipper.
Well well.
I stared very hard at the trees on the side of the trail opposite the peek-a-boo and kept on walking. He seemed a bit startled and moved his shoulder to the side and did I don't know what, because I was looking at those fascinating leaves. I think he might've been reacting to the camera in my hand. Maybe his penis is camera-shy, "No pictures!"
I passed by and came around to where I'd started on this circular bit of trail. There were two guys heading toward the guy I'd just passed, and I hung around to see what he'd show them. I saw his head (the one on his shoulders, sicko!) peek around the trail, look at the two guys, and then turn around and disappear. I don't know what happened after that because I decided I was showing too much interest in the guy with the zipper problem.
In fairness to Central Park and New York City the thousands of other men I saw on my visit there managed to keep it in their pants.
p.p.s. To purge ourselves of that story, here's another: I sat next to a couple of little girls sitting with their nanny in a coffee shop. The littlest girl asked the older one if she wanted to hear a joke and got the go-ahead. "Why couldn't the mummy come to the telephone when it rang?" the little one said. The older one said, "I know this one. He was all wrapped up." The younger one said, "That's right. She was tied up. She was chained to the floor and couldn't come to the phone when it rang." The older one slurped her drink without looking up.
I love that that little girl pictured someone's mom chained to the floor, staring helplessly at a ringing telephone, and thought that made for a fine joke.
I just got a sewing machine (for sewing! Home Ec redux!), and the best thing about it is this picture in the instruction manuel. Presumably this is the footwear that the good people at Brother envision their typical customer wearing as she sits at her crafts table in the refinished rec room. "Criminey -- I forgot to make the deviled eggs for the fair!"
It's like they're saying, "Enjoy your machine, housefrau. You can make a lot of muu-muus with this baby!"
They could've at least drawn Crocs -- stylish slopwear for those too classy for flip flops and too sane for slippers outdoors.
When I was a kid, I got my idea of the world from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Phillies and Braves games on TV (the Braves thanks to Ted Turner and his cable station), and a basic study of American history. I believed that American Senators were present-day Jeffersons and Adamses dedicated to the ideals of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, that baseball was the noble sport of American kings (which is to say, all of us, in our no-caste-system/no-monarchy/ Common Sense society), and that we were all essentially rabble-rousing, freedom fighting pamphleteers at heart.
I may have been wrong about some of these things.
Then I read an article about Happy Chandler and I thought I'd discovered the road to a perfect life. I seized on the following goals for myself:
1. Attend Princeton. 2. Become a U.S. Senator. 3. Become Governor of a state. 4. Retire from politics, become Commissioner of Baseball.
I don't know why I fixated on Princeton; I didn't know anyone who'd driven through Princeton, NJ, much less gone to the school. For some reason known only to a sheltered kid who read too many books, attending Princeton seemed like the epitome of good breeding and fine learning in natty suits. It is possible I had seen a picture of F Scott Fitzgerald and took all the wrong lessons from it.
I wanted to be a governor, but I don't remember picking a state. I knew it wouldn't be Southern, because I'm not Southern, but it was pretty open after that. I liked the idea of being responsible for a state that was all my own.
I wanted to be the next Kenesaw Mountain Landis and rid baseball of any sneaking suspicion of foul play and keep it the fine, upstanding game it was meant to be, played by fine, upstanding lads with pure hearts.
Then I grew up. I forgot about Princeton. I watched the Iran-Contra hearings and the Anita Hill hearings. I followed the presidency of former California governor Ronald Reagan. I watched chicken-eater Wade Boggs disparage his road girlfriend when she took their arrangement public. My heart broke. My dreams died a horrible death at the hands of trickle-down economics and good old boy sexism.
Now I have new goals in life. I am older and wiser, savvier, even. I know what's really important in life. Now I want only the following two things:
1. To be in a Levitra commercial. I want to see what it's like to be so happy to be with a silver-haired chemical stud. 2. To play a mascot/Fruit of the Loom character/monster/vitamin/what have you. In a commercial. Wearing a goofy costume looks like fun.
Sorry, Congress! You'll have to make due without me.
I was recently visiting a cemetery and learned that you don't have to leave flowers on the grave of your loved one; you can leave creepy little dolls and holiday-themed bottles instead.
The family plot I visited had -- surprise! -- a freshly dug grave with dead roses atop a mound of dried out earth. I'd been told that my great aunt died more than a week ago, but I didn't realize she would be buried in the same plot with a bunch of the other old timers. I don't know how they're all fitting down there, and I don't want to know.
At any rate, it's a bit unnerving to see new death when you thought you were just hanging out with safe and comfy old death.
Apparently chickens are the goats of the fowl world -- they will eat anything. Miro gave me grape halves to offer the birds, and they clucked in delight and jumped up to peck the grapes out of my hand.
Feeding chickens and watching them interact is a surprisingly enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. Jealous?
We'e you stunned by that one performance in RAY, and couldn't you not take your eyes of the actor, and didn't you think it deserved an Oscar? Me, too! And you know we're talking about Regina King, the Queen King of acting, the woman so versatile she needs a Bo Knows Acting campaign of her own.
Every time Ms King was on-screen in that movie, I couldn't take my eyes off her. That's what people mean when they talk about an actor bringing "energy" to a scene -- it doesn't mean shouting or running around or making those Jim Carrey faces (which, when he Eternally Sunshines or Man on the Moons, he's so good that he should only do projects with heavenly bodies in the title, but everything else gets into Fire Marshall Bill territory) -- it means being so alive that you light up the whole scene.
I just saw Year of the Dog, written and directed by Mike White, one of my favorite writers working today, and he might have performed a thought-experiment on me while casting, because he managed to fill his movie up with many of my favorites. Not least was King, but also there was my old Second City teacher Craig Cackowski! And Susan Mackin, who acted in a table read for one of my scripts! And Dr Steve Brule!
But back to business -- Regina King has that screen charisma that you can't buy or develop or fake. You either have it or you don't. Hollywood, wake up! King FTW!
p.s. How great is it that she was the kid in 227? God, could we use a dose of Marla Gibbs sass in this frozen-doll world of Hollywood women we've got going now. There are no women on TV giving us the business like Ms Gibbs did when I was growing up, and somehow I think that explains why we as a nation have become as arrogant and self-absorbed as Mr Jefferson and Jackee combined. Hey, you kids! Get off of my apartment stoop!
I used to live in Cambridge, MA. Cambridge, Harvard Square, the T stops -- these things are to buskers as honey is to flies with tip jars.
One day I took the escalator down to the Downtown Crossing platform. There was a busker sitting on the ground, singing and playing a battered old guitar held together with duct tape. He was probably in his late thirties, black hair spiced with gray held back in a long ponytail, bestickered black guitar case open for tips. I'd seen this guy all over town as I went on my way around Harvard Square, as I mingled with the tourists at Faneuil Hall, and as I ran the "No crazies, please!" prayer loop in my head while waiting at T-stops along the red line.
I recognized him, but there's no reason he would've recognized me. I rarely gave buskers money because I rarely had money, though there was that time I heard a country singer on the corner outside the Harvard Coop that turned me into such sentimental mush that I gave her whatever was in my pocket. It was the first and last time I ever saw her.
In contrast, I saw the regulars with a regularity. I saw Guster before they had a radio hit; in between songs they said they were going to NYC for a show, and they asked if anyone knew someone there with a spare floor they could crash on. After the next song they said, No, seriously, we need someplace free to stay there.
Aging Ponytail Duct-Taped Guitar Man rarely engaged with the audience. Sometimes I liked to stop and listen to him and other street musicians as a balm to the soul; plus I didn't have a choice. Move aside to a quiet spot and you've just moved into another busker's zone.
That day in Downtown Crossing the crowd placed me near Ponytail's guitar case. While waiting for the train, I watched him sing and play and smiled my encouragement.
He stopped playing abruptly and looked up at me and said bitterly, "Why don't I stare at you for a while?" He threw his guitar in his case and stood up and turned away.
What did I do?
There was a tall skinny guy with long hair who played guitar and sang rock songs in Harvard Square, mostly, and along the T. He had some measure of local fame, which I know because I saw him team up with other busking regulars sometimes, and because I saw him interviewed on the local cable access station once. He was practically famous!
One day in Harvard Square I was sitting on a wall outside the Discovery Store eating my lunch when Tall Skinny stopped playing and started lecturing the crowd. We were basically stealing entertainment, he told us. We were getting his work for free, and that's wrong. That's thievery. We owed it to him to drop a few bucks in his bucket.
Can I tell you what I wanted to drop in his bucket?
I get it. I understand the frustration of putting your talent out there and getting blank stares or simpering smiles (from me) in return. I understand the weight of failure that that puts on you. Believe me, I get it.
I understand the confusion you feel when you hear Courtney Love on the radio and here you'd gone and allegedly given Kurt Cobain, um, let's say "personal favors" on his tour bus and you've got all kinds of positive local press for your music and yet here you're the one out on the street in front of fucking smug-ass Harvard and there's Courtney being exactly the same except rich. ( I heard that story about a locally well-known Boston street musician from Courtney herself at a Hole concert at the Orpheum, and no, I didn't want to know, and yes, Ms. Love's a great musician but maybe not that reliable a storyteller.)
But standing in front of people and forcing them to listen to you is not the same as getting them to hear you, and no amount of whining about it is going to change that.
I wanted to tell this story to remind myself not to be Ponytail or Tall Skinny, no matter how frustrated I become, because DUDE, I DIDN'T FORCE YOU TO PERFORM AT ME WHILE I'M WAITING FOR THE T, AND NO, YOU CAN'T HAVE MY MONEY.
