MY FATHER: Happy birthday!
ME: Why, thank you very much!
MY FATHER: You’re old.
ME: Gee, thanks.
MY FATHER: You’re definitely not a kid any more.
ME: Well, I certainly am glad you pointed that out.
MY FATHER: I remember when I turned fifty—
ME: Jesus Christ I’m not fifty!
MY FATHER: I was kind of touchy when I turned fifty, too.
ME: Anyway.
MY FATHER: Are you doing anything special for your birthday? Going out?
ME: Well, we’re going out for pizza tonight, but last night we went into Manhattan and went to one of the restaurants participating in Restaurant Week.
MY FATHER: What is Restaurant Week?
ME: It’s a promotional thing they do in the city where various restaurants will offer $25 lunch specials and $38 dinner specials from a set menu.
MY FATHER: Thirty-eight dollars?
ME: Yes.
MY FATHER: Thirty-eight dollars just for dinner?
ME: It was three courses. Appetizer, entree, dessert.
MY FATHER: For thirty-eight dollars?
ME: These are fairly upscale—
MY FATHER: Gawrsh, for thirty-eight dollars at Denny’s you could get—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in Manhattan.
MY FATHER: Did you check?
ME: For three courses in New York City, thirty-eight dollars is pretty reasonable.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. The thirty-eight dollars is for one person?
ME: This’ll get you going. Craig had a choir member who gave him a gift card to a local fancy restaurant and we went last week for our anniversary and spent a hundred and seventy dollars for the two of us, so. . . .
MY FATHER (horrified): A hundred and seventy dollars?
ME: It was a special occasion.
MY FATHER: You could feed a family of twenty at Denny’s with—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in Connecticut.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. What did you eat?!
ME: Well, I had the filet mignon, and that was fifty-five dollars on its own.
MY FATHER: I hope you took some of that home with you!
ME: Why in the world would I take any of a really good meal home? I ate it all. It was delicious.
MY FATHER: Because it was fifty-five dollars!
ME: But it wasn’t even our money we were spending. It was a gift card.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh! This is totally out of my world.
ME: Anyway, I also had an appetizer of an artichoke baked with goat cheese, and—
MY FATHER: So you didn’t take anything home? The fancy restaurant was too cheap to give you a doggie bag?
ME: I didn’t need a doggie bag because I ate everything. Anyway, since this topic is obviously distressing to you. . . .
MY FATHER: The portions were that tiny? You didn’t have anything left over? Well no wonder they’re so fancy if they’re giving you such tiny—
ME: I did not have any leftovers.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. For fifty-five dollars I would expect what’s on my plate to last for at least three meals. Gawrsh! When I go out to eat, sometimes I have enough leftovers—
ME: I guess I’m a hog.
MY FATHER: All right. If that’s the way you want to do things. . . .
ME: It was delicious.
MY FATHER: Just remember at Denny’s—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in New England.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
The Group
Out of a perverse desire to meet some new people, I found myself stuffing a ball of yarn and my needles into my man-bag, last month, and taking a train into the city to attend a men’s knitting group.
This is usually the point of the story at which people start to laugh. So STOP THAT.
I took up knitting last winter because, as I tell people in all absolute seriousness, it was easier to learn to knit than it was to look through the boxes that comprise the eighty percent of our household that’s still in storage, in order to find the hats and scarves I’d packed away when we moved. I needed something crafty to do with my hands in the evenings when time moves slowly and I feel guilty about sitting on my rump watching TV, motionless. In my old home I had a basement studio devoted solely to my glass work, where I could putter to my heart’s content as I made lamps and windows and fused glass decorations. Here, I don’t have that room.
Knitting lets me work with color. It keeps my mind slightly occupied and my fingers dancing. It gives me an excuse to work my way through cheesetastic series television like Merlin and Primeval, all while I whip out all the winter accessories that I can stand to wear. So on the whole, it’s been a worthwhile hobby.
And it’s not as if I’ve found it a particularly shameful hobby, either. I’m not one of those men who grumbles about wimmin’s wurk as he hauls in the harvest, nor do I think proximity to a pair of knitting needles is automatically going to prompt people to think I’m a great big girly-man. If they do, I don’t really give a damn. I take knitting over to the church front desk when I’m down for a long shift. I’ve taken it to the coffee shop, when I want to get out of the house. So if I want to sit around with other men knitting, I say I’m entitled, thank you. Entitled!
The group takes place at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. There’s less than a half-dozen of us. For an hour and a half we sit around a table with our knitting projects. Then we pack up and go. I’m kind of entranced by the group, though, because of the personalities of the men who show up for it. I’m a little hesitant to write about them because it almost seems as if they’re characters for a one-act play I could write about a knitting group at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. At the same time, that’s pretty much exactly why I’m writing about them.
The Leader
The fact that the group has a leader might seem puzzling. But someone needs to send out the reminders, to reserve the room, to maintain the group’s listserv and its forums, and to collect the money to pay for the room’s rental at the end of every session. Our leader is a lean, tall, and lanky fellow from across the Atlantic; his lair is long and limp. He wears spectacles that give him a constant air of studiousness.
The Leader also has an air of mournful seriousness that’s only highlighted by his thick accent—a brogue that’s so pronounced and romantic that it makes every casual comment sound like a somber declaration made by a major character in a big-budget BBC production. Actually, with his big eyes and sober demeanor, the leader seems perpetually poised on the edge of breaking out into a song of howling anguish and rage, like Glen Hansard in Once.
“Has anyone ever worked with a cotton/acrylic blend wool?” someone will ask, for example.
“I did. One time.” The Leader will speak his words quietly, as if mulling over a memory so unspeakable and singular that it would make other human atrocities—Hiroshima, Tiananmen Square, the Holocaust—seem like trivialities. He’ll let loose his knitting needles, and fold his long, bony hands into his lap. Then he’ll brush the hair from his eyes and stare off into space. The rest of us will hush, rapt in the solemnity of the moment. “Just . . . one . . . time,” he’ll breathe.
The rest of us will move forward onto out chairs, afraid of breaking his silent reverie. What horrors is he seeing, in his mind’s eye? What terrible memories is he reliving? I can almost hear the cry of infants in the night, imagine the sounds of bombs and the terrifying wails of mothers.
Then he’ll sigh, and look around the table, meeting all of our glances, before sighing and uttering the words that have been torturing him for these last, long moments: “It was itchy.”
The Horny One
“Alex O’Loughlin,” says the Horny One. “On Hawaii Five-0. The new one, not the old one. Do you guys watch that? He’s hot.”
None of us watch the show, apparently. We all shake our heads in blank unrecognition.
“Oh my god, you got to watch that show. He’s hot!” The Horny One is a stout little Latin man who is busily crocheting a lap blanket, or an afghan or a placemat. I don’t know what. All crochet looks pretty much the same to me. “How about Jim Caviezel? Person of Interest?” Everyone shakes his head. We don’t know that one. “You guys! He’s hot! He’s hhhhhhot! I want him to bang me up one side of 13th and down the other! Day-um!”
The Horny One doesn’t so much participate in conversation as suddenly drop the names of guys he likes from obscure television shows into lulls in the conversation. Most of the references make me blink and think to myself, Is that show really still on?
“Jensen Ackles? Oh come on, guys. Supernatural? You just look at him and you know he can make a delivery better than UPS. Yee-ow!”
The Grandmother
“Back in the olden days, I never, ever knitted. Much as I wanted to! It wasn’t considered manly. When I grew up, if one was a male and one knitted, my dear. It meant that one was a homosexual.” The Grandmother sits at the table very primly, very properly, with his ankles neatly crossed and tucked beneath his chair. There’s something very fussy and prissy about him. He smells heavily of a cologne that is closer to lavender water than any man’s scent should be.
The Grandmother is wearing a garish pink beret that he’s crocheted himself. It’s hard as a rock. (I felt it.) The sweater he’s knitting is apparently designed for a small elephant. Piled on the table, it looks as if it would overload a high-capacity washing machine. “But so much has changed since then. Attitudes, my goodness, have changed. All the technology you young people use! And there’s so much talk about sex these days,” he’ll say, with a pointed look at the Horny One.
“Of course, some changes are for the better,” he’ll admit. “Look at the progress we’ve made. And of course, there’s not as much stigma about a man knitting as there once was. I’m not as young as I once was, but at least we have that.”
The Grandmother is roughly about the same age as I.
“So what hobby did you take up instead of knitting?” I ask, thinking in the back of my mind that I could at least share tales of the dark years in which I had to feign an interest in woodworking until my parents at last pulled me out of the Boy Scouts.
The Grandmother looks at me and shakes his head, as if I’m too young to understand. “It wasn’t until I came out that I was able at last to say, I don’t care how effeminate it looks, I want to knit. Before that, I was simply forced to take up crewel work and needlepoint!”
I bet his French knots were the hit of the football team.
The Know-It-All
“There’s a small sheep farm in the southwest of Kansas that makes a wool that would have been perfect for that sweater,” The Know-It-All declares from across the table. “But of course, they aren’t on the internet and they don’t sell by mail, and you really have to know how to find them, but of course, I’ve been friends with the owners for many years since we met at Rhinebeck. It helps to know people. I’m sure your sweater will look fine with that stuff you’re using,” he’ll tell The Leader, who will look at his knitting as if it was the boyfriend who betrayed his love, ruined his dreams, and caused him to lose sleep for a year. “Not everyone has the connections I do.”
The Know-It-All’s conversation is peppered with the most obscure references to techniques and knitting arcanities. I don’t so much listen to his lengthy speeches as set myself adrift in them and hope I’ll wash up ashore at some point. “. . . Based on a Civil War pattern that I researched when I was at the library in . . . Tunisian crochet . . . It’s certainly possible to dye the fabric while it’s on the warp and then to unweave it so that it produces an effect that’s . . . alum fixatives . . . and of course, they hired her to come in and completely revamp their colorways . . . of course they don’t allow just anyone to subscribe, but if you know the owner, as I do. . . .”
At the beginning of the meeting, he’ll show off all his projects he’s whipped up during the last month: a large crocheted afghan (Tunisian or not, I have no idea), a quartet of loom-woven tablecloths, a knitted blanket in an intricate design, a shawl of lace so intricate that Belgian nuns weep in fury, a sweater (made of Kansas wool?), and a photograph of a tapestry he’s working on ‘in his spare time’ when he’s not spinning his own wool from sheep he’s personally sheared. The project he’s working on at the table with the rest of us is a lap blanket made of crocheted granny squares. “I just needed something comforting to do after my bigger projects,” he says modestly. “I just started it a few nights ago.”
It’s roughly the size of the tarps they use to cover sailboats in winter.
The Crabby Old Man
“Yeah, there are other knitting groups for men around the city, but key-riiiiist,” says the Crabby Old Man to me. He’s a man in his seventies who speaks in the perpetually-annoyed tone of the much-aggrieved. “If it ain’t one thing with them, it’s another. Yap, yap, yap. You get a bunch of Nancys in the same god-damned room and what happens? They start yappin’ and yippin’ and everything goes all to hell. Key-riiiiist,” he’ll complain. “I tell ‘em, listen. Don’t Oh gurl me, son. I’m old enough to be your grandpappy and I could still whup your ass if I wanted!”
It bears mentioning that while he let loose with this diatribe, he was knitting an adorable baby jacket in pink wool.
The Crabby Old Man was the first of the group I met, when I walked into the appointed room for the first time. He stared at my outstretched hand as if I were offering him a palmful of ebola, and said, “Don’t bother telling me your name. I’m not gonna remember and I’m not even gonna try. Key-riiiist, at my age I’m lucky if I can remember whether I’m shittin’ in my diapers or peein’ in ‘em.”
It’s because of the Crabby Old Man and his hearing that the rest of us speak in raised voices, most of the time. Only the Know-It-All will persist in his monologue in soft, self-absorbed tones: “. . . really prefer double-pointed needles, and of course I use a set that was handmade from me from historic boxwood by a very tiny concern in the heart of Hampshire I was visiting during the summer of 2005. . . .”
“T. J. Thynes?” asks the Horny One. “Nobody? Seriously? Nobody? T. J. Thynes? He’s the hottest guy on Bones! I bet his bone. . . .”
“In my day, double-pointed needles were the only technique available for circular knitting,” sniffs the Grandmother. “We didn’t have these magic loops and double-circulars. . . .”
The Leader looks off into space with tormented eyes. “I use two circulars,” he announces. Everyone leans forward and waits for a verdict on them that should be accompanied by a haunting score from John Williams. It never comes.
The Crabby Old Man stares around the table at us like we’re all freaks. “What are you Nancys yappin’ about now? Yap, yap, yap. We’re men. We’re not supposed to be talkin’!” he announces, as he places a few deft purls into the absolutely darling powder-blue mittens he’s making for his grandson.
At the first meeting I attended, the Crabby Old Man told us about his experience with Hurricane Sandy. “Nah, I didn’t lose power. Are you kiddin’? Do I look like the kind who’d lose power?” he asked, as if the rest of us who did without for a week or more did so out of a lack of personal integrity, or some essential flaw that had nothing to do with the electrical companies. “And I had all kinds of god-damned people asking me if they could stay with me. Key-riiiiiist!”
“What did you tell them?” asked The Leader, looking as if he’d spent many a homeless cold night with only the sky for shelter.
“I told them no, goddamn it! Key-riiiiist, I’m not lettin’ people into my apartment just because they’ve got no power! I ain’t their god-damned granddaddy they can drop in on whenever they goddamned please! Oh, and that reminds me,” he told The Leader. “All those hats and scarves we made after Sandy, over at the senior center? I took them to the Red Cross and you know what they told me? They told me they were going to sell them! Sell them to the victims of Sandy!”
“That doesn’t sound right,” The Grandmother sniffed. “Are you sure?”
“Key-riiiiiist, I might be a hundred years old but I’m not deaf! I’m not senile!” The Crabby Old Man seems incensed that anyone would question him. “The Red Cross said they were gonna sell those god-damned hats and scarves instead of giving them to people who could use them. So you know what I did? I took all those god-damned hats and scarves and I walked out onto the street and I walked up to the first homeless asshole I saw. And then I threw them all at him and said, here, these are yours now! Selling them. Key-riiiiiist.”
It was roughly at this point that I looked at the Crabby Old Man and thought to myself, Key-riiiist. That’s me in another ten years.
This is usually the point of the story at which people start to laugh. So STOP THAT.
I took up knitting last winter because, as I tell people in all absolute seriousness, it was easier to learn to knit than it was to look through the boxes that comprise the eighty percent of our household that’s still in storage, in order to find the hats and scarves I’d packed away when we moved. I needed something crafty to do with my hands in the evenings when time moves slowly and I feel guilty about sitting on my rump watching TV, motionless. In my old home I had a basement studio devoted solely to my glass work, where I could putter to my heart’s content as I made lamps and windows and fused glass decorations. Here, I don’t have that room.
Knitting lets me work with color. It keeps my mind slightly occupied and my fingers dancing. It gives me an excuse to work my way through cheesetastic series television like Merlin and Primeval, all while I whip out all the winter accessories that I can stand to wear. So on the whole, it’s been a worthwhile hobby.
And it’s not as if I’ve found it a particularly shameful hobby, either. I’m not one of those men who grumbles about wimmin’s wurk as he hauls in the harvest, nor do I think proximity to a pair of knitting needles is automatically going to prompt people to think I’m a great big girly-man. If they do, I don’t really give a damn. I take knitting over to the church front desk when I’m down for a long shift. I’ve taken it to the coffee shop, when I want to get out of the house. So if I want to sit around with other men knitting, I say I’m entitled, thank you. Entitled!
The group takes place at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. There’s less than a half-dozen of us. For an hour and a half we sit around a table with our knitting projects. Then we pack up and go. I’m kind of entranced by the group, though, because of the personalities of the men who show up for it. I’m a little hesitant to write about them because it almost seems as if they’re characters for a one-act play I could write about a knitting group at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. At the same time, that’s pretty much exactly why I’m writing about them.
The Leader
The fact that the group has a leader might seem puzzling. But someone needs to send out the reminders, to reserve the room, to maintain the group’s listserv and its forums, and to collect the money to pay for the room’s rental at the end of every session. Our leader is a lean, tall, and lanky fellow from across the Atlantic; his lair is long and limp. He wears spectacles that give him a constant air of studiousness.
The Leader also has an air of mournful seriousness that’s only highlighted by his thick accent—a brogue that’s so pronounced and romantic that it makes every casual comment sound like a somber declaration made by a major character in a big-budget BBC production. Actually, with his big eyes and sober demeanor, the leader seems perpetually poised on the edge of breaking out into a song of howling anguish and rage, like Glen Hansard in Once.
“Has anyone ever worked with a cotton/acrylic blend wool?” someone will ask, for example.
“I did. One time.” The Leader will speak his words quietly, as if mulling over a memory so unspeakable and singular that it would make other human atrocities—Hiroshima, Tiananmen Square, the Holocaust—seem like trivialities. He’ll let loose his knitting needles, and fold his long, bony hands into his lap. Then he’ll brush the hair from his eyes and stare off into space. The rest of us will hush, rapt in the solemnity of the moment. “Just . . . one . . . time,” he’ll breathe.
The rest of us will move forward onto out chairs, afraid of breaking his silent reverie. What horrors is he seeing, in his mind’s eye? What terrible memories is he reliving? I can almost hear the cry of infants in the night, imagine the sounds of bombs and the terrifying wails of mothers.
Then he’ll sigh, and look around the table, meeting all of our glances, before sighing and uttering the words that have been torturing him for these last, long moments: “It was itchy.”
The Horny One
“Alex O’Loughlin,” says the Horny One. “On Hawaii Five-0. The new one, not the old one. Do you guys watch that? He’s hot.”
None of us watch the show, apparently. We all shake our heads in blank unrecognition.
“Oh my god, you got to watch that show. He’s hot!” The Horny One is a stout little Latin man who is busily crocheting a lap blanket, or an afghan or a placemat. I don’t know what. All crochet looks pretty much the same to me. “How about Jim Caviezel? Person of Interest?” Everyone shakes his head. We don’t know that one. “You guys! He’s hot! He’s hhhhhhot! I want him to bang me up one side of 13th and down the other! Day-um!”
The Horny One doesn’t so much participate in conversation as suddenly drop the names of guys he likes from obscure television shows into lulls in the conversation. Most of the references make me blink and think to myself, Is that show really still on?
“Jensen Ackles? Oh come on, guys. Supernatural? You just look at him and you know he can make a delivery better than UPS. Yee-ow!”
The Grandmother
“Back in the olden days, I never, ever knitted. Much as I wanted to! It wasn’t considered manly. When I grew up, if one was a male and one knitted, my dear. It meant that one was a homosexual.” The Grandmother sits at the table very primly, very properly, with his ankles neatly crossed and tucked beneath his chair. There’s something very fussy and prissy about him. He smells heavily of a cologne that is closer to lavender water than any man’s scent should be.
The Grandmother is wearing a garish pink beret that he’s crocheted himself. It’s hard as a rock. (I felt it.) The sweater he’s knitting is apparently designed for a small elephant. Piled on the table, it looks as if it would overload a high-capacity washing machine. “But so much has changed since then. Attitudes, my goodness, have changed. All the technology you young people use! And there’s so much talk about sex these days,” he’ll say, with a pointed look at the Horny One.
“Of course, some changes are for the better,” he’ll admit. “Look at the progress we’ve made. And of course, there’s not as much stigma about a man knitting as there once was. I’m not as young as I once was, but at least we have that.”
The Grandmother is roughly about the same age as I.
“So what hobby did you take up instead of knitting?” I ask, thinking in the back of my mind that I could at least share tales of the dark years in which I had to feign an interest in woodworking until my parents at last pulled me out of the Boy Scouts.
The Grandmother looks at me and shakes his head, as if I’m too young to understand. “It wasn’t until I came out that I was able at last to say, I don’t care how effeminate it looks, I want to knit. Before that, I was simply forced to take up crewel work and needlepoint!”
I bet his French knots were the hit of the football team.
The Know-It-All
“There’s a small sheep farm in the southwest of Kansas that makes a wool that would have been perfect for that sweater,” The Know-It-All declares from across the table. “But of course, they aren’t on the internet and they don’t sell by mail, and you really have to know how to find them, but of course, I’ve been friends with the owners for many years since we met at Rhinebeck. It helps to know people. I’m sure your sweater will look fine with that stuff you’re using,” he’ll tell The Leader, who will look at his knitting as if it was the boyfriend who betrayed his love, ruined his dreams, and caused him to lose sleep for a year. “Not everyone has the connections I do.”
The Know-It-All’s conversation is peppered with the most obscure references to techniques and knitting arcanities. I don’t so much listen to his lengthy speeches as set myself adrift in them and hope I’ll wash up ashore at some point. “. . . Based on a Civil War pattern that I researched when I was at the library in . . . Tunisian crochet . . . It’s certainly possible to dye the fabric while it’s on the warp and then to unweave it so that it produces an effect that’s . . . alum fixatives . . . and of course, they hired her to come in and completely revamp their colorways . . . of course they don’t allow just anyone to subscribe, but if you know the owner, as I do. . . .”
At the beginning of the meeting, he’ll show off all his projects he’s whipped up during the last month: a large crocheted afghan (Tunisian or not, I have no idea), a quartet of loom-woven tablecloths, a knitted blanket in an intricate design, a shawl of lace so intricate that Belgian nuns weep in fury, a sweater (made of Kansas wool?), and a photograph of a tapestry he’s working on ‘in his spare time’ when he’s not spinning his own wool from sheep he’s personally sheared. The project he’s working on at the table with the rest of us is a lap blanket made of crocheted granny squares. “I just needed something comforting to do after my bigger projects,” he says modestly. “I just started it a few nights ago.”
It’s roughly the size of the tarps they use to cover sailboats in winter.
The Crabby Old Man
“Yeah, there are other knitting groups for men around the city, but key-riiiiist,” says the Crabby Old Man to me. He’s a man in his seventies who speaks in the perpetually-annoyed tone of the much-aggrieved. “If it ain’t one thing with them, it’s another. Yap, yap, yap. You get a bunch of Nancys in the same god-damned room and what happens? They start yappin’ and yippin’ and everything goes all to hell. Key-riiiiist,” he’ll complain. “I tell ‘em, listen. Don’t Oh gurl me, son. I’m old enough to be your grandpappy and I could still whup your ass if I wanted!”
It bears mentioning that while he let loose with this diatribe, he was knitting an adorable baby jacket in pink wool.
The Crabby Old Man was the first of the group I met, when I walked into the appointed room for the first time. He stared at my outstretched hand as if I were offering him a palmful of ebola, and said, “Don’t bother telling me your name. I’m not gonna remember and I’m not even gonna try. Key-riiiist, at my age I’m lucky if I can remember whether I’m shittin’ in my diapers or peein’ in ‘em.”
It’s because of the Crabby Old Man and his hearing that the rest of us speak in raised voices, most of the time. Only the Know-It-All will persist in his monologue in soft, self-absorbed tones: “. . . really prefer double-pointed needles, and of course I use a set that was handmade from me from historic boxwood by a very tiny concern in the heart of Hampshire I was visiting during the summer of 2005. . . .”
“T. J. Thynes?” asks the Horny One. “Nobody? Seriously? Nobody? T. J. Thynes? He’s the hottest guy on Bones! I bet his bone. . . .”
“In my day, double-pointed needles were the only technique available for circular knitting,” sniffs the Grandmother. “We didn’t have these magic loops and double-circulars. . . .”
The Leader looks off into space with tormented eyes. “I use two circulars,” he announces. Everyone leans forward and waits for a verdict on them that should be accompanied by a haunting score from John Williams. It never comes.
The Crabby Old Man stares around the table at us like we’re all freaks. “What are you Nancys yappin’ about now? Yap, yap, yap. We’re men. We’re not supposed to be talkin’!” he announces, as he places a few deft purls into the absolutely darling powder-blue mittens he’s making for his grandson.
At the first meeting I attended, the Crabby Old Man told us about his experience with Hurricane Sandy. “Nah, I didn’t lose power. Are you kiddin’? Do I look like the kind who’d lose power?” he asked, as if the rest of us who did without for a week or more did so out of a lack of personal integrity, or some essential flaw that had nothing to do with the electrical companies. “And I had all kinds of god-damned people asking me if they could stay with me. Key-riiiiiist!”
“What did you tell them?” asked The Leader, looking as if he’d spent many a homeless cold night with only the sky for shelter.
“I told them no, goddamn it! Key-riiiiist, I’m not lettin’ people into my apartment just because they’ve got no power! I ain’t their god-damned granddaddy they can drop in on whenever they goddamned please! Oh, and that reminds me,” he told The Leader. “All those hats and scarves we made after Sandy, over at the senior center? I took them to the Red Cross and you know what they told me? They told me they were going to sell them! Sell them to the victims of Sandy!”
“That doesn’t sound right,” The Grandmother sniffed. “Are you sure?”
“Key-riiiiiist, I might be a hundred years old but I’m not deaf! I’m not senile!” The Crabby Old Man seems incensed that anyone would question him. “The Red Cross said they were gonna sell those god-damned hats and scarves instead of giving them to people who could use them. So you know what I did? I took all those god-damned hats and scarves and I walked out onto the street and I walked up to the first homeless asshole I saw. And then I threw them all at him and said, here, these are yours now! Selling them. Key-riiiiiist.”
It was roughly at this point that I looked at the Crabby Old Man and thought to myself, Key-riiiist. That’s me in another ten years.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Fifty Shades of Crimson
There’s an older woman in the church office—Barbara—who volunteers to sit at the front desk for a midweek morning slot. I think she’s amazing. I’ve tended to take a lot of my substitute desk-sitting shifts immediately after her; when I come in to relieve her from a long three and a half hours of keeping track of the ministers’ comings and goings, she’s always gracious enough to engage in a few minutes of chat with me.
Barbara is basically what I want to be when I grow up: smart, acerbic, strong-willed, and on top of current affairs. Several decades ago, when she was in her forties and her children were old enough to take care of herself, she announced that she was going back to college for the education she never got to have; she persevered through an undergraduate and grad degree, despite being twice the age of her classmates—and then went on to have a successful midlife career in education for herself. Which is all kinds of awesome.
Not too long ago I walked into the church office with a book and my iPad, armed with entertainment for the afternoon. The church’s youth minister, Mark, a younger guy himself, was loitering by the staff mailboxes. Barbara asked what I was reading. “It’s a biography of the lyricist Lorenz Hart,” I said, holding it up so she could see the shiny library spine.
“Lawrence who?” asked Mark, managing to imply that if he’d never heard of the guy, I must be reading up on smutmongers and criminal overlords.
“Don’t be silly, Mark. Lorenz Hart,” said Barbara. “Half of Rodgers and Hart. He wrote the lyrics to ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘The Lady Is a Tramp.’” She rattled off half a dozen of Hart’s other most famous hits, compared his output favorably to the later pairing of Rodgers and Hammerstein, wrapped it up with a theater review, and somehow managed to deliver this delightful learned bouquet in less than four succinct sentences.
Mark looked at my thick biography with a curled lip. “Sounds boring to me.”
I ignored him. “What are you reading, Barbara?” I asked.
“Well, it’s interesting you should ask,” she said. “It might interest you, too, Mark.” She then went into a disquisition of a non-fiction historical book she’d tackled—and probably absorbed in a single evening’s read—about the archaeological discovery of early Christian-era scriptures and the cult that had preserved them, then provided a summary of their importance to Biblical scholars. She summed up the thesis more handily than could the New York Review of Books, and simultaneously managed to make me regret that my previous literary diet had consisted of an Enid Blyton children’s book and a cheesy Anne McCaffrey.
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That sounds like something.”
“Gawd.” Minister Mark rolled his eyes. “It sounds like something boring.”
“Oh, Mark,” laughed Barbara, not at all fazed.
“Mark’s reading Fifty Shades of Grey,” I told her.
“Only because—!” sputtered Mark, who really was reading his way through the trilogy. “Only because—! Only because it’s very popular now, and as minister of youth, I have to keep my finger on the pulse of what kids are reading these days. . . !”
“Goodness,” said Barbara, mildly.
“. . . and because once I started reading it I couldn’t stop untilIfinishedthewholething,” he finished in a rushed mumble.
“The writing is dreadful,” I said.
“Yes, it’s really bad, but. . . .”
“Exactly how many of your high school kids are reading Fifty Shades of Grey, Mark?” I asked.
“Listen,” said Mark to me, his expression saying that’s enough of youse, mister. His face was flushing with at least fifty shades of crimson. To Barbara he turned with an apologetic face. Very delicately, as if struggling to figure out how to phrase his sentences with respect to Barbara’s age, gender, and gentility, he said, “Fifty Shades of Grey is about . . . well, it’s a fantasy of the, ah, erotic persuasion that um, is about . . . well, a couple whose preferred, um, style of interaction is of a sort that, um. . . .”
Barbara let out a long-suffering sigh. “Oh, stop pussy-footing around Mark,” she said in a no-nonsense New England manner. “Just come out and say what you mean. My goodness. Such a lot of fuss about explicit consensual sadomasochistic sex.” She brushed herself off, collected her purse and her newspaper, and left the office so she could go about her afternoon business.
Mark stared after her, slack-jawed. “Um yeah,” he said. “That’s what it is, all right.”
And that’s why I want to be Barbara when I grow up.
Barbara is basically what I want to be when I grow up: smart, acerbic, strong-willed, and on top of current affairs. Several decades ago, when she was in her forties and her children were old enough to take care of herself, she announced that she was going back to college for the education she never got to have; she persevered through an undergraduate and grad degree, despite being twice the age of her classmates—and then went on to have a successful midlife career in education for herself. Which is all kinds of awesome.
Not too long ago I walked into the church office with a book and my iPad, armed with entertainment for the afternoon. The church’s youth minister, Mark, a younger guy himself, was loitering by the staff mailboxes. Barbara asked what I was reading. “It’s a biography of the lyricist Lorenz Hart,” I said, holding it up so she could see the shiny library spine.
“Lawrence who?” asked Mark, managing to imply that if he’d never heard of the guy, I must be reading up on smutmongers and criminal overlords.
“Don’t be silly, Mark. Lorenz Hart,” said Barbara. “Half of Rodgers and Hart. He wrote the lyrics to ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘The Lady Is a Tramp.’” She rattled off half a dozen of Hart’s other most famous hits, compared his output favorably to the later pairing of Rodgers and Hammerstein, wrapped it up with a theater review, and somehow managed to deliver this delightful learned bouquet in less than four succinct sentences.
Mark looked at my thick biography with a curled lip. “Sounds boring to me.”
I ignored him. “What are you reading, Barbara?” I asked.
“Well, it’s interesting you should ask,” she said. “It might interest you, too, Mark.” She then went into a disquisition of a non-fiction historical book she’d tackled—and probably absorbed in a single evening’s read—about the archaeological discovery of early Christian-era scriptures and the cult that had preserved them, then provided a summary of their importance to Biblical scholars. She summed up the thesis more handily than could the New York Review of Books, and simultaneously managed to make me regret that my previous literary diet had consisted of an Enid Blyton children’s book and a cheesy Anne McCaffrey.
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That sounds like something.”
“Gawd.” Minister Mark rolled his eyes. “It sounds like something boring.”
“Oh, Mark,” laughed Barbara, not at all fazed.
“Mark’s reading Fifty Shades of Grey,” I told her.
“Only because—!” sputtered Mark, who really was reading his way through the trilogy. “Only because—! Only because it’s very popular now, and as minister of youth, I have to keep my finger on the pulse of what kids are reading these days. . . !”
“Goodness,” said Barbara, mildly.
“. . . and because once I started reading it I couldn’t stop untilIfinishedthewholething,” he finished in a rushed mumble.
“The writing is dreadful,” I said.
“Yes, it’s really bad, but. . . .”
“Exactly how many of your high school kids are reading Fifty Shades of Grey, Mark?” I asked.
“Listen,” said Mark to me, his expression saying that’s enough of youse, mister. His face was flushing with at least fifty shades of crimson. To Barbara he turned with an apologetic face. Very delicately, as if struggling to figure out how to phrase his sentences with respect to Barbara’s age, gender, and gentility, he said, “Fifty Shades of Grey is about . . . well, it’s a fantasy of the, ah, erotic persuasion that um, is about . . . well, a couple whose preferred, um, style of interaction is of a sort that, um. . . .”
Barbara let out a long-suffering sigh. “Oh, stop pussy-footing around Mark,” she said in a no-nonsense New England manner. “Just come out and say what you mean. My goodness. Such a lot of fuss about explicit consensual sadomasochistic sex.” She brushed herself off, collected her purse and her newspaper, and left the office so she could go about her afternoon business.
Mark stared after her, slack-jawed. “Um yeah,” he said. “That’s what it is, all right.”
And that’s why I want to be Barbara when I grow up.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
It's Book Review Roundup Time!
In this book review round-up: Moss Hart, more Betty MacDonald and her sister Mary, the Black Death, Penny Marshall, Dodie Smith, and perhaps the worst book I’ve ever read . . . and its sequel.
Act One
by Moss Hart
Moss Hart's Act One is, to put it simply, the most riveting work I've read about working in the American theater.
The work is not a comprehensive biography of the noted playwright and director. There's no mention (save in passing) of mega-successes like The Man Who Came to Dinner or Lady in the Dark, no My Fair Lady, no Camelot. There's remarkably little celebrity gossip. There's no Kitty Carlisle. (Darn it.)
Act One instead is a vivid, detailed, and slightly fictionalized look at Hart's early life, from his poverty-weighted youth in the Bronx until the day after opening night of his first hit collaboration with George S. Kaufman, Once in a Lifetime. Readers anxious to skip to the usual stuff of celebrity autobiographies aren't going to find much here, but anyone interested in the creative process itself will find much to contemplate. Hart is well aware that his work is the sum total of his experiences, from his early theater-going visits with a much-beloved aunt, to the clowning he did as social director of Borscht Belt summer camps in the Catskills. His discussion of his at-first uneasy collaboration with Kaufman is fascinating, as he's painfully aware of how different in approach and execution their writing skills could be.
Yet it's the attention to craftsmanship that makes this autobiography compelling. Its final third is an in-depth exploration of the revision process that transformed Once in a Lifetime from a dud doomed to close out-of-town, to the hit Broadway smash that liberated both Hart and his family from poverty. The process didn't happen overnight; it didn't come with a single burst of inspiration. It happened only with Hart's back-breaking effort and a genuine love for his craft.
It's that love—both for writing, and for the theater—that shines warmly from every page. What a fine read.
Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart
by Steven Bach
Steven Bach's obviously approached his biography of playwright and director Moss Hart with both respect for the man's accomplishments and love for his work. It shows in the enthusiasm with which he's researched his subject, and in his eagerness to outline Hart's lesser-known works to a new audience—he even shares the best lines with obvious relish.
If there's anything lacking in this otherwise-thorough biography, it would have to do with Hart's enduring stage legacy—after the playwright drops dead on his front lawn at the age of 57, the book's done. I might have appreciated an afterword chapter examining revivals of Hart's plays, or an examination of the ways in which the accepted narratives of Hart's life, his marriage to Kitty Carlisle (who refused to cooperate with Bach, he complains several times), and his sexuality have changed in the years since his passing.
There are points in the biography in which Bach seems to assume a casual reader might know more about the gossip and scandal of Hart's life than Bach's willing to explore himself. There's a passing mention of death threats made by Hart's aunt (immortalized and fictionalized in Hart's autobiography, Act One), but no real explanation or documentation of what's obviously a juicy story. I shouldn't have to dig out a past issue of The New Yorker in order to research what a biographer has decided is common knowledge. Bach has a tendency, too, to offer portent without much follow-through, foreshadowing later events in Hart's life without offering details or pulling together loose threads across (admittedly, a very active) timeline.
Still, those are minor flaws. Dazzler is a fascinating look at a man whose talent and seeming sheer force of will provided Broadway with many of its enduring classics, and is a good companion volume to the glossier, if more zestfully-written, Act One.
The Egg and I
by Betty MacDonald
I'm always a little mystified when people refer to the 'happy ending' of Betty MacDonald's 1945 runway bestselling memoir, and express their bafflement that she's divorced by the time of her follow-up volumes, The Plague and I and Anybody Can Do Anything. The book ends with MacDonald contemplating an imminent miserable winter with a distant husband she's just declared 'poles apart,' emotionally.
That's happy?
Perhaps much of the explanation lies with the era's higher tolerance for a husband's lack of empathy—at least, that's the only real justification for which I can attribute anyone's inability to see how miserable MacDonald is throughout her volume. She writes of her naive belief that a wife should support her husband's whims, and as a consequence ends up on a chicken farm with no running water or electricity, in the middle of the mountains of Washington state. She has no books, no friends. Her husband treats his dogs and livestock better than he does his wife; the height of his romanticism in the book is when he grudgingly cracks a crab for her at a picnic. (On their remote farm he even lifts mattresses to inspect if she's dusted the bedsprings, for Pete's sake.)
I suspect most of the blame for the misapprehension that this is a happy book lies with MacDonald herself . . . just because she's so damned funny. She recalls her deprivations with an admirable lack of self-pity and without really calling attention to how miserable she really must have been. Her comic sensibility blossoms in this, her very first work, as she contrasts her utter unpreparedness for the life of a egg farm workhorse with the absurdities she finds in rural living. It's a clever bit of misdirection to lead her readers into thinking her exile was a laugh a minute, but The Egg and I is definitely constructed upon a bedrock of isolation and regret.
I'm making it sound like a Chekovian nightmare—it's not. It's sharp, and funny, and amazingly unsentimental.
The book is always associated with the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle, whose appearance in the 1947 movie based on the book led to an eight-movie spinoff. It's surprising how very little space those characters occupy in the memoir, though—they appear on perhaps a dozen or so pages. MacDonald has such a natural and vivid way of bringing folk to life that it's unsurprising they're so unforgettable.
Forty Odd
by Mary Bard
Betty MacDonald's memoir, Anybody Can Do Anything, was essentially a valentine to the get-up-and-go gumption of MacDonald's older sister, Mary Bard, during the height of the Great Depression. MacDonald's portrait of Mary was of a devil-may-care, fearless crusader whose many natural talents led them both into outrageously funny situations. This little volume, penned by Mary Bard herself, is set twenty years after the events of MacDonald's memoir—and it might as well be titled Mary Bard Can't Do Anything Anymore.
Forty Odd takes as its premise that Bard, upon hitting a milestone birthday, suddenly decides that she's forty, fat, foolish, and frustrated. With menopause just around the corner, she decides to take matters in her own hands and avoid sliding into complacency. The book's a little bit of an odd combination of self-help manual, humorous memoir, and the just-between-us-girls practical household tips one might find in a dated issue of Home and Gardens. I'm willing to bet that modern readers will find its narrative style—which has Bard over and over again consulting male authority figures for their sage advice on a woman's purpose in life—a little bit too patronizing and patriarchal.
But the book's not really as dated as some would probably dismiss it. Bard's fashion makeover involves frank assessment of her own style in front of mirrors that are reminiscent of today's What Not to Wear and advice that could be coming straight from the mouth of Tim Gunn; her experiences with a book club aren't that far removed from the book clubs of today. And although Bard's fairly mopey about her impending Change of Life, she's at least in on the joke—she knows exactly how tiresome she's being, and takes steps to improve by the book's end.
Although none of her memoirs are as deft, as touching, or as funny as Betty MacDonald's, Bard's Forty Odd comes to life at unexpected moments. When she's placed in absurd situations, or well out of her depth, the chapters can be pretty humorous—and when she writes about situations in which she's taking care of others, as in the episodes involving her burgeoning Brownie troop, we get flashes of the old Mary Bard of whom MacDonald wrote so affectionately.
Onions in the Stew
by Betty MacDonald
Onions in the Stew stands out as Betty MacDonald's most mature and effortlessly humorous memoir. It's also seemingly the most unstructured of the four published in her lifetime. Whereas her previous volumes tackled the specific themes of egg farming, sanatorium life, and job hunting during the Great Depression, Onions is a simply a reflection upon life on Seattle's Vashon Island.
Of course, the simplicity is deceptive. Behind the stories of tides and gardens and page after page of rumination on local seafood is a truly remarkable narrative about the difficulties of blended families and of a mother's attempts during the nineteen-forties to raise a pair of adolescent girls. MacDonald is unafraid to be melancholy, though she's never maudlin; she portrays her daughters realistically and to the point of unattractiveness, though her love and affection for them is always clear.
Unsentimental and laugh-out-loud funny, Onions in the Stew is a classic slice of American domestic humor from an era that has vanished entirely, yet has never quite gone out of style.
Remains To Be Scene
by R.T. Jordan
One of my enduring pet peeves with the subgenre of the 'cute' murder mystery is how callously its usually-adorable and winsome leads behave while solving a comical and quaint little murder or two—when in reality, the stench of crime is pretty dreadful, and can never be obscured by buckets of syrupy banter and sugary character quirks. Remains To Be Scene neatly manages to bypass that typical shortcoming, however, by making its lead detectives as thoroughly unpleasant as its murder victims, thus neatly removing any obligation the reader has either to root for the former, or feel sorry for the latter.
The gimmick here is that Polly Pepper is a former has-been television star—something along the lines of Carol Burnett, but with less talent—whose career has come to a near-standstill. For some reason the novel really makes clear, when two rivals are killed on the set of a movie and Polly Pepper is asked to step into their acting roles, she appoints herself the lead investigator of the case and uses her powers of deduction to track down the ruthless killer. And damned if the entire LAPD doesn't just roll over and let Polly Pepper do it, too.
Unfortunately for Polly Pepper (the author's unspoken rule in the novel that one is only allowed to refer to his heroine by both names, as when her romantic interest gushes in the book's most romantic and lyrical line, "You look awesome, Polly Pepper!"), Polly Pepper’s powers mostly consist of slugging back cocktails and slinging abrasive and unsubtle questions in every direction.
Joining Polly Pepper as her nutty sidekicks are her son Tim, a wastrel slugabout whose function in the book is to be as stereotypically gay as possible on a wearying basis and to make icky-poo faces at any mention of his mother's lady-parts, and her maid, Placenta. No, that's the entire joke, there. Polly Pepper's maid's name is Placenta. Please, do attempt to keep your sides from splitting. Her job is primarily to keep Polly Pepper pickled with a peck of planter's punches.
I kept kind of hoping that the book might self-knowingly mock itself by following the Rosemary and Thyme model of amateur detection, in which the protagonists are so stupid and blundering and seemingly unable to detect their way out of a wet paper bag, that the murderer finally reveals himself out of exhaustion and tries to kill one or the other or both of the detectives. No such luck in this novel. Polly Pepper pulls a has-been television actress's version of the detective-in-the-parlor reveal that lasts for fully one-fifth of the entire book's total length. It's excruciating. I've never rooted for a third literary murder (Polly Pepper's) so hard in my life. And yet I have to confess that I'm quite curious if the sequels—oh yes, there's an entire Polly Pepper series—are as bad.
Dead curious, one might say.
Final Curtain
by R. T. Jordan
In the second installment of the Polly Pepper amateur detective series, Polly Pepper, the aging has-been star of television's much-beloved The Polly Pepper Playhouse, has been employed to star in a revival of the classic musical Mame. Yet when one of the show's production team ends up dead after being concussed by an Emmy (or, as the author breathlessly and tastefully puts it, "Karen was a goner the instant her brain began to seep through the crack in her head!"), who has to step in to solve the crime but Polly Pepper herself!
Well. maybe the police ought to. Especially since the head detective is Polly Pepper's boyfriend—I think we all remember his vivid testimony of love and dedication from the first book in the series, when he uncontrollably gushed, "You look awesome, Polly Pepper!" (Lest we forget, it's the author's unspoken dictum that Polly Pepper be referred to by her entire name, even when she's talking about herself, as when Polly Pepper grills a suspect by growling, "Tell us everything or sweet Polly Pepper will turn into Shirley Temple on a roid rage!")
But no, apparently when Polly Pepper is on the case, the LAPD simply rolls over and plays dead. Because, after all, who better to sniff out a criminal than a third-rate comedienne who has spent most of her life nursing grudges against Nanette Fabray and Pearl Bailey while tossing down Xanax with champagne chasers? Screw you, trained police detectives. Polly Pepper's got it under control! Polly Pepper's idiotic sidekicks, her incredibly gay son Tim and her incredibly badly-named maid Placenta, add to the general inanity of the antics by running around like chickens with their heads cut off, only with less brain activity than beheaded fowls.
I wish my mockery of the book's deplorable writing and its even worse plotting didn't make this novel sound a lot more campy and attractive than it actually is. It's painful to read several hundred pages of Final Curtain when one the entire time is asking the question of oneself, "Couldn't this all have been solved with a single call to the proper authorities?" Polly Pepper's frantic self-absorption and need to be at the center of any drama makes the book a slow and deadly slog that almost made me wish I'd been the one bonked in the head by an Emmy—even of the daytime variety.
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
by John Kelly
Once John Kelly gets to the 'intimate' portion of his The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, his overview of the most destructive human plague in history becomes a fascinating collection of vignettes. The book works best when it focuses upon its mission to collect very small and anecdotal stories of human triumph, perseverance, greed, and folly in the face of inconceivable adversity. In these later portions of his well-documented and researched study, the portraits Kelly paints of small-town physicians grappling to find some means to battle the disease, or of ignorant patriarchs or of those who see the demise of their rivals as an opportunity to chase power, are remarkably well-done.
However, it's slow going to get there. Kelly's writing gets off to several false starts when he uses both the introduction and the first chapter to paint a broad contextual canvas of the plague's age and geography, only to conclude with ominous portent that the aim of his book is to examine what happened during the Black Plague. Mr Kelly, I kind of figured out what I was getting into from the title and the book cover, thanks. I don't need two prefaces to warn me that I haven't picked up the latest Tyra Banks novel.
And when Kelly aims to provide those vast, panoramic expansive overviews of the medieval world, its trading practices, and its geography, his prose turns deadly dull. All but the most fact-starved readers will find the first few chapters a treacherous slog that's occasionally peppered with abrupt changes in tone, as when in the middle of a dry discussion of pathogens, he declares that Y. pestis has "biological oomph."
After the false starts and the turgid panoramic prose, however, the book's fairly interesting—and it even has its payoffs when it moves into the more intimate spectrum promised in its title. I also appreciated the afterword chapter about "plague deniers"—scientists who believe in alternate biological explanations of the Black Death.
Whether this is the only volume one will ever need about the calamitous plague that devastated much of the known world is debatable; as an introduction, it's fair.
It Ends With Revelations
by Dodie Smith
The central premise of Dodie Smith's It Ends with Revelations isn't even mentioned until over halfway through the novel: its heroine, Jill, is knowingly married to a gay man. There's no scandal to it—no shocking discovery, nothing that the heroine didn't know before she entered into the arrangement. It's all very genteel, as are most of the relationships in Smith's works—as is the follow-up plot, in which an MP and his family conspire to un-marry Jill from her husband and take her over for the own.
Smith's doing some subtle and sympathetic writing on a delicate topic, here. The latter is perhaps not unexpected; Smith was great friends with Christopher Isherwood during the height of his writing career, after all. She manages to address what was still a shocking subject with great sensitivity and aplomb.
What's disappointing, somewhat, is that the novel's plotting might be too subtle for most readers to appreciate. Most of the fighting Jill's husband does to keep her takes place in the book's earliest pages, long before the average reader would have picked up on the book's central struggle. Also, among all of Smith's heroines, Jill is the most frustratingly passive. Even at the book's climax, she's allowing the men in her life to negotiate with each other for who gets her in his life; she never seems to make an actual choice of her own. She's less a person than a utility to be annexed.
Worse still, the book's shockingly old-fashioned. A casual reader picking up this tale of arranged marriages and homosexual blackmail for the first time might well assume it was written during the mid-century time period of I Capture the Castle. Yet It Ends with Revelations was published almost a solid two decades later, in 1968; to consider that it came out in the year famous for the Summer of Love betrays how very much out of touch Smith's writing was with current events. Mere months later, the Stonewall riots would make this quaint and genteel novel look like an archaeological relic.
Still, for its sweet insight into the workings of the English theater, the book's a pleasant enough read. Dodie Smith's characteristic charm counts for a lot. Fans of I Capture the Castle and The Town in Bloom will enjoy another volume in the author's sweet re-creation of a lost and respectable age.
My Mother Was Nuts
by Penny Marshall
None of the revelations in actor/director Penny Marshall's autobiography are particularly astonishing. There was strife on the set of Laverne & Shirley during the show's run. (We knew.) There was a decades-long rift between Cindy Williams and Marshall as a result. (It figures.) Marshall dropped acid with Carrie Fisher. (Who didn't?)
What is remarkable about My Mother Was Nuts, however, is how uncannily is manages to capture Marshall's voice—that unmistakable Bronx whine. It brays from every page. As I read the pages of the book, I could hear every anecdote told in Marshall's remarkable and characteristic vowels. The experience makes an already-winning read even more so.
Marshall's career reads as haphazard and even accidental. Taken as a whole, though, it's representative of a philosophy repeated several times throughout the memoir: she surrounded herself with the funniest and most talented people she knew, and learned all she could from them. She's humble over her failures and perhaps even morbidly modest about her successes and influences (Steven Spielberg structured the last scene of Schindler's List after her final scene in A League of Their Own, after all).
But more importantly, even in times of adversity—career flux, cancer, armed intruders in her home—Marshall's wry humor is abundant and free-flowing. A swift and engaging read.
Act One
by Moss Hart
Moss Hart's Act One is, to put it simply, the most riveting work I've read about working in the American theater.
The work is not a comprehensive biography of the noted playwright and director. There's no mention (save in passing) of mega-successes like The Man Who Came to Dinner or Lady in the Dark, no My Fair Lady, no Camelot. There's remarkably little celebrity gossip. There's no Kitty Carlisle. (Darn it.)
Act One instead is a vivid, detailed, and slightly fictionalized look at Hart's early life, from his poverty-weighted youth in the Bronx until the day after opening night of his first hit collaboration with George S. Kaufman, Once in a Lifetime. Readers anxious to skip to the usual stuff of celebrity autobiographies aren't going to find much here, but anyone interested in the creative process itself will find much to contemplate. Hart is well aware that his work is the sum total of his experiences, from his early theater-going visits with a much-beloved aunt, to the clowning he did as social director of Borscht Belt summer camps in the Catskills. His discussion of his at-first uneasy collaboration with Kaufman is fascinating, as he's painfully aware of how different in approach and execution their writing skills could be.
Yet it's the attention to craftsmanship that makes this autobiography compelling. Its final third is an in-depth exploration of the revision process that transformed Once in a Lifetime from a dud doomed to close out-of-town, to the hit Broadway smash that liberated both Hart and his family from poverty. The process didn't happen overnight; it didn't come with a single burst of inspiration. It happened only with Hart's back-breaking effort and a genuine love for his craft.
It's that love—both for writing, and for the theater—that shines warmly from every page. What a fine read.
Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart
by Steven Bach
Steven Bach's obviously approached his biography of playwright and director Moss Hart with both respect for the man's accomplishments and love for his work. It shows in the enthusiasm with which he's researched his subject, and in his eagerness to outline Hart's lesser-known works to a new audience—he even shares the best lines with obvious relish.
If there's anything lacking in this otherwise-thorough biography, it would have to do with Hart's enduring stage legacy—after the playwright drops dead on his front lawn at the age of 57, the book's done. I might have appreciated an afterword chapter examining revivals of Hart's plays, or an examination of the ways in which the accepted narratives of Hart's life, his marriage to Kitty Carlisle (who refused to cooperate with Bach, he complains several times), and his sexuality have changed in the years since his passing.
There are points in the biography in which Bach seems to assume a casual reader might know more about the gossip and scandal of Hart's life than Bach's willing to explore himself. There's a passing mention of death threats made by Hart's aunt (immortalized and fictionalized in Hart's autobiography, Act One), but no real explanation or documentation of what's obviously a juicy story. I shouldn't have to dig out a past issue of The New Yorker in order to research what a biographer has decided is common knowledge. Bach has a tendency, too, to offer portent without much follow-through, foreshadowing later events in Hart's life without offering details or pulling together loose threads across (admittedly, a very active) timeline.
Still, those are minor flaws. Dazzler is a fascinating look at a man whose talent and seeming sheer force of will provided Broadway with many of its enduring classics, and is a good companion volume to the glossier, if more zestfully-written, Act One.
The Egg and I
by Betty MacDonald
I'm always a little mystified when people refer to the 'happy ending' of Betty MacDonald's 1945 runway bestselling memoir, and express their bafflement that she's divorced by the time of her follow-up volumes, The Plague and I and Anybody Can Do Anything. The book ends with MacDonald contemplating an imminent miserable winter with a distant husband she's just declared 'poles apart,' emotionally.
That's happy?
Perhaps much of the explanation lies with the era's higher tolerance for a husband's lack of empathy—at least, that's the only real justification for which I can attribute anyone's inability to see how miserable MacDonald is throughout her volume. She writes of her naive belief that a wife should support her husband's whims, and as a consequence ends up on a chicken farm with no running water or electricity, in the middle of the mountains of Washington state. She has no books, no friends. Her husband treats his dogs and livestock better than he does his wife; the height of his romanticism in the book is when he grudgingly cracks a crab for her at a picnic. (On their remote farm he even lifts mattresses to inspect if she's dusted the bedsprings, for Pete's sake.)
I suspect most of the blame for the misapprehension that this is a happy book lies with MacDonald herself . . . just because she's so damned funny. She recalls her deprivations with an admirable lack of self-pity and without really calling attention to how miserable she really must have been. Her comic sensibility blossoms in this, her very first work, as she contrasts her utter unpreparedness for the life of a egg farm workhorse with the absurdities she finds in rural living. It's a clever bit of misdirection to lead her readers into thinking her exile was a laugh a minute, but The Egg and I is definitely constructed upon a bedrock of isolation and regret.
I'm making it sound like a Chekovian nightmare—it's not. It's sharp, and funny, and amazingly unsentimental.
The book is always associated with the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle, whose appearance in the 1947 movie based on the book led to an eight-movie spinoff. It's surprising how very little space those characters occupy in the memoir, though—they appear on perhaps a dozen or so pages. MacDonald has such a natural and vivid way of bringing folk to life that it's unsurprising they're so unforgettable.
Forty Odd
by Mary Bard
Betty MacDonald's memoir, Anybody Can Do Anything, was essentially a valentine to the get-up-and-go gumption of MacDonald's older sister, Mary Bard, during the height of the Great Depression. MacDonald's portrait of Mary was of a devil-may-care, fearless crusader whose many natural talents led them both into outrageously funny situations. This little volume, penned by Mary Bard herself, is set twenty years after the events of MacDonald's memoir—and it might as well be titled Mary Bard Can't Do Anything Anymore.
Forty Odd takes as its premise that Bard, upon hitting a milestone birthday, suddenly decides that she's forty, fat, foolish, and frustrated. With menopause just around the corner, she decides to take matters in her own hands and avoid sliding into complacency. The book's a little bit of an odd combination of self-help manual, humorous memoir, and the just-between-us-girls practical household tips one might find in a dated issue of Home and Gardens. I'm willing to bet that modern readers will find its narrative style—which has Bard over and over again consulting male authority figures for their sage advice on a woman's purpose in life—a little bit too patronizing and patriarchal.
But the book's not really as dated as some would probably dismiss it. Bard's fashion makeover involves frank assessment of her own style in front of mirrors that are reminiscent of today's What Not to Wear and advice that could be coming straight from the mouth of Tim Gunn; her experiences with a book club aren't that far removed from the book clubs of today. And although Bard's fairly mopey about her impending Change of Life, she's at least in on the joke—she knows exactly how tiresome she's being, and takes steps to improve by the book's end.
Although none of her memoirs are as deft, as touching, or as funny as Betty MacDonald's, Bard's Forty Odd comes to life at unexpected moments. When she's placed in absurd situations, or well out of her depth, the chapters can be pretty humorous—and when she writes about situations in which she's taking care of others, as in the episodes involving her burgeoning Brownie troop, we get flashes of the old Mary Bard of whom MacDonald wrote so affectionately.
Onions in the Stew
by Betty MacDonald
Onions in the Stew stands out as Betty MacDonald's most mature and effortlessly humorous memoir. It's also seemingly the most unstructured of the four published in her lifetime. Whereas her previous volumes tackled the specific themes of egg farming, sanatorium life, and job hunting during the Great Depression, Onions is a simply a reflection upon life on Seattle's Vashon Island.
Of course, the simplicity is deceptive. Behind the stories of tides and gardens and page after page of rumination on local seafood is a truly remarkable narrative about the difficulties of blended families and of a mother's attempts during the nineteen-forties to raise a pair of adolescent girls. MacDonald is unafraid to be melancholy, though she's never maudlin; she portrays her daughters realistically and to the point of unattractiveness, though her love and affection for them is always clear.
Unsentimental and laugh-out-loud funny, Onions in the Stew is a classic slice of American domestic humor from an era that has vanished entirely, yet has never quite gone out of style.
Remains To Be Scene
by R.T. Jordan
One of my enduring pet peeves with the subgenre of the 'cute' murder mystery is how callously its usually-adorable and winsome leads behave while solving a comical and quaint little murder or two—when in reality, the stench of crime is pretty dreadful, and can never be obscured by buckets of syrupy banter and sugary character quirks. Remains To Be Scene neatly manages to bypass that typical shortcoming, however, by making its lead detectives as thoroughly unpleasant as its murder victims, thus neatly removing any obligation the reader has either to root for the former, or feel sorry for the latter.
The gimmick here is that Polly Pepper is a former has-been television star—something along the lines of Carol Burnett, but with less talent—whose career has come to a near-standstill. For some reason the novel really makes clear, when two rivals are killed on the set of a movie and Polly Pepper is asked to step into their acting roles, she appoints herself the lead investigator of the case and uses her powers of deduction to track down the ruthless killer. And damned if the entire LAPD doesn't just roll over and let Polly Pepper do it, too.
Unfortunately for Polly Pepper (the author's unspoken rule in the novel that one is only allowed to refer to his heroine by both names, as when her romantic interest gushes in the book's most romantic and lyrical line, "You look awesome, Polly Pepper!"), Polly Pepper’s powers mostly consist of slugging back cocktails and slinging abrasive and unsubtle questions in every direction.
Joining Polly Pepper as her nutty sidekicks are her son Tim, a wastrel slugabout whose function in the book is to be as stereotypically gay as possible on a wearying basis and to make icky-poo faces at any mention of his mother's lady-parts, and her maid, Placenta. No, that's the entire joke, there. Polly Pepper's maid's name is Placenta. Please, do attempt to keep your sides from splitting. Her job is primarily to keep Polly Pepper pickled with a peck of planter's punches.
I kept kind of hoping that the book might self-knowingly mock itself by following the Rosemary and Thyme model of amateur detection, in which the protagonists are so stupid and blundering and seemingly unable to detect their way out of a wet paper bag, that the murderer finally reveals himself out of exhaustion and tries to kill one or the other or both of the detectives. No such luck in this novel. Polly Pepper pulls a has-been television actress's version of the detective-in-the-parlor reveal that lasts for fully one-fifth of the entire book's total length. It's excruciating. I've never rooted for a third literary murder (Polly Pepper's) so hard in my life. And yet I have to confess that I'm quite curious if the sequels—oh yes, there's an entire Polly Pepper series—are as bad.
Dead curious, one might say.
Final Curtain
by R. T. Jordan
In the second installment of the Polly Pepper amateur detective series, Polly Pepper, the aging has-been star of television's much-beloved The Polly Pepper Playhouse, has been employed to star in a revival of the classic musical Mame. Yet when one of the show's production team ends up dead after being concussed by an Emmy (or, as the author breathlessly and tastefully puts it, "Karen was a goner the instant her brain began to seep through the crack in her head!"), who has to step in to solve the crime but Polly Pepper herself!
Well. maybe the police ought to. Especially since the head detective is Polly Pepper's boyfriend—I think we all remember his vivid testimony of love and dedication from the first book in the series, when he uncontrollably gushed, "You look awesome, Polly Pepper!" (Lest we forget, it's the author's unspoken dictum that Polly Pepper be referred to by her entire name, even when she's talking about herself, as when Polly Pepper grills a suspect by growling, "Tell us everything or sweet Polly Pepper will turn into Shirley Temple on a roid rage!")
But no, apparently when Polly Pepper is on the case, the LAPD simply rolls over and plays dead. Because, after all, who better to sniff out a criminal than a third-rate comedienne who has spent most of her life nursing grudges against Nanette Fabray and Pearl Bailey while tossing down Xanax with champagne chasers? Screw you, trained police detectives. Polly Pepper's got it under control! Polly Pepper's idiotic sidekicks, her incredibly gay son Tim and her incredibly badly-named maid Placenta, add to the general inanity of the antics by running around like chickens with their heads cut off, only with less brain activity than beheaded fowls.
I wish my mockery of the book's deplorable writing and its even worse plotting didn't make this novel sound a lot more campy and attractive than it actually is. It's painful to read several hundred pages of Final Curtain when one the entire time is asking the question of oneself, "Couldn't this all have been solved with a single call to the proper authorities?" Polly Pepper's frantic self-absorption and need to be at the center of any drama makes the book a slow and deadly slog that almost made me wish I'd been the one bonked in the head by an Emmy—even of the daytime variety.
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
by John Kelly
Once John Kelly gets to the 'intimate' portion of his The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, his overview of the most destructive human plague in history becomes a fascinating collection of vignettes. The book works best when it focuses upon its mission to collect very small and anecdotal stories of human triumph, perseverance, greed, and folly in the face of inconceivable adversity. In these later portions of his well-documented and researched study, the portraits Kelly paints of small-town physicians grappling to find some means to battle the disease, or of ignorant patriarchs or of those who see the demise of their rivals as an opportunity to chase power, are remarkably well-done.
However, it's slow going to get there. Kelly's writing gets off to several false starts when he uses both the introduction and the first chapter to paint a broad contextual canvas of the plague's age and geography, only to conclude with ominous portent that the aim of his book is to examine what happened during the Black Plague. Mr Kelly, I kind of figured out what I was getting into from the title and the book cover, thanks. I don't need two prefaces to warn me that I haven't picked up the latest Tyra Banks novel.
And when Kelly aims to provide those vast, panoramic expansive overviews of the medieval world, its trading practices, and its geography, his prose turns deadly dull. All but the most fact-starved readers will find the first few chapters a treacherous slog that's occasionally peppered with abrupt changes in tone, as when in the middle of a dry discussion of pathogens, he declares that Y. pestis has "biological oomph."
After the false starts and the turgid panoramic prose, however, the book's fairly interesting—and it even has its payoffs when it moves into the more intimate spectrum promised in its title. I also appreciated the afterword chapter about "plague deniers"—scientists who believe in alternate biological explanations of the Black Death.
Whether this is the only volume one will ever need about the calamitous plague that devastated much of the known world is debatable; as an introduction, it's fair.
It Ends With Revelations
by Dodie Smith
The central premise of Dodie Smith's It Ends with Revelations isn't even mentioned until over halfway through the novel: its heroine, Jill, is knowingly married to a gay man. There's no scandal to it—no shocking discovery, nothing that the heroine didn't know before she entered into the arrangement. It's all very genteel, as are most of the relationships in Smith's works—as is the follow-up plot, in which an MP and his family conspire to un-marry Jill from her husband and take her over for the own.
Smith's doing some subtle and sympathetic writing on a delicate topic, here. The latter is perhaps not unexpected; Smith was great friends with Christopher Isherwood during the height of his writing career, after all. She manages to address what was still a shocking subject with great sensitivity and aplomb.
What's disappointing, somewhat, is that the novel's plotting might be too subtle for most readers to appreciate. Most of the fighting Jill's husband does to keep her takes place in the book's earliest pages, long before the average reader would have picked up on the book's central struggle. Also, among all of Smith's heroines, Jill is the most frustratingly passive. Even at the book's climax, she's allowing the men in her life to negotiate with each other for who gets her in his life; she never seems to make an actual choice of her own. She's less a person than a utility to be annexed.
Worse still, the book's shockingly old-fashioned. A casual reader picking up this tale of arranged marriages and homosexual blackmail for the first time might well assume it was written during the mid-century time period of I Capture the Castle. Yet It Ends with Revelations was published almost a solid two decades later, in 1968; to consider that it came out in the year famous for the Summer of Love betrays how very much out of touch Smith's writing was with current events. Mere months later, the Stonewall riots would make this quaint and genteel novel look like an archaeological relic.
Still, for its sweet insight into the workings of the English theater, the book's a pleasant enough read. Dodie Smith's characteristic charm counts for a lot. Fans of I Capture the Castle and The Town in Bloom will enjoy another volume in the author's sweet re-creation of a lost and respectable age.
My Mother Was Nuts
by Penny Marshall
None of the revelations in actor/director Penny Marshall's autobiography are particularly astonishing. There was strife on the set of Laverne & Shirley during the show's run. (We knew.) There was a decades-long rift between Cindy Williams and Marshall as a result. (It figures.) Marshall dropped acid with Carrie Fisher. (Who didn't?)
What is remarkable about My Mother Was Nuts, however, is how uncannily is manages to capture Marshall's voice—that unmistakable Bronx whine. It brays from every page. As I read the pages of the book, I could hear every anecdote told in Marshall's remarkable and characteristic vowels. The experience makes an already-winning read even more so.
Marshall's career reads as haphazard and even accidental. Taken as a whole, though, it's representative of a philosophy repeated several times throughout the memoir: she surrounded herself with the funniest and most talented people she knew, and learned all she could from them. She's humble over her failures and perhaps even morbidly modest about her successes and influences (Steven Spielberg structured the last scene of Schindler's List after her final scene in A League of Their Own, after all).
But more importantly, even in times of adversity—career flux, cancer, armed intruders in her home—Marshall's wry humor is abundant and free-flowing. A swift and engaging read.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Na Na Hey Hey
When it comes to musical entertainment, I’ll be the first to admit that my tastes are dubious. I mean, sure, there are a couple of bands and singers I like who are modestly respectable. No one’s going to object to me liking Kate Bush or collecting the early recordings of David Bowie. Certain artsy types might nod and approve of my fondness for Laurie Anderson, while others of a certain age might approve of my complete set of the albums of Talking Heads.
But then someone looking at my collection would probably notice that while some of the so-called good stuff has been collecting dust, I’ve been wearing grooves into my hard drive from repeated playings of the complete oeuvre of Pepsi & Shirlie. You know. Pepsi & Shirlie. Oh come on. You remember. They were Wham!’s backup singers. Wham!. That group with George Michael and the other one. Yes, their backup singers. Yes, Pepsi & Shirlie had their own album. Two, actually. The second one was a Japanese-only release that no one . . . wait, why’re you looking at me like that?
Yeah, like I said. Dubious. If I were on some kind of reality show, I’d be the contestant that would cause Tim Gunn to clutch the tip of his chin with the crook of his finger, cross his arms, purse his lips, and worriedly say, “I’m just concerned that the judges are going to question your level of taste.”
I probably couldn’t sing to you much of the most popular and well-known hits by Bruce Springsteen, say, but I can discourse at length on the differences and merits between Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight’s original “Obsession” and its subsequent cover by Animotion. I’m perfectly prepared to forsake a much-admired genre like American blues in order to defend my love for Swedish pop music, from ABBA to BWO. In a showdown between divas with major pipes, I’m the guy off in the corner professing my adoration to a little warbler with a dubious sense of pitch. (Hi, Cristina Monet!)
All the preamble is simply to prepare everyone for the fact that one of my all-time favorite musical acts is, not surprisingly, Bananarama. Yes, they’re still together and making music. Shut up.
I mean, Bananarama has that whole vaguely aimless, pretty-much tuneless thing working in their favor for me; we’re talking about a group whose major mission statement for the last thirty years has been We pledge to sing our cheerful songs more or less on pitch in an unsubtle unison. But they were so cheeky, and quavered through their tunes gamely, and never ever seemed to take themselves too seriously and seemed as surprised as their early successes as just about anyone else. How could I resist?
So I was a fan when they were an obscure little new wave girl group no one had heard of in the states who were responsible for “Shy Boy” and “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” I was a fan of “Cruel Summer” when it came out the first time, and then when it hit big on its second release on this side of the Atlantic. I cheered them on during the years they were the jewels in Stock-Aitken-Waterman’s crown. When Siobhan (the Shakespeare’s Sister one) left the group, I adjusted when Sara (the blonde) and Keren (the one romantically involved with the other one from Wham!) invited in some chick named Jacqui for an album. I adjusted again when they kicked her right out again.
I rooted the girls on during the wilderness years, when they were reduced to doing the occasional television show theme song and their France-only CD. (If there’s anything lower than an album marketed only in Japan, it’s a France-only release.) Then I cheered again when they seemed to hit a groove in recent years with a couple of Euro-dance releases, from which Madonna has steadily been lifting lyrically and sonically these last couple of years. I haven’t been a casual fan, I have to confess. I’m not one of those buy-the-greatest-hits-album-and-call-it-done guys. No, I have the albums, including the Francophone one. All the twelve-inch remixes. The really obscure stuff. The remastered CDs. A book of sheet music for Wow! I bought their latest compilation CD last month because it came with a bonus DVD of thirty-six Bananarama videos, thirty-two of which I sat through in one sitting.
(I think I can be excused for swearing off the last four for a few days. The electronic clap machine noise was causing brain deterioration.)
When I read that Sara and Keren would be touring the US this month, I knew I had to go. The last US appearances they made were twenty-four years ago. These chicks are in their early fifties; they’re not going to be getting up on stage and chirping about being guilty of love in the first degree forever. And as nobody wanted to go with me—I got a lot of RSVPs that included the phrase wouldn’t be caught dead, for some reason—I ended up heading to the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square last week all by myself.
In three words: It. Was. Awesome.
I cannot say it was the most high-production show I’ve ever seen. I can’t say the backup dancers were the best, or that the choreography (which, for the girls, was more or less taken right out of their videos). I can’t say it was the best-sung show I’ve seen, or the most emotional, or the most rip-roaring. What it was, though, was sheer and unadulterated fun. In front of a live band and an audience of a couple of hundred gay men—the tour was kicking off the Hard Rock’s campaign for breast cancer awareness, but my guess is that there were maybe all of about eight breasts in the entire hall, and four of them belonged to Bananarama—the pair sang, danced, and giggled their way through a good fifteen or so songs from the Bananarama repertoire, both old and new. The giggling, I have to explain, usually came when they forgot or messed up their choreography.
(There was a lot of giggling.)
The girls sounded as good onstage as they do on their albums. (Interpret that as you will.) But most importantly, they seem to have latched onto a concept that eludes too many self-serious artists past the peaks of their career—that there’s nothing wrong with music that was intended sheerly to be fun. They grinned through the corniest of their lyrics as if to say yes, we’re in on the joke, too. They laughed and interacted with the audience and invited members up on stage to do the silly dance moves from their “Venus” video. Keren and Sara poked fun at each other in a way that only two people who’ve known each other since the age of five can. When Keren casually laid her hand on the shoulder of one of her meth-addict-looking dancers and discovered he was slick with sweat, her expression of mingled surprise and disgust followed by her dissolve into laughter made the audience hoot right along with her. Then, of course, she wiped her hand on Sara’s sequined ass and kept right on singing.
The evening was so good that it has inspired me to parade my Bananarama love out in the open. So ladies—thank you for not only a show that was far, far better than it had any right to be, but one of the best shows I’ve paid to see.
But then someone looking at my collection would probably notice that while some of the so-called good stuff has been collecting dust, I’ve been wearing grooves into my hard drive from repeated playings of the complete oeuvre of Pepsi & Shirlie. You know. Pepsi & Shirlie. Oh come on. You remember. They were Wham!’s backup singers. Wham!. That group with George Michael and the other one. Yes, their backup singers. Yes, Pepsi & Shirlie had their own album. Two, actually. The second one was a Japanese-only release that no one . . . wait, why’re you looking at me like that?
Yeah, like I said. Dubious. If I were on some kind of reality show, I’d be the contestant that would cause Tim Gunn to clutch the tip of his chin with the crook of his finger, cross his arms, purse his lips, and worriedly say, “I’m just concerned that the judges are going to question your level of taste.”
I probably couldn’t sing to you much of the most popular and well-known hits by Bruce Springsteen, say, but I can discourse at length on the differences and merits between Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight’s original “Obsession” and its subsequent cover by Animotion. I’m perfectly prepared to forsake a much-admired genre like American blues in order to defend my love for Swedish pop music, from ABBA to BWO. In a showdown between divas with major pipes, I’m the guy off in the corner professing my adoration to a little warbler with a dubious sense of pitch. (Hi, Cristina Monet!)
All the preamble is simply to prepare everyone for the fact that one of my all-time favorite musical acts is, not surprisingly, Bananarama. Yes, they’re still together and making music. Shut up.
I mean, Bananarama has that whole vaguely aimless, pretty-much tuneless thing working in their favor for me; we’re talking about a group whose major mission statement for the last thirty years has been We pledge to sing our cheerful songs more or less on pitch in an unsubtle unison. But they were so cheeky, and quavered through their tunes gamely, and never ever seemed to take themselves too seriously and seemed as surprised as their early successes as just about anyone else. How could I resist?
So I was a fan when they were an obscure little new wave girl group no one had heard of in the states who were responsible for “Shy Boy” and “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” I was a fan of “Cruel Summer” when it came out the first time, and then when it hit big on its second release on this side of the Atlantic. I cheered them on during the years they were the jewels in Stock-Aitken-Waterman’s crown. When Siobhan (the Shakespeare’s Sister one) left the group, I adjusted when Sara (the blonde) and Keren (the one romantically involved with the other one from Wham!) invited in some chick named Jacqui for an album. I adjusted again when they kicked her right out again.
I rooted the girls on during the wilderness years, when they were reduced to doing the occasional television show theme song and their France-only CD. (If there’s anything lower than an album marketed only in Japan, it’s a France-only release.) Then I cheered again when they seemed to hit a groove in recent years with a couple of Euro-dance releases, from which Madonna has steadily been lifting lyrically and sonically these last couple of years. I haven’t been a casual fan, I have to confess. I’m not one of those buy-the-greatest-hits-album-and-call-it-done guys. No, I have the albums, including the Francophone one. All the twelve-inch remixes. The really obscure stuff. The remastered CDs. A book of sheet music for Wow! I bought their latest compilation CD last month because it came with a bonus DVD of thirty-six Bananarama videos, thirty-two of which I sat through in one sitting.
(I think I can be excused for swearing off the last four for a few days. The electronic clap machine noise was causing brain deterioration.)
When I read that Sara and Keren would be touring the US this month, I knew I had to go. The last US appearances they made were twenty-four years ago. These chicks are in their early fifties; they’re not going to be getting up on stage and chirping about being guilty of love in the first degree forever. And as nobody wanted to go with me—I got a lot of RSVPs that included the phrase wouldn’t be caught dead, for some reason—I ended up heading to the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square last week all by myself.
In three words: It. Was. Awesome.
I cannot say it was the most high-production show I’ve ever seen. I can’t say the backup dancers were the best, or that the choreography (which, for the girls, was more or less taken right out of their videos). I can’t say it was the best-sung show I’ve seen, or the most emotional, or the most rip-roaring. What it was, though, was sheer and unadulterated fun. In front of a live band and an audience of a couple of hundred gay men—the tour was kicking off the Hard Rock’s campaign for breast cancer awareness, but my guess is that there were maybe all of about eight breasts in the entire hall, and four of them belonged to Bananarama—the pair sang, danced, and giggled their way through a good fifteen or so songs from the Bananarama repertoire, both old and new. The giggling, I have to explain, usually came when they forgot or messed up their choreography.
(There was a lot of giggling.)
The girls sounded as good onstage as they do on their albums. (Interpret that as you will.) But most importantly, they seem to have latched onto a concept that eludes too many self-serious artists past the peaks of their career—that there’s nothing wrong with music that was intended sheerly to be fun. They grinned through the corniest of their lyrics as if to say yes, we’re in on the joke, too. They laughed and interacted with the audience and invited members up on stage to do the silly dance moves from their “Venus” video. Keren and Sara poked fun at each other in a way that only two people who’ve known each other since the age of five can. When Keren casually laid her hand on the shoulder of one of her meth-addict-looking dancers and discovered he was slick with sweat, her expression of mingled surprise and disgust followed by her dissolve into laughter made the audience hoot right along with her. Then, of course, she wiped her hand on Sara’s sequined ass and kept right on singing.
The evening was so good that it has inspired me to parade my Bananarama love out in the open. So ladies—thank you for not only a show that was far, far better than it had any right to be, but one of the best shows I’ve paid to see.
Monday, September 24, 2012
I Hate Google Maps
Every time Apple releases a new product in one of its more popular lines, I know we’re in for a rollercoaster manic-depressive experience. After the lines and the Twitter and Facebook updates every fifteen minutes and the general elation of consumer avarice that floods the airwaves and internet, someone discovers some flaw or shortcoming that somehow got overlooked in the great anticipation over the newest and latest and hottest device. It gets a little press, which gets leapt upon by the company’s rivals and naysayers, which then gets whipped up to such proportions that it’s called a scandal, eliciting schadenfreude from everyone who didn’t buy the damned thing, and much wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who did. Then it sells a kerjillion units anyway and a couple of weeks later everyone’s forgotten about whatever it was that was supposed to bring the company to its knees.
We’ve all lived through Antennagate, that issue with the iPhone 4 that no one would shut up about for days and weeks, in which if one pressed kind of hard at a certain spot on the phone’s exterior, the number of bars in the signal strength would drop. Something like that. I could never get it to happen on mine, and I used the thing without a case for two years. With the last iteration of the iPad, the blogosphere attempted to whip people into a frenzy about it running warm. No, it wasn’t running warm, it was hot! Untouchable! BOILING! People pointed infrared cameras at the thing to show how dangerous it was for anything except for frying hamburgers, and the scandal lasted for a week, until someone actually measured the heat and found it was only about six degrees more than the previous iPad, and everyone shut up about it. No one’s said a thing about either of the blow-ups in months.
The latest hue and cry, after last week’s release of the iPhone 5, has to do with its Maps application. Apple decided to ditch Google Maps as its default mapping application. It’s been known for months—months, mind you—that the new Maps had several features new to the iPhone’s default locations app, including turn-by-turn directions and three-dimensional renderings of larger U.S. cities, but that it wouldn’t have Google Maps’ street views, and that it wouldn’t have Google’s public transit directions, either. That didn’t stop a lot of users, as well as the tech press, from trumpeting last Friday how shocking were the omissions, and how awful it was that no one told them that they were coming! (The changes been written about for months, mind you.)
I find some of the huffing a little bit hypocritical. The weeping and wailing over the lack of public transit directions is perhaps understandable for those of us who live in New York City and its environs, or who reside in other big cities and rely on public transportation to get around. (Even so, I don’t get why everyone claims to be helpless and lost without the original Google Maps app. Until Google releases its own app, which it will, one can still get public transit information from the Google maps mobile website. Put a shortcut to the damned thing on your home screen if you love it so much. Or get another mapping app.)
But here’s the thing—a lot of the bitching and moaning I hear comes from people who don’t live in these cities. It comes from people who never use public transit. It comes from people whose pharisaism over the issue might lead you to believe they’re as green and pure-intentioned as that Native American from the public service TV ads of my youth, gazing sadly over the polluted wastes and smog of an urban landscape in moccasins and a leather jerkin and a full feathered headdress, a single tear running down a wise red-skinned cheek.
When in reality, they’re people whose only interaction with a city bus has been to gag and make comments over the fumes as they zoom by them in their SUVs. They’re people who will hop into their gas guzzlers and drive half a block from their front doors to the Pump ’n’ Pay at the end of their street to pick up a lottery ticket and a bag of Cheetos so they can return home and watch The Voice. Yeah, I’m talking about you, my people of Detroit.
All the sanctimony and bemoaning of the martyred Google also kind of distracts from the fact that Google Maps was really never quite the exemplar of quality goods that people are now lauding. I rolled my eyes at it on a regular basis. Even though they’ve been in the business for years and years, I’ve been quite used to Google Maps giving me one of its what I called ‘comedy routes’ whenever I attempt to drive somewhere unfamiliar. What I assumed should have been a straight shot down I-95 and getting off at exit eleven, say, Google Maps would want me turn into a general meandering down I-95 with a side trip off of exit 5 through a residential neighborhood until I got back on I-95 at exit 6, and then a similar wild vagabond adventure off exit 8, around a golf course, down a business route, turning left at a deserted gas station, making a U-turn, and then getting back onto 95 at exit 10 for the final quarter-mile to my destination.
I’ve had Google Maps give me its comedy routes when I’m trying to bypass New York City to its north in a straightforward fashion, via the Tappan Zee Bridge—but no, every single one of its routes will try to direct me through the streets of the Bronx and downtown Manhattan, where I least want to drive. When I’ve been trying to drive past the District of Columbia and just wanted to know the name of the usual highway I take in the ring around the city, Google Maps has wanted to send me on a visit into the downtown area to the Washington Monument.
Last spring I used Google Maps in an attempt to walk from the subway to 34 West 15th Street in Manhattan, and it kept insisting I walk further and further west, despite the fact that the numbers were not getting smaller, but larger. (Worse, I kept thinking to myself, “This is Google Maps! It has to be right!”) Finally it told me I’d arrived when I was standing on the city’s edge in front of not the yarn store I’d wanted, but a nondescript auto shop, while I wondered why I could see Pier 54 and the Hudson River.
I’ve searched for Manhattan businesses by name in Google Maps, including the city information, and had it show me establishments with vaguely similar names in Plano, TX and Peoria. I’ve had Google Maps insist that there were restaurants open and existing in spots where no restaurants stand. And it’s not the only mapping service that pulls these stunts—I still shudder when I think about the time in Craig’s car that its turn-by-turn navigation had us going in a circle around a single city block in White Plains for several minutes until we were white-faced and frantic for escape. (White Plains is already enough of a No Exit city as it is, without that kind of ‘help.’)
As for Street View: I like the sound of it in theory. I had a fun five minutes when it came out looking up my address and seeing the trash set out to the curb in front of its capture of my old home. I used it a couple of times to attempt to see what a strange destination might look like when I arrived. But I also very quickly learned that the correspondence between a Street View address and an actual address is fairly low; if you were to look up my current address and look at the Street View, you’d come to the conclusion that I live either in a graveyard plot or smack in the middle of a pond. I found myself having to move up and down Google’s virtual streets and memorize several blocks of landmarks, because it was impossible to tell what it thought was 11 East 33rd Street really was 11 East 33rd, or somewhere three blocks away. Frankly, I find Street View mostly useless.
Reliable and consistent, Google Maps is not. It never has been. During my last driving trip to Richmond in the spring, Google Maps kept trying to lure me off of I-95 and the George Washington Bridge into Washington Heights, and when I refused, it announced in a fit of pique, “Fine! GPS disabled, asshole!” (the ‘asshole’ part might’ve been my imagination, admittedly) and turned itself off—which made me panic and start to try to stab my finger at it like a blunt weapon, while driving in the truck lane.
On the way home when it pulled the exact same stunt right at the juncture of I-95 and its various offshoots around and through DC, I yelled “WHATEVER, Google Maps! I don’t want your STINKY DIRECTIONS ANYWAY!” at it and ignored it until it very bashfully turned itself back on around Baltimore. It was so meek and mild after, and didn’t attempt to steer me, Tardis-like, to sites that were never my destination that I didn’t even notice it had sneakily prompted me to leave my route and take a drive through downtown Philadelphia. Not until I approached the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and saw the masts of old Revolutionary-era sailing ships in the Philadelphia Harbor did it dawn upon me that Philadelphia was not and never had been on my route between New York and Richmond.
(Sadly true story.)
Electronics wars are silly. I don’t like that the tenor of public discourse these days is aimed at leaving nothing but scorched earth beneath a rival’s feet; there’s no absolute victor here to be cheered, no abject loser to spit upon, bury, and then to sow his grave with salt. Consumer choices are not religion. I’m not really interested, generally, in what brand of peanut butter another person buys, or whether they buy peanut butter at all. Investing one’s energies in denigrating the choices another person makes in choosing a smartphone brand is as inane as would be rabid fans of Skippy facing off against lock-step hissing followers of Crunchy Jif, while in a corner the everyday users of Goober complain that they never, ever get any attention.
I know in another week the glow will have worn off the story and people will go back to their usual grousing about whatever map service they end up using. (Or not using, as is the more likely scenario.) But dang, people. Google Maps is one of the most capricious evil intelligences out there. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Plus I think it has a personal grudge against me, for some reason. Maybe because I just compared it to Crunchy Jif?
We’ve all lived through Antennagate, that issue with the iPhone 4 that no one would shut up about for days and weeks, in which if one pressed kind of hard at a certain spot on the phone’s exterior, the number of bars in the signal strength would drop. Something like that. I could never get it to happen on mine, and I used the thing without a case for two years. With the last iteration of the iPad, the blogosphere attempted to whip people into a frenzy about it running warm. No, it wasn’t running warm, it was hot! Untouchable! BOILING! People pointed infrared cameras at the thing to show how dangerous it was for anything except for frying hamburgers, and the scandal lasted for a week, until someone actually measured the heat and found it was only about six degrees more than the previous iPad, and everyone shut up about it. No one’s said a thing about either of the blow-ups in months.
The latest hue and cry, after last week’s release of the iPhone 5, has to do with its Maps application. Apple decided to ditch Google Maps as its default mapping application. It’s been known for months—months, mind you—that the new Maps had several features new to the iPhone’s default locations app, including turn-by-turn directions and three-dimensional renderings of larger U.S. cities, but that it wouldn’t have Google Maps’ street views, and that it wouldn’t have Google’s public transit directions, either. That didn’t stop a lot of users, as well as the tech press, from trumpeting last Friday how shocking were the omissions, and how awful it was that no one told them that they were coming! (The changes been written about for months, mind you.)
I find some of the huffing a little bit hypocritical. The weeping and wailing over the lack of public transit directions is perhaps understandable for those of us who live in New York City and its environs, or who reside in other big cities and rely on public transportation to get around. (Even so, I don’t get why everyone claims to be helpless and lost without the original Google Maps app. Until Google releases its own app, which it will, one can still get public transit information from the Google maps mobile website. Put a shortcut to the damned thing on your home screen if you love it so much. Or get another mapping app.)
But here’s the thing—a lot of the bitching and moaning I hear comes from people who don’t live in these cities. It comes from people who never use public transit. It comes from people whose pharisaism over the issue might lead you to believe they’re as green and pure-intentioned as that Native American from the public service TV ads of my youth, gazing sadly over the polluted wastes and smog of an urban landscape in moccasins and a leather jerkin and a full feathered headdress, a single tear running down a wise red-skinned cheek.
When in reality, they’re people whose only interaction with a city bus has been to gag and make comments over the fumes as they zoom by them in their SUVs. They’re people who will hop into their gas guzzlers and drive half a block from their front doors to the Pump ’n’ Pay at the end of their street to pick up a lottery ticket and a bag of Cheetos so they can return home and watch The Voice. Yeah, I’m talking about you, my people of Detroit.
All the sanctimony and bemoaning of the martyred Google also kind of distracts from the fact that Google Maps was really never quite the exemplar of quality goods that people are now lauding. I rolled my eyes at it on a regular basis. Even though they’ve been in the business for years and years, I’ve been quite used to Google Maps giving me one of its what I called ‘comedy routes’ whenever I attempt to drive somewhere unfamiliar. What I assumed should have been a straight shot down I-95 and getting off at exit eleven, say, Google Maps would want me turn into a general meandering down I-95 with a side trip off of exit 5 through a residential neighborhood until I got back on I-95 at exit 6, and then a similar wild vagabond adventure off exit 8, around a golf course, down a business route, turning left at a deserted gas station, making a U-turn, and then getting back onto 95 at exit 10 for the final quarter-mile to my destination.
I’ve had Google Maps give me its comedy routes when I’m trying to bypass New York City to its north in a straightforward fashion, via the Tappan Zee Bridge—but no, every single one of its routes will try to direct me through the streets of the Bronx and downtown Manhattan, where I least want to drive. When I’ve been trying to drive past the District of Columbia and just wanted to know the name of the usual highway I take in the ring around the city, Google Maps has wanted to send me on a visit into the downtown area to the Washington Monument.
Last spring I used Google Maps in an attempt to walk from the subway to 34 West 15th Street in Manhattan, and it kept insisting I walk further and further west, despite the fact that the numbers were not getting smaller, but larger. (Worse, I kept thinking to myself, “This is Google Maps! It has to be right!”) Finally it told me I’d arrived when I was standing on the city’s edge in front of not the yarn store I’d wanted, but a nondescript auto shop, while I wondered why I could see Pier 54 and the Hudson River.
I’ve searched for Manhattan businesses by name in Google Maps, including the city information, and had it show me establishments with vaguely similar names in Plano, TX and Peoria. I’ve had Google Maps insist that there were restaurants open and existing in spots where no restaurants stand. And it’s not the only mapping service that pulls these stunts—I still shudder when I think about the time in Craig’s car that its turn-by-turn navigation had us going in a circle around a single city block in White Plains for several minutes until we were white-faced and frantic for escape. (White Plains is already enough of a No Exit city as it is, without that kind of ‘help.’)
As for Street View: I like the sound of it in theory. I had a fun five minutes when it came out looking up my address and seeing the trash set out to the curb in front of its capture of my old home. I used it a couple of times to attempt to see what a strange destination might look like when I arrived. But I also very quickly learned that the correspondence between a Street View address and an actual address is fairly low; if you were to look up my current address and look at the Street View, you’d come to the conclusion that I live either in a graveyard plot or smack in the middle of a pond. I found myself having to move up and down Google’s virtual streets and memorize several blocks of landmarks, because it was impossible to tell what it thought was 11 East 33rd Street really was 11 East 33rd, or somewhere three blocks away. Frankly, I find Street View mostly useless.
Reliable and consistent, Google Maps is not. It never has been. During my last driving trip to Richmond in the spring, Google Maps kept trying to lure me off of I-95 and the George Washington Bridge into Washington Heights, and when I refused, it announced in a fit of pique, “Fine! GPS disabled, asshole!” (the ‘asshole’ part might’ve been my imagination, admittedly) and turned itself off—which made me panic and start to try to stab my finger at it like a blunt weapon, while driving in the truck lane.
On the way home when it pulled the exact same stunt right at the juncture of I-95 and its various offshoots around and through DC, I yelled “WHATEVER, Google Maps! I don’t want your STINKY DIRECTIONS ANYWAY!” at it and ignored it until it very bashfully turned itself back on around Baltimore. It was so meek and mild after, and didn’t attempt to steer me, Tardis-like, to sites that were never my destination that I didn’t even notice it had sneakily prompted me to leave my route and take a drive through downtown Philadelphia. Not until I approached the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and saw the masts of old Revolutionary-era sailing ships in the Philadelphia Harbor did it dawn upon me that Philadelphia was not and never had been on my route between New York and Richmond.
(Sadly true story.)
Electronics wars are silly. I don’t like that the tenor of public discourse these days is aimed at leaving nothing but scorched earth beneath a rival’s feet; there’s no absolute victor here to be cheered, no abject loser to spit upon, bury, and then to sow his grave with salt. Consumer choices are not religion. I’m not really interested, generally, in what brand of peanut butter another person buys, or whether they buy peanut butter at all. Investing one’s energies in denigrating the choices another person makes in choosing a smartphone brand is as inane as would be rabid fans of Skippy facing off against lock-step hissing followers of Crunchy Jif, while in a corner the everyday users of Goober complain that they never, ever get any attention.
I know in another week the glow will have worn off the story and people will go back to their usual grousing about whatever map service they end up using. (Or not using, as is the more likely scenario.) But dang, people. Google Maps is one of the most capricious evil intelligences out there. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Plus I think it has a personal grudge against me, for some reason. Maybe because I just compared it to Crunchy Jif?
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Adventures from the Church Desk: Kwawffee and a Nice Pudding
“You always get the weird stuff,” is what the church staff tell me when I sit at the reception desk.
I can’t aver with all my conviction that the statement is true. After all, I’ve passed several very long mornings at the front desk during which the wildest thing to happen is a spirited debate about the merits of frozen yogurt versus ice cream, or when the high point was connecting seven cows in a rousing game of Puzzle Craft. There’ve been a few shifts during which the only sounds I’ve heard are the muffled ticking of the grandfather clock as it slowly scrapes away another second of the afternoon, and the occasional intrusion of my husband as he sticks his head in the door and wants to know why I’m not done stamping and hand-numbering that three-foot stack of music he dumped on me, oh, all of fifteen minutes before.
But yes. When I stride into the church and stick my nameplate into its slot, and when I take the phone off its voice mail, I always get a giddy sense that just about anything could happen. Very often it does.
Yesterday was a pretty typical Monday morning designed to keep me on my toes. It began with me assisting the two very frail and elderly women who apparently comprise the church’s quilting league. They’d already assembled their quilt and stretched it on a massive wooden frame. It was my job to navigate that frame onto the tops of four chairs they’d arranged into a square in the middle of the room—but more importantly, to stick around for a few minutes after and listen to them tell me about their love for the dying art of quilting. I’d helped a man find a specific plot in the cemetery. I’d had a nice long talk about the cemetery itself with a location scout for a David Duchovny movie, which the producers wanted to use for a funeral scene. That had led to a discussion about the differences between graveyards in Greenwich (pretty!) versus graveyards in his native Brooklyn (covered with graffiti!), how Tyler Perry used the church last year when he was shooting one of his movies in the area, and basically how traditionally churchy the church building looked.
I’d sent him off to take his photographs of the sanctuary and the cemetery when the phone rang. I answered it chirpily. “Yhello?” asked the woman at the end of the line. She sounded older, and had one of those Noo Yawk accents that New Yorkers don’t like to think they have, even though my brain has to go through all the exact same mental gymnastics it performs when trying to translate the consonants hitting my eardrums from the more colloquial accents found in a typical episode of Downton Abbey or EastEnders. “I understay-and there’s a funeral there on Saturday?”
“Mmmm,” was my reaction. I hoped it conveyed a balanced kind of sympathy—the sort of vague sorrow one experiences upon hearing of the death of a much older but no longer relevant Hollywood former star that one had already assumed was dead anyway, like Ernest Borgnine. I thought it sounded better than Could be. I’m here once a week, lady. It’s news to me.
“Well,” she said, and I could just hear her licking her lips at the other end as she prepared to launch into her speech. “I was wondering what the family is planning to do after.”
“After?” I asked.
“Yes. As in, were they planning to have just coffee, after the ceremony?” She pronounced it kwawffe, the way so many New Yorkers too. “Kwawfee and a few nibbles? Or were they planning to have more than just kwawffee?”
“Um,” I said.
“Maybe even instead of kwawffee and nibbles they’re having a nice buffet? With chicken and maybe a nice salad and a nice dessert or pudding?”
“Well—“
“Because I can’t imagine they’re just having kwawffee. Maybe kwawffee and a cheese plate. That would be nice. Or kwawffee and a nice cake.”
“I don’t—“
“I was really hoping that they were having a nice buffet after. You know. Chicken. And a nice salad. And maybe pudding. Or a nice cake or even a refreshing fruit salad. Though I’m not sure what’s in season. Blueberries? And maybe kwawffee afterwards. You know. Something nice.”
“Let me put you on hold for a moment,” I said smoothly, before she started mentally planning the apertifs.
I walked a couple of rooms over to the desk of the office manager. She looked at me with suspicion. “There’s a funeral on Saturday?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” she replied.
“There’s a woman on the phone who’s asking if the family’s planning on serving kwawffee and nibbles or whether they’re having a nice buffet with pudding. Do we know . . . ?”
She stared at me for a moment. “Are you serious?” I shrugged and winced. After a long, wearied sigh, she shook her head. “Oh good god.”
Back at my desk, I took the woman off hold and apologized for keeping her waiting. “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound as apologetic as possible. “It’s really up to the family to make those arrangements, and if they’ve made them somewhere else, we don’t always know their plans.”
“Oh really.” She sounded put out, and a bit curt. “So you can’t even tell me if it’s kwawffee and cake, or kwawffee or a nice cheese tray, or a buffet with a nice salad and—“
“And pudding, no.” I tried to ooze sympathy. “Noooo, they haven’t left us with a menu. I really can’t tell you.”
“Well!” she harrumphed. Then she paused. “Maybe you could tell me this: are the family planning to keep the flowers, after the funeral’s over? Or will they be giving away some of the nicer bouquets to people attending?”
A moment later, when I’d hung up and was trying to blink and recover some thoughts that weren’t of kwawffee and pudding, the office manager walked into the room. “Well?” she asked.
I told her about the conclusion of the call. “Man!” she said. Then she shook her head. “You always get all the weird stuff.”
This time I couldn’t deny it.
I can’t aver with all my conviction that the statement is true. After all, I’ve passed several very long mornings at the front desk during which the wildest thing to happen is a spirited debate about the merits of frozen yogurt versus ice cream, or when the high point was connecting seven cows in a rousing game of Puzzle Craft. There’ve been a few shifts during which the only sounds I’ve heard are the muffled ticking of the grandfather clock as it slowly scrapes away another second of the afternoon, and the occasional intrusion of my husband as he sticks his head in the door and wants to know why I’m not done stamping and hand-numbering that three-foot stack of music he dumped on me, oh, all of fifteen minutes before.
But yes. When I stride into the church and stick my nameplate into its slot, and when I take the phone off its voice mail, I always get a giddy sense that just about anything could happen. Very often it does.
Yesterday was a pretty typical Monday morning designed to keep me on my toes. It began with me assisting the two very frail and elderly women who apparently comprise the church’s quilting league. They’d already assembled their quilt and stretched it on a massive wooden frame. It was my job to navigate that frame onto the tops of four chairs they’d arranged into a square in the middle of the room—but more importantly, to stick around for a few minutes after and listen to them tell me about their love for the dying art of quilting. I’d helped a man find a specific plot in the cemetery. I’d had a nice long talk about the cemetery itself with a location scout for a David Duchovny movie, which the producers wanted to use for a funeral scene. That had led to a discussion about the differences between graveyards in Greenwich (pretty!) versus graveyards in his native Brooklyn (covered with graffiti!), how Tyler Perry used the church last year when he was shooting one of his movies in the area, and basically how traditionally churchy the church building looked.
I’d sent him off to take his photographs of the sanctuary and the cemetery when the phone rang. I answered it chirpily. “Yhello?” asked the woman at the end of the line. She sounded older, and had one of those Noo Yawk accents that New Yorkers don’t like to think they have, even though my brain has to go through all the exact same mental gymnastics it performs when trying to translate the consonants hitting my eardrums from the more colloquial accents found in a typical episode of Downton Abbey or EastEnders. “I understay-and there’s a funeral there on Saturday?”
“Mmmm,” was my reaction. I hoped it conveyed a balanced kind of sympathy—the sort of vague sorrow one experiences upon hearing of the death of a much older but no longer relevant Hollywood former star that one had already assumed was dead anyway, like Ernest Borgnine. I thought it sounded better than Could be. I’m here once a week, lady. It’s news to me.
“Well,” she said, and I could just hear her licking her lips at the other end as she prepared to launch into her speech. “I was wondering what the family is planning to do after.”
“After?” I asked.
“Yes. As in, were they planning to have just coffee, after the ceremony?” She pronounced it kwawffe, the way so many New Yorkers too. “Kwawfee and a few nibbles? Or were they planning to have more than just kwawffee?”
“Um,” I said.
“Maybe even instead of kwawffee and nibbles they’re having a nice buffet? With chicken and maybe a nice salad and a nice dessert or pudding?”
“Well—“
“Because I can’t imagine they’re just having kwawffee. Maybe kwawffee and a cheese plate. That would be nice. Or kwawffee and a nice cake.”
“I don’t—“
“I was really hoping that they were having a nice buffet after. You know. Chicken. And a nice salad. And maybe pudding. Or a nice cake or even a refreshing fruit salad. Though I’m not sure what’s in season. Blueberries? And maybe kwawffee afterwards. You know. Something nice.”
“Let me put you on hold for a moment,” I said smoothly, before she started mentally planning the apertifs.
I walked a couple of rooms over to the desk of the office manager. She looked at me with suspicion. “There’s a funeral on Saturday?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” she replied.
“There’s a woman on the phone who’s asking if the family’s planning on serving kwawffee and nibbles or whether they’re having a nice buffet with pudding. Do we know . . . ?”
She stared at me for a moment. “Are you serious?” I shrugged and winced. After a long, wearied sigh, she shook her head. “Oh good god.”
Back at my desk, I took the woman off hold and apologized for keeping her waiting. “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound as apologetic as possible. “It’s really up to the family to make those arrangements, and if they’ve made them somewhere else, we don’t always know their plans.”
“Oh really.” She sounded put out, and a bit curt. “So you can’t even tell me if it’s kwawffee and cake, or kwawffee or a nice cheese tray, or a buffet with a nice salad and—“
“And pudding, no.” I tried to ooze sympathy. “Noooo, they haven’t left us with a menu. I really can’t tell you.”
“Well!” she harrumphed. Then she paused. “Maybe you could tell me this: are the family planning to keep the flowers, after the funeral’s over? Or will they be giving away some of the nicer bouquets to people attending?”
A moment later, when I’d hung up and was trying to blink and recover some thoughts that weren’t of kwawffee and pudding, the office manager walked into the room. “Well?” she asked.
I told her about the conclusion of the call. “Man!” she said. Then she shook her head. “You always get all the weird stuff.”
This time I couldn’t deny it.
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