Ruby

After the death of our cat Sarah, who had a very satisfying nearly twenty-three years on this earth, I was really reluctant to adopt again.

By now I know how it works with pets. We adopt them into our homes, we take care of them and love them and feed them. We put up with their ridiculous quirks like their licking their butts spread-eagled on the floor during a fancy dinner party, or upchucking at the drop of a hat. They tolerate our strange affinity for oddball, deviant activities like vacuuming the house free of the perfectly good cat hair they've taken time to distribute on the furniture, or gently requesting that they not throw up inside the grand piano. When they’re sick, we care for them. When the end is near, we try to be there, and to console ourselves with the notion that we’ve given them as good a life as we could. With Sarah, we could easily say that she’d never wanted for love or affection or, god knows, Meow Mix.

After Chloe’s unexpected death a couple of years ago, and after Sarah died in my arms, though, I just didn’t have the heart to sign up for it all over again. I privately decided that we just didn’t need to adopt another cat. Not in the raw couple of months afterward, and not in the future.

The household changed after her death, though. Our one remaining cat, Fred, got progressively more weird. It was as if when Sarah disappeared, Fred decided that she had to double her annoying behaviors to make up for her absence. She would hole herself up in out-of-the-way places and yowl loudly, forcing us to find her. She’d wander around restlessly and knock things over. Although she’d always slept all the night through before, she took to waking up at four in the morning and screaming at the top of her feline lungs in the darkness, which always woke me up thinking that someone was being killed in the next room. It didn’t take a genius to see that she was lonely, and missing Sarah, too.

So we started looking at cats up for adoption. We specifically wanted a female cat who was between nine months and year old, because we reasoned that it would be easier to introduce into the household a cat who was still recognizably young and less of a threat than an adult cat, but who’d lost the endless rambunctiousness of young kittenhood. We visited an animal shelter in Norwalk that had dozens and dozens of cats in its care. Their application form for adoption was longer than my masters’ dissertation. They had a screening interview in which they sat us in a room with a few of their more complacent and lethargic cats so they could see how we interacted with them, and then proceeded to ask us a number of (I thought) insensitive questions about how our previous pets had died. And then finally they allowed us, grudgingly, to walk through the cat cages while they insinuated to us that not only were we never going to be allowed to take one of their cats home, but no one else anywhere was ever going to be good enough to adopt one, either.

We went to a shelter on Long Island to look at the cats there. They were all either quite old and set in their ways (“Does not get along with other animals”) or at the stage of kittenhood in which they’d barely just opened their eyes. We went to a few pet stores that offered adoption events. At one in Port Chester, we encountered a female cat named Skittles who was the right age—about nine months—and whose temperament was sweet. She was a pretty calico who purred in our arms and blinked at us with enormous brown eyes, and we might have adopted her on the spot if we’d had any way of getting her from the store home. It was that night, when we stowed in Craig’s trunk a cat carrier “just in case," I realized that adoption was going to be inevitable.

It was a week or two later—a year ago this week, in fact—that we ended up going back to that Port Chester pet store to see if Skittles was still up for adoption. She was indeed. The woman told us that she’d rescued Skittles from a pound in Kentucky. We filled out a short form, waited while Skittles got the last of her shots, and took her home a half-hour later.

I’ve never really been of the super-cautious school of introducing a new cat into our household. I don’t separate them for days and let them get acquainted to each other’s smells through the crack of a closed door, or anything. When we brought Skittles home, I let Fred out into the courtyard behind our apartment—she loves going outdoors—while Craig took Skittles inside. The new cat ran around the apartment for a half-hour and got the lay of the land on her own, while Craig supervised. I sat outside with Fred (who knew something was going on) and supervised while she rolled around in the dirt. Then I brought a horrified Fred in, sat her on top of the entertainment center so she could watch the calico horror run around and try to get to her.

Honestly, it was the shortest acclimation period I’ve ever seen. Fred was miffy for all of an evening. Then Ruby, as we decided to rename the newest member of our household, pinned her down and cleaned around Fred’s ears. By the end of the second day, they were sleeping side by side on the sofa.
They’ve been buddies ever since. They sleep together, share perches together, play together. Not a day passes in which the two of them aren’t thundering down the hallway as loudly as they can, or in which they don’t wrestle and play-pounce on each other for hours of entertainment. They wash each other and share their meal bowls without much fuss. If Fred insists on being the senior cat, well, Ruby doesn’t seem to mind humoring her, very much.

If I’d thought that adopting an older kitten would cut down on the rambunctiousness, however, hoo boy, was I ever wrong. Right from the start, Ruby was hell on wheels. We discovered from day one that her favorite game was Fetch. Now, every other cat we’ve had has enjoyed a good game of Fetch. Sarah enjoyed it with an orange carrot toy, while Chloe loved to bring a ragged length of braided twine into the office for me to throw while I was working. Fred’s favorite toy was a purple mousie that I’d have to throw for her.

But Ruby was crazy for paper. Crumpled-up paper. When she discovered the joy of a Tootsie Roll Pop wrapper—waxy and lightweight, yet durable enough for repeated trips in her mouth—she stumbled upon a formula of play that’s lasted the entire year. For hours—literal hours—I will pick up the crumpled Tootsie Pop wrapper from my feet, throw it into the next room, and listen as Ruby pounds after it. She’ll grasp it in her teeth, bound back, drop it in my vicinity, and wait impatiently for me to throw it again. There have been mornings in which Craig has left for work while I’ve been writing on my laptop and absently throwing a Tootsie Pop wrapper for Ruby—and then he’s returned three hours later for lunch to find me still tossing the damned thing, with Ruby just as wild and anxious to dive after it.

Despite all the exercise she gets—and during the daylight hours, Ruby’s constantly either trying to get us to play Fetch, or bothering Fred—our little Ruby is not exactly the leanest cat around. Fred used always to make me exclaim Ooof! when I’d pick her up, but running around with Ruby has slimmed her down. Ruby, however, is tubby. To put it gently (and accurately), you know how snakes have a bulge along their length when they’ve just snacked on a whole mouse? Ruby looks as if her jaw has unhinged and she’s swallowed a basketball. She doesn’t care. Her favorite thing to do is lie on her back in the middle of the floor with her legs wide open, staring at the world upside-down, belly on display.

It’s during these moments that I yell out, in a Kentucky accent, “Hee-uh comes Honey Ru-Boo!” When I talk to Ruby, it’s with the thickest of drawls, as if she can’t understand my usually-uninflected accent. She’ll stare at me tolerantly with those brown eyes, then go back to demanding that I sweep under the sofas to find the Tootsie Pop wrappers that she’s been stashing beneath.

And then at night, after she’s finally calmed down, she’s the most affectionate of cats. She sleeps between my feet from the time we turn out the lights until the moment we get up in the morning, purring and snoring. She always greets us at the door when we’ve been out, and she’s not satisfied until we’ve both picked her up and fawned on her. She’s friendly to guests. Even if she did unravel four hundred and forty yards of yarn from my knitting box, one day, she managed through cuteness to convince me that it was my fault that I’d only stored the skeins in a plastic box with a lid that simply popped off when she pushed it from a tabletop, instead of in something more secure. That yarn had been asking for it, really.

It’s been a year and several hundred Tootsie Pop wrappers later, and Ruby, neé Skittles, is firmly one of us. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian

There are days in which I’m able to channel my thoughts into productive work, in which I’m disciplined and razor-focused and know exactly where I need to go with my thinking and what I need to do in order to get it done. Then there are days on which my brain rolls its eyes at me, cuts a fart, says Smell ya later, alligator, and heads off on a little day excursion that, while certainly scenic, makes no sense to anyone who is living outside of my head. (Which the little voices inside my head tell me are most of you.)

The other day, for example. I had an errand to run in the morning to pick up milk and yogurt from Stew Leonard’s. I go to Stew Leonard’s not because I really need to drive eleven miles for milk and yogurt, but because their dairy products are local and fresh and they usually have an abundance of free samples and I am, after all, easily swayed by the lure of anything that is bite-sized and without cost. On the way back, I was listening to an interview with singer Levi Kreis on the radio—he’s one of those vocalists I find interesting whenever I hear him interviewed or read about him, but the moment the magazine is down or the switch off, I forget all about him.

The interviewer asked him to choose a track from an upcoming album to be released later in the spring. Levi picked one. I’ve forgotten the name. My poor brain didn’t have a chance, because the track started out with a mixture of strings and bells in a poppy arrangement that had it thinking, within the first four notes, “That’s ‘Escapade.’” The bells and strings played on for a very long time. “That’s Janet Jackson’s ‘Escapade,’” I said aloud, to no one in particular. Then the singing kicked in and I was singing “Es-ca-pade! We’ll have a good time! Leave your worries behind” along with the chorus, with no real deviation from the rhythm or chord structure. And then the host came back on and was thoughtfully mooing into the microphone about what great appeal the song had, and I was shouting back at him, “Yes, because it was a VERY POPULAR SINGLE FROM RHYTHM NATION 1814!!!”

I’m sorry, Levi. Just callin’ ‘em like I see’s ‘em.

So by the time I got home, fuming over having to listen to “Escapade” tarted up with electronica appropriations and earnest male singing, my brain had already sailed off to sunnier shores as it demanded to hear some choice tidbits from my collection of flop soundalike songs.

I delight in flop soundalike songs. They are a genre unto itself. Even to say the phrase ‘flop soundalikes’ is redundant. The point of soundalike songs is not to achieve massive popularity. It’s to trigger enough familiarity to cause someone to buy the record, keeping the soundalike artist from having to get a real job for years, even though they never reach a point of saturation or fame to become self-sustaining.

The nineteen-eighties masters of the soundalike were producer Bobby Orlando and his house band The Flirts. I’ve always meant to write an essay about how masterful Orlando was as a rip-off artist. (This isn’t it.) Some of the Flirts’ early work is more impressionistic in its copycattedness—“Jukebox (Don’t Put Another Dime)” follows an easy, peppy Go-Go’s imprint that’s hard to pin down—until the middle sixteen, that is, when suddenly one can sing the “Hush my darling, don’t you cry” part from “Our Lips Are Sealed” atop it, and suddenly the source becomes clear.

But their later ripoffs were more blatant, to the point that lawsuits should’ve been filed by the estates of Madonna (because “New Toy” doesn’t even try to pretend that it’s not “Like A Virgin”), Laura Branigan (because “Helpless (You Took My Love)” is applause-worthy in its reconstruction of “Self Control”), ABBA (as when The Flirts’ “Voulez Vous” steals both the lyrics and melody of “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” and then confuses us with one of the Swedish’s band’s other song titles), and Janet Jackson (who might’ve been interested in hearing “Nasty” come out of the speakers whenever someone played The Flirts’ “All You Ever Think About Is (Sex)”). Sigh. I love The Flirts, with their blatant, calculated, and increasingly devil-may-care rip-offs of songs way more popular than they ever were.

Once my brain was on this sonic journey, it was difficult to stop. I went to another of my favorite soundalike songs, “Mismatch,” from Apollonia’s self-titled only solo outing. “Mismatch” is a boppy little song that didn’t perform very well on the charts, and that also draws from the inexhaustible well of Janet Jackson rip-offs. If you listen to the opening bouncy bass and perky synth strikes, it’s pretty clear that it’s a chord-for-chord reproduction of “What Have You Done For Me Lately?”, down to the one-fingered piano solo about three-quarters of the way through.

And you know, except to Jackson and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, there’s really nothing wrong with that. If you liked “What Have You Done For Me Lately?”, say Apollonia’s producers, you’re going to like “Mismatch.” Here, have another slice of that sweet imitation Flyte Tyme pie.

It was at this point that my brain really started to chug toward its destination, because I thought it was a shame that Apollonia’s solo album really never did better. It’s not bad. It’s about as lightweight a pop album as a couple of feathers resting on a helium balloon, but the arrangements are crisp, the songs are fun, and somehow the producers managed to cover up Apollonia’s dubious singing voice. But even as a legitimate co-star of one of 1984’s top-grossing films, Purple Rain, Apollonia never got any respect.

Okay, it might because the only thing thinner than Apollonia’s singing voice is her acting talent. I saw Purple Rain about a dozen times when it came out and was such a fan that for a year I wore a pencil-thin mustache, a frilly pirate shirt, and what I thought was a come-hither look in my smoldering eyes, which probably most people interpreted as indigestion. Upon viewing the movie recently, though, my only thought was, Were we really so starved for the internet and smartphones in 1984 that we thought Purple Rain was thrilling entertainment? It’s not. It’s pretty dreadful, in fact.

So. Levi Kreis. Soundalike songs. The Flirts. Mismatch. Apollonia. This is the chain of association I followed so far, that morning. And when I think about Apollonia, it’s tough not to think about her big breakthrough in Apollonia 6—the lingerie-clad band successor to the Prince spinoff project Vanity 6, after Vanity left the band to pursue a solo ‘career.’ Oh, don’t give me that look. I’m allowed to use those judgmental air quotes. I’m the only person on earth who bought both of Vanity’s solo albums.

Ah, Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6. You remember them. They consisted of The One Who Was Sleeping With Prince At The Time, the One Who Was Pretending To Be Underage, and the Skanky One. Or if that didn’t narrow it down enough for you, the Skanky One With The Cigarette Permanently Hanging From Her Mouth.

One of the interesting things about Prince’s Apollonia 6 project, of course, is that the band’s almost more famous for the songs it didn’t release than the songs it actually did. The original album was chock-full of good stuff that, at the last minute, got pulled until the album was pretty basically gutted. “Take Me With U” was originally mixed as an Apollonia 6 song until his purple highness yanked it, made it a duet that featured himself, and stuck it on the Purple Rain album; it became one of his biggest singles. The album’s lead-off song was, up until the very final pressing, none other than “Manic Monday.” Prince pulled that and handed it off to the Bangles, who made it a huge hit of their own. The group recorded “The Glamorous Life” for the album, only to have it handed off to Sheila E.

It all seems a little unfair until one considers the fact that having three singers and a trunk full of wispy camisoles, the group really had two weak links. One of them was the lead singer. It pains me to say this about one of my favorite campy bands, but during most of “Sex Shooter,” Apollonia 6’s only semi-hit, Apples' 'singing' sounds startlingly similar to the noises made by a tickled pig.

Then there was Susan. Poor, perpetually adolescent Susan, who spent her time in Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6 awkwardly posing in white lingerie and clutching a teddy bear. In both the band’s incarnations she sang lead only three times—if we can call it singing. It’s more like chanting . . . no, that word implies that Susan might have a rudimentary sense of rhythm, which she decidedly does not. Intoning, then. Her songs consist of Susan intoning sexual come-ons like, “I got a shape like a bottle of Co-Co-Co-Co-Cola” over increasingly frantic New Wave Prince compositions in a timbre that can only be described generously as ‘adenoidal.’

It was when I was reflecting on Susan and what can only be described as her triumph as the fastest-ever vanishing ‘talent’ from show biz after the dissolution of a band when my brain demanded to know: Hey. Is Susan on Facebook?

I know better than to oppose my brain on pursuing these trivial paths. If my brain wants to know, I scurry to obey its bidding, rather than pay the consequences. It was a lucky thing I knew Susan’s middle and last names—don’t ask me how. My brain has been on these fact-finding missions before—and all I had to do was type them into Facebook. Boom, there were pictures Susan in her current life. Happily fat, married, and raising three kids (one of them in a stroller), at Disney World. She looked very much like any other mom in her late forties or early fifties who didn’t spend most of the eighties strutting around in white lingerie, clutching a teddybear like her virginity depended on it, and shouting tone-deaf lyrics along the sophisticated lines of, “My name is Susan! And I’m a-oozin!”

Then my brain wanted to know what Brenda Bennett was up to. Brenda was the Skanky One, of course, and she was the only one out of the band that could really sing; she attacks her solos songs on both bands’ albums with a nicotine wail like she’s some kind of basso Teena Marie. It’s not really a surprise that on Apollonia 6’s seven tracks, Brenda gets to sing lead on three of them. That’s even more than Apples herself gets, if you don’t count the song in which Apollonia moans orgasmically in Spanish over some pretty flamenco guitars.

Now, I’m sure Brenda wasn’t really a skank in her real life. She seems like an intelligent woman in her current interviews. Yet though she was merely playing the part for videos and album covers . . . damn, she surely did throw herself into the role with the kind of Method vigor that usually nets Daniel Day Lewis an Oscar. When she’s chomping on her gum and a cigarette butt at the same time and growling at the cameras through sex-smudged mascara and blue eyeshadow, she’s freakin’ scary. But Brenda has recently released her own album of bluesy folk music. It’s really nice. I bought it.

But no, my brain still wasn’t satisfied. It had to know one more thing. Whatever happened to the Apollonia 6 movie?

You see, back in the mid-eighties after Purple Rain came out, it was pretty widely reported that Prince was having a movie made featuring Apollonia 6 and a good chunk of their album. It was supposed to be called Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian, and it was supposed to feature actor/singer Ricky Nelson in the lead opposite our three innocents. At the time I followed every news item about the film. I cheered when I read it had been wrapped. I waited and waited. Then I never heard anything about it again. A few years back I heard it had been scrapped, that it was just a rumor and nothing more. But thanks to the internet, where every piece of flotsam eventually washes to shore, I was now able to locate Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian in its entirety. After watching it, even my brain knew that it had reached its terminus for the day.

It’s perfectly clear why Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian never got a release. Simply put, it’s dreadful. It’s awesome, but horrible at the same time. It’s directed by Brian Thomson, the Australian who designed the sets for the original London Rocky Horror Show and managed to show no restraint whatsoever in designing everything in the Rocky Horror movie sequel, Shock Treatment. I’m imagining the conversation between him and Prince, pre-production, ran a little something like this:

THOMSON: So Prince, mate. I’d like to bring to Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian a dark and satirical edge that shows how mercilessly women are exploited and how they are forced to sexualize themselves in order to. . . .
PRINCE: U need 2 find a part 4 Ricky Nelson. I dig “Garden Party.”
THOMSON: Um, sure. I’ve been heavily studying the German Expressionists, particularly Fritz Lang, and I’d like to. . . .
PRINCE: That sounds good. Put in a lot of titty shots. Here’s a check 4 U, Mr. Tungsten.
THOMSON: Thomson.
PRINCE: Whatever. Peace.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian vacillates wildly between pretensions to high art, and the lowest cliches of softcore pornography. The sets and lighting are masterpieces of expressionism—huge constructions, walls of words, mazes of automobiles, stylized shadows, noir black-and-white dashboard shots caught in reflection in the rain. The costumes are theatrical and extravagant. Even Susan’s teddybear gets outfits matching her own. It’s obvious Thomson is trying to make A Major Statement.

But it’s also obvious that the short film is a product of compromise—the biggest compromise being that Apollonia 6 fans didn’t want arty camera work. They wanted to see the girls bustin’ out of their camisoles. He had only a thimbleful of actual talent with which to work, too. The acting is strictly out of My Mom Is a Bondage Slut IV, as when Apollonia gasps at the camera, “But we have nothing to wear!” and not only has to take a breath after the first word but needs to pause and peer at the cue card after her third word as well. The compromises create strange and even comical visual juxtapositions. One moment Thomson is aping the arty craziness of The Night of the Hunter; the next he’s inserting cheesy shots of Apollonia in black leather.

Basically three and a half songs go into the twenty minutes of Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian. (Oddly, the song that gives the movie its title is cut to about a quarter of its length.) Susan’s “Oo She She Wah Wah” is a bit of a throwaway in which Susan stomps around with a bunch of teddybears who turn into the Village People. Brenda’s “Blue Limousine” (after a cringe-worthy beginning in which a strangely lisping truck driver who seems to think he’s in Haulin’ Ass 2: Slippery Roads Ahead leers, “Sssstep right in, girlsss! Your meal ticket has arrived! And it’sss hhhhhhhhhot and waiting!”) is simply terrific.

But it’s Thomson’s video for the band’s single, “Sex Shooter,” that is notable for its je ne sais quoi, its liberal air of what the flippin’ eff? The traditional “Sex Shooter” video has the girls fooling around and gyrating more or less in time to the beat and giving their garters a workout. It’s a song in which the height of lyrical wit is Apollonia imploring listeners to “Come on, kiss the gun.”

But Thomson seems to be auditioning for a shot at directing a grim new version of 1984. He has a dead-faced Buck Henry as Everyman (was he blackmailed into this?) wandering the aisles of a massive concrete supermarket surrounded by aisle after aisle of lifeless advertising and products, attempting to find his place in a world of rampant consumerism that leaves him increasingly moribund both inside and out . . . interspersed with cheesecake shots of Apollonia in black lingerie. He has Buck Henry as Everyman infantilized by unrestricted commercialism, reduced to nothing but his credit card and a scan code, able only to parrot what messages are shouted into his ears . . . interspersed with more shots of Apollonia leaning over to expose her ample cleavage. The video is freakin’ bizarre, y’all. It’s perfectly obvious that Thomson has Something To Say here, but the message has about as much to do with sex shootin’ as do the Teletubbies.

APOLLONIA 6 "Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian" from Videodrome Discothèque on Vimeo.


I can only imagine that when Thomson handed over the final print of Happy Birthday Mr. Christian, Prince probably leered mysteriously through the opening half, smiled during Susan’s teddybear extravaganza, then sat up in his seat during the middle third that “Sex Shooter” occupies, stood up to his full four feet and seven inches, and chased that lousy Ozzie back down under. Then (before he even saw Brenda’s number, which is a shame) he put the video in the very back of his vault and tried to pretend the whole thing never happened.

Levi Kreis. Soundalike songs. The Flirts. Mismatch. Apollonia. Apollonia 6. It’s been days since I ended up watching Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian. My brain’s still reeling.

But not so much that it didn’t wake me up and demand, Hey, you. Why don’t you write about it?

Conversations with My Father: Restaurant Week Edition

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.