Matters of Art and Death

At the Feet of the Master

“Things don't affect people the way they used to. I mean it may very well be that 10 years from now people will pay $10,000 in cash to be castrated just in order to be affected by something.”

“We're bored. We're all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now, may very well be a self perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and it's not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?”

—André Gregory to Wallace Shawn, 

           My Dinner with André, 1981

Today your Miss O’ is thinking about meaning. This single week made fast work of sudden losses, health scares, deaths, and many other shocks, and at one point I remarked to my friend and colleague Howard, “I’ve started seriously thinking about what it all means.” Howard chuckled and said, “Who cares what it means?” And for some reason or another, possibly because I am less evolved than I should be, I care. My playwright friend Lynda remarked on Facebook, "I miss buying a new album and all of us sitting and listening to it, the way we used to listen to records." The shared experience of art means something, I think, and the farther we move away from it, the more remote we become to ourselves. (How's this for light reading on a Sunday in April?)

I was telling Howard about a new documentary showing at Film Forum here in New York City, André Gregory: Before and After Dinner, by his wife, filmmaker Cindy Kleine, and wondered if he had any interest in seeing it (Howard and I are Film Forum buddies who share a passion for classic movies, though he is far better versed in them than I am). As he had not seen My Dinner with André (the film to which this new one alludes), and especially as he had no particular interest in parsing meaning from art and existence in general (and doubtless he is healthier for it), I realized I’d just need to go by myself.

For those of you who are not acquainted with it, the movie My Dinner with André came out in 1981 and became what they call a “cult classic”. Directed by Louis Malle, the movie took place almost entirely in a restaurant over the course of a single meal between actor and writer Wallace Shawn, and experimental-theater director and actor André Gregory. (Gregory's production of Alice in Wonderland in 1970 is the stuff of theater legend.) The two men first became friends in 1973, and they are still collaborators and friends as of the date of this blog; the film was a scripted work based on their real lives in theater, and in it they play characters named “Wally” and “André”. (Shawn has said the "character" of Wally is a man motivated only by fear, and he wrote this movie in part to try to get rid of "that guy." That insight gives the film yet another great layer.) My first encounter with the movie was on video—I’d rented it with my friend Richard—who is now a Broadway stage manager, the one with the twins, for those of you keeping up with the cast of characters in my life—while in college.

I am often teased by some friends for my lifelong habit of using names when I tell a story. You’ll never hear me say, for example, “I had dinner with a friend.” Not only will I tell you the name of the friend and fill in useful biographical data, I will usually also tell you how I met that person. The title of the film, you see, resonated with me immediately: My Dinner with André. I loved the sense of invitation and inclusion in it, as if to say, “You remember André…,” and now as you watch the film you are part of the story, as you must already be friends with Wally. Coincidentally, I read just the other night something that the poet W.H. Auden said about names, from the essay “Auden and God” by Edward Mendelson (posted on Facebook by my friend Andy Becker):

"Auden’s passion for proper names in his poetry had a moral and theological point: like prayer, it was a form of attention. A proper name was a sign of personal uniqueness, and Auden used the word “miracle” to refer to anyone’s sense of the unique value of their own unpredictable individuality. ‘To give someone or something a Proper Name,’ he wrote, ‘is to acknowledge it as having a real and valuable existence, independent of its use to oneself, in other words, to acknowledge it as a neighbor.’ The value that is acknowledged through a proper name is not measurable in any objective sense; it exists in the eyes of the beholder."

Names for me are touchstones: When I say a name to you, as I doubtless will within seconds of an encounter, I am with you and also with that person, and we are all together. Being with people is vital to me, because I spend nearly all of my time alone (the lot of the writer)—and the need to be with people, as well as to be alone, was also one of the draws of moving to New York City after 20 years of my adult life in the country. So in the naming of names, I create a society, and having dinner with André, then, felt like the most natural thing in the world. (The philosopher Suzanne K. Langer said, “The very notion of giving something a name was the vastest generative idea ever conceived,” and when you think of all the things a name begins to conjure in your own mind, you’ll see how right she is: Miss O's friend is a just a friend, until he’s Richard.) Curiously, I almost never greet a friend by name; I’ve long been a person attached to sweetie, dear heart, doll, ass wipe. But once we part, you and your full name become a story for the ages, or at least for my office mates.

But back to André and that dinner with Wally Shawn.

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, My Dinner with André, 1981

The year is, let’s say, 1985, and Richard and I fell in love with this movie when we rented it a few years after it came out. We were seniors (or nearly, I'm not sure of the season) in Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech, and at the stage in our development where we were not only doing theater and ambitious to do more of it, but also asking why we were doing it. (It’s hard for me to imagine not getting to that place, as I seem to go there for regular and unplanned vacations, but plenty do not.) So as a gesture mimicking a Rooney-Garland barn experience, Richard and I rented the film again and had a showing in a studio in the Performing Arts Building for all the younger theatre majors, complete with bread sticks (because it's a dinner story, after all, and easy to get hungry). The result? Dead silence. Postures of annoyance. Then the words: "This is pointless," they said. "Self-indulgent," they said. "Nothing means anything," they summed up. Everyone seemed to feel his or her time had been wasted, when what Richard and I were hoping for was a rousing discussion about theater, the future of art, our roles in it. So out of the studio the undergraduates went, the breadsticks mostly untouched, off to memorize lines for scene study, to get head shots made, to prepare an audition. Richard and I could only conclude that our purpose for doing theater had changed over the years, while theirs was as yet still motivated by dreams of commercial success. Or something. Who cares what it means? has echoed in my head ever since but doesn't seem to land. "All life is an experiment,"Emerson said. "The more experiments you make, the better." Not every experiment is a success, of course, but considering my list of outright failures, it's astonishing I didn't take up drinking until I was 40.

When that movie was made, André Gregory had been a force in the so-called “experimental-theater” movement since the 1960s, studying with Jerzy Grotowski, a Polish theater director and founder of The Poor Theater, and going on to create his own company. Grotowski and Gregory were contemporaries, born one year apart (Grotowski in Poland in 1933, the same year as my dad, Bernie; and Gregory, the child of Russian Jews, in Paris in 1934, the same year as my mom, Lynne—I mention my parents because I cannot imagine more different lives than those of my folks and these two guys, who seem to live in mythological time), but Grotowski was the master at whose feet every artist who cared about theater’s future went to sit. Astonishing rethinking came out of that era of experimentation, so I'm thinking about that rethinking today, and thinking, "What now, my love?"

“I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” 
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

I take issue with the term “experimental-theater” only because it seems such a shame to me that theater cannot simply be theater in whatever iteration; but in the commercial world, when it’s not a Disney-style musical the whole family will enjoy (!), or a contemporary realistic play, or a revival of a classic, one must “prepare” an audience with the caveat, “experimental,” which is to say, “weird/you might not like it/it’s not worth spending as much money on/not a sure thing,” etc. (I get it: Leisure time is golden, money is dear, choices must be made; and I think, Isn’t that a shame?) I love musicals, not ashamed to say it, and loved the commercials for touring shows I'd see on TV. Really, I knew only about commercial theater—though I did not see a live show until I was 15, the first show I saw that I wasn’t in being the Dalewood Community Theater production of L’il Abner (after which show I deeply offended the lead male when I thought my friend Denise knew him from church, hers being Our Lady of Angels, and he flashed, “I’m a proud Southern Baptist,” and it just goes to show politics and religion are the inescapable realities of human life until we all decide to grow the fuck up); thence followed a few high school field trips to see A Chorus Line (by which I was bored—no idea what in the hell was going on);  and Evita (thrilling!); and Mark Twain Tonight! with Hal Holbrook (really interesting).

My first encounter with the brand of theater (and may I pause to say ick? What a concept—what could feel more ick, really, than to become a "brand," and bless Stephen Colbert for his willingness to become one just to show us how vulgar, limiting, and creepy it is, his genius being to manage to transcend branding at the same time he makes a living from it) called “experimental-theater” occurred when I was a sophomore in college, serving as an assistant stage manager for a play called “Interview,” one of eight plays in a work called America Hurrah by Jean-Claude van Itallie, originally directed by Joseph Chaikin and developed with The Open Theater. America Hurrah premiered in New York (a faraway land hardly real to me then) in 1966, and my encounter with it would have been 1983, so the real question was, “Why was this two-decades-old play still considered avant-garde?” The term “avant-garde,” or in advance of one’s time, was also becoming creaky, and Chaikin’s work (admired by Gregory though they were not collaborators, which I learned in a film talk-back with the man himself just last week) was a revelation to me, and also a natural fit for my sensibilities. The director of this particular production was a graduate student, David Thomas, who went on to co-found ART Station in Stone Mountain, Georgia, which he still runs today (with his husband, Michael Hidalgo, who went to a rival high school of mine and whom David met at Tech—are you following?). Watching David work on this piece was fascinating, because he was taking what had been truly experimental at the time, and now directing it as a revival—which is to say a museum piece. His awareness of this irony was seminal in my education: He talked to the assembled eight actors (I’d failed the audition, but he’d seen something in me that he wanted me to stick around to assist) about the history of The Open Theater and their approach to developing a piece together: An empty space, total experimentation, exercises for building unity of the ensemble, saying “Yes” to new ideas, playing with things, seeing where it goes. That David was doing this as a graduate student project was the sticking point: He has no choice, really, but to treat Chaikin’s work as a textbook case, and reinvent it rather than create something totally new, given that the script was a finished piece, not a work in progress. There is nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes: It was a way of “sitting at the feet of the master,” as best he could at the time.

And it was during those rehearsals where I started to wonder, “Is there any experimental theater happening any more?” Too many plays we were reading for scene study, by then-contemporary writers such as Michael Weller and Kevin Wade, felt so small—stories of troubled relationships, or a bad marriage—so ordinary. Until college, to be fair, my entire theater experience amounted to being in the chorus of a handful of musicals, one Neil Simon play, one Kaufman and Hart play (“Who did you play in You Can’t Take It With You?” director and playwright David Hilder asked me early in our New York acquaintance. "How did you know I was in it?" I asked. "We were ALL in it," he said. Insert smiley face. I played Penelope Sycamore), and a few others, including forgettable competition one-acts and a children's show. That there was MORE, or that theater could be so ugly, imaginative, political, and unnerving, was a joyous discovery, because I was quite frankly bored with both realism and the stock musical comedy: I had decided to eschew acting for directing before I ever started college, mostly because I never wanted to act in anything like these plays again.  I don’t think I understood this at the time—what I mean is I could not articulate why I was disenchanted—and it wasn’t until learning about Chaikin that I awakened and I could say, “Now I know why I’ve been unhappy with acting.” At the time, I hated reading plays, and really I still do. I can count on one hand relatively modern plays that have sent me soaring and made me want to act in or direct them: America Hurrah by Jean-Claude van Itallie (by which I mean not that play, but rather it made me want to create original plays on meaningful themes with my students-to-be); Angels in America, Parts One and Two, by Tony Kushner; Fen by Caryl Churchill; The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder; and Talley’s Folly by Lanford Wilson. (There are others, I'm sure, but these come readily to mind.) These are wildly different scripts—but they have in common something so hard to explain: They are true. One feels it in one’s heart: “This is a true story of being human on Earth.” More than that: These plays have a social conscience and take on real issues, from AIDS, to worker and environmental exploitation, to corporate oligarchies and consumerism, to religious philosophy, to the discovery of love between two lost and unusual people. The language in each play is compelling. One cannot help but want to enter these worlds, and what we find there may or may not reflect us or console us, but it will surely awaken something in us.

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle."
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Bored yet?

If you have found yourself drifting as you read today’s blog, it may surely be because my writing is dull, but what’s even more likely is that this sort of reflection bores the shit out of you. If this is the case, do by all means stop reading and go for a walk, and do NOT rent My Dinner With André, which has been described by at least two geniuses I know (neither of whom much likes theater, as it happens) as “self-indulgent” and “deadly.” You have been warned.

What Richard and I responded to in the Malle film was the search for meaning that Gregory was immersed in: After many years as a commercial (if unconventional) actor (you've seem him: the guy who gets his eye gouged out by Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man, John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ) and revolutionary theater director, he just lost heart. He didn’t know why he was even doing it anymore. He walked away for about six years and went on a quest—a quest that most people could not afford, by the way, but that he could and did. Now that I am 48—the age Gregory was when he made the film—I relate whole-heartedly to his mid-life crisis, but when I was 21, I related to his existential crisis, I guess you’d call it: What does it all mean? For myself, I really wondered what it meant to do theater at all, for whom, and what did they, what does the world, get out of it? And if I become a teacher, what on earth do I have to teach anyone? And for what purpose?

More Art, Less Matter

From the time I was a little kid, I worried about where the garbage went, about disabled children feeling excluded, about how much things would cost when I grew up, about people dying or not being cared for. On my first field trip on a school bus to D.C. when I was in second grade, I couldn't take my eyes off the smoke stacks of plants, those clouds coming out of them, the eerie feeling it gave me of its unnaturalness. I was a barrel of goddamned laughs. In high school and college and in my early years of teaching, I used to spend long, long hours writing about meaning, trying to make meaning out of the events of my life and of the world. Mercifully I left my twenties, but not before a complete breakdown at age 28. And then, at the point when I wanted to give up entirely, I started again. It was at this time—in the midst of beginning therapy and moving to a new school and a new house—that I began creating truly original theater with my students, guiding them to write their own work out of their life experiences, which I then shaped into a drama for performance. Mostly I followed what I’d seen David do with his Chaikin work, and yet each process was different because the kids in each cast were always different, and the real fun of being a high school theater director was having a company of actors who came in, grew over four years, flew out, and were forever supplanted by new actors. It’s really nourishing, artistically. The down side is that while you have these kids, you always have to hurry up and put on the show, so the process is truncated in a way we all would sort of resent; then again, at least we finished something we could all be proud of, and audiences saw it and responded in largely positive ways.

André Gregory was not afraid to spend years making a play. His 1970 breakthrough work, Alice and Wonderland (which coincidentally I performed in at the Virginia Tech Summer Arts Festival in 1987), was created over the course of four years with a small company of dedicated actors—the Lewis Carroll work reimagined for adults. What I learned from doing this kind of work myself, as much as I was able, was that art and life can be one thing, and this way of working affirmed for me that the process rather than the outcome is where the joy lies. I have always enjoyed the rehearsals of a show more than the performances, and I must add that I am just as happy to have performed something so I can strike the set and move to the next thing. The performance part is for other people, and it’s the least you can do: Given all the work you’ve put in, why not? (Gregory and company have spent 14 years, off and on, rehearsing Wallace Shawn's adaptation of Ibsen's The Master Builder, and this process, and the resulting handful of performances (discussed in the new documentary), is the subject of a new movie by Jonathan Demme, Wally and André Shoot Ibsen, coming out this year.) And then there’s the question of meaning: If you make a play and no one sees it, does it count? If you create a work and only 22 of your closest friends witness the performance, does it have value on Earth?

“Good theater can happen anywhere,” a professor, Michael Cadden of Princeton, declared to a group of us drama directors at an NEH summer intensive in Vermont. “It can happen in your classroom. Just because only 20 of you saw it doesn’t make it any less valuable.”

Here’s another way to think of it: If you cook the most astonishing meal of your life—Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon, say, with noodles and French bread and garden fresh peas—and only your friends Chuck and David eat it, is the meal any less of a masterpiece?

And yet we live in the age of Hell’s Kitchen and the Iron Chef, of folk legend Leonard fucking Cohen playing to arenas of iPhones; of celebrities (who are nonentities) like Kim Kardashian making money hand over fist for posing in front of plastic sheets of corporate logos at movie premieres for thousands of photographers. Do you hear the clicks, the clatters, the echoes in this empty canyon?

Five chemical companies, including Monsanto, Dow, and DuPont, own 75% of the worlds SEEDS. Even the growing of food has become a synthetic production of the largest possible measure, and food has never had less flavor.

I submit that all this largeness is not only needless and vulgar; I submit that it is foolish, meaningless, exhausting, and that as it is, more powerfully, taking us to greater and greater levels of stupid, it is therefore deadly. My current search for a way back to meaning really is a search for what is alive. 

What’s the Most Annoying Trend in News? You Won’t Believe It!

Can we say THE TEASER? I am so fucking sick of teasers: What Are the Most Annoying Things Girls Say?  or What Is the Worst Food You Can Eat? The Answer Might Surprise You! or Which Famous Singer Died Today? or Who Has Your Mom Been Fucking? The Answer Might Surprise You! Does anything surprise us anymore? I want life to follow a quest narrative, and while I don't expect or even want an easy-teasy surprise answer, I really do live for a surprising question.

In the preface to the screenplay for My Dinner with André, Gregory wrote this:

 “A few weeks ago I had dinner with Twyla Tharp in her kitchen, and we were talking about the problems of the artist, or for that matter the individual, maturing in our society. Why do we have so few mature artists? Trying to answer this question, we began to speculate that your early years, say your twenties, should be all about learning — learning how to do it, how to say it, learning to master the tools of your craft; having learned the techniques, then your next several years, say your thirties, should be all about telling the world with passion and conviction everything that you think you know about your life and your art. Meanwhile, though, if you have any sense, you’ll begin to realize that you just don’t know very much — you don’t know enough. And so the next many, many years, we agreed, should be all about questions, only questions, and that if you can totally give up your life and your work to questioning, then perhaps somewhere in your mid-fifties you may find some very small answers to share with others in your work. The problem is that our society (including the community of artists) doesn’t have much patience with questions and questioning. We want answers, and we want them fast. My Dinner with André uses some of the experiences of my six years out of the theater as foundation stones for a work which is made up entirely of questions and which I would like to dedicate to all, artists and otherwise, who are out on the road somewhere wandering, with no destination anywhere in sight, almost forgetting why they ever set out in the first place, yet still unable to turn back, because they honestly believe that the shortest distance between two points just may not be a straight line.”

Miss O’ turns 49 in May. Reading Gregory's and Tharp's ideas struck a chord, you might say; this song of aging as an artist makes total sense to me. I have not had loud success, which is to say there has been no arrival, no fame, no (or little) money for my art. What our friend André is getting at is exactly what all human beings might need to be doing, especially in mid-life—it’s the opposite of settling in, shutting down, tuning out, waiting to die. Mid-life, in fact, is the most opportune time to question everything, to awaken and challenge all the old assumptions, because you have learned shit, you have experienced shit, and you still feel pretty good. (Stephen Hawking has lived far longer with ALS that most people can because, his late mother asserted, he’s a searcher.) You are no longer riding on received wisdom, but are rather becoming the potential dispenser of that wisdom.  The secret of a worthwhile life and worthwhile art, I think, is love (searching for it and giving it), followed by questing to understand more about who we all are, followed by making something out of the quest; “to hold, as ‘twere, a mirror up to nature,” as Hamlet said, to show human beings the body of their time, and then to strike it down and start again. And then, of course, to enjoy a fine malt beverage at each day’s end, with friends. I realize, as I say, as I have voiced these ideas over the years, that not everyone agrees with any of them, or with all of them, or with all of them at once. And I think that's why we seek not only our friends, but also art. In art we can feel less alone in our private insanity. Music, poetry, theater, sculpture: there's art for everyone, and an artist to speak to each of us. I never thought I'd care about painting, for example, hard though I tried, and then it happened. If you haven't found your visual artist yet—my first was Georgia O'Keeffe, "Blue Lines," at the National Gallery when I was 21; followed shortly by Van Gogh's portraits of inmates in an asylum, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; and now the list includes too many to name, but the last artist whose work caused me to sob while standing in front of it was Romare Bearden, a retrospective of his collages at MoMA, in 2006—it's never too late. You cannot plan the epiphany, is what I mean, but nor will you have a chance to experience it unless you get out there into worlds of art beyond what you currently know. 

Death in Chelsea 

All the things I'm musing on have to do with human endeavors rather than connections to the natural world, but I'm concerned today with what human beings are making out of their lives when they aren't trying to kill each other or screw each other over. In New York Magazine this week is an essay, or rather, an elegy, “The Death of the Gallery Show” by Jerry Saltz, which offers as its subhead, “Between online sales and art fairs, fewer and fewer people are showing up to see art in its natural habitat.” The author laments the closing of a lot of galleries, owners thrown out by jacked-up rents ($30,000 per MONTH?) or bankrupted by lack of attendance. “The art world has become more of a virtual reality than an actual one…,” Saltz writes. He is discussing the meaning of art shows, and he echoes Gregory, but for the audience rather than the artist:

Looking, making, thinking, experiencing are our starting point. Art opens worlds, lets us see invisible things, creates new models for thinking, engages in cryptic rituals in public, invents cosmologies, explores consciousness, makes mental maps and taxonomies others can see, and isn’t only something to look at but is something that does things and sometimes makes the mysterious magic of the world palpable. (p. 102)

Saltz concludes:

Proust wrote, ‘Narrating events is like introducing people to opera via libretto only.’ Instead, he said one should ‘endeavor to distinguish between the differing music of each successive day.’ That’s what we do when we look at art, wherever we look at it, however much noise surrounds it. In galleries, we try to discern ‘differing music,’ and it’s still there right now. I love and long for it. (p. 102)

I am always searching for great theater, and whereas most art galleries are free (though their contents are far from it), one of my frustrations about theater is the cost, specifically high ticket prices which make theater more and more exclusive; available to, and therefore too often made only to serve and flatter, wealthy people. I’m sick of wealthy people. I’ve had it with luxury goods and celebrities and blockbusters and Iron EVERYTHING. I’m sick of what my mom, Lynne, calls the vapid. Is it just me? I really do think the free, palpable art experience is worth having, worth seeking out, and worth trying to make. It's why I live, and I guess, just like Jerry Saltz up there, and André and Wally. I guess we keep writing about it because we can't help thinking you should have these experiences, too, that somehow your lives will mean more if you do. And that art will make us kinder, better people. (I'm still working on it.)

"Do you think I've gone round the bend?"
"I'm afraid so. You're mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are."
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Here’s to André Gregory, Before and After Dinner, and all the art in between, coming soon to a theater probably nowhere near you—its commercial obscurity doesn’t make it lesser art, but rather makes it matter all the more.

And so, to drink.

Love from Miss O'

Miss O', Elizabeth Wills, and Richard Rauscher,
BA, Theatre Arts, Virginia Tech, Class of '86,
shortly before setting off to change the world.

She Oughta Be in Pictures

All (Mostly) About My Mother

Lynne Kirlin, high school graduation photo, Council Bluffs, Iowa, 1952

So my brother Pat was going home for Easter for the first time in a decade, this time with his wife, Traci, and 8-year-old son, Cullen. I’d planned to go home (funny how we talk about going “home,” which is where our childhoods were, our family hearts are, but it’s really so alien to me—everything that was gargantuan in my childhood, from the yard to the bookshelves to the couches, to my parents’ bodies, seems too small now, or else I’ve become outsized in my skin) in May, but now was just fine. I booked a bus, and on the ride to D.C. I realized that Cullen was the right age to show photographs to, to show him some of his ancestors.

My mom, Lynne, has always had a very strained and complicated relationship with photographs. Growing up, though, we had a 14” or so square wicker basket that contained all the childhood, youth, and pre-marriage photos she and my dad possessed. Tossed into it over the years were ones they took together, along with the holiday pictures sent to us by aunts and uncles—cousins’ school pictures or family snaps—as well as pictures taken by neighbors. The fun of this picture basket was that you could dip into it and pull up a random memory, which really is how our minds work, when it comes to that—a photo album is made to show the chronology of events, or maybe is based on a theme of our lives, but the basket has always felt more honest in relation to the way events will make us recall a family story. “Oh, that reminds me of the time my mom opened the door for Nadine’s piano teacher, and my dad was standing in the kitchen with his back to them, pouring water from a kettle into the coal stove, and the teacher only saw my dad’s hands in front of him and the water coming out in a stream, and she gasped….” (That’s a memory that really wouldn’t belong in anyone’s formal chronology of events, you know?)

In graduate school I read a book called Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko, a marvel of a book about the role of story in shaping a culture, in this case, the Navajo culture in the American Southwest. In the introduction she talks about the Hopi picture basket, a tradition that developed once Native Americans started accepting photographs as part of the way to tell the story of the People; and this decision, coupled with the decision to embrace writing and not only the oral tradition to continue the stories, was not made lightly, either. When I read about the Hopi picture basket, I remembered ours, of course, and wondered if it’s something lots of people started doing when they couldn’t afford the materials, time, or even the imaginative energy needed to make picture books.

In addition to the basket, my mom had a photo album of her life in the United States Navy from 1956 to 1963 or so (her marriage and pregnancy meant she’d be leaving by May of 1964), and it has always been one of my favorite things to look at. All my life, it rested atop a stack of art books on the right-hand side of the built-in bookshelves my parents had put in when they moved into their house 8 weeks after I was born. We were the only family I knew that had a “library”— and the “collection,” such as it is, consists even today mainly of my mom’s college textbooks (English Literature, American Literature, Plato, Spanish history, algebra, grammar), science texts (The Sea Around Us, The Microbe Hunters, archaeology, Egyptology), Agatha Christie mysteries, and great works of literature (Thackery, Austen, Thoreau, Twain, Melville, Cervantes, poetry anthologies, the Brothers Grimm, the Brontes). As I say, it looks so small now, this library, but its presence was one of those things that set the O’Haras apart from their neighbors, another way my mom was just not like the other mothers. It made us weird, and yet also inspired awe: "Your mom has read ALL of these?" (What choice did Miss O’ have then?)

So the album: What I’ve always loved about that large, square, tan-covered collection of navy-era pictures—placed on large black paper sheets using adhesive photo corners, black or white—was how it told the story of my mom before “us”: Scenes of my mom in the rain forest in Puerto Rico; at the Breakers in Newport; at attention in uniformed inspections on various bases, my mom’s tanned legs preventing a need for regulation hosiery (“My CO never noticed the difference”); her formal naval portraits in both white and black uniforms; and candid shots of lots and lots and lots of parties and all the fabulous dresses my slender and glamorous mother wore to them. My favorite of the dresses was a deep taupe, or dark brown-grey cotton dress with three-quarter sleeves, fitted bodice and flared skirt to the knees, with large white windowpane lines across the fabric, its only pattern. The dress went up to the neck, but was backless, which I know because of the photo of my mother in an embrace, the man’s arms around her bare back, lips in a passionate (and doubtless drunken) lock—really wild to see when you realize, “This is my mom,” and how they all were probably 24 but looked 35, which made that photo all the wilder.

Also there were snaps of navy people, including the last active-duty Commodore; my mom’s CO, Lt. Doug Kiker (who would become an NBC news anchor); Kate Barker, a fellow WAVE (they were still called that then) who used to visit when I was little—a large woman who looked like Kate Smith and drove a Cadillac convertible (which I asked for a ride in by promising her a ride in our Volkswagen—and what a ride!; and Laura Corr, another WAVE, who was from New Orleans and gave me a black Mammy doll when I was a baby (I still have her and treasure her), because Laura was reared by her own mammy (Laura was, as it turned out, the first true bigot my mom ever met, but otherwise a fun gal). My mom realized later that Kate and Laura, though never with each other, were lesbians—another interesting facet of life in the album.  In the back of this same album, after her naval career pictures, rested, loosely, various other photos, including some of her cousins’ weddings, my favorite being an 8” x 10” of her white-tuxedoed cousin Bob shyly posing with a silver ladle, serving punch into a silver cup to his shy new wife JoAnn, ca. 1960, and you know full well these two were complete innocents upon entering the marriage state; overseeing this scene was my gorgeous Grandma Kirlin, who wore plastic floral costume jewelry like a Hollywood star wears diamonds. I used to stare at that black and white picture for long minutes—my twice-divorced, struggling grandma (Bob’s beloved aunt by marriage), looking on with such love and hope at these two sweet newlyweds at their wedding reception; but this scene is made into a story by the way my grandma, in profile, is leaning hard on the table, the fingertips of her two hands pressed hard on the cloth, and one wrinkled, fleshly elbow exposed below a cream short sleeve of her black and white dress—a pose that says, however unintentionally, “Kids, good for you, but this isn’t going to be easy.”

So many pictures: I have looked at this album on nearly every visit since college, a flip-through of my mom’s story, and I understood more about her because of it. I needed the proof of this album. My mom is a very closed person, and one not given to sentiment, though she drops a story from time to time. I said earlier that my mom has a complicated relationship with photographs, and here is what I mean: Whenever I visited other people’s houses, I noticed that almost no one had books, but nearly everyone had framed photographs of family members hanging on the walls or resting at angles on ledges. When I asked my mom why we didn’t display photos, Lynne replied sharply, “Because it’s morbid." (She always used really cool words like that and didn't define them.) "Why do I want to look at dead people up on the walls? And it’s silly to put up pictures of living people—I see them all the time.” And that was that. When my friend Patty became a framer in 1988, I found all of the 8” x 10” photos we had, along with dozens of old family snapshots that looked special, and had Patty frame all of them. I gave them as presents to my family for years. The year I quit teaching the first time, in 1990, and worked for a farm paper, I absconded with the picture basket and made photo albums for all of us for Christmas, leaving quite a pile in the picture basket nonetheless, because I would miss dipping in if I hadn’t. To my surprise, my parents have hung all the pictures I’ve had framed for them, and they keep the albums out where everyone can see.

 

My grandma, Louise Kirlin, with daughter Lynne,
Iowa ca. 1935, hand-tinted photo

So when I got home on Friday afternoon, wanting to prepare for Cullen’s arrival on Saturday, I went upstairs to the bookcase to retrieve the navy album, but it had been moved. I called to my mom, who was coming up the stairs, “Mom, where is your navy photo album?”

Lynne said, “Oh, I threw it out.”

Threw it out?

My spine seized. I gasped. And I began to sob, the tears uncontrollable. “Oh my god. You didn’t….”

And Lynne surveyed me quizzically, as she does, and said flatly, as she does, “I didn’t have any attachment to those pictures. What do you care? Less junk to clean up when I’m gone.” My tendency to tears has always annoyed her—I am a sentimental O’Hara, one of my many deeply unattractive qualities, whereas Lynne, a survivor of astonishing inner strength, gets on with it. And in this event, I had no one to share my grief with: curiously, my father and brothers had never even looked at that photo album, had no idea what I was talking about when I’d mentioned she’d tossed it in the trash. (Another of my deeply unattractive qualities is snooping, looking at notebooks and inside albums and through boxes. I had another moment of panic but didn't ask if my mom had thrown out her college writing, which I'd loved to read. These things are my mother's after all, to do with as she wishes. I have no claim on them. (Note: Pat just told me he snooped and looked at that album, too.) 

 

As to the depth of my grief, the torrent of unexpected tears, what I understand now is that this is how I will feel—only more so, much more—when I learn, as I eventually will, that my mother has died.

Long Ride Home

At the Braddock Road stop on the Metro (as I headed to Union Station on Sunday afternoon, after a very pleasant holiday hiding Easter eggs and watching the joy with which my nephew hunted for them; a fine day also to throw the Frisbee and the football; and to share a neighborhood moment as we all walked down to the corner of Alaska Road where a car had somehow crashed through a fence on one side of the street and ended up crashed into a house on the other—Cullen even mimicked the way we all walked with our hands in our pockets to survey the scene, trying to solve the mystery amidst the flashing siren lights—no one was hurt), as the train doors opened, a woman of about 40, plain-faced, her mouse brown hair chopped sharply just beneath her ears, entered with a younger, bearded man in an army green canvas jacket. They sat across the aisle from me, and the woman, who was speaking in the clear voice of someone who more or less wants the car to overhear, shared her anger and confusion over having been made to reconcile all her early years of catechism with public school lessons in evolution (“and then later you realize Darwin’s not right, but it’s too late,” and Miss O’ managed not to interject, “Um… actually…”), and what a trauma that was for her and, in her view, is for all children to learn the truth about things like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, not to be told from the beginning that all of these things are symbols, and yet where is the wonder? “You can only find wonder with God, and we need to teach that…,” and the young man had his own anger over his upbringing, but he didn’t get many words in before they exited at Pentagon City.

I’d remembered to ask Pat and Traci, as we prepared to dye Easter eggs and when Cullen was outside, “Does Cullen still believe in the Easter Bunny?” and it turns out he does, and I told my mom, “Mom, Cullen still believes,” and my mom was delighted—we’d made his Easter basket already, and now she knew to have it set out before he got up in the morning. Lynne the Realist—the rigorous student who in her papers forever challenged the Jesuits of Creighton University on the doctrines of the Catholic Canon; the agnostic/atheist/do-your-own-religion woman who thinks sentiment is stupid—this same woman is yet deeply in love with Santa, ghosts, all things Halloween, and the Easter Bunny candy delivery system. And so I started thinking about how Santa Claus is different from catechism teachings, er, evolution, and I remembered Pat saying that when Cullen asks him (as he most likely will this Christmas) if Santa is real, “I’ll tell him Santa is here,” and he pointed to his heart, “and that’s as real as it gets.”

The science of Darwin is the outer-directed world of measurable facts. Where God dies as a concept for so many occurs at the point where God is treated like Darwin rather than like Santa. God is also Santa, and the Easter Bunny—the God of any religion has to live in a person’s heart, or not at all, is the point. I do hope that someday that very troubled woman on the Metro is able to find that truth inside herself—funny how a stranger’s torments can haunt me.

This got me thinking that my mom’s photo album—her life before us—was a tangible, measureable thing that is simply no more, just as she will be, just as my dad, Bernie, will be; as I will be. Here and gone: to be, and not to be. And so I am writing about it, how I will hold it in my heart, which is where it really lives anyway. The rest is so much paper.

It’s Up to You, New York

A 7-hour bus ride into Manhattan was made out of what should have been just over four-plus, through fog and traffic pile-ups (though the Lincoln Tunnel would be empty and the subways merciful), and during the last two hours a man behind me began a round of cell-phone calls which made those of us around him want to deck him, mostly because he seemed to want us all to hear them. One ongoing conversation was about editing a letter, “‘To that end,’” he insisted, “should be the wording,” at one point. He punctuated conversations with phrases like “it’s a new day,” and with addresses of “my Brother,” and eventually I think we all began to realize—though it took over an hour for me to realize it, and maybe I’m slow, though I was dozing as much as his voice allowed—that he was doing his round of Sunday night therapy calling, either as an AA sponsor or some kind of counselor, where he talked basketball and hope, urging each person on the line to get to the next day. The two and a half extra hours on the road may have been the reason for the “fuck it” attitude of his natural and too-audible voice, the reason for blithely irritating his fellow passengers while he went about his business of saving lives. Still, I could not completely be okay with it. If the man had preceded his calls by saying to the passengers around him, “Guys, I am a counselor and people depend on me to contact them,” would we have been more understanding? Or did we have to have the reasons for his calling slowly dawn on us to reach that place? I don’t know. I only know that I could not wait to be in Queens, in my own bed, and out of that dark night of other people’s souls.

The Thousand Natural Shocks That Flesh Is Heir To

When I got off the bus on 7^th Avenue, I was heavy with the need for sleep, as I say, and also deeply sad. It was partly about my mom’s discarding of an item of too much importance to me, but really there was something else I couldn’t put my finger on. I woke up feeling as if the world was different, this small shift, couldn’t quite figure it out. I began writing this, and something told me what it was, and I logged onto Facebook and there was a message from my dear friend George: “Do not go public with this yet, but my mom died in her sleep last night…” and there it was. George’s mom, Judy, was gone. She deserves a tribute I don’t know how to give here, and she will have a beauty of one from her loving son.* I met Judy a few years after I’d graduated from Bread Loaf (the graduate school where I’d met George), but my first encounter with her gifts (aside from her son, who became one of my best friends) was a Bread Loaf tee shirt George presented me with for my graduation, tie dyed by Judy herself. George imitated her, “I’m not sure what I want to do. Do I want to swirl or do a spiral?” and told me how she’d stared and thought it through before going with pink sunbursts. I know a hundred stories about Judy, just as George knows a hundred about Lynne. Our moms figure at the heart of our life stories. I’d like to think my mom will be around another decade, but one never knows. Judy was doing well up until she was about 80, five years ago, and then began what George called “the long fade.” Lynne is 79.

I have deeply wise friends who are biologists and poets, some of whom reflect on death and what that means, and some who don’t. All of them are engaged with life, though, and some step aside at moments and wonder what in the hell that means; and others are at one with living, present to it, and try to keep the ego out of it all, not worrying about the meaning at all. For myself, I’m in it up to the neck and into my head, down the spine and through the heart, ego and all, death and life, and can’t seem to be otherwise. What I mean is, as far as I am concerned we are all in this picture, until we are not, and I mean to keep the album and look hard at each and every person in the photograph for as long as I can. And mean it.

Miss O' with her mom, Lynne, in Virginia, 1964

(P.S. The long fade: I made another discovery that I really can’t bear to write about. That old picture basket? I couldn’t find it. I guess Lynne threw that out, too. I was too choked to ask.)

(*And she does: Tribute posted on Facebook. Love to George, Apryl, and Sam, in memory of that angel of a human, Juliana Lightcap, 1928-2013.)

The Ultimate Jerk Chicken

or, We Could Be Having So Much Fun

        “There is no sin except stupidity.”

                —Oscar Wilde

Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

This Sunday morning your Miss O’ awoke around 2:45 AM (following a few weeks of that ol' one-two combination, depression and writer's block) thinking about Preston, the super of her building in the first three years she lived here, who would not get to know Miss O’ at all, try though she might. Preston was a tightly-built black man of indeterminate age, but in those three years, he aged a lot. I hardly ever saw him on my side of the building, but when I did, he was usually sitting on my steps having a smoke. He’d jump up, as if embarrassed, and walk off, and I never knew why that was. The longest encounter I ever had with Preston occurred around 5 AM one day, when I awoke hearing him say angrily to someone outside my bedroom window, “Who’s doing this? I think it’s that first apartment,” and a moment later my bell buzzed. I raced to the door, and there Preston stood, shaking with rage. He fairly growled, “Why are you leaving your trash out here on the sidewalk? We get fined for that!” and I replied—because even at 5 AM I know how to talk like a poised, veteran teacher, “Hi, Preston—that trash isn’t mine. I take my trash out through the basement and put it in the trashcan. I don’t know who is leaving trash.” He said, “Well, someone is!” and I said, “It isn’t me, and I’m sorry about that.” And he marched off.

About a week later, Preston collapsed and was taken to the hospital by the wife he spent his days avoiding by watching television in our co-op’s basement boiler room, when he wasn’t sweeping up and bagging our garbage. (Our small building only has a part time super, a couple of hours a day is all that’s needed, tops, and when a new owner asked of our current super, “Why isn’t José around more?” a longtime resident quipped, “He likes his wife.” The new person just stared as the rest of us chuckled.) Preston, as it turned out, was diagnosed with lung cancer, chose to go home, and died two weeks later. Everyone was stunned. When I think about that exchange of ours that morning—the level of his anger out of all proportion to the event, and the ungodly hour of his doorbell ringing—I can only step back and marvel that somewhere, somehow, Miss O’s writer’s brain had grasped his decline, his physical pain, and knew that his rage that morning was not about the trash, or even directed toward her. Preston knew he was dying, I think. He was afraid. And whatever inconvenience I may experience at such moments, it’s odd how so many people know that when it comes to venting fear, they know they can throw it at me, and get compassion back. Unless they are total jerks and assholes, and then, fuck it: Hell hath no fury.

Try to See It My Way

Miss O’ spends a lot of time with this tension: Is teaching the same as evangelism? When does the sharing of information and opinion cross over into proselytizing? And is enjoying alcohol the same as being a drunk? Because several recovered (recovering) alcoholics I know say there is no difference, and I cannot help but think that this leads me back to the first question.

Story One: Many years ago now, a Christian (now ex-) friend invited Miss O’ to a First Baptist Church to hear a bluegrass band (and bluegrass, as we know, is rooted in Christian country songwriting). She wanted us to sit on the front row of the church so her pastor could see that she had brought in a potential convert (nothing like Christian humility). The pastor, though, took one look into the steely yet loving grey eyes of Miss O’ and knew that won’t happenin’, as we say in the South. Still, the music was just fantastic, and possibly because I was the only non-Christian in this white congregation, I was also the only one who seemed to be moving her body to the music, at least in that long front row (I’d be much more at home in a black church). At the break, the pastor came out to the stage, clapping his hands and, with too-large a grin, declaimed, “It’s a joyous thing to be a Christian,” thus sucking all the joy from the occasion by assigning this musical uplift to an agenda, and when he then looked at me, I said—drowned out though I was by the cheers of the congregation, “It’s a joyous thing to be a human.” My (now ex-) friend was disappointed.

Story Two: Many years ago now, a Communist (now ex-) friend came home to Virginia fresh from his first blush feelings of fanatical love for Noam Chomsky and Chairman Mao, which was but the beginning of a 20-year academic pursuit toward his Ph.D. He asked Miss O’, “What do you think of American democracy?” and unschooled as she was in agenda-based political baiting, Miss O’ attempted to answer as best she could, really pleased to enter into a discussion like this. After remarking on the revolutionary vision of the Founding Fathers, and the stabs that the various nations of the world had made at governments of the people and by the people and for the people, and you know, the flaws of the whole thing, what with the greed and corruption of capitalism and the Indian genocide and African slavery, but it’s a process, and on the whole, it seems to be beneficial, because we the people keep working to make it better—you know, first thoughts—the Commie cried, “You’d think that, but you would be wrong!” and launched into what can only be described as an evangelical tirade against all things American, and capitalists in particular, thereupon working up to his pitch for me becoming a Communist. Jerk. Miss O’ was disappointed. 

And this brings me to Saturday: As of 9:27 AM, March 23, 2013, in the 98 days since the Newtown NRA-endorsed massacre of 20 first-graders, there have been 2,243 additional gun deaths in the United States of America. (Immigration reform? Seriously? Who wouldn’t want to move here?)  I found this horrific statistic on The Huffington Post front page this morning in a frighteningly effective graphic. While The Huffington Post too often shames itself by its misogyny and tabloid coverage of Hollywood starlets in skimpy clothing—thereby reminding all the little fillies out there that you are only as worthwhile as your outfit is attractive to judgers at The Huffington Post—often they post stories that are vital, most a digest from news services around the country. This day, Jason Cherkis wrote a piece featuring in-depth accounts of five very specific gun deaths in this country, showing the range of forces behind gun violence. So I posted this on Facebook with a plea to work toward more gun control, and my cousin Bill in Iowa, who changes the subject as only Republicans can, commented, “And there were about 322,000 abortions.” Unless these abortions were performed at gunpoint, I have no idea how this is relevant. Jerk. Miss O’ was disappointed. 

This week on my Facebook wall, I posted a graphic meme showing a photo of John Lennon’s blood-splattered glasses, along with this text: “Over 1,057,000 people have been killed by guns in the U.S.A. since John Lennon was shot and killed on December 8, 1980.” The site from which the meme was taken included this information: An average of 31,537 people are killed by guns in the USA every year, along with a call for stronger regulations. The ensuing exchange with a former work colleague began with her outrage: “How many times do we have to say it???!!! guns don’t kill people people kill people!!!!!!” Sigh. First, you cry, and not just at the lousy capitalization and the punctuation overkill. You think, snarkily, “Yes, guns just walk around freely, going off on their own, firing at will,” but what’s the point? What I finally was able to get through to her was that GUN REGULATION is what we all agree on, and when she in fact read the article, and noted she really does agree with that, and says she doesn’t know what the hold up is—how do you say, “Well, YOU are the hold up, because you drink the NRA Kool-Aid, not realizing that the NRA is controlled by the gun manufacturers, for whom gun deaths are a boon to sales to the paranoid.” This game is so exhausting. And yet, as the play set in Hell, No Exit, ends, “Nous continuons.” Everyone remains disappointed. Because of jerks.

What else on Facebook? Drano bombs, computer viruses, email hacking…as my friend George says, “We are all going to be inconvenienced to death.” I’m starting to think that everyone who isn't otherwise starved, eaten with cancer, foreclosed upon, denied water, shot, or tortured will be disappointed to death.

Books of Revelations

My mom, Lynne, went back into the public workforce in 1980, when I was a sophomore in high school. She applied for and got a job as an assistant manager at a new book store, Crown Books, which had just opened up a location in our town (which is not a town so much as a giant suburban mailing address 20 miles outside of Washington, D.C., a strip along Rt. 1)—and this surprised her, because she’d gotten her degree in English way back in 1956, and her naval career, and last paying job, ended with Miss O’s birth in 1964. Still, Lynne was an avid reader, read the Washington Post’s Book World section faithfully every Sunday, and was just, you know, really smart and sophisticated, and anyone could see that. Even gray hair couldn’t conceal it.

And Lynne’s favorite genre is detective fiction—so it’s not surprising that her naval job was cryptography, or the writing and deciphering of codes. It’s also of a piece with her habit of people study (something her daughter inherited), which observations she shared over whatever meals our family managed to have together each week. Mom’s real shocks about humans came from the realization that the people who frequented that book store were no longer her kids’ former teachers or her neighbors, but rather, upon entering that store, became that dreaded subspecies, customers. And more specifically, customera horribulus. Which I just made up.

American capitalism infects some people, as we see daily, with miserly, entitled behavior that baffles. For example, Mom recounted how one of my most beloved teachers returned a paperback book two days after she’d bought it, claiming she’d decided not to read it. The spine, my mom reported, was destroyed, as might be caused, say, by the repeated opening of the cover and the turning of pages. Presumably this act of turning each and every page had caused my former teacher to decide not to read it after all. The store policy was to accept all returns (though this book could not be sold again as it was), and so my mom did it, but ol’ Lynne gave her the eye of shame—it’s Miss O’s same eye of shame, for all the kids out there, only scarier, and now you know where I got it—and yet this same teacher, while clearly ashamed, continued to treat the bookstore as a lending library for years.

Another customer was the father of a childhood friend, and his wife was a teacher all our friends knew. He was tall and handsome, and I remember him as being very nice. “Lisa,” my mom reported—not as a gossip, but more like Poirot on a case—“he comes into our bookstore all the time—and it’s a discount bookstore, we buy popular books in bulk to sell at a discount, and all the signs say so—I know you know this, but this is what I’m thinking whenever he comes in—and he asks for the most obscure books you can imagine. Philosophy textbooks or some specialized economics monograph or some such, and when we don’t have it, he rolls his eyes, and says, ‘And you call yourselves a book store?’ He’s always wearing an expensive suit, and all I can think is, ‘We’re all really impressed by your prosperity and erudition. Now why don’t you go to a college book store?’ What a cheap jerk.”

The stories are endless—Miss O’ has discoursed on retail life in previous posts—and the outcomes of these encounters are so depressing. And disappointing. My friend Quinn and I were sitting at Bar Centrale here in New York a couple of weeks ago comparing our lives in our various jobs, and we both asked the same question: Why aren’t we having more fun? All of us are miserable in the United States: We get up, work out, commute, and work, though all too often there is nothing to look forward to in the day-to-day of our workaday jobs, and nothing anyone wants to hear on the news, and few movies we can’t wait to catch, and everyone hates everyone, so what the...

We Interrupt This Conversation to Change the Conversation

I am trying to understand my own feelings of dread and nausea when I am faced with extremists, whether in the news or on Facebook or face to face. Whenever, for example, my (now ex-) friend Commie Boy called to say he was in town, as much as I loved him, I dreaded seeing him. At the other extreme, I have the Conservatives—the ones I have to fight on Facebook or the ones I avoid visiting in Virginia. Commie Boy is, as I said, highly educated, and no doubt he is smarter than I am and has a higher IQ than I do, and yet his knowledge seems filtered through one lens, the lens of Marxism; and if there is another lens, it is, curiously, world music (which you'd think would make him more, I don't know, accepting)—any other lenses (of, say, nature, religion, theater, democracy, classical studies) are dismissed, or worse, mocked for being “irrelevant.” I think his attitude is stupid. As for the Conservatives I take on, I have no idea about IQs, but their ignorance of basic facts (about female reproduction, evolution, health care laws (they think “Death Panels” are real), important people (they really think Obama is not a citizen), public organizations (thinking the only thing Planned Parenthood does is provide abortions), GMOs, civil rights, pick a subject) is so staggering in its breadth that it can only be called stupidity. Some claim to be “fiscal conservatives,” which is even more breathtakingly stupid, given the daily proof we have endured since Bush. I'm beginning to think that the constant ingestion of their stupidity is melting my intestines.

In my opinion. So I have opinions: This raises another question, because I really do worry about this.

Am I Opinionated?

From Merriam-Webster online:

Definition of OPINIONATED

: unduly adhering to one's own opinion or to preconceived notions

— opin·ion·at·ed·ly adverb

— opin·ion·at·ed·ness noun

I reject this adjective opinionated, as it applies to me, and am frustrated when I hear myself thus described: “You are opinionated.” It’s the words “unduly” and “preconceived” in the definition that I draw your attention to. I have come by my opinions, such as they are, honestly—mostly. Certainly I have been influenced by my dad, Bernie, a lifelong union member and liberal; and my mom, Lynne, a lifelong liberal and lover of poetry, archaeology, science, and murder mysteries, who demands research and proof for anything you say. The combination of parents has been fascinating, because my dad is, if I had to quantify it, 80% intuition, 20% research; my mom is 20% intuition, 80% research. Both, however, are more or less empiricists, which is to say their knowledge comes mostly from sensory, lived experience. Both of them wrestle with information, and once they arrive at an opinion, it’s mostly been formed through brute contact. Debate in my family is a contact sport. (On one of his many “death beds,” my crippled-with-arthritis Grandpa O’Hara was known to have risen and recovered just to take on his conservative brother Jack in a fist fight and wrestling match over politics. I know: You cannot imagine gentle Miss O' coming from such warrior blood.)

I am not opinionated: I have opinions. I am not judgmental: I evaluate. If you can say your peace, hold your ground, provide researchable evidence to support your assertions, and keep to the subject, I may be swayed. I am open. You will never, I am secure in saying, convince me that a woman does not have a right to her own body, or that black people should not vote, or that the poor don’t deserve to live. I will have no truck with misogyny or racism or eugenics. Does this make me opinionated?

No. It makes me decent. Jerk.

What Would Shakespeare Do?

In Shakepeare’s tragedy, Macbeth (or, The Scottish Play, as it is known by theater people, as the witches’ incantations set down by the bard are reputed to have been real ones used by witches of the day, thus causing catastrophes to the companies that play this play), the poetry spoken by the title character (and his lady) is among Shakespeare’s finest. As a man of the theater, Will includes theater allusions and metaphors throughout, but these are not happy references—they are, rather, cynical and weary-sounding—and actor/scholar Tina Packer posits that Will himself was in a very depressed period in this life when he wrote this play, around 1607, nearing his retirement. He had no marriage to speak of (though he did return to Stratford for good in 1613, and to his wife), having abandoned his family for London years before; no relationship with his daughters, and his son having died at age 11 must have left a deep rent in his heart. Who knows the cause?

But out of this low ebb came Macbeth, where Shakespeare imagined a story of a regicide committed by a heretofore decent and loyal man and his wife, who have a good marriage and real sexual attraction, exploring how they could be so altered by the death of their newborn and the prophecies of some witches as to destroy the lives of their king, their friends, their countrymen. When he learns of the death of Lady Macbeth in Act V, Macbeth delivers one of the most gorgeous soliloquies written for the theater. That we the audience should be presented with an opportunity to be moved by this man who has killed his very good king, several good countrymen, and Macduff’s children, is a testament to the power of language, of the compassion of the writer, and of the talent of the actor playing the speaker.

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing. — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)

When I am faced with the Extremists, with the hopelessly Stupid, with the Willfully Ignorant, the Hateful, the Deliberately Cruel; or am forced to hear arguments that molesting priests are now retiring and so the victims they molested need to be more respectful of the priests' reputations; or must watch as news reporters express empathy for convicted male rapists, thus ignoring the female victim's trauma—I say this speech over and over to myself. I say it not because I believe that this is what life is, however depressed I get; but rather because this is what life must be for them. Joyless, airless, violent, and ugly—"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more." Theirs really is a tale told by an idiot: It's the despairing cry of every tyrant in his death throes, and I wouldn’t trade places with any one of them for a kingdom. Or maybe I would if it would make them go the fuck away.

How Now Dow Jones?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/09/dow-jones-record-high_n_2839862.html

Why in the name of fuck do I hear the trumpeted reports all the time—morning, noon, and late afternoon and evening and night—of the Dow Jones Industrial Averages? No one I know has a life that is made or broken by the reports and trades on the stock exchange, and yet plenty of people I know need to know, oh, gosh, I don’t know, how the new health care laws will affect their cost of and access to care; and EVERYONE I know needs to know about threats to clean water and safe food, and, hey, what about new JOBS?—and the reporting on all that is nil.

Nor does anyone I know need for America's "hard news" desks to report on Kelly Osborne’s seizure, Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy, or Anne Hathaway’s Oscar™ dress nipple thingy. And yet even I know all about all of these so-called news stories.

And I haven’t seen one prominent news story this week on the latest findings about climate change or what we should start to do about it, nor heard one elected official beyond our president discuss how our government plans to address this catastrophe, but the other week I heard ALL ABOUT how Rand Paul spent 13 pee-free hours filibustering a CIA appointee because of the drone strike issue. Gun control legislation, rather than Paul's bladder control, would be far more immediately useful to take action on, especially as appointee John Brennan was going to be confirmed anyway.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,…

We Could Be Having So Much Fun

We live in a nation where the people who HATED school the most are putting themselves in charge of education, their goal being to make the hoops to jump through so strenuous, the teachers so discouraged, and the populace so worn down, that the public schools will FAIL, you see, and then they can close the schools. Step two is to destroy the economy so completely we can’t recover, and then they'll say, “Well, democracy doesn’t work,” and can become dictators, thus preventing the spread of thinking and knowledge, so we can reinforce prejudices and stupidity and all die not soon enough for them. They are jerks. That so many people are complicit in this is just asinine.

Can we not agree on anything? Bite me. Eat THIS. Suck it.

Then it hit me: I thought of the one universal. You know what is fun? Eating.

I like food. Don't you? One offering in my company’s cafeteria the other week was jerk chicken. I’ve always wondered why it’s called jerk chicken, and when I brought my delicious-smelling dish back to my grimy corporate cubical, I looked up “jerk chicken” on the Google. Well, it’s a fascinating history, it really is. And I thought, “You know, if we could teach children about the world not through Common Core Standards but rather through Delicious Dishes, think how much more fun school would be. For example, if Fourth Grade had a unit in Jerk Chicken, just look at how much territory a teacher could cover, starting with the ingredients (from Nigella Lawson’s recipe):

Homestyle Jerk Chicken

Ingredients

6 chicken breasts, without skin or bone (or chicken supreme joints, with the wing bones still attached)

2 teaspoons ground allspice

2 teaspoons dried thyme

2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons ground ginger

2 teaspoons ground nutmeg

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

2 cloves garlic, peeled

1 1 3/4 piece gingerroot, peeled and cut into chunks

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

1/4 cup dark rum

1/4 cup lime juice

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/2 cup cider vinegar

2 fresh red chiles, whole

1 onion, peeled and quartered

Rice and Peas, recipe follows

Read more at: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/nigella-lawson/homestyle-jerk-chicken-recipe/index.html?oc=linkback

Let’s begin in Jamaica: You have word origins (“jerk” from Wiki: The term jerk is said to come from the word charqui, a Spanish term of Quechua origin for jerked or dried meat, which eventually became jerky in English. The term jerk spice (also often commonly known as Jamaican jerk spice) refers to a spice rub. ); cooking chemistry; spice trade routes (the stories of sugar and salt ALONE will carry you all over the world); cultural contact prevented by geography (or created by force); economics; war for resources; slavery (again, from Wiki: Though Jamaican jerk sauce certainly was derived from African ancestry, it is something that was adapted and modified over hundreds of years as various cultures added their influence. From the start, changes had to be made since the Cormantee slaves found themselves in new surroundings on the island of Jamaica and were forced to use what was available to them.)—it all has a reality, stories like this, and can be modified depending on the ages of the children. Teach everything in the world though the lens of food, and all the learning would be both practical and enchanting, not to mention memorable. And FUN. And it's delicious. Who didn't love a classroom "cultural experience"? Every kid knows that means food! (Oh, fuck me, there's the peanut allergy police...still, glass half full!)

If Miss O' could teach anything she wanted, what would she teach young children? WONDER. AWE. To me the most important thing to show children is that the world has marvels. I get really pissed off when we tell them only about problems, because it seems to me the adults should be solving those. (The best way to tell children about problems in the world? Fairy tales.)

Note: I don’t like the “adults” we have in power in Congress right now because they are incapable of addressing actual problems. They live in a fairy tale of evil step-everythings. Harry Reid gives me hives. Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, and John Boehner are jokes, obviously, of what informed, capable leadership should be. They are middle school punks playing, “Beat the black man.” And if that means destroying the nation, so be it. It's impossible to imagine teaching "wonder" to children in this kind of poisoned atmosphere.

What I'm saying is too many JERKS are playing CHICKEN with Americans’ lives, with this nation’s future, with the planet’s clemency, is what I’m saying. They are doing it out of fear. Fear and some kind of psychic pain are their motivators, and they are projecting their fears and pain onto the rest of us, out of, let's face it, stupidity. I think of ol’ Preston back there, who didn’t mean to be a jerk that morning, though he really was—yet there was nothing at stake in the event of an errant bag of trash on the sidewalk, whereas corporate and religious ownership of the nation is high stakes, the highest. 

The makings of this awful national stew remind me of Macbeth's Weird Sisters, the witches who in delivering the prophecy over their brewing cauldron of nefarious ingredients (seasoned with incantations) in fact planted the seed in Macbeth's mind, and in his wife's, that to reach the future the witches foretell, murder is the way to do it. And it is, in fact, exactly how they reach that end—and then, of course, they die (along with too many others to count, as happened in, say, Iraq). This sort of spell casting was and ever will be a recipe for disaster, and it's what Republicans are doing every day as a matter of policy. And why not? In America, we don't punish evil. We protect pillaging banks, molesting priests, war criminals, and football-playing rapists. George Bush and Dick Cheney are the Macbeths, and they're fine, thanks. You?

Don’t let ’em do it, is what I’m saying. Vote, boycott, march, write, organize. Cook up something we can all eat. Miss O' despairs. And we could be having so much fun.