MY FATHER: They opened up one of those stores out here.
ME: Oh, good. I was wondering when they were going to open one of those stores. [Massive pause.] Are you perhaps eventually going to tell me which one of those stores you’re talking about?
MY FATHER: The fancy one.
ME: Neiman Marcus?
MY FATHER: The fancy frozen foods one.
ME [mouthing the words]: The fancy frozen foods one?
MY FATHER: The one with all the fancy frozen foods.
ME [mystified]: The one with all the fancy frozen foods?
MY FATHER: It has frozen foods, and it’s fancy.
ME: Gordon’s?
MY FATHER: Nooooo. Gawrsh. The fancy frozen food store near your old house.
ME: Fancy frozen foods near my old house? I don’t . . . Omaha Steaks?
MY FATHER: No. . . .
ME: I don’t know. . . .
MY FATHER: Why don’t you call up Surry and ask?
ME: Surry? Surry, Virginia? Is that where the store is?
MY FATHER [staring at me as if I’m an idiot]: Why in the world would you call up Surry, Virginia?
ME: That’s what I want to know!
MY FATHER: It was only a few blocks from your old house, and we walked there. . . .
ME: Surry?
MY FATHER [patiently]: The fancy frozen foods store.
ME: Are you talking about Trader Joe’s?
MY FATHER: That’s what I’ve been saying the entire time.
ME: For one thing, Trader Joe’s is not fancy. It’s less expensive than most supermarkets.
MY FATHER: No, it’s fancy.
ME: And for another, it’s not a frozen foods store.
MY FATHER: Does it have frozen foods?
ME: It has an aisle of frozen foods. Out of several aisles of other non-frozen goods.
MY FATHER: I bet if you had called up Surry. . . .
ME: For the love of god, who is Surry? Who? What? Does it have a fringe on top?
MY FATHER: Surry, your personal assistant. Your phone is full of it.
ME [after a pause]: Are you talking about Siri?!
MY FATHER [sighing]: That’s what I’ve been saying. . . .
ME: . . . the entire time, yes. For one thing, you don’t call up Surry. Siri. You just ask it.
MY FATHER: Well, she would have known.
ME: Would have known what, the name of the fancy frozen food store? No.
MY FATHER: Surry knows everything.
ME: I could ask Siri what the weather would be today, or I could ask Siri to send a text message. I could ask Siri how many ounces are in a cup, or what time a certain movie is, or what seventy percent off of a hundred and thirty-five dollars is. What I cannot do is ask Siri what the name of the fancy frozen food store is.
MY FATHER [reaching for his wallet]: I will make you a dollar bet. . . .
ME: Oh, you are so on. How do you want me to word it? Tell me the name of the fancy frozen food place?
MY FATHER [with disdain]: Not like that. Call her up and say, Hi Siri, can you tell me the name of the fancy store that sells frozen foods?
ME: You don’t have to address Siri by name. But okay.
SIRI: Buh-beep!
ME: Can you tell me the name of the fancy store that sells—?
MY FATHER: In Detroit.
SIRI: Buh-boop.
ME: Are you done? [He nods.]
SIRI: Buh-beep!
ME: What’s the name of the fancy store in Detroit that sells—?
MY FATHER: That has an aisle of fancy frozen foods.
SIRI: Buh-boop.
ME: You can’t keep talking like that.
MY FATHER: Fine! Gawrsh, I didn’t know Surry was so touchy.
SIRI: Buh-beep!
ME [enunciating in a way that would make Henry Higgins proud]: I’d like to know the name of the fancy store in Detroit that has an aisle of fancy frozen foods.
SIRI: I’m sorry . . . Vance. I don’t know about Detroit that has an ocho of Frenchy frozen flus.
ME: HAH!
MY FATHER [handing over the dollar]: She didn’t know the answer?
ME: She failed miserably. Miserably.
MY FATHER [sadly]: Gawrsh. Surry, you let me down.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
A Real New Yorker
New Yorkers like to talk about one thing: their apartments.
No, New Yorkers like to talk about two things. Their current apartments, and the list of miserable apartments where they used to live before they moved to the adorable and perfect little apartment where they now quite happily reside, even if that amazing bagel shop on the corner got driven out by a freakin’ Starbucks.
Wait. Three things: current apartments (amazing), old apartments (crap heaps), and who they’ve hired to re-do their apartments (expensive and you have to be on his waiting list for three years, but so worth it. Want to see photos? Hang on, let me pull up the album on my smartphone!).
If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll sometimes get away from the topic of apartments and onto the standard fallback talking point—the moment, if they weren’t a native of the city, that they felt like real, honest-to-God New Yorkers.
For some residents it’s a milestone of time. Living in the city for two years, or a decade. For others, the realization of belonging comes from finding a perfect little restaurant, or that one’s favorite places to shop are sprinkled on New York’s complicated grid of streets. It might be comprehending that one has more friends here than elsewhere. It might be that moment, when traveling, when someone asks where one’s from, and the automatic reply is no longer, Well, I grew up in Akron, but I’ve lived in Queens for the last fifteen years…, but instead a short and snappy, I’m from New York City.
I can’t say I’ve had one of those moments myself. Technically, of course, I’m not a New Yorker. I’m in the suburbs, just over the border in Connecticut. I do live remarkably close to the city, though. (My old Detroit friends don’t really understand how close. Here’s a frame of reference. Drive from Birmingham down Woodward until you reach the Detroit River. That’s how far away Manhattan is from my front doorstep.) Close enough that the traffic reports to which I listen are New York City traffic reports. Close enough that the local news is New York City news. The culture in which I live here is New York culture with all of its quirks and bustle and craziness. The city might be a Emerald City-like shimmering outline of skyscrapers across the Long Island Sound from the shores of the beach down the road from me, but it really is the hub of my new universe.
Well, maybe I have had one of those moments. Our friends Maryann and Kim visited Manhattan a couple of weeks ago, from Michigan. They stayed at a nice hotel near Grand Central. For two days Craig and I commuted into the city to show them around. We did Times Square, and took them on a rainy Circle Line tour so they could see the Statue of Liberty. We restaurant-hopped in Hell’s Kitchen. We went down to the September 11 Memorial, and visited Wall Street and tramped around Little Italy and Chinatown. We let them pick a Broadway show to see, and got cheap seats for them. I taught Maryann how to tell where subway cars were likely to stop and open their doors by identifying concentrations of the mashed-down and blackened remains of spat-out chewing gum along the subway platforms. We had, in short, a fine and educational time.
But there was a moment. We were all sitting on the 6 train, meatballs from Little Italy digesting like rocks in our stomachs. There weren’t many people on our car, so we were all slumped in the benches, glad for the opportunity to sit down. At Bleecker Street, the doors slid open. A few people straggled on. One of them was one of those guys who gets on a subway car, makes a speech, tries to collect money, and moves on. Some of them have sob stories to spill and a tin can to shake in people’s faces. Many of them will sing and accept donations, or play an instrument for quick cash. This guy, however, was one of the ones who had something to sell—I don’t remember what, pencils, or newspapers, or buttons or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. All I knew is that his short oration ended with him proffering whatever it was he was hawking, holding out a cup for money, and asking, “So anybody wanna help out the homeless?”
From all around the rattling car there was dead silence. Except for two simultaneous, sweet, angelic women’s voices, both saying very politely and in flat, Midwestern tones, “No, thank you!”
Startled, I turned my head and looked at my friends, who were smiling at the man as if he merited their sweet (if automatic) civility. The rest of us had turned the guy into an invisible, inaudible cipher. They’d actually listened to him. And I thought to myself, man, am I really a different person now. Because three or four years ago, I might’ve been joining in that chirpy chorus of cherubic No thank yous!, too.
It’s not that New Yorkers are rude, or unkind. One of my favorite memories of last year was having a leisurely, fascinating three-hour conversation with a stranger in Central Park. I keep returning to a certain yarn store on the upper west side because not only was the proprietor incredibly friendly and helpful, but an elderly African-American woman from the neighborhood spent twenty minutes there telling me about her philosophy of knitting. I’ve found it infinitely easier to strike up random conversations with strangers here—in a city with a reputation of uptight and rude residents—than in the midwest.
If New Yorkers come across as walled-off and impersonal at first glance, it’s because they—we—live in a limited space in which everything is tightly compacted together. We stand hip to hip on the trains and pretend not to notice. At restaurants, we’re packed into seats like sardines in tins, wedged elbow to elbow. We don’t have privacy here, not in public venues. We don’t have personal space. What we maintain is the polite illusion that, even though there’s a hipster slurping coffee three inches on one side of us and a pair of Asian NYU students chattering loudly three inches on the other, we can have a frank discussion with a friend about hemorrhoids without us losing our dignity or our neighbors their lunch.
I suspect I fit an in-between kind of profile, when I’m out and about in the city. I seem enough like an insider to know my stuff, yet I must seem approachable and not entirely walled-off. In other words, I am the guy who is constantly asked directions by tourists. I am the man who, upon stepping off his train and into the great atrium of Grand Central, will be surrounded by a self-guided Russian tour group askink easiest vay to Ompire State Buildink. I’m the man who, at any subway stop, will be approached by two cute out-of-town chicks to consult which train they should transfer to get to Prospect Park. I’m that guy who will be stopped mid-stride at Seventh Avenue and 48th Street by a family of middle Americans who want to know if I can direct them to Times Square. (At least that one was easy. “Um, see all those video displays and that big crowd of people a block away?”)
I’m pretty sure that the part of me that says Lookit, a real New Yawker! to these people is my brisk pace and my total and remorseless willingness to march in front of tourists attempting to take photos of their honeybears from 25 feet away. (This is New York, people. We don’t have 25 feet to spare you, better Instagram moment or not.) It’s that quality that makes out-of-towners clear a path for me on a busy street, rather than making me step aside. I look like I know where I’m going. I look like I have a place to go. I usually do. Sometimes, though, I’m just looking for a public restroom.
And the approachability thing, I’m pretty sure, is just that I’m the sole semi-local walking down the street and crossing intersections who isn’t fixated on his phone, texting like a madperson.
I’ve given directions for all the major landmarks. Every skyscraper. The Cloisters. The Brooklyn Bridge. Major department stores. The other day, I’d pushed through a subway turnstile and turned to see Craig giving me a shrug clearly intended to convey, Oh, shoot, I don’t have as much money on my MetroCard as I thought, hang on while I add some. During the minute, tops, that I was at a standstill, I gave directions to one confused woman to the Metro North ticket booths in Grand Central, and to Columbus Circle for a post-cougar/pre-retirement home panther wearing an expensive designer dress and a pair of ratty Birkenstocks. So far, I’m happy to say, I’ve never been stumped.
Except once. I was walking somewhere on Fifth Avenue last month when a couple loomed up out of nowhere and asked me how to get to Staten Island. I thought about it. And I thought about it some more. At last I just peered at them, shook my head, and asked plaintively and with a pained expression, “Why?”
Come to think, that’s a moment in which I could’ve considered myself a real New Yorker.
No, New Yorkers like to talk about two things. Their current apartments, and the list of miserable apartments where they used to live before they moved to the adorable and perfect little apartment where they now quite happily reside, even if that amazing bagel shop on the corner got driven out by a freakin’ Starbucks.
Wait. Three things: current apartments (amazing), old apartments (crap heaps), and who they’ve hired to re-do their apartments (expensive and you have to be on his waiting list for three years, but so worth it. Want to see photos? Hang on, let me pull up the album on my smartphone!).
If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll sometimes get away from the topic of apartments and onto the standard fallback talking point—the moment, if they weren’t a native of the city, that they felt like real, honest-to-God New Yorkers.
For some residents it’s a milestone of time. Living in the city for two years, or a decade. For others, the realization of belonging comes from finding a perfect little restaurant, or that one’s favorite places to shop are sprinkled on New York’s complicated grid of streets. It might be comprehending that one has more friends here than elsewhere. It might be that moment, when traveling, when someone asks where one’s from, and the automatic reply is no longer, Well, I grew up in Akron, but I’ve lived in Queens for the last fifteen years…, but instead a short and snappy, I’m from New York City.
I can’t say I’ve had one of those moments myself. Technically, of course, I’m not a New Yorker. I’m in the suburbs, just over the border in Connecticut. I do live remarkably close to the city, though. (My old Detroit friends don’t really understand how close. Here’s a frame of reference. Drive from Birmingham down Woodward until you reach the Detroit River. That’s how far away Manhattan is from my front doorstep.) Close enough that the traffic reports to which I listen are New York City traffic reports. Close enough that the local news is New York City news. The culture in which I live here is New York culture with all of its quirks and bustle and craziness. The city might be a Emerald City-like shimmering outline of skyscrapers across the Long Island Sound from the shores of the beach down the road from me, but it really is the hub of my new universe.
Well, maybe I have had one of those moments. Our friends Maryann and Kim visited Manhattan a couple of weeks ago, from Michigan. They stayed at a nice hotel near Grand Central. For two days Craig and I commuted into the city to show them around. We did Times Square, and took them on a rainy Circle Line tour so they could see the Statue of Liberty. We restaurant-hopped in Hell’s Kitchen. We went down to the September 11 Memorial, and visited Wall Street and tramped around Little Italy and Chinatown. We let them pick a Broadway show to see, and got cheap seats for them. I taught Maryann how to tell where subway cars were likely to stop and open their doors by identifying concentrations of the mashed-down and blackened remains of spat-out chewing gum along the subway platforms. We had, in short, a fine and educational time.
But there was a moment. We were all sitting on the 6 train, meatballs from Little Italy digesting like rocks in our stomachs. There weren’t many people on our car, so we were all slumped in the benches, glad for the opportunity to sit down. At Bleecker Street, the doors slid open. A few people straggled on. One of them was one of those guys who gets on a subway car, makes a speech, tries to collect money, and moves on. Some of them have sob stories to spill and a tin can to shake in people’s faces. Many of them will sing and accept donations, or play an instrument for quick cash. This guy, however, was one of the ones who had something to sell—I don’t remember what, pencils, or newspapers, or buttons or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. All I knew is that his short oration ended with him proffering whatever it was he was hawking, holding out a cup for money, and asking, “So anybody wanna help out the homeless?”
From all around the rattling car there was dead silence. Except for two simultaneous, sweet, angelic women’s voices, both saying very politely and in flat, Midwestern tones, “No, thank you!”
Startled, I turned my head and looked at my friends, who were smiling at the man as if he merited their sweet (if automatic) civility. The rest of us had turned the guy into an invisible, inaudible cipher. They’d actually listened to him. And I thought to myself, man, am I really a different person now. Because three or four years ago, I might’ve been joining in that chirpy chorus of cherubic No thank yous!, too.
It’s not that New Yorkers are rude, or unkind. One of my favorite memories of last year was having a leisurely, fascinating three-hour conversation with a stranger in Central Park. I keep returning to a certain yarn store on the upper west side because not only was the proprietor incredibly friendly and helpful, but an elderly African-American woman from the neighborhood spent twenty minutes there telling me about her philosophy of knitting. I’ve found it infinitely easier to strike up random conversations with strangers here—in a city with a reputation of uptight and rude residents—than in the midwest.
If New Yorkers come across as walled-off and impersonal at first glance, it’s because they—we—live in a limited space in which everything is tightly compacted together. We stand hip to hip on the trains and pretend not to notice. At restaurants, we’re packed into seats like sardines in tins, wedged elbow to elbow. We don’t have privacy here, not in public venues. We don’t have personal space. What we maintain is the polite illusion that, even though there’s a hipster slurping coffee three inches on one side of us and a pair of Asian NYU students chattering loudly three inches on the other, we can have a frank discussion with a friend about hemorrhoids without us losing our dignity or our neighbors their lunch.
I suspect I fit an in-between kind of profile, when I’m out and about in the city. I seem enough like an insider to know my stuff, yet I must seem approachable and not entirely walled-off. In other words, I am the guy who is constantly asked directions by tourists. I am the man who, upon stepping off his train and into the great atrium of Grand Central, will be surrounded by a self-guided Russian tour group askink easiest vay to Ompire State Buildink. I’m the man who, at any subway stop, will be approached by two cute out-of-town chicks to consult which train they should transfer to get to Prospect Park. I’m that guy who will be stopped mid-stride at Seventh Avenue and 48th Street by a family of middle Americans who want to know if I can direct them to Times Square. (At least that one was easy. “Um, see all those video displays and that big crowd of people a block away?”)
I’m pretty sure that the part of me that says Lookit, a real New Yawker! to these people is my brisk pace and my total and remorseless willingness to march in front of tourists attempting to take photos of their honeybears from 25 feet away. (This is New York, people. We don’t have 25 feet to spare you, better Instagram moment or not.) It’s that quality that makes out-of-towners clear a path for me on a busy street, rather than making me step aside. I look like I know where I’m going. I look like I have a place to go. I usually do. Sometimes, though, I’m just looking for a public restroom.
And the approachability thing, I’m pretty sure, is just that I’m the sole semi-local walking down the street and crossing intersections who isn’t fixated on his phone, texting like a madperson.
I’ve given directions for all the major landmarks. Every skyscraper. The Cloisters. The Brooklyn Bridge. Major department stores. The other day, I’d pushed through a subway turnstile and turned to see Craig giving me a shrug clearly intended to convey, Oh, shoot, I don’t have as much money on my MetroCard as I thought, hang on while I add some. During the minute, tops, that I was at a standstill, I gave directions to one confused woman to the Metro North ticket booths in Grand Central, and to Columbus Circle for a post-cougar/pre-retirement home panther wearing an expensive designer dress and a pair of ratty Birkenstocks. So far, I’m happy to say, I’ve never been stumped.
Except once. I was walking somewhere on Fifth Avenue last month when a couple loomed up out of nowhere and asked me how to get to Staten Island. I thought about it. And I thought about it some more. At last I just peered at them, shook my head, and asked plaintively and with a pained expression, “Why?”
Come to think, that’s a moment in which I could’ve considered myself a real New Yorker.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Ruby
After the death of our cat Sarah, who had a very satisfying nearly twenty-three years on this earth, I was really reluctant to adopt again.
By now I know how it works with pets. We adopt them into our homes, we take care of them and love them and feed them. We put up with their ridiculous quirks like their licking their butts spread-eagled on the floor during a fancy dinner party, or upchucking at the drop of a hat. They tolerate our strange affinity for oddball, deviant activities like vacuuming the house free of the perfectly good cat hair they've taken time to distribute on the furniture, or gently requesting that they not throw up inside the grand piano. When they’re sick, we care for them. When the end is near, we try to be there, and to console ourselves with the notion that we’ve given them as good a life as we could. With Sarah, we could easily say that she’d never wanted for love or affection or, god knows, Meow Mix.
After Chloe’s unexpected death a couple of years ago, and after Sarah died in my arms, though, I just didn’t have the heart to sign up for it all over again. I privately decided that we just didn’t need to adopt another cat. Not in the raw couple of months afterward, and not in the future.
The household changed after her death, though. Our one remaining cat, Fred, got progressively more weird. It was as if when Sarah disappeared, Fred decided that she had to double her annoying behaviors to make up for her absence. She would hole herself up in out-of-the-way places and yowl loudly, forcing us to find her. She’d wander around restlessly and knock things over. Although she’d always slept all the night through before, she took to waking up at four in the morning and screaming at the top of her feline lungs in the darkness, which always woke me up thinking that someone was being killed in the next room. It didn’t take a genius to see that she was lonely, and missing Sarah, too.
So we started looking at cats up for adoption. We specifically wanted a female cat who was between nine months and year old, because we reasoned that it would be easier to introduce into the household a cat who was still recognizably young and less of a threat than an adult cat, but who’d lost the endless rambunctiousness of young kittenhood. We visited an animal shelter in Norwalk that had dozens and dozens of cats in its care. Their application form for adoption was longer than my masters’ dissertation. They had a screening interview in which they sat us in a room with a few of their more complacent and lethargic cats so they could see how we interacted with them, and then proceeded to ask us a number of (I thought) insensitive questions about how our previous pets had died. And then finally they allowed us, grudgingly, to walk through the cat cages while they insinuated to us that not only were we never going to be allowed to take one of their cats home, but no one else anywhere was ever going to be good enough to adopt one, either.
We went to a shelter on Long Island to look at the cats there. They were all either quite old and set in their ways (“Does not get along with other animals”) or at the stage of kittenhood in which they’d barely just opened their eyes. We went to a few pet stores that offered adoption events. At one in Port Chester, we encountered a female cat named Skittles who was the right age—about nine months—and whose temperament was sweet. She was a pretty calico who purred in our arms and blinked at us with enormous brown eyes, and we might have adopted her on the spot if we’d had any way of getting her from the store home. It was that night, when we stowed in Craig’s trunk a cat carrier “just in case," I realized that adoption was going to be inevitable.
It was a week or two later—a year ago this week, in fact—that we ended up going back to that Port Chester pet store to see if Skittles was still up for adoption. She was indeed. The woman told us that she’d rescued Skittles from a pound in Kentucky. We filled out a short form, waited while Skittles got the last of her shots, and took her home a half-hour later.
I’ve never really been of the super-cautious school of introducing a new cat into our household. I don’t separate them for days and let them get acquainted to each other’s smells through the crack of a closed door, or anything. When we brought Skittles home, I let Fred out into the courtyard behind our apartment—she loves going outdoors—while Craig took Skittles inside. The new cat ran around the apartment for a half-hour and got the lay of the land on her own, while Craig supervised. I sat outside with Fred (who knew something was going on) and supervised while she rolled around in the dirt. Then I brought a horrified Fred in, sat her on top of the entertainment center so she could watch the calico horror run around and try to get to her.
Honestly, it was the shortest acclimation period I’ve ever seen. Fred was miffy for all of an evening. Then Ruby, as we decided to rename the newest member of our household, pinned her down and cleaned around Fred’s ears. By the end of the second day, they were sleeping side by side on the sofa.
They’ve been buddies ever since. They sleep together, share perches together, play together. Not a day passes in which the two of them aren’t thundering down the hallway as loudly as they can, or in which they don’t wrestle and play-pounce on each other for hours of entertainment. They wash each other and share their meal bowls without much fuss. If Fred insists on being the senior cat, well, Ruby doesn’t seem to mind humoring her, very much.
If I’d thought that adopting an older kitten would cut down on the rambunctiousness, however, hoo boy, was I ever wrong. Right from the start, Ruby was hell on wheels. We discovered from day one that her favorite game was Fetch. Now, every other cat we’ve had has enjoyed a good game of Fetch. Sarah enjoyed it with an orange carrot toy, while Chloe loved to bring a ragged length of braided twine into the office for me to throw while I was working. Fred’s favorite toy was a purple mousie that I’d have to throw for her.
But Ruby was crazy for paper. Crumpled-up paper. When she discovered the joy of a Tootsie Roll Pop wrapper—waxy and lightweight, yet durable enough for repeated trips in her mouth—she stumbled upon a formula of play that’s lasted the entire year. For hours—literal hours—I will pick up the crumpled Tootsie Pop wrapper from my feet, throw it into the next room, and listen as Ruby pounds after it. She’ll grasp it in her teeth, bound back, drop it in my vicinity, and wait impatiently for me to throw it again. There have been mornings in which Craig has left for work while I’ve been writing on my laptop and absently throwing a Tootsie Pop wrapper for Ruby—and then he’s returned three hours later for lunch to find me still tossing the damned thing, with Ruby just as wild and anxious to dive after it.
Despite all the exercise she gets—and during the daylight hours, Ruby’s constantly either trying to get us to play Fetch, or bothering Fred—our little Ruby is not exactly the leanest cat around. Fred used always to make me exclaim Ooof! when I’d pick her up, but running around with Ruby has slimmed her down. Ruby, however, is tubby. To put it gently (and accurately), you know how snakes have a bulge along their length when they’ve just snacked on a whole mouse? Ruby looks as if her jaw has unhinged and she’s swallowed a basketball. She doesn’t care. Her favorite thing to do is lie on her back in the middle of the floor with her legs wide open, staring at the world upside-down, belly on display.
It’s during these moments that I yell out, in a Kentucky accent, “Hee-uh comes Honey Ru-Boo!” When I talk to Ruby, it’s with the thickest of drawls, as if she can’t understand my usually-uninflected accent. She’ll stare at me tolerantly with those brown eyes, then go back to demanding that I sweep under the sofas to find the Tootsie Pop wrappers that she’s been stashing beneath.
And then at night, after she’s finally calmed down, she’s the most affectionate of cats. She sleeps between my feet from the time we turn out the lights until the moment we get up in the morning, purring and snoring. She always greets us at the door when we’ve been out, and she’s not satisfied until we’ve both picked her up and fawned on her. She’s friendly to guests. Even if she did unravel four hundred and forty yards of yarn from my knitting box, one day, she managed through cuteness to convince me that it was my fault that I’d only stored the skeins in a plastic box with a lid that simply popped off when she pushed it from a tabletop, instead of in something more secure. That yarn had been asking for it, really.
It’s been a year and several hundred Tootsie Pop wrappers later, and Ruby, neé Skittles, is firmly one of us. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
By now I know how it works with pets. We adopt them into our homes, we take care of them and love them and feed them. We put up with their ridiculous quirks like their licking their butts spread-eagled on the floor during a fancy dinner party, or upchucking at the drop of a hat. They tolerate our strange affinity for oddball, deviant activities like vacuuming the house free of the perfectly good cat hair they've taken time to distribute on the furniture, or gently requesting that they not throw up inside the grand piano. When they’re sick, we care for them. When the end is near, we try to be there, and to console ourselves with the notion that we’ve given them as good a life as we could. With Sarah, we could easily say that she’d never wanted for love or affection or, god knows, Meow Mix.
After Chloe’s unexpected death a couple of years ago, and after Sarah died in my arms, though, I just didn’t have the heart to sign up for it all over again. I privately decided that we just didn’t need to adopt another cat. Not in the raw couple of months afterward, and not in the future.
The household changed after her death, though. Our one remaining cat, Fred, got progressively more weird. It was as if when Sarah disappeared, Fred decided that she had to double her annoying behaviors to make up for her absence. She would hole herself up in out-of-the-way places and yowl loudly, forcing us to find her. She’d wander around restlessly and knock things over. Although she’d always slept all the night through before, she took to waking up at four in the morning and screaming at the top of her feline lungs in the darkness, which always woke me up thinking that someone was being killed in the next room. It didn’t take a genius to see that she was lonely, and missing Sarah, too.
So we started looking at cats up for adoption. We specifically wanted a female cat who was between nine months and year old, because we reasoned that it would be easier to introduce into the household a cat who was still recognizably young and less of a threat than an adult cat, but who’d lost the endless rambunctiousness of young kittenhood. We visited an animal shelter in Norwalk that had dozens and dozens of cats in its care. Their application form for adoption was longer than my masters’ dissertation. They had a screening interview in which they sat us in a room with a few of their more complacent and lethargic cats so they could see how we interacted with them, and then proceeded to ask us a number of (I thought) insensitive questions about how our previous pets had died. And then finally they allowed us, grudgingly, to walk through the cat cages while they insinuated to us that not only were we never going to be allowed to take one of their cats home, but no one else anywhere was ever going to be good enough to adopt one, either.
We went to a shelter on Long Island to look at the cats there. They were all either quite old and set in their ways (“Does not get along with other animals”) or at the stage of kittenhood in which they’d barely just opened their eyes. We went to a few pet stores that offered adoption events. At one in Port Chester, we encountered a female cat named Skittles who was the right age—about nine months—and whose temperament was sweet. She was a pretty calico who purred in our arms and blinked at us with enormous brown eyes, and we might have adopted her on the spot if we’d had any way of getting her from the store home. It was that night, when we stowed in Craig’s trunk a cat carrier “just in case," I realized that adoption was going to be inevitable.
It was a week or two later—a year ago this week, in fact—that we ended up going back to that Port Chester pet store to see if Skittles was still up for adoption. She was indeed. The woman told us that she’d rescued Skittles from a pound in Kentucky. We filled out a short form, waited while Skittles got the last of her shots, and took her home a half-hour later.
I’ve never really been of the super-cautious school of introducing a new cat into our household. I don’t separate them for days and let them get acquainted to each other’s smells through the crack of a closed door, or anything. When we brought Skittles home, I let Fred out into the courtyard behind our apartment—she loves going outdoors—while Craig took Skittles inside. The new cat ran around the apartment for a half-hour and got the lay of the land on her own, while Craig supervised. I sat outside with Fred (who knew something was going on) and supervised while she rolled around in the dirt. Then I brought a horrified Fred in, sat her on top of the entertainment center so she could watch the calico horror run around and try to get to her.
Honestly, it was the shortest acclimation period I’ve ever seen. Fred was miffy for all of an evening. Then Ruby, as we decided to rename the newest member of our household, pinned her down and cleaned around Fred’s ears. By the end of the second day, they were sleeping side by side on the sofa.
They’ve been buddies ever since. They sleep together, share perches together, play together. Not a day passes in which the two of them aren’t thundering down the hallway as loudly as they can, or in which they don’t wrestle and play-pounce on each other for hours of entertainment. They wash each other and share their meal bowls without much fuss. If Fred insists on being the senior cat, well, Ruby doesn’t seem to mind humoring her, very much.
If I’d thought that adopting an older kitten would cut down on the rambunctiousness, however, hoo boy, was I ever wrong. Right from the start, Ruby was hell on wheels. We discovered from day one that her favorite game was Fetch. Now, every other cat we’ve had has enjoyed a good game of Fetch. Sarah enjoyed it with an orange carrot toy, while Chloe loved to bring a ragged length of braided twine into the office for me to throw while I was working. Fred’s favorite toy was a purple mousie that I’d have to throw for her.
But Ruby was crazy for paper. Crumpled-up paper. When she discovered the joy of a Tootsie Roll Pop wrapper—waxy and lightweight, yet durable enough for repeated trips in her mouth—she stumbled upon a formula of play that’s lasted the entire year. For hours—literal hours—I will pick up the crumpled Tootsie Pop wrapper from my feet, throw it into the next room, and listen as Ruby pounds after it. She’ll grasp it in her teeth, bound back, drop it in my vicinity, and wait impatiently for me to throw it again. There have been mornings in which Craig has left for work while I’ve been writing on my laptop and absently throwing a Tootsie Pop wrapper for Ruby—and then he’s returned three hours later for lunch to find me still tossing the damned thing, with Ruby just as wild and anxious to dive after it.
Despite all the exercise she gets—and during the daylight hours, Ruby’s constantly either trying to get us to play Fetch, or bothering Fred—our little Ruby is not exactly the leanest cat around. Fred used always to make me exclaim Ooof! when I’d pick her up, but running around with Ruby has slimmed her down. Ruby, however, is tubby. To put it gently (and accurately), you know how snakes have a bulge along their length when they’ve just snacked on a whole mouse? Ruby looks as if her jaw has unhinged and she’s swallowed a basketball. She doesn’t care. Her favorite thing to do is lie on her back in the middle of the floor with her legs wide open, staring at the world upside-down, belly on display.
It’s during these moments that I yell out, in a Kentucky accent, “Hee-uh comes Honey Ru-Boo!” When I talk to Ruby, it’s with the thickest of drawls, as if she can’t understand my usually-uninflected accent. She’ll stare at me tolerantly with those brown eyes, then go back to demanding that I sweep under the sofas to find the Tootsie Pop wrappers that she’s been stashing beneath.
And then at night, after she’s finally calmed down, she’s the most affectionate of cats. She sleeps between my feet from the time we turn out the lights until the moment we get up in the morning, purring and snoring. She always greets us at the door when we’ve been out, and she’s not satisfied until we’ve both picked her up and fawned on her. She’s friendly to guests. Even if she did unravel four hundred and forty yards of yarn from my knitting box, one day, she managed through cuteness to convince me that it was my fault that I’d only stored the skeins in a plastic box with a lid that simply popped off when she pushed it from a tabletop, instead of in something more secure. That yarn had been asking for it, really.
It’s been a year and several hundred Tootsie Pop wrappers later, and Ruby, neé Skittles, is firmly one of us. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian
There are days in which I’m able to channel my thoughts into productive work, in which I’m disciplined and razor-focused and know exactly where I need to go with my thinking and what I need to do in order to get it done. Then there are days on which my brain rolls its eyes at me, cuts a fart, says Smell ya later, alligator, and heads off on a little day excursion that, while certainly scenic, makes no sense to anyone who is living outside of my head. (Which the little voices inside my head tell me are most of you.)
The other day, for example. I had an errand to run in the morning to pick up milk and yogurt from Stew Leonard’s. I go to Stew Leonard’s not because I really need to drive eleven miles for milk and yogurt, but because their dairy products are local and fresh and they usually have an abundance of free samples and I am, after all, easily swayed by the lure of anything that is bite-sized and without cost. On the way back, I was listening to an interview with singer Levi Kreis on the radio—he’s one of those vocalists I find interesting whenever I hear him interviewed or read about him, but the moment the magazine is down or the switch off, I forget all about him.
The interviewer asked him to choose a track from an upcoming album to be released later in the spring. Levi picked one. I’ve forgotten the name. My poor brain didn’t have a chance, because the track started out with a mixture of strings and bells in a poppy arrangement that had it thinking, within the first four notes, “That’s ‘Escapade.’” The bells and strings played on for a very long time. “That’s Janet Jackson’s ‘Escapade,’” I said aloud, to no one in particular. Then the singing kicked in and I was singing “Es-ca-pade! We’ll have a good time! Leave your worries behind” along with the chorus, with no real deviation from the rhythm or chord structure. And then the host came back on and was thoughtfully mooing into the microphone about what great appeal the song had, and I was shouting back at him, “Yes, because it was a VERY POPULAR SINGLE FROM RHYTHM NATION 1814!!!”
I’m sorry, Levi. Just callin’ ‘em like I see’s ‘em.
So by the time I got home, fuming over having to listen to “Escapade” tarted up with electronica appropriations and earnest male singing, my brain had already sailed off to sunnier shores as it demanded to hear some choice tidbits from my collection of flop soundalike songs.
I delight in flop soundalike songs. They are a genre unto itself. Even to say the phrase ‘flop soundalikes’ is redundant. The point of soundalike songs is not to achieve massive popularity. It’s to trigger enough familiarity to cause someone to buy the record, keeping the soundalike artist from having to get a real job for years, even though they never reach a point of saturation or fame to become self-sustaining.
The nineteen-eighties masters of the soundalike were producer Bobby Orlando and his house band The Flirts. I’ve always meant to write an essay about how masterful Orlando was as a rip-off artist. (This isn’t it.) Some of the Flirts’ early work is more impressionistic in its copycattedness—“Jukebox (Don’t Put Another Dime)” follows an easy, peppy Go-Go’s imprint that’s hard to pin down—until the middle sixteen, that is, when suddenly one can sing the “Hush my darling, don’t you cry” part from “Our Lips Are Sealed” atop it, and suddenly the source becomes clear.
But their later ripoffs were more blatant, to the point that lawsuits should’ve been filed by the estates of Madonna (because “New Toy” doesn’t even try to pretend that it’s not “Like A Virgin”), Laura Branigan (because “Helpless (You Took My Love)” is applause-worthy in its reconstruction of “Self Control”), ABBA (as when The Flirts’ “Voulez Vous” steals both the lyrics and melody of “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” and then confuses us with one of the Swedish’s band’s other song titles), and Janet Jackson (who might’ve been interested in hearing “Nasty” come out of the speakers whenever someone played The Flirts’ “All You Ever Think About Is (Sex)”). Sigh. I love The Flirts, with their blatant, calculated, and increasingly devil-may-care rip-offs of songs way more popular than they ever were.
Once my brain was on this sonic journey, it was difficult to stop. I went to another of my favorite soundalike songs, “Mismatch,” from Apollonia’s self-titled only solo outing. “Mismatch” is a boppy little song that didn’t perform very well on the charts, and that also draws from the inexhaustible well of Janet Jackson rip-offs. If you listen to the opening bouncy bass and perky synth strikes, it’s pretty clear that it’s a chord-for-chord reproduction of “What Have You Done For Me Lately?”, down to the one-fingered piano solo about three-quarters of the way through.
And you know, except to Jackson and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, there’s really nothing wrong with that. If you liked “What Have You Done For Me Lately?”, say Apollonia’s producers, you’re going to like “Mismatch.” Here, have another slice of that sweet imitation Flyte Tyme pie.
It was at this point that my brain really started to chug toward its destination, because I thought it was a shame that Apollonia’s solo album really never did better. It’s not bad. It’s about as lightweight a pop album as a couple of feathers resting on a helium balloon, but the arrangements are crisp, the songs are fun, and somehow the producers managed to cover up Apollonia’s dubious singing voice. But even as a legitimate co-star of one of 1984’s top-grossing films, Purple Rain, Apollonia never got any respect.
Okay, it might because the only thing thinner than Apollonia’s singing voice is her acting talent. I saw Purple Rain about a dozen times when it came out and was such a fan that for a year I wore a pencil-thin mustache, a frilly pirate shirt, and what I thought was a come-hither look in my smoldering eyes, which probably most people interpreted as indigestion. Upon viewing the movie recently, though, my only thought was, Were we really so starved for the internet and smartphones in 1984 that we thought Purple Rain was thrilling entertainment? It’s not. It’s pretty dreadful, in fact.
So. Levi Kreis. Soundalike songs. The Flirts. Mismatch. Apollonia. This is the chain of association I followed so far, that morning. And when I think about Apollonia, it’s tough not to think about her big breakthrough in Apollonia 6—the lingerie-clad band successor to the Prince spinoff project Vanity 6, after Vanity left the band to pursue a solo ‘career.’ Oh, don’t give me that look. I’m allowed to use those judgmental air quotes. I’m the only person on earth who bought both of Vanity’s solo albums.
Ah, Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6. You remember them. They consisted of The One Who Was Sleeping With Prince At The Time, the One Who Was Pretending To Be Underage, and the Skanky One. Or if that didn’t narrow it down enough for you, the Skanky One With The Cigarette Permanently Hanging From Her Mouth.
One of the interesting things about Prince’s Apollonia 6 project, of course, is that the band’s almost more famous for the songs it didn’t release than the songs it actually did. The original album was chock-full of good stuff that, at the last minute, got pulled until the album was pretty basically gutted. “Take Me With U” was originally mixed as an Apollonia 6 song until his purple highness yanked it, made it a duet that featured himself, and stuck it on the Purple Rain album; it became one of his biggest singles. The album’s lead-off song was, up until the very final pressing, none other than “Manic Monday.” Prince pulled that and handed it off to the Bangles, who made it a huge hit of their own. The group recorded “The Glamorous Life” for the album, only to have it handed off to Sheila E.
It all seems a little unfair until one considers the fact that having three singers and a trunk full of wispy camisoles, the group really had two weak links. One of them was the lead singer. It pains me to say this about one of my favorite campy bands, but during most of “Sex Shooter,” Apollonia 6’s only semi-hit, Apples' 'singing' sounds startlingly similar to the noises made by a tickled pig.
Then there was Susan. Poor, perpetually adolescent Susan, who spent her time in Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6 awkwardly posing in white lingerie and clutching a teddy bear. In both the band’s incarnations she sang lead only three times—if we can call it singing. It’s more like chanting . . . no, that word implies that Susan might have a rudimentary sense of rhythm, which she decidedly does not. Intoning, then. Her songs consist of Susan intoning sexual come-ons like, “I got a shape like a bottle of Co-Co-Co-Co-Cola” over increasingly frantic New Wave Prince compositions in a timbre that can only be described generously as ‘adenoidal.’
It was when I was reflecting on Susan and what can only be described as her triumph as the fastest-ever vanishing ‘talent’ from show biz after the dissolution of a band when my brain demanded to know: Hey. Is Susan on Facebook?
I know better than to oppose my brain on pursuing these trivial paths. If my brain wants to know, I scurry to obey its bidding, rather than pay the consequences. It was a lucky thing I knew Susan’s middle and last names—don’t ask me how. My brain has been on these fact-finding missions before—and all I had to do was type them into Facebook. Boom, there were pictures Susan in her current life. Happily fat, married, and raising three kids (one of them in a stroller), at Disney World. She looked very much like any other mom in her late forties or early fifties who didn’t spend most of the eighties strutting around in white lingerie, clutching a teddybear like her virginity depended on it, and shouting tone-deaf lyrics along the sophisticated lines of, “My name is Susan! And I’m a-oozin!”
Then my brain wanted to know what Brenda Bennett was up to. Brenda was the Skanky One, of course, and she was the only one out of the band that could really sing; she attacks her solos songs on both bands’ albums with a nicotine wail like she’s some kind of basso Teena Marie. It’s not really a surprise that on Apollonia 6’s seven tracks, Brenda gets to sing lead on three of them. That’s even more than Apples herself gets, if you don’t count the song in which Apollonia moans orgasmically in Spanish over some pretty flamenco guitars.
Now, I’m sure Brenda wasn’t really a skank in her real life. She seems like an intelligent woman in her current interviews. Yet though she was merely playing the part for videos and album covers . . . damn, she surely did throw herself into the role with the kind of Method vigor that usually nets Daniel Day Lewis an Oscar. When she’s chomping on her gum and a cigarette butt at the same time and growling at the cameras through sex-smudged mascara and blue eyeshadow, she’s freakin’ scary. But Brenda has recently released her own album of bluesy folk music. It’s really nice. I bought it.
But no, my brain still wasn’t satisfied. It had to know one more thing. Whatever happened to the Apollonia 6 movie?
You see, back in the mid-eighties after Purple Rain came out, it was pretty widely reported that Prince was having a movie made featuring Apollonia 6 and a good chunk of their album. It was supposed to be called Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian, and it was supposed to feature actor/singer Ricky Nelson in the lead opposite our three innocents. At the time I followed every news item about the film. I cheered when I read it had been wrapped. I waited and waited. Then I never heard anything about it again. A few years back I heard it had been scrapped, that it was just a rumor and nothing more. But thanks to the internet, where every piece of flotsam eventually washes to shore, I was now able to locate Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian in its entirety. After watching it, even my brain knew that it had reached its terminus for the day.
It’s perfectly clear why Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian never got a release. Simply put, it’s dreadful. It’s awesome, but horrible at the same time. It’s directed by Brian Thomson, the Australian who designed the sets for the original London Rocky Horror Show and managed to show no restraint whatsoever in designing everything in the Rocky Horror movie sequel, Shock Treatment. I’m imagining the conversation between him and Prince, pre-production, ran a little something like this:
Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian vacillates wildly between pretensions to high art, and the lowest cliches of softcore pornography. The sets and lighting are masterpieces of expressionism—huge constructions, walls of words, mazes of automobiles, stylized shadows, noir black-and-white dashboard shots caught in reflection in the rain. The costumes are theatrical and extravagant. Even Susan’s teddybear gets outfits matching her own. It’s obvious Thomson is trying to make A Major Statement.
But it’s also obvious that the short film is a product of compromise—the biggest compromise being that Apollonia 6 fans didn’t want arty camera work. They wanted to see the girls bustin’ out of their camisoles. He had only a thimbleful of actual talent with which to work, too. The acting is strictly out of My Mom Is a Bondage Slut IV, as when Apollonia gasps at the camera, “But we have nothing to wear!” and not only has to take a breath after the first word but needs to pause and peer at the cue card after her third word as well. The compromises create strange and even comical visual juxtapositions. One moment Thomson is aping the arty craziness of The Night of the Hunter; the next he’s inserting cheesy shots of Apollonia in black leather.
Basically three and a half songs go into the twenty minutes of Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian. (Oddly, the song that gives the movie its title is cut to about a quarter of its length.) Susan’s “Oo She She Wah Wah” is a bit of a throwaway in which Susan stomps around with a bunch of teddybears who turn into the Village People. Brenda’s “Blue Limousine” (after a cringe-worthy beginning in which a strangely lisping truck driver who seems to think he’s in Haulin’ Ass 2: Slippery Roads Ahead leers, “Sssstep right in, girlsss! Your meal ticket has arrived! And it’sss hhhhhhhhhot and waiting!”) is simply terrific.
But it’s Thomson’s video for the band’s single, “Sex Shooter,” that is notable for its je ne sais quoi, its liberal air of what the flippin’ eff? The traditional “Sex Shooter” video has the girls fooling around and gyrating more or less in time to the beat and giving their garters a workout. It’s a song in which the height of lyrical wit is Apollonia imploring listeners to “Come on, kiss the gun.”
But Thomson seems to be auditioning for a shot at directing a grim new version of 1984. He has a dead-faced Buck Henry as Everyman (was he blackmailed into this?) wandering the aisles of a massive concrete supermarket surrounded by aisle after aisle of lifeless advertising and products, attempting to find his place in a world of rampant consumerism that leaves him increasingly moribund both inside and out . . . interspersed with cheesecake shots of Apollonia in black lingerie. He has Buck Henry as Everyman infantilized by unrestricted commercialism, reduced to nothing but his credit card and a scan code, able only to parrot what messages are shouted into his ears . . . interspersed with more shots of Apollonia leaning over to expose her ample cleavage. The video is freakin’ bizarre, y’all. It’s perfectly obvious that Thomson has Something To Say here, but the message has about as much to do with sex shootin’ as do the Teletubbies.
APOLLONIA 6 "Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian" from Videodrome Discothèque on Vimeo.
I can only imagine that when Thomson handed over the final print of Happy Birthday Mr. Christian, Prince probably leered mysteriously through the opening half, smiled during Susan’s teddybear extravaganza, then sat up in his seat during the middle third that “Sex Shooter” occupies, stood up to his full four feet and seven inches, and chased that lousy Ozzie back down under. Then (before he even saw Brenda’s number, which is a shame) he put the video in the very back of his vault and tried to pretend the whole thing never happened.
Levi Kreis. Soundalike songs. The Flirts. Mismatch. Apollonia. Apollonia 6. It’s been days since I ended up watching Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian. My brain’s still reeling.
But not so much that it didn’t wake me up and demand, Hey, you. Why don’t you write about it?
The other day, for example. I had an errand to run in the morning to pick up milk and yogurt from Stew Leonard’s. I go to Stew Leonard’s not because I really need to drive eleven miles for milk and yogurt, but because their dairy products are local and fresh and they usually have an abundance of free samples and I am, after all, easily swayed by the lure of anything that is bite-sized and without cost. On the way back, I was listening to an interview with singer Levi Kreis on the radio—he’s one of those vocalists I find interesting whenever I hear him interviewed or read about him, but the moment the magazine is down or the switch off, I forget all about him.
The interviewer asked him to choose a track from an upcoming album to be released later in the spring. Levi picked one. I’ve forgotten the name. My poor brain didn’t have a chance, because the track started out with a mixture of strings and bells in a poppy arrangement that had it thinking, within the first four notes, “That’s ‘Escapade.’” The bells and strings played on for a very long time. “That’s Janet Jackson’s ‘Escapade,’” I said aloud, to no one in particular. Then the singing kicked in and I was singing “Es-ca-pade! We’ll have a good time! Leave your worries behind” along with the chorus, with no real deviation from the rhythm or chord structure. And then the host came back on and was thoughtfully mooing into the microphone about what great appeal the song had, and I was shouting back at him, “Yes, because it was a VERY POPULAR SINGLE FROM RHYTHM NATION 1814!!!”
I’m sorry, Levi. Just callin’ ‘em like I see’s ‘em.
So by the time I got home, fuming over having to listen to “Escapade” tarted up with electronica appropriations and earnest male singing, my brain had already sailed off to sunnier shores as it demanded to hear some choice tidbits from my collection of flop soundalike songs.
I delight in flop soundalike songs. They are a genre unto itself. Even to say the phrase ‘flop soundalikes’ is redundant. The point of soundalike songs is not to achieve massive popularity. It’s to trigger enough familiarity to cause someone to buy the record, keeping the soundalike artist from having to get a real job for years, even though they never reach a point of saturation or fame to become self-sustaining.
The nineteen-eighties masters of the soundalike were producer Bobby Orlando and his house band The Flirts. I’ve always meant to write an essay about how masterful Orlando was as a rip-off artist. (This isn’t it.) Some of the Flirts’ early work is more impressionistic in its copycattedness—“Jukebox (Don’t Put Another Dime)” follows an easy, peppy Go-Go’s imprint that’s hard to pin down—until the middle sixteen, that is, when suddenly one can sing the “Hush my darling, don’t you cry” part from “Our Lips Are Sealed” atop it, and suddenly the source becomes clear.
But their later ripoffs were more blatant, to the point that lawsuits should’ve been filed by the estates of Madonna (because “New Toy” doesn’t even try to pretend that it’s not “Like A Virgin”), Laura Branigan (because “Helpless (You Took My Love)” is applause-worthy in its reconstruction of “Self Control”), ABBA (as when The Flirts’ “Voulez Vous” steals both the lyrics and melody of “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” and then confuses us with one of the Swedish’s band’s other song titles), and Janet Jackson (who might’ve been interested in hearing “Nasty” come out of the speakers whenever someone played The Flirts’ “All You Ever Think About Is (Sex)”). Sigh. I love The Flirts, with their blatant, calculated, and increasingly devil-may-care rip-offs of songs way more popular than they ever were.
And you know, except to Jackson and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, there’s really nothing wrong with that. If you liked “What Have You Done For Me Lately?”, say Apollonia’s producers, you’re going to like “Mismatch.” Here, have another slice of that sweet imitation Flyte Tyme pie.
It was at this point that my brain really started to chug toward its destination, because I thought it was a shame that Apollonia’s solo album really never did better. It’s not bad. It’s about as lightweight a pop album as a couple of feathers resting on a helium balloon, but the arrangements are crisp, the songs are fun, and somehow the producers managed to cover up Apollonia’s dubious singing voice. But even as a legitimate co-star of one of 1984’s top-grossing films, Purple Rain, Apollonia never got any respect.
Okay, it might because the only thing thinner than Apollonia’s singing voice is her acting talent. I saw Purple Rain about a dozen times when it came out and was such a fan that for a year I wore a pencil-thin mustache, a frilly pirate shirt, and what I thought was a come-hither look in my smoldering eyes, which probably most people interpreted as indigestion. Upon viewing the movie recently, though, my only thought was, Were we really so starved for the internet and smartphones in 1984 that we thought Purple Rain was thrilling entertainment? It’s not. It’s pretty dreadful, in fact.
So. Levi Kreis. Soundalike songs. The Flirts. Mismatch. Apollonia. This is the chain of association I followed so far, that morning. And when I think about Apollonia, it’s tough not to think about her big breakthrough in Apollonia 6—the lingerie-clad band successor to the Prince spinoff project Vanity 6, after Vanity left the band to pursue a solo ‘career.’ Oh, don’t give me that look. I’m allowed to use those judgmental air quotes. I’m the only person on earth who bought both of Vanity’s solo albums.
Ah, Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6. You remember them. They consisted of The One Who Was Sleeping With Prince At The Time, the One Who Was Pretending To Be Underage, and the Skanky One. Or if that didn’t narrow it down enough for you, the Skanky One With The Cigarette Permanently Hanging From Her Mouth.
One of the interesting things about Prince’s Apollonia 6 project, of course, is that the band’s almost more famous for the songs it didn’t release than the songs it actually did. The original album was chock-full of good stuff that, at the last minute, got pulled until the album was pretty basically gutted. “Take Me With U” was originally mixed as an Apollonia 6 song until his purple highness yanked it, made it a duet that featured himself, and stuck it on the Purple Rain album; it became one of his biggest singles. The album’s lead-off song was, up until the very final pressing, none other than “Manic Monday.” Prince pulled that and handed it off to the Bangles, who made it a huge hit of their own. The group recorded “The Glamorous Life” for the album, only to have it handed off to Sheila E.
It all seems a little unfair until one considers the fact that having three singers and a trunk full of wispy camisoles, the group really had two weak links. One of them was the lead singer. It pains me to say this about one of my favorite campy bands, but during most of “Sex Shooter,” Apollonia 6’s only semi-hit, Apples' 'singing' sounds startlingly similar to the noises made by a tickled pig.
Then there was Susan. Poor, perpetually adolescent Susan, who spent her time in Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6 awkwardly posing in white lingerie and clutching a teddy bear. In both the band’s incarnations she sang lead only three times—if we can call it singing. It’s more like chanting . . . no, that word implies that Susan might have a rudimentary sense of rhythm, which she decidedly does not. Intoning, then. Her songs consist of Susan intoning sexual come-ons like, “I got a shape like a bottle of Co-Co-Co-Co-Cola” over increasingly frantic New Wave Prince compositions in a timbre that can only be described generously as ‘adenoidal.’
It was when I was reflecting on Susan and what can only be described as her triumph as the fastest-ever vanishing ‘talent’ from show biz after the dissolution of a band when my brain demanded to know: Hey. Is Susan on Facebook?
I know better than to oppose my brain on pursuing these trivial paths. If my brain wants to know, I scurry to obey its bidding, rather than pay the consequences. It was a lucky thing I knew Susan’s middle and last names—don’t ask me how. My brain has been on these fact-finding missions before—and all I had to do was type them into Facebook. Boom, there were pictures Susan in her current life. Happily fat, married, and raising three kids (one of them in a stroller), at Disney World. She looked very much like any other mom in her late forties or early fifties who didn’t spend most of the eighties strutting around in white lingerie, clutching a teddybear like her virginity depended on it, and shouting tone-deaf lyrics along the sophisticated lines of, “My name is Susan! And I’m a-oozin!”
Then my brain wanted to know what Brenda Bennett was up to. Brenda was the Skanky One, of course, and she was the only one out of the band that could really sing; she attacks her solos songs on both bands’ albums with a nicotine wail like she’s some kind of basso Teena Marie. It’s not really a surprise that on Apollonia 6’s seven tracks, Brenda gets to sing lead on three of them. That’s even more than Apples herself gets, if you don’t count the song in which Apollonia moans orgasmically in Spanish over some pretty flamenco guitars.
Now, I’m sure Brenda wasn’t really a skank in her real life. She seems like an intelligent woman in her current interviews. Yet though she was merely playing the part for videos and album covers . . . damn, she surely did throw herself into the role with the kind of Method vigor that usually nets Daniel Day Lewis an Oscar. When she’s chomping on her gum and a cigarette butt at the same time and growling at the cameras through sex-smudged mascara and blue eyeshadow, she’s freakin’ scary. But Brenda has recently released her own album of bluesy folk music. It’s really nice. I bought it.
But no, my brain still wasn’t satisfied. It had to know one more thing. Whatever happened to the Apollonia 6 movie?
You see, back in the mid-eighties after Purple Rain came out, it was pretty widely reported that Prince was having a movie made featuring Apollonia 6 and a good chunk of their album. It was supposed to be called Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian, and it was supposed to feature actor/singer Ricky Nelson in the lead opposite our three innocents. At the time I followed every news item about the film. I cheered when I read it had been wrapped. I waited and waited. Then I never heard anything about it again. A few years back I heard it had been scrapped, that it was just a rumor and nothing more. But thanks to the internet, where every piece of flotsam eventually washes to shore, I was now able to locate Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian in its entirety. After watching it, even my brain knew that it had reached its terminus for the day.
It’s perfectly clear why Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian never got a release. Simply put, it’s dreadful. It’s awesome, but horrible at the same time. It’s directed by Brian Thomson, the Australian who designed the sets for the original London Rocky Horror Show and managed to show no restraint whatsoever in designing everything in the Rocky Horror movie sequel, Shock Treatment. I’m imagining the conversation between him and Prince, pre-production, ran a little something like this:
THOMSON: So Prince, mate. I’d like to bring to Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian a dark and satirical edge that shows how mercilessly women are exploited and how they are forced to sexualize themselves in order to. . . .
PRINCE: U need 2 find a part 4 Ricky Nelson. I dig “Garden Party.”
THOMSON: Um, sure. I’ve been heavily studying the German Expressionists, particularly Fritz Lang, and I’d like to. . . .
PRINCE: That sounds good. Put in a lot of titty shots. Here’s a check 4 U, Mr. Tungsten.
THOMSON: Thomson.
PRINCE: Whatever. Peace.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian vacillates wildly between pretensions to high art, and the lowest cliches of softcore pornography. The sets and lighting are masterpieces of expressionism—huge constructions, walls of words, mazes of automobiles, stylized shadows, noir black-and-white dashboard shots caught in reflection in the rain. The costumes are theatrical and extravagant. Even Susan’s teddybear gets outfits matching her own. It’s obvious Thomson is trying to make A Major Statement.
But it’s also obvious that the short film is a product of compromise—the biggest compromise being that Apollonia 6 fans didn’t want arty camera work. They wanted to see the girls bustin’ out of their camisoles. He had only a thimbleful of actual talent with which to work, too. The acting is strictly out of My Mom Is a Bondage Slut IV, as when Apollonia gasps at the camera, “But we have nothing to wear!” and not only has to take a breath after the first word but needs to pause and peer at the cue card after her third word as well. The compromises create strange and even comical visual juxtapositions. One moment Thomson is aping the arty craziness of The Night of the Hunter; the next he’s inserting cheesy shots of Apollonia in black leather.
Basically three and a half songs go into the twenty minutes of Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian. (Oddly, the song that gives the movie its title is cut to about a quarter of its length.) Susan’s “Oo She She Wah Wah” is a bit of a throwaway in which Susan stomps around with a bunch of teddybears who turn into the Village People. Brenda’s “Blue Limousine” (after a cringe-worthy beginning in which a strangely lisping truck driver who seems to think he’s in Haulin’ Ass 2: Slippery Roads Ahead leers, “Sssstep right in, girlsss! Your meal ticket has arrived! And it’sss hhhhhhhhhot and waiting!”) is simply terrific.
But it’s Thomson’s video for the band’s single, “Sex Shooter,” that is notable for its je ne sais quoi, its liberal air of what the flippin’ eff? The traditional “Sex Shooter” video has the girls fooling around and gyrating more or less in time to the beat and giving their garters a workout. It’s a song in which the height of lyrical wit is Apollonia imploring listeners to “Come on, kiss the gun.”
But Thomson seems to be auditioning for a shot at directing a grim new version of 1984. He has a dead-faced Buck Henry as Everyman (was he blackmailed into this?) wandering the aisles of a massive concrete supermarket surrounded by aisle after aisle of lifeless advertising and products, attempting to find his place in a world of rampant consumerism that leaves him increasingly moribund both inside and out . . . interspersed with cheesecake shots of Apollonia in black lingerie. He has Buck Henry as Everyman infantilized by unrestricted commercialism, reduced to nothing but his credit card and a scan code, able only to parrot what messages are shouted into his ears . . . interspersed with more shots of Apollonia leaning over to expose her ample cleavage. The video is freakin’ bizarre, y’all. It’s perfectly obvious that Thomson has Something To Say here, but the message has about as much to do with sex shootin’ as do the Teletubbies.
I can only imagine that when Thomson handed over the final print of Happy Birthday Mr. Christian, Prince probably leered mysteriously through the opening half, smiled during Susan’s teddybear extravaganza, then sat up in his seat during the middle third that “Sex Shooter” occupies, stood up to his full four feet and seven inches, and chased that lousy Ozzie back down under. Then (before he even saw Brenda’s number, which is a shame) he put the video in the very back of his vault and tried to pretend the whole thing never happened.
Levi Kreis. Soundalike songs. The Flirts. Mismatch. Apollonia. Apollonia 6. It’s been days since I ended up watching Happy Birthday, Mr. Christian. My brain’s still reeling.
But not so much that it didn’t wake me up and demand, Hey, you. Why don’t you write about it?
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Conversations with My Father: Restaurant Week Edition
MY FATHER: Happy birthday!
ME: Why, thank you very much!
MY FATHER: You’re old.
ME: Gee, thanks.
MY FATHER: You’re definitely not a kid any more.
ME: Well, I certainly am glad you pointed that out.
MY FATHER: I remember when I turned fifty—
ME: Jesus Christ I’m not fifty!
MY FATHER: I was kind of touchy when I turned fifty, too.
ME: Anyway.
MY FATHER: Are you doing anything special for your birthday? Going out?
ME: Well, we’re going out for pizza tonight, but last night we went into Manhattan and went to one of the restaurants participating in Restaurant Week.
MY FATHER: What is Restaurant Week?
ME: It’s a promotional thing they do in the city where various restaurants will offer $25 lunch specials and $38 dinner specials from a set menu.
MY FATHER: Thirty-eight dollars?
ME: Yes.
MY FATHER: Thirty-eight dollars just for dinner?
ME: It was three courses. Appetizer, entree, dessert.
MY FATHER: For thirty-eight dollars?
ME: These are fairly upscale—
MY FATHER: Gawrsh, for thirty-eight dollars at Denny’s you could get—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in Manhattan.
MY FATHER: Did you check?
ME: For three courses in New York City, thirty-eight dollars is pretty reasonable.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. The thirty-eight dollars is for one person?
ME: This’ll get you going. Craig had a choir member who gave him a gift card to a local fancy restaurant and we went last week for our anniversary and spent a hundred and seventy dollars for the two of us, so. . . .
MY FATHER (horrified): A hundred and seventy dollars?
ME: It was a special occasion.
MY FATHER: You could feed a family of twenty at Denny’s with—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in Connecticut.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. What did you eat?!
ME: Well, I had the filet mignon, and that was fifty-five dollars on its own.
MY FATHER: I hope you took some of that home with you!
ME: Why in the world would I take any of a really good meal home? I ate it all. It was delicious.
MY FATHER: Because it was fifty-five dollars!
ME: But it wasn’t even our money we were spending. It was a gift card.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh! This is totally out of my world.
ME: Anyway, I also had an appetizer of an artichoke baked with goat cheese, and—
MY FATHER: So you didn’t take anything home? The fancy restaurant was too cheap to give you a doggie bag?
ME: I didn’t need a doggie bag because I ate everything. Anyway, since this topic is obviously distressing to you. . . .
MY FATHER: The portions were that tiny? You didn’t have anything left over? Well no wonder they’re so fancy if they’re giving you such tiny—
ME: I did not have any leftovers.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. For fifty-five dollars I would expect what’s on my plate to last for at least three meals. Gawrsh! When I go out to eat, sometimes I have enough leftovers—
ME: I guess I’m a hog.
MY FATHER: All right. If that’s the way you want to do things. . . .
ME: It was delicious.
MY FATHER: Just remember at Denny’s—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in New England.
ME: Why, thank you very much!
MY FATHER: You’re old.
ME: Gee, thanks.
MY FATHER: You’re definitely not a kid any more.
ME: Well, I certainly am glad you pointed that out.
MY FATHER: I remember when I turned fifty—
ME: Jesus Christ I’m not fifty!
MY FATHER: I was kind of touchy when I turned fifty, too.
ME: Anyway.
MY FATHER: Are you doing anything special for your birthday? Going out?
ME: Well, we’re going out for pizza tonight, but last night we went into Manhattan and went to one of the restaurants participating in Restaurant Week.
MY FATHER: What is Restaurant Week?
ME: It’s a promotional thing they do in the city where various restaurants will offer $25 lunch specials and $38 dinner specials from a set menu.
MY FATHER: Thirty-eight dollars?
ME: Yes.
MY FATHER: Thirty-eight dollars just for dinner?
ME: It was three courses. Appetizer, entree, dessert.
MY FATHER: For thirty-eight dollars?
ME: These are fairly upscale—
MY FATHER: Gawrsh, for thirty-eight dollars at Denny’s you could get—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in Manhattan.
MY FATHER: Did you check?
ME: For three courses in New York City, thirty-eight dollars is pretty reasonable.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. The thirty-eight dollars is for one person?
ME: This’ll get you going. Craig had a choir member who gave him a gift card to a local fancy restaurant and we went last week for our anniversary and spent a hundred and seventy dollars for the two of us, so. . . .
MY FATHER (horrified): A hundred and seventy dollars?
ME: It was a special occasion.
MY FATHER: You could feed a family of twenty at Denny’s with—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in Connecticut.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. What did you eat?!
ME: Well, I had the filet mignon, and that was fifty-five dollars on its own.
MY FATHER: I hope you took some of that home with you!
ME: Why in the world would I take any of a really good meal home? I ate it all. It was delicious.
MY FATHER: Because it was fifty-five dollars!
ME: But it wasn’t even our money we were spending. It was a gift card.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh! This is totally out of my world.
ME: Anyway, I also had an appetizer of an artichoke baked with goat cheese, and—
MY FATHER: So you didn’t take anything home? The fancy restaurant was too cheap to give you a doggie bag?
ME: I didn’t need a doggie bag because I ate everything. Anyway, since this topic is obviously distressing to you. . . .
MY FATHER: The portions were that tiny? You didn’t have anything left over? Well no wonder they’re so fancy if they’re giving you such tiny—
ME: I did not have any leftovers.
MY FATHER: Gawrsh. For fifty-five dollars I would expect what’s on my plate to last for at least three meals. Gawrsh! When I go out to eat, sometimes I have enough leftovers—
ME: I guess I’m a hog.
MY FATHER: All right. If that’s the way you want to do things. . . .
ME: It was delicious.
MY FATHER: Just remember at Denny’s—
ME: We don’t have Denny’s in New England.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
The Group
Out of a perverse desire to meet some new people, I found myself stuffing a ball of yarn and my needles into my man-bag, last month, and taking a train into the city to attend a men’s knitting group.
This is usually the point of the story at which people start to laugh. So STOP THAT.
I took up knitting last winter because, as I tell people in all absolute seriousness, it was easier to learn to knit than it was to look through the boxes that comprise the eighty percent of our household that’s still in storage, in order to find the hats and scarves I’d packed away when we moved. I needed something crafty to do with my hands in the evenings when time moves slowly and I feel guilty about sitting on my rump watching TV, motionless. In my old home I had a basement studio devoted solely to my glass work, where I could putter to my heart’s content as I made lamps and windows and fused glass decorations. Here, I don’t have that room.
Knitting lets me work with color. It keeps my mind slightly occupied and my fingers dancing. It gives me an excuse to work my way through cheesetastic series television like Merlin and Primeval, all while I whip out all the winter accessories that I can stand to wear. So on the whole, it’s been a worthwhile hobby.
And it’s not as if I’ve found it a particularly shameful hobby, either. I’m not one of those men who grumbles about wimmin’s wurk as he hauls in the harvest, nor do I think proximity to a pair of knitting needles is automatically going to prompt people to think I’m a great big girly-man. If they do, I don’t really give a damn. I take knitting over to the church front desk when I’m down for a long shift. I’ve taken it to the coffee shop, when I want to get out of the house. So if I want to sit around with other men knitting, I say I’m entitled, thank you. Entitled!
The group takes place at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. There’s less than a half-dozen of us. For an hour and a half we sit around a table with our knitting projects. Then we pack up and go. I’m kind of entranced by the group, though, because of the personalities of the men who show up for it. I’m a little hesitant to write about them because it almost seems as if they’re characters for a one-act play I could write about a knitting group at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. At the same time, that’s pretty much exactly why I’m writing about them.
The Leader
The fact that the group has a leader might seem puzzling. But someone needs to send out the reminders, to reserve the room, to maintain the group’s listserv and its forums, and to collect the money to pay for the room’s rental at the end of every session. Our leader is a lean, tall, and lanky fellow from across the Atlantic; his lair is long and limp. He wears spectacles that give him a constant air of studiousness.
The Leader also has an air of mournful seriousness that’s only highlighted by his thick accent—a brogue that’s so pronounced and romantic that it makes every casual comment sound like a somber declaration made by a major character in a big-budget BBC production. Actually, with his big eyes and sober demeanor, the leader seems perpetually poised on the edge of breaking out into a song of howling anguish and rage, like Glen Hansard in Once.
“Has anyone ever worked with a cotton/acrylic blend wool?” someone will ask, for example.
“I did. One time.” The Leader will speak his words quietly, as if mulling over a memory so unspeakable and singular that it would make other human atrocities—Hiroshima, Tiananmen Square, the Holocaust—seem like trivialities. He’ll let loose his knitting needles, and fold his long, bony hands into his lap. Then he’ll brush the hair from his eyes and stare off into space. The rest of us will hush, rapt in the solemnity of the moment. “Just . . . one . . . time,” he’ll breathe.
The rest of us will move forward onto out chairs, afraid of breaking his silent reverie. What horrors is he seeing, in his mind’s eye? What terrible memories is he reliving? I can almost hear the cry of infants in the night, imagine the sounds of bombs and the terrifying wails of mothers.
Then he’ll sigh, and look around the table, meeting all of our glances, before sighing and uttering the words that have been torturing him for these last, long moments: “It was itchy.”
The Horny One
“Alex O’Loughlin,” says the Horny One. “On Hawaii Five-0. The new one, not the old one. Do you guys watch that? He’s hot.”
None of us watch the show, apparently. We all shake our heads in blank unrecognition.
“Oh my god, you got to watch that show. He’s hot!” The Horny One is a stout little Latin man who is busily crocheting a lap blanket, or an afghan or a placemat. I don’t know what. All crochet looks pretty much the same to me. “How about Jim Caviezel? Person of Interest?” Everyone shakes his head. We don’t know that one. “You guys! He’s hot! He’s hhhhhhot! I want him to bang me up one side of 13th and down the other! Day-um!”
The Horny One doesn’t so much participate in conversation as suddenly drop the names of guys he likes from obscure television shows into lulls in the conversation. Most of the references make me blink and think to myself, Is that show really still on?
“Jensen Ackles? Oh come on, guys. Supernatural? You just look at him and you know he can make a delivery better than UPS. Yee-ow!”
The Grandmother
“Back in the olden days, I never, ever knitted. Much as I wanted to! It wasn’t considered manly. When I grew up, if one was a male and one knitted, my dear. It meant that one was a homosexual.” The Grandmother sits at the table very primly, very properly, with his ankles neatly crossed and tucked beneath his chair. There’s something very fussy and prissy about him. He smells heavily of a cologne that is closer to lavender water than any man’s scent should be.
The Grandmother is wearing a garish pink beret that he’s crocheted himself. It’s hard as a rock. (I felt it.) The sweater he’s knitting is apparently designed for a small elephant. Piled on the table, it looks as if it would overload a high-capacity washing machine. “But so much has changed since then. Attitudes, my goodness, have changed. All the technology you young people use! And there’s so much talk about sex these days,” he’ll say, with a pointed look at the Horny One.
“Of course, some changes are for the better,” he’ll admit. “Look at the progress we’ve made. And of course, there’s not as much stigma about a man knitting as there once was. I’m not as young as I once was, but at least we have that.”
The Grandmother is roughly about the same age as I.
“So what hobby did you take up instead of knitting?” I ask, thinking in the back of my mind that I could at least share tales of the dark years in which I had to feign an interest in woodworking until my parents at last pulled me out of the Boy Scouts.
The Grandmother looks at me and shakes his head, as if I’m too young to understand. “It wasn’t until I came out that I was able at last to say, I don’t care how effeminate it looks, I want to knit. Before that, I was simply forced to take up crewel work and needlepoint!”
I bet his French knots were the hit of the football team.
The Know-It-All
“There’s a small sheep farm in the southwest of Kansas that makes a wool that would have been perfect for that sweater,” The Know-It-All declares from across the table. “But of course, they aren’t on the internet and they don’t sell by mail, and you really have to know how to find them, but of course, I’ve been friends with the owners for many years since we met at Rhinebeck. It helps to know people. I’m sure your sweater will look fine with that stuff you’re using,” he’ll tell The Leader, who will look at his knitting as if it was the boyfriend who betrayed his love, ruined his dreams, and caused him to lose sleep for a year. “Not everyone has the connections I do.”
The Know-It-All’s conversation is peppered with the most obscure references to techniques and knitting arcanities. I don’t so much listen to his lengthy speeches as set myself adrift in them and hope I’ll wash up ashore at some point. “. . . Based on a Civil War pattern that I researched when I was at the library in . . . Tunisian crochet . . . It’s certainly possible to dye the fabric while it’s on the warp and then to unweave it so that it produces an effect that’s . . . alum fixatives . . . and of course, they hired her to come in and completely revamp their colorways . . . of course they don’t allow just anyone to subscribe, but if you know the owner, as I do. . . .”
At the beginning of the meeting, he’ll show off all his projects he’s whipped up during the last month: a large crocheted afghan (Tunisian or not, I have no idea), a quartet of loom-woven tablecloths, a knitted blanket in an intricate design, a shawl of lace so intricate that Belgian nuns weep in fury, a sweater (made of Kansas wool?), and a photograph of a tapestry he’s working on ‘in his spare time’ when he’s not spinning his own wool from sheep he’s personally sheared. The project he’s working on at the table with the rest of us is a lap blanket made of crocheted granny squares. “I just needed something comforting to do after my bigger projects,” he says modestly. “I just started it a few nights ago.”
It’s roughly the size of the tarps they use to cover sailboats in winter.
The Crabby Old Man
“Yeah, there are other knitting groups for men around the city, but key-riiiiist,” says the Crabby Old Man to me. He’s a man in his seventies who speaks in the perpetually-annoyed tone of the much-aggrieved. “If it ain’t one thing with them, it’s another. Yap, yap, yap. You get a bunch of Nancys in the same god-damned room and what happens? They start yappin’ and yippin’ and everything goes all to hell. Key-riiiiist,” he’ll complain. “I tell ‘em, listen. Don’t Oh gurl me, son. I’m old enough to be your grandpappy and I could still whup your ass if I wanted!”
It bears mentioning that while he let loose with this diatribe, he was knitting an adorable baby jacket in pink wool.
The Crabby Old Man was the first of the group I met, when I walked into the appointed room for the first time. He stared at my outstretched hand as if I were offering him a palmful of ebola, and said, “Don’t bother telling me your name. I’m not gonna remember and I’m not even gonna try. Key-riiiist, at my age I’m lucky if I can remember whether I’m shittin’ in my diapers or peein’ in ‘em.”
It’s because of the Crabby Old Man and his hearing that the rest of us speak in raised voices, most of the time. Only the Know-It-All will persist in his monologue in soft, self-absorbed tones: “. . . really prefer double-pointed needles, and of course I use a set that was handmade from me from historic boxwood by a very tiny concern in the heart of Hampshire I was visiting during the summer of 2005. . . .”
“T. J. Thynes?” asks the Horny One. “Nobody? Seriously? Nobody? T. J. Thynes? He’s the hottest guy on Bones! I bet his bone. . . .”
“In my day, double-pointed needles were the only technique available for circular knitting,” sniffs the Grandmother. “We didn’t have these magic loops and double-circulars. . . .”
The Leader looks off into space with tormented eyes. “I use two circulars,” he announces. Everyone leans forward and waits for a verdict on them that should be accompanied by a haunting score from John Williams. It never comes.
The Crabby Old Man stares around the table at us like we’re all freaks. “What are you Nancys yappin’ about now? Yap, yap, yap. We’re men. We’re not supposed to be talkin’!” he announces, as he places a few deft purls into the absolutely darling powder-blue mittens he’s making for his grandson.
At the first meeting I attended, the Crabby Old Man told us about his experience with Hurricane Sandy. “Nah, I didn’t lose power. Are you kiddin’? Do I look like the kind who’d lose power?” he asked, as if the rest of us who did without for a week or more did so out of a lack of personal integrity, or some essential flaw that had nothing to do with the electrical companies. “And I had all kinds of god-damned people asking me if they could stay with me. Key-riiiiiist!”
“What did you tell them?” asked The Leader, looking as if he’d spent many a homeless cold night with only the sky for shelter.
“I told them no, goddamn it! Key-riiiiist, I’m not lettin’ people into my apartment just because they’ve got no power! I ain’t their god-damned granddaddy they can drop in on whenever they goddamned please! Oh, and that reminds me,” he told The Leader. “All those hats and scarves we made after Sandy, over at the senior center? I took them to the Red Cross and you know what they told me? They told me they were going to sell them! Sell them to the victims of Sandy!”
“That doesn’t sound right,” The Grandmother sniffed. “Are you sure?”
“Key-riiiiiist, I might be a hundred years old but I’m not deaf! I’m not senile!” The Crabby Old Man seems incensed that anyone would question him. “The Red Cross said they were gonna sell those god-damned hats and scarves instead of giving them to people who could use them. So you know what I did? I took all those god-damned hats and scarves and I walked out onto the street and I walked up to the first homeless asshole I saw. And then I threw them all at him and said, here, these are yours now! Selling them. Key-riiiiiist.”
It was roughly at this point that I looked at the Crabby Old Man and thought to myself, Key-riiiist. That’s me in another ten years.
This is usually the point of the story at which people start to laugh. So STOP THAT.
I took up knitting last winter because, as I tell people in all absolute seriousness, it was easier to learn to knit than it was to look through the boxes that comprise the eighty percent of our household that’s still in storage, in order to find the hats and scarves I’d packed away when we moved. I needed something crafty to do with my hands in the evenings when time moves slowly and I feel guilty about sitting on my rump watching TV, motionless. In my old home I had a basement studio devoted solely to my glass work, where I could putter to my heart’s content as I made lamps and windows and fused glass decorations. Here, I don’t have that room.
Knitting lets me work with color. It keeps my mind slightly occupied and my fingers dancing. It gives me an excuse to work my way through cheesetastic series television like Merlin and Primeval, all while I whip out all the winter accessories that I can stand to wear. So on the whole, it’s been a worthwhile hobby.
And it’s not as if I’ve found it a particularly shameful hobby, either. I’m not one of those men who grumbles about wimmin’s wurk as he hauls in the harvest, nor do I think proximity to a pair of knitting needles is automatically going to prompt people to think I’m a great big girly-man. If they do, I don’t really give a damn. I take knitting over to the church front desk when I’m down for a long shift. I’ve taken it to the coffee shop, when I want to get out of the house. So if I want to sit around with other men knitting, I say I’m entitled, thank you. Entitled!
The group takes place at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. There’s less than a half-dozen of us. For an hour and a half we sit around a table with our knitting projects. Then we pack up and go. I’m kind of entranced by the group, though, because of the personalities of the men who show up for it. I’m a little hesitant to write about them because it almost seems as if they’re characters for a one-act play I could write about a knitting group at a gay and lesbian center in Manhattan. At the same time, that’s pretty much exactly why I’m writing about them.
The Leader
The fact that the group has a leader might seem puzzling. But someone needs to send out the reminders, to reserve the room, to maintain the group’s listserv and its forums, and to collect the money to pay for the room’s rental at the end of every session. Our leader is a lean, tall, and lanky fellow from across the Atlantic; his lair is long and limp. He wears spectacles that give him a constant air of studiousness.
The Leader also has an air of mournful seriousness that’s only highlighted by his thick accent—a brogue that’s so pronounced and romantic that it makes every casual comment sound like a somber declaration made by a major character in a big-budget BBC production. Actually, with his big eyes and sober demeanor, the leader seems perpetually poised on the edge of breaking out into a song of howling anguish and rage, like Glen Hansard in Once.
“Has anyone ever worked with a cotton/acrylic blend wool?” someone will ask, for example.
“I did. One time.” The Leader will speak his words quietly, as if mulling over a memory so unspeakable and singular that it would make other human atrocities—Hiroshima, Tiananmen Square, the Holocaust—seem like trivialities. He’ll let loose his knitting needles, and fold his long, bony hands into his lap. Then he’ll brush the hair from his eyes and stare off into space. The rest of us will hush, rapt in the solemnity of the moment. “Just . . . one . . . time,” he’ll breathe.
The rest of us will move forward onto out chairs, afraid of breaking his silent reverie. What horrors is he seeing, in his mind’s eye? What terrible memories is he reliving? I can almost hear the cry of infants in the night, imagine the sounds of bombs and the terrifying wails of mothers.
Then he’ll sigh, and look around the table, meeting all of our glances, before sighing and uttering the words that have been torturing him for these last, long moments: “It was itchy.”
The Horny One
“Alex O’Loughlin,” says the Horny One. “On Hawaii Five-0. The new one, not the old one. Do you guys watch that? He’s hot.”
None of us watch the show, apparently. We all shake our heads in blank unrecognition.
“Oh my god, you got to watch that show. He’s hot!” The Horny One is a stout little Latin man who is busily crocheting a lap blanket, or an afghan or a placemat. I don’t know what. All crochet looks pretty much the same to me. “How about Jim Caviezel? Person of Interest?” Everyone shakes his head. We don’t know that one. “You guys! He’s hot! He’s hhhhhhot! I want him to bang me up one side of 13th and down the other! Day-um!”
The Horny One doesn’t so much participate in conversation as suddenly drop the names of guys he likes from obscure television shows into lulls in the conversation. Most of the references make me blink and think to myself, Is that show really still on?
“Jensen Ackles? Oh come on, guys. Supernatural? You just look at him and you know he can make a delivery better than UPS. Yee-ow!”
The Grandmother
“Back in the olden days, I never, ever knitted. Much as I wanted to! It wasn’t considered manly. When I grew up, if one was a male and one knitted, my dear. It meant that one was a homosexual.” The Grandmother sits at the table very primly, very properly, with his ankles neatly crossed and tucked beneath his chair. There’s something very fussy and prissy about him. He smells heavily of a cologne that is closer to lavender water than any man’s scent should be.
The Grandmother is wearing a garish pink beret that he’s crocheted himself. It’s hard as a rock. (I felt it.) The sweater he’s knitting is apparently designed for a small elephant. Piled on the table, it looks as if it would overload a high-capacity washing machine. “But so much has changed since then. Attitudes, my goodness, have changed. All the technology you young people use! And there’s so much talk about sex these days,” he’ll say, with a pointed look at the Horny One.
“Of course, some changes are for the better,” he’ll admit. “Look at the progress we’ve made. And of course, there’s not as much stigma about a man knitting as there once was. I’m not as young as I once was, but at least we have that.”
The Grandmother is roughly about the same age as I.
“So what hobby did you take up instead of knitting?” I ask, thinking in the back of my mind that I could at least share tales of the dark years in which I had to feign an interest in woodworking until my parents at last pulled me out of the Boy Scouts.
The Grandmother looks at me and shakes his head, as if I’m too young to understand. “It wasn’t until I came out that I was able at last to say, I don’t care how effeminate it looks, I want to knit. Before that, I was simply forced to take up crewel work and needlepoint!”
I bet his French knots were the hit of the football team.
The Know-It-All
“There’s a small sheep farm in the southwest of Kansas that makes a wool that would have been perfect for that sweater,” The Know-It-All declares from across the table. “But of course, they aren’t on the internet and they don’t sell by mail, and you really have to know how to find them, but of course, I’ve been friends with the owners for many years since we met at Rhinebeck. It helps to know people. I’m sure your sweater will look fine with that stuff you’re using,” he’ll tell The Leader, who will look at his knitting as if it was the boyfriend who betrayed his love, ruined his dreams, and caused him to lose sleep for a year. “Not everyone has the connections I do.”
The Know-It-All’s conversation is peppered with the most obscure references to techniques and knitting arcanities. I don’t so much listen to his lengthy speeches as set myself adrift in them and hope I’ll wash up ashore at some point. “. . . Based on a Civil War pattern that I researched when I was at the library in . . . Tunisian crochet . . . It’s certainly possible to dye the fabric while it’s on the warp and then to unweave it so that it produces an effect that’s . . . alum fixatives . . . and of course, they hired her to come in and completely revamp their colorways . . . of course they don’t allow just anyone to subscribe, but if you know the owner, as I do. . . .”
At the beginning of the meeting, he’ll show off all his projects he’s whipped up during the last month: a large crocheted afghan (Tunisian or not, I have no idea), a quartet of loom-woven tablecloths, a knitted blanket in an intricate design, a shawl of lace so intricate that Belgian nuns weep in fury, a sweater (made of Kansas wool?), and a photograph of a tapestry he’s working on ‘in his spare time’ when he’s not spinning his own wool from sheep he’s personally sheared. The project he’s working on at the table with the rest of us is a lap blanket made of crocheted granny squares. “I just needed something comforting to do after my bigger projects,” he says modestly. “I just started it a few nights ago.”
It’s roughly the size of the tarps they use to cover sailboats in winter.
The Crabby Old Man
“Yeah, there are other knitting groups for men around the city, but key-riiiiist,” says the Crabby Old Man to me. He’s a man in his seventies who speaks in the perpetually-annoyed tone of the much-aggrieved. “If it ain’t one thing with them, it’s another. Yap, yap, yap. You get a bunch of Nancys in the same god-damned room and what happens? They start yappin’ and yippin’ and everything goes all to hell. Key-riiiiist,” he’ll complain. “I tell ‘em, listen. Don’t Oh gurl me, son. I’m old enough to be your grandpappy and I could still whup your ass if I wanted!”
It bears mentioning that while he let loose with this diatribe, he was knitting an adorable baby jacket in pink wool.
The Crabby Old Man was the first of the group I met, when I walked into the appointed room for the first time. He stared at my outstretched hand as if I were offering him a palmful of ebola, and said, “Don’t bother telling me your name. I’m not gonna remember and I’m not even gonna try. Key-riiiist, at my age I’m lucky if I can remember whether I’m shittin’ in my diapers or peein’ in ‘em.”
It’s because of the Crabby Old Man and his hearing that the rest of us speak in raised voices, most of the time. Only the Know-It-All will persist in his monologue in soft, self-absorbed tones: “. . . really prefer double-pointed needles, and of course I use a set that was handmade from me from historic boxwood by a very tiny concern in the heart of Hampshire I was visiting during the summer of 2005. . . .”
“T. J. Thynes?” asks the Horny One. “Nobody? Seriously? Nobody? T. J. Thynes? He’s the hottest guy on Bones! I bet his bone. . . .”
“In my day, double-pointed needles were the only technique available for circular knitting,” sniffs the Grandmother. “We didn’t have these magic loops and double-circulars. . . .”
The Leader looks off into space with tormented eyes. “I use two circulars,” he announces. Everyone leans forward and waits for a verdict on them that should be accompanied by a haunting score from John Williams. It never comes.
The Crabby Old Man stares around the table at us like we’re all freaks. “What are you Nancys yappin’ about now? Yap, yap, yap. We’re men. We’re not supposed to be talkin’!” he announces, as he places a few deft purls into the absolutely darling powder-blue mittens he’s making for his grandson.
At the first meeting I attended, the Crabby Old Man told us about his experience with Hurricane Sandy. “Nah, I didn’t lose power. Are you kiddin’? Do I look like the kind who’d lose power?” he asked, as if the rest of us who did without for a week or more did so out of a lack of personal integrity, or some essential flaw that had nothing to do with the electrical companies. “And I had all kinds of god-damned people asking me if they could stay with me. Key-riiiiiist!”
“What did you tell them?” asked The Leader, looking as if he’d spent many a homeless cold night with only the sky for shelter.
“I told them no, goddamn it! Key-riiiiist, I’m not lettin’ people into my apartment just because they’ve got no power! I ain’t their god-damned granddaddy they can drop in on whenever they goddamned please! Oh, and that reminds me,” he told The Leader. “All those hats and scarves we made after Sandy, over at the senior center? I took them to the Red Cross and you know what they told me? They told me they were going to sell them! Sell them to the victims of Sandy!”
“That doesn’t sound right,” The Grandmother sniffed. “Are you sure?”
“Key-riiiiiist, I might be a hundred years old but I’m not deaf! I’m not senile!” The Crabby Old Man seems incensed that anyone would question him. “The Red Cross said they were gonna sell those god-damned hats and scarves instead of giving them to people who could use them. So you know what I did? I took all those god-damned hats and scarves and I walked out onto the street and I walked up to the first homeless asshole I saw. And then I threw them all at him and said, here, these are yours now! Selling them. Key-riiiiiist.”
It was roughly at this point that I looked at the Crabby Old Man and thought to myself, Key-riiiist. That’s me in another ten years.
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Fifty Shades of Crimson
There’s an older woman in the church office—Barbara—who volunteers to sit at the front desk for a midweek morning slot. I think she’s amazing. I’ve tended to take a lot of my substitute desk-sitting shifts immediately after her; when I come in to relieve her from a long three and a half hours of keeping track of the ministers’ comings and goings, she’s always gracious enough to engage in a few minutes of chat with me.
Barbara is basically what I want to be when I grow up: smart, acerbic, strong-willed, and on top of current affairs. Several decades ago, when she was in her forties and her children were old enough to take care of herself, she announced that she was going back to college for the education she never got to have; she persevered through an undergraduate and grad degree, despite being twice the age of her classmates—and then went on to have a successful midlife career in education for herself. Which is all kinds of awesome.
Not too long ago I walked into the church office with a book and my iPad, armed with entertainment for the afternoon. The church’s youth minister, Mark, a younger guy himself, was loitering by the staff mailboxes. Barbara asked what I was reading. “It’s a biography of the lyricist Lorenz Hart,” I said, holding it up so she could see the shiny library spine.
“Lawrence who?” asked Mark, managing to imply that if he’d never heard of the guy, I must be reading up on smutmongers and criminal overlords.
“Don’t be silly, Mark. Lorenz Hart,” said Barbara. “Half of Rodgers and Hart. He wrote the lyrics to ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘The Lady Is a Tramp.’” She rattled off half a dozen of Hart’s other most famous hits, compared his output favorably to the later pairing of Rodgers and Hammerstein, wrapped it up with a theater review, and somehow managed to deliver this delightful learned bouquet in less than four succinct sentences.
Mark looked at my thick biography with a curled lip. “Sounds boring to me.”
I ignored him. “What are you reading, Barbara?” I asked.
“Well, it’s interesting you should ask,” she said. “It might interest you, too, Mark.” She then went into a disquisition of a non-fiction historical book she’d tackled—and probably absorbed in a single evening’s read—about the archaeological discovery of early Christian-era scriptures and the cult that had preserved them, then provided a summary of their importance to Biblical scholars. She summed up the thesis more handily than could the New York Review of Books, and simultaneously managed to make me regret that my previous literary diet had consisted of an Enid Blyton children’s book and a cheesy Anne McCaffrey.
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That sounds like something.”
“Gawd.” Minister Mark rolled his eyes. “It sounds like something boring.”
“Oh, Mark,” laughed Barbara, not at all fazed.
“Mark’s reading Fifty Shades of Grey,” I told her.
“Only because—!” sputtered Mark, who really was reading his way through the trilogy. “Only because—! Only because it’s very popular now, and as minister of youth, I have to keep my finger on the pulse of what kids are reading these days. . . !”
“Goodness,” said Barbara, mildly.
“. . . and because once I started reading it I couldn’t stop untilIfinishedthewholething,” he finished in a rushed mumble.
“The writing is dreadful,” I said.
“Yes, it’s really bad, but. . . .”
“Exactly how many of your high school kids are reading Fifty Shades of Grey, Mark?” I asked.
“Listen,” said Mark to me, his expression saying that’s enough of youse, mister. His face was flushing with at least fifty shades of crimson. To Barbara he turned with an apologetic face. Very delicately, as if struggling to figure out how to phrase his sentences with respect to Barbara’s age, gender, and gentility, he said, “Fifty Shades of Grey is about . . . well, it’s a fantasy of the, ah, erotic persuasion that um, is about . . . well, a couple whose preferred, um, style of interaction is of a sort that, um. . . .”
Barbara let out a long-suffering sigh. “Oh, stop pussy-footing around Mark,” she said in a no-nonsense New England manner. “Just come out and say what you mean. My goodness. Such a lot of fuss about explicit consensual sadomasochistic sex.” She brushed herself off, collected her purse and her newspaper, and left the office so she could go about her afternoon business.
Mark stared after her, slack-jawed. “Um yeah,” he said. “That’s what it is, all right.”
And that’s why I want to be Barbara when I grow up.
Barbara is basically what I want to be when I grow up: smart, acerbic, strong-willed, and on top of current affairs. Several decades ago, when she was in her forties and her children were old enough to take care of herself, she announced that she was going back to college for the education she never got to have; she persevered through an undergraduate and grad degree, despite being twice the age of her classmates—and then went on to have a successful midlife career in education for herself. Which is all kinds of awesome.
Not too long ago I walked into the church office with a book and my iPad, armed with entertainment for the afternoon. The church’s youth minister, Mark, a younger guy himself, was loitering by the staff mailboxes. Barbara asked what I was reading. “It’s a biography of the lyricist Lorenz Hart,” I said, holding it up so she could see the shiny library spine.
“Lawrence who?” asked Mark, managing to imply that if he’d never heard of the guy, I must be reading up on smutmongers and criminal overlords.
“Don’t be silly, Mark. Lorenz Hart,” said Barbara. “Half of Rodgers and Hart. He wrote the lyrics to ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘The Lady Is a Tramp.’” She rattled off half a dozen of Hart’s other most famous hits, compared his output favorably to the later pairing of Rodgers and Hammerstein, wrapped it up with a theater review, and somehow managed to deliver this delightful learned bouquet in less than four succinct sentences.
Mark looked at my thick biography with a curled lip. “Sounds boring to me.”
I ignored him. “What are you reading, Barbara?” I asked.
“Well, it’s interesting you should ask,” she said. “It might interest you, too, Mark.” She then went into a disquisition of a non-fiction historical book she’d tackled—and probably absorbed in a single evening’s read—about the archaeological discovery of early Christian-era scriptures and the cult that had preserved them, then provided a summary of their importance to Biblical scholars. She summed up the thesis more handily than could the New York Review of Books, and simultaneously managed to make me regret that my previous literary diet had consisted of an Enid Blyton children’s book and a cheesy Anne McCaffrey.
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That sounds like something.”
“Gawd.” Minister Mark rolled his eyes. “It sounds like something boring.”
“Oh, Mark,” laughed Barbara, not at all fazed.
“Mark’s reading Fifty Shades of Grey,” I told her.
“Only because—!” sputtered Mark, who really was reading his way through the trilogy. “Only because—! Only because it’s very popular now, and as minister of youth, I have to keep my finger on the pulse of what kids are reading these days. . . !”
“Goodness,” said Barbara, mildly.
“. . . and because once I started reading it I couldn’t stop untilIfinishedthewholething,” he finished in a rushed mumble.
“The writing is dreadful,” I said.
“Yes, it’s really bad, but. . . .”
“Exactly how many of your high school kids are reading Fifty Shades of Grey, Mark?” I asked.
“Listen,” said Mark to me, his expression saying that’s enough of youse, mister. His face was flushing with at least fifty shades of crimson. To Barbara he turned with an apologetic face. Very delicately, as if struggling to figure out how to phrase his sentences with respect to Barbara’s age, gender, and gentility, he said, “Fifty Shades of Grey is about . . . well, it’s a fantasy of the, ah, erotic persuasion that um, is about . . . well, a couple whose preferred, um, style of interaction is of a sort that, um. . . .”
Barbara let out a long-suffering sigh. “Oh, stop pussy-footing around Mark,” she said in a no-nonsense New England manner. “Just come out and say what you mean. My goodness. Such a lot of fuss about explicit consensual sadomasochistic sex.” She brushed herself off, collected her purse and her newspaper, and left the office so she could go about her afternoon business.
Mark stared after her, slack-jawed. “Um yeah,” he said. “That’s what it is, all right.”
And that’s why I want to be Barbara when I grow up.
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