Chicken sandwiches, gay marriage, and freedom of speech

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I wrote last week about Dan Cathy, CEO of fast-food chain Chick-fil-A, who made a big contribution to an anti-gay-marriage organization, and bragged about his morals as he did so. (He made a comment about “all of us here being on our first marriages,” which I think is pretty comical.) He and his company promptly got dumped upon, most publicly and most appropriately by the Henson Company, which broke ties with Chick-fil-A (Henson used to manufacture toys for their children’s meals).  The Hensons then contributed the money they’d received from Chick-fil-A to GLAAD, a prominent gay organization.

 

 

All of this I love.

 

 

The next part becomes more complex.

 

 

Leaders in four American cities – Denver, Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago – have talked about forbidding the expansion of the Chick-fil-A chain in their cities. Is this okay? I’m not sure. I dislike homophobes and prudes, of course, but I can’t forbid them to own businesses, and I’m not sure if I can justify zoning them out of whole cities.  If they were openly flouting the law – refusing service based on sexual preference, or something like that – I might think differently.

 

 

This is the lovely thing about America. You can be as ridiculous as you like, and no one can really tell you to shut up about it. You can be against gay marriage, or women’s suffrage, or the Emancipation Proclamation if you like, and you can even put up big banners in your place of business announcing your political beliefs.

 

 

You’d just better be prepared to lose quite a bit of business.

 

 

To be sure, the homophobes are rallying around the chicken place. Mike Huckabee, the Christian zealot, and Rick Santorum, the animated sweater-vest, have encouraged other zealots and bigots to join them at Chick-fil-A on August 1, to show their “support.” (It’s like the Civil Rights Movement in reverse: lunch counter sit-ins to deny people their rights!) I also saw a lovely photo of Sarah and Todd “Secede From America” Palin picking up their chicken sandwiches and smiling pretty for the camera. (CNN played Pink’s song “Stupid Girls” as background as they relayed the story. Excellent commentary.)

 

 

The natural response for the gay and gay-friendly communities is to boycott Chick-fil-A. Some organizers, more interestingly, are organizing “Gay Day at Chick-fil-A,” to be held on the same day as the Huckabee/Santorum hate rally. This will create, um, an interesting dynamic.

 

 

Myself, I’m with the boycotters. This will be easy for me, because there are no Chick-fil-A franchises in Rhode Island.

 

 

(I was never much for chicken sandwiches, anyway. I’m more of a burger queen.)

 

 

Theater review: "Timeshare," at Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep

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Partner and I saw the last play in the Brown/Trinity Playwrights Rep series, “Timeshare,” on Saturday night.

 

 

I love a good farce. I have a very childish sense of humor; I love it when people run in and out of rooms, and scream, and dress in ridiculous outfits, and hide inside coffee tables. (Of course, it has to be done well.  Silly is good; stupid is quite another thing.) Also, you need actors with good timing, who can scream, and cajole, and wheedle, and make funny faces, and do long ridiculous takes.

 

 

We were fortunate to have pretty much all of the above on Saturday night.

 

 

This is a traditional mixed-up family comedy: everyone (mother, father, married daughter + husband, unmarried daughter + boyfriend) shows up at the mountain cabin on the same weekend. Misunderstandings ensue. Two engagement rings are hidden, misplaced, given to the wrong recipients.

 

 

As in all good farce, there is a happy ending.

 

 

I especially liked the use – and subtle subversion – of stereotypes. There’s an unbearable Jewish mother, who turns out to be a convert. The whiny emasculated Jewish dad is also a stoner. The handsome black boyfriend (a shaygetz if I ever saw one) is Jewish. The banker son-in-law is as dumb as a bag of hammers.

 

 

All in all: nicely done.

 

 

(This is a brand-new play, and a very nice one. It takes a teeny bit too long to set the scene in the first act; I think we could have met the characters more speedily. I kept wanting it to be funny during the first few scenes, but it felt sitcom-watery. Once all six of the characters were introduced, however, the fun began in earnest, and there were few dull moments after that.)

 

 

I give high marks to three of the performers: Mark Cohen, the father; Anne Nichols, the mother; and Ben Chase, the goofily stupid/charming son-in-law. (He was my favorite: he’s tall and lanky, with an expressive face and a voice that goes from cornball to Yalie to falsetto seamlessly. We got a lot of laughs out of him.)

 

 

From “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”:

 

 

No royal curse, no Trojan horse –

And a happy ending, of course.

What is the moral? Must be a moral . . .

Here is the moral, wrong or right:

Tragedy tomorrow – comedy tonight!

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For Sunday: A shelf cloud over a 7-11 in Norfolk, Virginia

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We have had all kinds of crazy weather here on the East Coast over the last few weeks.


Here is a wonderful video from YouTube, from Norfolk, Virginia, of a rare “shelf cloud.” This is a subtype of “arcus cloud,” just in case you’re wondering. (Look it up on Wikipedia, or buy yourself a copy of the very entertaining and informative “Cloudspotter’s Guide.” I have a copy. I like clouds.)


(Note: the language in this video is not terribly proper, so if you’re sensitive to casual obscenity, handle with care.)


But the camerawork is masterful. And the cloud is beautiful.

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No one thinks old people are funny

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Apollonia and I were laughing ourselves sick the other day, trying to remember that stupid song that Strawberry Alarm Clock sang back in the 1960s.  “O god,” she croaked.  “I just thought of another one.  Remember Question Mark and the Mysterians?”

 

 

“O god,” I groaned.  “What did they sing?”

 

 

She Googled it quick as a flash. “’96 Tears,’” she said, and we began hooting with laughter again.  I started to sing: “’I’m gonna cry, cry-cry-cry – “

 

 

Suddenly Apollonia stopped laughing and became almost solemn.  “Have you noticed,” she said, "that we just kill one another?”

 

 

“No kidding,” I said, wiping tears of laughter from my eyes. “We’re both hysterical.”

 

 

“And have you noticed,” she said, “that no one else laughs when we tell our little amusing stories?  Everyone gets very quiet.  They wait for us to calm down.”

 

 

“So they don’t get the jokes,” I said. “To hell with them.”  (Actually I didn’t say “To hell with them.”  I was far ruder, if you see what I mean.)

 

 

She smiled.  “Yeah,” she said.  “To hell with them.”  (She also used the ruder expression.)

 

 

It’s a privilege you gain as you get older: the right to laugh yourself silly over stupid things that kids just don’t understand.  They just haven’t lived long enough.

 

 

They’ll figure it out, if they live long enough.

 

 

In the meantime: to hell with them!

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Listen to the mockingbird

Sometimes, on weekend mornings in spring and summer, when the windows are open, I lie in bed and listen to the birds outside: repeated notes, strange sliding calls, Morse-code beeping, alien whoops. 

 

 

I can recognize a crow.  Bluejays have a distinctive hoarse call, and I know the rusty-screen-door screech of a cardinal.  I know the scream of a hawk; believe it or not, there are hawks here in Rhode Island too. 

 

 

And I know the mockingbird.

 

 

I didn't at first.  Then, one day, sitting in a folding chair in a local park, reading a book, I was absent-mindedly listening to a bird singing in a nearby tree.  It went on and on.  It was pretty, in a way, but it had no continuity.  It'd tweet a few times, and then warble, and then do sharp repeated notes, and then peep, and then coo.  It never let up.  It went on for twenty minutes, and never repeated itself once.

 

 

It was like reading a story with the pages scrambled. 

 

 

This is the mockingbird's survival strategy.  A lot of birds sing to mark territory: Get out of here! This is my turf!  The mockingbird memorizes every birdsong it hears, and plays them all back in an endless random loop, and keeps all the other birds away, some through challenge, some through confusion.

 

 

And then it has all the delicious bugs in the neighborhood to itself. 

 

 

Mockingbirds are good at their work.  I heard one imitate the caw of a crow once.  Citydwellers have reported hearing them do the beep-beep-beep of a vehicle backing up.

 

 

 

They are dismal-looking, dull-colored, nondescript.  They perch high up in the branches, or on the tops of telephone poles, or on traffic lights, above the action, looking down.  I’m sure it's to ensure maximum coverage.

 

 

They drive me mad. 

 

 

I really sympathize with the other birds, who must really hate them. 

 

 

In “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Atticus tells Scout and her brother that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird, because it just sits in its tree and sings all day long.  And what's wrong with that?

 

 

Oh, Atticus.  I wish you were here right now. I could explain it all to you. 

 

 

And then I would eradicate all the mockingbirds.

 

 

Scowling all the way

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I come from a long line of scowlers. My maternal grandmother had a scowl that could peel paint (see above, scowling over her birthday cake). My uncle Primo (who wasn’t a bad-looking bloke) ranged between a frown and a scowl most days. Grandma’s father, whom I never met, had one of those melancholy Polish faces that seemed to be set permanently on “unhappy.”

 

 

This is fine with me.

 

 

I stick to the scowl as much as I can. It keeps people off-guard. I work with people who are grinny and cheerful all the time; some of them can’t say “Good morning” without giggling. I abominate this. I have worked for years on my scowl and glare, and I have it almost right; it’s nearly at Grandma intensity, and (if I live long enough) I may get it up to an even higher power level.

 

 

There have been times when I think we’re one of those families who have the gift: the Evil Eye, the malocchio. We can blight your cattle and stunt your children and make your well run dry with a single glance.

 

 

You think that’s silly? Here’s a testimonial.

 

 

A few weeks ago, as I’ve already written, Partner and I were at a play at Brown. There were two clueless women sitting behind us, passing a bag of potato chips back and forth. I turned and gave them The Scowl, and it silenced them (mostly).

 

 

A few days later, I received this email from Joe Zarrow, who wrote the play we saw that night:

 

 

Loren,

 

I was, as playwrights tend to do, googling around for review quotes I could pull on Principal Principle when I came across your blog. Thanks for your thoughtful review, but extra double thanks for getting those women with the potato chips to be quiet. I was glaring at them impotently from one of the other seating sections, and I totally saw you turn around and give them the evil eye. You are a hero.

 

Best,

Joe

 

 

 

Moral: don’t belittle the evil eye. It has its uses.

 

 

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Sally Ride, gay marriage, the Muppets, and Chick-fil-A

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I was saddened when I read that Sally Ride, first American woman in space, passed away a few days ago. She was a role model, certainly; back in 1983, science and engineering were still distinctly woman-unfriendly disciplines. (The Russians had Valentina Tereshkova all those decades ago, but never really closed the gender gap.)

 

 

Astronauts were never really my heroes. They were too bland. When I was a kid in the 1960s, I used to be irritated when all those Gemini missions kept preempting my favorite programs. And then – these guys went into space, and came back, and never had anything interesting to say!

 

 

Then, the other day, I learned that Sally was in a relationship with a woman, Tam O’Shaughnessy, for the last 27 years of her life.

 

 

Now I’m interested.

 

 

The astronaut business was intensely macho. The original astronauts – Mercury, Gemini, Apollo – were mostly test pilots and Air Force hotshots, and most of them were insufferable boors. (My favorite reference text on this subject is Michael Collins’s lovely book “Carrying the Fire,” about his own time as an astronaut. He was the guy who circled the moon back in 1969 while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were traipsing around in the Sea of Tranquility.  He describes the psychological tests, and the physical training, and the sometimes-not-very-friendly sparring between the astronauts.)

 

 

 

Now: imagine being Sally Ride, competing in that macho environment.

 

 

I would have wilted in five seconds under that pressure. In the words of Tony Kushner, daisies would have sprouted out of my ears.

 

 

But Sally made it. She even married (for a few years in the 1980s) one of the other astronauts, Steve Hawley, who seems nice enough.

 

 

But she ended up with Tam O’Shaughnessy, who lived with her for over two decades, and worked with her, and co-authored several books with her, and was with her through her final illness

 

.

Bravo to her.

 

 

And what does Tam get?

 

 

Why, nothing! No death benefits. The U. S. Gummint don’t recognize non-traditional relationships.

 

 

(Mitt Romney recently posted a fatuous/obvious comment on Twitter about Sally being a “pioneer.” Here’s how that went:)

 

 

 

Which brings me to Chick-fil-A.

 

 

We don’t have this particular chain in Rhode Island, thank goodness. I say “thank goodness” because Dan Cathy, the company’s CEO, recently made a large donation to an anti-gay-marriage cause, and made some nasty comments to accompany his contribution.

 

 

The Jim Henson Company, which made toys for Chick-fil-A’s kids’ meals, broke with them over this. They made a wonderful statement about it, and they gave the money they’d earned from Chick-fil-A to GLAAD, a gay organization.

 

 

Tee hee!

 

 

And here’s a pictorial version of the victory:

 

 

 

 

All of this means we still have a very long way to go.

 

 

But there’s light on the horizon.

 

 

Maybe.

 

 

(Rest in peace, Sally. Tam: best wishes, and stay strong. Lisa Henson: you go, girl. Dan Cathy of Chick-fil-A: go to hell, rapidly, now.)

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Joe Paterno's legacy

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I think this is the third time I’ve written about the Paterno / Sandusky scandal.

 

 

This will be the last time, I promise.

 

 

But I can’t help myself.

 

 

So: Jerry Sandusky was found guilty. Then the Freeh report (which, by all accounts, was thorough and fair) found that Sandusky’s crimes were not only known to the University administration – and to Joe Paterno – but that those crimes were systematically covered up by the administration. Most damningly, this was largely at the behest of Joe Paterno himself, who wanted nothing to get in the way of his winning legacy. At one point, the administrators were about to go to the local authorities; then one of them met with Paterno, and some days later informed his colleagues that “we’re going to go another way with this.”

 

 

It’s largely on the basis of the Freeh report that institutions all over America, including Penn State itself, have quietly removed Paterno’s name from scholarships and such. Penn State took down Paterno’s statue on Sunday morning.

 

 

So it looks as if everyone’s trying to move on.

 

 

Except (sadly) for Paterno’s family.

 

 

Listen, I understand family solidarity; I admire it. It doesn’t shock or horrify me when a convicted murderer’s mother insists on his innocence. We don’t want to believe the worst of our loved ones.

 

 

But the Paterno family’s recent statements are way beyond the pale.

 

 

See if you can find the howlers in the following paragraph:

 

 

Sexual abuse is reprehensible, especially when it involves children, and no one starting with Joe Paterno condones or minimizes it. The horrific acts committed by Jerry Sandusky shock the conscience of every decent human being.  How Sandusky was able to get away with his crimes for so long has yet to be fully understood, despite the claims and assertions of the Freeh report.

 

 

Here’s my list:

 

 

-        They talk about Joe Paterno in the present tense, even though he passed away some months ago. Just a slip? Or are they implying that Joe lives on as a kind of angelic presence?

-        According to the Freeh report, Paterno did indeed minimize the crime of child abuse. He certainly considered it of less importance than his football record.

-        Sandusky’s crimes might shock a decent human being – they shock me, and I am far from being a decent human being – but Freeh established that Paterno had a pretty good idea of what Sandusky was doing, and evidently it didn’t shock Paterno enough to remove Sandusky from proximity to the kids he was abusing.

-        How did Sandusky get away with his crimes? Well, sugar, he had help. To be sure, Sandusky was dropping clues like bread crumbs all over the place – most horribly, that book of his called “Touched.” But for some reason, every time a little piece of information made its way to the Penn State administration or to the police, something (or someone) brought the action to a screeching halt.

 

 

The family's statements go on. It’s not fair to punish the college, and the students, for what Jerry Sandusky did. How does this benefit the victims? Or the students?

 

 

And so, drearily, on.

 

 

I don’t like to get too psychological, but I can just imagine what it was like to grow up with Joe Paterno as a father. One assumes that life was all about winning and losing. Sadly, the family is applying that attitude to the current situation.  They do not seem to realize that the game has already been lost. It was lost in 1998, back when their father first discovered that Sandusky was abusing children.

 

 

The family needs to retreat, and express sympathy and condolences to Sandusky’s victims, and make a generic statement like “We respect our father’s memory,” and leave the rest to silence.

 

 

Silence, in this case, as far as the Paterno family is concerned, would be best.

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New Hampshire

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Partner and I just came back from a couple of days in New Hampshire.

 

 

I have lived in New England for almost thirty-five years, and in that time, I have spent maybe three weeks in New Hampshire. So that makes me an expert on the subject.

 

 

Partner and I have vacationed in New Hampshire a couple of times, and went up a few years ago for a wake, and have gone a couple of times just for the hell of it (the state line is barely 90 minutes from Providence).  It always struck me as Massachusetts North: gritty and industrial (at least in the south: Manchester, Nashua).  The state line between Methuen, Massachusetts and Salem, New Hampshire is almost invisible: trees and gravelly hillsides on one side of the border, trees and gravelly hillsides on the other.

 

 

If you go farther north, you end up in the White Mountains, which are very Robert Frostish and picturesque. A few years ago we made the obligatory drive up Mount Washington, and marveled at the view from the visitor center.  We’ve been to Franconia Notch. We’ve walked around the Flume, which is lovely (Partner still remembers going there when he was young).  We’ve explored the Polar Caves, which have ice in them, even in August.

 

 

But then there’s all the other stuff.

 

 

New Hampshire, for some reason, is a conservative state. (I much prefer Vermont. Vermont is like your aging hippie cousin, who’s funny and manic and very liberal; New Hampshire is like your conservative uncle, who thinks Obama is a socialist and a fascist at the same time.) On this most recent trip, I saw Romney signs everywhere. (Have you seen his campaign logo? It’s a double-image “R,” something like the Rolls-Royce logo. I think he’s trying to suggest “Ronald Reagan,” and doesn’t realize that he’s also conjuring up the Rolls-Royce thing. Or maybe he knows and doesn’t care.)

 

 

Then there’s the whole “Live Free or Die” thing. It’s on their license plates! It’s the state motto! It’s a little – hm – heavy. (Partner always rephrases it: “Live free, then die.” “Live free and die.” I like his rephrasings better than the original motto.)

 

 

Also: there is the Old Man of the Mountain. This was a big stone profile on Cannon Mountain, visible for miles, that looked like the profile of an old man with a beard. New Hampshire still uses it on its road signs (all of the New Hampshire state route numbers appear in an “Old Man of the Mountain” frame). It’s on their 2002 state quarter.

 

 

The Old Man of the Mountain collapsed in 2003. It looks like exactly nothing now, except maybe a big pile of rubble. (I remind myself that I grew up within sight of Mount Saint Helens, and it blew up. Then I lived within shouting distance of the Old Man, and he fell apart. Is it me?)

 

 

Anyway: New Hampshire is green and lovely and full of wild scenery (if you go far enough north, anyway).

 

 

(But I’ll take Vermont any day of the week, if you give me the choice.)

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For Sunday: Coldplay performs “Viva La Vida”

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I love this song. It’s lyrical and grandiose without being too much so. And the video is spectacular: it plunges the band members into the Delacroix painting “Liberty Leading the People” – same color scheme, same turbulent background – until they finally blow away into ashes.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

 

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Tennis elbow

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Hey, kids! I just self-diagnosed myself into another interesting condition!

 

 

About two months ago, my right elbow began to bother me. It hurt when I picked anything up with my right hand, even small light things. It felt better some days, but then it got worse again. Sometimes it felt like it was burning. (Actually, I think I whammed it into a wall or cabinet around that time. I am extraordinarily uncoordinated.)

 

 

One day, on a whim, I asked my student assistant Jake: “What does tennis elbow feel like?”

 

 

He raced onto the Net and read the info to me, and showed me a diagram of the bones and tendons involved.

 

 

Bingo!

 

 

It’s not a big deal. It only hurts once in a while, when I pick something up the wrong way. It’s not a crippling pain; it’s a once-in-a-while ache. It has lots of other names: its medical name is “lateral epicondylitis,” but we can call it “shooter’s elbow,” or “archer’s elbow,” if we are feeling twee.

 

 

My friend Matt, the big tough parking cop, tells me that I can buy a brace that will help. I read on WebMD that I’m supposed to rest it, and ice it. My skinny little doctor giggled when I described it, and when I touched my elbow to show him where the pain was, he said: “That’s exactly where tennis elbow pain is.”

 

 

I can deal with it. I have gigantic bottles of ibuprofen at home and at the office, and I eat them like M&Ms if/when necessary.

 

 

It’s just one more thing in my life, you know? One more small breakdown, one more ache, one more flower in my garden.

 

 

From “The Simpsons”:

 

 

Doctor: Mr. Burns, I'm afraid you are the sickest man in the United States. You have everything. 

Burns: You mean I have pneumonia?

Doctor: Yes.

Burns: Juvenile diabetes?

 Doctor: Yes.

 Burns: Hysterical pregnancy?

 Doctor: Uh, a little bit, yes. You also have several diseases that have just been discovered – in you.

 Burns: I see. You sure you haven't just made thousands of mistakes?

 Doctor: Uh, no, no, I'm afraid not.

 Burns: This sounds like bad news.

 Doctor:Well, you'd think so, but all of your diseases are in perfect balance.

 Burns: So what you're saying is, I'm indestructible.

 Doctor: Oh, no, no, in fact, even a slight breeze could . . .

 Burns: Indestructible. 

 

Over and out, kids.

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Add one bay leaf

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My current student assistant, Jake, is thinking about moving out on his own, and is very excited about it. He is hunting for the ideal first-kitchen setup: he already has a microwave, so he’s going to get a toaster oven, and probably a hot plate, and a slow cooker.

 

 

Well, my god! What can’t you do with a slow cooker?

 

 

I lent him my slow-cooker cookbook, the #1 New York Times best-seller “Fix It And Forget It” (what a terrible name for a book!), just to give him some ideas. He’s pretty excited about the idea of pot roasts, and chicken, and stew, and chili, that pretty much make themselves (which is the whole charm of the slow cooker, of course).

 

 

I was describing my various pot-roast attempts to him, then said: “Do you have any bay leaves in the house?”

 

 

“Any what?” he said uncertainly.

 

 

Well, to be fair, neither did I until I was at least in my thirties. I considered that they were a kind of joke, or hoax. “Add one bay leaf.” Really? One little frail-looking bay leaf? And it’s gonna do something magical to the pot roast, or the stew, or the whatever?

 

 

But it does. There’s a fragrance, or an earthiness, to it. Bay, after all, is laurel. The Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece used to breathe the smoke of burning laurel to put herself into a trance. Most of the Mediterranean cultures cook with it (cautiously, one bay leaf at a time). There’s gotta be something in there.

 

 

The only way to find out, really, is to make a pot roast without adding a bay leaf.

 

 

And I am reluctant to do that.

 

 

It’s the one thing necessary, to quote Jesus. It’s the magical ingredient. It’s the lucky charm that makes your pot roast tender and succulent and fragrantly delicious.

 

 

Who are you to doubt three thousand years of culinary tradition?

 

 

Add one bay leaf.

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Summer heat

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It has been very hot in Providence this summer.  This week was pretty awful: mid-90s, high humidity. The air was like the water in a dirty aquarium: warm, and thick, and most likely toxic. Yesterday morning, walking to work, I was sweating like a Teamster. I was carrying a blue-covered library book, and when I got to work I found that it had left blue dye all over my lovely rose-pink shirt. At one point downtown I realized that the temperature inside my body was almost the same as the temperature outside my body; I had the creepy feeling that I didn’t know where my body left off and the outside world began.


I know, however, that we have it easy compared to other parts of the country. We haven’t had any really horrible storms (although lightning did strike our building a while back). We are not spontaneously combusting, like Colorado. We are not getting flash floods, like Arizona.


Still, it’s pretty icky and nasty here.


I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, green and mild, where 80 degrees was considered steamy. (On my first trip to the Northwest with Partner in 2001, we were in Seattle during a (mild) heatwave – mid-80s! – and everyone was apologizing to us for the heat.) Then I came here, to Southern New England, where the winters are bitter and the summers are ferocious, and I suffer every day. (Except during the long beautiful autumn and the brief gorgeous spring.)


I take it easy on these hot days. I drink lots of water and move slowly. (Last summer, I nearly dehydrated myself on a hot summer day, and came close to collapsing. I will not do that again.) On Monday, one of my student employees, an athlete in training, overdid it during an afternoon workout; he spent the evening retching and the next day recuperating. (I told him to hydrate and not overexert himself. These kids don’t listen to me. I lectured him on this yesterday, and he heard me out very meekly, but I doubt that he’s learned his lesson.)


Global warming? Oh, wait, we call it “climate change” now. Nah. Couldn’t be.


As I said to Apollonia the other day: this is good practice for Hell, when we finally get there.


From the Book of Jonah, Chapter Four (King James Version, naturally):

⁵ So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. 

⁶ And the Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. 
⁷ But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. 
⁸ And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. 


Speaking for myself: I would be exceeding glad of a gourd right about now.

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The Presidential campaign: an update

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I don’t write about politics very often. It doesn’t win me many friends. The people who agree with me still agree with me, and the people who disagree – well, they can just shut their pieholes.

 

 

But I cannot resist commenting on the past week’s Presidential-campaign events, which have been truly delicious.

 

 

The overture was Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP. “ROMNEY IN THE LION’S DEN!” trumpeted any number of commentators. See? Mitt is the prophet Daniel, and the NAACP were the lions, or the Persians, or the Assyrians, or something. Anyway, it didn’t take long to see that Mitt was using this as an opportunity to show his (white) supporters that he isn’t going to take any backtalk from any (nonwhite) minority groups when he becomes President. It reminded me of those wonderful moments in professional wrestling when the villain grabs the microphone from the scrawny announcer and begins to berate the audience. He knows they hate him. That’s what it’s all about.

 

 

This is an interesting campaign strategy, trying to win the Presidency with not a single minority vote. (Mitt might still pick a ringer for VP, like Marco Rubio, but I doubt it; it’ll be a whitey like him and me, like Pawlenty or Ryan (well, Ryan sounds Irish, so I don’t know), or that guy from Ohio that no one’s ever heard of. Absolutely not a woman. Not Sarah Palin, and not Condi Rice. She’s pro-choice! She’s been on “30 Rock”! She’s black!)

 

 

Then there was the call for Mitt to release his tax returns. He will not, will not, do it. (Do you wonder what’s in them? So do I. I’m not normally eager to read other people’s tax returns, but these I’ll take a glance at.) Speculation is running wild. Were there years in which he paid no tax at all? Quite possible. Would the itemizations yield up interesting facts about the Romney fortune? Also quite possible.

 

 

There was a day or two of Mitt looking strangled and hopeless over this issue. Then the GOP figured out its riposte: OBAMA ISN’T AN AMERICAN!

 

 

Yes, you heard me.

 

 

Mitt called his policies “foreign” in a speech a day or two ago. John Sununu said that he wished “Obama would learn how to be an American.” (John Sununu, by the way, is an Arab-American. You would think – wouldn’t you? – that an Arab-American would realize that this kind of rhetoric can be inflammatory.  Apparently not.) Sununu said lots of other unkind things. Obama’s team are “liars” (because the Obama campaign has said – with perfect reasonableness, and in the absence of any extenuating evidence – that, if Romney lied about his status at Bain on his tax returns, it might have been a felony. Naturally this can be disproven if Romney were to release his returns.). Also: Obama has “demonized success.” (Not at all. Would that we could all be as wealthy as Mitt Romney! Of course, he inherited part of his fortune, and his handsome sons will inherit even more, from all those fat Swiss / Cayman bank accounts.)

 

 

Most deliciously: Rush Limbaugh has decried the new Batman movie, because the villain’s name is Bane. Obviously this is a reference to Bain Capital. (One Tumblr wit pointed out that, since the Batman villain Bane is a fat drug user who was popular in the 1990s, you’d think that Rush would like him.)

 

 

Oh, it’s all pretty funny.

 

 

So why am I not laughing?

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The things we buy too many of

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Years ago, the New York Times’s “Metropolitan Diary” ran a series on things we only buy once in a lifetime: Worcestershire sauce. Angostura Bitters. Tabasco. Styptic pencil (although nobody seems to use these anymore). Laundry bluing (probably ditto).

 

 

There’s a corollary group: the things we feel compelled to buy too many of.

 

 

For Partner, it’s mustard. He sees it on the grocery shelf (especially when it’s on sale) and his eyes light up. “I think we need one,” he says. “And it’s so cheap, we may as well get two. Or three.”

 

 

I have a dim recollection of a whole mess of mustard bottles in one of the kitchen cabinets, but I say nothing. Why? It’s mustard. It’s cheap. And we’ll use it.

 

 

(But, sure enough, when we get home, I discover at least seven mustards in the cabinet, right where I thought they were.)

 

 

I have my own let's-buy-them! items. Sardines: you can never have too many cans of sardines. Also ranch dressing. Also pasta, especially when it’s a dollar a pound.

 

 

My late friend Jan always said her husband was a nut for Pine-Sol. “I think we need another bottle,” he’d say.

 

 

“We have a bottle for every room in the house, and two for the garage,” she’d reply.

 

 

But he’d buy it anyway.

 

 

This is not the same as hoarding. Hoarding is a compulsion verging on mental illness.  Buying too much pasta is a “whoops!”  Hoarders save t-shirts and Beanie Babies and string ties, all of which are inedible.  I, on the other hand, can always eat the pasta and mustard and sardines (sometimes in the same meal!).

 

 

I admit that I sometimes misjudge. Why did I buy that can of sauerkraut, or that tin of imitation crabmeat?  But ultimately these odds and ends get thrown away, or put in a “food for the community” bin. (I feel guilty about this, fleetingly. Is some poor family really longing for a meal of imitation crabmeat with sauerkraut on the side?)

 

 

(But maybe someday these orphaned items will end up in the home of someone who will actually use them.)

 

 

(And then – you see! – I was right to buy them after all.)

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"Principal Principle," and teaching, and teachers

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Partner and I saw a brand-new play called “Principal Principle,” by Joe Zarrow, at Brown the other evening. It’s a funny / serious look at a year in the life of four high-school teachers, seen from the teachers’ workroom. Overall, it was excellent: crisp dialogue, good use of devices like the P.A. system (what would school be without one?), and (as usual) really excellent performances by the five actresses in the show.

 

 

(It was a new play, and not perfect. The ending was a little unsatisfying. Some of the moral dilemmas seemed a little too pat. And the passage of the school year – we began in September, so we knew that intermission would be December and the ending would be May – was a little too clockwork-predictable, like the passage of time in a Harry Potter novel.)

 

 

But it made me thoughtful about the teaching profession.

 

 

Firstly, it made me (again) grateful that I did not choose teaching as a career. I am not built for it. I have tried it, fitfully, over the years, in harmless small doses that did no real harm to my “students,” and I know for a fact now that I was not constructed to be a teacher. I am tough, in my lotus-blossom way, and (in the words of Elinor Wylie) I have faced out a hundred dooms, but if I’d ever tried to be a real honest-to-god teacher, I’d have been a gibbering wreck by mid-October.

 

 

This leads me, secondly, to give honor and respect to the very many good / great teachers I’ve had in my life. One of them is actually now my Facebook friend, forty years later. She was a wonderful teacher, and is now retired, and has now dedicated her life to being an all-around wonderful human being. Other great teachers – from grade school, intermediate school, high school, college, grad school – crowd to mind. They were distinctive, and authoritative, and knew their onions. Some were funny; some were stuffily serious; some were alternately remote and chummy. (I guess that’s to say that they were, in general, various types of human beings.)

 

 

This leads me, thirdly, to say that I feel vaguely nauseous when I hear people (mostly Republicans, strangely enough) talk about teaching as if it’s a well-paid racket run by crooked unions. I wonder, sincerely, if they’re playing to the fact that there’s a significant chunk of the population that hated school, and always regarded teachers as the enemy. (You know: dullards and idiots. And there will never be a shortage of those.)

 

 

So I suppose “Principal Principle” was a pretty good play after all, if it caused me to do all this deep thinking after seeing it.

 

 

(Of course, there were two women sitting behind us eating potato chips for a while. But I turned suddenly and gave both of them the Deadly Radioactive Stare a few times, and it seemed to quiet them down (although one had a nasty cough, and kept spraying Partner with dengue fever, or whatever she had).)

 

 

(But isn’t that what theater is all about?)

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For Sunday: the Chiffons sing "One Fine Day"

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I like many (most!) of the girl-group bands of the 1960s. They remind me of my childhood, first off. Then there’s that thrill of hearing them again, fifty-plus years later, and realizing that they just sound really good.

 

 

This is one of the best. I can only describe its mood as “ecstatic.” That ringing almost-out-of-tune piano riff, and the shooby-doo vocals behind the lead singer, and the harmonies in the chorus . . .

 

 

Enjoy.

 

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Thinking vegetarian

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What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’

 

 

All right. Well, what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow.

 

 

So I sort of played a moral hide-and-seek in my mind. I was left with this realization that I could eat an animal directly, or I could pass an animal through a plant and then eat it, but either way there were animals involved in this process. I could not remove animals from the equation.

 

 

I had to accept on some level that there was a cycle here, and it was very ancient, and ultimately very spiritual. It was really hard for me to accept the ‘death’ part of that equation. It took me years to finally face it. But there wasn’t any way out of it if I was going to grow things.

 

 

 

(Lierre Keith, on gardening as a vegan; October 8, 2009 on Underground Wellness Radio)       I am not a vegetarian. I have eaten enough meat to feed a thousand third-world kids for ten years.  But I think about it a lot. I like the idea of eating only vegetables; I hate the idea of animals dying to feed my appetite.     However: chicken, and pork, and beef (and goat, and eggs, and cheese, and mutton) taste good from time to time.     I love the advice Mark Bittman gives: be vegetarian as much you can, but don’t go crazy. Meat can be a side dish, a flavoring; it doesn’t need to be a main dish.     But the Lierre Keith piece above (which I found on Tumblr) gave me pause.  She’s exactly right. There’s no escape from death. Plants love the death of animals; it feeds them. Plants love the waste and decay of the animal world.     Quite obviously, plants and animals feed on one another.     Sad, and creepy. But true. Even when you’re eating a salad.     I think the important thing is to be mindful of what you’re eating. Don’t not think about it. Don’t wolf down a cheeseburger without thinking about it. Same with a salad. Think about where the ingredients came from, and what nutritional requirements are being filled by what you’re eating.     It’s all about mindfulness.     (Oh what a priggish New Age pseudo-Buddhist nerd I have become!)

 

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New glasses

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A couple of weeks ago, I took off my glasses at work to make a dramatic gesture, and the temple snapped off in my hand. This is the second time these particular frames have broken in just a few months, so I bounced right off to my funny little optician to get them fixed.


He is a silly little bunny. His prices are good, but he is not much of a businessman. Also, intellectually, he does not seem to be the most fully-inflated beach ball at the pool party. “They’ll be ready by Wednesday” usually means “Check back on Friday.” He gets dithery and confused easily. Every time I go to him, I swear I’ll never go to him again. Then he posts a new price list, and I think: Wow! That’s cheap! And I go back to him.


Anyway: “No problem,” he said. “I’ll order new frames for you.”  (This was on a Saturday.) “Check back on Wednesday.” (Translation: “Stop by next Saturday.”)


During the week, I made do with old pairs of glasses. My prescription changes dramatically from year to year; evidently my eyeballs mutate at random. Some of my old glasses are good for distance vision, some for close-up. I found I was reading the newspaper by taking off my (old) glasses altogether and holding it up to my eyeball, like a jeweler examining a precious stone.


Another week passed. I went to see Funny Optician. He spun in circles, excusing himself for not having fixed my glasses yet. It was the manufacturer’s fault; they hadn’t sent the replacement frames. He didn’t know what the problem was. (Did I mention that he has a high whiny voice with a really seriously advanced Rhode Island accent?) Come back Monday, maybe Tuesday.


I checked in on Monday. I found a sign that said CLOSED MONDAY.


Now I was ready to kill him.


I took the day off on Wednesday and went to see him again, carrying a polo mallet. Again he spun in circles. Then, suddenly, he circled back. “Hey!” he wheezed. “What about plastic?”


“What?” I said.


“Instead of metal frames,” he said. “Maybe they’d wear better for you. I could do those right now. These are tortoise. You don’t want tortoise. Are these brown or black? Can you tell? I got black here somewhere. Wait a minute –“


As he was jabbering, I thought: I need something new. I just turned fifty-five. I’ve been wearing metal frames for decades now. Maybe a little hipster action will be good for me. Also, he’s probably right; plastic will probably wear better than metal.


I left a few minutes later with a nice pair of plastic frames. I’d forgotten how intense! my most recently-updated prescription was; as I stepped out onto the street, I think I could see the past and future simultaneously.


Everyone says I look younger now.


So: my funny little optician has (inadvertently) given me the best fifty-fifth birthday present of all.

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Going to the beach

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When you grow up in the Northwest (as I did), going to the beach is a unique experience. The Northwest seashore is cold and foggy most of the time, even in the summertime, and not terribly welcoming.  Still, we went at least one day a year. It was a two-hour drive each way, to a little town called Long Beach, Washington, which was the usual beachfront honky-tonk town, with arcades and candy stores (I associate it with the smell of cotton candy, and I was there a few years ago, and am pleased to tell you that it still smells like cotton candy). 

 

 

Down the road from Long Beach is Ilwaco, a fishing port at the mouth of the Columbia.  (Ilwaco doesn't smell like cotton candy; it smells like low tide and fish guts. But it has its charms too.) My father sometimes went salmon fishing on a charter boat out of Ilwaco; they'd go out very early, spend the day retching their guts out (the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia is famous for being choppy), and come back empty-handed.  Then, on our way home, we'd stop in a little town called Chinook and buy a huge whole salmon for fifteen cents a pound, and pack it in ice in the trunk of the car. Dad would clean it when we got home, and we had a freezer full of salmon steaks to eat all winter long. 

 

 

In 1978 I relocated to Rhode Island, the Ocean State.  Here you're never more than eight or nine yards away from a nice beach: Goosewing, Horseneck, Misquamacut, Narragansett, Moonstone.  (Moonstone was for a long time a nude beach.  Then the state decided to protect the piping plover, which (coincidentally) nested on the nude beach. And that was the end of that.)

 

 

In the Peace Corps, I was lucky enough to be posted to two places with beaches attached: Kenitra in Morocco, which has a lovely beachtown called Mahdia Plage nearby, and Tunis, with its long arc of beaches stretching out through Carthage to La Marsa. 

 

 

For one dangerous moment in Morocco I thought about becoming a professional expatriate, living in Tangiers with Paul Bowles and William Burroughs and the rest of the louche lowdown American crew I found there. 

 

 

Good sense talked me out of it.  But it would have been wonderful to wake up and look down at the Strait of Gibraltar every morning while having my morning coffee.

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The day the ceiling collapsed

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I woke last Saturday morning at 7:30 a.m. to a huge crash in the bathroom.

 

 

My first thought was that Partner had fallen in the bathroom, and I leapt up to help him. (I did not notice that he was asleep in bed beside me. I am not very observant first thing in the morning.)

 

 

I opened the bathroom door and found that half of the ceiling had collapsed. There was moldy plaster everywhere: in the toilet, in the tub, in the sink, and all over the floor.

 

 

I thought about going upstairs to yell at our neighbors. Then I realized that I was naked and needed to put some clothes on. I put a pair of athletic shorts on, backwards. I went and looked at the damage again, and went in the bedroom to announce to Partner: “The bathroom ceiling fell in.” (He did not react. He sleeps with earplugs. I used to sleep with earplugs. I should start doing it again; it’s a good idea.)

 

 

It dimly dawned on me that our upstairs neighbors had not intentionally made our ceiling collapse. It then occurred to me that I ought to call the landlords and tell them what had happened. I closed my eyes to remember their phone number – I usually have an astounding memory – and couldn’t come up with a thing.

 

 

I need to pee, I thought.

 

 

Luckily, there’s a common bathroom in the basement of the apartment house, next to the laundry room. The trip downstairs did me good, and I finally noticed that my athletic shorts were on backwards, and rectified my earlier error.

 

 

I went back upstairs to the apartment. I looked at the damage again for a while, and then I looked up the landlords’ number and placed an emergency message.

 

 

I went back to stare at the damage again. The smell of wet plasterboard was beginning to get to me, and I was beginning to think about things like Stachybotrys. I have to get the bathroom door closed, I thought, and tried, but there was too much debris on the floor. I spun around in circles three or four times like a dog, and realized the only shovel-like thing in the house was our dustpan. So I started shoveling wet plaster with the dustpan.

 

 

At this point Partner awoke. He let out a little shriek when he saw what had happened. “Ceiling collapsed,” I said pointlessly.

 

 

“Oh my god!” he said. “What if we’d been in there when it happened? Can you imagine?”

 

 

“I’m picturing it,” I said.

 

 

Finally I got the bathroom door shut, containing the rancid moldy smell.

 

 

Think about it: no bath, no shower, no sink. No medicines from the medicine cabinet (Partner dashed into the bathroom to fetch his prescriptions, and I realized he’d had a good idea, and fetched mine also). My mouthwash bottle was floating in the toilet; we decided to leave it where it was.

 

 

But we made the best of it. The building superintendent, a bouncy talkative soul named Bob, came by a few hours later, and he and a morose little fellow named Angelo cleaned the plaster up and made some preliminary repairs. I ran to the health club for a shower, and later Partner and I picnicked on Subway sandwiches while waiting for the plumber. Plumber went upstairs, determined that the upstairs toilet was leaking, and fixed it in about ten seconds. By nightfall the bathroom was clean (if still stinking of wet plaster), the sink and toilet and bathtub were useable, and the gaping hole in the bathroom ceiling was covered with a blue tarp.

 

 

It was just like the London Blitz.

 

 

(Honestly: how we inflate these little daily problems. This was a small disaster, but the operative word here is “small.” Both of us survived. The worst moment (for me) was that initial moment of fear, when I thought Partner might have fallen in the bathroom. Everything after that was anticlimax.)

 

 

And we’re getting by.

 

 

So maybe it’s not World War II after all.

 

 

(Postscript, a few days later: the ceiling is fixed. We have a new vanity. Soon the painters will come over.)

 

 

(So I guess WWII is over.)

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For my birthday: Sammy Hagar sings "I Can't Drive 55"

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Today is my 55^th birthday. I thought this video would be appropriate, especially since:

 

 

-        I don’t have a driver’s license;

-        I look exactly like Sammy Hagar;

-        This song was recorded in 1984, which is a long time ago.

 

 

Happy birthday to me!

 

 

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I love a good calamity

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On the morning after the Fourth of July, Partner told me something he’d just seen on TV: some huge fiasco at the San Diego fireworks display the night before.

 

 

Later in the day, idly, I looked up the video of the event. And I nearly died laughing.

 

 

Every single thing went off at once. There were four barges full of fireworks, and something sparked them all simultaneously. It’s like watching the sun explode. It lasts approximately fifteen seconds, and then it dies down, and you hear the crowd applauding tentatively, waiting for more.

 

 

 

 

And there ain’t no more.

 

 

No one was hurt. Many, however, were disappointed. Some were “angry.”

 

 

Angry at what? I ask. That was just about the funniest and best fireworks display I’ve ever seen. It was mercifully brief, and bizarrely intense. If I were a kid watching that, I would know in my heart that I had just seen the best fireworks display ever.

 

 

But then, I love a good calamity.

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For Sunday: Art Garfunkel sings "The Waters of March"

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I have loved this song since the late 1970s and wanted to share it with you. I knew that it was written by Antonio Carlos Jobim, but had only heard it through this lovely unearthly Art Garfunkel version, from his album “Breakaway”; I did not know until recently that Jobim not only wrote the song, and the Portuguese lyrics, but the very allusive and strange English lyrics also.

 

 

I have always had very specific associations with the images here, and they’re kind of dark in places. When I hear: “A scratch, a lump / It is nothing at all,” I think of a cancer diagnosis, and someone lying to protect his loved ones from the truth. Guns are mentioned twice. Death is mentioned twice.

 

 

But the images in this video are much more varied, and brighter, than the ones in my head: the wild little fox, and the deer at the end of the road, and the stick, and the trees. They cheered me, and gave me a few goosebumps, when I watched this.

 

 

“And the riverbank talks / Of the waters of March / It’s the promise of life / In your heart, in your heart.”

 

 

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How to wash your stuffed animals

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(This blog is going to be terribly icky. If you can’t stand to read about adults playing with stuffed animals, click away now.)

 

 

(Still with me? Read on.)

 

 

We have a houseful of stuffed animals. The best-loved are a little brown dog who came from CVS back in the 1990s, and a big fat polar bear we purchased with prize tickets at Dave & Buster. We act out little dramas with them, and generally have a good time. The dog’s name is “Blot,” by the way. If the polar bear has a name, I don’t know it.

 

 

 

When animals get played with, and roll around on the floor, they get dirtier and dirtier. The formerly-white polar bear was turning dingy, and a little whiffy.

 

 

Neither animal wanted to go for a ride in the washing machine, though I tried very hard to make it sound like fun.  So I looked up instructions online (from a charming website called StuffedZoo.com), and it turned out to be pretty easy, as follows (all stuffed-toy owners pay attention, now):

 

 

-        Make sure your pets are washable. If they are stuffed with polyester fiber, and don’t have all kinds of things glued on them, then you are in luck. Polar bear had google-eye appliqués, which I removed. Both dog and polar bear were wearing pretty necklaces, which I also removed.

-        If they’re stained, dab laundry detergent on the stains.

-        Put them in a lingerie bag or pillowcase, and tie it up. (The spin cycle can be traumatic if you’re a little brown dog.)

-        Wash on the gentlest cycle.

-        Dry carefully. (I took them out of the bag and let them go commando in the dryer. In forty-five minutes, they were nice and dry, and neither looked the worse for it.)

-        If they’re not entirely dry, StuffedZoo.com recommends using a blowdrier. The kids can help with this; tell them that it’s a pet makeover session, and the pets are going to the salon.

 

 

The whole family is clean and lovely now. I reglued the Polar Bear’s eyes, and he can see again. He was a little shell-shocked by the washer/dryer thing, but when he saw how bright and clean he was, he forgave us. The little dog is also much cleaner, and looks much fluffier now.

 

 

And both of them are bragging about how brave they are, and how the other was crying like a baby the whole time.

 

 

But you know how kids are.

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