The last time my library of books sat on actual bookshelves was in July of 2010. That’s when I packed them away. I’ve not seen them since. Within a couple more months that year, I’d filled our old garage with cardboard boxes of DVDs and photos, of decorations and glassware. Anything that might distract or annoy a prospective homeowner who might want to purchase our house in Michigan went into boxes and into the ever-increasing stacks where the cars used to sit.
Over the course of 2010 and 2011, while Craig was living in Connecticut and I was living in Michigan and trying to keep our house on the market, those cardboard boxes in the garage multiplied month by month. I packed everything that wasn’t essential. Extra blankets and linens. Winter clothing, which I promptly had to unpack and replace with spring clothing as the weather got colder. Winter clothing again, when I had to dig out the warm weather stuff after the months became almost a year. I packed kitchen goods and cat toys, board games and wrapping paper, old treasures and things we’d just purchased. My weekly routine was to hit Home Depot, buy a crapload of cheap cardboard boxes, and then fill them with vacuum bags and clocks and candles and towels and Silpats and spoons and paper reams and extension cords and CDs and the gifts people had given us for Christmas and anniversaries that we never used but with which couldn’t bear to part.
If I wasn’t throwing away stuff—and I threw away a dumpster’s worth of crap we were well rid of, and another dumpster’s worth of stuff that I kind of wish I hadn’t—I packed it into a box, taped it up, and put it in the garage. When we’d moved to that house a little over a decade before, I’d started off with great enthusiasm creating boxes with very clear labels so thoroughly packed with information that they resembled the nutritional data on supermarket goods. (CHRISTMAS ANNUAL COOKBOOKS 1992-2002: 11 LBS. ALUMINUM FOIL/WAX PAPER/PARCHMENT PAPER/FOIL SQUARES/PLASTIC WRAP: 20% BY WEIGHT.)
My organizational zest dimmed very quickly, however, so that after I’d written the equivalent of a master’s thesis on the first few dozen boxes I packed, I was sick enough of the job that I would simply toss into a single carton an old afghan, a half-used bottle of soap bubbles, two winter hats, a weird plastic thing that had been sitting on the kitchen sill for two years because it had dropped off something and we didn’t know what yet we were afraid to throw it away, a broken umbrella, a waste basket, and a tangled skein of old Christmas tree lights and slap on the outside a label that read SEASONAL MISC.
Mystery Boxes, we ended up calling them when we got to the new house. We still had several of them, intact and as undisturbed as Tutankhamen’s tomb, in the crawl space of the house when we started the move to Connecticut. Ten years after they’d been packed, I threw out most of their contents.
I didn’t want any Mystery Boxes on this move. When I put my thousands of books into storage, I’d labeled them by subject matter if I could. If I couldn’t, I’d at least mark from what bookcase and which room they’d come. We’d digitized all our CDs years ago, but I spent three days alphabetizing them and putting the jewel cases into boxes with legends like VANCE’S CDS: BA-CL—just in case we had to find something specific, at some point. If I had to pack my family’s nineteenth-century linens in with a lampshade and a pack of tarot cards, instead of simply slapping the ASST. MISC label on it, I’d write out the crap that was inside. I was thorough, dammit.
Since we were being professionally moved, however, we let the movers do the bulk of the remaining job, the two days before the van left. What they packed tended to be those things I’d deemed necessary until the last minute. If anything, though, the movers tended to lean to my former organizational method. When we arrived in our new neighborhood, we had a dozen boxes marked KITCHEN, but no idea in which the plates or cutlery might be found. Items that we expected to be found in BASEMENT FRONT appeared in UPSTAIRS HALL CLOSET. There are several containers marked LIVING ROOM, but whether they contain books, or pillows, or area rugs, or all three, is a bit of a mystery. Though we rescued my favorite of the stained glass lampshades from its enclosure, intending to use it in our temporary living room, we never did find the base in any of the boxes marked LAMPSHADES/LAMPSTANDS, nor in any of those LIVING ROOM boxes. (I fully expect to find it eventually in SOFT FURNISHINGS/SPARE BEDROOM.)
The movers were extremely thorough in protecting every object with reams and reams of paper, however. I will give them credit for that. I remember well the entire afternoon and evening it took to excavate my kitchen spices from a strata in the middle of a four-and-a-half-foot-high KITCHEN box. It was such a lengthy task because the movers had mummified each spice in two—two!—sheets of of manila wrapping paper roughly a yard square each. Seriously. At first I’d thought I’d hit on a layer of wadded-up paper, and started to throw it all out. Then I realized that if I unscrewed each ball, rolled it out first lengthwise then widthwise, and dug around in the protective kernel within, I’d find a solitary shaker of adobo seasoning, or a teeny-tiny plastic container of cloves. I’m actually dreading the day—soon—when we finally move into our more permanent home and I dive once more into that Mystery Box and discover an ossified container of honey or an equally-petrified Pop-Tart. In their own individual bulky wrappings, of course.
The home that we were promised as part of the job package is finally (finally!) nearing its renovation, meaning we should be able to start moving those boxes once again to their final destination. Save for what we fished out for the kitchen, and save for the clothing we’ve been wearing the last nearly three years, everything we own is still in those boxes. It was impossible to fit the contents of a three-bedroom Colonial in the eight hundred square feet of the one-floor flat we’ve been calling ‘temporary’ since 2011. I haven’t seen their contents for nearly four years at this point.
And you know, for the longest time I actually was able to keep in my head a catalog of what was there. I knew exactly what we’d deemed essential for day-to-day temporary living (potato masher, perpetual calendar, butane lighter) and what still lurked in those hundreds of cartons in storage (cheese grater, glass vases, old journals). If I’d packed the box myself, I knew exactly what was in them; when Craig needed a particular computer dongle, I’d produce it almost instantly from the correct carton in storage, where I’d wedged it inside a coffee mug, several Post-Its, and a cache of pens and paper clips (which had all sat on my home office desk together, thank you very much). For months and months I could perform that kind of miracle conjuring act.
Then—I don’t know when—all that information and muscle memory suddenly all vanished. Maybe I reached a point at which I no longer needed to remember where I’d possibly packed that box of envelopes. Maybe our computer situation became so streamlined that my brain no longer felt the need to keep a complete catalog of the ethernet cords we’d used at our old house. Maybe my brain was so overloaded that it could no longer keep track of Craig’s bowling ball. Whatever the cause, it just all vanished. Now, every box is a Mystery Box again.
The day rapidly approaches when we’ll be moving two doors down and expanding back into a three-bedroom home again. I’m finding myself baffled and a little overwhelmed by the vague memories of belongings that remain. We did used to have a large soup pot, didn’t we? Or is it one of the things we threw out? How about an olive tray? If we had one, why? Did I ever have any rain boots? That stained glass rose lampshade did have a base—didn’t it? What the hell is in those boxes that we haven’t found essential for four years, now?
We keep telling ourselves it’ll be like Christmas when we finally unpack. We toss off that little witticism and laugh lightly about it. But I have a sense of faint unease, even as I joke about it now. Our household is a pared-down version of itself compared to 2010, it’s true—but how it is we’ve managed to do without so many of our things for so long?
I picture us unsheathing each item, one by one, regarding them with puzzlement. They’ll be like quaint museum pieces. Perhaps they’ll have a recognizable function, but no relevance to the mess of debris and gadgets around which we now organize our life than a tin washing board, or a funerary relic. I worry that each object will carry the ache of familiarity, perhaps, but nothing approaching necessity.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Book Review Roundup
One of the things I’ve tended to do, during my adult reading life, is to balance the frivolous and the serious. No matter what I’m reading at the time (and I read a lot of books every year, including a bunch for which I don’t write reviews), I usually try to juggle one Very Serious Nonfiction Tome with the light-hearted fiction to which I am naturally drawn. It makes me feel better if I can look at my queue of books to read and see that there’s a Very Serious Nonfiction Tome to balance out the fact that I’m about to devote the next four weeks of my life re-reading an enormously long fantasy series in which love-crossed scientists on a future planetary settlement have genetically re-engineered giant kittens with wings and titanium claws so they can fight the ecological predators threatening Zeta Colony.
Remember the year I managed to get through thick histories of the Black Plague and biographies of Charles Dickens and the Brontës? Gosh, that was high-class stuff. If that was the apex of my commitment to feeding my brain a well-rounded diet, 2013 was the year in which I went out and bought it a giant tub of Cheez Doodles.
Apparently in 2013, when faced with the task of picking out the next Very Serious Nonfiction Tome, instead of choosing something to expand my horizons and lift my consciousness, I would spy a celebrity biography, snatch it off the shelves, and call it good. That’s why 2013 turned out to be the year in which I read about Tallulah Bankhead and Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse and Jennifer Saunders (sorry, Dawn French, but I haven’t been able to get through Dear Fatty at all) and Garry Marshall and Rita Moreno and Bruce Kimmel and the jaw-dropping experience that is Scotty Bowers’ autobiography.
In 2014 I need to make better brain food choices. God knows I’ll have to do something to counterbalance the Enid Blyton I’ve been inspired to re-read.
Bobby Blanchard Lesbian Gym Teacher (Lesbian Career Girl Series, #2)
by Monica Nolan
To carry off a pulp fiction parody requires both a mastery of period detail and a ear for the cadences of previous decades of—let's face it—often indifferently-written genre literature. Mabel Maney managed the feat admirably in her Nancy Clue trio of burlesques, which put a lesbian spin on familiar detective books for girls. In her Lesbian Career Girl series, Monica Nolan attempts the same sort of seemingly effortless feat.
Bobby Blanchard: Lesbian Gym Teacher's Sapphic sexual content is little more than a few knowing smirks among various members of the all-female cast of characters, and longing glances over pre-dinner cocktails and late-night cups of cocoa. It's all about as erotic as reading a vintage Betty Crocker cookbook, but vastly more fun. Nolan's convincingly resurrects the career-girl romances of a vanished era, and even manages to cross-pollinate the genre with that of the boarding school mystery. It's all done with a conspiratorial, wink-wink nudge-nudge sense of humor and double-entendre that's nearly pitch-perfect.
The mystery itself, though, is a bit of a dud. I would've enjoyed the book as much (or even more) without it intruding every few pages on the campy good fun. I had no idea why a slightly dim instructor of peasant dance and rope-climbing, lesbian or otherwise, would have appointed herself amateur detective. Perhaps the girl investigator territory should be ceded to Mabel Maney and her Nancy Clue; Bobby Blanchard is stout-hearted and a dab hand with a field hockey stick, but no intellectual match for a crime-solving professional. The tears and trials of a career girl lesbian gym teacher would have been story enough.
Dark Cities Underground
by Lisa Goldstein
As a conspiracy theory, Lisa Goldstein's attempt to link Egyptian mythology to world subway systems, Victorian archaeology, children's fantasy literature, and thought control is a goldmine of weird tin-foil hat spooky good stuff. As a literary fantasy, however, Dark Cities Underground is a bit of a mess. Despite an engaging premise, her characters never really connect with each other or their audience; they already stuck in the very archetypal ruts they fear from their repeated visits to the underworld.
I've read this book three or four times at this point, lured by the premise, and still I can't really figure out what happens in the book's muddled, confusing second half. Like most conspiracy theories, Goldstein's novel isn't rewarded by too close an examination, or applying even literary logic to its madcap multiple mythologies.
A College of Magics (A College of Magics, #1)
by Caroline Stevermer
The author has packed into a fin-de-siècle fantasy enough scenarios for multiple separate novels, in A College of Magics. There's a magical-teen coming of age story, a lyrical college novel, a grand tour of Europe adventure, and enough Balkan monarchy intrigue to fill out the plots of a couple of operettas. Thankfully the college and coming-of-age material carries the weaker mechanics of the unstable throne subterfuge—which almost seem as if they might have been relegated to separate volumes. Stevermer's conception of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe graced by magic is charming, however, and the novel's conclusion is an unexpected and lovely grace note.
A Scholar of Magics (A College of Magics, #2)
by Caroline Stevermer
It's a pity that I found A Scholar of Magics so slow-moving and unlikable, when I liked its predecessor, A College of Magics, so very much. Stevermer's scenes spark whenever two or more women dominate the action; it's clear that if she'd stuck to the nearly all-female cast of College, this sequel might have been as interesting. The book bogs down whenever the hero and heroine work together—and a more wooden romance couldn't be found in a coed lumberjack camp.
The Knitter's Life List: To Do, To Know, To Explore, To Make
by Gwen Steege
If you, as a knitter, are so completely devoid of imagination, initiative, drive, and the ability to make endlessly long simple craft-related bucket lists that include the following—
If you, as a knitter, are likely to blink, take pause, and wonder what the hell planet Gwen Steege is from when among her bland maxims she drops the following list items—
Whores of Lost Atlantis: A Novel
by Charles Busch
It's a shame that Charles Busch, playwright and extraordinary channeler of glamorous Hollywood divas that never were, only wrote a single novel. Whores of Lost Atlantis is not even so much a work of fiction as a thinly-disguised autobiography of how Busch assembled the group of actors and improv artists who came to form Theatre in Limbo in the nineteen-eighties—the troupe that with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom became a wild Off-Off-Broadway success and propelled him into stardom.
On stage, Busch may be larger than life, but within the pages of his sole attempt at fiction, he's self-effacing, modest, and nothing at all like the outlandish divas he writes for himself. Though the (slightly) fictionalized version of the truth employs a (slightly) silly crime caper subplot to add some oomph to the proceedings, it's the least-convincing aspect of Busch's writing. What emerges is a sweet-natured tribute to a vanished era when any female impersonator with drive and moxie could become a downtown cult sensation.
Austenland
by Shannon Hale
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady with an inquisitive mind, a well-discerned taste, and both the means and disposition to follow her creative muse, after seating herself at the feast of fertile thought there is to be found in philosophy, in her histories, and in the great authors of literature throughout the centuries, may one day pen a novel of her own that illuminates where there is darkness, provides guidance where there are no pathways, and brings solace where there is little hope.
Readers, this is not that novel. For it is also a truth universally acknowledged that if the young lady in question confines her diet to multiple lazy viewings of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice DVDs, she's likely to poop out the stinking, steaming turd that is Austenland.
The Ogre Downstairs
by Diana Wynne Jones
This whimsical tale of a five-child blended family brought together by the mishaps that occur from a pair of mysterious chemistry sets was one of my favorite books when I was in fourth and fifth grade. I'm always relieved, when I revisit it periodically through the years, that it holds up well. Chemistry sets might not be as in vogue as they were in my youth, but the animus between the two families is recognizable to kids of any decade, as ultimately are the tricky negotiations that both adults and children alike need to make when accepting new people into their lives. Purely delightful.
The Family Tree
by Sheri S. Tepper
For those who find Sheri S. Tepper's authorial preoccupation with eco-feminist issues humorless, The Family Tree is likely to be a revelation. The twin stories intertwined here—one a kitchen-sink detective story set in the present day, and the other an exotic tale of multiple tribespeople on an adventure to save the world—both sparkle with a sly jocularity not seen since Tepper's earliest novels. The moment when the two stories converge is simply magical; the first time I read it, I sat up in my bed, dumbfounded at the neatness of it all.
Tepper is writing at the height of her powers in her fable on the connectedness of all living creatures. As an introduction to her themes and her incredible imaginative skills, The Family Tree is a good introduction to the author's novels, and a ripping good read on its own.
Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods
Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse
by Sheri S. Tepper
As might be intuited by their playful alliterative titles, Sheri S. Tepper's trilogy of Marianne books—Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore, followed by Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods and Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse—are light-hearted caprices. Written early in her career, they're also the shortest of Tepper's output.
Yet they're not slight in imaginative content. Tepper's heroine becomes trapped in a series of alternate, fantasy universes, each with their own oddball and inexorable set of rules from which she must puzzle her way out. Imagination as a wild creative force, and specifically the concept of being trapped in worlds created by the imagination of others, is a conceit that Tepper explores again to deeper and more tragic effect in her later novel, Beauty. But in these short works Marianne's determination to prevail is charming and humorous . . . and sometimes her determination to reshape history in her favor is even a little frightening.
If the third book in the trilogy is a little less compelling than its predecessors, it's simply because the antagonist of the piece never appears until near the book's very end, and it's difficult to take him as much of a threat compared to the terrifying Madame of the first two entries. Still, all three books are among Tepper's most whimsical, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or two.
Fosse
by Sam Wasson
"How much time do I have?" asks Bob Fosse at the start of Sam Wasson's biography of the director and choreographer. Sixty years, as it turns out, as Wasson's chapter headings turn into a relentless countdown of the years--and later, minutes--left before his last, fatal heart attack. It's an effective device, for who among us is not a ticking timebomb with an uncertain expiration date?
Wasson's narrative--expertly researched, exhaustively documented--is as gritty and sometimes as knowingly vulgar as his subject. Its thoroughness, however, is somewhat undermined by a lack of any kind of post-mortem evaluation of Fosse's legacy. Of all his contemporaries, it's Fosse whose name is a household word, and whose style is inseparable from his name. Wasson, however, is so hellbent on ending his work with Fosse keeling over dead in the streets that his countdown gimmick undermines his subject's deeper significance. Fosse's influence didn't end the moment his heart stopped; for as long as he is emulated, imitated, and honored on stage, is as much time as he and his legacy have.
Bonkers: My Life in Laughs
by Jennifer Saunders
Jennifer Saunders, half of the French and Saunders comedy team and creator of the Absolutely Fabulous TV series, is a deeply private person with a vast English reserve. Yes, it's difficult to believe that the woman who spent most of her Ab Fab screen time outrageously drunk and arse-over-knickers is truly shy to the point she's virtually unable to discuss her personal life in an autobiography—which by its very nature is a deeply personal document. Her reticence and hesitation to delve too deeply into her own personal history create a bit of an odd duck of a book, which while not particularly illuminating, is still a fun read.
Saunders is willing to share safe, talk-show friendly anecdotes about how she met Dawn French, the creation of several (but not all) of her comedy projects, her trips abroad. She's utterly unwilling to talk about her wooing of and subsequent marriage to Adrian Edmondson or to her recent three-year battle with breast cancer, as she's obviously more comfortable with light cocktail chatter in the guise of a memoir.
But that's okay. As she points out after an incident in which she confronts paparazzi who invade her family's privacy deep in the rural solitude where they've made a home, Saunders never chased the spotlight or angled for red-carpet appearances. She merely wished to be left alone to write and act, and create her much-loved comedies. Let's be grateful to those have given her imagination free reign for the last thirty years, even if her characters are infinitely more outrageous than their originator and her not-tell-much biography.
Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars
by Scotty Bowers
I have to confess that at several points during Scotty Bowers' sin-sational Hollywood tell-all, Full Service, I would forget that I was reading something allegedly from the non-fiction shelves. Instead I would flip the pages with wide eyes and think, "This satire on Tinseltown memoirs is hi-LAR-ious!" I can't quite think of another autobiography featuring such purple prose and such an unreliable narrator—or in which I've had to suspend, from front to back cover, such a great amount of disbelief. That is, at least, not since Patrick Dennis' devastating fictional parody on the same territory of the glamorous film world, Little Me.
According to Full Service the studios would all but empty of their big-name talent whenever Scotty Bowers' evening shift began at a little gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. That's where he would pimp out (but not for money!) handsome young men and women to some of the hugest stars of Hollywood's golden age. "Oh, Kate, Spence, Judy, Tyrone, George, Cary, Rita," writes the author, mourning the past. One might think he was done, but no. ". . . Charles, Randolph, Edith, Vivien . . . where are you now?" These are but a few of the powerful for whom Bowers arranged sexual trysts with rent-boys and good-time girls (but for which he never received a nickel!), and for whom the well-endowed Bowers performed his 'swizzle-stick trick' when he would bartend private sex parties (at which, both he and no doubt his legal team are intent upon reminding you every fourth paragraph, he never ever EVER received any compensation. He did it out of the goodness of his heart! Honest! Swear to god!).
There's a certain breathless naiveté in Bowers' revelations. Of the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, for example, he sums up the icon in these riveting words: "She was a sad person who seemed to be on the verge of tears all the time. During sex she would say sing-songy things in French!" (The sex was unpaid, of course.) Of the love of his life, Vivien Leigh, he plumbs into the depths of his soul to fish up this poetic apothegm: "She was a hot, hot lady. She was very sexual!" Second only to his affection for Leigh was Eddy. You know. Eddy. Eddy Windsor. His Royal Highness the Royal Duke of Windsor and former King of England, Edward VIII. Well. the gas station restrooms must've been sanitized to an inch of their lives when Eddy and Wallis Simpson showed up to avail themselves of Bowers' (free! donated!) pimping services. Bowers was so generous to the former monarch that he became Eddy's lover out of the goodness of his heart. For free. ("Eddy was good. Really good. He sucked me off like a pro!")
Pity those whom Bowers dislikes—though he really never disliked anyone, he's careful to emphasize, and/or wished to libel any of the hundred and hundreds of celebrities within his pages . . . all of whom are somewhat coincidentally dead and therefore unable to sue. Katharine Hepburn comes in for some of the worst treatment. A frequent consumer of Bowers' (free) services for female prostitutes, Bowers feels compelled, whenever her name is mentioned, to repeat that no one in Hollywood liked working with her, and that she had a bad skin problem. He liked her! Cross his heart! It was everyone else who hated that lousy bull dyke. And yeesh. That crocodile skin!
There are certain chapters in this gloriously naive autobiography that I would be happy never to read or think of again, such as the very long passages devoted to Charles Laughton's disinclination to good sexual hygiene, or to his fondness for a sandwich spread that resembles—yet definitely is not—Nutella. I also did not need to know that the designer of the original Barbie was into surprising young women while fondling himself in a casket. And I am afraid that the phrase 'doo-doo queens' is now permanently etched in my sorry memory.
I'll be honest. I really only believe about twenty percent of Full Service, and that portion consists of verifiable universals such as the notions that cars need gas that can be found at filling stations, or that there is a state named California and Hollywood is a city within its borders. The details of Bowers’ thirty-year career as Hollywood's most notorious (unpaid!) pimp, who cannot even fall asleep on a park bench without a movie star waking him up and employing him (as a volunteer!) for sex . . . well, like any unreliable narrator, I'm not sure I trust a word.
But I certainly had a good time reading about it, with my jaw dropped for the duration.
Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
From its inception, planners and architects intended Grand Central Terminal to become not merely a locus of commerce and industry on 42nd Street, but a testament both to the Beaux Arts ideal and to New York City as an emerging world center. Although Sam Roberts' Grand Central (written for the one hundredth anniversary of the Terminal's debut) is exhaustively researched, it's approachable enough for readers who don't happen to be up on their railroad barons. The book dwells extensively on the history of the New York Central and the New York and Harlem Railroads in the decades before the Terminal's construction, then takes readers through the building's glory days during the first half of the twentieth century. Chapters on its mid-century decline in fortunes, its salvation from destruction, and the renaissance of the the building during the last two decades give the narrative a satisfying arc and conclusion.
Roberts seems more interested in the social history of Grand Central Terminal rather than on its architecture; those searching for a more comprehensive account its builders and artists might be better served elsewhere. But in its chosen focus Grand Central offers up some interesting tidbits about how a single railroad terminal changed a nation—and even a the world—for good. When opened to the public, for example, the Terminal's unique use of sloping walkways led to the adaptation of the word 'ramp' in popular vocabulary—and the railroad system itself transformed the way the population synchronized and time zones.
Grand Central Terminal made a Midtown in Manhattan. This celebration of its glories—and its low points—makes for an engaging read.
The Secret Passage
by Nina Bawden
Considering I was the child who spent hours banging at the basement paneling in my parents' house, hoping to find a hidden spring that would unlock a hitherto-undiscovered chamber, I would have adored Nina Bawden's The Secret Passage. A number of themes in this children's novel are old-fashioned enough that they wouldn't have been amiss in an E. Nesbit classic like The Railway Children—a trio of youths who've lost a parent, a forced relocation to somewhere exotic and strange, the titular secret passage, a number of adults who need the children's intervention to set things right, a lost child, and even a runaway princess of sorts.
Bawden's considerable skill turns all these somewhat hoary tropes on their head. The exotic location is dreary London, while the children's original home is an Africa to which they've become thoroughly acculturated. The secret passage itself isn't much of a secret; it's simply behind a door. The lost child isn't lost—at least not in the way the children think. And the princesse lointaine is one of the most unapologetically disagreeable brats in literature.
It's Bawden's playfulness with these vintage themes, and her willingness to be either humorous or sentimental in equal parts, that makes The Secret Passage a fun read . . . even for an adult like myself, who never quite got over the urge to rap on paneling, hoping to hear a hollow sound beyond.
Five Go Adventuring Again (Famous Five Series, #2)
by Enid Blyton
I have great difficulty making it through an Enid Blyton novel without developing an appetite for great quantities of treacle pudding and lashings of ginger beer.
The Asylum: A Collage of Couture Reminiscences ... and Hysteria
by Simon Doonan
In his books of essays, Simon Doonan has proven he can be both tremendously humorous and touching. His determination to be iconoclastic and outré without being offensive or—heaven forbid—mean renders him into an eccentric little darling, a compact and lovable example of walking drollery free of spite.
Some of his essays in The Asylum are laugh-out-loud funny. But as always with Doonan's books, it's difficult to anticipate what one will be getting from chapter to chapter. He simply tells stories as they occur to him, without chronological organization or overall arcing narrative. The Asylum is nominally focused on the fashion industry, but so loosely that it gives Doonan leeway to ruminate on any of the odd people or experiences he's encountered in his lifetime. One can almost hear his husband in the background between chapters, saying, "Don't forget to tell them about Tom Ford seeing your toenail fungus!" or "Make sure to include about when you auditioned for The Devil Wears Prada!"
Throughout, Doonan manages to be just enough on the outside of the A-List to make the reader feel as if he or she is part of his circle. Although the overall scattershot effect is a little like listening to a garrulous old friend nattering away at a cocktail party, The Asylum—especially taken in small doses—is a rewarding read.
Remember the year I managed to get through thick histories of the Black Plague and biographies of Charles Dickens and the Brontës? Gosh, that was high-class stuff. If that was the apex of my commitment to feeding my brain a well-rounded diet, 2013 was the year in which I went out and bought it a giant tub of Cheez Doodles.
Apparently in 2013, when faced with the task of picking out the next Very Serious Nonfiction Tome, instead of choosing something to expand my horizons and lift my consciousness, I would spy a celebrity biography, snatch it off the shelves, and call it good. That’s why 2013 turned out to be the year in which I read about Tallulah Bankhead and Stephen Sondheim and Bob Fosse and Jennifer Saunders (sorry, Dawn French, but I haven’t been able to get through Dear Fatty at all) and Garry Marshall and Rita Moreno and Bruce Kimmel and the jaw-dropping experience that is Scotty Bowers’ autobiography.
In 2014 I need to make better brain food choices. God knows I’ll have to do something to counterbalance the Enid Blyton I’ve been inspired to re-read.
Bobby Blanchard Lesbian Gym Teacher (Lesbian Career Girl Series, #2)
by Monica Nolan
To carry off a pulp fiction parody requires both a mastery of period detail and a ear for the cadences of previous decades of—let's face it—often indifferently-written genre literature. Mabel Maney managed the feat admirably in her Nancy Clue trio of burlesques, which put a lesbian spin on familiar detective books for girls. In her Lesbian Career Girl series, Monica Nolan attempts the same sort of seemingly effortless feat.
Bobby Blanchard: Lesbian Gym Teacher's Sapphic sexual content is little more than a few knowing smirks among various members of the all-female cast of characters, and longing glances over pre-dinner cocktails and late-night cups of cocoa. It's all about as erotic as reading a vintage Betty Crocker cookbook, but vastly more fun. Nolan's convincingly resurrects the career-girl romances of a vanished era, and even manages to cross-pollinate the genre with that of the boarding school mystery. It's all done with a conspiratorial, wink-wink nudge-nudge sense of humor and double-entendre that's nearly pitch-perfect.
The mystery itself, though, is a bit of a dud. I would've enjoyed the book as much (or even more) without it intruding every few pages on the campy good fun. I had no idea why a slightly dim instructor of peasant dance and rope-climbing, lesbian or otherwise, would have appointed herself amateur detective. Perhaps the girl investigator territory should be ceded to Mabel Maney and her Nancy Clue; Bobby Blanchard is stout-hearted and a dab hand with a field hockey stick, but no intellectual match for a crime-solving professional. The tears and trials of a career girl lesbian gym teacher would have been story enough.
Dark Cities Underground
by Lisa Goldstein
As a conspiracy theory, Lisa Goldstein's attempt to link Egyptian mythology to world subway systems, Victorian archaeology, children's fantasy literature, and thought control is a goldmine of weird tin-foil hat spooky good stuff. As a literary fantasy, however, Dark Cities Underground is a bit of a mess. Despite an engaging premise, her characters never really connect with each other or their audience; they already stuck in the very archetypal ruts they fear from their repeated visits to the underworld.
I've read this book three or four times at this point, lured by the premise, and still I can't really figure out what happens in the book's muddled, confusing second half. Like most conspiracy theories, Goldstein's novel isn't rewarded by too close an examination, or applying even literary logic to its madcap multiple mythologies.
A College of Magics (A College of Magics, #1)
by Caroline Stevermer
The author has packed into a fin-de-siècle fantasy enough scenarios for multiple separate novels, in A College of Magics. There's a magical-teen coming of age story, a lyrical college novel, a grand tour of Europe adventure, and enough Balkan monarchy intrigue to fill out the plots of a couple of operettas. Thankfully the college and coming-of-age material carries the weaker mechanics of the unstable throne subterfuge—which almost seem as if they might have been relegated to separate volumes. Stevermer's conception of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe graced by magic is charming, however, and the novel's conclusion is an unexpected and lovely grace note.
A Scholar of Magics (A College of Magics, #2)
by Caroline Stevermer
It's a pity that I found A Scholar of Magics so slow-moving and unlikable, when I liked its predecessor, A College of Magics, so very much. Stevermer's scenes spark whenever two or more women dominate the action; it's clear that if she'd stuck to the nearly all-female cast of College, this sequel might have been as interesting. The book bogs down whenever the hero and heroine work together—and a more wooden romance couldn't be found in a coed lumberjack camp.
The Knitter's Life List: To Do, To Know, To Explore, To Make
by Gwen Steege
If you, as a knitter, are so completely devoid of imagination, initiative, drive, and the ability to make endlessly long simple craft-related bucket lists that include the following—
"Try knitting on a bus!"—then very likely this book could be for you. If you are a knitter who actually has a couple of brain cells in that noggin of yours sparking around somewhere, however, you likely do not need the author's inane suggestions.
"Try knitting in a car!"
"Knit a scarf!"
"Knit a sweater!"
"Knit a pair of socks!"
"Visit a yarn store!"
"Collect all your needles in one place!"
If you, as a knitter, are likely to blink, take pause, and wonder what the hell planet Gwen Steege is from when among her bland maxims she drops the following list items—
"Watch the film version of Cabaret!"—then you can join me in tossing this book (which is apparently intended for desperate suckers who need a holiday gift for feeble-minded relatives who enjoy knitting) into the compost heap in which it so richly belongs.
"Visit Estonia!"
Whores of Lost Atlantis: A Novel
by Charles Busch
It's a shame that Charles Busch, playwright and extraordinary channeler of glamorous Hollywood divas that never were, only wrote a single novel. Whores of Lost Atlantis is not even so much a work of fiction as a thinly-disguised autobiography of how Busch assembled the group of actors and improv artists who came to form Theatre in Limbo in the nineteen-eighties—the troupe that with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom became a wild Off-Off-Broadway success and propelled him into stardom.
On stage, Busch may be larger than life, but within the pages of his sole attempt at fiction, he's self-effacing, modest, and nothing at all like the outlandish divas he writes for himself. Though the (slightly) fictionalized version of the truth employs a (slightly) silly crime caper subplot to add some oomph to the proceedings, it's the least-convincing aspect of Busch's writing. What emerges is a sweet-natured tribute to a vanished era when any female impersonator with drive and moxie could become a downtown cult sensation.
Austenland
by Shannon Hale
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young lady with an inquisitive mind, a well-discerned taste, and both the means and disposition to follow her creative muse, after seating herself at the feast of fertile thought there is to be found in philosophy, in her histories, and in the great authors of literature throughout the centuries, may one day pen a novel of her own that illuminates where there is darkness, provides guidance where there are no pathways, and brings solace where there is little hope.
Readers, this is not that novel. For it is also a truth universally acknowledged that if the young lady in question confines her diet to multiple lazy viewings of the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice DVDs, she's likely to poop out the stinking, steaming turd that is Austenland.
The Ogre Downstairs
by Diana Wynne Jones
This whimsical tale of a five-child blended family brought together by the mishaps that occur from a pair of mysterious chemistry sets was one of my favorite books when I was in fourth and fifth grade. I'm always relieved, when I revisit it periodically through the years, that it holds up well. Chemistry sets might not be as in vogue as they were in my youth, but the animus between the two families is recognizable to kids of any decade, as ultimately are the tricky negotiations that both adults and children alike need to make when accepting new people into their lives. Purely delightful.
The Family Tree
by Sheri S. Tepper
For those who find Sheri S. Tepper's authorial preoccupation with eco-feminist issues humorless, The Family Tree is likely to be a revelation. The twin stories intertwined here—one a kitchen-sink detective story set in the present day, and the other an exotic tale of multiple tribespeople on an adventure to save the world—both sparkle with a sly jocularity not seen since Tepper's earliest novels. The moment when the two stories converge is simply magical; the first time I read it, I sat up in my bed, dumbfounded at the neatness of it all.
Tepper is writing at the height of her powers in her fable on the connectedness of all living creatures. As an introduction to her themes and her incredible imaginative skills, The Family Tree is a good introduction to the author's novels, and a ripping good read on its own.
Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods
Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse
by Sheri S. Tepper
As might be intuited by their playful alliterative titles, Sheri S. Tepper's trilogy of Marianne books—Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore, followed by Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods and Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse—are light-hearted caprices. Written early in her career, they're also the shortest of Tepper's output.
Yet they're not slight in imaginative content. Tepper's heroine becomes trapped in a series of alternate, fantasy universes, each with their own oddball and inexorable set of rules from which she must puzzle her way out. Imagination as a wild creative force, and specifically the concept of being trapped in worlds created by the imagination of others, is a conceit that Tepper explores again to deeper and more tragic effect in her later novel, Beauty. But in these short works Marianne's determination to prevail is charming and humorous . . . and sometimes her determination to reshape history in her favor is even a little frightening.
If the third book in the trilogy is a little less compelling than its predecessors, it's simply because the antagonist of the piece never appears until near the book's very end, and it's difficult to take him as much of a threat compared to the terrifying Madame of the first two entries. Still, all three books are among Tepper's most whimsical, and can easily be consumed in an afternoon or two.
Fosse
by Sam Wasson
"How much time do I have?" asks Bob Fosse at the start of Sam Wasson's biography of the director and choreographer. Sixty years, as it turns out, as Wasson's chapter headings turn into a relentless countdown of the years--and later, minutes--left before his last, fatal heart attack. It's an effective device, for who among us is not a ticking timebomb with an uncertain expiration date?
Wasson's narrative--expertly researched, exhaustively documented--is as gritty and sometimes as knowingly vulgar as his subject. Its thoroughness, however, is somewhat undermined by a lack of any kind of post-mortem evaluation of Fosse's legacy. Of all his contemporaries, it's Fosse whose name is a household word, and whose style is inseparable from his name. Wasson, however, is so hellbent on ending his work with Fosse keeling over dead in the streets that his countdown gimmick undermines his subject's deeper significance. Fosse's influence didn't end the moment his heart stopped; for as long as he is emulated, imitated, and honored on stage, is as much time as he and his legacy have.
Bonkers: My Life in Laughs
by Jennifer Saunders
Jennifer Saunders, half of the French and Saunders comedy team and creator of the Absolutely Fabulous TV series, is a deeply private person with a vast English reserve. Yes, it's difficult to believe that the woman who spent most of her Ab Fab screen time outrageously drunk and arse-over-knickers is truly shy to the point she's virtually unable to discuss her personal life in an autobiography—which by its very nature is a deeply personal document. Her reticence and hesitation to delve too deeply into her own personal history create a bit of an odd duck of a book, which while not particularly illuminating, is still a fun read.
Saunders is willing to share safe, talk-show friendly anecdotes about how she met Dawn French, the creation of several (but not all) of her comedy projects, her trips abroad. She's utterly unwilling to talk about her wooing of and subsequent marriage to Adrian Edmondson or to her recent three-year battle with breast cancer, as she's obviously more comfortable with light cocktail chatter in the guise of a memoir.
But that's okay. As she points out after an incident in which she confronts paparazzi who invade her family's privacy deep in the rural solitude where they've made a home, Saunders never chased the spotlight or angled for red-carpet appearances. She merely wished to be left alone to write and act, and create her much-loved comedies. Let's be grateful to those have given her imagination free reign for the last thirty years, even if her characters are infinitely more outrageous than their originator and her not-tell-much biography.
Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars
by Scotty Bowers
I have to confess that at several points during Scotty Bowers' sin-sational Hollywood tell-all, Full Service, I would forget that I was reading something allegedly from the non-fiction shelves. Instead I would flip the pages with wide eyes and think, "This satire on Tinseltown memoirs is hi-LAR-ious!" I can't quite think of another autobiography featuring such purple prose and such an unreliable narrator—or in which I've had to suspend, from front to back cover, such a great amount of disbelief. That is, at least, not since Patrick Dennis' devastating fictional parody on the same territory of the glamorous film world, Little Me.
According to Full Service the studios would all but empty of their big-name talent whenever Scotty Bowers' evening shift began at a little gas station on Hollywood Boulevard. That's where he would pimp out (but not for money!) handsome young men and women to some of the hugest stars of Hollywood's golden age. "Oh, Kate, Spence, Judy, Tyrone, George, Cary, Rita," writes the author, mourning the past. One might think he was done, but no. ". . . Charles, Randolph, Edith, Vivien . . . where are you now?" These are but a few of the powerful for whom Bowers arranged sexual trysts with rent-boys and good-time girls (but for which he never received a nickel!), and for whom the well-endowed Bowers performed his 'swizzle-stick trick' when he would bartend private sex parties (at which, both he and no doubt his legal team are intent upon reminding you every fourth paragraph, he never ever EVER received any compensation. He did it out of the goodness of his heart! Honest! Swear to god!).
There's a certain breathless naiveté in Bowers' revelations. Of the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, for example, he sums up the icon in these riveting words: "She was a sad person who seemed to be on the verge of tears all the time. During sex she would say sing-songy things in French!" (The sex was unpaid, of course.) Of the love of his life, Vivien Leigh, he plumbs into the depths of his soul to fish up this poetic apothegm: "She was a hot, hot lady. She was very sexual!" Second only to his affection for Leigh was Eddy. You know. Eddy. Eddy Windsor. His Royal Highness the Royal Duke of Windsor and former King of England, Edward VIII. Well. the gas station restrooms must've been sanitized to an inch of their lives when Eddy and Wallis Simpson showed up to avail themselves of Bowers' (free! donated!) pimping services. Bowers was so generous to the former monarch that he became Eddy's lover out of the goodness of his heart. For free. ("Eddy was good. Really good. He sucked me off like a pro!")
Pity those whom Bowers dislikes—though he really never disliked anyone, he's careful to emphasize, and/or wished to libel any of the hundred and hundreds of celebrities within his pages . . . all of whom are somewhat coincidentally dead and therefore unable to sue. Katharine Hepburn comes in for some of the worst treatment. A frequent consumer of Bowers' (free) services for female prostitutes, Bowers feels compelled, whenever her name is mentioned, to repeat that no one in Hollywood liked working with her, and that she had a bad skin problem. He liked her! Cross his heart! It was everyone else who hated that lousy bull dyke. And yeesh. That crocodile skin!
There are certain chapters in this gloriously naive autobiography that I would be happy never to read or think of again, such as the very long passages devoted to Charles Laughton's disinclination to good sexual hygiene, or to his fondness for a sandwich spread that resembles—yet definitely is not—Nutella. I also did not need to know that the designer of the original Barbie was into surprising young women while fondling himself in a casket. And I am afraid that the phrase 'doo-doo queens' is now permanently etched in my sorry memory.
I'll be honest. I really only believe about twenty percent of Full Service, and that portion consists of verifiable universals such as the notions that cars need gas that can be found at filling stations, or that there is a state named California and Hollywood is a city within its borders. The details of Bowers’ thirty-year career as Hollywood's most notorious (unpaid!) pimp, who cannot even fall asleep on a park bench without a movie star waking him up and employing him (as a volunteer!) for sex . . . well, like any unreliable narrator, I'm not sure I trust a word.
But I certainly had a good time reading about it, with my jaw dropped for the duration.
Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America
by Sam Roberts
From its inception, planners and architects intended Grand Central Terminal to become not merely a locus of commerce and industry on 42nd Street, but a testament both to the Beaux Arts ideal and to New York City as an emerging world center. Although Sam Roberts' Grand Central (written for the one hundredth anniversary of the Terminal's debut) is exhaustively researched, it's approachable enough for readers who don't happen to be up on their railroad barons. The book dwells extensively on the history of the New York Central and the New York and Harlem Railroads in the decades before the Terminal's construction, then takes readers through the building's glory days during the first half of the twentieth century. Chapters on its mid-century decline in fortunes, its salvation from destruction, and the renaissance of the the building during the last two decades give the narrative a satisfying arc and conclusion.
Roberts seems more interested in the social history of Grand Central Terminal rather than on its architecture; those searching for a more comprehensive account its builders and artists might be better served elsewhere. But in its chosen focus Grand Central offers up some interesting tidbits about how a single railroad terminal changed a nation—and even a the world—for good. When opened to the public, for example, the Terminal's unique use of sloping walkways led to the adaptation of the word 'ramp' in popular vocabulary—and the railroad system itself transformed the way the population synchronized and time zones.
Grand Central Terminal made a Midtown in Manhattan. This celebration of its glories—and its low points—makes for an engaging read.
The Secret Passage
by Nina Bawden
Considering I was the child who spent hours banging at the basement paneling in my parents' house, hoping to find a hidden spring that would unlock a hitherto-undiscovered chamber, I would have adored Nina Bawden's The Secret Passage. A number of themes in this children's novel are old-fashioned enough that they wouldn't have been amiss in an E. Nesbit classic like The Railway Children—a trio of youths who've lost a parent, a forced relocation to somewhere exotic and strange, the titular secret passage, a number of adults who need the children's intervention to set things right, a lost child, and even a runaway princess of sorts.
Bawden's considerable skill turns all these somewhat hoary tropes on their head. The exotic location is dreary London, while the children's original home is an Africa to which they've become thoroughly acculturated. The secret passage itself isn't much of a secret; it's simply behind a door. The lost child isn't lost—at least not in the way the children think. And the princesse lointaine is one of the most unapologetically disagreeable brats in literature.
It's Bawden's playfulness with these vintage themes, and her willingness to be either humorous or sentimental in equal parts, that makes The Secret Passage a fun read . . . even for an adult like myself, who never quite got over the urge to rap on paneling, hoping to hear a hollow sound beyond.
Five Go Adventuring Again (Famous Five Series, #2)
by Enid Blyton
I have great difficulty making it through an Enid Blyton novel without developing an appetite for great quantities of treacle pudding and lashings of ginger beer.
The Asylum: A Collage of Couture Reminiscences ... and Hysteria
by Simon Doonan
In his books of essays, Simon Doonan has proven he can be both tremendously humorous and touching. His determination to be iconoclastic and outré without being offensive or—heaven forbid—mean renders him into an eccentric little darling, a compact and lovable example of walking drollery free of spite.
Some of his essays in The Asylum are laugh-out-loud funny. But as always with Doonan's books, it's difficult to anticipate what one will be getting from chapter to chapter. He simply tells stories as they occur to him, without chronological organization or overall arcing narrative. The Asylum is nominally focused on the fashion industry, but so loosely that it gives Doonan leeway to ruminate on any of the odd people or experiences he's encountered in his lifetime. One can almost hear his husband in the background between chapters, saying, "Don't forget to tell them about Tom Ford seeing your toenail fungus!" or "Make sure to include about when you auditioned for The Devil Wears Prada!"
Throughout, Doonan manages to be just enough on the outside of the A-List to make the reader feel as if he or she is part of his circle. Although the overall scattershot effect is a little like listening to a garrulous old friend nattering away at a cocktail party, The Asylum—especially taken in small doses—is a rewarding read.
Monday, December 30, 2013
The Man Who Knits
A few weeks ago I was sitting at the church reception desk for which I volunteer, when a woman walked in from the parking lot. Often on my regular shift there’s quite a bit to be done around the office—mailings to be sent out, postcards needing postage, bulletins that have to be folded and collated and placed in cunning bundles in one of the hundreds of wicker baskets that the women of the church have apparently been hoarding since the original Easter. That kind of thing.
On this particular day, though, I’d zipped through my tasks, I’d read a couple of chapters in my book of the moment, tended to my flowers in Animal Crossing, and had finally opened my knitting box and hauled out the piece on which I’d been working for a while. Even rolled up, it was quite a huge creation. Picture, if you will, a hood that stretches up and over the top and back of the head. To either side, add long individual scarves that hang down a yard and a half to the ankles. The entire thing is rendered in garter stitch that makes it resemble chain mail. Whenever I’d work on it at home, Craig would stare at it and say at every opportunity, “We are the Knights Who Say Ni!”
There I was with about five pounds of wool in my lap, patiently knitting away, when the outside doors opened and a woman walked in. She wasn’t a church member. But she had an appointment with the pastor, and after I undertook a short trip on foot to ensure he was in his office, I walked back to the office to show her in. “Oh,” she said, stopping at my desk. “Are you the man who knits?”
Now, often when I’m just talking to people in a casual manner, that is, without planned talking points or in a non-public-speaking kind of way, I have a tendency to take long pauses between words and phrases. I do so not because I’m unskilled with my native tongue or because I’m having a moment of aphasia. It happens because my imagination is always racing ahead. My slower cognitive processes, like moving my lips and producing sounds, are lagging behind. When this stranger asked that question—Are you the man who knits?—I had several simultaneous visions.
One was of Geraldo Rivera, wearing one of his pinstripe suits hewn out of shiny fabric, and weighed down by a massive white calf-length coat made out of artificial Alaskan Husky fur, standing on a mountainside in a blinding snowstorm. “Experts say he’s a legend,” says Rivera into the TV camera lens as flakes accumulate on his thick mustache. “Locals in this remote region, however, tell another story.” Then onto the screen he thrusts a grainy black-and-white photograph, enlarged, featuring a blurry boot half-visible behind a tree. “Has one brave scientist finally found evidence of. . . .” he intones, as the show’s frantic theme music plays, “. . . THE MAN WHO KNITS?”
Another was a cinematic sweep through a cheap seaside carny from the nineteen-thirties. We see a flame-eater. A corseted girl on a unicycle. A guy in striped pants juggling knives. We pass the funhouse, the cotton candy vendor, and zoom into the sideshow. There, on plain display beneath their lurid posters are the outcasts, the freaks, the sad dregs that the curious pay their dimes to see so they can titter and shiver and return home secure in the knowledge that they’re better off than these caged oddities. The Gorilla Woman. The Dog-Faced Boy. A pair of sad Siamese Twins. The Rubber Man. And most frightening of all and rarely seen: THE MAN WHO KNITS.
A third was set at a zoo, where parents are noticing that their children are ignoring the monkeys working so hard to be entertaining, and instead are crowding around a cage where they laugh and point. One girl is even crying. It is THE MAN WHO KNITS, sitting on a stool with one knee crossed over the other, licking his lips so he can moisten the end of a piece of yarn to put it through the eye of a tapestry needles. “Get away!” shout the panicked mothers and fathers. “You’ll get ideas! Come watch the monkeys flinging shit at each other instead!”
As I say, all that passed through my head in the space of a second and a half while I stood there and looked at the woman. What came out of my mouth, eventually, was “Beg pardon?”
“The man who knits,” she repeated. “I heard that The Man Who Knits goes to this church.”
Another cinematic flash: this time of the housewives of Greenwich thronging the aisles of Whole Foods Market, dressed in their lululemon and Talbot’s, blond bobs swinging beneath their velvet headbands as in turn they whisper in each others’ ears. “That’s the place with THE MAN WHO KNITS.”
“I have a reputation, then?” I asked in the mildest of tones. Then I led her into the office.
Men who knit aren’t uncommon, of course. We are legion. But either we aren’t as open about taking our hobby out into public as we could be, or else everyone’s gender priorities are still screwed up. The sight of me with an acre of garter stitched Monty Python hood in my lap doesn’t tend to elicit so much the question of “Oh hey, what’re you making?” as it does barely-veiled variations of queries that essentially boil down to, “You KNIT? How can you?! Doesn’t your PENIS GET IN THE WAY?”
I took up knitting only two years ago, after we moved to the New York suburbs. Suddenly I didn’t have the space to have the glass workshop I kept in Michigan, where I made stained glass panels and lamps and worked glass in my kiln. That was all packed away and in storage, and there was no telling when I’d be able to get back to it again. And I didn’t choose knitting because I’d always wanted to do it, or anything. I’ve learned over the years that I need some kind of constructive hobby to keep my hands busy and my brain calm. In my new circumstances, I needed a hobby that was going to be small and self-contained, and used supplies I could get fairly easily. Coincidentally I also needed winter hats and scarves and gloves, since all of mine were packed away in storage, god knew where.
Also—and this part is most important—I needed to find a hobby that would give me an excuse to watch hours of cheesy television. The theory being, of course, that a creative occupation would cancel out my bad television choices, much as a single brussels sprout redeems a weekend of binging on brownies.
Knitting fit the bill. I could fit most of the components into a box. I could wear the stuff I made. Yarn could be colorful, like glass. So I bought a pair of cheap needles and a skein of cheap yarn to see if I could actually do it. Several hours later, I had a knotty, sweaty little swatch that I could barely cast off the needles, I’d pulled the yarn so tight. I couldn’t purl. It was too difficult and it reduced me to actual tears. But I could knit, dammit. Here I am almost exactly two years later, with a number of scarves, countless hats, several mittens, a couple of sweaters, and one long Knights Who Say Ni hood trailing behind him.
One of the things I’ve done over these last couple of years is to try to learn new techniques and face new challenges with every new project. I graduated from a simple scarf to a scarf that alternated colors, and that used some stitches I hadn’t encountered the first time around. From there I learned how to knit in the round and how to increase and decrease, and then how one could pick up little details like thumbs for mittens. The sweaters were an undergraduate course in themselves, as I dealt with all kinds of concepts that were new to me.
More often than not, the difficulty level of the projects I’d spy and like was way over my head. The pattern instructions would make my eyes cross and glaze. “That’s too hard,” I’d say, as I’d regretfully put the patterns in a queue so I could review them when I had the skill level to understand. The Knights of Ni hood was one of those deferred pattern. I saw it the first month I started, and when I couldn’t make head nor tail out of all the talk of short rows or provisional cast-ons, so I set it aside until a time when I could. It’d come, sooner or later. I just didn’t know when.
This last week, I discovered that the time is apparently now. When I’d chugged through the hood project, I discovered that what was once intimidating and scary was actually a little bit boring for my present skill level; there were times, needling my way down those Rapunzel-like scarves on the sides, the pattern was so easy that I wondered if the simplicity of it might make me give up the project out of tedium. Then right before Christmas I cast on another project on my needles that I’d delayed for a year and a half because it was so incomprehensible. I finished it in two sittings.
After that, I pondered what to do next. Which of the scary, out-of-reach patterns would I attempt? I hadn’t learned cables. You know, cables. The raised patterns on sweaters that can be either intricate or gently sinuous. I knew the theory behind cables. I just didn’t like cables. Cables reminded me of Christmas, 1977, when I was in seventh grade.
That was the Christmas on which I received no less than four sweaters from varying relatives in shades of decaying avocado green, bruise-colored puce, jaundice yellow, and raging venereal disease red, all thickly crusted with cables. The sweaters were warm, I’m sure, but like most of the clothing adults would pick out for me in those days none of them were quite right. The shades were of a identifiable hue that today, if a Project Runway contestant used any one of them, Tim Gunn would look exasperated, put his hands on his hips, and say, “Heavens to Betsy! Are you trying to resurrect nineteen-seventy-seven?!” But though of their era, they still weren’t quite the colors the popular kids wore at school. And cables were so out. I endured a winter and spring beneath those four awful sweaters, and once I grew out of them, I never wore cabled wool again.
It was with a sigh that I got out some scrap yarn and assayed a swatch with cables. It was easy, as I thought they would be. I tried another. Easy again. I also made the felicitous discovery that while cables on store-bought men’s sweaters are still kind of sickening, the cables one makes oneself are awesome.
It was when I went back to look at the patterns I’d queued over the last couple of years that I made a discovery. The night after the cable experiment I was looking through the PDF files I store on my tablet, one by one, trying to figure out which to tackle next. That doesn’t look hard anymore, I’d say about a sweater that previously seemed as mysterious and arcane as an old alchemic formula. Before, I would read a pattern and start to get confused after the initial instructions of Collect your yarn from the closet. I’d see the charts and array of abbreviations think, I could NEVER do that!, and work on something more suitable for my grasp.
In what seemed like a sudden turnaround, though, I was looking at all these patterns—all of them—and I would see how they worked, and think to myself, Yeah, I could do that. Or, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be all that tough. Or, I get how this chart works, now. Or, Maybe I haven’t tried this exact technique yet, but how tough could it be? It was a pretty great moment. It was like learning the building blocks of a foreign language well enough so that when I stepped into the public square of a European city, the people talking around me weren’t making mere noise, or individual occasional words connected by gibberish. It was as if the babble receded, and entire conversations took their place.
It was my Miracle Worker moment, dammit. Let me have it.
I know I haven’t learned everything. There’s no point in a hobby when there’s nothing left to explore. But I’m no longer going to look at a photograph of a knitted object and say to myself, “Oooo, that looks impossible. Maybe some day!”
I’m going to be all, “Girl, hand me my leather needle case. Then stand back for a couple of weeks and watch me knock that sucker right out.”
That’s right. Fear me. For I am The Man Who Knits.
On this particular day, though, I’d zipped through my tasks, I’d read a couple of chapters in my book of the moment, tended to my flowers in Animal Crossing, and had finally opened my knitting box and hauled out the piece on which I’d been working for a while. Even rolled up, it was quite a huge creation. Picture, if you will, a hood that stretches up and over the top and back of the head. To either side, add long individual scarves that hang down a yard and a half to the ankles. The entire thing is rendered in garter stitch that makes it resemble chain mail. Whenever I’d work on it at home, Craig would stare at it and say at every opportunity, “We are the Knights Who Say Ni!”
There I was with about five pounds of wool in my lap, patiently knitting away, when the outside doors opened and a woman walked in. She wasn’t a church member. But she had an appointment with the pastor, and after I undertook a short trip on foot to ensure he was in his office, I walked back to the office to show her in. “Oh,” she said, stopping at my desk. “Are you the man who knits?”
Now, often when I’m just talking to people in a casual manner, that is, without planned talking points or in a non-public-speaking kind of way, I have a tendency to take long pauses between words and phrases. I do so not because I’m unskilled with my native tongue or because I’m having a moment of aphasia. It happens because my imagination is always racing ahead. My slower cognitive processes, like moving my lips and producing sounds, are lagging behind. When this stranger asked that question—Are you the man who knits?—I had several simultaneous visions.
One was of Geraldo Rivera, wearing one of his pinstripe suits hewn out of shiny fabric, and weighed down by a massive white calf-length coat made out of artificial Alaskan Husky fur, standing on a mountainside in a blinding snowstorm. “Experts say he’s a legend,” says Rivera into the TV camera lens as flakes accumulate on his thick mustache. “Locals in this remote region, however, tell another story.” Then onto the screen he thrusts a grainy black-and-white photograph, enlarged, featuring a blurry boot half-visible behind a tree. “Has one brave scientist finally found evidence of. . . .” he intones, as the show’s frantic theme music plays, “. . . THE MAN WHO KNITS?”
Another was a cinematic sweep through a cheap seaside carny from the nineteen-thirties. We see a flame-eater. A corseted girl on a unicycle. A guy in striped pants juggling knives. We pass the funhouse, the cotton candy vendor, and zoom into the sideshow. There, on plain display beneath their lurid posters are the outcasts, the freaks, the sad dregs that the curious pay their dimes to see so they can titter and shiver and return home secure in the knowledge that they’re better off than these caged oddities. The Gorilla Woman. The Dog-Faced Boy. A pair of sad Siamese Twins. The Rubber Man. And most frightening of all and rarely seen: THE MAN WHO KNITS.
A third was set at a zoo, where parents are noticing that their children are ignoring the monkeys working so hard to be entertaining, and instead are crowding around a cage where they laugh and point. One girl is even crying. It is THE MAN WHO KNITS, sitting on a stool with one knee crossed over the other, licking his lips so he can moisten the end of a piece of yarn to put it through the eye of a tapestry needles. “Get away!” shout the panicked mothers and fathers. “You’ll get ideas! Come watch the monkeys flinging shit at each other instead!”
As I say, all that passed through my head in the space of a second and a half while I stood there and looked at the woman. What came out of my mouth, eventually, was “Beg pardon?”
“The man who knits,” she repeated. “I heard that The Man Who Knits goes to this church.”
Another cinematic flash: this time of the housewives of Greenwich thronging the aisles of Whole Foods Market, dressed in their lululemon and Talbot’s, blond bobs swinging beneath their velvet headbands as in turn they whisper in each others’ ears. “That’s the place with THE MAN WHO KNITS.”
“I have a reputation, then?” I asked in the mildest of tones. Then I led her into the office.
Men who knit aren’t uncommon, of course. We are legion. But either we aren’t as open about taking our hobby out into public as we could be, or else everyone’s gender priorities are still screwed up. The sight of me with an acre of garter stitched Monty Python hood in my lap doesn’t tend to elicit so much the question of “Oh hey, what’re you making?” as it does barely-veiled variations of queries that essentially boil down to, “You KNIT? How can you?! Doesn’t your PENIS GET IN THE WAY?”
I took up knitting only two years ago, after we moved to the New York suburbs. Suddenly I didn’t have the space to have the glass workshop I kept in Michigan, where I made stained glass panels and lamps and worked glass in my kiln. That was all packed away and in storage, and there was no telling when I’d be able to get back to it again. And I didn’t choose knitting because I’d always wanted to do it, or anything. I’ve learned over the years that I need some kind of constructive hobby to keep my hands busy and my brain calm. In my new circumstances, I needed a hobby that was going to be small and self-contained, and used supplies I could get fairly easily. Coincidentally I also needed winter hats and scarves and gloves, since all of mine were packed away in storage, god knew where.
Also—and this part is most important—I needed to find a hobby that would give me an excuse to watch hours of cheesy television. The theory being, of course, that a creative occupation would cancel out my bad television choices, much as a single brussels sprout redeems a weekend of binging on brownies.
Knitting fit the bill. I could fit most of the components into a box. I could wear the stuff I made. Yarn could be colorful, like glass. So I bought a pair of cheap needles and a skein of cheap yarn to see if I could actually do it. Several hours later, I had a knotty, sweaty little swatch that I could barely cast off the needles, I’d pulled the yarn so tight. I couldn’t purl. It was too difficult and it reduced me to actual tears. But I could knit, dammit. Here I am almost exactly two years later, with a number of scarves, countless hats, several mittens, a couple of sweaters, and one long Knights Who Say Ni hood trailing behind him.
One of the things I’ve done over these last couple of years is to try to learn new techniques and face new challenges with every new project. I graduated from a simple scarf to a scarf that alternated colors, and that used some stitches I hadn’t encountered the first time around. From there I learned how to knit in the round and how to increase and decrease, and then how one could pick up little details like thumbs for mittens. The sweaters were an undergraduate course in themselves, as I dealt with all kinds of concepts that were new to me.
More often than not, the difficulty level of the projects I’d spy and like was way over my head. The pattern instructions would make my eyes cross and glaze. “That’s too hard,” I’d say, as I’d regretfully put the patterns in a queue so I could review them when I had the skill level to understand. The Knights of Ni hood was one of those deferred pattern. I saw it the first month I started, and when I couldn’t make head nor tail out of all the talk of short rows or provisional cast-ons, so I set it aside until a time when I could. It’d come, sooner or later. I just didn’t know when.
This last week, I discovered that the time is apparently now. When I’d chugged through the hood project, I discovered that what was once intimidating and scary was actually a little bit boring for my present skill level; there were times, needling my way down those Rapunzel-like scarves on the sides, the pattern was so easy that I wondered if the simplicity of it might make me give up the project out of tedium. Then right before Christmas I cast on another project on my needles that I’d delayed for a year and a half because it was so incomprehensible. I finished it in two sittings.
After that, I pondered what to do next. Which of the scary, out-of-reach patterns would I attempt? I hadn’t learned cables. You know, cables. The raised patterns on sweaters that can be either intricate or gently sinuous. I knew the theory behind cables. I just didn’t like cables. Cables reminded me of Christmas, 1977, when I was in seventh grade.
That was the Christmas on which I received no less than four sweaters from varying relatives in shades of decaying avocado green, bruise-colored puce, jaundice yellow, and raging venereal disease red, all thickly crusted with cables. The sweaters were warm, I’m sure, but like most of the clothing adults would pick out for me in those days none of them were quite right. The shades were of a identifiable hue that today, if a Project Runway contestant used any one of them, Tim Gunn would look exasperated, put his hands on his hips, and say, “Heavens to Betsy! Are you trying to resurrect nineteen-seventy-seven?!” But though of their era, they still weren’t quite the colors the popular kids wore at school. And cables were so out. I endured a winter and spring beneath those four awful sweaters, and once I grew out of them, I never wore cabled wool again.
It was with a sigh that I got out some scrap yarn and assayed a swatch with cables. It was easy, as I thought they would be. I tried another. Easy again. I also made the felicitous discovery that while cables on store-bought men’s sweaters are still kind of sickening, the cables one makes oneself are awesome.
It was when I went back to look at the patterns I’d queued over the last couple of years that I made a discovery. The night after the cable experiment I was looking through the PDF files I store on my tablet, one by one, trying to figure out which to tackle next. That doesn’t look hard anymore, I’d say about a sweater that previously seemed as mysterious and arcane as an old alchemic formula. Before, I would read a pattern and start to get confused after the initial instructions of Collect your yarn from the closet. I’d see the charts and array of abbreviations think, I could NEVER do that!, and work on something more suitable for my grasp.
In what seemed like a sudden turnaround, though, I was looking at all these patterns—all of them—and I would see how they worked, and think to myself, Yeah, I could do that. Or, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be all that tough. Or, I get how this chart works, now. Or, Maybe I haven’t tried this exact technique yet, but how tough could it be? It was a pretty great moment. It was like learning the building blocks of a foreign language well enough so that when I stepped into the public square of a European city, the people talking around me weren’t making mere noise, or individual occasional words connected by gibberish. It was as if the babble receded, and entire conversations took their place.
It was my Miracle Worker moment, dammit. Let me have it.
I know I haven’t learned everything. There’s no point in a hobby when there’s nothing left to explore. But I’m no longer going to look at a photograph of a knitted object and say to myself, “Oooo, that looks impossible. Maybe some day!”
I’m going to be all, “Girl, hand me my leather needle case. Then stand back for a couple of weeks and watch me knock that sucker right out.”
That’s right. Fear me. For I am The Man Who Knits.
Friday, December 20, 2013
In the Kitchen with Vance and Craig
My friend Andrew used to say that relationships are very much a series of negotiations about outsourcing. That is, contracting to one’s partner jobs one would rather not perform, often in exchange for another task instead. For example, after what felt like an endless decade of pushing a lawn mower for hire during my adolescence, I had absolutely no desire to mow my own yard in either of the houses we owned. I outsourced that to the Craig Corporation, who didn’t find the chore as off-putting. In return, Vance Industries got stuck with weeding duty—which I didn’t exactly enjoy, but which was better than looking at the exhaust end of a lawn mower.
A lot of these trade-offs tend to be wordless exchanges that evolve with the relationship. I tend to be vague about dates. I mean, really vague. The kind of vague that makes patients with advanced Alzheimer’s seem really on the ball. My most common question about dates is not along the lines of What is today, the 16th? or even It’s Friday, right? No, I’m more likely to wrinkle my brow, try to get a few feeble brain cells a-sparking, and mumble, “Hey, um, what month are we in?” My absent-mindedness in this area does not make me an ideal bill-payer. Craig has learned over the years that it’s therefore probably best to take care of recurring payments himself. Creditors probably think so, too.
In return, I have been the one who scrubs the toilets and the bathrooms. It’s a grungy task, but someone’s got to do it. Honestly, I don’t mind it in the least. It’s just some spraying and some wiping and some mopping. Plus it smells good, after. I can wash my hands when I’m done and still feel cleaner than if I’d sent checks to the utility companies. Toss in most of the cat pan duties, and I’d say it’s still a fairly even exchange.
My parents had their own trade-offs. My dad hated proofreading his own articles, so my mother would fire up a pot of coffee and light up a cigarette and have at it while he, in exchange, would make school sack lunches for us. He performed mysterious rites under the hoods of the cars while she tended the vegetable garden. And though he did all the grocery shopping every Saturday morning, she was the one who for a time did all the cooking.
Cooking duties were probably the biggest bone of contention between them when I was growing up. My mother disliked cooking, and her nature rebelled against the then-common assumption that she should be the one stuck at the stove merely because of her gender. However, my father’s repertoire in the kitchen consisted solely of one dish: a chili made with ground beef, a can of kidney beans, a can of tomato sauce, and a whole mess of Minute Rice. Even with my dad making chili once a week and with him guaranteeing a take-out pizza or Arby’s sandwiches for everyone on another, that was still five dinners a week she had to plan and prepare. (Forget breakfasts and lunches. As soon as we were weaned from her breast milk, we were pretty much on our own for those.) As far as she was concerned, that was still five meals a week too many.
And she let us know it, too. During a particularly self-pitying moment in my childhood she sat down with a pencil and a pad of paper, performed a rapid series of calculations on the ruled pages in her impeccable hand, and figured out how many more dinners she had to prepare until both her children had graduated high school—the point at which she felt her indentures ended, apparently. For years after she’d chip away at that number, meal after meal. “Two thousand, one hundred and seven,” she’d growl as she’d chuck down a plate loaded with pot roast in a uniform gray, some potatoes on which she’d taken out her frustrations while mashing, and a few watery green beans that had come from a can. Or, “One thousand, eight hundred and forty-five,” as from the other side of the room she’d fling sodden chunks of meatloaf and lukewarm store-bought rolls.
I’m shortchanging my mother’s cooking a little. The dishes she genuinely liked turned out well—like cornbread from scratch or fluffy angel biscuits or any of the stews that struck her fancy. Occasionally she’d be inspired to try a Julia Child recipe that she and my father would enjoy. She claimed she made a good steak and kidney pie, but since the prospect of eating kidneys had me hiding behind tall furniture rather than coming anywhere near the kitchen table where we ate, I never found out. She didn’t like desserts, but she made good cakes and tortes and pies. Most of the everyday dinners, however, she approached with the same enthusiasm of a condemned man his noose.
I’ve been reminded of my mother in recent months because we’ve been planning—at long last—to move again in the early new year. The one-bedroom flat in which we’ve been living since 2011 is cute and cozy, but it’s also so cramped that about eighty percent of our old Detroit household has been in storage for two and a half years. Long enough, that is, so I no longer remember what’s in any of those dozens and dozens of boxes that have never been unpacked since they left Michigan. Originally when we took up residence in our current place, we thought we’d be there for two months, three months. Six months at the most. I laugh now at what naive children we were.
Anyway, the house to which we’ll be moving actually looks as if it might be nearing the completion of its renovation. Since November we’ve had to spend a little bit of time picking out appliances and countertops and knobs and all the other things that keep HGTV in business. I’ve outsourced my vote in these matters to Craig because I really don’t care if the floor is sandy taupe or taupey sandstone, nor do I have a strong opinion on the entire Oval Knobs vs. Round Knobs debate. For all I care the knobs can be molded from the late Gore Vidal’s nipples, the floor can be electric blue, the cabinets a metallic faux crocodile, and the countertops made of recycled porcelain from NYC subway urinals. I just want my chest freezer back, dammit.
Early in the renovation process we were over at the house looking at the gutted kitchen and the taped outlines of where the cabinets and the appliances would be installed. “I must have a good working triangle!” Craig declared, as in the air he made wild gestures. “Refrigerator! Stove! Sink! I must have space! Working space! Counter space, to prepare my meals!” He bit his lip, wheeled around, and narrowed his eyes at one corner of the room. “I wonder if we could get a professional oven.”
Reader, I smirked. I couldn’t help it. I just found it funny. Perhaps it was more of a snort than a smirk, because it made Craig wheel around. Hands on his hips, he glared at me as if he were Gordon Ramsay demanding to know where the fuckety fuck were his fucking Yorkshire puddings, and I was some contestant on Hell’s Kitchen asking, What’s a Yorkshire pudding, again? In answer to his unspoken question, I cleared my throat and said, in my mildest tones, “I just think it’s cute that you pretend to know how to work an oven.”
He stiffened. He regarded me as Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey might stare down a jocular tradesman who asked if she kept a flask of hooch up her bustle. “I beg your pardon.”
“Well honey,” I said. “You never cook. You don’t cook.”
Which is verifiable. I didn’t say he can’t cook. He just doesn't.
It’s true that in our early life together he had to be gently trained a little on Things Not To Do In A Kitchen, like putting a piping hot pan directly onto a glass refrigerator shelf (the shelf shattered). And it’s also a fact that long, long ago, he would on occasion attempt to prepare dinner with new and exciting recipes. His blood-rare pork tenderloin was not a personal favorite of mine. We also both still shudder at the memory of his Southern Hamloaf—a mound of ground ham studded with golf ball-sized onion chunks. Curiously, while the meat managed to bake to a consistency of hot Underwood’s Deviled Ham (I’m not claiming that’s a good thing, mind you), the onions remained raw and cold. I’d say the dish tasted like a goddamned salt lick with some goddamned raw onions, but I don’t want to be unkind to either the salt lick or the onion industry.
In point of fact, the only meal that Craig had prepared in the kitchen where we’ve lived for nearly three years was his chili—which is the exact same chili my father used to make in my youth. Ground beef, a can of kidney beans, a can of tomato sauce, and a whole mess of frozen microwavable brown rice. (Not Minute Rice. We’re not savages.) Yes, as I’ve realized many times throughout my life, I have married my father.
Now. I have to be fair and point out that the above conversation took place in the early autumn. I was knocked flat on my back sick for a good six weeks during the months of October and early November, and didn’t have the strength to sit upright, much less stand in the kitchen cooking. While I was recuperating, Craig really stepped up to the plate for mealtimes. By ‘stepped up to the plate,’ I don’t entirely mean ‘went to Taco Bell and regarded me worriedly while he chewed his burrito’, either. He fiddled until he turned on the oven, he fired up the gas range, and he made some credible meals. From recipes I printed for him in large type and verbally annotated from the living room sofa with helpful tips like “CUT THE POTATOES INTO QUARTERS!” or “MAKE SURE YOU SPRAY THE PAN FIRST!”
Helpful . . . condescending. To-may-to, to-mah-to.
As I resumed my health, though, I’ve noticed that he hasn’t exactly insisted on preparing meals again. I’ve been back in the kitchen, happy to be back on my feet again. He’s back in the living room, watching Chopped and fantasizing about his new kitchen.
Last week, in fact, we went over to the house and let ourselves in so that we could look at the installed cabinets and countertop. Craig stretched his arms wide and extended his fingertips in a Christ-like pose. “I cannot wait,” he intoned, with hushed reverence. Then again, “I cannot wait to begin . . . my work!”
He sounded like an elderly French chef stepping into a professional kitchen after a forced indenture of three years heating up McMuffins in a microwave. He sounded like Isadora Duncan, long scarf sweeping the boards, stepping onto the stage of Covent Garden after being long away.
I snickered, of course, and reached out to touch him gently on the arm in a conciliatory way so I could tell him that yes, Madame Isadora, the cans of kidney beans will be arranged to his rigid mise en place. Before I could get in my good-natured dig, however, he narrowed his eyes at me. “Zip it,” he growled.
I let the man dream.
A lot of these trade-offs tend to be wordless exchanges that evolve with the relationship. I tend to be vague about dates. I mean, really vague. The kind of vague that makes patients with advanced Alzheimer’s seem really on the ball. My most common question about dates is not along the lines of What is today, the 16th? or even It’s Friday, right? No, I’m more likely to wrinkle my brow, try to get a few feeble brain cells a-sparking, and mumble, “Hey, um, what month are we in?” My absent-mindedness in this area does not make me an ideal bill-payer. Craig has learned over the years that it’s therefore probably best to take care of recurring payments himself. Creditors probably think so, too.
In return, I have been the one who scrubs the toilets and the bathrooms. It’s a grungy task, but someone’s got to do it. Honestly, I don’t mind it in the least. It’s just some spraying and some wiping and some mopping. Plus it smells good, after. I can wash my hands when I’m done and still feel cleaner than if I’d sent checks to the utility companies. Toss in most of the cat pan duties, and I’d say it’s still a fairly even exchange.
My parents had their own trade-offs. My dad hated proofreading his own articles, so my mother would fire up a pot of coffee and light up a cigarette and have at it while he, in exchange, would make school sack lunches for us. He performed mysterious rites under the hoods of the cars while she tended the vegetable garden. And though he did all the grocery shopping every Saturday morning, she was the one who for a time did all the cooking.
Cooking duties were probably the biggest bone of contention between them when I was growing up. My mother disliked cooking, and her nature rebelled against the then-common assumption that she should be the one stuck at the stove merely because of her gender. However, my father’s repertoire in the kitchen consisted solely of one dish: a chili made with ground beef, a can of kidney beans, a can of tomato sauce, and a whole mess of Minute Rice. Even with my dad making chili once a week and with him guaranteeing a take-out pizza or Arby’s sandwiches for everyone on another, that was still five dinners a week she had to plan and prepare. (Forget breakfasts and lunches. As soon as we were weaned from her breast milk, we were pretty much on our own for those.) As far as she was concerned, that was still five meals a week too many.
And she let us know it, too. During a particularly self-pitying moment in my childhood she sat down with a pencil and a pad of paper, performed a rapid series of calculations on the ruled pages in her impeccable hand, and figured out how many more dinners she had to prepare until both her children had graduated high school—the point at which she felt her indentures ended, apparently. For years after she’d chip away at that number, meal after meal. “Two thousand, one hundred and seven,” she’d growl as she’d chuck down a plate loaded with pot roast in a uniform gray, some potatoes on which she’d taken out her frustrations while mashing, and a few watery green beans that had come from a can. Or, “One thousand, eight hundred and forty-five,” as from the other side of the room she’d fling sodden chunks of meatloaf and lukewarm store-bought rolls.
I’m shortchanging my mother’s cooking a little. The dishes she genuinely liked turned out well—like cornbread from scratch or fluffy angel biscuits or any of the stews that struck her fancy. Occasionally she’d be inspired to try a Julia Child recipe that she and my father would enjoy. She claimed she made a good steak and kidney pie, but since the prospect of eating kidneys had me hiding behind tall furniture rather than coming anywhere near the kitchen table where we ate, I never found out. She didn’t like desserts, but she made good cakes and tortes and pies. Most of the everyday dinners, however, she approached with the same enthusiasm of a condemned man his noose.
I’ve been reminded of my mother in recent months because we’ve been planning—at long last—to move again in the early new year. The one-bedroom flat in which we’ve been living since 2011 is cute and cozy, but it’s also so cramped that about eighty percent of our old Detroit household has been in storage for two and a half years. Long enough, that is, so I no longer remember what’s in any of those dozens and dozens of boxes that have never been unpacked since they left Michigan. Originally when we took up residence in our current place, we thought we’d be there for two months, three months. Six months at the most. I laugh now at what naive children we were.
Anyway, the house to which we’ll be moving actually looks as if it might be nearing the completion of its renovation. Since November we’ve had to spend a little bit of time picking out appliances and countertops and knobs and all the other things that keep HGTV in business. I’ve outsourced my vote in these matters to Craig because I really don’t care if the floor is sandy taupe or taupey sandstone, nor do I have a strong opinion on the entire Oval Knobs vs. Round Knobs debate. For all I care the knobs can be molded from the late Gore Vidal’s nipples, the floor can be electric blue, the cabinets a metallic faux crocodile, and the countertops made of recycled porcelain from NYC subway urinals. I just want my chest freezer back, dammit.
Early in the renovation process we were over at the house looking at the gutted kitchen and the taped outlines of where the cabinets and the appliances would be installed. “I must have a good working triangle!” Craig declared, as in the air he made wild gestures. “Refrigerator! Stove! Sink! I must have space! Working space! Counter space, to prepare my meals!” He bit his lip, wheeled around, and narrowed his eyes at one corner of the room. “I wonder if we could get a professional oven.”
Reader, I smirked. I couldn’t help it. I just found it funny. Perhaps it was more of a snort than a smirk, because it made Craig wheel around. Hands on his hips, he glared at me as if he were Gordon Ramsay demanding to know where the fuckety fuck were his fucking Yorkshire puddings, and I was some contestant on Hell’s Kitchen asking, What’s a Yorkshire pudding, again? In answer to his unspoken question, I cleared my throat and said, in my mildest tones, “I just think it’s cute that you pretend to know how to work an oven.”
He stiffened. He regarded me as Dame Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey might stare down a jocular tradesman who asked if she kept a flask of hooch up her bustle. “I beg your pardon.”
“Well honey,” I said. “You never cook. You don’t cook.”
Which is verifiable. I didn’t say he can’t cook. He just doesn't.
It’s true that in our early life together he had to be gently trained a little on Things Not To Do In A Kitchen, like putting a piping hot pan directly onto a glass refrigerator shelf (the shelf shattered). And it’s also a fact that long, long ago, he would on occasion attempt to prepare dinner with new and exciting recipes. His blood-rare pork tenderloin was not a personal favorite of mine. We also both still shudder at the memory of his Southern Hamloaf—a mound of ground ham studded with golf ball-sized onion chunks. Curiously, while the meat managed to bake to a consistency of hot Underwood’s Deviled Ham (I’m not claiming that’s a good thing, mind you), the onions remained raw and cold. I’d say the dish tasted like a goddamned salt lick with some goddamned raw onions, but I don’t want to be unkind to either the salt lick or the onion industry.
In point of fact, the only meal that Craig had prepared in the kitchen where we’ve lived for nearly three years was his chili—which is the exact same chili my father used to make in my youth. Ground beef, a can of kidney beans, a can of tomato sauce, and a whole mess of frozen microwavable brown rice. (Not Minute Rice. We’re not savages.) Yes, as I’ve realized many times throughout my life, I have married my father.
Now. I have to be fair and point out that the above conversation took place in the early autumn. I was knocked flat on my back sick for a good six weeks during the months of October and early November, and didn’t have the strength to sit upright, much less stand in the kitchen cooking. While I was recuperating, Craig really stepped up to the plate for mealtimes. By ‘stepped up to the plate,’ I don’t entirely mean ‘went to Taco Bell and regarded me worriedly while he chewed his burrito’, either. He fiddled until he turned on the oven, he fired up the gas range, and he made some credible meals. From recipes I printed for him in large type and verbally annotated from the living room sofa with helpful tips like “CUT THE POTATOES INTO QUARTERS!” or “MAKE SURE YOU SPRAY THE PAN FIRST!”
Helpful . . . condescending. To-may-to, to-mah-to.
As I resumed my health, though, I’ve noticed that he hasn’t exactly insisted on preparing meals again. I’ve been back in the kitchen, happy to be back on my feet again. He’s back in the living room, watching Chopped and fantasizing about his new kitchen.
Last week, in fact, we went over to the house and let ourselves in so that we could look at the installed cabinets and countertop. Craig stretched his arms wide and extended his fingertips in a Christ-like pose. “I cannot wait,” he intoned, with hushed reverence. Then again, “I cannot wait to begin . . . my work!”
He sounded like an elderly French chef stepping into a professional kitchen after a forced indenture of three years heating up McMuffins in a microwave. He sounded like Isadora Duncan, long scarf sweeping the boards, stepping onto the stage of Covent Garden after being long away.
I snickered, of course, and reached out to touch him gently on the arm in a conciliatory way so I could tell him that yes, Madame Isadora, the cans of kidney beans will be arranged to his rigid mise en place. Before I could get in my good-natured dig, however, he narrowed his eyes at me. “Zip it,” he growled.
I let the man dream.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Man Bites Shaggy Dog
There I was, settling down in my seat at the Starbucks where all the off-duty drag queens hang out, when on the other side of the armchair opposite, I saw Patrick Stewart.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Here in the metro NYC area we ordinary people spy celebrities from time to time. My friends have had fabulous sightings. Fabulous. Laurence Fishburne. Meryl Streep. De Niro. Even out here in the not-so-far-flung suburbs we have Meryl (again) dining at the little restaurant down the avenue, or Laura Linney filming at the little civic center, or Tyler Perry eating lunch in the church. Why, Beyonce and Jay-Z recently dropped by for a quick lunch at the local Cosi. Why, I can’t imagine. I mean, Cosi has a fine Cobb salad, but if I were Beyonce the only way I’d slum it at a chain like Cosi would be if I’d wandered out for the day with less than twenty bucks slipped into my skin-tight gold spandex catsuit. Am I right?
Stellar celebrities abound here. That is, I haven’t seen any of them. But I’ve heard. For a very very long time, my only celebrity sightings have been of the minor Z-list reality TV show variety. No, I don’t mean the time last summer when we went to that taping of America’s Got Talent at Radio City Music Hall and saw Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn and a wee, Pee-Wee-Herman-doll-sized Zac Posen. That hardly counts as a celebrity sighting at all, because Heidi was paid to be there, since she was judging the domino-felling, talking-dog, juvenile-stripper contestants. Tim and Zac were just at her side to be supportive. Besides, they were so far away.
Which in the end was probably a good thing, since it prevented me from lunging like the rabid fan-boy I am at Tim Gunn to tell him I was one of the only five people who actually made it all the way through his book Gunn’s Golden Rules and that if I were ever invited to his apartment for an overnighter (hint, hint) (and not that way, you pervs. Just to sleep on his futon after a long night of gossip and rumination about Art and Fashion!) I learned from Chapter 10 (“Be A Good Guest Or STAY HOME!”) not to mess with the remote controls on his coffee table like his niece did when she was trying to watch cable, because the cable service is on component rather than Aux 2, since Aux 2 is connected to his DVD player and besides, why would anyone, related or not, be so presumptuous as to mess with Tim Gunn’s remotes? All that might have been a little bit too much to yell at him from the warm embrace of the arms of the NYPD officers restraining me, after all.
No, the celebrities I saw . . . well, let’s just say the word sad is particularly apropos. There was the time we were walking through Hell’s Kitchen and I had a good chinwag with Chris March. Chinwag might be overstating it a tad. We were walking past Starbucks—not the drag queen Starbucks where I either saw or didn’t see Patrick Stewart—one chilly early spring afternoon. Sitting by himself on a bench outdoors sipping a piping hot Chai Cookie Latte was someone I recognized. My brain registered the face and, in that instantaneous way it occasionally does, immediately came up with a match in my database. You know this person . . . ! it told me. Cheerfully ignoring the little warning from my central processor that it was still searching, I raised my hand and yelled out, “Well heeeeeey!” in the manner one does when one sees an old friend and can’t immediately remember his name. I didn’t want to be guilty of rudely snubbing someone a buddy, after all.
Mr. March looked up from his Chai Cookie Latte in surprise, and responded exactly as someone does when accosted by someone yelling out “Well heeeeey!” in a super-friendly manner. “Heeeeey!” he said, startled.
We both wore big smiles on our faces as we stared at each other in silence. Then, right on time, my brain finished its data search. You know this person . . . from TV! My smile froze into something a little more terror stricken. He started to wear the rictus of someone thinking, Holy hell, what have I gotten myself into? Then, both of us realizing we had absolutely no basis of acquaintance whatsoever, we both said “Take care!” at the same time and with a great deal of forced gaiety.
I scrambled down the street after Craig. “That was Chis March,” I growled at him.
“Who?”
“Chis March,” I repeated. “Project Runway. Chris March.”
“Who?” Craig asked, looking around.
“You know!”
“Where?” he craned his neck around, but by then all that was left of the designer were the skid marks he’d left on the pavement in his speedy attempt to get away from the crazy guy.
Note: I don’t know for certain that Chris March was drinking a Chai Cookie Latte. That was my authorial imagination filling in a few of the details to make the experience richer for my readers. But he seems the type. Am I right?
Then there was the time a few months later we were walking by a row of townhouses in the Village. “Hey,” I said, when we passed a window. I stopped us in our tracks. “That’s that guy,” I said, nodding inside, where a hairdresser was taking care of a client.
“What guy?” asked Craig.
“That guy!” I said, exasperated. “That guy on that awful show we watch.”
“Which awful show we watch?” he said. My previous reply, I had to admit, didn’t exactly narrow the field. We watch a lot of awful shows.
“You know!” I groped around for the answer. “The A List: New York.”
“Which guy?” Craig wanted to know. “The dumb pretty one?”
“Don’t talk about Rodiney that way,” I pouted.
“The one from The Amazing Race?”
“No.”
“The bitchy one?”
“The hag?”
I shook my head. “No. The one who isn’t any of those.”
We both stared at the hairdresser for a brief moment, then shrugged at each other, and went on our merry way.
My luck turned briefly on a brisk winter afternoon earlier this year when I was walking down Seventh Avenue and passed Harvey Fierstein straggling in the opposite direction. He was wrapped in some kind of bedraggled-looking wooly jacket usually seen on wrinkled Russian babushkas and was carrying an armful of folders. He looked very tired. Oh hey, said my brain, there’s Harvey Fierstein on the way to Kinky Boots rehearsals! Not wanting a repeat of Marchgate, I managed to keep my hand down as we passed. Then a huge gust of wind assaulted us at the cross-streets. Harvey staggered and yelped. When I turned around, my brain thought to itself, Oh hey, there’s Harvey Fierstein, dropping all the Kinky Boots scripts!
I thought the sighting was quite the coup for me, until my friend Eric rolled his eyes upon hearing about it and informed me that everyone saw Harvey Fierstein. He made it sound as if ol’ Harve was the celebrity panhandler of Seventh Avenue, wandering around dressed in eccentric costumes inspired by Little Edie Beale, pleading to be recognized.
I confess: the information deflated me.
But Patrick Stewart. I mean, come on. Genuine celebrity gold right there. Sure, he might’ve had a tendency to slum it with a ray gun in that Star Trek series or being wheeled around those X-Men movies, but even as he was battling the Borg he did it in an acting style intended to make sure you’d never forget he was trained in Shakespeare, damn it. That’s one hundred percent pure class, right there. And he was sitting not six feet from me.
Or was it really him?
I’d gone into that particular Starbucks after a long afternoon walking around Manhattan with my husband. We’d gone to an art house movie. We’d done some Christmas shopping up Broadway and down 23rd. We’d spent a very long time in Home Depot looking at kitchen cabinets. I had a meeting of my Men’s Knitting Group/Downton Abbey Fan Fiction Society scheduled for later in the West Village, so we parted paths with plans to meet up again after my session. Which is how I ended up in the Village ninety minutes early for the knitting group, looking for a place to sit for a while.
Now, when I lived into Detroit, I would wander into my local Starbucks and occasionally find its six four-person tables occupied by one person apiece. I would look at those six occupied chairs and the eighteen empty chairs and put my hands on my hips and stalk out, harumphing something like, “There’s no place to SIT in this joint!” In New York City, where space and privacy both are at a premium, I have downgraded my expectations so severely that I can walk into a packed coffee shop and spy an unoccupied flat space atop the overflowing trash bin on one side of the room, and on the other a retro diner stool missing its seat so that it resembles a medieval-era anal torture spike, and complacently think to myself, “Oh, there’s puh-lenty of seating!”
But for some reason, I was lucky enough to get an actual armchair at this Starbucks. An armchair by the window! And nobody had vomited in it! I made a beeline for its upholstered comfort, stepping over assorted bags and arms and legs while clutching my skinny mocha, and sat down with a contented sigh. There were five or six similar armchairs set around the coffee table where I set my beverage; they were all occupied by well-dressed African-American men. They ignored me. As I pulled out my iPad to read, I kind of gathered, by the multiple Oooo gorls and the lengthy conversation about dress construction, that they were drag queens with some down time before their show. Normally this discovery would have fascinated me, but that’s when I spotted—I believe I might’ve mentioned it before—the man who may have been Patrick Stewart.
There he was, ensconced on the window side of the large communal table crowded with about sixteen people. He was the only one who wasn’t engrossed in a laptop or iPad or smartphone or other electronic device—a bald older gentleman with a sharp nose and intelligent eyes that danced over the pages of a trade paperback copy of À la recherche du temps perdu. All right. I couldn’t see the title. It could’ve been 50 Shades of Grey, for all I know. But he seems the type. Am I right?
Anyway, the point is that he was reading it like it was À la recherche du temps perdu. He held the book aloft so that his profile was plainly visible. Like a hand mirror prop, he held it. He read the hell out of that book in a manner intended to make sure you knew he’d held a mirror like that when he played Lear, damn it! And my helpful brain thought to itself, Wow! That’s Patrick Stewart!
Why in the world would Patrick Stewart be at a Starbucks in the West Village, I asked my brain?
Um, isn’t he going to be in some play in town soon? You know. One of the ones without songs and dancing or anything interesting?
I had to concede the point. Patrick Stewart was indeed performing in town. It was certainly conceivable that he had a Monday evening off. But really? The best thing he had to do in his spare time was to read Proust at a Starbucks in the West Village?
Why not? asked my brain.
Really? Patrick Stewart? At the communal table, no less, crowded between a Jamaican nanny with two loud lily-white brats and a congested student in flaccid corduroy who looked like he smelled like skunk?
My brain faltered a little there. Well. . . .
Come on, now. If you looked at the guy’s face, it wasn’t really Stewart-like. He looked too seedy. You’d just jumped to that conclusion because of his shiny head. After all, not every bald guy is Patrick Stewart. Some of them are Bruce Willis and William Frawley.
Maybe you’re right, said my brain. Oh god, yeah. I see it now. That’s not Patrick Stewart at all. Doesn’t look like him a bit! What a big phony that freak is!
“Ex-cuse me,” said a deep but feminine voice to my left, distracting me. The guy next to me had leaned over the coffee table to touch me lightly on the knee. He was probably the most effeminate of the drag queen cadre. Even though it was a cold and blustery day, he wore Capris with no socks and a pretty pair of orange sandals and a loose T-shirt in a particularly intense teal. He nodded at the iPad on my lap. “But do you happen to have an iPhone charger with you? My battery is fixing to expire.”
Did I have a battery charger? Hah! I scoff at such questions. My man purse is a veritable Mary Poppins carpetbag from which I can pull the entire contents of Radio Shack on demand. “Why, sure,” I told him, reaching into its bottomless depths and producing a little charger and cord.
He plugged it into the outlet between us. His phone chirped happily as he connected the other end. “Why thank you, kind sir,” he murmured through lowered lashes. “Why, I bet when you walked into this Starbucks, a pretty straight boy like you never thought he’d be sharing his charger so intimately with a queen like me, now, did you?”
I cheerfully declined to deny the pretty boy part of his inquiry. But I did say, “Oh, I’m not straight.”
My new friend’s head immediately swiveled around to his comrades. “I told you,” he said, in shady tones of victory.
When I picked up my iPad again, that big bald phony who skulked around the West Village trying to make people think he was Patrick Stewart—like anyone cared what that fraud did—had risen from the communal table and was making his way to the door. The man in Capri pants immediately lunged from his armchair, though he carefully set his phone down in the seat to make poachers knew it was occupied. “Oh, Mr. Stewart!” he cried, tripping gracefully across the crowded seating area. “Mr. Stewart! I loved you in Jeffrey!” I heard him say.
Well, god damn.
I watched as Mr. Capri Pants engaged in a minute-long conversation with the actor that concluded with them actually hugging. All the while I was cursing my bloody luck. I could recognize (kind of) Chris March. I could spot that guy from that show who wasn’t the other guys on that show, you know? I could even pick Harvey Fierstein out of a crowd—even though Harvey Fierstein is apparently the roach of the celebrity world and everyone has suffered an infestation at some time or another. But sit me six feet away from Patrick Stewart? That’s when my idiot brain decides I’m just looking at some bald poseur reading some awful novel who's parking his keister and killing time until his trendy hot yoga class on 14th Street.
When it comes to the rarified realm of spotting big cheeses, apparently I need to stick to the aisle where they stock the celebrity equivalent of Velveeta.
Am I right?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Here in the metro NYC area we ordinary people spy celebrities from time to time. My friends have had fabulous sightings. Fabulous. Laurence Fishburne. Meryl Streep. De Niro. Even out here in the not-so-far-flung suburbs we have Meryl (again) dining at the little restaurant down the avenue, or Laura Linney filming at the little civic center, or Tyler Perry eating lunch in the church. Why, Beyonce and Jay-Z recently dropped by for a quick lunch at the local Cosi. Why, I can’t imagine. I mean, Cosi has a fine Cobb salad, but if I were Beyonce the only way I’d slum it at a chain like Cosi would be if I’d wandered out for the day with less than twenty bucks slipped into my skin-tight gold spandex catsuit. Am I right?
Stellar celebrities abound here. That is, I haven’t seen any of them. But I’ve heard. For a very very long time, my only celebrity sightings have been of the minor Z-list reality TV show variety. No, I don’t mean the time last summer when we went to that taping of America’s Got Talent at Radio City Music Hall and saw Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn and a wee, Pee-Wee-Herman-doll-sized Zac Posen. That hardly counts as a celebrity sighting at all, because Heidi was paid to be there, since she was judging the domino-felling, talking-dog, juvenile-stripper contestants. Tim and Zac were just at her side to be supportive. Besides, they were so far away.
Which in the end was probably a good thing, since it prevented me from lunging like the rabid fan-boy I am at Tim Gunn to tell him I was one of the only five people who actually made it all the way through his book Gunn’s Golden Rules and that if I were ever invited to his apartment for an overnighter (hint, hint) (and not that way, you pervs. Just to sleep on his futon after a long night of gossip and rumination about Art and Fashion!) I learned from Chapter 10 (“Be A Good Guest Or STAY HOME!”) not to mess with the remote controls on his coffee table like his niece did when she was trying to watch cable, because the cable service is on component rather than Aux 2, since Aux 2 is connected to his DVD player and besides, why would anyone, related or not, be so presumptuous as to mess with Tim Gunn’s remotes? All that might have been a little bit too much to yell at him from the warm embrace of the arms of the NYPD officers restraining me, after all.
No, the celebrities I saw . . . well, let’s just say the word sad is particularly apropos. There was the time we were walking through Hell’s Kitchen and I had a good chinwag with Chris March. Chinwag might be overstating it a tad. We were walking past Starbucks—not the drag queen Starbucks where I either saw or didn’t see Patrick Stewart—one chilly early spring afternoon. Sitting by himself on a bench outdoors sipping a piping hot Chai Cookie Latte was someone I recognized. My brain registered the face and, in that instantaneous way it occasionally does, immediately came up with a match in my database. You know this person . . . ! it told me. Cheerfully ignoring the little warning from my central processor that it was still searching, I raised my hand and yelled out, “Well heeeeeey!” in the manner one does when one sees an old friend and can’t immediately remember his name. I didn’t want to be guilty of rudely snubbing someone a buddy, after all.
Mr. March looked up from his Chai Cookie Latte in surprise, and responded exactly as someone does when accosted by someone yelling out “Well heeeeey!” in a super-friendly manner. “Heeeeey!” he said, startled.
We both wore big smiles on our faces as we stared at each other in silence. Then, right on time, my brain finished its data search. You know this person . . . from TV! My smile froze into something a little more terror stricken. He started to wear the rictus of someone thinking, Holy hell, what have I gotten myself into? Then, both of us realizing we had absolutely no basis of acquaintance whatsoever, we both said “Take care!” at the same time and with a great deal of forced gaiety.
I scrambled down the street after Craig. “That was Chis March,” I growled at him.
“Who?”
“Chis March,” I repeated. “Project Runway. Chris March.”
“Who?” Craig asked, looking around.
“You know!”
“Where?” he craned his neck around, but by then all that was left of the designer were the skid marks he’d left on the pavement in his speedy attempt to get away from the crazy guy.
Note: I don’t know for certain that Chris March was drinking a Chai Cookie Latte. That was my authorial imagination filling in a few of the details to make the experience richer for my readers. But he seems the type. Am I right?
Then there was the time a few months later we were walking by a row of townhouses in the Village. “Hey,” I said, when we passed a window. I stopped us in our tracks. “That’s that guy,” I said, nodding inside, where a hairdresser was taking care of a client.
“What guy?” asked Craig.
“That guy!” I said, exasperated. “That guy on that awful show we watch.”
“Which awful show we watch?” he said. My previous reply, I had to admit, didn’t exactly narrow the field. We watch a lot of awful shows.
“You know!” I groped around for the answer. “The A List: New York.”
“Which guy?” Craig wanted to know. “The dumb pretty one?”
“Don’t talk about Rodiney that way,” I pouted.
“The one from The Amazing Race?”
“No.”
“The bitchy one?”
“The hag?”
I shook my head. “No. The one who isn’t any of those.”
We both stared at the hairdresser for a brief moment, then shrugged at each other, and went on our merry way.
My luck turned briefly on a brisk winter afternoon earlier this year when I was walking down Seventh Avenue and passed Harvey Fierstein straggling in the opposite direction. He was wrapped in some kind of bedraggled-looking wooly jacket usually seen on wrinkled Russian babushkas and was carrying an armful of folders. He looked very tired. Oh hey, said my brain, there’s Harvey Fierstein on the way to Kinky Boots rehearsals! Not wanting a repeat of Marchgate, I managed to keep my hand down as we passed. Then a huge gust of wind assaulted us at the cross-streets. Harvey staggered and yelped. When I turned around, my brain thought to itself, Oh hey, there’s Harvey Fierstein, dropping all the Kinky Boots scripts!
I thought the sighting was quite the coup for me, until my friend Eric rolled his eyes upon hearing about it and informed me that everyone saw Harvey Fierstein. He made it sound as if ol’ Harve was the celebrity panhandler of Seventh Avenue, wandering around dressed in eccentric costumes inspired by Little Edie Beale, pleading to be recognized.
I confess: the information deflated me.
But Patrick Stewart. I mean, come on. Genuine celebrity gold right there. Sure, he might’ve had a tendency to slum it with a ray gun in that Star Trek series or being wheeled around those X-Men movies, but even as he was battling the Borg he did it in an acting style intended to make sure you’d never forget he was trained in Shakespeare, damn it. That’s one hundred percent pure class, right there. And he was sitting not six feet from me.
Or was it really him?
I’d gone into that particular Starbucks after a long afternoon walking around Manhattan with my husband. We’d gone to an art house movie. We’d done some Christmas shopping up Broadway and down 23rd. We’d spent a very long time in Home Depot looking at kitchen cabinets. I had a meeting of my Men’s Knitting Group/Downton Abbey Fan Fiction Society scheduled for later in the West Village, so we parted paths with plans to meet up again after my session. Which is how I ended up in the Village ninety minutes early for the knitting group, looking for a place to sit for a while.
Now, when I lived into Detroit, I would wander into my local Starbucks and occasionally find its six four-person tables occupied by one person apiece. I would look at those six occupied chairs and the eighteen empty chairs and put my hands on my hips and stalk out, harumphing something like, “There’s no place to SIT in this joint!” In New York City, where space and privacy both are at a premium, I have downgraded my expectations so severely that I can walk into a packed coffee shop and spy an unoccupied flat space atop the overflowing trash bin on one side of the room, and on the other a retro diner stool missing its seat so that it resembles a medieval-era anal torture spike, and complacently think to myself, “Oh, there’s puh-lenty of seating!”
But for some reason, I was lucky enough to get an actual armchair at this Starbucks. An armchair by the window! And nobody had vomited in it! I made a beeline for its upholstered comfort, stepping over assorted bags and arms and legs while clutching my skinny mocha, and sat down with a contented sigh. There were five or six similar armchairs set around the coffee table where I set my beverage; they were all occupied by well-dressed African-American men. They ignored me. As I pulled out my iPad to read, I kind of gathered, by the multiple Oooo gorls and the lengthy conversation about dress construction, that they were drag queens with some down time before their show. Normally this discovery would have fascinated me, but that’s when I spotted—I believe I might’ve mentioned it before—the man who may have been Patrick Stewart.
There he was, ensconced on the window side of the large communal table crowded with about sixteen people. He was the only one who wasn’t engrossed in a laptop or iPad or smartphone or other electronic device—a bald older gentleman with a sharp nose and intelligent eyes that danced over the pages of a trade paperback copy of À la recherche du temps perdu. All right. I couldn’t see the title. It could’ve been 50 Shades of Grey, for all I know. But he seems the type. Am I right?
Anyway, the point is that he was reading it like it was À la recherche du temps perdu. He held the book aloft so that his profile was plainly visible. Like a hand mirror prop, he held it. He read the hell out of that book in a manner intended to make sure you knew he’d held a mirror like that when he played Lear, damn it! And my helpful brain thought to itself, Wow! That’s Patrick Stewart!
Why in the world would Patrick Stewart be at a Starbucks in the West Village, I asked my brain?
Um, isn’t he going to be in some play in town soon? You know. One of the ones without songs and dancing or anything interesting?
I had to concede the point. Patrick Stewart was indeed performing in town. It was certainly conceivable that he had a Monday evening off. But really? The best thing he had to do in his spare time was to read Proust at a Starbucks in the West Village?
Why not? asked my brain.
Really? Patrick Stewart? At the communal table, no less, crowded between a Jamaican nanny with two loud lily-white brats and a congested student in flaccid corduroy who looked like he smelled like skunk?
My brain faltered a little there. Well. . . .
Come on, now. If you looked at the guy’s face, it wasn’t really Stewart-like. He looked too seedy. You’d just jumped to that conclusion because of his shiny head. After all, not every bald guy is Patrick Stewart. Some of them are Bruce Willis and William Frawley.
Maybe you’re right, said my brain. Oh god, yeah. I see it now. That’s not Patrick Stewart at all. Doesn’t look like him a bit! What a big phony that freak is!
“Ex-cuse me,” said a deep but feminine voice to my left, distracting me. The guy next to me had leaned over the coffee table to touch me lightly on the knee. He was probably the most effeminate of the drag queen cadre. Even though it was a cold and blustery day, he wore Capris with no socks and a pretty pair of orange sandals and a loose T-shirt in a particularly intense teal. He nodded at the iPad on my lap. “But do you happen to have an iPhone charger with you? My battery is fixing to expire.”
Did I have a battery charger? Hah! I scoff at such questions. My man purse is a veritable Mary Poppins carpetbag from which I can pull the entire contents of Radio Shack on demand. “Why, sure,” I told him, reaching into its bottomless depths and producing a little charger and cord.
He plugged it into the outlet between us. His phone chirped happily as he connected the other end. “Why thank you, kind sir,” he murmured through lowered lashes. “Why, I bet when you walked into this Starbucks, a pretty straight boy like you never thought he’d be sharing his charger so intimately with a queen like me, now, did you?”
I cheerfully declined to deny the pretty boy part of his inquiry. But I did say, “Oh, I’m not straight.”
My new friend’s head immediately swiveled around to his comrades. “I told you,” he said, in shady tones of victory.
When I picked up my iPad again, that big bald phony who skulked around the West Village trying to make people think he was Patrick Stewart—like anyone cared what that fraud did—had risen from the communal table and was making his way to the door. The man in Capri pants immediately lunged from his armchair, though he carefully set his phone down in the seat to make poachers knew it was occupied. “Oh, Mr. Stewart!” he cried, tripping gracefully across the crowded seating area. “Mr. Stewart! I loved you in Jeffrey!” I heard him say.
Well, god damn.
I watched as Mr. Capri Pants engaged in a minute-long conversation with the actor that concluded with them actually hugging. All the while I was cursing my bloody luck. I could recognize (kind of) Chris March. I could spot that guy from that show who wasn’t the other guys on that show, you know? I could even pick Harvey Fierstein out of a crowd—even though Harvey Fierstein is apparently the roach of the celebrity world and everyone has suffered an infestation at some time or another. But sit me six feet away from Patrick Stewart? That’s when my idiot brain decides I’m just looking at some bald poseur reading some awful novel who's parking his keister and killing time until his trendy hot yoga class on 14th Street.
When it comes to the rarified realm of spotting big cheeses, apparently I need to stick to the aisle where they stock the celebrity equivalent of Velveeta.
Am I right?
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Blame It All On Carter
If you see me stumbling around Stop ’n’ Shop, having a conversation with myself in two different voices, it’s not because I’m schizophrenic. Honestly, it’s not. It’s because of former president Jimmy Carter.
First of all, math is not my strong point. I count on my fingers. At certain sums I’m adept. A two and a one? Three. I and other mentally capable five-year-olds can do that one right off the top of my head. Four plus four? Eight, right? But then I get to one of the additions that’s traditionally tough for me, like eight plus five. You might not see it, but my fingers are pulsing and my lips are silently working as I count out nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen.
Yes, I count on my fingers. I’m not proud of it. But I’m brave enough to admit to it.
Through much of school I was able discreetly to disguise my dependency on such babyish methods. I fingered my way through the multiplication tables, I twiddled my digits during long division. I managed to hit my stride during the year of geometry, but then faced setbacks during Algebra I. I didn’t understand algebra. Why had all these mysterious letters wandered in? What were they doing sidled up amongst the numbers? I had enough social difficulties in eighth grade without this worst and most confusing integration.
It didn’t help that my Algebra I teacher was a sweetheart and a pushover who happily agreed to teach the ‘gifted and talented’ class in which I’d been plonked. Since mostly I was talented at being lazy and gifted at schmoozing As out of teachers without doing any actual work, I breezed through Algebra I without actually learning anything about the basics of algebra.
It was quite a shock when in tenth grade I landed in Algebra II and began carrying home Ds and Fs on my homework and report cards. My parents at first thought it was because of the teacher. And it was, really. It was the teacher giving me failing grades that I deserved because I had no idea how to balance an equation. There were four or five of us in the class from my Algebra I year, however, and we were all in the same boat. Our parents decided to hire a tutor for us from the local seminary, however. We must’ve been gifted enough—or as I suspect, frightened of our parents’ wrath—because within a couple of months we’d caught up to the rest of the class and I managed to score a respectable, though not enthusiastic, B on my final report card.
Trigonometry was the bane of my senior year. I was fascinated by Miss Bibby, my teacher, who during those late nineteen-seventies apparently set a course for her personal style using Pam Grier and Blaxploitation films as her north star. She taught her class in a stern and unsmiling manner, pointer gripped as tightly in her hand as might a dominatrix brandish a whip, dressed in super-tight pants with flares and a faux-fur jacket, or in high and shiny patent-leather lace-up boots with stiletto heels, a thigh-high skirt, and a diaphanous top that exposed plenty of her ample cleavage. She was addicted to wigs. One day she’d show up in a long ponytail that hung down to her butt. The next she’d have an enormous Coffy-style Afro. (“You call her Coffy and she’ll cream you!”) As fascinating as Miss Bibby herself could be, I sat there day after day in the classroom feeling futile about what we were doing there. I knew I’d never use trigonometry in my future. I never saw my parents calculating a negative sine.
It was when I was fifth or sixth grade that Jimmy Carter really pushed the Metric Conversion Act that had been passed in 1975. In the school system it was a big deal. The metric system was the future of America! We were the only country in the world that hadn’t been metricated, and it was going to happen by 1980, by gum! In math and science classes we watched movies about the metric system and how natural and easy it was to use. We gleefully abandoned traditional twelve-inch rulers in favor of the newer, shinier, more novel metric versions. We were the future, we were told over and over again.
We were also instructed to become little evangelicals for the cause. Our teachers wanted us to use the metric system at home, and gave us the formulae so that we could annoy our parents by telling them it was 13 degrees Celcius outside, or rolling our eyes when they mentioned such hilariously outmoded and antique conventions as ‘miles’ or ‘inches’. The metric system was in, baby, and we were the vanguard!
I actually loved the metric system. English measurements were based on weird fours and eights and twelves, but the ten-times table was easy. Converting three hundred and seventy inches to feet required a lot of work, but all I had to do to convert centimeters to meters was move the decimal point. Those decimal points weigh nothing. And of course I, who was gifted at avoiding as much work as possible and talented at mental torpor, very quickly decided that if the metric system was the future, I’d make a clean break from those English measurements that were as current as, say, dentistry with pliers, or rapid transit via velocipede.
So I simply never learned how many cups were in a pint, or how many pints were in a quart, or how many quarts were in a gallon. It was too much math. Too many fingers to count. Then the rest of the seventies was disco, and CB radio, and the Iran hostage crisis. Then came the eighties and Ronald Reagan, and the metric system was absolutely not the future any longer. People stubbornly stuck to their ounces and their pounds, their bushels and pecks and miles and pints, and like Ishmael, I alone was left to tell the tale of a time when we were promised—promised—that everything could be divided by ten.
But back to Stop ’n’ Shop. There I was, two days before Thanksgiving last week, pushing around an overloaded cart. Connecticut mommies were swerving out of my way as I passed, because like someone without adequate access to mental health care I was talking to myself in an erratic and eccentric manner. In two different voices. Only I wasn’t, really. I had my iPhone clutched in my hand as I stared in panic at the canned goods, knowing that the pie recipe I was using required two cups of pureed sweet potato and how the hell many was that in ounces? Did I need the big can or the small can? Or the one that looked like it should be purchased by a Mormon survivalist? “How many ounces are in two cups?” I asked Siri, in a frenzy.
Siri always obliges when I’m in a demoralizing panic. “There are sixteen! Ounces! In a cup!” it replied, soothingly.
I raced to the dairy aisle. “How much is two cups in pints?!”
“Two cups! Are one pint!”
“Oh my god, how many god-damned teaspoons are in a god-damned gallon?!”
“There are seven hundred! And sixty-eight! God-damned teaspoons! In a god-damned gallon!”
Siri’s cursing is pure wish-fulfillment in the last one. But I get the sense that Siri would loosen the tie a little bit and let loose with profanity outside business hours.
Either way, when I’m lumbering through the supermarket, crashing my cart into little old ladies and mumbling questions to myself that my coat pocket answers and then counting on my fingers, I’m sure I’m a sight to see. And in the meantime, no matter how many times I ask the same questions over and over, I never remember. It’s too late for me. My brain is too feeble and aged to forge the new neural paths for junk I should’ve learned in fifth grade.
Damn you, former president Jimmy Carter! That Metric Conversion Act turns me into a social outcast whenever I set foot in a grocery store!
First of all, math is not my strong point. I count on my fingers. At certain sums I’m adept. A two and a one? Three. I and other mentally capable five-year-olds can do that one right off the top of my head. Four plus four? Eight, right? But then I get to one of the additions that’s traditionally tough for me, like eight plus five. You might not see it, but my fingers are pulsing and my lips are silently working as I count out nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen.
Yes, I count on my fingers. I’m not proud of it. But I’m brave enough to admit to it.
Through much of school I was able discreetly to disguise my dependency on such babyish methods. I fingered my way through the multiplication tables, I twiddled my digits during long division. I managed to hit my stride during the year of geometry, but then faced setbacks during Algebra I. I didn’t understand algebra. Why had all these mysterious letters wandered in? What were they doing sidled up amongst the numbers? I had enough social difficulties in eighth grade without this worst and most confusing integration.
It didn’t help that my Algebra I teacher was a sweetheart and a pushover who happily agreed to teach the ‘gifted and talented’ class in which I’d been plonked. Since mostly I was talented at being lazy and gifted at schmoozing As out of teachers without doing any actual work, I breezed through Algebra I without actually learning anything about the basics of algebra.
It was quite a shock when in tenth grade I landed in Algebra II and began carrying home Ds and Fs on my homework and report cards. My parents at first thought it was because of the teacher. And it was, really. It was the teacher giving me failing grades that I deserved because I had no idea how to balance an equation. There were four or five of us in the class from my Algebra I year, however, and we were all in the same boat. Our parents decided to hire a tutor for us from the local seminary, however. We must’ve been gifted enough—or as I suspect, frightened of our parents’ wrath—because within a couple of months we’d caught up to the rest of the class and I managed to score a respectable, though not enthusiastic, B on my final report card.
Trigonometry was the bane of my senior year. I was fascinated by Miss Bibby, my teacher, who during those late nineteen-seventies apparently set a course for her personal style using Pam Grier and Blaxploitation films as her north star. She taught her class in a stern and unsmiling manner, pointer gripped as tightly in her hand as might a dominatrix brandish a whip, dressed in super-tight pants with flares and a faux-fur jacket, or in high and shiny patent-leather lace-up boots with stiletto heels, a thigh-high skirt, and a diaphanous top that exposed plenty of her ample cleavage. She was addicted to wigs. One day she’d show up in a long ponytail that hung down to her butt. The next she’d have an enormous Coffy-style Afro. (“You call her Coffy and she’ll cream you!”) As fascinating as Miss Bibby herself could be, I sat there day after day in the classroom feeling futile about what we were doing there. I knew I’d never use trigonometry in my future. I never saw my parents calculating a negative sine.
It was when I was fifth or sixth grade that Jimmy Carter really pushed the Metric Conversion Act that had been passed in 1975. In the school system it was a big deal. The metric system was the future of America! We were the only country in the world that hadn’t been metricated, and it was going to happen by 1980, by gum! In math and science classes we watched movies about the metric system and how natural and easy it was to use. We gleefully abandoned traditional twelve-inch rulers in favor of the newer, shinier, more novel metric versions. We were the future, we were told over and over again.
We were also instructed to become little evangelicals for the cause. Our teachers wanted us to use the metric system at home, and gave us the formulae so that we could annoy our parents by telling them it was 13 degrees Celcius outside, or rolling our eyes when they mentioned such hilariously outmoded and antique conventions as ‘miles’ or ‘inches’. The metric system was in, baby, and we were the vanguard!
I actually loved the metric system. English measurements were based on weird fours and eights and twelves, but the ten-times table was easy. Converting three hundred and seventy inches to feet required a lot of work, but all I had to do to convert centimeters to meters was move the decimal point. Those decimal points weigh nothing. And of course I, who was gifted at avoiding as much work as possible and talented at mental torpor, very quickly decided that if the metric system was the future, I’d make a clean break from those English measurements that were as current as, say, dentistry with pliers, or rapid transit via velocipede.
So I simply never learned how many cups were in a pint, or how many pints were in a quart, or how many quarts were in a gallon. It was too much math. Too many fingers to count. Then the rest of the seventies was disco, and CB radio, and the Iran hostage crisis. Then came the eighties and Ronald Reagan, and the metric system was absolutely not the future any longer. People stubbornly stuck to their ounces and their pounds, their bushels and pecks and miles and pints, and like Ishmael, I alone was left to tell the tale of a time when we were promised—promised—that everything could be divided by ten.
But back to Stop ’n’ Shop. There I was, two days before Thanksgiving last week, pushing around an overloaded cart. Connecticut mommies were swerving out of my way as I passed, because like someone without adequate access to mental health care I was talking to myself in an erratic and eccentric manner. In two different voices. Only I wasn’t, really. I had my iPhone clutched in my hand as I stared in panic at the canned goods, knowing that the pie recipe I was using required two cups of pureed sweet potato and how the hell many was that in ounces? Did I need the big can or the small can? Or the one that looked like it should be purchased by a Mormon survivalist? “How many ounces are in two cups?” I asked Siri, in a frenzy.
Siri always obliges when I’m in a demoralizing panic. “There are sixteen! Ounces! In a cup!” it replied, soothingly.
I raced to the dairy aisle. “How much is two cups in pints?!”
“Two cups! Are one pint!”
“Oh my god, how many god-damned teaspoons are in a god-damned gallon?!”
“There are seven hundred! And sixty-eight! God-damned teaspoons! In a god-damned gallon!”
Siri’s cursing is pure wish-fulfillment in the last one. But I get the sense that Siri would loosen the tie a little bit and let loose with profanity outside business hours.
Either way, when I’m lumbering through the supermarket, crashing my cart into little old ladies and mumbling questions to myself that my coat pocket answers and then counting on my fingers, I’m sure I’m a sight to see. And in the meantime, no matter how many times I ask the same questions over and over, I never remember. It’s too late for me. My brain is too feeble and aged to forge the new neural paths for junk I should’ve learned in fifth grade.
Damn you, former president Jimmy Carter! That Metric Conversion Act turns me into a social outcast whenever I set foot in a grocery store!
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
I Sniffed These Candles So You Don't Have To
For most of the month of October I was sick. Sick as a dog. If I wasn’t shivering and shaking hard enough to jar the fillings from my teeth, I was sprawled on the sofa licking my parched lips and listening to the sounds of the buzzards circling the desert sands upon which I seemingly had been abandoned. I was weak. I was miserable.
But thanks to the specialist I’ve been seeing, I’m feeling better. Thanks for asking. And then my husband, sweet guy that he is, decided to cheer me up by taking us on a quick weekend getaway to Vermont. He had it all planned out; we’d stay at a historic little bed and breakfast in the mountains, we’d maybe visit some kind of place that sold (what else) maple products, we’d visit the Ben and Jerry’s factory, we’d explore downtown Burlington.
He even, as I found out on the morning of our departure, had selected where we would eat that night. “I’ve found the perfect restaurant,” he told me.
“What’s the name of it?” I asked, contemplating my socks.
“Um, I’ve forgotten.”
“What do they serve?”
“You know,” he said. “Smoked . . . things . . . and pig stuff.”
“Mmmm,” I said, rubbing my belly. “Smoked things and pig stuff. You know, honey, the world of advertising daily mourns that you did not share with them your abundant descriptive gifts.”
“Shut up!” he said. With affection, I’m sure.
I’ve never been to Vermont before. I didn’t know the danger that lurked on the freeway between here and there. It wasn’t until we’d traversed Connecticut and most of Massachusetts that I even noticed a highway advertisement for the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. Out of politeness, I wasn’t sure whether I should mention it or not. When I saw Craig craning his neck in order to read the details. I kept my mouth shut.
To say that my husband, in the past, has had a little bit of a candle addiction problem is an understatement. When we moved three years ago, I had to dispose of two giant Hefty bags full of unused candles—it felt like about two hundred pounds’ worth of wax that I hauled out to the curb or dumped on friends’ doorsteps. He doesn’t use the candles, mind you. He just buys them. Then he hides them away from the light of day while talking to himself, like Gollum with the One Ring. Taking him to the Yankee Candle flagship store seemed like it would be a little bit like driving a recovering alcoholic to the Smirnoff Factory Outlet, or parachuting a heavy cocaine user right into El Salvador with unmarked treasury bills strapped to his chest.
But, you know. It was a mini-vacation. And he’d gone to all the trouble of arranging the bed-and-breakfast and a dinner of pig stuff. When we passed an urgent last-chance! turn here now! billboard on the road and I saw that longing look in his eyes, I couldn’t resist. “Do you want to go?” I asked. “We can go.”
I still have the bump on my head from the hard swerve he took onto the exit lane.
What I recall of the Yankee Candle flagship store is as a feverish dream; I’m still not sure how much of my memories were actually potpourri-induced hallucinations. From the outside, I was led to expect that the store itself would be perhaps a little larger than the average mall candle franchise. Once inside, however, I realized it was a Tardis-like never-ending expanse of rooms full of wax-filled bottles in every shade of the rainbow opening into other rooms containing even more candles in even more eye-popping colors and nose-stripping scents, opening into confusing corridors lined with popcorn and fudge vendors that circled back into even more rooms filled with even more candles. I vaguely remember a room filled with artificial spruces and Christmas candles in which fake snow blew down onto us from the ceiling. There was a room full of gargoyles and candles of a deep purple hue. For over an hour we wandered without direction from place to place, uncertain what would lie around the next corner (but still pretty certain all the same that it would involve candles) and wondering when it would end.
If there is a Limbo, it’s a lot like the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. We basically were trapped in an Escher engraving, if Escher had ever accepted a commission from the Association of American Beeswax Manufacturers. And along the way, I smelled a lot of candles. A lot of candles. In fact, I regard my excursion into the dark heart of the Yankee Candle Factory as a selfless act. I actually smelled these candles so that you, reader, would not have to. And these are the conclusions I have drawn about what the candles claim to be, and what they actually smell like. Here goes.
Cozy Sweater: Ass.
Autumn Wreath: Spicy ass.
Leather: Sweaty chapped ass. And not the good kind.
Fluffy Towels: Bounce fabric sheets.
Cream Colored Ponies: Sweet Jesus, who thinks of these scents? Another Bounce fabric sheet dipped in vanilla.
Merry Marshmallow: The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, after he’s exploded in Ghostbusters.
Mmm, Bacon!: Easily the worst scent of the afternoon. Liquid smoke extract with no hint of pig stuff whatsoever.
Queen Anne’s Lace: What? Queen Anne’s Lace doesn’t even have a scent. If it did, it would be the smell of highway gasoline fumes and burnt-out tires.
Turkey and Stuffing: There was one holiday in which Craig’s mother turned up with a turkey that smelled so rancid I was convinced she’d gotten it by accident from a hospital for turkeys with incurable leprosy. I had to excuse myself from the kitchen and dry-heave in the bedroom, the scent was so awful. It turned out that she’d forgotten to retrieve the plastic bag with the neck and the gizzard from the turkey’s inside before she baked it. This candle smelled worse than that.
Red Velvet: Vanilla.
Shortbread Cookie: Vanilla.
Snowflake Cookie: Vanilla.
Almond Amaretto Biscotti: Vanilla. And ass.
Cherries on Snow: Why in the world would you take your cherries out into a snowstorm, much less leave them there? Are cherries even in season at the same time it snows? Why can’t you just eat your cherries inside and in a bowl or dunked in a nice Cosmo? Get it together, people! Cherry-scented ass.
Patchouli: Hippie ass.
Man Town: Musk, and ass.
First Down: There’s a photo of a football on the jar, but basically it smells like an assy locker room in which everyone has a scorching case of athlete’s foot.
Whiskers on Kittens: Cat ass.
Riding Mower: Grass.
Treehouse Memories: The sweet scent of autumn leaves, mingled with traces of sawdust from the freshly-hewn wood forming the sturdy floor of a child’s treehouse . . . in which someone has let rip an enormous fart.
Don’t thank me. You’re already welcome.
But thanks to the specialist I’ve been seeing, I’m feeling better. Thanks for asking. And then my husband, sweet guy that he is, decided to cheer me up by taking us on a quick weekend getaway to Vermont. He had it all planned out; we’d stay at a historic little bed and breakfast in the mountains, we’d maybe visit some kind of place that sold (what else) maple products, we’d visit the Ben and Jerry’s factory, we’d explore downtown Burlington.
He even, as I found out on the morning of our departure, had selected where we would eat that night. “I’ve found the perfect restaurant,” he told me.
“What’s the name of it?” I asked, contemplating my socks.
“Um, I’ve forgotten.”
“What do they serve?”
“You know,” he said. “Smoked . . . things . . . and pig stuff.”
“Mmmm,” I said, rubbing my belly. “Smoked things and pig stuff. You know, honey, the world of advertising daily mourns that you did not share with them your abundant descriptive gifts.”
“Shut up!” he said. With affection, I’m sure.
I’ve never been to Vermont before. I didn’t know the danger that lurked on the freeway between here and there. It wasn’t until we’d traversed Connecticut and most of Massachusetts that I even noticed a highway advertisement for the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. Out of politeness, I wasn’t sure whether I should mention it or not. When I saw Craig craning his neck in order to read the details. I kept my mouth shut.
To say that my husband, in the past, has had a little bit of a candle addiction problem is an understatement. When we moved three years ago, I had to dispose of two giant Hefty bags full of unused candles—it felt like about two hundred pounds’ worth of wax that I hauled out to the curb or dumped on friends’ doorsteps. He doesn’t use the candles, mind you. He just buys them. Then he hides them away from the light of day while talking to himself, like Gollum with the One Ring. Taking him to the Yankee Candle flagship store seemed like it would be a little bit like driving a recovering alcoholic to the Smirnoff Factory Outlet, or parachuting a heavy cocaine user right into El Salvador with unmarked treasury bills strapped to his chest.
But, you know. It was a mini-vacation. And he’d gone to all the trouble of arranging the bed-and-breakfast and a dinner of pig stuff. When we passed an urgent last-chance! turn here now! billboard on the road and I saw that longing look in his eyes, I couldn’t resist. “Do you want to go?” I asked. “We can go.”
I still have the bump on my head from the hard swerve he took onto the exit lane.
What I recall of the Yankee Candle flagship store is as a feverish dream; I’m still not sure how much of my memories were actually potpourri-induced hallucinations. From the outside, I was led to expect that the store itself would be perhaps a little larger than the average mall candle franchise. Once inside, however, I realized it was a Tardis-like never-ending expanse of rooms full of wax-filled bottles in every shade of the rainbow opening into other rooms containing even more candles in even more eye-popping colors and nose-stripping scents, opening into confusing corridors lined with popcorn and fudge vendors that circled back into even more rooms filled with even more candles. I vaguely remember a room filled with artificial spruces and Christmas candles in which fake snow blew down onto us from the ceiling. There was a room full of gargoyles and candles of a deep purple hue. For over an hour we wandered without direction from place to place, uncertain what would lie around the next corner (but still pretty certain all the same that it would involve candles) and wondering when it would end.
If there is a Limbo, it’s a lot like the Yankee Candle Factory flagship store. We basically were trapped in an Escher engraving, if Escher had ever accepted a commission from the Association of American Beeswax Manufacturers. And along the way, I smelled a lot of candles. A lot of candles. In fact, I regard my excursion into the dark heart of the Yankee Candle Factory as a selfless act. I actually smelled these candles so that you, reader, would not have to. And these are the conclusions I have drawn about what the candles claim to be, and what they actually smell like. Here goes.
Cozy Sweater: Ass.
Autumn Wreath: Spicy ass.
Leather: Sweaty chapped ass. And not the good kind.
Fluffy Towels: Bounce fabric sheets.
Cream Colored Ponies: Sweet Jesus, who thinks of these scents? Another Bounce fabric sheet dipped in vanilla.
Merry Marshmallow: The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, after he’s exploded in Ghostbusters.
Mmm, Bacon!: Easily the worst scent of the afternoon. Liquid smoke extract with no hint of pig stuff whatsoever.
Queen Anne’s Lace: What? Queen Anne’s Lace doesn’t even have a scent. If it did, it would be the smell of highway gasoline fumes and burnt-out tires.
Turkey and Stuffing: There was one holiday in which Craig’s mother turned up with a turkey that smelled so rancid I was convinced she’d gotten it by accident from a hospital for turkeys with incurable leprosy. I had to excuse myself from the kitchen and dry-heave in the bedroom, the scent was so awful. It turned out that she’d forgotten to retrieve the plastic bag with the neck and the gizzard from the turkey’s inside before she baked it. This candle smelled worse than that.
Red Velvet: Vanilla.
Shortbread Cookie: Vanilla.
Snowflake Cookie: Vanilla.
Almond Amaretto Biscotti: Vanilla. And ass.
Cherries on Snow: Why in the world would you take your cherries out into a snowstorm, much less leave them there? Are cherries even in season at the same time it snows? Why can’t you just eat your cherries inside and in a bowl or dunked in a nice Cosmo? Get it together, people! Cherry-scented ass.
Patchouli: Hippie ass.
Man Town: Musk, and ass.
First Down: There’s a photo of a football on the jar, but basically it smells like an assy locker room in which everyone has a scorching case of athlete’s foot.
Whiskers on Kittens: Cat ass.
Riding Mower: Grass.
Treehouse Memories: The sweet scent of autumn leaves, mingled with traces of sawdust from the freshly-hewn wood forming the sturdy floor of a child’s treehouse . . . in which someone has let rip an enormous fart.
Don’t thank me. You’re already welcome.
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