Illuminations

The Mexican

2018-01-23T13:39:00.001-08:00

Multi-ethnic families have a wide range of humor that's either entertainment or weaponry, and like any other family, we use it as both. An old family joke snapped sharply into focus for me through, of all things, an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, starring an actor I didn't know named Adam Beach. On the show, he was newly transferred to the unit and partnered with Ice-T's character, who naturally assumes he's Hispanic. "Yeah, just the other day some guy asked me if I was Mexican!" No way! Haha!

Growing up, we called my cousin Michael "The Mexican" for growing a cheesy, pencil-thin 'stache that practically begged us to mock it. If attention was what he wanted, he got it. Everywhere he went, we yelled out a chorus of bad Cheech and Chong accents. "Eeyyy, greengo! Whatchoo doin'?" had us rolling around, crying tears of laughter. "Essaayyy! How's it hangin', hombre?" Me and my bro thought it was a funny game, but in their tough Brooklyn neighborhood, a gentle taunt could become a barroom brawl later on, after a lot of beer was consumed.

His older brother would sneer "Spick" at him constantly, once he figured out that his younger brother could actually pass as Hispanic in some heavily Puerto Rican neighborhoods, which chafed him raw because in his family, he was the outcast for passing as white. It was shocking at times, too, especially during his first growth spurt. He'd go for the annual family Christmas portrait to be asked how long he was in town visiting his own family, like a down-on-his-luck relation come to spend time in the big city after his parents divorced.

"You know 'Ree (my childhood nickname), I know I come off as some big 'tough guy', but sometimes it really hurts my feelings", and I could totally see why. He'd arrange to meet his family at the local pizza parlor for dinner, only to be asked by the hostess where he wanted to be seated, with his family waving him over from the table they sat at, right in front of the waiter's face. It always felt like a put-down to him; like an unwanted interloper in his own childhood home.

The Sears family portrait in their living room showed four small, dark people with a giant-sized "white dude" standing behind them almost cropped out of frame, towering thinly above them all. It wasn't a wonder to me, as much as it took me aback, that he'd chosen to identify as Irish-American as an adult by changing his name and marrying a very Irish girl from Staten Island. It was the only place, among all of New York's ethnic groups, that he felt he could fit into, especially in the context of an inherited alcoholism that killed his parents. It felt easier for him to pass as just another Irish drunk.

But when our family got together, or if it was just him and his brother around, there was no question that, like Adam Beach, we weren't Hispanic at all. European....yeah, maybe....and then there was something else that was less available to us on surveys, questionnaires, and medical forms at the doctor's office. That "something" was a someone: his mother who'd left the reservation a long time ago to marry his Jewish father after they met at a corner bar in Brookyln, running from an upstate New York tribe of just 67 people, led by her abusive chief of a father, according to her often slurred telling. No one knew who we were. Not really.

So, for today: here's to all the "hybrids", "mixed bloods", "mutts", and "half breeds" of the world, plus all the other ethnic blends we have that testify to a legacy of love and marriage in this country that is so distinctly American. This one's for you, cuz. Ironically, after so much separation in their lives, the brothers are the only family they have left, and they remain the ONLY Celtic Jewish Indians from New York I've ever met. Thanks for being Metis like me, before we even knew there was a name for it. And thanks to all the brave actors like Adam Beach for representing a history that so often gets taken away by someone of European descent. I really appreciated seeing our funny ethnic reference on a major network TV show, my brother. It was a first.

Here's to all the other "firsts" out there in the world like me, representing a genuinely original, distinctly American ethnic minority. This time is ours.

Maus

2018-01-03T13:37:00.000-08:00

Prizes used to be the winning domain of very few people in the world, not toys for savvy publicists and marketing agents to play with that guaranteed franchise success through lucrative licensing deals. The Pulitzer Prize, for instance, meant a lot to me as a young reader, because its status conferred an honorific upon the writer that was like a Michelin star of literary greatness. It meant that an expert panel had agreed upon, and recognized, the strength of the work. This, amongst a group of people that counted rigorous, heated debate as an intrinsic part of the narrative artform.

After I had studied "The Art of the Book" at its chosen institute for Higher Learning, the newest iteration of illustrated narration, the graphic novel, won our discipline's greatest honor. It was no surprise to me as a young apprentice that the first real Art Director I ever worked with had designed the cover for Art Spiegelman's Maus, which I only discovered after he asked me whether or not it should be included in his "book": the portfolio of cover designs that we show prospective clients. I was taken aback for a moment. Are you kidding me? It's so famous, and it's such a great book! What's the question, here? Keep it in there! I didn't see the point of asking.

"Yeah....", he mused to me slowly, in a way I'd learn to find as normal for a mentor leading junior talent through a question, "but, is it still fresh? I designed it sooo many years ago." It was a telling statement about the shortness of memory publishing had recently acquired, as an industry that capitalizes on the new and trendy like a viciously starved dog. But, my former mentor was supposed to be different than the rest of the pack. He'd won many prestigious book awards as the creative lead of a selective literary imprint. This was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel! Their gold seal meant more than Oprah's Book Club seal-of-approval! This was an award judged by our peers. It meant something. Right?

"Well...", he went on to explain its limited recognition to the university press he was meeting with, that served the needs of younger minds with much less reference material to work with. Why would NYU care about a trade book cover, no matter how famous it was? They were looking for someone who could design for their current curriculum. He got the freelance gig to design their catalog, but he lost respect with me. There was no question in my mind what the better job was, but with his conditions, he was at the office until 10-11 pm anyway, after making a noontime appearance that only the very best divas were afforded for their prize-winning productivity. In his OCD/ADHD-manic world, it was all about NEW! NOW! NEXT! Not old, dead Jews.

Just like the movies that depend so much on our creative output for their industriousness, his idea of freshness was based on a series of serious medical diagnoses that we only had euphemisms for in the public world of 90s America, as we struggled with the sickness of other people's madness behind closed, locked doors. The way he shut out his own storied past became an apt metaphor for the same climate that produced the modern worlds' most horrifying genocide, done with the same efficient penstrokes of so many office workers "just doing their job(s)." It was a perfect example about the banality of evil my father had so often warned me about that lurked in the corporate world, perpetrated daily in office cubicles by a dully unfeeling people frightened only by the threat of a paycheck to pay for their next escapist entertainment.

Maus remains the best true life account I have ever read about the horrors of the Holocaust, told through the fabled cat-and-mouse of Art Spieglman's family history in so many pen strokes, and it is not to be missed. Add this book series to your college curriculum.
I dare you.

Son of a preacher, man.

2017-12-12T14:48:00.001-08:00

I'd been single for about ten years in 2012, and after the Internet dating bubble burst, I went back to good ole' fashioned, face-to-face contact with the same limited results. Based on the sound reasoning that I'd made a female friend of sorts at an alumni function quickly after my return from out west, I invited a Korean friend (also somewhat lukewarm) from my dojo to an alumni function downtown that served as an equidistant meeting point between our respective subway commutes from Brooklyn and Queens.

My fair-weather friend agreed to the get-together, which was somewhat surprising to me after she rebuffed other fun invitations, but summer in the city makes even the most winter-shocked South Korean eager to be outside. The theme was a disco dance party, which made my older friend happy at the prospect of enjoying. Something was in the air that night, because soon after she showed up, we started doing shots, and then time seemed to speed up. The music got louder, the bar got more crowded, and after an older man hit on me early on, the younger office guys started showing up from their pre-game bar hops further uptown that led them to our downtown soiree.

It got blurry after that, but I remember a spinning disco ball with lots of flashing lights, and dancing in a group with a cute, dark-haired guy. We took breaks from the dance floor to talk to him on the sidewalk outside, and then we were too drunk to go on. I didn't remember getting home that night, which scared my middle-aged self a lot more than the younger version of me. The city was rapidly changing with this latest wave of gentrification, and a lot of the newcomers didn't know the rules, which made it even more dangerous than it'd been before, in direct proportion to their out-of-towner paranoia. You could see the tension in their eyes walking around.

It must have scared off my friend, too, because other summer alumni party invites got turned down right away with no hesitation. We even emailed each other over the contacts we made that night, with both of us given the same info for the guy we'd been dancing with. She declined the idea of dating him while we were at the beach in Coney Island, silenced by my bodysurfing in the same way a Filipino friend from another dojo would be during my first, successful bodyboarding attempt using his board. He also never accepted an invite from me again, and they'd both been afraid of the murky Atlantic Ocean.

So, my new alumni friend and I struck up an easy correspondence at the same time I'd met another younger guy at a second alumni party that summer. Ryan was in his 20s, though, so we didn't get as far as my other paramour in his 30s did, but I was working a freelance gig midtown that made lunch dates and after-work excursions easy to arrange. He was good company, too, of a sort that I'd been accustomed to for a long time: an intelligent, educated Nuyorican making good after leaving the 'hood. I was proud to see other hardcore city kids get through "The Ivy League" system a lot easier than I did.

That didn't make life problem-free, though, on account of us being natives. The manager at his landscape design firm was a real bitch who kept hitting on him, years before this recent spate of sexual harassment suits y'all are thriving in began. Every time she knew he was heading out the door, she'd drop work on his desk due immediately, like she'd done for our lunch date he was late for, and now this dinner date he thought she was weirdly trying to sabotage.

She was a much older, extremely aggressive, non-native blond lady having fun jerking the chain of a young brother on the rise, in a classic RISD "pas-de-deux" of sexual tension marred by intense career competition. Poor kid couldn't tell if he was attracted by all the attention or if he was afraid for his life, when I asked him about it over pre-dinner drinks, which worried me even more. She was a seasoned cougar accustomed to muddying the work-waters with her shirts unbuttoned just the right amount, so that whenever she leaned over his desk, she showed her thickly tanned "creasage" to the newest kid on the block, confused and stressed out as he was by making it to "The Big League" firms of Manhattan.

Based on that disclosure alone, plus the rapturous detail he supplied to me about the technical qualities of the soil in the street planters we passed as we headed toward our destination, I knew he was "hands-off" dating material for me, but I liked the warmth of a humid summer night on the water. We were going to see a Muay Thai fight at the Hudson River piers later on, so even if our dinner date didn't go as planned, I'd still see some action that night. We were finally seated in a really loud restaurant that seemed to immediately perk him up with its Hispanic-flavored appetizers. We got more drinks and with our entrees, I leaned in to ask him some serious questions, as the Mojitos started to give me a fuzzy "halo effect" I could see reflected on his now more-amorous face.

Alright. Let's get down to it: food, family, faith....all the really good stuff. Here, he faltered a bit as the evenings' sheen wore away, like I suspected. Just talking about his hardened single mom from Puerto Rico brought about a dampening effect, as we dived down into the reality of our respective situations. I'd come from a broken family that did time in the projects coming up, too. I knew that without a very solid foundation, and if our careers suddenly "went south", we didn't have anything or anyone to rely on besides the stuff that got us to this point in time, and I needed him to feel that pressure a little bit, because I was way past the age of random hook-ups. He started responding to it, opening up beyond the bland office demeanor we used to pass through midtown offices, but I could see his confidence was fading.

By the time we got around to religion, he was almost done talking to me. I spoke haltingly about my traditional Catholic upbringing, and I could tell from the chill falling over him that "The Ivory Tower" we attended was still unreceptive to people of faith. Oh, well. I stopped talking so I could listen to him describe his mothers' descent into the extremes of Evangelical Christianity brought on by the stress of single motherhood, including demonic possession and public displays in the churchs' aisles while writhing on the ground speaking in tongues. Huh. I did not have that kind of upbringing. Candles, yes. Stained glass, yes. Beauty and discipline, si. This shit you sayin' to me? Uh, hell, no.

I truly did not know what to say back to him. He told me as his mom worked her way up the small, storefront church hierarchy, she'd egged him on to make up phony scenarios that would promote them even higher within the parish, by babbling gibberish and making a false conversion. "I lied about it", as he laughed uncomfortably in the face of my genuine experience. Yeah, I hesitated, but your moms...."Oh, I know!" He said it too loud and too quick, which meant he wasn't over anything. "She's totally nuts!" Right, but, that doesn't mean your spiritual life is over, I gently advised him. You're Hispanic. Catholics can always come home. And I meant it. He was my Brother-in-Christ. He was more insistent on putting all religions in the same category as UFOs and Bigfoot sightings. This brush-up with sincerity? He disliked that even more. It had happened to me more than once at RISD, so I knew the deal: the door was officially closing.

When he saw the stage version of my real-life warrior act down at the pier, I knew we'd reached the end of our destination. Now it was his turn to be silent over post-fight beers at a makeshift cabana by the water. "So, that's what you trained in, huh?" Yeah, my man. As the sun set over the river on a romance that was never-to-be, he suddenly seemed to want the evening to go on, with another round of beers and a renewed sense of energy, in pursuit of a feeling that left quickly with so many fighter men milling around the bar, dressed in tight t-shirts emblazoned on the back with a trendy design motif: two big, graphic angel wings with the feathers articulated in a highly realistic, line-art style. And just like that, it was time for us both to go home. Alone.

Happy Feast Day to Our Most Blessed Mother, The Holy Virgin,
Our Lady of Guadalupe. Forever She Reigns as Queen of Heaven.

Black Robe

2017-11-17T14:33:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving had been co-opted by the party good suppliers, greeting card manufacturers, and mail-order catalogs of the world, and as young intellectuals, we were afraid we'd never get it back. Our generation saw holiday seasons twisted into nightmarish marathons of brutish endurance that wasted our time and money, becoming unruly scenes that would take an army of Dr. Phil's to undo in their individual dysfunctions.

We watched in horror as people gorged themselves on shopping and bad food, through dystopian scenes shown on our parent's evening news programs that seemed lifted from a scifi movie about the Apocalypse. People were trampled to death during buying frenzies in pursuit of the latest toy craze, like a Cabbage Patch doll. Imagine dying over THAT. Giving thanks in a meaningful way had become supplanted by something advertisers called "Black Friday", as a prelude to a Christmas that was the complete opposite of good cheer.

As we deconstructed the painful pasts of our history books, we talked about how it all went wrong, beginning with an overly romanticized version of the Pilgrims meeting the Indians for the first time, in a goofy portrayal of Northern Europeans as naive waifs somehow caught in a wintertime they'd never met, utterly dependent on the suckling teat of the local, pipe-smoking natives scantily clad in a hippie fantasy of leather headbands and groovy feathers.

It was as preposterously out-of-date as our textbooks, especially to us French Canadian kids who knew better. Their Jamestown was not our Quebecois settlement or Acadian mixed marriage, right off the boat. It was one story about one tribe meeting one group of puritanical Englanders famed for their firebrand of religious extremism that got them kicked out of Merry Old Englande. My ship-faring ancestors came here to trade and mate, hopefully at the same time. Knowing the men in my family, that sounds about right.

By contrast, in college we learned about the First Nations and their territories through the geography of who did what where, at which time. It wasn't as simple as "white man=bad, Indian=good", just a lot more honest, and why not? We were there to learn. After me and my boyfriend made fun of the wacky anachronisms in "Dances with Wolves", we'd tell them to check out a film that's been called one of the most realistic depictions of indigenous life from colonization times that's ever been made into a movie, through the eyes of a French missionary and his Huron allies. Let's just say this: the Mohegans live up to their name.

For Americans lucky enough to have First Contact stories, why not share that over the usual turkey talk this year? Instead of finding an enemy sitting across the table from you separated by a wall you built, you might find family, like we did. Blessings to you.

WUTR: Utica/Rome

2017-11-10T14:51:00.000-08:00

Me and my best friend had way more than altitude to adjust to, deep in the remote mountains of upstate New York. Before the Internet and cell phones, we had a pay phone on the first floor that we shared with an entire dorm and a television in the common room, also on the first floor. We'd already broken a lot of rules in the dorm and around campus, the least of which was having a hot plate in our room for heating up cans of soup or making box mac and cheese, in direct violation of the dorm's fire code. There were no microwave dinners, no cable TVs, no personal computers, and no anxious "helicopter parents" circling overhead. We were free.

Our relative isolation from the rest of the world created a bubble for young minds to thrive, especially in exploration of the past through our art history and history textbooks. It didn't really matter what day or time it was, because we lived through our studies, anyway. The allure of being out of touch in a cool way has trapped many a hippie perpetually in college towns, like the demon from the movie 'Krampus' captures souls stuck in so many snow globes sitting on its shelf. There was something eerily dead about going to the same bar forever, dating the same tie-dyed wearing sophomore over and over again.

We'd shudder in the frigid evenings over the possibility of a similar fate, which propelled us past incredible odds to our respective educational careers: Karen from urban-based Yonkers, and me from the projects in Queens. Sometimes we wondered like 'The Talking Heads', "....how did we get here?", only to be brutally reminded of our commitment to our ideals by a six-hour bus ride through the frozen tundra of a nearly deserted landscape. In the overheated dorm rooms of our engaged minds, we always left a window open to catch the coldness of the crisp, clear mountain air.

After a night of Old Milwaukee and weak pot, we slunk down to the first floor to watch TV on the sly, with our reputations preceding us. It was late, so we'd escaped the voracious Long Island crowd that were more supported in their daily habits by their similarly enabled parents. Used to the abuse that comes with shared family spaces, we sank into the old, sunken couch with a sigh of relief, in a mostly dark room that was empty of other kids. Finally! We had the TV to ourselves, without the petty power plays or bitchy stand-offs that happened among the factions of hardcore viewers in the dorm with time and madness on their sides. Kids would plot TV "takeovers" in the cafeteria with their dorm-mates by shouting down anyone who objected to their "Must See TV" during coveted time slots.

But, like two weary, single moms at the end of yet another tough day, we just wanted to put up our feet and relax without making a highly charged political statement about how spoiled and compulsive we weren't. We'd had enough of that growing up. So, one late night found us turning the dial on the TV unmolested by cries of outrage, to catch Letterman or maybe a "Honeymooners" rerun. Didn't really matter. New York City channels usually showed black-and-white classics or freaky monster movies for the overnight crowd working the night shift at the precinct or in the ER; great, working-class stuff.

We'd gotten to the right point of mellow before bedtime when catastrophe struck. We'd lost the signal! Some old movie started playing, then cut out to a screen full of static. What the...? We were left to spend the rest of the night in wondering paranoia. Had the Russians attacked? Was it nuclear war? A media blackout based on alien invasion? What? WHAT? WHAT?! What the fuck just happened? We'd adjusted the rabbit ears, unplugged and replugged the set, banged on the side of it until horizontal lines shimmied across the tube; no such luck. Our electronic babysitter was dead. It was humbling to our superior senses of self, as well-adjusted freshmen.

The next morning in the cafeteria, we immediately told our friends the bad news. Someone had to approach the Residence Hall Director with the creepy molester 'stache about buying a new TV ("dude, we should totally draw straws to see who does it"), because the old one had just cut out. Huh? What are you guys talking about? Our friend from Buffalo was a blue collar girl used to working the early morning shift at the local convenient store, so she'd already been up to catch "her programs" at six a.m., and the set was working just fine. What'd you two do?

Nothing! We protested. We did absolutely nothing but turn the thing on and sit down. Must've been a signal drop, because we were watching some old movie and then the fuzz came on. Wait a minute...our friend from Syracuse asked us around what time. Oh, we didn't know. It was late. Letterman had been on, then some war movie started with this big flag flying and the National Anthem playing...no, wait, dude! Probably a baseball movie, hence the music....yeah, that was it. Totally.

Our upstate friends erupted into hysterical shrieks of laughter, crying at the cafeteria table, clutching themselves and each other. Me and Karen just looked at each other. Now what? <shoulder shrugs> We were called "Abbott and Costello" behind our backs by some of the kids, because she's a big girl and I was a beanpole. Sometimes, we were funny without even trying. Okay...mind letting us in on the joke? Finally, good ole Tracey told us the truth, and it was so much weirder than The Cold War or the end of the world. "No, you guys." Hahaahaa! "Lemme tell 'em!" What? WHAT?

"That wasn't a movie. That was the station signing off for the night." Crickets. I looked at my friend again and shook my head. I had nothing. We turned back to them. What do you mean? They, in turn, looked just as baffled. A sign-off! The station "signed off" for the night! What are you talking about?! Finally, Lisa from Rome kicked in, "Guys! GUYS! That means no more TV!" No. More. TV. What is this strange Bizarro universe? "That's it! The TV goes off the air until morning." Holy....what frigid level of hell is this?! We struggled to assimilate a place with no late night take-out, or Ralph Kramden banter with Alice.

Suddenly, two hip girls from the 'burbs realized how far from home they were, and then our real education began. "Humbled" wasn't exactly the word for how we felt. We were almost completely cut off from the outside world, and we were alone in it. After that, we had a new nickname around campus. 'Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure' had officially arrived, and it was massive in its scope. Like, totally, dude. And dudettes! It was the start of a whole new era.

Lift

2017-11-01T14:56:00.002-07:00

My Brooklyn boyfriend from Bay Ridge has always been scared of the country, though he was loathe to admit it to me when we dated, fearing a lesser stature than myself in just about everything. It was nonsensically competitive, and therefore, doomed to fail. He'd complain about the crickets being too loud for him to sleep well at my mother's house in upstate New York, which made traveling with him exceptionally laborious, as our round-trip flight on "McAir" bore out.

How would he fare out west? A family holiday found my father springing for a ski trip to New Mexico while we were in college, in accommodation of our tastes that were more sophisticated than West Bumblef-ck, Texas could provide. The people were so incredibly rude to us where they lived that we couldn't find any reasons to visit an extremely remote place that took pleasure in being a barren wasteland depressingly littered with broken farm equipment. Not even with free tickets and airfare provided.

So, one lucky Thanksgiving saw us flying pleasantly non-stop from New York with no small plane change-overs to beautiful New Mexico and the Sangre de Cristo mountain range, and what a gorgeous drive it was. The mountains were dusted with snow like a classic Christmas fable, and I thought we'd finally have the happy ending to a holiday story that had eluded us as a family since my parents bitter divorce.

The weather was perfect, too: plenty of light, powdery snow and bright southwestern sun. Until the last day of skiing. We had been doing surprisingly well for non-skiers, mastering the bunny slopes with its lower lifts that surrounded the lodge, which led us to greater heights on the very last day of our trip. Back then, lifts were small, open-air seats with one metal bar to hold onto, and the snow beneath us was strewn with poles, gloves, and hats stuck in the frozen no-man's land of the rising slope.

We'd stood at the bottom of a lift that disappeared into thick, heavy, snow clouds, wondering if it was worth it. I hated the height and the wildly careening seats blown about in the stiff winds, but we reasoned that we were here to experience this, so we might as well do it. Sure enough, my instincts proved correct once we reached the top: a deep squall of fiercely blowing drifts immediately froze our goggles, but we had to make a decision about quickly turning left or right, because the lift was swiftly moving with people skiing off.

We veered left, trying to see a sign half-covered in ice and snow, but as we started our descent, it was already too late. We were on a Black Diamond, expert-level trail covered in compacted blue ice that was impassable, and we were next to a cliff's edge. We couldn't even skate across it with the edge of our ski blades, so we took the skis off and walked down the mountainside until we reached another lift with another lodge, and then the lights went out and the lift turned off.

Okay....now what? We went inside the abandoned lodge to think. What to do? I guess we could cross-country ski back to the main lodge and our hotel using the service road. Right? The lift operator finally told us the truth: we were seven miles outside of town, and the sun was quickly setting. Well, we thought, it might be okay....he was Mestizo and obviously unused to talking with tourists, but we were teenagers, so he offered us a ride in his old pickup truck instead. Thanks! I was psyched. This trip was over and I was done with skiing, quite possibly forever. Done.

Of course, my passive-aggressive city boyfriend grumbled that we could have made it back on our own. "This isn't so bad! Look at how level the road is! Oh, Marie. This would've been easy!" The guide shot him a sharp look. "You don't realize how fast the temperature drops at night here." That was true, but I could already see my boyfriend stirring restlessly in his seat. He loved to argue. Yeah, but it wasn't that far....the guide began shaking his head. "You don't get it, son. Cold isn't the only thing that'll get you out here."

He lowered his window just as an orange disk of sun set behind the mountains through a silhouette of dense pines. "The wolves are telling each other we're here." As he said it, we could hear the thin, loud howl of the alpha male. "They're already tracking us, because we're in their territory. They know it's only the three of us." If you've never heard the rough barking of a pack as it runs, I don't know how to describe it to you. It was like nothing we'd ever heard before. Bart turned white, and shut up for the rest of the ride back. The lift operator continued talking with his window down, so we could hear them. "They're following us." And it was true. We heard them signalling to each other with the same speed that the truck drove on the snowy road, speeding across the mountaintops in pursuit, all the way back to the hotel.

Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers.
Happy All Saints Day.

War Braids

2017-10-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, two well-known American football players had an uncomfortable public exchange on social media about the (mis)appropriation of what one player considered the sole cultural property of his particular ethnic heritage. Crazy as it may seem, two exceptionally elite individuals performing at the highest level of their game had a tensely bitchy discussion about....world politics, gun control, healthcare, or was it famine? No, it was hair. That's right: a hairstyle. It brought me back to a scene from Chris Rock's movie "Good Hair" when he actually asked Maya Angelou what she thought about the issue, to which she famously replied "It's just hair!" Right! It grows on your head. Or not.

I get it, because I also have what's called "difficult hair" that I've written about before on this site (also known as "curly hair"), and for many years, the world didn't let me forget that my hair was a sign of poor genetics, or as my father calls it, "mongrel DNA". It's his defense mechanism for having what was once known as "the taint" of Indian blood in his familial line. You know that old squabble about all the "bad" stuff that comes from the other side of the family. For me, salvation was finally found in the pages of a book written by a similarly-afflicted Briton who also suffered from the genetic legacy of "poor hair" that was to be covered up for being too "wild", because it was seen as overtly sexual.

After that, my life changed. I bought products for my hair type, switched up my cleansing routine/styling techniques and....voila! Better hair. It seemed so simple that it almost felt criminally easy, until my heightened awareness made shopping for products in stores a lesson about the blatant racism that drives marketing stances used to sell products to whichever group can be victimized with their profitable shaming techniques. So, I guess it was progress to read men feeling the sting over appearances now aimed their way through corporate endorsements, as an inevitable outgrowth of civil rights with "hair shaming" for men.

But, I still didn't quite get it. I understood that an African-American man felt he could stand up for dreadlocks to be his hairstyle specifically, given the context of an American history that has brutally taken away too much from his ethnic group, except for this: all mixed martial artists wear "war braids" in the sport of fighting while in the arena, because we all want our hair off our faces during a fight. It's too messy and distracting, otherwise. And then there's this: my hair's also a fine voluminous blend of textured curls that can dread freakishly easily. Scarily so, as my friend noted at the Jersey Shore. She can quickly run a pick through her wet hair and be done with it, while the Medusa-like snakes on my head changed every minute or so from straight, wet hair to a snarled mess that needs a long list of products, tools, and accessories to be somewhat manageable. She admitted to me that it was like nothing she'd ever seen before.

So, I thought to myself: well, maybe the other guy wearing a helmet wants that same kind of ease with his hair, Asiatic as it is. I know a dude whose Cuban Chinese fro is so thick that he can also stand a pick up in it without any intervention. And then it occurred to me that maybe people just don't know about the range of human hair historically, or how other tribes and clans of the world can also feel the struggle deeply and personally, like I do. Just like one picture can cover a thousand words, here are two infamous warriors from the past wearing dreads from other cultures, as legitimate to them as any on the planet. Meet the Kouroi of ancient Greece and "The Dying Gaul" during his last, beautiful moments before death. Welcome to the world.

Leni

2017-09-21T12:57:00.001-07:00

Leni Riefenstahl was a major force at St. Martin's Press, the small house that was quickly becoming a midsized one during my apprenticeship. She'd become our shot at entering the grown-up world of bestsellers about infamous personalities from history that give a house prestige and win awards. The attention over a hardcover edition drives sales, and a major hit is something a house can make a profit from for years, which meant everyone who could get involved did so most vocally.

I was first introduced to her in the art department. One of my friends was jealous that another art director he considered less talented was designing the cover, and in our back-stabbing world of "celebrity" designers, you're only as good as your last cover design. It wasn't lost on me at the time that we mirrored her world of uneasy alliances made in service to art and design, because she'd worked as a filmmaker during Hitler's regime.

After the hardcover edition went to paperback, my friend finally got to revise the design to meet his standards, and that's when we talked about Nazi Germany; at his computer, while he colorized her cover photo. He told me he could relate to her conversion to fascism (!!) through the carefully fabricated military outfits. "How seductive it must have been to a poor farm kid back then", he said to me as the son of Chinese immigrants who owned a laundry business. The leather boots, those sharp shoulders on the jacket that fit just so...

Huh. That's....eerie, dude. The first "Leni" art director would come out of the closet years later, after dumping his very masculine wife and their adopted Asian baby, before my friend finally came out as ADHD and OCD. On the heels of those twin disclosures, I could finally see what kind of monst...er, person, would be attracted to stage sets full of blond boys in matching military dress, and just like then, I still don't like what I heard as an excuse for genocide through collusion. What horror!

It brought me back to the importance of authenticity, and how very important it is that we tell the truth about our histories, hard as that may be. For my family, we finally got the happy ending we were seeking, not that we had sat around waiting for validation from anyone. My father's family had told us the truth about our Acadian Metis origins as the first generation of Europeans to intermarry with the Micmac people of Nova Scotia, because that's exactly what my dad's East Asian/Native American DNA reflects: the time period of first contact in Canada between 1780-1600s. BTW, my little native percentage showed up as a Yakutian from East Siberia before our ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge many moons ago.

And so it was no surprise to me that I remembered hearing the art directors talk about Leni Riefenstahl's fake autobiography, because it was said she had her birth certificate forged so she could profit from Hitler and the Nazi Regime as an artist. So, that isn't actually in the book? I had to know our culpability. The art director told me the editor wanted it in the epilogue, but he'd been shot down. Well...what is it? "She lied about not being Jewish, and he's Jewish, too." Oh. That's kind of big deal.

As I wrote this piece to you, I thought about my part in the process when I relieved myself of debt from a honest lifetime spent on basic food, clothing, and shelter, bought at the time with my bargain salary of $19,500/year. I know I've paid it back in full, and then some.
The real question is: have you?

Apothecary Rose

2017-09-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

The connection between American publishing and the English houses that supported them were as clear as day to me, as a young apprentice at St. Martin's Press. Editors went on annual buying trips "across the pond" to partake in the comfy literary markets of murder mysteries and tearoom gardens that are so quintessentially British. Excepting for some technical difficulties present in the differences between printing processes, our repackaged series were the house staples we could all rely on. Murder mystery readers are overwhelmingly female, and surprisingly devoted to their fictional, crime-solving heroes; a pat, easy formula that's the perfect armchair read on a chilly autumn night, served with a warm cuppa on the side.

Until a certain female protagonist caught my attention. Because I produced the advance reader copies sent out to reviewers, I usually knew the manuscript well enough to talk about it, and because of the lulls in my work, I actually read most of them, too. We did a bunch of medieval murder mysteries that sought to capitalize on the commercial success of Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose". This one began similarly, but with a twist: the prime suspect was also the chief investigator. She was a female apothecary working as a laywoman within abbey walls, tending to the same medicinal garden that produced the deadly herbal used as the murder weapon, found on her shelves. Neat plot twist, right?

I was reminded of my own botanist mother who'd cried foul play over my child's bouquet, picked to cheer her up during one of her many "moods". "Agh!" She dramatically cried out when I presented my flowers to her, at her bedside. "That's 'deadly' nightshade!" Oh? Pretty purple flowers. "Are you trying to poison me?!" Uh, no...but, thanks for the tip. End scene, cut, aaannnd...fade out.

Aside from the theater of her daily undoing, I learned a lot about the power of plants from her. She often knew their Latin names by heart, and if we couldn't readily identify the wildflowers we found, we'd look them up. She knew the trees around us by the shape of their leaves, and the colors they changed in the fall. It was a beauty and magic to me that lengthened into homesickness for the forests of my northern woods. Never would I forget the shape of sunlight slanting through the trees, or the happy yellow of a early spring daffodil.

It's become grounding to me with every move I've made, a steadying process that keeps me down-to-earth in a sea of change; collecting specimens, looking them up, and then pressing them between the pages of books. That is the strength of our collective gifts as a mother and daughter: a knowledge that is straight and true.
And so very beautiful.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2017/09/14/england-to-be-re-dedicated-as-dowry-of-mary/

Intersex

2017-08-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

When author Jeffrey Eugenides appeared on the Oprah show to promote his then-new book "Middlesex", I was shocked by the medical stats explained by a doctor also on the show; that 1 in 20 people are born with either ambiguous genitalia, or internal sex organs related to both sexes. A young woman in the next segment had Androgen Insensitive Disorder, meaning that she was diagnosed in puberty with a set of undescended gonads that had secreted enough testosterone during puberty to stop her female maturation process. After having the tissue removed, she easily decided to proceed with hormone injections that would give her female breasts, since she had always identified as a woman, but for other Intersex patients, it's not so easy.

Her adolescence had given her the height of a man and slenderness of a boy that made her a natural fit for working as a runway model, as she readily admitted on the show that most of the models she worked with were also Intersex. Her reasoning was excellent, too. Think about it: a 6-foot tall girl with a square jaw and no hips?! Gives "Victoria's Secret" a whole new connotation, doesn't it? But for all the intersex people who have clearer choices between genders, many do not. The young model went on to explain that her male hormones had destroyed her ovarian tissue, and she was born without a uterus, so she can never have children. And that's the less complicated version.

For intersex people from older generations, babies born with ambiguous genitalia were often assigned a gender at birth while still in the delivery room, based on the leanings of the attending physician, without consulting the parents or allowing the child to develop into puberty, armed with information that would assist them in making a choice later in life. One man didn't learn that he had a complete set of fully functioning ovaries and a uterus until an MRI technician told him while he was an enlistee in the army who'd just broken his back, because he also had fully functioning male genitalia and the total outward appearance of a man.

He isn't alone in his gender assumptions, either. Several years ago, a very well-known Olympic runner was newly diagnosed as intersex after her first full medical exam during the Olympic trials was performed on her, because she came from a poor, remote African village that was far from the readily available medical communities of a big city. Her grandmother explained that she'd raised her as a girl, because she looked like one (!), even though she'd never had her menses, which is often common for extreme athletes. The runner was embarrassed beyond belief to have her unusual condition plastered across the evening news, especially since it also cast a shadow over her athletic performance. She'd originally tested positive for the elevated testosterone levels that are typically linked to the usage of performance-enhancing drugs (like steroids) that are banned from legitimate competition.

I'm happy to report that she was finally accepted into Olympic competition for the women's team years ago, and again more recently as a competitor in the summer Olympic Games, proud to represent her African country unblemished with questions about her performance and her gender. For her, the story ends with a successful entry into womanhood, though for many intersex individuals, such is not the case. New York finally granted its first documented designation of intersex gender status THIS YEAR to a driver's license applicant, which tells you about the lack of acceptance and recognition within a LGBTQI community that places a "Q" for "questioning" before the biological reality that is Intersex. Even further progress has been made medically-speaking, with the standard of allowing intersex children to self-identify later in life without surgical intervention. For them, there are no questions about being intersex, because they already are.
How's that for an "I"?

Apocalypto

2017-07-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

Like media stereotypes about the "gentle hippie", Indians have to contend with a full set of deeply ingrained prejudices about every facet of their lives and appearance. Americans love Kevin Costner's white girl adopted by a tribe that bestows upon her sexy Injun magic, with her blow-dried 80s wings sprayed stiffly into place, as yet another annoying anachronism that's wildy out of place with history. But, it sure is pretty! And who doesn't like wolves? It gives you a special feeling!

Of course, media professionals have always been hip to the manipulation in Hollywood movies, which are designed to put you into a emotional space that sets you up (compulsive gambler, drinker, smoker, and/or hoarder) for a major Disney-esque shopping spree, like a supermarket that pumps out smells of fried chicken and chocolate chip cookies baking, fresh from the oven. They're extremely overworked scenarios designed to suck money from your weaknesses and vulnerabilities; an example of greed at its worst.

Enter into this toxic, European-dominated market the real and the true. I'm not a fan of Mel Gibson's public meltdowns, drinking sprees, and weird views about a made-up religion imposed upon him by his far-out, fascist, Aussie dad (notice Mel has Americanized his accent to put him at a distance from his Aussie "Mad Max" days, to sell a franchise of buddy-cop movies, like Madonna in England or anywhere in the world), but he has made some of the best movies I've ever seen in my life, including the entire "Road Warrior" series.

As someone who is very familiar with The Bible and scripture, his movie version about "The End of Days" is one of the best Apocalyptic movies I've seen, including his post-Apocalyptic work set in the aboriginal bush-land of native Australia, as the white folks revert to a bloody, animistic, murderously tribal version of themselves. In his "dog eat dog" worlds, it's every man (and woman) for themselves, and who hasn't had that said to their face by a competing employee (or so they think) while at work? The amount of overly-heightened emotionalism attached to the acquisition of resources makes the common junkie an accomplished liar, and the practiced accountant your white-collar criminal doing time in a minimum-security prison, tennis whites not included.

"Apocalypto" is THE BEST MOVIE I'VE EVER SEEN about the massive die-off of the Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs, that artfully deconstructs the passive Indian stereotype to reveal a band of blood-thirsty savages sacrificing heads to their burning demon in the sky, controlling their crops (as a stand-in for more European concepts about evil and Satan) and their destinies, in justification for murdering their own people, setting them up for the smallpox invasion of the conquering Spaniards who finished the job for them through cultural extinction.

Our hero is a gifted husband and father who is an expert hunter/warrior for their tribe, happily married to his beautiful wife who is expecting their second child, when their "Apocalypto" takes place, changing their lives forever. Just as an iceberg the size of London and Manhattan has broken off from the ice shelf to melt into water that will be the next "Great Flood" of our time, our heroic family fights to survive under the most vile, extreme circumstances humanity has to offer, finding each other before the next wave of corruption and death rolls in. After our hero finally escapes for good (surviving many life-or-death battles his young family does without him), they do what any sane, rational people facing the end of the world do: head for higher ground.

My G-d Bless You And Keep You Safe, My Most Faithful Children Of The Word. Amen.

Narc

2017-06-15T11:24:00.001-07:00

Copping weed in a sleepy suburb that's always been more country than city was almost impossible for me growing up, the city even harder for me because of my clean-cut good looks. I joked with my buddies at the corner store that no one even wanted to stand near me during our town St. Pat's Parade because (according to one of them), "You look like a cop!" If being a detective means I'm aware of open container laws, cognizant of my surroundings, and respectful of my neighbors even during a daytime "beer buzz" by still recycling appropriately, then I'm the Sheriff of this here town.

After being rebuffed by do-ragged bangers hanging curbside in the tough gang towns of Rockland run by drug dealers during the 80s, me and my friends turned to the city for our teenage rebellion, but I was quickly becoming a curse to them in their nefarious deeds, in an anti-anti-establishment cancel out. We'd cut class to take the city bus to buy weed near Central Park, only to be ID'ed by a beat cop who laughed at my underage library card (the only ID I had), throwing our small dime bag into the trash with the order to take the first bus back home, which we did, after debating about trying to find the little baggie in the garbage pail.

It didn't end there, either. Me and my friend who'd emigrated from Ghana as a girl tried hanging out in her family neighborhoods of Harlem and Downtown Brooklyn, but without my Hispanic home-girl outfit from back in the day (slicked-back ponytail that made my hair look darker, bright red lipstick, big hoop earrings, and tight jeans), the people in those 'hoods treated me like an outcast on my own native soil, to be shunned and feared as a girl-child not of their kind.

The pinnacle of my brief career as a country criminal officially ended in the back of a Harlem liquor store with my girl, Donnel. She'd said she bought weed from the guy behind the plexi-glass window with a pull-out money drawer before, so it should be no problem. We laughed on the street before going in that he'd be afraid of me as a "white girl", which was the only way to explain my presence in certain parts of New York City that hoped they'd killed or frightened off the natives a long time ago. I mean, I look this way at 47; you can see from my photos how youthful I've always been.

And it's true; there's a purity and wholesomeness to me that doesn't go away with alcohol, or pot, or cigarettes, or junk food, because I don't let it. I want to live, even in the chaos of this world. And so, with one quick walk to the back of a ghetto liquor store, the nervous demeanor of your average black man livin' on my mean streets told me everything I needed to know about what my choices would be. In his wide-eyed stare, I immediately knew what side of the line that he'd drawn between us I stood on, and it was with the good guys.

"Uh uh. I ain't sellin' to huh." My friend improvised like the slick con she can be, rolling her eyes at him. "Oh, come on, man! I've bought from you before, no problem!" He wasn't buyin' it. "She a cop! You a narc?" He asked me flat out, but my friend pushed me aside. "Look at her! When was the last time you sold weed to a 15 year-old narc?!" And it was pretty incredulous, his irrational fear about a baby-faced teenage girl. But, just like that, I knew it in my heart, that this native New York girl wan't no criminal, and I never would be. As we left the store empty-handed, I could feel my less-principled friend cutting ties with me mentally, diverging in the opposite direction, because (s)he was right about me. I'm no fucking criminal. I AM THE LAW.

Agression

2017-05-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

Not a lot of people know this about me, but I dated an actual rock star, and not your garden-variety, mass market, "American Idol" pop star, either. No, "Kunte Kente" was (and is) a bona fide punk rocker with impressive music credentials. I met him at the recording studio I worked at, just as my marriage was breaking up, which was perfect timing. I needed a big head-of-steam to exit a poorly-made marriage, and punk rock gave me the edge I needed to punch my way out of a bad situation. That, and my new boyfriend threatened to kill my ex if he ever tried to contact me again, with a solid 6'1, 265 lb., ex-football player's frame to back it up. It was the perfect ending to a volatile relationship.

Kent had toured as a replacement guitarist for a skater band from Southern California called "Agression", led by frontman Mark Hickey. After that gig went bust, Mark moved back to Colorado to start a band called "Mark Hickey's Blues", and after that band broke up (Mark died from cirrhosis, like old rockers so often do), Kent and another singer created the band "Praise G-d And Pass The Ammunition" named after an old military song, that retained the sense of humor and spirit with which the previous bands were formed.

They were (like most native Coloradans) violently anti-hippie, what with the massive migration of tech transplants from Southern California fanning the flames of their homeland aggression. It was easy to see why. In less than five years, the landscape had totally changed. What was once gently rolling foothills leading to the massive Rockies grew almost overnight into generically suburban homes built in haste and poor taste, in ugly cul-de-sac after ugly cul-de-sac.

So much for the Western frontier. It was so bad that the state allocated their lottery proceeds for buying land in the foothills that will never be developed, creating an "open space" park system rife with obnoxious weekend warriors. In short, there was a lot to be angry about. The building boom that had given my ex and my new boyfriend so much work also crowded out the wildlife we loved so much. C'est la vie. Kent told me that being in a band was like juggling five girlfriends at the same time, because the interpersonal dynamics are so challenging.

Soon after we met and the band played a few gigs, Kent started grumbling about the "Yoko Ono" of their group: a tall, plain, skinny girl called "Precious". She'd broken up the lead singer's marriage to be the youngest of us all, and in the heat of that breakup, she lashed out at me as an uneasy target for their growing tensions, but it was too hard a sell, given the fact that I'd art directed their only CD, which made her hate me even more, since I had genuine work-related credentials. She wore a dog collar with a dog tag of her name around her neck proudly, even though Kent bought it as a snarky joke for her utter lack of a true identity, because he used tags in his line work as a master electrician.

Anyway, their interests were waning. Mike, the lead singer, and the drummer were both in their 40s, and Kent and I had moved in together with our own careers to look after. The only thing the 20-something girlfriend had to cling to was that group, which was naturally moving on, as she looked for someone to blame. But, touring gets old and so do the mean drunks throwing cans at the stage, which means most punk rock bands (fueled by youth) die a natural death, like it did for "Praise G-d". Still, every now and again, when I'm moving stuff around the house, I find those old CD's with their photos to remind me of our hardcore punk past, and it was a blast. Hang in there, rockers. Aging gracefully is never easy.

Mighty Bitch

2017-04-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

Moving back to New York was big enough to shake loose my Colorado boyfriend, just like moving out west shook up my New York ex. Me and my dog Ted didn't have easy escapes like my men, so we did what every woman with a family does: we made do. To help Teddy adapt to Brooklyn, I enrolled us into a basic obedience class to make our walks through Prospect Park (and around the neighborhood) safer. He never got used to the big inflatable rat union workers put up in protest on street corners, or the way subway grating vibrates above ground, whenever a train passes by underneath.

My main concern was his safety. After our first lesson, the dog trainer confirmed for me what I already knew. Open runs in Prospect Park are full of the biggest urban danger for every dog walker: bad owners and their pets. I'd seen a guy wrapped in padded clothing teach his German Shepherd to attack him every morning in the park during off-leash hours, which meant we had a serious timeline in place for the most challenging human environment on earth. It was what my new dog-training friend told me, too: if we walked our dogs every morning and evening in the park, it was only a matter of time before our pets would need stitches after an attack.

Fuck that! Ted had survived an e-coli/ebola infection from swimming in a lake in Denver's public park, and that was after he fully recovered from a car accident. It was enough to get me to commit to the classes, even though I was still interviewing in the city for work, rapidly losing weight after my ex left me with the high rent to pay. Mama always comes last. When my friend saw Ted snapping at treats with wolf-like gusto, she was delighted. Oh, so he "responds" to food! That's good! Some animals don't :( Ted was her first Malamute.

We quickly got bored with the easy exercises, which did not go unnoticed in class. The trainer realized Teddy was deciding which orders he would obey, based on his moods and the amount of cooked chicken with brown rice left in my pocket. It totally waylaid her. He was picking and choosing which commands to follow! On purpose!! Right. Welcome to snow dogs. After that, Ted would run through her little obstacle courses, standing by the side of the cones to razz his competition. Every time another dog tried to weave through the cones, he'd smile and "Woo!Woo!" loudly, laughing at them nervously shying away from him.

She kicked us out of the class for disturbing the other animals, which Ted took as a sign, pulling me towards the cold outside and the school doors. One animal was so badly inbred that the instructor had a special corner of the gym coned off just for the doddering old couple who diapered it and picked it up for staircases, because it didn't "do stairs". She said to me that she told them to put the animal down, but they'd already "bonded" with it. Oy vey...

A rather colorful gay couple had chosen the name "Noodles" for their surrogate child (this was before legalized gay marriage), which made the calling-out exercises a lesson in restraint for the entire class, as the masculine-looking female yelled at the top of her lungs in a sing-song voice (for an unnecessary "park-like" simulation): "NOOOOOODLESSSS! COOOOOME!" The short butch woman proudly recounted her training sessions in the park for us during class because she told us, "we're gonna win first prize!" There're fucking prizes?! After that, her and her long-haired femme made no secret that they saw me and Ted as their top competition in the small class. I was just trying to stay alive through the slow starvation of poverty while blocking Ted from swallowing my arm up to the elbow.

By coincidence, my father and stepmother were visiting during our last class. The teacher played graduation music for our walk down the saftey-cone aisle one more time, as I wisely skipped the cap and gown pictures that would only be Ted fodder turned to diarrhea later on. Because of our, uh, lack of commitment to the process, we got second place without even trying. Honestly, I'd never seen two happier lesbians in all my life, smiling proudly as they took the #1 blue ribbon home. It was for kinda hard for us to be angry at them. After all, the biggest bitch in class won.

McAir

2017-03-13T13:16:00.001-07:00

The first time I flew overseas, I was 19 and flying with my working class boyfriend from Brooklyn, which meant we were already connected before we stepped foot on the plane. His older brother had a union job at Aer Lingus, the Irish airline, because of his Irish roots. We'd been regaled with funny stories at their local bar in Bay Ridge about the comic misadventures of the shanty set, a colloquialism derived from the derogatory term for low class Micks who're "Shanty Irish", as it relates to their less-than-stellar housing situations. Irish "on the dole" live in sponsored housing just like here, called "Council Flats"; a mindset reflected in their cumbersome responses to international flight, as well.

We'd already heard from his brother Doug about the neighborhood guy he booked on a cheap flight as a favor, who'd stuffed as many American-made jeans as he could into a bunch of garbage bags that he crammed into the plane's overhead compartments, only to be foiled by the physics of storage that found his loot exploding into the aisle before being escorted off the plane by security, because illegal contraband is in violation of several international laws. He'd sheepishly explained to them that good jeans were hard to find in Ireland, and at the late 80s price of $10-25 a pair (depending on the buyer), he'd be sure to make a killing that'd sponsor several flights back and forth.

Ya, right? It was true, too. Levi's jeans were a thousand times better than the tacky, cheaply-made, thinly-fabricated knock-offs available to foreign markets at the time, with their poorly placed pockets and overly long pants legs that scraped the ground to become tattered around the cuffs rather early on. They just didn't look right, especially on Europeans. We'd been, in a word, "prepped" for our experience beforehand, and our fellow fliers did not disappoint us on this first, uniquely Celtic crossing.

After being seated, I'd already seen the most handsome Catholic priest in collar I'd ever seen in my life; a beautiful blond boy barely in his 20s, young-looking like us. Whew...Irish clergy were different. His brother Doug had a nice surprise waiting for us, too. He'd tried to bump us "up" into First Class, but the stewardess told us Brian Dennehy, the well-known American actor, had already been seated there, as she handed us a couple of Mimosas. Ah, best to be careful about it, then. With that, we were already plugged into local gossip. She said it was being told that Mr. Dennehy was looking to buy a pub in Dublin (the big stars do that as investments, like Bono from U2), and a potential deal that could be so financially favorable was to be supported by all of us, especially if we were keen for an economic boost, which we were.

As nervous a flier as I can be during long flights with turbulence, I'd never felt safer than I was on that flight, bolstered as we were by a large gaggle of nuns seated in coach with us. Surely, G-d won't knock us out of the sky with this many clergy on board? And you know what? He didn't! It was a smooth ride until the prop plane trip to Amsterdam, but even the weather gods can't do much about that. Like my first time to Italy, I swore as we left on our returning flight from Galway that I'd be back to Ireland, and I'm proud to write that I kept my promise, even at great expense to myself. Would you expect any less? I wouldn't. To you and yours on this special Irish holiday month, and for every day after. Be safe.

One-Two Punch

2017-02-17T12:19:00.000-08:00

Before I graduated from the publishing industry to become a totally broke independent, I honed my repartee skills on a viciously left-wing website that was popular with a devoted lesbian crowd while I worked a day job as an Art Director, but first I needed the right avatar for my online persona: a "front" for my actual intellectualism as a genuine media professional working in the big city among so many striving, pseudo-literary poseurs.

I found the perfect image in an actress whose breakthrough part had been playing it straight in a thinly-masked gay role about a female boxer from the 'hood. Because I was training hard in MMA at the time, my sports lingo was freshly dyke-friendly, which dovetailed nicely since the "out" actress had practically crashed her car on the set of a popular t.v. show with her also-drunk girlfriend in the passenger seat. She was dysfunctional enough for me to pass muster with the bullish traffic cops on the site. It got me "in" with their gatekeepers, as I began hunting the board during the annual summer slowdown that's our industry standard. I was so good at it, in fact, that I became a "starred commenter"; meaning, out of all the responses their articles generated, mine would be at the top of the list as a preferential read.

It was incendiary. As I won every conversation, the trolls went wild with bloodsport. The message boards were so hot that the editors, in a fit of diva pique, decided to remove them from the article's features one slow Monday morning, as their entire audience (myself included) wrote them the painful truth: our sparring meant to be a sideline to their "ChickLit" main event was far better than any trite, canned copy a bunch of easily-programmed drones could ever hope to write.

Their collective online works were such robotic, politically-correct pieces of crap, that any ass-kissing, first-year student at a women's college could regurgitate the tepid curriculum of an average "Gender Studies" class on their site. Their supposedly select cadre of special guest writers and accompanying editors didn't have an original point of view in the entire pretentious place, but I did. I was so unnerving to the home team that I earned a "rep" that carried me all the way here, to you: my beloved, faithful audience living in the land of the free and the home of the brave, in an actual writer's paradise that's "The Promised Land". Thanks for sticking with it. <Ding ding!> "HERE. WE. GO!"

The Geographic Cure

2017-02-02T12:58:00.000-08:00

The "Four Corners" of the American West exemplifies the idea that we are tied to our native lands by much more than a superficial connection, because any tourist who's been there can tell you that the biggest distinguishing feature to the monument is the same dusty red dirt on all four sides. Where does one state begin and the other end? Without a marker, you might not ever know.

That's not to say that it doesn't mean something to the people who live there. I hiked Harriman Park one summer several times with my dad, and for me, it became a lesson in identifying the landscape: first were the sticker bushes at the beginning of the trail, a small hillside with a dead deer slowly decaying, then a stand of pines above a waterfall, next to a rock quarry. By memorizing it, I was able to find my way in and out of the mountain, day or night. Those woods became home to me.

Most borderlines are like that, too: clearly defined by mountain chains, big lakes, or an entire ocean, just as I know that my eczema is worse in the warmer weather of New York because I'm missing the cold water seafood of Nova Scotia. And no, I can't pop a couple of pills or pile on expensive (and probably toxic) prescription-only lotions, gels, and salves. My body IS the land that I come from, so closely is our health reliant on this connection.

Armed with knowledge and experience, I avoided most of the pitfalls that accompany people who move around frequently. I didn't (and don't) pretend that a different view or country will cure or improve the human condition, as much as I can accurately recognize what a real home is, what "home" means to me, and when it isn't that, unlike many of my friends and peers who feel that changing locales is like going to a fun, new, costume party every single night of the week.

At its worst? An old college classmate of mine who was a typical Middle American cheerleader from Minnesota, then a fashion designer all about clothes and arty trends, and then a burnt-out Californian in her 30s and 40s just looking to "mellow out and chase waves", when she'd once been afraid of swimming alone in the Atlantic Ocean without her native Northeastern friends by her side in the water. Of course, besides the outfit changes lies her serious case of manic-depression that's incurable, which is the real "final frontier" for us, as human beings: the inner-space of our minds, filled as they may be with the broken dreams of what might've been. It's time to come home.

Ongka's Big Moka

2017-01-26T12:19:00.000-08:00

The gods must have been crazy to show a bunch of hard-partying, state school kids a movie about a tribe in Papua, New Guinea that selects a new "head honcho" to enrich so that everyone can have a chance to participate in the fun, but that's exactly what happened when a class in Cultural Anthropology tore its way through my crowd. After that, the stoners went wild with late night discussions about society's failings. Why couldn't Americans be, like, more hip? Yeah, right. Why?

Most of the time, our talks took place in the off-campus living rooms of rich suburban hippies whose parents bought them cars and homes to go back to after school. We'd be eating their mama's carefully shipped food like starving charity cases, when I'd been cooking all my life. Pot makes the crazy kids even nuttier, so I sat on my growing unease with my hands tucked between my knees most of the time, in the freezing old houses we rented for cheap. It never seemed warm enough, no matter how many layers we put on.

But, the idea was interesting. If a group of people agreed to it, could you actually give away all of your stuff to someone else without being a total asshole about it? It seemed doubtful, the way hippie kids tried to outdo each other over things like mixed tapes of live Dead shows, while they argued about who had the best collection. The hippies at school were some of the worst kinds of kids, too: petty, deceitful, spiteful, arrogant, defensive, condescending, overly competitive, and cheap. They wouldn't give anyone a loose joint for free, let alone the whole dime bag. These kids were gonna grow up to save the world? It's 2017, and guess what? I'm still waiting on that.

Red Light

2017-01-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

At the same time I was feeling out my identity as a young illuminator (that came to a head over a collection of excellently preserved Gutenberg Bibles at the Trinity Library in Dublin), my college boyfriend decided it would be exotic for us to smoke pot in Amsterdam, rather than our less glamorous state-school dorm rooms. I didn't really think of it as "fun", so much as a really far away place to travel to, so we could smoke some hash that we'd get cheaper back in New York, but like his newly found discovery of sex (I was his first), he seemed to think that the world would totally change if he was high in another part of it, which it does not.

It's like getting drunk in a bunch of different bars; you just get drunk in different rooms. Accents and a hip European locale, was (and is) travelling to a lot of young tourists: places to get drunk and high for more money. It was stupid, wasteful, and stressful for me to be stoned in another language with an American passport back in the late 80s as a teenager, because you don't need to get a hangnail over and over again to know they hurt badly.

But, of course, who I was and what I wanted was much less relevant to him, since he was paying for the trip. So, before I could miss seeing "The Book of Kells" opened to a text-only folio because the library is closed on Mondays (and I had to fight to stay an extra day to see even that), I found myself sitting in a small commuter prop plane made for European businessmen after a long intercontinental flight from the U.S., exhausted and scared beyond belief at the jostling in a tiny plane, so my boyfriend could smoke pot in a bar.

We nervously went into a hash cafe and ordered pot off a menu from a bored hippie behind a plexi-glass window, to take a seat at a cafe table rolling smokes and drinking beer. Because smoking cigarettes in a bar was still legal back then, it felt exactly like sitting in a bar smoking and drinking, except pot was included with the beer and cigarettes. Just like Ireland is much more to me than a quaint pub to drink in, Amsterdam was punctuated by incredible artistic experiences for me as a college student, like seeing a Rembrandt for the first time, or Vermeer's painting of a milkmaid pouring from a jug by an open window.

There isn't any kind of smoke or lager to compete with that, and my non-artistic boyfriend knew it, hence his sniping sabotages and subterfuges that I'd outgrow right after college. It was the same with the much-hyped "Red Light District" of Amsterdam, walking its cobblestone streets at night alongside the winding, misty canals: if Bart hadn't stopped me at the end of a block to inquire, I'd never had known we just walked down a street with legal prostitution.

New York City hookers were loud, cat-calling addicts running wild through the streets, ready to jack the car of any trick who tried to run them over, not these genteel plate-glass storefronts with a chair in the middle of a window. He made me walk back down the block again, stoned and high as a kite, so I could take it all in, this time aware of what I was looking for. Well...what did I think? Of a beefy, middle-aged, frazzled-haired blond woman sitting alone in a window on a plain wood chair wearing ugly lingerie? Like it was quiet desperation mixed with incredible loneliness and a deeply penetrating sadness. Almost immediately, I missed the bright lights and big things of Times Square; of home.

The Underground

2017-01-12T11:31:00.000-08:00

When the northern states abolished slavery forever, they became revolutionary for a second time since the original thirteen colonies war for independence with Britain, except this was much more personal. It split a new nation in half along the Mason-Dixon line, between a falsely sharp black-and-white divide, punctuated by the shocking bloodshed of The Civil War.

Of course, the reality of American life is that European colonization and its economy based on imported African slave labor created a corrupt dynamic on top of a native culture that had already bartered, traded, and mated with newly-arrived locals, to create the first mixed ethnicity outside of plantation boundaries. In opposition to the insanely cruel inhumanity that drove the southern slave trade, an underground railroad was designed to free people from their captivity through a secret network of waterways, safe houses, and territories, up to the free states of the north.

New York was essential to the resettlement of freed slaves via its connected waterways of rivers, streams, and brooks. Not far from where I am now is a historic town on the Hudson River called "Nyack", that has a few old underground stops made for a people who yearned to be free. From here, they could escape to the colder north of our upstate wilderness, impenetrable in the wintertime to a slaving people used to the much warmer weather of the American south. Even further north are the prominent river and bay area conduits to Canada, to the always-free provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

We still have rebellious warrior genes in our blood, represented in the eye-patch logo for the Pearl River Pirates high school football team, or the horned helmet for the team from my high school alma mater, the Clarkstown South Vikings of West Nyack. Here, there is same blended ethnicity as Solomon Northup, the famously kidnapped and freed New Yorker from "12 Years A Slave": Indian, African, European, even Asian blood running hotly through our veins. If you ever need to escape tyranny, I knew a few buccaneers who'll help. Welcome to the underground, my friends. You've reached terminus, the end.
Finally, free at last.

Patchouli

2017-01-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Oprah famously said on her talk show that she loved giving away stuff because "GIVING FEELS GOOD", in a not-so-veiled reference to the compulsiveness that drives the lives of so many celebrities. Who doesn't like a new car?! Right? It's sort of like a shopping high, except you and your audience participate in the buzz of "new car smell" together, like a bunch of giggly girls at a sleepover sucking on helium balloons and doing bad cartoon voices.

After the hangover from her giveaways, Oprah was stuck with an African lawsuit alleging sexual abuse (herself a victim of molestation as a young girl) at the all-girls boarding school she famously built in Africa to make better female Africans, as weird a gesture for an eccentric rich American to make as ever. Much like Mark Zuckerberg's condescending attitude about giving "free internet" to those poor Africans (what about us here?), it's a do-gooder pose that hides, if not malicious intent, then some seriously disordered intentions.

At the local free library, such cheap easy sentiment runs rampant through their special needs policies (to attract local, state, and federal funding), that includes someone else cleaning up the messes from their ridiculous build-a-bag-from-newspaper workshops for retarded adults. They pander to brain disordered people without actually giving a fuck about the abuses tied to their presence at a place for advanced learning (which a library used to be), including not monitoring heroin users on the nod at their public access computers. That's distasteful and not part of their job!

It's okay to pad their typically empty building with Down Syndrome people, or day residents from the local psych center who need healthcare over stupid craft projects, because that's what makes them FEEL GOOD. The lady with carpel tunnel and OCD can feel proud that she shelves books all day very precisely, over those poor unfortunates struggling to use a mouse without her benevolent help. It keeps their corrupt system of co-dependence in place, so everybody who's sick benefits without actually calling it that.

That would be "labelling" and they don't do that in their "judgment-free zone", except for this: every book and media product in a library is very carefully assigned a Library of Congress category (by people like me) for the purpose of classification, bar-coded (also by people like me) for the ease of finding it by corresponding subject at their very place of employment. The dysfunctional pattern they're trapped in is so bad, that the disabled people working there were separated to me from the handicapped patrons they condescend to only by the distinctive blend of arrogant social "do-gooders" everywhere, saturated as they are by the scent of patchouli, a hippie's classic olfactory weapon of choice. See you in the stacks, kids.

En Velo

2017-01-03T11:59:00.000-08:00

Caroline was a French foreign-exchange student at our high school I met in French class, because when the teacher asked her to read, she read our curriculum the way I read "Moby Dick": flawlessly, like a native. Everyone in class turned around to look at her in astonishment, until the teacher finally admitted she was French-born like herself. Oh.

I immediately asked her afterward why she was taking it, because a lot of the students were worried that she would throw off the curve for the entire class, and we were fourth-year language, Regency-diploma students with advanced college credits (Amy and Michael Wechsler, I'm thinking of you two, specifically). I didn't want to see her attacked by the other students for the rest of the year, and with a last name like "Doucette", the only other French name in our senior class, I felt honor-bound to become her friend. It was the right thing to do.

She was a really nice person to talk to, actually. Besides, she explained to me that she was taking senior-level classes at a high school that was foreign to her, given entirely in English. She had a grade-point average to protect, too. After all, European colleges were a lot more particular about grades than our more well-rounded studies that included athleticism and the arts. They wanted certain numbers as cut-off points for certain levels, and that was that. Taking French would guarantee her an easy "A" she really needed, because she had to take Chemistry as her science requirement in English, and she was completely struggling with it, as you could imagine.

Her fluency as an excellent student at home in the south of France found her using a tutor after school just to get through the lesson plans, which was embarrassing enough for her. There was still the social stigma of her year in New York to be addressed. She lived with her affluent grandparents in an exclusive neighborhood of expensive architect-designed houses, each one a unique statement about the intrinsic wealth of New Yorkers. Her grandfather was a tenured History professor in the city, and her grandmother an eccentric Japanese calligrapher with a private studio equipped with Shoji screens and custom sliding doors, wandering around the house with an affected air of white privilege as she toured the grounds in her cheomsang.

They were, in short, insufferable, and Caroline had been sent abroad because of a sexual scandal in her hometown after she'd fallen in love with an Arab boy. Her parents "je ne sais quoi" about providing her with birth control pills as a 16 year old minor ended when confronted with his gang affiliation and darker skin. She told me he was part of a moped gang that did violent "drive-bys" for their initiation. As his girl, she rode on the back of his bike during their fights with rival gangs. They would hold razor blades between their fingers to swipe at each others faces, making long-lasting scars that they wore with pride.

"Like thees", she showed me as if holding a blade sharp-side down between her index and middle finger, "pht pht!", imitating a slashing sound. They'd go for cuts across the cheeks that would be permanent reminders of their epic Euro battles made from small scooters imported from Italy. After a couple of run-ins with the cops, her parents freaked out and she was shipped here, to New York City and its environs, which I found questionable as a choice. She immediately took up with a few Asian martial arts guys at school, as her latest ethnic fetish. But, it did the trick of unsticking the dangerous Arab boy from her, which was the whole point. By the end of the year, I spoke French like "une naturelle", acing my college-level language classes. Merci, Caroline. Pour toi.

After Midnight

2016-12-29T11:56:00.001-08:00

Despite occasional harsh prejudices to the contrary, I remain an unpopular "day person" awake in the dawn of your socially acceptable manic-depression. In my small town of Pearl River, only two businesses operate 24/7, 365 days/year: the convenient store on the corner doing a brisk business in chemically-laden tobacco, booze, energy drinks, junk food, and lotto tickets, or the chain drugstore right across the street with its handy drive-up window.

It speaks to our priorities about what we feel is most important to us in our lives, and it's the commercialized convenience of excess, which makes my natural body-clock jarring to the pale shakiness of a typical "night owl". Nor does it stop at a simple day/night dichotomy either, observed through the touchy tenderness about "alternative" circadian rhythms. It was in this vein that I suffered through each and every New Year's Eve with my mom growing up, who gets a "jolt of energy" (her words) between 10-11 p.m., moving around her carefully controlled, highly monitored "home environment" (her words again) to wash dishes and do laundry, then check her emails until 12 p.m.-1:30 a.m., unless of course I want to watch the UFC fights in her apartment airing "late" that end around her usual bedtime of 2:00 a.m. Then, my entire life and schedule is immediately suspect and abused.

It didn't matter how much my mom and her freaky friends or family "made fun" of me for sleeping at night, even if it was New Year's Eve. When you wake up between 6-7 a.m. in the morning, you go to sleep in the evening whether you want to or not, and that's healthy, except if you're paranoid and bipolar. Then, it's the complete opposite. Most of the seriously disordered people I know crave sugar, caffeine, or cocaine to get that rush when the depressive side of their illness kicks in, making them miss active late nights over a feeble, disabling, daytime lethargy. Of course, I can stay up for an event if I plan for it, but if I don't have to, I don't. It's simple: no dinner date or late-nite party to attend, I'm asleep. And I'll probably be working the next day.

So, to all you lone wolves regularly sleeping with the sun like I do, know that you're not alone in your healthy sleep habits this New Year's Eve. And no, Jane, there's nothing wrong with getting a full 8-9 hours of sleep, despite peer pressure or what you've been told about "peak performance hours" for "maximum productivity". They're marketing buzzwords for anxiety and mania, anyway. Have a good night's sleep, and I'll see you all in 2017, fans of daytime. G-d bless.

Arena

2016-12-27T10:30:00.000-08:00

Warriors have always been regarded by society with fear, awe, and a little trepidation. Would you want to get on the bad side of someone who could kill you ten different ways before your body even hits the ground?! It might make friendships and relationships a little bit trickier, but I like to think that it makes us more honest and respectable towards each other, because we're both combatants. After all, fighting is a legitimate (and fun!) sport of women competing against other women, not men. It isn't a fair fight, anyway. Men have the biological advantage because of their greater height, strength, and muscle mass.

That's not to say that a female black belt can't take out a larger, less well-trained man, because they do so in dojos around the world every day. It's just stating that two athletes of the same skill and experience who are of different sexes are not evenly matched, which is why we do not compete in arenas together....in this century. In the past, prisoners, exiles, and other enemies of the state fought their way to freedom in Ancient Rome's Coliseum.

It is an awesome site to see. It's much bigger than it looks in pictures, which makes its past more frightening when you think about how many people watched other people (and every kind of animal known to mankind) die very violent deaths, for so many years. It was their Metropolitan Opera, major Broadway musical, and giant concert stage, operating around (and between) fights to the death. There were side stages, dropped floors with hidden panels, rising platforms bringing up lion cages to the main stage, chambers for costuming with props, an armory, and a network of highly sophisticated, intricately complex irrigation systems that flooded a stage with water, to re-create epic battles at sea for "The Empire".

The sheer spectacle and grandeur of it, even all these years later...to say that the Coliseum is impressive is a totally inadequate understatement. It wasn't just the size and scale of their stagings, either. Gladiatore were huge stars. You can still see graffiti in Rome scratched into the ancient walls that publicize and congratulate favorite fighters of the day. Cemeteries have stone tributes to enslaved warriors who won their freedom from the empire through the shedding of blood for sport, which must have sat uneasily on a cornered Christian's shoulders, new as they were back then to the pagan state of Rome. It's a good thing we believe in forgiveness and redemption, mes gendarmes, because death by mass suicide isn't in our credo either. Rest easy, warrior.

The Book of Ende

2016-12-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

Becoming a female illuminator in the late 20th to early 21st century has been arduous, odd, and ultimately, my raison d'etre thus far. Unlike, say, Impressionism or the Renaissance period, any examples I found of exceptional illuminating were extremely rare, and a female's excellent works rarer still. But, they were there. Back in my apprenticeship, St. Martin's Press had annual editorial buying trips to England, in a reverse production process that had us recalibrating equipment to accommodate film flats done the exact opposite of our photographic process used for plate-making on American presses, but I digress.

Murder mysteries were (and still are) an export with an easy audience here in the States, as any real publishing professional will tell you. Just look at the numbers for Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie, and the "Dial __ for Murder" series. My mother is particularly enamored with a British show currently airing on PBS about two older women who plan estate gardens and solve murders, in the exact same format every single week, which is the core demographic for any murder mystery audience.

Edward Gorey famously illustrated an opening spot for the introduction to the PBS "Masterpiece Theater" murder mystery series, in a gothic pen-and-ink style that had the 90s graduating classes of RISD's Illustration department completely under his spell: a cool, hermetic character who left New York City after his own career in publishing for Provincetown, to create work reminiscent of the the 1900-1930s Art Nouveau revival, but I digress again.

At work, we produced a series of murder mysteries by British authors that I still have on my bookshelves, with one stand-out selection: "The Apothecary Rose". Here, we find a female herbalist working in a medieval abbey garden attached to a cloister, who also solves murders most foul. Back then, the weapon of choice was often poison secreted from the abbey garden or her own apothecary shelves, for death-dealing instead of healing.

The same fictional construct used in murder mysteries was the actual historical context for female illuminators working in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: artists who were either raised in the family business of making books attached to a prestigious monastery, or the nuns working in the scriptorium of their own monasteries. It was uncommonly educated and rare for anyone to read, write, and paint with such skill, but for a woman? Well, that's another story entirely.

Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, to my illuminated readers of 2016.