All Is Not Luminous

2011-11-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

Why I Give a Rat's Ass About Ashton & Demi

I don't know that they were the oddest couple ever (um, Anna Nicole Smith and that octogenarian), but I can't imagine anyone looking at Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher and thinking, "Yeah, that makes total sense."

Quite the opposite. She comes across as sophisticated and humorless while he seems like a cross between a doofus and a douche--a doodou. So I guess it's fitting that she didn't find anything funny about his extramarital affairs. Cue the divorce announcement.

I can't say that I was surprised, but I was surprised that I was sad.

I wanted Moore and Kutcher to go the distance, if for no other reason than to prove a younger man could love, honor and find an older woman attractive into her 50s, 60s and beyond. I mean, Hollywood's offered us plenty of examples of the opposite: Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart, Regis and Kelly. Demi's ex, Bruce Willis (56), is 23 years older than wife #2; 23, coincidentally, is the age of Willis' daughter Rumer.

I'm old enough to remember Demi Moore's debut as the much-reviled Jackie Templeton on "General Hospital," a woeful attempt to fill the vacuum left by Genie Francis. Which means that, gulp, like Moore, I'm over the age of 40 (but not as far over as she is, let's get that straight).

So I was rooting for her and Ashton. Somehow, my logic went, if the two of them could make it, it would be a victory for every woman on the far side of the 18-35 demographic. See, we're still relevant. See, men find our confidence and life experience a turn-on. See, we're in our prime. Ashton + Demi = validation of my very existence.

I know--trust me, I know--that's a stupid and irrational belief system I've got going. But it's also stupid and irrational that the current darlings of the red carpet are Hailee Steinfeld, Chloe Moretz and Elle Fanning--combined age, 12. Against this tidal wave of youth culture, Demi was the dam holding at bay the utter annihilation of all humans born prior to 1990. And now the dam has been breached.

Last weekend, we were visiting my brother, his wife and their new baby in St. Louis. As we were saying our good-byes, we ran into a neighbor from their apartment building, a female law student. Before my brother could introduce us, she blurted, "Are these your parents?"

Are these your parents? Granted, I'm 9 years old than my brother, but our mother is 35 years his senior. Do I look 70? Do I?

I physically recoiled at her comment, which tipped the nymph that she had made an egregious mistake. "We don't like you," my husband added. He was kind of, sort of, not really joking.

We continued idly chit chatting for a few more awkward moments and then headed toward our respective cars. "You know, she's in her twenties," my brother said, once we were out of earshot. "Everyone looks old to her." (Actually, I probably looked like her mom to her. I did the math, it's technically possible.) Forty, 70, 100--yeah, we're all the same. Not young.

But Demi taught us that didn't matter. Demi taught us that we could be physically appealing well past the age when women of previous generations were pushed aside. Demi was a big f-you to Emma Stone, Keira Knightley, Evan Rachel Wood and the rest of their porcelain-skinned sisters. I might have envied her impossibly toned body and insanely lustrous raven locks, but damn, she made the rest of us feel like we still had game.

Then Ashton had to go and cheat on her with some young piece of trash. Turns out he's the pig, cheat, louse and overall ass I always thought he was. Worse, he proved all the naysayers right, all the folks who said Demi-Ashton, couldn't work and wouldn't last. I hate that he pretty much confirmed their opinion that one day he would wake up and say, "Shit. My wife is old. She works her ass off to not look it, but she is. And some day, she's going to be all wrinkled and stuff."

But that's not why they broke up. Truth is, their marriage ended because he's a big doodou.

2011-08-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

A Little Mississippi in All of Us

I went to see "The Help" at the Davis Theater this weekend and I suspect I wasn't the only one at the Sunday matinee who thought, "God, I'm glad I'm not from Mississippi."

Not that I've ever met anyone from Mississippi, ever visited the state or plan to, but I've got a pretty good idea--thanks to TV and the movies--of what it's like to live there: it's hot and humid and racist. It's almost like Mississippi exists just to make the rest of us feel better about ourselves.

And walking out of "The Help," I did feel pretty darned good about the fact that I've never said the "n" word, never treated another person like property, never refused to let someone use my bathroom based on the color of their skin. I like to think that if I were raised in the Jim Crow South, I would have been, to borrow from "The Help," a Skeeter, not a Hilly.

Which is precisely what many find offensive about the film and the book on which it was based. It lets white people feel good, even heroic, about a decidedly woeful period in American history. We're all Skeeters now. Well, at least those of us who voted for a black man for president.

Except that any thoughtful person, of which I count myself one, will, after patting herself on the back, have the presence of mind to say, "Whoa, not so fast."

It's easy for us Yankees to feel superior to our Confederate counterparts until we take a look around our cities and neighborhoods, our schools and dining rooms. Back in Ohio, where I grew up, black people were so rare in my cozy little suburb that I can recall the name of every African-American student in my high school (not just my class, the entire school)--there were only five so it's really not such an impressive feat. I've lived in Chicago for nearly 20 years and in that time I've made a fair number of friends and acquaintances: single, married, older, younger, gay, Jewish, Serbian, gluten-free. Not a one of them black.

There are no black people in our condo building, just as I can can guarantee there are precious few white people living in certain areas of Chicago's South Side. Ride a Red Line train toward 95th Street some evening. If there are any white people still on board after Chinatown, it's a safe bet they're going to a Sox game. Take the Lakefront Bike Path south of McCormick Place, heck, south of the Museum Campus, and watch the hordes of white cyclists, runners and yes, a few diehard rollerbladers, dwindle to a trickle.

While black and white in Chicago typically breaks down along South Side and North Side boundaries, there are sizable Latino and Muslim populations in my little neck of the world. But you wouldn't know it from strolling through Lincoln Square most any day of the week. Ocktoberfest, May Fest, Apple Fest, Folk & Roots Fest--these all draw predominantly white crowds. The Latinos are over in River Park picnicking and playing soccer and volleyball. One of the city's few events that routinely attracted residents of all colors and creeds, the lakefront 4th of July fireworks, was canceled this year, leaving us all to celebrate the founding of our melting pot nation in our own segregated enclaves.

It would be simple to view "The Help" as revisionist history, or history filtered through the guazy kind of lighting that keeps Barbara Walters looking wrinkle-free and dewy at the age of 108. It's more challenging to look at "The Help" and see ourselves, in 2011. "Separate but equal" is alive and well in Chicago public schools. Wealthy white people are still relying on "colored" people to raise their children--look at all those Latino nannies.

And what of the bathroom situation, the rallying point of "The Help"? A few months ago, a repairman came into our home to fix our dishwasher. While I normally wouldn't feel the need to point out his ethnicity, for the purpose of this essay it's important to note that he was Latino. Before getting down to work, he asked to use the bathroom and, having had a few bladder emergencies myself, I responded, "Of course." He was so grateful, you'd have thought I'd just offered to pay off his mortgage. "Do people really say 'no'?" I asked him. Oh yes, he assured me. Plenty of women would rather have their serviceman waste time driving around looking for a McDonald's or an empty alleyway to pee in than admit them to their bathroom. Maybe they would do the same if the person were white, or a woman, but there's a part of me that suspects not.

So, my apologies to Mississippi. Turns out you're not so different from the rest of us.

2011-07-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

I'm Saying It's Too Hot and You Can't Stop Me

I don't know why our local meteorologists persist in delivering long-winded forecasts these days when the weather can succinctly be summarized as "fucking hot." On to the traffic report.

Because I live in Chicago, I'm not supposed to complain about the blast furnace outside my door. I'm supposed to be happy it's 100 degrees and not 30 below. You know what, I'm not. I'll take the deep freeze over a heat wave any day.

My husband is fond of saying that I'm too cold until I'm suddenly too hot. The thing about being cold is that it's possible, especially in the age of the Snuggie, to warm up--just add layers. It also provides an excellent excuse to drink hot chocolate or stoke up the oven with a batch of cookies.

The thing about being too hot is that it's impossible in certain situations to get any cooler. Anyone who's ever stood on an "L" platform knows what I'm talking about.

There's a certain sense of adventure when it comes to braving the cold. You put on your parka, pull up your boots, add scarf, hat and mittens and tell Mother Nature to bring it on. It's exhilarating to push your shoulder into the wind, to wade through a snow drift, to feel icicles forming on your nose hairs. You feel like an explorer, conquering the South Pole.

By contrast, there's nothing fun about the heat. Forget a sense of adventure, there's no sense at all other than of being hot, hot, hot. We were walking to brunch yesterday and I had to tell Dave to stop trying to engage me in conversation--I was too busy concentrating on the line of sweat running from my boobs down my abdomen. (Don't get me started on sweat. That's a whole other topic.) Where the cold puts a bounce in my step, the heat makes me feel like I'm moving slow-motion through molasses--when I feel like moving at all.

I'm not saying I'd like the climate to be stalled on perpetual February. Don't get me wrong, February sucks. But so does July and for the most part August. It's just that in February, you look out the window and think, what a cozy night to stay in, pop some popcorn and watch a movie. In July, you look out the window and think, sure would love to go for a walk or a bike ride or sit at an outdoor cafe and read a book and show off my cute new sandals. But it's too fucking hot.

See you in September.

2011-06-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

Stand By Your Man

Several years ago, when I first started working at Tribune Co., one of my new colleagues asked what my husband did for a living. A harmless enough question. When I replied "social worker," the co-worker responded, "Oh. You must be the dynamic one in the relationship."

I was so offended, I didn't know how to react. I let the comment slide, but it has annoyed me ever since. And it keeps coming back to me, especially in light of recent scandals involving Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rep. Weiner (whose first name is now utterly irrelevant).

I suppose if you narrowly define "dynamic" as ambitious, and equate ambition with making gobs of money as our culture pretty much does, then, no, my husband Dave isn't dynamic. (Neither am I anymore, having left the Trib to become a starving freelancer.) He doesn't want to climb the corporate ladder or become Master of the Universe or a Captain of Industry. His huge career move was to graduate from social worker to teacher--he works in special education, helping disadvantaged kids reach their potential.

Dynamic? You be the judge, but he puts my ambitions to shame every day.

Actually, the word people most often use when they find out Dave's profession is "noble." This irks him to no end, I suspect because he senses the slight note of condescension in the term. They don't say "how exciting" or "how innovative" or "how challenging." They say "noble" as if he's off doing the bidding of angels, while the rest of us engage in the "real" world of commerce and business, stuff like manufacturing and retail and research. Stuff you can buy, sell and trade--including power and influence. These are the things we value. And while we're glad that people like Dave exist to take care of the young and elderly and all those starving people in Africa, the implication is always "better him than me." We'd much rather be Bill Gates. Or, until yesterday, Mr. Weiner.

I guess that's what bothered me about the whole "dynamic" exchange. My co-worker reduced Dave to his job title and annual salary and dismissed him as unimportant. Of lesser value.

Let's ask Maria Shriver and Mrs. Weiner how valuable Dave looks to them now.

This is why I married him. Not because I thought he would make a good provider or that we could become some sort of unstoppable super couple. I married him because at his core he's quite simply the best person I know.

So I'm fine vacationing in Michigan. Shopping at the Gap instead of Barney's. Eating cheap chow at local bar and grills.

Because I know that I will never have to stand behind a podium, facing a blitzkrieg of cameras and reporters, while my husband confesses to sexting, or sleeping with prostitutes, or fathering a child with the maid.

My guy may not be dynamic. He's so much better than that. He's loyal, faithful and true.

He's a keeper, not a weiner.

2011-05-31T10:31:00.000-07:00

Those Three Little Words

I spent my Memorial Day exercising my freedom to enjoy 40% off at the Gap. I'd like to say that I at least purchased items in the colors of red, white and blue, but truthfully I'm more of a yellow, purple and pink kind of gal. (Fun fact: Apparently Latvia is the lone country man enough to fly pink in its flag.)

It was only after I had spread out my new loot at home that I realized I had forgotten to check one important detail: the washing instructions. I swear, with God as my witness, that if any of these items were labeled "hand wash only," I would...never wash them.

Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at ferreting out dry clean only clothing. Certain fabrics are dead giveaways (wool, cashmere, silk), as are certain retail outlets (Banana Republic, say, versus Old Navy). You can avoid or buy at your own risk.

Hand wash, on the other hand, is like the stealth bomber of labels. Perfectly harmless T-shirts will, upon closer examination, prove to be too delicate for the old spin cycle. How have we allowed clothing manufacturers to perpetuate this fraud upon us? It's blatant sexism, I tell you.

The introduction of the washing machine freed women from hours of labor. Ladies, remember the bad old days when we schlepped down to the river to whack our jeans and sundresses against the rocks? How about scrubbing blouses and socks against washboards that our husbands mistook for an instrument in a bluegrass band? Yeah, me neither. Because, progress, thy name is Maytag. Except now there's a vast conspiracy to send us back to the Dark Ages, also known as 1930.

At least with dry cleaning, I can fob the work off onto someone else. Hand wash is just me, mano a mano with my garments. Frankly, there's a certain hubris I attach to an item that demands my individual attention, or is so fastidious as to refrain from mixing it up in the washer with her brothers and sisters in cloth. I'm more than a little put off by the presumption that my affection is so great as to overlook this major character flaw.

Against my better judgment, I occasionally succumb to temptation and pull little Miss Hand Wash out of the closet. I usually regret the decision about the time I'm scrubbing the bathroom sink so that it's clean enough to give Miss Prissy Hand Wash and her ilk a soak. Sopping wet items are then draped over the shower rod, picking up creases and rust fragments while dripping water all over the bathroom floor. All of which explains why I tend to simply throw "hand wash only" in the dryer with a fabric softener sheet and set to fluff. It's possible to smell clean without actually being clean.

This solution wasn't an option, though, when I dropped a greasy French fry on a brand-new hand wash tank top. Seriously, first time I had worn the thing. I tried spot cleaning with one of those Tide-to-Go pens--no go. Next I doused the stain with laundry detergent, scrubbed and rinsed. Now I had a big purple-bluish blotch in addition to the grease.

Screw it. I threw the top in the washing machine.

Would I remove the tank in tatters and shreds? Would it crumble to dust in my hands? Would it shrink, turn colors, lose its shape or cease to exist altogether? I waited with bated breath. (Not really. That's the beauty of laundry machines--set it and forget it.)

You know what happened? Nothing. Well, not exactly nothing--both the grease and the blotch were gone.

I was free! Free from the tyranny of hand wash. It was like finding a loophole in "some assembly required." Giddy with emancipation, I tossed another sacrifice into the maw of the washer. Same result.

Fair warning "Line Dry": I'm coming after you next.

2011-03-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

It All Comes Back to Hitler

A friend of mine recently introduced me to Godwin's Law, which states that any online discussion will invariably lead to Nazis or Hitler. Once you're aware of the Law, I promise you will start to notice it everywhere. To wit....

I have, for the better part of my life, been convinced that I was supposed to be British. As evidence: my obsession with the royal family, my love of Jane Austen, and my preference for stiff upper lips versus touchy-feely Oprah-style self confession.

Now David Lebovitz has me thinking I might be French. Frankly, the notion had never occurred to me. I don't consider myself particularly rude. I'm definitely not uber-fashionable (I'm wearing sweats and slippers as I type, quel horror!). And I don't get Jerry Lewis.

But in his book, The Sweet Life in Paris, Lebovitz more than once calls out the French for a decidedly non-American quirk: they don't believe in customer service. Tres magnifique!

These are my people.

During college, I worked at a department store to earn extra spending money. Compared to, say, working at a nuclear power plant in Japan, it was not a particularly onerous job, though I definitely thought it was. My personal pet peeve: customers entering my orbit anywhere within a half hour of closing time, when I had pretty much already counted out my register. I was scheduled until 9 p.m., not 9:15, people.

Our company's motto was "We want what you want," which was emblazoned on buttons we were all supposed to wear. I made up my own slogan, which I shared with my pal Tom, who worked in Men's while I was ghettoized in Children's: "We don't give a damn what you want."

The thing is, customers and management operated under the delusion that employees (dressed up as "associates") were there to serve them. Wrong. We were there to pass a set amount of time in order to collect a certain amount of money, nothing more. Whether we waited on 30 people or 3, our salary was the same. Personally, when I was slotted into the early morning shift, I made it a goal to see if I could get through the day without a single sale (busying myself rearranging the sock wall). If a customer came in with a return and put me in the red, so much the better.

Apparently the French are like-minded and I was all set to celebrate my newfound heritage with a croissant and a rendition of La Marseillaise when Lebovitz noted another Gallic trait: these people refuse to wait their turn in line. Egads!

This I could not abide. I am a big fan of rules, even unwritten ones, and I like people to follow them. Order is everything.

"You would like Germany," my brother said.

That's funny, because I am German. Or, to be more precise, a good number of my ancestors hail from Deutschland.

But nobody wants to be German. As a people, they're not as fun as the Irish, as chic as the French, or as romantic as the Italians. They're hard-working nose-to-the-grindstone folks who are obsessed with recycling, but they also damn near annihilated the world. Twice.

It's hard to wear your German heritage with pride. Sure, you can strap on some leiderhosen and act a fool, but in the backs of people's minds, they will always think, "Nazi" or "holocaust."

My neighborhood used to be Chicago's German enclave and there's still a residue of German influence, specifically an annual Oktoberfest parade. We ran into an old neighbor during last year's festivities. "My Jewish friends won't even come here," he told us. "They think this is so offensive."

Never mind that most of the people participating in the parade were born in the U.S. or after WWII. When it comes to Germans, it's guilt by association with Hitler.

Viva la France!

2011-03-15T09:20:00.000-07:00

We Need More Jennifer Egans

Jennifer Egan, you just won the National Book Critics Circle Award! Where are you going next?

"To the Harold Washington Library!"

Fresh off the honor for her highly innovative A Visit From the Goon Squad (a prize many felt was destined to go to Jonathan Franzen), Egan appeared at Columbia College's Story Week in Chicago.

While not addressing the surprise win directly, Egan did note: "There's a cultural expectation that our most adventurous books will come from men. I was aware of feeling that I might be overreaching. There was the sense, 'Am I allowed to do this?'"

She was and she did, but a number of her fellow female authors seems to have denied themselves the same permission.

For the past year or so, I've been reviewing books for Booklist. Maybe the editor there has me pigeonholed into reading works from a specific genre, but it seems like all the female authors I've been assigned write about one topic and one topic only: relationships. A popular sub-topic: marital infidelity.

I'm not saying this isn't fertile ground for a novel--heck, even Franzen thought so--I'm just saying there's a whole wide world of other material out there that women shouldn't leave to the guys to explore.

Take the two most recent books I've reviewed (both due out this summer): One is about a woman's break-up with her long-time boyfriend and subsequent whirlwind romance with and marriage to her rebound guy. The other is about a wildly dysfunctional summer camp, a misfit counselor, and a tragic act of shocking violence. Guess which book is by a female author.

I realize I'm making a sweeping generalization here, and of course there are exceptions. Hilary Mantel picked up a slew of accolades for Wolf Hall, which had nothing to do with Men from Mars and Women from Venus and everything to do with Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell.

More of that please.

2011-03-09T09:29:00.000-08:00

Why Skyrocketing Gas Prices Are a Good Thing

I'll admit, I'm freaked out about growing older. If I spot a gray hair, I pluck it (alas, half the time it turns out to be a golden highlight). If there's a moisturizer that markets itself as age-defying, I buy it. If I had the money, I don't even like to think about what I'd do with collagen.

As much as I focus on the physical--I'm also working on my balance and strength-building--it's the financial aspect of my senior years that has me more than a little worried.

"I hope you kids have as much fun in your retirement as we're having in ours," my dad says, while he blows through my inheritance. Never mind that half his money came from his father, who never met a nickel he didn't like to hoard.

I see lots of cat food in my future.

So the other day, Dave and I decided to get our financial house in order. We met with a bona fide investment adviser--he worked in a bank and wore a tie--and tried to look smart and moderately interested as he talked about things like IRAs and annual yields and bond exposure.

He recommended a few mutual funds that might perform well for us. I hated to tell him that, frankly, us sinking our money into anything is a near certain guarantee it will tank overnight: I'm pretty sure we're the only people who didn't make money hand over fist in the late '90s; the original owners of our condo realized a 50% profit in 2 years and we...well, I don't have to tell you about the real estate climate. The only stock I ever owned outright was in a newspaper company. Hah, joke's on me.

Still, as The Adviser scrolled through his charts and graphs, it was hard not to swoon over funds that with past-year growth in the 20% range were as attractive as George Clooney in a tuxedo (forget 5-year averages of 3%, which are like George Clooney in a beard and fat suit). We could be rich! So long cat food and pass the caviar.

The thing is, as we delved deeper into our potential holdings, we found where the money was being made. While most of the funds were incredibly diversified, with rarely more than 5% invested in any one sector, almost all had oil at the top of their list.

"It's a good time to be in oil," The Adviser joked with a dorky guffaw that suggested why he'd been banished to an outlying branch of this particular financial institution rather than afforded a corner office at central headquarters.

So here was a conundrum. Did we want to be in oil?

Ethically, no. I believe in global warming. I take public transportation. We recycle. And I'm pretty sure that if America weren't so dependent on oil, our government could afford to fund things like health care for all its citizens instead of a war in Iraq.

But financially? Dave and I need to make money. We need for Wall Street--which I totally despise for having cost a good number of my friends and family their jobs--to go gangbusters. We need this because Americans are expected to pay for their retirement years through ever increasing gains in the stock market as opposed to a more reliable safety net. Like, say, a pension.

Pension has, of late, become a dirty word. It's what those fat cat union employees collect while the rest of us muddle through with our vastly depleted 401 (k)s. What I don't understand is why, instead of being angry at--and let's be truthful, jealous of--these individuals, we don't demand the same benefit. Why, instead of asking the corporations that profit from our labor to invest in our retirement, are we expected to invest in them?

I remember back in the '80s when my dad lost his pension--the owners of his company looked at that big pile of cash and decided they'd like to have it for themselves. I was in junior high or high school at the time, so I had bigger concerns, like curling my hair, but I was profoundly aware of the stress this produced in our household. Suddenly my dad didn't have to just worry about paying the mortgage and putting food on the table and doling out allowances to four greedy kids, he had to worry about paying for all those things 50 years down the road. Subtracting the allowances and adding golf course fees.

He began saving like a fiend. Every expense became a catastrophe. Every school fee, every doctor's appointment, every bottle of contact lens solution felt like we were dooming mom and dad to the poorhouse. Meanwhile, his boss indulged his hobby of Civil War reenactments.

So, yea for the demise of pensions.

Which brings us back to The Adviser and our debate about oil. The thing is, my grandpa lived to be 98. If I inherited those genes--along with his sweet tooth and short stature--my nest egg needs to be feathered for a really long haul. "How much is enough?" Dave asks.

We're going into oil.

2011-02-15T07:11:00.000-08:00

Remembrance of Valentine's Past

Marcel Proust dips a madeleine in a cup of tea and cranks out the world's longest novel. I see madeleines and think Valentine's Day 1996.

At the time, I had been "dating" my now-husband Dave for about six weeks. I say "dating" because we lived in different states and during those six weeks we had seen each other exactly once, our relationship built less on dinner and a movie and more on phone calls and letters (ah, those quaint pre-email days; 1996 sounds like Victorian England). He had traveled to Chicago in January and for Valentine's I reciprocated with a visit to Ohio. And I have no idea why, but I thought that baking him a batch of madeleines would be the perfect way to convey that he was The One. I guess they delivered the message successfully because by the next Valentine's Day, we were engaged.

I don't think I've made madeleines since--in the pastry canon, they're about a gazillion notches below anything with chocolate--but sweets have factored into most of our Valentine's celebrations, whether it's a candy jar filled with conversation hearts or a red velvet cupcake. This year we kicked things up a notch: Fritz Pastry announced a pop-up dinner that would feature five to six dessert courses. Seriously? Dessert for dinner. Why has no one thought of this before (besides me)?

Because man can not live on lemon granita alone, the meal started off with fennel soup and a salad sandwich, followed by a vegetable ragout encased in phyllo. (A fellow diner provides far better photos than I was able to snap.) Having duly consumed our recommended daily allowance of vitamins and fiber, the granita cleansed our palates of all that wholesomeness and it was time to get our sugar buzz on.

Two fruit courses followed, which I would never order in a restaurant because, hello, boring, but I relaxed when I saw that we would be finishing with two chocolate desserts. I have to hand it to the folks at Fritz, this menu was extremely well planned. The emphasis was on flavor and texture as opposed to rich and heavy. Don't get me wrong, I like my rich and heavy as much as the next gal, but not for five courses. Gastro distress was not high on my Valentine's wish list.

Fruit One was a dreamsicle vacherin--orange sorbet, vanilla ice cream, vanilla meringue, whipped cream, candied orange zest and clementine. It reminded me of the dreamsicle ice cream we had at a roadside stand in Rochester, or possibly Syracuse, New York, on our way to the Adirondacks. One of the best soft ice cream cones I've ever eaten, and I've eaten plenty. If you're ever in Rochester, or possibly Syracuse, you totally have to find this place. You should also check out this spot in Wisconsin that serves pretty much an entire pint per cone. Or this joint in Wyoming, where they sell locally-made hard-serve that comes in flavors like cabernet. Overheard: "You'll find this in all the five-star restaurants in Wyoming." Customer: "How many five-star restaurants could there be in Wyoming?" Ben & Jerry's factory and scoop shop in Stowe, Vermont, is a no-brainer. (The tour of the factory is a total dud but, bonus, free samples!) If this sounds like we've criss-crossed the U.S. eating ice cream, we have. That includes Zion National Park, where we were enjoying a cone while the sun set over the glittering canyon walls when a pack of wild turkeys descended and chased us off the grounds. You don't get that at Dairy Queen.

Fruit Two featured a refreshing pineapple sorbet--it's not like you can't get fruit in Chicago in February but pineapple kind of disappears after August--and tapioca. I can't say I was super-psyched about mushy pudding to start with, and when our waiter delivered the detailed description, I remembered why I usually avoid fixed menus. Because the chef will always include something you hate. If there's one thing I've learned about Dave, it's that he despises coconut. If there's one thing he's learned about me, it's that I abhor cilantro. Chef Fritz, not being married to either of us, had no clue, and put both in the tapioca. Imagine your hairstylist shaving your head and dying your scalp blue--it was that level of disaster. Except that it wasn't. Honestly, I couldn't taste any cilantro and Dave couldn't detect any coconut. Perhaps this was the new molecular cuisine everyone's been raving about and the ingredients were present in sub-atomic levels. Fritz should do us all a favor and pass this technique along to every Mexican restaurant as part of a "save salsa from cilantro" campaign.

Next came Chocolate One, a black forest chocolate cherry crepe souffle, all sweetness and light. We were starting to feel positively European, what with the meal already clocking in at well over an hour and not including gigantic portions of meat and potatoes. We've only actually been outside the States twice, once to Ireland and once to Canada, which normally I wouldn't count as a foreign country except that we went to Quebec. The Quebecois are serious about not being American or Canadian. They're French, goddammit. To prove it, they say things like "bon jour" instead of "hello." We became so adept at this greeting, people started mistaking us for locals. "Bon jour" we said to our waiter at a creperie in Quebec City. "Voulez vous, couscous," he responded, or something like that. "English?" we begged, panicked. "Ah, your bon jour was so good, I thought you spoke French," he replied. Lesson: When in Rome, do not do as the Romans do unless you're prepared to speak French.

Chocolate Two was a chocolate semi freddo (ice cream-esque??) with chocolate creme anglais and chocolate covered chocolate cerieal. You could try this at home with Cocoa Puffs, Edy's chocolate mousse slow-churn style and Hershey's syrup. In fact, I think I might.

The grand finale, "mignardises," re-imagined the four preceding courses in bite-sized portions. (Think mini raspberry macaron with chocolate filling as a version of the black forest crepe.) The meal itself proved something of a mignardises, taking us through all the years we've spent together, all the memories we've shared, how much our lives have become intertwined. I think about all of the places we've been, all the things we've done and, yes, all the ice cream that we've eaten, and I can't imagine any of it without Dave.

As the server handed us our bill, she put the cherry on top of our sweetheart's dinner. Fritz' parting gift to all its Valentine's diners: a bag of madeleines.

2011-02-07T09:41:00.001-08:00

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Dibs Wars

A couple of years ago, the San Francisco Giants rolled into town to take on the Chicago Cubs. We had tickets to the game, which promised to provide more drama than usual, given the presence of the much-reviled Barry Bonds in the Giants' lineup.

As the disgraced slugger stepped to the plate for his first at-bat, the crowd came to its feet. And booed.

The raspberries rained down on Bonds, each one pelting him with the verdict of cheater. Because even though he's yet to be convicted of a crime, we've all pronounced Bonds guilty of abusing steroids.

I didn't join in the razzing, partly because of a strong contrarian streak--the more everyone else does something, the less inclined I am to take part--but also because I didn't feel it was my job to judge Barry Bonds. Of course, plenty of other people felt that it was. Plenty of other people felt secure that, under the same circumstances, they would have just said no to drugs. They would have acted with integrity. They would never cheat to gain an advantage over the competition.

Bullshit.

We all have a little bit of larceny in us. As evidence, I point to the side streets of Chicago, currently littered with chairs and buckets and, in one curious instance, a Casio electronic keyboard. I speak, of course, of dibs.

Dibs, for the uninitiated, is a quaint Chicago tradition of holding your parking space following a snowstorm, using whatever castoff garbage you can find around your house. As a result, our streets currently look like a cross between an open landfill and a contemporary art installation. The point is that after you've allegedly spent hours digging out your car, you have a right to claim that strip of public pavement as your private spot. To which I again say, bullshit.

Though the mayor himself has tacitly endorsed dibs, much as he has cronyism and corruption, the practice has plenty of detractors--some have even likened the subject to abortion, Sarah Palin and "Glee" in terms of the polarizing reactions it produces. I would call that an overstatement, except for that I participated in a heated comments-section war on the Internet a few weeks ago and emotions regarding dibs do indeed run high.

The trouble with dibs is that, just like steroids, it's ripe for abuse. Plenty of people set out their placeholders in spots that they didn't personally shovel. I've seen one con artist on our block drag what looks to be a portable toilet for a disabled person from space to space. (I do NOT need to know what's going on his household with that particular piece of equipment taken out of commission.) Wherever he finds an opening, he marks his territory. Then there are those who will call dibs under the flimsiest of circumstances--if two inches of snow falls, they're out their with their chairs and buckets, despite not having so much as needed to shovel a single flake. In the absence of any regulation or oversight--Is there a time limit on dibs? Nobody knows--and what with the mayor and his minions essentially turning a blind eye, people can twist dibs to suit whatever purpose they want, for however long they want. In short, they cheat.

The real issue, of course, has nothing to do with snow and physical exertion and everything to do with the fact that there are too many cars in the city and not enough parking spaces. Our condo building has 26 units, so factor minimally 26 cars. We can't all fit in the handful of spaces on our street. If you don't snag one of those cherished slots out front, you have to park around the corner or around the block, or around the block from around the block. Admittedly, this sucks, especially when it's cold out, or late at night, or raining and you've just brought home a shitload of stuff from Costco or Ikea. But that's part of the charm of living in the city. We don't have garages and this allows us to feel superior to people in Naperville. It's a trade-off.

Then along comes a snowstorm and people suddenly use dibs as an excuse to get what they've always wanted, a guaranteed parking space. An advantage, much like steroids, over every other poor sap with a car. Once one person does it, more are sure to follow. Because if you don't, if you clear your spot but fail to "own" it, you'll find it filled with some other vehicle whenever you arrive home from work or dinner or whatever activity you deemed more important than holding onto your parking space. Just like you would any other night of the year. Normally you'd move onto the next opening, but courtesy of dibs, they're also taken--by a cardboard box, a ladder or a pair of folding chairs. (I must say, I do appreciate the whimsy of people who face their sets of chairs toward each other, as if passersby will stop for a chat at this makeshift street-side cafe and share a cup of hot cocoa.) So you circle and circle and swear that the next time it snows you won't be such a chump, next time you're calling dibs.

Kind of how if everyone else were doing steroids, you would be tempted to take them too--just to level the playing field. When the rules of the game shift--they go from non-steroids to steroids, from non-dibs to dibs--you either get on board or you get left behind. It doesn't matter whether you think the new world order is wrong, or even illegal, because holding onto your ideals won't help you keep your place in the lineup or find a parking space.

Personally, I think dibs is crap. I not only think it's selfish, I find it galling for people to think that by setting out a Casio keyboard, they can somehow claim ownership of a public street. If I shovel my sidewalk, can I tell you not to walk on it? Mostly I hate that dibs is indicative of an every-man-for-himself mindset.

A mindset I was sorely tempted to give into. Last week, it took me an hour and a half to shovel the two feet of snow entombing our Honda. While I was out laboring, I watched a steady stream of cars drive down our street, searching for a place to park. All the openings were claimed, natch, some by cars and some by portable toilets. I knew that the second we moved our car, one of these vultures would swoop in and benefit from my hard work.

"We are so doing dibs," I told my husband. I was about to retrieve a pair of plastic lawn chairs from storage when Dave stopped me. He'd been talking to a couple of neighbors from our building, all of them likewise digging out their cars, all of them likewise opposed to dibs. One guy even went so far as to walk across the street, take the chair holding a space, and chuck it into the facing yard. (What keeps other people from doing this? Fear of retaliation. If you appropriate a dibs spot, who knows what vengeance the "owner" will take on your car.)

So now we were being pressured to do the right thing, instead of the wrong. Dammit. If Dave had come home five minutes earlier or five minutes later, we would have felt perfectly comfortable participating in dibs--because everyone else was doing it. Once we learned otherwise, the decision became more difficult--cave to the mob and give ourselves the same advantage they had no problem claiming or stick to our principles and find ourselves screwed. I imagine there's a point when Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa faced this same dilemma. Just like everyone who calls dibs, they took the easier path. Think about that, ye dibs proponents, the next time you're tempted to boo someone for being weak.

For our part, we compromised. Instead of putting out plastic chairs, we've yet to move our car. It's like we're still in the game, but sitting on the bench, waiting for the rules to change back to normal.

2011-02-02T17:27:00.001-08:00

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How I Spent the Day After Snowpocalypse

When we'd had our fill of local news coverage of Snowpocalypse 2011—they pre-empted "The View," for crying out loud, and what's the point of a snow day if you can't wallow in craptastic daytime TV—we decided to venture out to see for ourselves what havoc the blizzard had wrought.

It was as spectacular as promised, no small feat given the hyperbolic predictions. Our street had yet to be touched by a plow and glistened in the glare of the short-lived sun. We checked on our Honda and then, like most people we encountered, decided to have a little fun before digging out. Fun being a relative term and consisting largely of walking down the middle of Lawrence Avenue.

Where major arteries had been cleared, sidewalks were still thigh-deep in drifts (mad props to Harvesttime for shoveling down to bare pavement), leaving pedestrians to take their chances on normally bustling thoroughfares. Given that most cars were buried, and that most drivers were still suffering PTSD from what will go down in history as the Horror on Lake Shore Drive, Lawrence, Western and Lincoln were all but deserted of automobiles.

On Western, we saw a convoy of plow-salt truck-plow blow through the intersection, passing up a CTA bus struggling to free itself from a snow bank. In Lincoln Square, there were plenty of gawkers, but few businesses open. The Davis Theater, normally an excellent refuge for those afflicted with cabin fever, is closed until Thursday, with snow piled up against the theater's shuttered doors in case anyone got it in their head to rush the popcorn machine. No need to watch "True Grit," anyway, we're living it.

Trekking down side streets, it was impossible to determine the rhyme or reason of the city's snow plowing efforts. Wilson clear, Sunnyside impassable. A few hardy souls were shoveling out their cars, but unless they went all James Bond and turned into airplanes (O'Hare, by the way is open, we learned at this morning's press conference, it's just that there are no flights), it was hard to see where anyone thought they were going.

So where were all the kids? Given Chicago Public School's astounding closure—with a lame duck mayor and an interim school chief, clearly the inmates are in charge of this asylum—I expected to see more than a few little people running wild and building snowmen. But a hike to River Park produced sightings of a lone cross-country skier and a pair of snowshoers—all adults. "They have these things called video games," my husband reminded me of the youngsters.

Have duly borne witness to nature's mighty power, we headed home exhausted. I had insisted on walking through drifts instead of around them, because why not, and I promise you it's the best cardio blast, butt-and-thigh firming workout you'll get all year.

2011-01-25T13:12:00.000-08:00

Do Movies Need Movie Stars?

I'm not going to question, examine or otherwise dissect why I and millions of other people care about the Oscars. We just do.

Now that the nominations have been announced, the official horse race is on. If I were a betting man and not a female averse to gambling, I'd wager on Colin Firth as a lock for Best Actor and Natalie Portman for Best Actress, though I've yet to see "The Black Swan" because I'm not a fan of psycho-thrillers or birds. Up until last night, I would have been thrilled to see Christian Bale take home the statue for Best Supporting Actor.

And then I watched "Winter's Bone."

"Winter's Bone" is one of those small indie features, made on a shoestring budget, that grabs all kinds of critical attention and next to no box office. Seriously, who wants to go see a movie about the daughter who has to clean up the mess left by her sorry ass crystal meth addicted father. I'll take another ticket to "Toy Story" please.

Still, I didn't want to miss out on a potential Oscar contender, so I added "Winter's Bone" to our Netflix queue and it eventually percolated to the top of the heap. Turns out, the movie isn't so much depressing as outright compelling. We've grown accustomed to seeing the urban poor onscreen ("Precious," "Gone Baby Gone"), but not so much abject rural poverty, and it is an eye opener. The people who populate this film are menacing and hard, so it would follow that the actors cast in these roles are not your standard Hollywood type.

That's a good thing, and brings us back to Christian Bale. Bale is outstanding in "The Fighter," an emaciated bundle of twitchy energy. You can't take your eyes off him (why he's considered "supporting" and not "lead" is a question for the Academy). But at no point are you not aware of this being Christian Bale delivering an Oscar-worthy turn. At no point are you not cognizant of the way Christian Bale transformed himself for the part--losing weight, learning an accent, dressing like a downscale caricature of Vanilla Ice. I'm not saying I wasn't amazed by all of this, but I also felt like that reaction was the whole point--look at what Christian Bale can do. I've seen Bale in interviews and more glammed-up roles like "Batman." I know how articulate he is, I know how handsome he is, I know that he's a movie star--I know what a "stretch" it is for him to tackle the part of this low-class lowlife.

Contrast that with John Hawkes in "Winter's Bone." Like Bale's character, Hawkes' is a drug addict. Unlike Bale, Hawkes doesn't just make you nervous, he scares the crap out of you. From the moment his Teardrop appears on screen, you understand that violence is his language of choice; you do not, for one second, feel safe in his presence. Yet, by the end of the film, Teardrop, within the context of the culture depicted in the film, has become almost noble. This is so deftly handled by Hawkes, you don't fully appreciate what he's accomplished until his final scene.

Hawkes inhabits Teardrop in a way that Bale couldn't possibly inhabit his character largely because John Hawkes is a blank slate. We see Teardrop, not John Hawkes playing Teardrop or transforming himself into Teardrop. We see a guy with a grizzled beard, a slight frame, and a face that looks like its taken a beating or two, and we don't have to stop to think about whether Hawkes grew the beard for the part or whether those scars are his or an expert application of makeup. It doesn't enter our consciousness. We're never taken out of the story unfolding onscreen because John Hawkes, for now at least, is just an actor doing his job and not a movie star.

Think about any character Brad Pitt or Tom Hanks has ever played. If the name wasn't in the title--like Forrest Gump or Benjamin Button--would you know it? What about Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie? When you go home and talk about one of their movies, don't you always refer to "the Julie Roberts character" or the "Brad Pitt character"?

I don't mean to suggest that "movie stars" and "actors" are mutually exclusive. I just mean to say that we're always aware of movie stars being actors playing a part. In "The King's Speech," Colin Firth offers a stunning turn as a stammering king, but you never once look at the screen and think you're watching anyone other than Colin Firth portraying King George. In "Winter's Bone," you never once look at the screen and think you're watching anyone other than Teardrop.

I sat through the credits last night for Hawkes name alone. Turns out, I'd seen him before. He was in "The Perfect Storm," one of the crew who sets out with George Clooney (oops, I mean the character being played by George Clooney) and winds up fish food. I remembered Hawkes--he's the guy who's not John C. Reilly or Mark Wahlberg. I'd also seen him on "Lost," where he had the misfortune of playing the much-maligned "Lennon" in the much-reviled "temple" episodes during the much-debated final season. I would never have made the connection.

Now that I know who Hawkes is, the next time he turns up in a film, it's quite possible that I'll think, "That's John Hawkes playing so-and-so." His magical effect as an unknown (to me at least) will be slightly diminished.

We'll always have "Winter's Bone."

2011-01-19T08:47:00.001-08:00

Realigning the Stars

Another birthday has come and gone. I like to use this time as an annual opportunity to take stock of my life, to look at where I've been and where I'm heading. This self examination rarely turns out well, particularly if I compare myself to others who share the same birthday as me, like Michelle Obama and Betty White. Let's see, first lady of the United States and comedic icon. And what do I have to show for myself? My major accomplishment in 2010 was finding a hat that didn't make me look like a total pinhead. Break out the accolades.

This year's reflection was even more traumatic than usual, considering a recent revelation that I might not be who I always thought I was.

I might not be a Capricorn.

Some astronomer in Minnesota broke the news last week that the Earth's orbit was blah, blah, blah and the constellations no longer line up with astrological signs.

I don't know about you, but I don't take astrology all that seriously, except when it comes to defining who I am as a human being. This is what it means to be a Capricorn: We set high goals, are ambitious and high achievers. We're committed, practical, grounded and disciplined. We plan ahead, you can count on us.

This is my tribe, these are my people. Sure, we may sound a little high strung and a tad dull, but we also make the rest of your lives a lot easier. You go on vacation, we've got the guidebook. You need something on Thursday, we get it to you on Tuesday. You say, "til death do us part," rest assured, we're not messing around with the mailman behind your back.

Now I'm supposed to be someone completely different?

I checked the dates associated with the new signs and crossed my fingers please, please, please, that I wouldn't wind up with the alleged 13th sign, Ophiuchus, which sounds like the wad of phlegm that collects in the back of your throat. Instead, I landed on Sagittarius.

Just like that, I'm no longer an introvert, I'm an extrovert. Apparently I also love to ride horses, which makes sense for half-man, half-horse centaurs. I'm an incurable optimist, always up for adventure.

In short, the anti-Patty.

How does one go from loathing crowds to loving them? From dependable to impetuous? From me to a complete alien?

Fortunately I didn't have to undergo a complete personality transplant. Astrologers immediately debunked the zodiac switcheroo as a load of hogwash. Phew. I can keep on being the same old inflexible perfectionist I've always been. I couldn't change even if I wanted to--my personality is written in the stars.

And yet.... I'd glimpsed the potential for something different as a Sagittarius. Setting aside their Pollyanna tendencies, they're not bad people. They also enjoy hiking and running. Hey, so do I. They seek knowledge and wisdom. Check. They enjoy travel and higher education (aka, travel of the mind). Check and check. I was starting to feel at home with these people too. They sounded kind of cool. They sounded like the kind of person I secretly want to be. Or maybe I already am?

I got to wondering, have I, all these years, been ignoring or tamping down aspects of my personality that didn't fit into my astrological box? What if, from day one, I'd been told that I saw the silver lining in things, that I lived in the moment, that I loved adventure? Would I see those traits in myself? Would I be that person?

In some alternate universe, I would totally go with the flow instead of trying to control each and every situation. I would act without thinking about consequences. I wouldn't care whether I made a success of my life or not. It was liberating to contemplate the possibilities of who I could be, if I didn't know who I already was.

I tried to explain all of this to my parents. "I would never in a million years put that much thought into this," my dad said. Funny, because he's a Taurus and we're totally supposed to be on the same page.

2011-01-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

We Need a Little Christmas

Last night, we polished off the last of the Christmas cookies. It was a lemon wreath, which my brother Matt said looked more like a bagel. Perhaps it was this very flaw in its design that allowed the wreath to survive so long. Where its sexier brothers and sisters bedazzled eaters with their chocolate coatings (cake balls), ginormous size (giant sugar cookies) or toffee toppings (millionaire shortbread), the misshapen wreaths slipped by under the radar, and lived to see another day. Until last night.

And just like that, the holidays were officially over.

I know, most people got on with their lives Jan. 2. They took down their trees. Put away the decorations. Completely denuded their households of anything remotely red and/or green. To which I can only ask, why the rush?

Because you know what comes after Christmas? Nothing. All the way to Memorial Day, it's one long slog of everyday living. You can try to make a case for Valentine's Day or President's Day, but these one-offs have none of the appeal of the holiday season. It's an entire month (or months, if you started celebrating back on Halloween) where we're encouraged to make our homes look cheerful, wear sparkly clothes, eat as much crappy/delicious food as we want and make merry with all our friends and loved ones. Why would we want to see that end?

Historians will tell you that December has nothing to do with the actual birth of Christ. We position the holiday where it is because right around that time of the year, we could all do with a little pick-me-up. When daylight savings ends, night falls in Chicago about an hour after the sun rises. Most days are relentlessly cold and gray. For awhile, amidst all the twinkling lights and shiny ribbon, you kind of don't notice. But once we've all been mandated to put the sparkle away, it's like stepping from technicolor into black and white.

I say we don't need less Christmas, we need more.

Why, for heaven's sake, do we all need to get in shape in January--suddenly every gym is full and salmon becomes our daily ration--when no one will see our flesh until June? What we really need is an extra layer of blubber to make it through February and, alas, March, or even beyond. You know, some years I've pulled out my winter coat in November, searched through the pocket hoping to find spare change or dollars, and come across a receipt or ticket stub from the previous May. That's right, I was wearing my winter coat in May.

It's still dark out when most people leave work at night, so why castigate the folks who keep their lights up past St. Patty's day? They're doing us all a favor, practically performing a public service, to keep us from getting SAD (seasonal affect disorder). We should be applauding these people, not sending investigative reporters to their homes to embarrass them on air.

These next few months are rough, particularly on northerners. There's snow, which loses all of its appeal the second it turns to slush, to say nothing of the blackened piles that congregate curbside. (You ever look at the charred snow and realize that soot is there, hanging in the air, all the time? We just can't see it without the white background.) The worst of the temperatures are still to come. Cabin fever will run rampant. Most of us will hunker down in our homes, no parties to go to, no reason to change out of our sweats or emerge from under our Snuggies. Wouldn't it be nice to have a little Christmas?

I don't mean all the presents and expense. I mean reveling in the child-like innocence of "Rudolph," and the frosted sugar cookies and the gatherings with family and friends. The tree, standing in the corner of the living room, a beacon of light and hope.

They say Ebenezer Scrooge knew how to keep Christmas all year long. So why can't I? I found a box of chocolate pudding hidden away in the back of a kitchen cupboard. It's no lemon wreath (and definitely not a cake ball), but it's a start.

2011-01-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

The Real Lesson From Arizona

When I first heard about the shootings in Arizona, like every good liberal American, I gladly pointed a finger at Sarah Palin. "See what your 'reload' and your crosshairs and your anti-'hopey, changey' speech has wrought! Now crawl back to whatever rock John McCain pulled you out from under and keep your hateful rhetoric and your malapropisms to yourself."

And then I stopped reading my Twitter feed and thought about Vincent van Gogh.

I just finished a soon-to-be-published novel about the artist, so it's not as random as it might seem to have Vincent on the brain, nor is his connection to Gabrielle Giffords. While this book has much to say about van Gogh's genius as a painter and the way he revolutionized the medium, it's also a profoundly compassionate story about mental illness. And isn't mental illness really what this weekend in Arizona was all about?

Growing up in suburban Ohio, I didn't have a whole lot of contact with flat-out crazy people. Since moving to Chicago, though, I encounter them on a regular basis. Near my old apartment, there was the shell-shocked man who would wrap himself in a blanket and huddle under whatever doorway would shelter him. Or the guy on the train who kept shouting "I've had it" and started banging his head against the window of the rail car until CTA personnel were notified and he was removed from the train. Once, I was walking home from the bus and an elderly man approached from the opposite direction. Too late I noticed he was ranting and raving--either at voices inside his head or invisible demons accompanying him on the sidewalk. I didn't have time to cross to the other side of the street, and as we passed each other, he swung his arm out to hit me. He missed, just barely, but I can still feel the whoosh of air his fist displaced near the side of my head, and the power and anger behind the blow, which, I've no doubt, had it landed, would have knocked me to the ground.

In van Gogh's time, such people would have been straight-jacked, locked up in asylums, labled lunatics or insane, or, by the more enlightened, deemed "hysterics" or "melancholiacs." No matter the nomenclature, the prognosis was poor. Van Gogh understood there was no stopping the violent episodes that gripped him without warning. We all remember that he cut off his ear in the midst of one of these spells, less known is that he later shot himself in the chest to ward off future anguish.

Today, we have kinder, gentler terms of diagnosis. Bi-polar, depressive, OCD. We don't say "mad," we say "mentally ill." We've developed therapies and drugs. Yet it's fair to say that we have no better understanding in 2011 of what it's like to lose control of one's mind than we did in van Gogh's time, more than 100 years ago. Often we can't predict what causes mental illness and, perhaps most frightening, typically we can't cure it.

Former classmates of the Arizona shooter have come forward in recent days. They confess they all but predicted just the sort of deadly rampage that ultimately occurred. So where was the help for this young man? If you saw a fellow student with an open, gaping wound, surely you would notify someone. We would rush to his aid, we would rally around. But when that wound is of the mind, when the fix is not a matter of a simple bandage, we turn away, not out of callousness, but more out of helplessness and fear.

We don't know what to do. It's not like cancer or heart disease. We don't know how to begin to try to offer assistance, and if we do, we don't know whether our efforts will meet with resistance or worse, violence. And the upshot is that while we no longer confine the mentally ill to asylums, they are just as isolated today as they were in centuries past, having scared away family, friends and neighbors with their erratic, volatile behavior. Only now they walk among us, sometimes with automatic weapons.

I've heard much in the past few days about the need to tamp down the hate speech our pundits have favored of late. I've even heard a few quiet rumblings about gun control. You can modulate the former, you can legislate the latter. But what to do about the mentally ill?

I've been thinking about Vincent van Gogh, and how we still don't have the answer.

2011-01-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

The Real Price of Pay TV

My dad is fond of talking about the early days of television, when he would sit, dazed, in front of his family's newly purchased black-and-white set, watching test patterns. Not actual programming, mind you, just test patterns, so powerful was the allure of this new medium.

I fear that soon I'll be doing the same.

Dave and I don't subscribe to cable (or satellite) TV. I know what you're thinking. Gasp! When we confess this deficiency to strangers, they react as if we've a) admitted to driving a horse and buggy or b) told them we have cancer. Disbelief mixed with a tinge of pity.

It's not that I don't like or care about TV. I love TV, especially really good TV, which these days is more and more often confined to cable, along with really, really bad TV. Mock "Dancing With the Stars" all you want, but cable made a "star" of Kate Gosselin first.

I just don't feel like paying for something that's supposed to be free. I mean, if television had existed at the time of the Declaration of Independence, I'm pretty sure our Founding Fathers would have agreed that we, the people, had an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of "Mad Men."

At least that was the prevailing wisdom when I was a kid. Then cable came along, and by cable, I mean MTV, and suddenly we were all willing to pay for something that had previously cost us absolutely nothing. Kind of hard to believe in today's climate, where the Internet and its model of free content has all but wiped out institutions like the Chicago Tribune. How is that in one medium, we're patently opposed to shelling out so much as a penny to read a newspaper's online edition, something that we gladly subscribed to in print, but when it comes to television, we'll throw open our wallets to keep up with the Kardashians? If you have the answer, alert the execs at the New York Times.

Normally, I don't mind being a non-cable household. It feels kind of retro cool, like I'm standing up to The Man. But just to make sure that I don't fall into a pop culture black hole, I keep conversant with the latest cable offerings via Entertainment Weekly and Netflix. Never seen "Top Chef" but I can speak Padma Lakshmi. I make do. I get by. Besides, so many cable programs are watched by such a tiny fraction of the population, in any large group, I'm likely not the only one who hasn't caught onto "Caprica."

Then, damn if baseball didn't go and sell the early rounds of its playoffs to TBS. College football followed suit, handing off its bowl games to ESPN, the highest bidder. And that's just not right.

We all know we live in a fractured nation. There's hardly a topic that doesn't polarize these days. Used to be that we could lay those differences aside and gather around the boob tube for major cultural events, like "Who shot J.R." or the Rose Bowl. No more.

Some of my favorite childhood memories are the New Year's Days we spent at my Aunt Mary Jo's, where my entire extended family would gather to celebrate my cousin Holly's birthday and settle in to watch bowl game after bowl game after bowl game. Perfection would be a victory for my grandpa's beloved Notre Dame.

This year, I sent Holly birthday greetings on Facebook.

It's sad enough that my family has grown apart geographically. I saw my youngest brother, Matt, at Christmas for the first time since the previous year's holiday. Maybe, if you don't like your brother, you'd consider that a positive turn of events. I happen to love mine and think this a sad state of affairs.

Now television has to go and take away the precious few moments that have the potential to bind us all together, no matter where we are.

Last night, our home team, the Ohio State Buckeyes played Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl. Normally, when the Buckeyes square off, I can picture Matt in St. Louis, dying with every dropped pass or fumble. I know my dad will be watching in Toledo or Florida, depending on the month of the year. I'll be pacing our living room in Chicago, ducking into the hallway if the outcome looks like it's going the other team's way. Physically we might be separated but mentally we're connected.

But this year, the Sugar Bowl was on cable. So off Dave and I went into the bitter cold night--the kind of cold that makes your teeth hurt, the kind of cold meant for snuggling under blankets with a cup of hot cocoa--in search of a bar with a big screen TV tuned into ESPN. We wound up at Bad Dog Tavern, where the bartender happened to be an OSU grad. The game was on half a dozen flat screens, and he cheered with us as the Buckeyes turned a near catastrophic fumble into a miraculous touchdown. We stayed through the first half, long after we had exhausted our order of food and drink. As we left, I smiled at the woman in the OSU jersey, sitting at a table near the door.

This morning I logged on to email to see a flurry of "Go Bucks" messages. It seems the game, which OSU had well in hand last Dave and I knew, had turned into a nail biter. We'd not only missed the best part, but missed out on the conversation. Curse you, NCAA.

My point, and I do have a point, is where does this end? Does the Super Bowl wind up on TLC? The Oscars on E!? Election night coverage on FOX News, and only FOX News? Oprah is now only viewable on her own network. How will the poor, tired, huddled, non-OWN households receive their daily dose of inspiration?.

When every event has a price of entry, you're bound to leave some people out. The more exclusive, the more who are excluded, and the less we have in common as Americans. Shared cultural experiences have the capacity to cut across racial, economic, religious and political divides. As they become more scarce, we are each more alone in our own little silos.

I say this not just because I'm too cheap to pay for cable. I say this because I think we're losing a little piece of ourselves as a society everytime something that once was accessible to all becomes accessible to a few.

2011-01-04T13:08:00.000-08:00

Luck of the Draw

I have a system when it comes to picking lottery numbers. I feel like you need to have one number between zero and 10, one in the teens, two in the twenties, one in the thirties and one in the forties. This system has never actually worked, so I don't know why I stick with it, but the fact that I try to impose order on a completely random drawing pretty much tells you everything you need to know about me.

It's been years since I've purchased a ticket, but tonight's gazillion dollar Mega Millions jackpot has me sorely tempted to try my luck. I mean, who doesn't dream, on a nightly basis, about what they'd do with 300 million bucks.

First off, I'll throw in with my husband, Dave, but that's all the sharing I'm willing to do. You always see those groups of 30 or 40 co-workers who split some huge payout, and you know every last one of them is thinking, damn, I should have gone it alone. Twenty million sounds like a lot, until you know it could have been 10 times that amount.

A friend of mine did the math and determined that in order to quit your job, you need to win at least $3 million. So I imagine the first thing we'd do after our numbers come up would be to hand in our resignation letters. Since I work at home, pretty much for myself, this should be a relatively painless transaction.

Next I would vacate our condo faster than you can say "single family dwelling" and buy myself a house. I know, this seems kind of lame. You win $300 million, you should shoot for the moon. But I tell you, knowing that I would never again have to listen to footsteps stomping above me, or a stereo blasting below me, well, as they say in those Visa commercials, "priceless."

Then I would travel to Paris, where I would eat shitloads of pastries (because I could afford a personal trainer and chef to help me take off the pounds when I got home, to my new house, with its own fully-equipped gym), and New Zealand, which my husband insists is not really populated by hobbits.

After I got bored with living a life of leisure, I would go back to school. I love to learn and if I could have stayed in college forever, without having to write term papers or sit for exams but just listen to lectures, I would have. Or maybe I'll apply to pastry school and open up my own bakery. I've always wanted to test the theory that if you do something you completely love, it doesn't feel like work or a job.

Now here's where it gets tricky. After I've taken care of myself (this would include purchasing every conceivable form of outerwear known to North Face, as I am constantly lacking whatever essential garment Chicago's weather calls for on any given day), and Dave, I suppose, what am I expected to do for my family?

Do I have to pay off my parents' mortgages. That's right, mortgages as in plural. We're talking about people who have homes in Ohio and Florida, while I live in a shack. Do they really need my help? What about my siblings? I've talked this over with Dave, and we feel one-time payouts are appropriate, but at what amount? Twenty-five grand? Fifty? At what point does generosity come across as miserly? Same for my niece and nephews. Do I have to spring for their college educations, or can I just fund the equivalent of a semester?

How do I keep from turning into the family ATM?

And that's just my relatives. I couldn't pick Dave's nephew out of a police line-up. Does he deserve to be treated on par with my brother and sister's kids, with whom we have actual relationships? (I swear my 2-year-old nephew Logan suspects we might hit it big. At Christmas dinner he said, apropos of nothing, "I need Dave to give me a kiss." Shrewd move.) I think not, but I suspect my husband would think so. I foresee some tense, if not downright contentious discussions over equitable distribution.

Now suddenly Dave and I are fighting over money, something we never do, because we don't have anything to quarrel about. This business of being spectacularly, obscenely wealthy is more stress than I bargained for and I have to wonder if I wouldn't be better off staying poor.

Nah.

2010-11-16T07:56:00.000-08:00

Reasonably Content Ever After

The morning news was all atwitter with the announcement of Prince William's engagement to Kate, aka Miss Catherine, Middleton. (Quick question: I get Kate for Katherine, but why not Cate--a la Blanchett--for Catherine? It's like she's a completely different person now that we know she's been a "C," not a "K," all along.) Far be it from me to tell Meredith Vieira how to conduct her interviews with professional royal watchers, but neither she nor any of her competitors asked the question on every viewers' mind, at least the female ones--what does the ring look like, how many carats, and when will we get to see it?

Diana sported a big honking sapphire sparkler that probably was worth a ton of money but wasn't nearly as pretty as a diamond--in fact it was kind of dark and ominous, which in retrospect was fitting for the marriage. Fergie got a ruby and I guess by default, Prince Edward gave his wife (named Sophie, but nobody cares about the 7th in line to the throne) an emerald. That covers the major gems--will Cate have to make do with a garnet? Or topaz? C'mon NBC, sick "Dateline" on this mystery.

Somewhere at my parents' house is a box of memorabilia from my childhood that contains my baby teeth, a rabbit's foot and a sheaf of magazine covers and newspaper clippings chronicling the wedding and early married life of Lady/Princess Diana. I was the perfect age to completely buy into this fairytale. She was like the ultimate glamorous older sister--so tall and leggy, so blushing and blond. Who didn't want to be her? It was as if by marrying Charles she'd managed the trifecta of head cheerleader, homecoming queen and prom queen all at once.

I lapped up stories of her bopping around the palace, listening to Duran Duran on her Walkman. Telling Charles to stop with the comb over. Falling asleep during stodgy old symphonies. If I were a princess, that's exactly what I'd do. Never mind that I was a junior high student and she was behaving like one too.

What I didn't realize at the time, because I was a kid and kids have absolutely no concept of how a marriage works, is that all the things that made Diana such a hoot of a princess made her a horrible wife. She had nothing in common with her husband. Well, what 19 year old does with a 30something prince? It was a recipe for disaster, but I, along with a billion other people, was too blinded by sapphires and tiaras to see the catastrophe ahead.

So I guess it doesn't matter what K/Cate's ring looks like. Don't get me wrong, I'm as psyched for the spectacle of this royal wedding as anyone. I actually said to my husband the other day, "If this wedding isn't on broadcast [Edward's wasn't, see above note about 7th in line] we're going to have to get cable." I'll be up at 3 in the morning, waiting to see what the dress looks like and hanging on every moment of horse-drawn carriage hoopla. But I'll also be watching with a wiser eye, rooting not for the beautiful princess and her dashing groom, but for a young couple and the success of their marriage. Already it bodes well that they're the same age, have equivalent educations and seem to genuinely like each other--this relationship seems less "Cinderella," more Jim and Pam of "The Office." I'll settle for a little less fairytale this time around, and a little more happily, or reasonably content, ever after.

Update: Oh no he didn't. William gifted K/Cate with his mother's engagement ring. Ugh. Maybe it's just me, but I'd want my own ring, not one associated with the most disastrous marriage in modern history. William sweetly claimed the gesture was his way of making sure Diana didn't miss out on the festivities, but I can vouch that no woman wants her mother-in-law being part of her marriage proposal. Good luck, K/Cate, you'll need it.

2010-11-15T14:28:00.001-08:00

I'm Keeping My Arm

I'm not giving anything away when I say that the climax in the movie "127 Hours" comes when Aron Ralston, well played by James Franco, decides to cut off his right arm. It's been pinned by a boulder, trapping him in a remote canyon for five days. He's out of food, water (he's already resorted to drinking his own urine) and hope, but not the will to live--it comes down to the arm or him. At this point, the audience has plenty of time to ponder what they'd do under similar circumstances, given that most people at the screening I attended, me included, chose to avert their eyes from the amputation, fake or not. I peeked at the screen for perhaps a nanosecond, only to see a flash of flesh and blood. I kind of vurped and put my head back down.

It didn't take me long to answer "What would Patty do?" because I had come to the conclusion an hour and 15 minutes earlier that I would never find myself in a remote canyon with my arm pinned by a boulder in the first place.

Rewind to another telling scene near the beginning of the film in which Aron befriends a pair of female hikers and leads them off the beaten path to a super cool hidden swimming hole. You've probably seen this in the movie's trailer: the three are wedged between rock, scooting along with their butts on one side of a narrow gorge and bracing themselves with their feet on the other. Aron suddenly drops his legs and plummets to the unseen water below. The girls follow suit, one more reluctantly than the other after letting loose a string of "fuck, fuck, fuck."

I'm the girl who says "fuck." And then turns around.

Several years ago, Dave and I were hiking the Angel's Landing trail in Utah's Zion National Park. A more accurate moniker would be Satan's Spire but the Mormons had naming rights, so heaven won out. From the guidebook, and I quote: "The route, cut into solid rock, very steeply ascends a knife-edge sandstone rib, from which cliffs plunge 500 feet or more on either side. Sloping steps cut into the rock making footing precarious. Short segments of chain bolted intermittently to the rock offer occasional handholds, but many exposed stretches offer no such protection." Yeah, just another walk in the park.

The guidebook had duly warned me, yet there I was, "fuck, fuck, fuck," clinging to the "intermittent" chain for dear life. We came to a lookout point and stopped so I could collect myself. That was it. I was done. I'm sure the view at the top was spectacular, but I'll never know.

Do I regret not finishing the climb? Hell yes. I was angry and disappointed in myself, for being afraid and giving into that fear. For being such a wuss-assed wimp. Not for "faint-hearted hikers and small children" the guidebook chided. That was me--a faint-hearted baby. I stomped back down the trail, which intersected with another less-vertiginous path, and proceeded to death march Dave for miles through the blistering August heat just to prove...what? If I couldn't conquer height, I would conquer distance? Spurred on by adrenaline, I quickly outpaced my parched and hungry husband, who ultimately refused to go one step further on our meager reserve of supplies. I continued some way without him--who was the wuss-ass now--until it struck me that this was our vacation. We were supposed to be having fun. Together. For the second time that day, I switched direction.

The Arons of the world keep going.

I want to be the person who climbs mountains, but content myself hiking the foothills below. I want to camp under the stars, but retreat to indoor plumbing at night. As much as I envy and admire the people who abandon themselves to the call of the wild, I'll never be one of them. For some reason, that depresses me.

Do you know how many people tour the Grand Canyon via car? Griswold-like, they pull up in their SUVs, hop out to snap a photo, then hop back in and motor on to the next scenic turnout. The fact that Dave and I hiked halfway down and back should be a point of pride and probably puts us ahead of 99 percent of the population (it doesn't count if you get to the bottom via mule, unless you're the mule). But damned if we didn't encounter a pair who were hiking the canyon's entire width, rim to rim. The couple, a man and woman (we assumed married), were maybe in their 50s, possibly early 60s. And just like that, our far less vigorous excursion was utterly diminished. It mattered not one whit that on our return to the top we came across another couple huffing and puffing and turning at the one-mile point. In their minds, we were gods, but I knew better.

I'm not Aron Ralston. I might share his motivation to challenge nature, to go deeper and farther, to explore and discover, but where he plunges ahead, I hold myself back. When I come to a sign that says, and I paraphrase, "If you're stupid enough to think you can hike to the bottom of the canyon and back in a day, you will die," I take it at face value. So I go halfway, half-hearted, half-assed. I respect limits, I consider consequences, and once you do that, you're toast as a Mountain Dew poster child.

Aron lost his arm because it never occurred to him that he might. I've got both of mine, because it occurs to me that I could.

2010-11-12T15:38:00.000-08:00

Top Chef Disappoints

The good thing about being a vegetarian: how superior I felt when reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma." The bad thing about being a vegetarian: how inferior I feel whenever I go out to eat.

I tend to think my little neck of the woods is crawling with vegetarians, the same way that when I get together with my family, I have the sense that all people are shorter than 5' 5". I forget that I'm part of what's still a fairly small minority. Fortunately there's always a restaurant menu handy to bring me back to reality. Doesn't matter whether the joint serves burgers and fries or 3-star French cuisine, there's typically a lone concession to non-meat eaters. Often it involves a portobello mushroom or eggplant, always combined with goat cheese, as if by swearing off meat I also took an oath against cheddar and gorgonzola. For the record, I hate mushrooms. I hate eggplant. I hate goat cheese.

"Nothing here for Patty," I say, disappointed by yet another chef's limited approach to meatless cuisine, as Dave and I wander hopelessly from restaurant to restaurant, like Mary and Joseph searching for a room at the inn.

My email constantly fills with messages announcing trendy underground or farm dinners, great bargains on prix fixe menus at the latest hotspot, grand openings of the newest gastropub. A revolution is taking place in terms of innovative, fresh cuisine--could there be more cooking shows on TV--and I'm stuck with my nose pressed up against the glass. I don't need someone to throw me a bone, I need them to throw me an avocado.

(I know what you're thinking. Aren't there vegetarian restaurants? Why don't you just go there and shut up already. Trouble is, I don't much care for "vegetarian" food. Tofu has all of the appeal of a pencil eraser and seitan resembles congealed oatmeal or, worse, vomit. I don't want weird food, I want the same stuff as everyone else, without the meat.)

I thought, mistakenly as it turns out, that a bona fide Top Chef like Rick Bayless would be more progressive in his offerings. On a recent weekday that happened to be a holiday for Dave, we headed downtown to XOCO, Bayless' latest downscale restaurant, intended to satisfy people with gourmet tastes and fast-food budgets. We stepped up to the counter and perused the list of tortas (Spanish for "sandwiches made with round bread"). Lots of pork and chicken. Last and most definitely least, oh look, mushrooms. With goat cheese. And black beans cooked with pork.

We could have walked away and gone to Potbelly's but, dammit, all they have is mushrooms too and besides, I would not be denied yet another opportunity to taste the creation of someone who had appeared on The Food Network. My options narrowed to vegetable soup or a churro. Churros I can get at Costco for a buck so I ordered the vegetable soup in spite of the fact that I hate soup. Someday, when I'm 90, and I don't have any teeth and my jaw doesn't work, I'm sure I'll feel differently. But at this point in my life, I still have the ability to chew, and that's what I like to do with my food. As consolation, I also ordered a hot chocolate, the Barcelona, described simply as "thick."

A hostess-type person led us to our table, explaining for the second time that this communal table seated six, and other people that we didn't know would eventually be joining us. (As if restaurants aren't typically filled with strangers.) Our drinks arrived first and our mystery companions shortly thereafter.

The Barcelona, how to describe it. You know those chocolate cakes with the molten centers? It was like drinking that or, perhaps a more accurate analogy, warm brownie batter. I had to finish it with my soup spoon, which was a better use of the utensil than scooping up my sad, salty black bean broth, about which I have nothing more to say.

The Barcelona saved the meal. Not just because it was so magically delicious, but because it was the spark that lit the conversation with our tablemates. "Now I wish I'd ordered that," she said. And we were off and running. We learned that they were originally from New York but now lived outside Philadelphia--he wanted to move back, she wanted to explore other possibilities (I suggested Portland, my personal obsession, though I've never been). They talked about their experience with Amtrak (hey, we hate flying too) and their impressions of Chicago--deep dish pizza overrated, Lincoln Park Zoo a total gem, with which we were in total agreement.

It was a delightful, serendipitous 20-30 minutes, what Michael Pollan would term the difference between eating and "dining." XOCO completely failed me in terms of the former; the communal table completely delivered the latter.

2010-11-10T15:57:00.000-08:00

No One's Cornered the Market on Misery

For all the years I've studied writing, for all the time I've put into honing my craft, for all the money I've debated plowing into an MFA program, I am constantly humbled by the work of Tom & Lorenzo, aka, TLo, the bloggers behind the projectrungay site. As one of their adoring minions (or, alternately, kittens), I laugh out loud at their bitchery and insanely clever turns of phrases; their television recaps are frequently more insightful than those of professional entertainment writers/critics. They helped me understand "Lost," which is saying a lot.

While it may be simple to dismiss the boys as lightweights--their In or Out fashion posts aren't going to win any Pulitzers for investigative reporting but are often the highlight of my day--their work also demonstrates a frank, emotional depth that's irritatingly illuminating, particularly given how quickly they crank out this stuff. I've debated verb tense longer than it takes them to write a beautifully crafted 1,000-word post.

Their recap of last night's episode of "Glee" was typically heartfelt. Speaking from their own experience: "Giving a young gay boy the dream that someday Prince Charming will come and sing a love song to him? You cannot imagine. You simply cannot imagine how revolutionary such a thing is."

Their point: "Imagine going through high school without even so much as a hint of yourself reflected in any of the things you watch and listen to, any of the things that literally every other kid is talking about." Heartbreaking stuff.

And yet...I sort of beg to differ.

I'm not saying gay people haven't been woefully underrepresented in the media. I am arguing that they're not the only ones who don't see anyone remotely resembling themselves onscreen. Unless you're a super hot doctor, lawyer or police officer.

I'm barely over 5 feet tall. I wanna see someone my height, I've gotta watch Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel. I've worn glasses since I was in the fourth grade. My compadres on the boob tube are limited to Tina Fey and Ugly Betty, emphasis on ugly. I have thighs--when's the last time you saw a pair of those on an actress.

I don't mean to equate being short, chunky or near-sighted with being gay. None of those things is nearly as isolating or draws the venom of "religious" conservatives. But we all have things that make us feel like outcasts, especially in high school. There are the fat kids, the nerds who join Chess Club, the kids who have really bad acne, anyone with a disability. ("Glee" makes paralysis look cool. My husband works with special needs wheelchair-bound students who require toileting. Trust me, they don't have a gaggle of friends.) To suggest that gay students are the only ones with their noses pressed up against the glass, always on the outside looking in, is to ignore all the others kids (and adults) for whom Prom King or Queen, or a first kiss, or a happily-ever-after with Prince or Princess Charming is a complete and utter pipe dream as well. No one group has cornered the market on misery. I have a friend whose nephew is 7 feet tall--and he's not Shaquille O'Neal. Her nieces top 6 feet. Ask them how they feel when they watch romantic comedies. Do J. Lo and Matthew McConaughy represent any remote possibility of how their adulthood is going to play out? You don't have to be gay to find "When Harry Met Sally" depressing as hell.

The reality of high school and life in general is that flat-out winners represent a tiny fraction of the population--kind of like the teeny tiny percentage of people beautiful enough to take up acting. To consider them the standard model for how we should look or how we should behave is kind of crazy.

While I agree with TLo that it's a wonderful thing for gay kids to see themselves represented on TV, I'm not sure that's the be-all end-all we should be pursuing in terms of validating our own individual life experiences. Why do we need to see ourselves reflected onscreen to feel worthy? I'm a fairly rational person and I buy into this myself. I watch "Sex and the City" and I think, my god, I've never had a Brazilian wax, I can't afford to buy Manolos and even if I could I'd have no hope of walking in them, and I don't think it's insane to date a man for more than two weeks before having sex with him. Ergo, I'm not a modern woman. My existence is nullified.

Wouldn't we all be better off if we stopped looking for entertainment and the media to provide us with a reflection of ourselves? Wouldn't we all be better off if we turned to the person next to us instead--if the gay kid and the fat kid and the pimply-faced kid and the homecoming queen all saw themselves reflected in each other?

2010-11-03T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Day After

The calendar says November 3, but it feels more like Groundhog Day. I could swear this is a repeat of a morning in 2004, when I awoke to discover that my fellow Americans had ushered in a Republican Congress, defying all reason, logic and my own personal preference. Back in 2004, I dressed in black to mourn the occasion, which I've decided to eschew today because it's just not a good color for me. But the emotion remains the same.

I'm depressed.

I'm depressed by the mere existence of Republicans. I don't mean I want them to disappear off the face of the Earth. Some of these creatures are my family members and when they stop talking politics, I kind of like, possibly even love them. But I can't wrap my head around their thought processes, by their way of thinking that boils down to "I've got mine, too bad you didn't get yours." I don't quite understand how most of these people also consider themselves the sole keepers and bearers of the Christian flame. They can quote the chapter and verse that seems to prove God hates gays, but they can't remember "do unto others." They drive around with bumper stickers that wonder "What Would Jesus Do?" without contemplating that Jesus would never consider health care a privilege, as opposed to a basic human right. There's much talk about the need for the left and right to compromise, to come to the center, where most Americans reside. The thing is, while I agree that most of us have more in common than FOX and MSNBC would suggest, I would also argue that at the most basic level, Republicans and Democrats have such a fundamentally different approach to life--"me" vs. "we" if you will--that the gap is too wide for us to ever bridge.

I'm depressed that the young people who were so excited to vote in 2008 showed absolutely no interest in governing. They seemed to consider Barack Obama the electoral version of Lollapalooza--a really fun show--and supporting his legislative agenda the equivalent of canned peas. Distasteful. Which brings me to my next point.

I'm depressed that Americans are so ADD. A lot of us went to the polls in 2008 hoping for change. When that didn't happen the day after the inauguration, we started getting antsy. What the hell was taking so long? We wanted the stock market back at 13,000; we wanted everyone to have a job, even the people who were unemployed before the Great Recession; we wanted China and India to go back to being Third World non-powers; we wanted our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday; and if we could stop being so fat, well, that would be cool too. Never mind that change takes time. We don't have the patience. We're so used to flipping channels when we don't like what's on TV--and politics has become TV--that we don't understand you can't switch social movements on and off with similar ease. Because I'm convinced that I was supposed to be British, I can't help but think that the UK form of government might get us all to settle down a little bit. Four or five years between election cycles would give policies a chance to prove their merit--as it is, the ink was barely dry on the healthcare bill before opponents began talking about repealing it. These two-year cycles mean congressmen and women are in perpetual campaign, not legislative, mode. Everything is a posture, nothing is a real position.

I'm depressed because I have to look at and listen to John Boehner for two whole years. I'm suicidal at the thought of two more years of Sarah Palin, who was supposed to have gone away by now. John McCain may have lost the presidency but look at the devil he unleashed.

I'm depressed because "The West Wing" is off the air and I don't have an alternate political reality, where everyone is honest and idealistic and morally upstanding, to get me through the misery to come.

I'm depressed to think the people on the other side of the fence hate Barack Obama as much, if not more, than I hated George W. Bush.

But here's the thing: As much as the pundits and the Tea Baggers are all talking about last night's election as some sort of sea change, life for most of us will pretty much go on the same as it has for the past decade. Some of us have lost our jobs and homes, but most of us haven't. Whether the Congress leans blue or red, we'll still get married and divorced, have babies, watch football, hit the beach on a hot summer day, eat too much pie on Thanksgiving, run red lights, go to the movies, and pay too much attention to Charlie Sheen. The world wasn't coming to an end before last night; it's not coming to an end now.

At least that's what I keep telling myself.

2010-10-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

Bring Back the True Meaning of Halloween

If Christmas isn't about presents ("let's put the Christ back into Christmas"), then Halloween isn't about costumes. Or haunted houses. Or scary movies.

It's about candy.

You'd never know that from watching TV. Case in point: last night's episode of "Modern Family." I watched the Dunphys orchestrate the sort of elaborate trick-or-treating scenario that could only come from a sitcom writer's mind. I won't even try to explain, because it won't sound particularly funny, but suffice to say that after the neighborhood kids rang Phil & Claire's doorbell, a mini-horror movie was enacted for their benefit, which took close to 30 seconds. Sorry, this transaction should last no longer than 5.

That's what Halloween is, a carefully disguised transaction in which one person cons another person to give them something, preferably a Heath Bar, for free. This should take as little time as possible so the thief can move on to their next victim.

When I was a kid, there was a house in our neighborhood that was well-known for its spooky antics. Never went there. Not because I was a scaredy-cat but because who had that kind of time to waste. My goal every year was to make it up and down both sides of the four major streets of our subdivision--approximately 150 houses--in the three hours alloted for plundering. I never came close, but each successive year, I honed my technique. First, I substituted running for walking; then I started skipping sidewalks--toddlers are the ultimate traffic jam--and started racing straight across lawns. If my dad were dead, he'd be rolling in his grave, because we weren't even allowed to play on our own grass.

I paid zero attention to my costume, throwing on a sheet or overalls (look, I'm a bum!) at the last minute. You know why? Because my mom was no Martha Stewart and it didn't matter anyway. I got the same pack of Sweet-Tarts as the more elaborately outfitted. All I cared about was my pillowcase, and the way it felt as it accumulated weight from house to house, and the way all that candy looked spread out on the living room floor as I divided it into piles. Come to mama, Sugar Daddy.

Lately, Halloween celebrations have grown more and more elaborate, because Wal-Mart needs to sell more junk and grown-ups need another excuse to get drunk. There's even a movement to, shudder, turn the holiday all healthy by forcing kids to count the calories in those mini-Snickers. Are you kidding me? That's like giving a 5-year-old a Christmas present that says you've donated the cost of his gift to charity. It goes against nature.

What I want to know is, where's Glenn Beck when you need him? Where's the movement to stop this desecration of one our most sacred rituals? Let's stop with the parties and the insistence that everyone must play dress up and get rid of those giant black cat inflatables the size of SUVs. It's time to get back to Halloween's basic, core value.

It's time to put the candy back in Halloween. Pass the Heath Bars, please.

2010-10-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

One Degree of Separation

The Snow Birds, aka my parents, called from their new perch in Florida, ostensibly to see if our home had been obliterated by The Overhyped Wind Storm of 2010, but mostly to gloat about the temperature in The Villages--the kind of retirement hub where old people go to drink, play golf, or drink while playing golf. "It's already 80 degrees by the time we take our morning walk," they boasted.

If they had rung me up two days prior, I would have counter-attacked with a report of our glorious Indian Summer weather. But it's supposed to be 48 degrees tomorrow, which, when engaging in combat with The Villages, is akin to bringing a letter opener to a knife fight. I confessed to them that I'd already caved and turned the furnace on last week, when our fallow thermostat registered 66 degrees.

"Sixty-six? That's what we set our heat at," my dad replied. "No, it's at 67," my mom corrected. "One degree makes a big difference." No, four more degrees would make a big difference, which is where I set our heat.

Who are these people? If there weren't some compelling physical evidence to suggest otherwise, I'd swear I was adopted.

I used to think my dad was just being cheap in keeping our house a frigid 65 throughout my entire childhood, given that our electric bills used to top $300/month, a hefty sum back in the day. How do I know this? Because electric bills were all the menfolk in our neighborhood ever talked about, the way I imagine pioneers used to gather and discuss the "Indian problem." Dad went so far as to convert the house from electricity to gas, which he claimed was not only less expensive but a "warmer heat," the way people in Phoenix try to con the rest of us that 105 is a perfectly pleasant "dry heat." Me and my purple fingernails weren't buying it. Sixty-five is 65.

My mom's motives were more mysterious. She either towed the party line because a) she'd been raised by nuns, who taught her that suffering was next to godliness or b) she'd been brainwashed by my dad. Lately I've come to realize that in truth, it seems both these creatures actually consider 67 a comfortable indoor temperature. I can't believe that I share their DNA, me the girl who's never warm enough until she's too hot.

Here's my philosophy regarding indoor temperature: it should pass the outerwear test. Allow me to explain. You don't expect to wear a coat indoors, do you? That's sort of the whole point of heat, yes? So why would you set your thermostat at, for the sake of argument, 67 degrees, when that's totally light jacket weather? See my point--67 flunks the outerwear test.

The Snow Birds, I understand, apply a different standard, which is that a little frostbite won't kill you. That's why, come December, when the folks migrate back up north and we all gather at the family homestead for the holidays, I'll be packing a hat and scarf.

2010-10-16T15:06:00.001-07:00

Super Sad Untrue Story

Ask James Frey what happens when a non-fiction writer sneaks a little fiction into his true-life story. Nothing short of the Wrath of Oprah shall descend upon ye. But what about when a novelist borrows from fiction and passes it off as real experience?

A couple of weeks ago, author Gary Shteyngart paid a visit to my local indie bookstore, the Book Cellar, to read from his latest novel, Super Sad True Love Story, that, I'll admit, I had no intention of purchasing. Partly because my bookshelves are overcrowded, partly because I'm on a budget, and mostly because I'm annoyed by everyone on the New Yorker's 20 under 40 list. Dude's already got enough going for him, I figured. He didn't need my 26 bucks to further feed his ego.

But then he was so damned charming. During the Q&A portion of his appearance, he regaled us with the sort of anecdotes that English majors dream about, when we're not picturing ourselves as Jane Austen heroines.

He talked about his students at Columbia, with their OMGs and LOLs, and the way they're slowly dismantling the English language. (This is catnip to people over the age of 30 who attempt to work words like "aspersion" into their conversation.) He contrasted this with an elderly woman he ran into on the street, and the way she described the weather as "blustery." Who uses words like that anymore, besides Chicago's meteorologists, who constantly cast about for ways to distinguish one windy day from another? I couldn't get blustery out of my head for days.

I was utterly smitten by Shteyngart. You know what comes next. I bought the book.

Super Sad is a quick read, not because it's simple but because it's such a wickedly funny and entertaining satire, set in the not-too-distant future America. As science-fiction goes, it's not much of a reach to picture a world where people rely on their "apparat" (imagine a 20th generation iPhone) for pretty much everything in life, including downloading other people's credit ratings and personality and "fuckability" scores.

I was reading along at a pretty good clip when page 304 brought me to a halt. Shteyngart's lead character, Lenny Abramov, narrates: "A month ago, mid-October, a gust of autumnal wind kicked its way down Grand Street. A co-op woman, old, tired, Jewish, fake drops of jade spread across the little sacks of her bosom, looked up at the pending wind and said one word: 'Blustery.' Just one word, a word meaning no more than 'a period of time characterized by strong winds,' but it caught me unaware, it reminded me of how language was once used, its precision and simplicity, its capacity for recall. Not cold, not chilled, blustery."

Wait. A. Minute.

These were, if not the exact words Shteyngart had used in the Q&A, then a very close approximation. Particularly the whole precision part. I was taken aback.

It's common for novelists to borrow bits of their own lives and work them into their fictions, "write what you know" being a common mantra in any creative writing class. And maybe that's what happened here. Shteyngart really did run into some old Jewish lady on the street and she really did say "blustery." Maybe he's loved this little random exchange for years and finally found the perfect way to insert it into one of his books, with some added imagined details. I don't begrudge him that.

But. During the Q&A, I could swear Shteyngart said this interaction had taken place recently, though perhaps I'm misremembering--we non-fiction writers tend to do that. Minimally he made it seem as though this anecdote were being recalled on the spot, his particular response to a particular question, when clearly it was already a well-formulated, previously thought-out tale. At best he's like every other celebrity talk show guest, who appears to be having a spontaneous conversation with the host, but in reality is just trotting out material agreed upon with the show's producer. I suppose this is what happens on any press tour--be it to promote a book or a movie--you prepare your schtick in advance. You can't be fresh every night. And no one would be the wiser, assuming they never get to page 304.

At worst, he never heard a woman say "blustery." Lenny did. Shteyngart was so enamored with the lovely scene he created, he decided to make it part of his own experience, passing off something as real that never happened outside his own imagination.

Whatever the scenario, the result is the same: I feel lied to. What once seem genuine and off the cuff now strikes me as practiced and studied. Was anything he said representative of Gary Shteyngart, or merely "Gary Shteyngart," too charming to be true?

2010-10-15T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Year of the Mistress

By the time the fourth or fifth Chilean (you say Chee-LAY-un, I say CHILL-ay-un) miner emerged from the rescue tube looking none the worse for wear--seriously, I was expecting ZZ Top and got Javier Bardem--let's face it, the only drama left was whether the wife and mistress of Miner 21 (??) would both show up to greet their man. Spoiler alert (can you spoil something that already happened?): the wife stayed home. Cat fight averted. Damn. You know every news anchor was dying to see these women throw down.

I found this angle of the story surprising for two reasons: For starters, who knew miners had time for mistresses? I mean, whenever anyone complains about how hard their job is, you can bet someone will whip out this chestnut, "It's not like you work in a coal mine." (Can you say that to a gold miner? Is there added prestige to digging for precious metal?) Point being that mining is a pretty taxing gig. But apparently not so taxing that a dude can't juggle a senorita on the side.

What really struck me, though, was that for once, the media seems to have used the term "mistress" appropriately.

I'm not sure what 2010 is in China--the Year of the Dog or the Year of Lead-Poisoned Toys? But in the U.S., it's most definitely been the Year of the Mistress. Surely you all remember Tiger Woods' parade of paramours. Or the tattooed freak show Jesse James apparently preferred to Sandra Bullock. This past week alone gifted us with the Miner and his gal pal and David Arquette and Jasmine Something-or-Other.

The thing is, apart from the Miner's side dish, none of these women are, strictly and grammatically speaking, mistresses.

Mistress implies long-term. Mistress implies an actual relationship (read: more than sex). Mistress is Hepburn and Tracy, Charles and Camilla. Not Tiger and Jaimee With Two E's. (How much you wanna bet she also dots the "i" with a heart?)

In the case of Katharine Hepburn, mistress meant for all intents and purposes being married to a man who was unable to divorce his wife. In the case of Charles and Camilla, mistress meant choosing love over British law. (Taking a mistress is pretty much standard operating procedure for royals, who historically were forced into marriages of convenience. Well, not so much any more, after Chuck & Di's spectacular flame out.) Stability, semi-permanence and a dash of respectability--those are the calling cards of a true mistress. She's more than just a lover, more than a casual affair, more than a one-night or two-night (sorry Jasmine) stand.

I know that holding "Inside Edition" to Oxford English standards is kind of like expecting two-year-olds to recite Shakespeare, still I'm curious as to why "mistress" became the default choice in describing JamiEE, et al. Granted the alternatives--slut, tramp, strumpet, harlot, whore--sound a bit harsh and smack of moral judgment. But what's so wrong with that? Explain to me why we're so concerned with offending the sensibilities of women whose sole purpose in life seems to be having sex with other women's husbands.

"Mistress" soft pedals the reality of the situation. Why should it? Are we worried that "slut" or "tramp" will set back feminism? I'd say these women are doing a fairly good job of that themselves. Does "harlot" somehow not portray them as enough of a victim? Good, because they're not. Back in the Dark Ages, mistress was one of the few ways for a woman to get ahead. Today, we've got plenty of other options--like education and employment. Is it troublesome that these women get labeled "whore," while Tiger, Jesse & Co. face fewer verbal repercussions? I might have agreed if the word "douche" had not made such a spectacular comeback.

I know that in this post-Sex and the City world, women's sexuality is meant to be celebrated, not criticized. I'm not suggesting that we brand these women with a scarlet "H" for "Ho" or that we lock them up in chastity belts. What I am suggesting is that we stop making them sound better than they are.

Last week there was a lot of buzz on the Internet regarding "The Social Network" and the dearth of positive female role models to be found not just in the country's #1 movie, but in the origin story of Facebook itself. There were plenty of co-eds willing to sleep with and get drunk and high with Mark Zuckerberg and pals once they hit it big. To write complicated computer code? Not so much. Commentators pondered, Where were all the girl geeks? Almost as an answer, we got word of the Duke student who based her thesis paper on a rating system of the various attributes of the guys she had sex with. That's what young women are doing instead of founding Facebook.

And what of the next generation? I look at Miley Cyrus, alas a role model for a fair number of tweens, who seems to equate womanhood with stripper poles. Seriously, that's the message that we want sent to little girls, that this is how you prove you're all grown up? How about going to college and becoming the first female president?

What I'm seeing in this year of the mistress is a broader societal trend of a lot of women, young and not so young, equating power and maturity with sex. Or at least the women who bombard our TV sets and Internet websites, which is what passes for reality these days. So when the talk show circuit tags JaimEE and Jasmine with "mistress" instead of "self-esteem train wreck," they're doing a huge disservice to the rest of us. It sounds so glamourous and sophisticated, "mistress," like you're the lady of the mansion. Except that you're not. There's nothing powerful about having meaningless sex with the CEO of Google or the world's greatest golfer or the entire Duke lacrosse team. Especially if it's keeping you from becoming Google's CEO or a great golfer yourself.

2010-10-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

A Bone to Pick With Dr. Oz

Not that I believe everything I see or hear on TV, but Dr. Mehmet Oz comes with some pretty hefty credentials. Aside from being Oprah-approved, he's the vice-chair and professor of surgery at Columbia University. In case we didn't know that, he wears hospital scrubs on his wildly successful nationally-syndicated talk show.

So when Dr. Oz, as opposed to Rachael Ray, recommends anti-aging skin care techniques, I sit up and listen. What is the new wonder vitamin or food that will keep me glowing?

Which is why I have a bone, the ulna let's say, to pick with what happened on his show yesterday. After scaring the crap out of me with digitized images of how a dewy young woman eventually morphs into the Wicked Witch of Middle Age, he called upon a dermatologist (female, in her 50s, so relatable) to run through the top three tips to younger looking skin. The first two were no brainers--sunscreen and moisturizer. The third pissed me off.

The skin doctor, who clearly avails herself of her own services, noted that while plastic surgery isn't for everyone, guess what is? Fillers! These injections of collagen, or whatever, were placed alongside Oil of Olay as a tool every woman should have in her arsenal to "age gracefully."

Um, no. Fillers are a cosmetic, not medical, treatment. While I would argue that women have as much right to them as men have to Viagra (essentially both treatments deal with self esteem, not health, issues), the insurance industry doesn't agree. If you want fillers--which, in my opinion, make most women look like someone took a bicycle pump to their cheeks--you're going to have to shell out thousands of your own dollars to pay for ongoing injections.

I imagine surgeons, along with other rich people, don't view thousands of dollars as a significant expense, which is why Dr. Oz didn't blink when the subject of fillers was raised. He probably knows lots of people (ie, colleagues' wives) who routinely plump their faces. But that kind of money is a big deal to me, pretty much everyone I know, and I'm guessing the vast majority of Dr. Oz's viewers. Which leaves us poor folk (read, the middle class) with two rock-and-a-hard-place choices: 1) go broke trying to turn back the clock or 2) look old. It says much about the times we live in when bankruptcy is preferable to wrinkles.

I'm not holding Dr. Oz accountable for our youth- and celebrity-obsessed culture. For that I blame "Access Hollywood." Here's my problem with Dr. Oz: Much of his show is built around busting myths. The other day, for example, he floored me with the information that the female bladder is no smaller than the male's--contrary to evidence presented in lines at public restrooms--with actual bladders as props to prove his point. But in allowing the dermatologist to talk about fillers, he legitimized their use as a viable component of an everyday skin care regimen, which they're not. That's a huge disservice to viewers, who come to him for their daily dose of common sense.

Here's the vicious cycle he's promoting: Wealthy celebrities--who can afford fillers, surgery and soft-focus lighting--are held up as the beauty standard for all of us women who can't. (To say nothing of their personal chefs, personal trainers and personal hair and make-up artists.) Yes, if you're Demi Moore, 50 certainly is the new 30. If you're Jane Smith, elementary school teacher or administrative assistant, not so much. Yet poor Jane will compare herself to and be compared with Demi and found lacking.

I expect this kind of crap from the women of "The View," who are out and proud when it comes to extolling the virtuies of Botox, never mind that they're all paid seven-figure salaries. I don't expect it from Dr. Oz. If you're going to provide straight talk about bladders, you should do the same about wrinkles. And the truth about wrinkles is that most of us are stuck with them.

I'm furrowing my brow as I type. You know how I combat those crevices? Bangs.

2010-09-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

An Evening With Gary Shteyngart: The Art of Reading

I've read my work in public once, and only because I was forced to by an evil Program Director who thought all writing students should prepare themselves for eventual fame. I approached the requirement much the way I imagine a condemned man approaches the electric chair, sans the extravagant last meal. I was too nervous to eat. My friend Milan, who had appealed this sentence nearly as vigorously as I, poured vodka into his sports drink, mixing liquid courage with electrolytes in an effort to cure a virulent case of public speaking dreads.

The reading did not start off well. I treated a benign comment of "we can't hear you" as if it were heckling, and shot off the snappy comeback, "This is as loud as I get." Then just as I was warming to the experience--I'll admit hearing a few laughs in all the right places was kind of gratifying--the southern half of my body decided to secede from the Union. My right leg began to shake, violently and uncontrollably. I sent an army of neural transmissions to quell the rebellion, but these forces were repelled. With no podium to take cover behind, I had no choice but to loop the offending shin around the sturdier left, like a vine clinging to a pole for support. This tactic was not completely effective.

What can I say--I'm no Gary Shteyngart. Maybe it's that he takes acting classes, or that anyone would be cocky after making the New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list, or maybe it's just because he hangs out in close proximity to James Franco. Whatever the reason, Shteyngart, who was in Chicago recently for a reading from his new book, Super Sad True Love Story , completely blows the whole writer-as-introverted-troll image.

"I'm so glad to give hope to Russian Jewish nerds everywhere," he cracked upon greeting a standing room audience that had "fire code violation" written all over it. Small venues are charming that way--70 people packed shoulder to shoulder in an indie bookstore can feel like a U2 concert in Soldier Field.

After finishing his warm-up comic act, Shteyngart launched into an excerpt from Super Sad, which is set in a dystopian near-future post-literate America. The kind of place where nobody reads books, turning 40 is a major no-no and there are only two TV stations left--Fox Liberty Prime and Fox Liberty Ultra. In other words, not that far a reach from today.

Shtyengart, who was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, which he calls St. Leninsburg) but moved to the States as a boy, employed a heavy Russian accent he actually shed years ago to heighten his portrayal of various characters, themselves Russian immigrants. Asked later about his relationship to his Russian heritage, Shtyengart noted, "Remember the Evil Empire? Red Dawn?" It was tough to grow up Russian in the U.S. in the 1980s where, in Hebrew school, he was better off pretending to be German. That's right, better his fellow Jews think him German than Russian. Packed off to Ohio's Oberlin College, "It was cool to be an immigrant, I had to get the accent back. It's been an interesting journey from hating who you are to trying to be more of who you are."

He has, through satires that include "Absurdistan," taken his share of shots at his former homeland, for which he is apparently not particularly popular. ("I'm going [to Russia] in a couple of weeks. It's BYOP, bring your own pogrom.") Destroying the Soviet Union, even if only in his imagination, provided a certain satisfaction, whereas in Super Sad, taking down the U.S. "hit closer to home," requiring a number of drafts, partially because he was challenged to dig for greater emotion. Mentor Chang Rae Lee posed this question, "Can you do the blood and guts of the immigrant experience?"

In Super Sad, Shteyngart's main characters, Lenny and Eunice, Russian and Korean respectively, are unmoored in a culture that's becoming untethered itself. "I want to entertain, I want people to laugh. For me a book has to be funny," he said (as opposed to the majority of literary fiction, or what's been "ghettoized" as literary fiction, which has to be serious). "But I wanted this book to have depth, so I focused on a love story set against a backdrop of a society falling apart."

And what signals a society falling apart? To Shteyngart, an emphasis on youth, for starters. He points to friends and acquaintances, 65-70 years old, all trying to turn back the clock. "I admire them," he said. "I don't want to die either, but as an Ashkenazi pessimist, I know the end is near."

But primarily Shteyngart seems concerned with technology, and how that's revolutionized our culture, particularly when it comes to reading. He points to his students at Columbia, with their OMGs and LOLs, and the way young people, spurred by email and text communication, have "filleted and dismantled" the English language. While he's prepared to go with that flow--he's not the sort to dig in his heels and demand a return to the language of Shakespeare, or Chekhov--something is lost when we can only describe the weather as "nice" or "cloudy." "The other day I heard a woman use the word 'blustery.' No one says blustery anymore. I miss language deployed like that."

Though he appreciates that 25 percent of Super Sad's sales have been electronic--"People have given me their Kindles and iPads to sign"--he seemed more proud that the paperback edition of Absurdistan became an "accessory book," something guys carried around on the train to attract women. "It says a lot about who we are--the books on our shelves," he said.

But these days, people seem more intrigued by writing than reading. Not that he wants to hog the authorial field to himself, but the "cult of self-expression"--ie, blogging--has given rise to people who seem solely interested in what they have to say as opposed to "retreating inside the consciousness of someone else." (And no, I wasn't offended, because I know he wasn't talking about me--I read plenty.) This has him contemplating a possible foray into writing for television, pointing to shows like "Mad Men," "The Sopranos" and "The Wire," which he likened to "novels come to life"--richly written but a more passive experience. People seem more willing to let this programming wash over them, as opposed to the more active engagement required by reading. "We're bombarded by textual information all day long--do you want to come home and sit down with a book?"

That's the world as envisioned by Super Sad True Love Story. A vision Shteyngart--despite his threat to go Hollywood--hopes remains in the realm of satire. "There's better and better books being written," he said. "I want people to be around to read them."

2010-09-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

So Close, Yet So Far

You ever notice during the Olympics how the bronze medalist is the happiest person on the podium--with a loopy grin that says, "how the fuck did I get invited to this party"--while the silver medalist looks like she's chewing glass? That's because a third-place finish is a notch above Loser-ville, while #2 is a peg below Cheerios box. Bronze is lucky, silver an instant footnote.

I thought about this as yet another rejection letter popped up in my email today. Nine months ago I submitted an essay to the lit mag River Teeth. Nine months ago. I've gotten, like, six haircuts since then. Christmas came and went, not to mention Easter, the Fourth of July and Labor Day. Speaking of Labor Day, I could have conceived and birthed a human in the time it took River Teeth to read through my 20-page submission, apparently one syllable at a time.

Wanna hear their excuse? "Our apologies for hanging on to this for so long, Patty. It came close but just didn't make the cut this time. We hope you'll submit again."

Close. It was sweet of them to tell me so, in a personalized email no less--that's like electronic eye contact and a handshake. I should have been elated. I should have taken the glass half full, look on the bright side, you still have your health approach--hey, at least my piece hadn't been summarily tossed onto the scrap heap, and me along with it. At least someone (or maybe multiple someones) thought my work had a shred of merit.

Not good enough. That's what I took away instead. Who cares if I missed by the publishing equivalent of .00001 of a second. When it's winner takes all--you get a byline or you don't--I might as well have missed by a mile. I might as well have failed horribly, slipping on the ice and taking the entire Dutch speed skating team down with me, because in the end the result was the same. Not published. So why torture me with "almost"? I'd rather lose than not-win.

Excuse me while I go chew some glass.

2010-07-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

From Pigeon Shit to Bullshit

Pity the poor Kings of Leon. One minute you're riding high with a multi-platinum selling album and a Grammy for Record of the Year, the next you're being shat upon by pigeons. The band opted to cancel a concert in St. Louis after being showered with bird poop during a set at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.

I read this item with keen interest, partly because I'm a fan of KoL, but mostly because I despise pigeons and am intent on collecting evidence of their nefarious ways. I don't know what I plan on doing with said information, other than wave it in the face of people who persist in feeding these disgusting birds.

Anway, that was the extent of the story. Concert venue infested with pigeons, bass player hit with poop near the mouth, concert off. The end.

Except, today, a story on the Web never really ends. There's always the comments section. Depending on the topic, these can run into the hundreds, even thousands. Because everyone has an opinion and it must be heard.

In the event of the pigeon poop, a number of commenters made it clear they don't much care for KoL or their music. So, hurray for the pigeons! (In a comments section, you will always find at least one poster wondering why haters bother to read articles about people/things they claim to despise.) Others deemed the band members a bunch of spoiled sissies for bailing under the circumstances. These postings ran along the lines of, "If I were getting paid a million dollars, I'd open my mouth and let the pigeon squirt right in!" Oh, really? I suppose we can thank reality TV for that sort of mentality. We're so accustomed to seeing desperate, attention-seeking people perform all sorts of demeaning acts, including eating bugs, for their 10 seconds of notoriety that we imagine that individuals who've earned their fame due to actual talent would be equally willing to debase themselves. (If your job entailed being bombarded by bird guano, and you weren't, say, an ornithologist assigned to the Galapagos, I suspect you'd have OSHA on the phone in a nanosecond.)

And then, predictably, came the politicizing of a decidedly non-political event. These "liberal" rock stars apparently got what was coming to them. Never mind that KoL hail from Tennessee (hardly a hotbed of progressive thought) and traveled throughout the U.S. as children, following the wanderings of their father, a Pentecostal preacher. But they're entertainers, which I guess equals "Hollywood," which I guess equals Obama.

I don't know why I bother with comments sections. I only started reading the ones related to recaps of "Lost," looking for, and occasionally obtaining, additional glimmers of insight. With regard to KoL, I was hoping people who had attended the concert might provide further first-person accounts. What I got was the usual--a whole lot of anger.

Much blame for the current mean-spirited tone of our public discourse has been laid at the altar of cable news. To that let me add the comments section.

My husband, Dave, does not spend much time on the computer unless he's managing his fantasy baseball team. So when he commented on an article about the Supreme Court ruling against Chicago's handgun ban--noting that as an actual resident of the city, this didn't make him feel a whole lot safer--he was unprepared for the wrath to come. Foolishly, he had failed to disguise his identity as either "anonymous" or something more clever, like "chitownwussy." So just moments after he clicked "publish," he found people he'd never met or would never want to meet, calling him out by name and responding to his comment with a level of hatred typically reserved for serial killers. Many of them hoped he'd find himself in a home-invasion type situation, staring down the barrel of gun, utterly defenseless. So, to sum up, complete strangers, in a public forum, wished my husband bodily harm, possibly even death. Why? Because they hold a different point of view.

Dave was visibly shaken; to have that sort of personal attack waged so impersonally mystified and troubled him. He vowed to never wade into the mire of comments sections again. Oh, if only everyone would take such an oath.

Used to be, in the olden days of the early 1990s, the news was reported with objectivity by trained journalists. They gave us the facts and that was that. Now, objectivity is this quaint little concept, as outmoded as mainframe computers. Facts are for ninnies, opinion is king. And derogatory opinion trumps all.

I appreciate that freedom of speech is one of the founding tenets of our nation. It's just that unfortunately, a lot of free speech these days is less akin to Martin Luther King's powerful and soaring "I have a dream" and more like "You suck, you idiot."

Hate begets hate. One spiteful comment leads to another--either in agreement with the original or in opposition. And before you know it, the "conversation" has degenerated into name calling and expletives so far removed from the original topic that it's nearly impossible to follow the thought process that leads from pigeon poop to "die, commie bastards." You never know what's going to set off the firestorm. Commenters seem to have an uncanny ability to twist the most innocuous subject--the Jonas Brothers, let's say--into fodder for their vitriol.

It's too late to put Pandora back into the box. But I can't help wondering what would happen if the comments section suddenly disappeared. If people were forced to share their opinions, old-style. Face to face. Only with people they know. I suspect a number of individuals would be far too mortified to own up to their thoughts when they can't hide behind "anon." Others might be forced to think twice before spewing their diatribes and discover that, on second thought, some opinions are better kept to oneself.

Barring an outright elimination, what if we insisted that commenters adhere to the old cliche "if you can't say something nice, don't say it." That sound you'd hear? A whole lot of silence.

2010-07-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Reality Hunger Gives Me Heartburn

Bravo to you if you're reading this blog. Clearly you understand that personal opinion is the only true form of literary expression worth reading today.

I jest, but David Shields does not. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, released earlier this year, Shields touched off a firestorm of commentary with his assertion that the novel is dead, long live the essay/memoir. Of course, that's just his personal opinion.

It took me awhile to get around to reading the manifesto, partly because there was a bit of a wait to obtain what seems to be the Chicago Public Library's only copy. Apparently a number of us want to read Shields, we just don't want to buy him.

Reality Hunger is a collage of quotes and epiphanies--many of them not by Shields--in support of his general thesis that the lines between fiction and non-fiction are blurring, with non-fiction gaining the upper hand due to its general "truthiness." He spends 205 pages arguing this same point 618 times (the quotes and epiphanies are numbered), which is ironic, given that Shields devotes an entire four-page chapter to the art of brevity.

As someone who writes non-fiction, I was bolstered by his assertion that the form be allowed room to breathe. That when it comes to creative non-fiction, the creative part be given as much sway as the non-fiction. This is not journalism, people, he says. Memory is by its nature unreliable and the mere ordering of a life's event into a narrative suggests creative license has been taken. To which I say, hear, hear. Let the redemption of James Frey commence.

What I can't abide, however, is his insistence that the novel is no longer worth reading or writing. Simply because Shields himself prefers to read and write non-fiction. OK. That's his choice. I'm just wondering why this personal preference bubbled up to the level of national (possibly international) debate. I don't like goat cheese, but I don't see a publisher offering me a contract for a book that declares the superiority of cheddar.

Shields' primary argument against fiction is that it doesn't feel authentic--that readers can (or should) see the wheels of the plot turning. That novelists are working to invent what for essayists already exists--true experience. That knowing that a story is true makes it infinitely more powerful than knowing that a story is a figment of someone else's imagination. I couldn't disagree more.

Before I cracked open Reality Hunger, I finished reading Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer, the sequel to his earlier novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Both center on the character of Paula Spencer--Irish, alcoholic, battered wife. There are scenes in the first book of such utter devastation and brutality, as Paula describes beating after beating, that I found myself wincing in pain. In those moments, I knew what it felt like to be dragged around by your hair, to be kicked and hit and smashed until you're curled up like an animal, covered in your own blood. I read the second book because, as I told my husband, "I have to know that Paula is OK." "You know she's not a real person," he said. Oh, but you see, thanks to Doyle's astounding powers, she absolutely is. Perhaps not to Shields, but most definitely to me.

My question to Shields would be, why must it be either/or? Non-fiction but not fiction? I know the answer. It's that polarization sells. It's not enough to argue that non-fiction deserves greater respect and creative leeway (which is likely what he's really after), you also have to state that the rising popularity of one form completely negates the validity of the other.

That's the reality of the culture we live in. Pardon me for wanting to escape it.

2010-07-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

Playing Tourist in the Parent 'Hood

My nephews, ages 2 and 4/almost 5, were in town over the weekend (along with my brother and sister-in-law). Their visit proved an eye-opener in more ways than one.

For starters, my husband and I got to play tourist too, and in Chicago, that means one thing--Navy friggin' Pier. Oh, how we natives love to deride the Pier as the eighth circle of hell where all things hip and trendy go to die. I mean, it has a food court, for god's sake. But you know, if your goal isn't so much to be cool and pretentious as it is to have fun, the Pier totally delivers.

We rented one of those quadcycles, which looks like a cross between a bicycle and the Flinstones' car. Or an un-motorized golf cart with pedals. Pick your analogy. With the four of us adults pedaling our thighs off and the kids in front just soaking up the view, we struck out on the lakefront bike path, heading past North Avenue Beach, up to Fullerton. This is like taking a Big Wheel onto the expressway. In rush hour. Normally, when Dave and I are out for a ride, we hate the quadcycles. They're lumbering, people don't know how to steer them, and basically they get in our way. The dorks pedaling them are also always having too much fun, and cycling isn't supposed to be fun. Just ask the dudes dressed like Lance Armstrong, constantly shouting "on your left" as they attempt to turn a recreational path into the Tour de France.

But the quadcycle is so goofy in its construction and operation, you can't help but laugh at your own absurdity. The fact that it moves at a much slower pace all but forces you to stop and take notice of the beauty of the lakefront on a perfect summer day. The people-watching was particularly grand. Zipping along at our regular clip, we might have missed the old man in the Speedo performing a bizarre stretching routine along the side of the path for the benefit of the multitudes. With God as my witness, I will never mock the quadcycle again.

The other thing about hanging with the boys was that not only were given the chance to look at our city in a different light, we saw everything from a new perspective. Routine objects and activities became cause for excitment. Do you know how awesome elevators are to a 2-year-old? And not just riding them, but pushing the "up" and "down" buttons. How about a revolving door? Magic. The CTA, bane of my existence, became a veritable Disneyland. "I've never ridden a train that went anywhere before," exclaimed Connor (the 4/almost 5-year-old). We actually skipped our stop--which typically only happens to drunk, passed-out Cubs fans--just to make the trip longer for the boys.

I had been worried that our condo would prove a total bust, being completely devoid of toys. That's because I was viewing it with jaded, adult eyes. Little did I know that our accordian-style doors would be a total revelation to Logan. Look, they fold when they open! Our living room lamp, which you turn on by tapping its base, provided non-stop entertainment. Just letting Connor turn the key to our front door, well, you'd think we'd told him we'd won the lottery and made him our sole heir. We also had popsicles and Cheerios, which pretty much qualified as a four-star feast and cemented our status as best aunt and uncle ever.

But perhaps most illuminating was not the kids' reaction to their surroundings, but their surroundings' reaction to them. And by that I mean that people are so much nicer to children--especially little boys in "my name is Trouble" t-shirts--than adults. I'm guilty of this behavior myself. Where grown-ups get the stone-faced stare, I smile at babies, make funny faces for kids on the train, hold doors open for people with strollers. The thing is, I'd never been on the receiving end of this warmth and kindness before.

People chatted me up in elevators, often mistaking me for a mother instead of an aunt. "How old is he?" one woman asked, pointing to Logan. "My grandson will be 2 in a couple of months." The owner of Scooter's Frozen Custard, which we go to probably once a week, has never made eye contact with us before. But with Connor and Logan in tow, she came out from behind the counter and talked our ear off. It was like having an audience with the Pope. At a restaurant, we commiserated with another parent whose child, likewise, would not stay in her seat. She worried that kids on the loose--it was an outdoor patio--would bother the other diners. Not us, mind you, who she considered comrades and co-conspirators, but the "singletons," aka, people without kids. In other words, on any other night under more typical circumstances, me and Dave.

I saw some statistic a couple of weeks ago that said 18% of women my age don't have kids. That seems like a large number, but flip the statistic around: 82% do. I suspect if you further parsed the results and included only married women in my bracket, the percentage of mothers would top 90%. Either way, I represent such a tiny fraction of the female population as to nearly qualify as an endangered species. I'll admit, it can feel mighty lonely at times out here in non-mom-land. I lack the tie that binds, not just to other women but to other adults. The shared experience that gives complete strangers common ground. Once, I was at a birthday party for a friend's husband. We didn't know many of the other guests, so it was a relief when someone turned to me for conversation. "How do you know K?," he asked. "Do your kids go to school together?" "No, we don't have kids," I replied. He turned away.

For the few brief days that the boys were in town, I felt like someone finally taught me the secret handshake, finally gave me the access code to their exclusive club. Instead of standing there, nose pressed up against the glass, I was on the other side, mixing and mingling with the "in" crowd. All those moms and dads who otherwise consider me some sort of enemy, the person to be feared at restaurants and concerts and shopping malls and anywhere else they think a screaming child is likely to draw my ire rather than my sympathy.

I gotta say, even though I was just visiting parenthood, it felt nice. To be included. As much as Americans celebrate our freedom and individuality and our "don't tread on me" spirit, we're also very much a nation of joiners. We like to identify ourselves with groups. How else to explain Lady Gaga's 10 million Facebook fans, or better yet, the gazillions of people who tune into the Super Bowl when they don't even like football. It's only human to not want to feel left out or left behind. To be marginalized.

I've never been the sort of person who does something simply because everyone else is doing it. In fact, often quite the opposite. I guess I just never fully appreciated what it would mean to swim against the tide when it comes to having kids.

I'm the quadcycle. To know me is to love me, but most people won't bother to take me out for a spin.

2010-07-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

From Bust to Boom

When Mayor Daley announced that the city's annual downtown 4th of July fireworks display would be canceled in lieu of three smaller events spread along the lakefront, much grumbling ensued. Nobody likes change, especially not to beloved holiday traditions.

But I gotta say, in practice, this seeming bust of an idea turned out to be pretty damned spectacular.

We've headed to the Grant Park fireworks maybe once every three years. It's a lot of schlepping on the train for a North Sider. To claim a tiny patch of grass from a semi-decent vantage point, we'd have to leave our place about 3 hours in advance of the fireworks. The display would last all of 15 minutes, and then another 2 hours to get home. Not that I'm complaining. We were always glad we made the effort--there's something about seeing the entire city of Chicago, all colors and economic levels, come together that's electrifying. Not to mention the opportunity, after the display ended, to walk up Lakeshore Drive, closed to auto traffic. That was probably the best part--gazing at the lake and city skyline on a warm summer night and falling in love with Chicago all over again.

Here's how last night played out in comparison: At 8 p.m., an hour before the fireworks were set to shoot off, we hopped on our bikes and rode down a nearly deserted Wilson Ave. to the lakefront. Where cars were stymied by police barricades, we sailed on through. (I have to say, traffic cop is an awesome job. You get paid to be rude.) By 8:30, we were plopped on the grass, just feet from the beach. We watched as the fireworks' barge maneuvered to a spot on Lake Michigan literally right in front of where we were sitting. We had lucked into a front-row seat.

As I surveyed the crowd, which stretched from Montrose to Lawrence and beyond, I couldn't help but wonder what the Tea Partiers would make of such an assemblage. As a rough estimate, I'd say white folks like my husband and me made up about 5 percent of the gathering. The rest were a mix of Latinos (the vast majority), African-Americans and assorted other ethnic groups. They might not have looked like the Founding Fathers, but they celebrated with as much gusto and joy. Little kids ran around with glow sticks and the smell of barbecue mingled with the stench of sulphur. Fireworks are illegal to shoot off in Illinois, but you'd never know it from where we sat. The amateur bangs and crackles were applauded by the crowd, while we waited for the real show to start.

This was something new, something you didn't get in Grant Park. The spirit of independence--it was like the city had come to our party instead of the other way around. We weren't sitting under the shadow of august institutions like the Field Museum. This was our neighborhood so we were free to loosen up a bit. The year before, we had watched security personnel shoo people off the lawn of the Shedd Aquarium, which had been reserved for a private party. In contrast, here it felt like being at the kids' table on Thanksgiving instead of with the grown-ups in the dining room.

According to my watch, the city's display kicked off a minute late, but once the first rocket launched, I knew I was among my own people. People who love fireworks. People who aren't too cool to admit thier childish delight in watching sparkly things go boom. We whooped and cheered every burst--which included smiley faces and heart shapes and these gorgeous cascading fountains that drew a collective gasp. No one had thought to bring a radio to listen to the musical simulcast; instead, a guy next to us, part of large extended familial group, kept up a running play-by-play. His schtick needed a little work--he called the grand finale approximately halfway into the 15-minute show. All the while, people continued to shoot off their own fireworks, because what is the 4th but a pyromaniac's dream come true.

As the last burst faded to black, we got back on our bikes, weaved through the crowd, and were shortly in the clear. We zoomed passed buses, parked, waiting for the oncoming hordes. I'd never ridden in the dark before and had been a little apprehensive of making the attempt. But much like that walk up Lakeshore, it was the best part of the night. It felt free--free to be in the open air, to be part of this tiny band of cyclists, to have the road nearly to ourselves. As we made our way home, fireworks shot off all around us, and we were in the center of the celebration, enveloped by the magic.

By 9:45, we'd pulled up to our building, ready for Round 2. For the past couple of years, a group of teens has held their own fireworks display in the park behind our condo. For amateurs, it's pretty impressive (we wonder how much it costs and how the heck these kids get the money to pay for it, but that's a minor quibble). We settled onto our back deck--again, a front row seat--and a few of our neighbors came out to enjoy the show as well. When the cops arrived to shut the kids down, we nearly staged a protest but thought better of it--Chicago cops have a reputation, after all. (Where were they on the lakefront, where the crowds were much thicker and the danger much greater?) Not willing to call it a night, we chatted up our neighbor and her guests, one of them in town from Ohio, our home state. This might not sound like a remarkable occurrence, but it was, because in a huge city like Chicago, you don't necessarily even know the people who live five feet across the hall from you, much less talk to them.

On this night, the fireworks had brought us together. And wasn't that the point, after all.

2010-07-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

Princesses Lose Their Crown

While real-life princesses--see previous post--are staging a comeback (I picked up a copy of Majesty magazine in Borders and I swear there was an article titled "Know Your Princesses"), apparently fictional ones are lagging in popularity.

According to an item in Entertainment Weekly, Disney was none too pleased with the relatively paltry box office for "The Princess and the Frog." So to promote its forthcoming fall animated feature, "Rapunzel," it's dialing down the estrogen and ramping up the stud quotient. All in a bid to attract more boys to the movie. Check out the trailer and you'll see what I mean.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I realize it's healthy for girls to grow up knowing they can be doctors or lawyers or sales clerks at Walgreens. Or a Crown Princess who will get to rule her country some day, not Cinderella who just looks pretty in a big poofy ballgown. It doesn't need to be all pink, all princess, all unicorns and rainbows all the time.

On the other hand, must we always pander to the guys? Something like 99.99999 percent of movies are aimed at men or boys. Women are aware of this, which is why a lot of us went to see "Sex and the City 2" even though we knew it sucked. If we don't turn out for "female" fare, no matter how bad it is, we'll never see it again. Take away a little girl's princess movie, or de-emphasize the female role in it, and you're just affirming at a young age that girls are secondary to boys. That it's a man's world and we're just along for the added date-night revenue.

The same studios that worry that boys didn't like "The Princess and the Frog" are the same ones that cast 22-year-old starlets as the love interests of 60-year-old coots. The princess phase, when girls are the center of the story, is so fleeting and now the powers that be aren't even willing to concede that modest territory to members of the fairer sex, who clearly are considered a less desirable audience.

Save the princess.

2010-06-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

Princesses: A Cure for What Ails You

As the Fourth of July approaches, I have to wonder, especially in light of recent events, whether Americans made the right decision. To revolt.

I get that the colonists were keen on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Equality and justice and all that jazz. But perhaps we were a bit hasty in overthrowing the English king.

Because no king means no princesses.

Princesses are having a bit of a moment. Last weekend, in case you hadn't heard, Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden married her prince--actually, her personal trainer. I gorged on the coverage like it was triple-layer chocolate cake. I pored over photos of the glittering gowns and bejeweled guests--Bulgaria has a king and queen, who knew? Lapped up fun facts about Victoria's Cameo Tiara (apparently a gift from Napoleon to Josephine). Obsessed over YouTube footage of the couple's first waltz and the groom's toast to his new wife, never mind that most of it was in Swedish. And I wasn't the only one. The Internet was buzzing with well wishers from around the globe. If you're looking to bring about world peace, there's nothing quite like a royal wedding to get us to all join hands and hum the Pachelbel Canon. Because even after Charles and Diana smashed the myth to smithereens, we still want to believe in fairytales.

And now comes word that Prince Albert of Monaco is engaged. This tiny principality, which, without its royals would be about as exciting as Andorra, will have its first Crown Princess, a former Olympic swimmer, since Princess Grace died in 1982. Can we handle another spectacle? Bring. It. On.

Royal weddings take the excitement of Christmas and multiply it by a gold-plated horse drawn carriage. There's nothing in the States that remotely compares--that's sort of the point of our country--and I for one miss the pomp and circumstance. Sure, we have our inaugurations, but those mostly feature old men in grey suits making speeches. Yawn. I want to see palaces and footmen and, did I mention, the Cameo Tiara.

Clearly plenty of my compatriots do as well, admittedly most of them of the female persuasion, otherwise how to explain the popularity of the Oscars or the Kardashians? What is "The Bachelor" but a modern re-telling of Cinderella, arguably the most famous princess of them all. In the absence of a titled aristocracy and their attendant glamour, Americans created Hollywood and a class of professional celebrities to fill the void, though they don't quite muster up, now do they. Where's the mystique? Where's the elegance? Even if you could picture Julia Roberts in a crown and a 20-foot train, would you wake up at 4 a.m. to watch her marry her cameraman? It's just not the same.

Celebrities are a dime a dozen--quick, tell me the difference between Jessica Biel and Jessica Alba. Enough said. While admittedly standards for royals have slipped in recent years, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway married not just a commoner, but a single mother (she definitely had some 'splaining to do), they remain, in their rarity, a breed apart.

Like a white tiger, there's something magical about royalty in general and princesses in particular. They're pretty and sparkly and not quite real--a pure escapist dream. Note, little girls don't play "queen." That's stodgy and boring and too much like a job. Listen to Paris Hilton talk about how hard she works to promote her "brand" and that's all you need to hear to know she's not a princess. Princesses sprinkle fairy dust, they don't attend networking events.

The other day, I spent the afternoon with a two-year-old, dressed in her Cinderella costume. She took my hand and walked me to her bedroom, where she showed off her princess dolls, along with Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse. Princesses, to her, are every bit as fictional as a Disney character (heck, some of them are Disney characters). And perhaps, after all, that's their enduring appeal, to this writer at least: they're a bit of childhood fantasy come to life.

You can aspire to fame and fortune, but the mere fact that these goals are attainable--we have Lady Gaga and Bill Gates as proof--causes them to lose their luster. What's more, trying and failing to achieve that status--notoriety or unheard of riches or even a modicum of material success--is the reason entire categories of pharmaceutical drugs exist. That's what I appreciate about royalty: you can't possibly aspire to it, so just sit back and enjoy it like a summer popcorn movie. Instead of popping a pill to relieve the stress of modern American adulthood, doesn't having a princess to gawk at sound like a far better antidote?

Can't we have our Constitution and our princess too?

2010-06-22T14:29:00.001-07:00

An Inconvenient Truth About Public Transit

One of the benefits of being a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club is that it assuages the guilt I feel over owning a non-hybrid vehicle (frankly, our Honda Element verges on SUV, but we barely drive it, I swear, and it's a total lifesaver at IKEA). Another is Sierra magazine. It arrives every couple of months, which means that I have time to finish reading one issue before another shows up in my mailbox (New Yorker, I'm talking to you).

The current edition has a fascinating feature on ultralight backpacking for those crazy folks who like to hike thousand-mile trails, or blaze their own path from Maine to Washington. I'd totally love to join them on their trek if there were such a thing as indoor outdoors plumbing.

But what I found most intriguing were the results of a climate change poll that took a look at how well people walk the environmental talk. In other words, which potential conservation actions a person believes to be important vs. whether or not they engage in said behavior. For example, 93% of those surveyed thinks it's important to turn off unneeded lights, and 84% follow up by actually flipping off switches. Sixty-two percent believe in composting, only 14% do it.

The greatest discrepancy, not surprisingly, had to do with transportation. We all know Americans are profoundly attached to their cars (I cried when someone smashed in one of our Element's windows last year), here's how much: 73% believe public transit is important, only 10% ride it. Count me among that paltry latter group--I said I love my car, I didn't say I love to drive--but I'm not exactly out there beating the public transportation drum. Why not? Because it sucks.

I suspect a large number of, for lack of a better term, let's just call them hypocrites, eschew public transit for the sole reason that they don't have access to it. I grew up in suburban Ohio. There was no bus system, much less rail. We didn't even have a movie theater. If we wanted entertainment, we got drunk in the bowling alley parking lot. And we liked it that way. When I moved to Chicago (really, can you blame me?) I immediately started riding the bus to and from work and pretty much walking everywhere else. Later I graduated to the El system--once you go rail, you never go back to the bus. For the past 17 years, public transit has been my primary mode of transportation. So when I say that it sucks, I say that with a fair amount of authority.

Here's the trouble:

For starters, it's inconvenient. Sure, bus routes blanket the city, but to get from Point A to Point B might require any number of transfers from one route to another. If you think a connecting flight via airplane is a hassle, try waiting for that second plane in the rain or snow or blistering heat--for a half an hour. Rail lines are even less ubiquitous, leaving huge swaths of the city unserved. My personal solution has been to essentially live my life along the route of 1 or 2 train lines. And while I've managed just fine with this system, it's been limiting, to say the least, not just in terms of little things like where we dine out or where we shop for clothes, but major decisions like where I've looked for work. If I can't get there via the Brown or Red lines--or on foot--there's a pretty good chance I don't go there at all. I can understand why most people aren't willing to make that kind of sacrifice.
It's public. I know, that seems rather obvious. But if you're used to driving a car, it's quite shocking to suddenly share your ride with dozens of other people. Most of whom forget they're sharing their ride with you. They clip their toenails. (Yes, they do.) They listen to their headphones, really loudly. They argue with their boyfriends--either in person or on their cellphones. (Oh, don't get me started on cellphones.) They eat fried chicken--though food is specifically prohibited--and leave the scraps on the floor or their seat. They beg for money or run con games. If they're Cubs fans, they tend to vomit after 9 innings of beer consumption. If you don't have to subject yourself to this, why would you?
It's messy. This point is not to be confused with the chicken scraps or barf. It has to do with walking to and from a train station or bus stop--which are not, make no mistake, situated in your driveway--in any and all kinds of weather. And in Chicago, there is always weather. If it's raining, you get wet. If it's snowing, you get slush all over your pants. If it's windy, your hair is destroyed. If it's hot, you need a second shower before you reach the station. By the time you get to your destination, you look like trash. And all those people in their cars--fresh as a daisy.
It's expensive. A gallon of gas costs about $3 in Chicago. Even a relative guzzler like our Element can go 25 miles for that amount, or about 12 cents per mile. Now let's price transit: A one-way rail trip, regardless of distance, will set you back $2.25. Same for the return unless you can accomplish your business in two hours or less. So let's say I travel roughly 4 miles to see a movie. That's $4.50 in train fair vs. 48 cents in gas. Even factoring in parking, and Chicago's skyrocketing parking rates at that, driving is still a better deal. Just this past weekend, my parents were in town and we took them to the Green City Farmers Market near the Lincoln Park Zoo. To and fro, with a transfer in between, cost four of us $19 in train fare. Compare that with $12 to park at the zoo. We went out to brunch on Sunday, this time taking our car, and coughed up two bucks in quarters for the meter. Two bucks versus almost $20 for the train, with a sizable walk from the station tacked on at that. My parents are in their late 60s and my dad's sciatica had been acting up all weekend. I look at them and I see myself down the road; I try to picture myself on the train at that age and it's not pretty. Makes me want to move to Florida where the seniors tool around in tricked out golf carts.

That's an abbreviated look public transportation--believe me, I could go on for pages and pages--and all the ways that it fails miserably as an alternative to cars. What I didn't mention is that there's no traffic, at least not on the train, and it's a great place to read a magazine if you can shut out all the distractions. That's pretty much the extent of the positives. For 90 percent of the people, they don't outweigh the negatives. Until they do, I don't see how we're going to move more people onto buses and trains. Sadly, I don't thinking anybody, at the local or federal level, is seriously trying to change that equation.

2010-06-16T10:20:00.000-07:00

Let Them Eat Cake, If They Can Afford It

So we finished watching Season 1, Disc 1, of "Cake Boss" last night. First let me state unequivocally how much I adore this show. With that out of the way, let me pick it apart.

Yesterday I complained about Buddy Valastro's use of pound cake. Lo, in later episodes, he actually goes with red velvet for one of his concoctions, if only because it's a zombie cake and he needs something that looks like blood. He also, in perhaps my favorite segment of the series so far, demonstrated how to make the dough for an Italian pastry called lobster tails. When baked, it looked like puffed pastry wrapped around cream puff dough, filled with cream. I hate seafood, but I want one of those tails. Now. This was exactly the behind-the-scenes glimpse I had hoped for--how bakers make all those things that customers see when they walk into a shop.

That's the good news. The bad news is, this show feels naggingly scripted. Out of the blue, Buddy's mom forbids "exotic, erotic, whatever" cakes and a customer just happens to request one for a raunchy bachelorette party. The delivery team just happens to drop a cake on their way out the door, creating additional chaos. An engaged couple agrees to have live doves as part of their wedding cake. No. Way. There's not a bride on this planet who hears the words "you'll release the doves from the cake" and agrees to have live creatures winging around her reception, possibly pooping on her veil (though I was more concerned about damage to the cake itself). Perhaps most egregious was the scenario in which a husband purportedly surprised his pregnant wife with a delivery of baked goods from Buddy. I say "purportedly" because how surprised could a person be when a camera crew shows up at her house and sets up equipment to film Buddy walking through the door.

I'm starting to suspect that all of these "customers" have been recruited to create an excuse for ridiculously extravagant cakes. You ever heard of a "Zombie Walk"? Me neither. And in exchange, the aforementioned plants receive said cake, and perhaps the entire party, for free.

Which brings me to the "c" word. "How much do these cakes cost?" asked the voice of reason, aka, my husband.

I had posed a similar question to a local pastry chef, Peter Rios, the owner of Alliance Bakery in Wicker Park. He told me about a couple who had approached him to bake their wedding cake. The pair apparently lived or worked, I'm not sure which, right across from Pennsylvania Avenue. They wanted the Capitol Building for their cake, to feed 150 people. Rios spent half a day figuring out a design and quote for the cake, and arrived at $2,000. Let me repeat. $2,000. At that, Rios admits he's taking a loss. "We could never charge what goes into baking that cake."

The couple, on a budget, balked. Rios wound up creating a smaller dome and another cake on the side, for about half the original price. Even at that relative discount, Rios confesses, "I would never pay that."

Brides, or their fathers, often will. But Buddy's customers aren't all brides. In one episode, he creates a 4-tiered monster for a Sweet 16 party. The cake easily would have fed 200 and I counted maybe 15 girls at the soiree. The zombie cake was even more excessive--using Rios' pricing as a guide, I'd estimate the value in the $3,000-$4,000 range--and this for a group that seemed likely to be unemployed when they weren't busy being undead. I'm betting that in both these instances, Buddy donated the cake, having wrung sufficient drama out of their creation for yet another episode.

The problem is that your average couple from Peoria now wants, and expects, a Buddy-style cake for their special occasion. On the one hand, that's good news for freestanding bakeries that lost a fair amount of their cake business to grocery store chains and Costco over the years. "Now people understand that what we produce is of value," says John Roeser, owner of Roeser's Bakery in Humboldt Park, which has been in business since 1911. How great of a value they don't quite grasp. "People bring in pictures and want you to make a $7,000 cake for $200."

That only happens on TV.

2010-06-15T14:51:00.000-07:00

Yes, Mr. Letterman, We Do Need Another Cake Show

Usually, I'm on board with David Letterman's rants, but when he took on the proliferation of cake shows, we parted company. Check out the monologue here; it turns up about 2:30 into the video.

Thanks to the magic of DVD, a cable-free household like mine can enjoy the wonders of "Cake Boss," which follows the adventures of Buddy Valastro and his band of merry men and women at Hoboken's Carlo's Bakery. Last night, I gorged on five episodes from Season 1, munching on microwave popcorn for lack of an appropriate sweet.

Buddy is a wizard with rolled fondant and gum paste. He's a Rembrandt with a piping tube, deftly applying swirls and curlicues to a canvas of buttercream. Bridezillas bow down before him. And he owes it all, sniff, to his dead father, Buddy Sr.

But once the sugar buzz wore off, a question kept nagging at me, mostly because my husband wouldn't stop harping on the subject. "Noboby ever says how it tastes," Dave noted. (My Dave, not Mr. Letterman.) Much as I hated to admit it, he had a point.

From what I could tell, Buddy makes most of his creations out of pound cake because it's easy to carve into crazy shapes, like a bi-plane, a fire engine or a roulette wheel, not because it's inherently more flavorful than, say, red velvet. What's more, in all of the episodes I watched, I saw a sum total of one cake batter being mixed. (I confess I have an obsession with industrial Hobart mixers. I could watch giant vats of butter and flour churn for hours. Seriously, if somebody posts that on YouTube, I'll never leave my computer.) In fact, Buddy literally separates his baking and decorating operations--baking on the first floor, decorating on the second. And guess where we, the viewers, spend most of our time.

Sure, Buddy's quick to mention that all the frou frou--flowers, bows, gambling chips--is perfectly edible. But seriously, who's going to chow down on a figurine, shaped like a fireman, of solid gum paste. My teeth hurt just thinking about it. Once the grand presentation is over and the carvers get to work, it's the cake itself that matters.

I get that cake in the nude isn't particularly sexy, though if it's so bland, how come cake batter is only the most awesome ice cream flavor ever. It can't compete, looks-wise, with the finished, frosted product. At least not on television, which is all about the visual. But it could, and should, be part of the equation.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of the cookie, but even I have to admit that there's nothing quite like an amazingly good piece of cake. I've had chocolate slices that were so rich I thought I would vomit if I ate another bite--and yet I took that next bite because I couldn't stop. I'm also a sucker for special occasion sheet cakes--somebody invite me to a graduation, please--and not just the cake itself but the crumb layer that stubbornly adheres to the cardboard underneath. When noboby's watching, I scrape up those leavings, which any cake expert will attest is the best part.

For my own wedding, because this is the way I plan all my menus, I started with the cake and worked from there. Ours was a four-tiered affair, a different flavor for each level. One was banana, one was lemon with raspberry filling, and a third was chocolate mousse. (The topper was chocolate cake with raspberry cheesecake filling. Oh yes, we hogged that one to ourselves for our anniversary. Awe. Some.) I had sampled each of these--and more--at a tasting with our baker. You never see Buddy offer this to his customers. It's all about the design. (And I don't mean to pick on Buddy. I'm totally powering through the rest of Season 1 tonight.)

So what we need, Mr. Letterman, is a cake show that's really about cake. There's more to life than pound cake and gum paste--goodness, there's an entire Cake Bible to choose from. My pitch: a combination of the two aspects of cake making--baking and decorating--the way "Law & Order," cha-chung, combines the cops with the courts. Food Network, you listening?

2010-06-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

How Low Can You Go

I thought women over 40 were supposed to be more confident, more self-possessed, less concerned with the opinions of others. At least that's what Oprah keeps telling us.

To a certain extent, I've found that to be true of myself. I'm more willing to take chances than I was when I was younger, more willing to give myself permission to do what I want and be who I want, whether it's cool or not. Why, just the other day, I had my hair cropped short, all those other pony-tailed women be damned (an obsession Ms. O herself has caved to).

Then I watched the Tony Awards last night. Actually, because my husband was in the room with me, I flipped between the Tonys, the NBA finals and "Forrest Gump." I don't think I've ever seen Gump from start to finish because I'm pretty sure I would have remembered the part where little Forrest overhears his mom exchanging sex for educational services for her son. TV is like a box of chocolates--you never know what you're going to get, and this scene was like hoping for a caramel filling and biting into asparagus.

Anyway, back to the Tonys. This has to be the strangest award show on TV, in that most of the viewers have no first-hand knowledge of the nominees and/or winners. How many people attend the theater each year, much less Broadway? How many people, who think Hollywood is too liberal, went positively apopleptic at the sight of so many honorees thanking their "partners"? I suppose if you fall into this latter camp, you weren't watching the Tonys, you were sticking with Gump (and getting more than you bargained for there), or you were watching the Tonys, but only to get your daily dose of things to be pissed off about, which, clearly, the show delivered.

Me, I was watching because I love live theater and even if I'll never see a single Broadway production, I read all the reviews. (Reviews are like Cliff Notes for adults. I've never so much as skimmed a single page of "Harry Potter" or the "Twilight" series but thanks to reviews am fluent in both languages. Go Team Edward!) I was also watching because, as my husband would put it, there were dresses. Not necessarily on par with Oscar gowns, because Linda Lavin was a nominee not Charlize Theron, but fashion nonetheless.

And that brings me back to my original point, which I'd nearly forgotten amidst the Gump tangent. Cate Blanchett and Kristen Chenoweth. Chenoweth, 42 (almost), is a Broadway baby and former Tony winner, who also dabbles in TV and film. She played Glinda in "Wicked," but now more closely resembles a scarecrow. Blanchett, 41, is an Oscar winner who also dabbles in theater. More than dabbles, actually: she and her husband are currently artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. She, too, looks like a scarecrow.

It's no secret that the vast majority of successful actresses are subject to insane requirements when it comes to body type, mostly so that they can fit into the pretty dresses that I tuned in to ogle and critique. But you would think--or at least I would think--that by the time these women reach a certain pinnacle in their profession, and a certain supposedly confident age, they would stop playing by the industry's rules and start making their own.

I'm not suggesting that they "let themselves go." I like the fact that women in their 40s, 50s and 60s (you go, Helen Mirren) are still considered attractive, in a way that they weren't twenty years ago. But I am suggesting that we need to adjust our opinion of attractive, which is to say that a 40-year-old Oscar winner shouldn't have to compete with this week's flavor of the 20-something month in the how-low-can-you-go on the scale sweepstakes. Speaking from personal experience, it's a lot harder after 35 to keep the pounds off. It scares me a little to think of what women like Blanchett and Chenoweth are doing to maintain their girlish figures (or not doing, which seems to be eating).

I don't know why we put celebrities on a pedestal. But we do. And as long as we do, we're going to take our cues from people like Blanchett and Chenoweth regarding what a women over 40 should look like. Which is why they owe it to us to look like a woman, a successful, confident, self-possessed woman. Not a scarecrow. And not a girl.

2010-06-07T09:42:00.001-07:00

Eat, Pray, Film

People magazine wants to know which book-to-film conversion you're dying to see this summer. Well, actually they only give you three choices. I don't know, ever since Hollywood turned The Iliad into "Troy," I've been a little wary of film adaptations of my favorite books.

I'm not saying the novel-to-screenplay makeover is always a bad thing. For one, hearing that a book is going to be made into a film often inspires people to read the original source material. I've been seduced a few times myself. But what usually happens is that after I read the book, I don't want to see the movie. For starters, I already know the plot. But mostly I can't see how the movie can possibly be an improvement--subtleties are inevitably lost; interior dialogue, frequently key to understanding character motivation, is often jettisoned; casting choices are made with an eye on the box office, not what's called for on the page. I also tend to get too attached to the text; it pains me to have it altered in the slightest way (major case in point, "Atonement"; minor case in point, "Lord of the Rings: Two Towers"). In fact, the best adaptations are often of novels I never knew existed (ie, "Up in the Air").

So, which books has Hollywood mucked up the worst? Which book would you like to see get the film treatment?

2010-06-07T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Best Talk Show Not on TV

Last week, I watched Ellen DeGeneres chat up Scottish actor Gerard "Call Me Gerry" Butler (the show was a re-run; the film Butler was hawking, "The Bounty Hunter," has long since slunk out of theaters on a tide of bad reviews). The surprisingly charming Butler was recounting a recent trip to Iceland, in which he and a pal camped out atop a glacier in the glow of the Northern Lights. It sounded amazing and I couldn't wait to hear more. But DeGeneres was only interested in whether Butler was or wasn't dating then co-star Jennifer Aniston. So after a few polite "uh-huhs" she cut off all the nattering about Iceland and interjected, "So, were there any women there?" I flipped the channel to "Jeopardy."

DeGeneres, like most hosts of celeb talk shows, is a comedian. She has no formal training in reporting or interviewing, which is an actual skill. And it shows. (Craig Ferguson is the rare exception in this stilted format and has a Peabody to prove it.)

I was reminded of this on Friday, at The Interview Show, a little local gem hosted by Mark Bazer, a journalist and syndicated columnist. On the first Friday of every month, Bazer gathers an eclectic line-up of Chicagoans (or folks with Chicago ties)--musicians, actors, designers, chefs, athletes, authors, politicians--and puts on the finest not-quite-late-night talk show around. Maybe it's because he has weeks, not hours of advance notice, but Bazer always comes uber-prepared. He's read the book, seen the play, eaten at the restaurant. And done a boatload of background research that goes beyond "look at this goofy photo of you when you were in high school." He has a list of questions, but those are just starting points; he gives the conversation room to breathe, lets it take its natural twists and turns, and, gasp, follows up on interesting revelations.

His most recent show included the god of Chicago chefs, Charlie Trotter; actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts; and former Cubs player-turned-author Doug Glanville. Where his network (and cable) brethren might fawn over such illustrious subjects, Bazer pulled no punches. Trotter was once named the second-meanest person in Chicago--with Michael Jordan, the former #1 no longer in town, did that elevate Trotter to top meanie?

The results were often meandering, but largely enlightening. Who knew that Trotter, Chicago's king of fine dining, was once an avid beer can collector? Glanville illuminated what really goes in those infamous baseball pile-ups: not much. No one wants to risk an injury by punching someone else.

Glanville, in particular, sparkled under Bazer's guidance. The two held one of the most measured, reasonable discussions I've heard on the subject of steroids. Free of the hyperbole and rhetoric that's the bread and butter of sports talk radio, Glanville explained the mindset of his juiced-up counterparts (clearly clean himself, Glanville looked slight as a cyclist), driven largely by fear--the daily fear that big league players have of losing their job, not just to the young hotshot in the minors but to the guy next to them on the bench. And Bazer listened.

It made me wonder, what if all talk shows were hosted by people skilled in the art of interviewing? And why aren't they?

2010-06-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

A Noo Way Uv Spelling

While Anamika Veerami was busy correctly spelling "stromuhr" to take home the prize in the annual National Spelling Bee, protesters from the American Literacy Council were questioning why bother to learn spelling at all.

The folks at the ALC think English is crazy hard to learn because of its wacky spelling, and they'd like some standardization, and logic, applied. So enough with "enough"--their SoundSpel method would change that to "enuf," and a whole bunch of other words along with it.

I don't know, the ALC seems at least a decade late with their protest. What with email and Twitter and texting, abbeviated, phonetic and otherwise incorrect spelling has become an accepted norm anyway. What nitpicking is left keeps a few dozen editors and proofreaders gainfully employed, which, in this economy, is a good thing.

Besides, do we really need to be encouraging further laziness, and a further dumbing down of the curriculum. So what if spelling is hard. So is algebra, so is chemistry. It's called learning. Are we giving up on that altogether?

Kudos to Anamika. She wants to go to Harvard and become a surgeon. And I don't mean sirjun.

2010-06-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Everything in Moderation

You'd never know it from FOX News or MSNBC, but there are moderate Republicans out there. Like Tom Campbell, a pro-choice, gay marriage supporter who's running for the senate in California. I'd actually consider voting for him, you know, if he weren't trying to oust Barbara Boxer and I lived in California.

Campbell is the subject of a piece in the June 7 New Yorker, that focuses on the senate race in general, but largely serves as a reminder that if extremist, attention whores like Sarah Palin would crawl back under their rock, this country might be able to reconcile left and right. Here's what's so unusual about Campbell--not just for a Republican, but for a politician of any persuasion--he doesn't pander. Asked during a debate whether individuals on the the "no-fly" list should be allowed to carry guns, he logically answered "no." NRA be damned. And then his opponents, who responded, WTF, "yes," had the audacity to call him soft on terror. Wha?

But this is where Campbell truly won my heart--he's the first Republican I've ever heard say, "If less government intrusion is desirable in economic life, why shouldn't it be equally desirable in private life?" Meaning, if you want to keep government out of your wallet, let's keep 'em out of your bedroom and uterus as well. Come on California Republicans--reward this man for not only being honest, but being right (in the best sense of the word).

2010-06-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

Life Ends at 40

This week, the New Yorker announced its list of 20 fiction writers to watch. Half of them were women and a fair number hail from outside the U.S. None of them were under 40.

That's right, here we go again with an oh-so-original 20 under 40 list.

I was so annoyed by yet another publication's insistence on 40 as the demarcation line for success that I scarcely noticed, or cared, who made the New Yorker's role call. (I do recall Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, who happen to be married, so, phew, marital meltdown averted.) Apparently, I wasn't the only one offended. Ward Six provided a quick rejoinder: 10 over 80 rewarding writers who've been "kicking a** for longer than we've been alive." To which I say, it's about time.

I find 20 under 40 offensive for a number of reasons. True confession time: I'm no longer eligible to make the cut. I find this difficult to comprehend, and practically choke whenever I'm forced to give my age. I have no idea how I got here. A friend of mine recently turned the big 4-0, which was semi-traumatic for her. That's not even the hard part, I warned her. The hard part is that once you get over that hump, and make peace with it, the years keep turning. And it wouldn't be so bad--truly, I'm happier and in a far better place than I was in my 20s--if our entire society weren't conspiring to constantly remind me that my life is over. Or at least not worth recognizing.

In reviews, or comments on reviews, of "Sex and the City 2," I saw these stunning 4 over 40 actresses referred to as "crones" (definition: an old woman, hag). I've read suggestions that no one over 40 be allowed to work on "American Idol," as if the age of the show's producers is the sole reason behind theme nights like Songs from the Cinema. FYI: I've got Modest Mouse and MGMT on my iPod and would kill to ban Pink Floyd from radio airplay.

This ageism strikes me as schizophrenic. On the one hand, our culture is fixated on precocity and the youthful phenom. I was going to offer Mozart as an example, but that would date me, so how about Justin Bieber as a reference point. Or those 8-year-old gold-medal Chinese gymnasts. Or the toddler in Thailand who smokes cigarettes. On the other hand, we're living longer and, at least in the U.S., we're being expected to work longer, well into our 70s, when, if you're a woman, you're also expected to still be "hot"(for those of us who weren't hot to begin with, we just get to feel bad about ourselves for a few extra decades). Talk about mixed messages: We're told 50 is the new 30, but if that were the case, why no 50-year-olds on the 20 under 40 list?

"Golden Girl" actress Rue McClanahan died yesterday. She was 76, which, as my friend Lori pointed out, means she was 51 years old when she took on the role for which she's best remembered. Fifty-one. Playing a golden girl. Can you imagine that today? Thinking someone that age is ready for the old folks' home, when they're more likely to have a kid in elementary school.

I'm no fan of the Baby Boomers and their narcissism and the way they're going to bleed my Social Security dry, but they have made huge inroads in the way we think, not necessarily about aging--nobody really likes it--but about what we're capable of as we age. I was at a wedding last weekend where the groom was 50 and the bride was in her mid-40s, her first marriage. These two are just getting started, at an age when my own parents were walking my older sister down the aisle. But the media, with its lists, seems to not have caught up with this shift in the way people are living their lives.

Plenty of us are angling for second acts, myself included. And that's the other thing that irks me about the New Yorker piece. One of the things I love about writing is that it's not gymnastics--there's no biological component that lends an advantage to youth over age and experience. I'm constantly cheered by the fact that some authors produce their best work late in life. Case in point: Jose Saramago. Nobel Prize winner. You might have heard of him. I'm currently reading the latest brilliant novel by 67-year-old Peter Carey, who's likely to contend for a record third Booker prize. There's one to watch.

I know, the point of these lists is to shed light on up and comers. But does that mean no one over 40 can still be on the upswing? That we have nothing new or original to add to our public discourse? That late bloomers are less deserving of praise than quick starters? (BTW: Where will Bieber be in 20 years? Or 2?) At least 10 over 80 gives me something to aim for. By the time I get there, 80 will be the new 40. And I still won't make the New Yorker list.

2010-05-21T14:20:00.001-07:00

And the Grief Goes On

Last night, I came as close as I'll ever get to a Star Trek convention. No, I'm not a Trekkie, but I am a Lostie, and I gathered with my fellow fans of the soon-to-be dearly departed drama at the AMC River East for a Q&A with "Lost"'s dynamic creative duo, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. On a scale of 1-10, I'd rank this a solid 7 for pure geekiness.

Mind you, Cuse and Lindelof, or Darlton as they've been dubbed by some in the media, were in New York and I was in Chicago. But they technically were appearing "live," as the session was beamed from New York Times headquarters to 500+ Dharma stations, I mean theaters like mine, across the U.S. and Canada. I paid $12.50 for the privilege, and it wasn't even broadcast in 3-D.

Some of us--and I imagine that in total we numbered well into the thousands--had come for answers. Like "were you making this up as you went along?" and "What's up with Walt?" The short answers: A) Mostly not, honestly and B) The actor grew up. (As Lindelof noted, Malcolm David Kelley started out as a 12-year-old playing an 8-year-old. By the end of Season 1, his voice started doing the "Peter Brady" crack and the producers determined "We've got to get that boy on the raft, stat!") Some of us had come to show off our nifty Dharma jumpsuits. (One dude in NY was sporting an especially awesome "Not Penny's Boat" t-shirt that I spent half of the morning searching for online.)

But I suspect most of us, myself included, had come because, like Darlton themselves (itself?), we're "Elizabeth Kubler Ross-ing." We're greiving, and stuck in denial that this astounding television show, whose characters have been a part of our lives for 6 years, is, as of Sunday, no more. We're not ready for it to end.

So, after staying up late this week to catch Matthew Fox on Letterman, only to hear how happy Jack Shepard was to leave the island and move on to feature films, it was comforting to hear that Lindelof cried so hard watching the finale that he got kicked out of the recording studio where the brilliant Michael Giacchino was conducting the show's final musical notes.

What's made parting particularly difficult is that this sixth season has circled back to the near-perfect and much-beloved Season 1 in a nifty bit of symmetry. (Jeff Jensen, Entertainment Weekly's resident Lost savant, predicted this last year.) In the same way that S1 flashbacks gave us greater insight to the characters, S6 flash sideways have shown us alternate shadings of these same individuals. "Let's give the audience the experience of getting to know these characters again in a different way," Cuse explained. Yet just as we've fallen for James Ford, detective, poof, he's gone.

Fans have not only become profoundly attached to these characters--witness the fury over Jin choosing to make his daughter an orphan, as if there really were a little 3-year-old Korean girl who was now parent-less--but they also feel deeply involved in the process of the show's development. Darlton have been particularly sensitive to fan reaction and have at times responded via various plot points, which made it feel as much our show as theirs. That kind of power can be dangerous. Lindelof reminded the audience that the whole Nikki & Paolo debacle of S3 was initially an answer to viewers questioning why, out of 40+ plane crash survivors, we had only ever met a dozen or so. On a more humorous note, Hurley's stash of Dharma ranch dressing was added to quiet detractors who wondered why Hugo hadn't gone all "Biggest Loser" and dropped some major tonnage. (This prompted Cuse to point out: "Nobody ever asked why Kate's hair looked so good." Or, I might add, how she kept finding t-shirts that fit like a glove.)

While Cuse & Lindelof were more than willing to cop to their mistakes (Nikki & Paulo, 'nuff said), they also deserve credit for tackling big ticket topics--on broadcast TV no less. "We set up this thematic debate of faith vs. empiricism. What's the cost of faith?" Cuse said. Try and find that on "CSI." They also upped the ante in a way that few other shows dare, which they signaled in the very first episode. People would die. OK, maybe it was just the Oceanic pilot, who had all of 5 minutes of screen time. But just when we felt comfortable that "Lost" was playing by established rules--extras are expendable--they knocked off Boone. He of the amazing cheekbones and eyebrows. And then they killed Shannon and Ana Lucia and Libby and Mr. Eko. And Charlie. Granted, they told us Charlie was going to die, but even after all of the carnage mentioned above, we didn't believe them. He was a hobbit for crying out loud. You don't kill off a hobbit.

Except they did. "The hardest plot point was killing Charlie," Cuse admitted. Having constructed a narrative path that dictated that outcome, they found themselves in the writers' room thinking "Oh, we are such bastards." But it also had the effect of telling viewers "no one is safe." Of keeping us on edge. Of instilling in us the troubling notion that we might not get a happy ending. Just like real life.

In the event we don't get that happy ending, Darlton has left us in good hands--each other's. When asked which television shows were their major influences, Lindelof referenced "Twin Peaks." (Cuse, who's like the senior partner to Lindelof's wise-cracking, pop culture-referencing junior associate, hearkened back to "Gunsmoke.") He'd watch it with his father and at the end of each episode, "We'd talk and say 'what just happened?'" In "Lost," he created a similar dynamic--a show that got people talking, and expounding crazy theories, and buying Dharma jumpsuits. A show that created not just fans, but a community. Like Lindelof, I watched the show with my dad (albeit in different time zones). And after each episode, I could count on a "WTF" phone call from Pops (which I would prepare for by reading every recap in sight in order to sound like a friggin' genius). By the end, I don't know if my dad even liked the show, but he stuck with it, for me, because it was something for us to share. I'll miss that.

Because I don't have cable--and perhaps not even if I did--the candidates (pun totally intended) to fill the gaping hole left by "Lost" are few if non-existent. Of late, I've grown fond of "Parenthood," but not in the way that I gave my heart to "Lost." (I like Peter Krause, but he's no Josh Holloway--with or without a shirt.)

"This show has provided us an opportunity to illuminate our ideas of faith," Cuse said. Characters started out as loners, came together and formed a sort of family (live together, die alone) and found strength in each other. "We all lifted each other up--that's what matters in life."

Namaste.

2010-05-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

A Tyra Tirade

Tyra Banks, novelist. Someone shoot me now. Seriously. Put me out of my misery.

According to various news outlets, Banks is under contract for a three-book young adult fantasy series called "Modelland." It's about a girl trying to keep up with the beauty game at an elite school for supermodels, or Intoxibellas. I am not making this up. Tyra is (or, more likely, someone on Tyra's payroll).

I know it shouldn't bother me. Anymore than Lauren Conrad getting a book deal or the fact that Nicole Richie has an ISBN to her credit. But it does.

It bothers me because I've always wanted to be a writer. Lauren Conrad just wants to be famous. Ditto for Nicole, who also dabbles in TV and designing jewelry and clothes (as does Conrad). Writing isn't a calling, it's more like a pair of shoes for these girls--something to try on and discard if it doesn't fit or goes out of fashion.

Banks made a name for herself as a model, but has of late become more of a media personality, one who's admitted she's bent on Oprah-like world domination. Wikipedia lists her as a "businesswoman" and I imagine that, for her, inking a three-book deal was a simple transaction. A means to the end of extending the "Tyra brand."

For me, it would be a halleluia, tears-of-joy, pop-the-cork-on-the-champagne moment. The culmination of a life spent toiling in anonymity, sitting in front of a blank computer screen, staring at a blinking cursor that refuses to magically transfer the thoughts in my head into words on the page. Affirmation of my very existence. I might even tweet about it.

The first story I remember writing, back in the first or second grade, was a mystery involving a jewel heist. The thieves had hidden the stolen gems in a roll of Charmin for safe keeping, which Mr. Whipple discovered when he handled the toilet paper. It was not squeezably soft. Hardly the stuff of Jane Austen, but it was a start.

I won't bore you with all of the twists and turns that my life has taken since then. Suffice to say that I did not become the Next Great American Novelist. After a long and winding detour into the corporate world, I'm back at square one, trying to convince editors that I'm worthy of writing for their web sites--for free.

I would like Tyra to feel some of that pain. Before she pens a single word of "Modelland," I would like her to listen to lectures on structure and voice and narrative distance. I would like her to agonize over whether to use a semi-colon or a dash. I would like her to debate active versus passive verbs. I would like her to sit in a workshop and have her writing critiqued (aka, ripped to shreds), by her fellow students, to her face. I would like her to live with the knowledge that she'll never be great, and then to question whether she's even passably good. I would like her to have a passion for this one and only thing--writing--and to never have that dream come true.

The day Tyra's deal was announced, I received the latest in a slew of rejection letters. I spent two days staring at the envelope before I worked up the courage to open it. I already knew what was inside. When you see your own handwriting on your own self-addressed stamped envelope, you know the tidings won't be glad. I'm not sure which is more insulting: the fact that I have to pay for the postage to have news of my non-acceptance communicated to me or the fact that I mailed out a 30-page essay, which took painful months to craft, and in response I got a form letter that dared to wish me "best of luck!" when the deliverer of this chipper drivel was fully aware that the best of luck would have been having my essay published in their magazine.

I can't even soothe my wounded pride with a hefty dose of trashy TV. I flip on "Gossip Girl," only to see Dan, a high-school student for Christ's sake, have a piece accepted by The New Yorker. It's a wonder I ever get out of bed.

One could argue that Tyra has felt the sting of rejection as well. After all, models try out for lots of jobs that go to someone else. Sorry, I don't care. The mere fact that you call yourself a model suggests you have a certain impression of your appearance, which is that you're better looking than 99.999% of the other humans on the planet. If your ego gets taken down a peg or two, best of luck.

Except for that, according to Wikipedia, Tyra was a phenom out of the gate. I quote: "Within Banks' first week in Paris, designers were so entranced by her presence on the runway that she was booked for an unprecedented twenty-five shows--a record in the business for a newcomer." (I have a slight suspicion that this copy was lifted from Banks' PR materials. Who, in the Wiki-universe, says "entranced"?)

That's what really ticks me off. Tyra already won the genetic lottery. She's tall. She's beautiful. She turns heads. She has a commanding presence. She's a freaking supermodel. That she gets to add author to her resume isn't fair.

It isn't fair to anyone who's ever clutched a copy of "Jane Eyre" as their personal bible, as proof that the shy, bookish, average-looking woman eventually wins the day with her smarts and her wit. We'll concede categories such as modeling and acting and the chance to win The Bachelor to the pretty girls as long as they keep their long legs and perfect hair out of our Plain Jane territory--writer, anthropologist, Green Peace activist, Supreme Court justice. We'll allow Tyra & Co. their superficial rewards as long as we're left with everything else of substance.

Tyra Banks, author, blows my world order out of the water. It doesn't just rub salt in the wound of "best of luck," it shoves a bayonet in it, twists it and rips out my guts.

At least I get to write about it.

2010-05-05T12:38:00.000-07:00

A Bird in Hand

If I ever turn terrorist and get picked up by the CIA, they can skip the waterboarding. If they really want to torture me, all they have to do is make me listen to the sound of a trapped bird flailing around in a metal cage. I'd sell my own mother up the river to make it stop.

I learned the amount of mental anguish a single little bird can inflict when one became stuck in the duct work of our condo late on a Saturday night. It announced its presence with a thump, and then a flurry of scraping ensued. At first, we thought the sound was coming from outside--such is the shoddy insulation of our building that conversations conducted on the street below sound as though the people are chatting in our bedroom. But no, as anyone familiar with horror movies from the 1970s will immediately recognize, the noise was coming FROM INSIDE OUR OWN WALLS!

Mind you, at this point, we had no idea what kind of critter we were dealing with. The scraping suggested feet or claws, the fluttering suggested wings or a tail, which narrowed our options to a rat or squirrel, a bat or bird. Our early bet was on bat, solely because our neighbor had one in her duct work last year. Her account of the ordeal was so dramatic that we've taken to calling her Bat Girl (admittedly because we're not sure of her actual name). Highlights included her locking her cellphone, with the bat, in her bedroom at 3 a.m. and trekking to the corner gas station in her pajamas to beg to use the phone to call Animal Control. As if Animal Control works nights and weekends, but such is the mindset of someone whose home has been invaded by a bat at 3 a.m.

With this cautionary tale in the back of our minds, we immediately determined to 1) stay fully clothed (it was closing in on 11 p.m.), 2) keep cellphones handy, 3) close all of our vents, which reminds me, we need to reopen them, and 4) grab a tennis racket. That last was my husband's idea. I'm not sure it was the most appropriate weapon of choice--I've seen his backhand and frankly, it's not all that lethal.

I suppose the simple and smart thing to do would have been to try and free the thing and somehow coax it back outside. But that would have required a certain amount of courage and while I don't mean to call Dave's cojones into question, I'll readily admit that when it comes to creatures of any sort, I'm a complete and total wuss. I deeply fear them all, and never so much as contemplated coming face to face with whatever was roaming around our ceiling.

So I flipped through the phone book, looking under "exterminators," which does not exist as a Yellow Page category. Gee, and publishers wonder why print is dead. Google at least has the courtesy to ask, "'Exterminator'? Did you mean 'Pest Control?'" I managed to find one company that touted its 24/7 service, along with plenty of others whose advertisements included pictures of the very pests I was trying mightily to avoid. Who, pray tell, thinks a photo of a rat is going to entice anyone to do anything other than turn the page as quickly as possible? Anyhow, 24/7 turned out to be a bit of misnomer; basically it meant that the company answered their phone on weekends, to set up appointments for Monday. Monday? We could be rat kibble by then.

I don't know how we slept, but eventually the thing quieted down--in our dreams, it found its way back from whence it came--and we went to bed. With the tennis racket at our side.

The creature woke us up at 7 a.m. with his thrashing, which was louder and more furious than the night before, sounding, I swear, like the rat-a-tat-tat of a drumroll. (Yes, it could have been a she, but I tend to assign the male gender to all rodents and pests. Cartoons always show female critters with cute little bows in their hair and there was nothing cute about our invader.) Dave patrolled the hallway with his racket, as the thing moved from the position it had taken up between our bathrooms toward the vicinity of the furnace.

I wanted it gone.

A teeny tiny part of me felt a teeny tiny bit of sympathy for the thing, which obviously was frightened and wasn't any happier than we were to find itself our unwelcome guest. I pictured a human, bound in a straight jacket, bouncing off the walls of a padded room. But my sympathy had its limits and mostly I wanted the thing to get the hell out of my home and stop freaking me out. A second go around with the Yellow Pages produced better results. Animal Trackers promised to send someone out within a couple of hours, which wasn't soon enough for my liking, but better than Monday. While we waited, our visitor grew increasingly impatient, banging itself against the ducts in what seemed like its death throes. I tried to drown out the noise by putting on headphones, but I couldn't concentrate on the music. Even though I couldn't hear the thing, I still knew it was there. I'm not proud to admit this, but I started to whimper, "Make it go away, make it go away." "Are you crying?" Dave asked. "No." But I wanted to.

Jim from Animal Trackers arrived at the midway point of his one-hour window. He exuded the confidence of a cowboy, only in a logo-ed polo shirt and ball cap. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if he had tipped his hat and said, "Don't you worry 'bout a thing little lady."

Instead of a holster and six-shooter, he came armed with a net. "I'm going to open the vent," he advised. "If it gets loose and starts running around, don't panic." Don't panic? Seriously? If the thing got loose and started running around, the very first thing I absolutely, positively would do would be to panic. That's when I decided to shut myself away in our spare bedroom, er, to protect the computer.

As you might have guessed, the bird did not saunter out and calmly step into Jim's waiting net. It started flying around, air brushing Dave's head, and zoomed straight for the master bedroom, which we'd stupidly left unguarded, door wide open. "My clothes!" I yelled from behind my barricade. I pictured the bird leaving a trail of poop--scared shitless, as it were--over my entire wardrobe. Jim eventually barehanded the elusive starling and put him in a cage. My hero. Animal Trackers pledges to humanely trap its prey but at that moment, I would have gladly looked the other way and let Jim break the damned thing's neck.

Here's the thing that gets me about the whole experience: it was a bird. Birds are like 6-inches tall and weigh all of a pound. Even if it were our worst-case scenario, a rat or a squirrel, we'd still have a huge height advantage. Aside from, say, being accosted by a bear or a tiger, people are tops on the food chain. Every shred of logic indicates that we shouldn't be afraid of small rodents and other pests. And yet we are. We're terrified of spiders and roaches and mice, worms and wasps and tiny lizards, when it most assuredly ought to be the other way around. I'm not sure why this is so, I suspect part of it has to do with the filth and squalor and disease associated with many of these pests, but I think it also has something to do with the fact that logic isn't really part of the equation, at least not where the pest is concerned. You can't reason with a roach--"Hey, buddy, get out of my sink, you don't belong." You can't tell a bird, "Dude, you're in our ceiling duct. Turn right, walk straight to the furnace, fly up two stories and exit at the chimney vent." Animals operate on instinct, which makes them unpredictable and wild and out of control. Not to mention they have teeth and claws, much sharper than our own pathetic incisors and fingernails, and they're not afraid to use them. Where we're taught to avoid a fight, they're wired to attack.

To be fair, not all of us are overcome by this fear. I came across a guy on Twitter (TomDark9, whom I've identified only so that you can avoid him) who tweeted: "A very busy wild bird has been building 2 nests in our living room for a week. Leaving door open so he can get an early start." If Tom invites you to dinner, be sure to take your tennis racket.

But most of us live indoors to keep the wild at bay. We mark our territory with walls and roofs and, rather foolishly, expect the animal kingdom to get the message. Keep out. If you want to come inside, you're supposed to ring the buzzer and if I know you or you've brought pizza, I'll let you in. The fact that critters don't know their place, that they insist on gaining entry behind my back--through a hole in a window screen or a crack under the door--leaves me feeling vulnerable, and not particularly hospitable. You don't come sneaking in through the ducts and expect a welcome wagon. I've got Jim on speed dial.

2010-04-29T07:34:00.000-07:00

Not Ready for My Close-up

"Food Network taping in Lincoln Square this afternoon." You've got to hand it to my friend, Mary--she knows how to craft an email subject line.

I clicked on the link to an article she forwarded and yes indeed, the Food Network would be filming at Lutz Bakery, maybe a 15-minute walk from my house. Taping, according to the news item, was already completed for a kitchen-centric segment but the public was invited to come on down, between 2 and 4 p.m., and participate in a scene yet to be filmed in the cafe. Thanks, but no thanks, I typed back. Camera shy, I said. Not a fan of Lutz, I added.

Of course, I went.

I am not, I should quickly point out, a fame whore. I never so much as tried out for a school play, and barely suffer to pose for family photos. I prefer to fly under the radar. But I have an obsession with bakeries. While I had no intention of worming my way into a Food Network shot, I was interested in watching how the show was put together. Honestly, what I really was hoping for was a sneak peek into the inner workings at Lutz. In my dreams, I pictured the owner taking a shine to me--a quiet bystander--and shuttling me back into the kitchen to give one of his giant Hobart mixers a spin. (I don't know, for a fact, that Lutz uses a Hobart, but I've never seen an industrial mixer that was anything but.)

So I sauntered off to Lutz under the pretense that I was simply a gal in need of a sugar fix. Just in case I arrived and, surprise, a Food Network taping happened to be under way, I made a little extra effort with my hair (which was two weeks overdue for a haircut) and put on my cropped blue corduroy jacket, which pretty much serves as my wardrobe's little black dress.

As I walked up Montrose Avenue towared the bakery, I wondered if I had read the information wrong. I've come across a few movie crews in my day--where were the trucks and trailers? Where was the throng of gawkers attracted by any display of lights and cameras? Instead, the sidewalk was deserted, like it always is. This stretch of Montrose isn't exactly a mecca for foot traffic and it always surprises me that Lutz, which opened in 1948, has survived at this address for as long as it has. I mean, I've lived in the vicinity for nearly 10 years, have a massive sweet tooth, and this would only mark my second visit. Because I forget the place exists.

I tentatively approached the doorway and spied a sign in the window informing patrons of the camera crew on premises. I took a breath and entered close behind a handsome young-ish man in a gray pinstripe suit. Because I don't have cable, I rarely catch Food Network programming, so I'm not as familiar with its personalities as I'd like to be. Could this be the host?

Um, no. Turns out he was Lutz' loan officer, which I learned by totally eavesdropping on his conversation with a woman who seemed to be the owner/manager/person of importance. (To further shake your already diminished confidence in our banking system, the gentleman had apparently doled out large sums of money to Lutz while never before bothering to visit to determine whether it was, in fact, a decent investment.) There was no camera crew in sight and precious few customers besides myself, although I did witness much flurrying of staff--people popping out from the kitchen who clearly rarely visit the front of the shop.

Apparently I had ill-timed my arrival. The Food Network was between set-ups and in the hurry-up-and-wait world of Hollywood, everyone was cooling their heels for the next segment to begin shooting in the outdoor cafe (typically not open until Mother's Day but I guess the Food Network gets what the Food Network wants). I lingered in front of the bakery cases, pretending to peruse the merchandise while hoping to overhear a more definitive filming schedule and waiting for that chimerical invite into the kitchen. It did not materialize.

Eventually I could loiter no longer, what with there being no one else for staff to wait on, and selected a couple of treats that I didn't particularly want to buy or eat. (While I give Lutz credit for eschewing the cupcake trend and sticking to its European roots--strudels and tortes and bite-sized cookies--I find their cakes to be fairly dry and tasteless. Sorry.) As I waited to pay at the register, I seized upon an opportunity to insert myself into the tete-a-tete between the banker and the owner/manager/person of importance. Playing innocent, I asked, weren't the Baumkuchen samples on the counter featured in the New Yorker? Why yes, the PoI responded. Seems that's what had sparked the Food Network's interest (as if I hadn't already guessed). Suddenly banker boy was the third wheel and I was one-on-one with the PoI. "Do you know 'Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives'? Guy Fieri?" she asked. Mercifully, I did after wallowing in satellite TV on our last vacation. "He has a new show, 'A Kid in a Candy Store.'" (This contradicts info sent in Mary's link. Who to believe--a local reporter or a PoI?) The focus is on sweet shops, the Lutz segment should air in three or four months. How very exciting, I replied.

Then I paid for my slices of strange-looking pastries (one, a hazelnut log, and the other, I swear, called something like "The Plucker"), collected my change and left. Not five feet out the door and I was kicking myself for not staying. At that point, I could have turned around, I should have turned around, but every step I took toward home made that outcome less and less likely.

I don't know why I couldn't admit that I really wanted to watch the taping. It's not as if banker boy felt the need to engage in subterfuge--he was at Lutz for one reason and one reason only. I don't know why I didn't just ask the PoI if it was OK to hang back and be a fly on the wall.

I don't know why I'm so shy about doing or getting what I want.

When I was a little girl, my big sister, Anne, would take me by the hand, walk me over to my best friend's house, ring the doorbell, and ask if Amy could come out and play with me. If only Anne had been with me at Lutz, I have no doubt what would have happened: We would have marched into the bakery, asked about the taping, grabbed ourselves a table in the cafe and gotten ourselves on TV. Barring Anne's magical appearance from two states away, what I really needed was crowd. Us shy folks, ironically, find safety in numbers. Crowds give us cover, crowds give us anonymity, crowds give us permission to do whatever everyone else is doing without drawing any attention to ourselves.

I keep wondering when I'm going to stop wanting to be so invisible. When I'm going to stop observing from the sidelines and become an active participant. When I'm going to blossom into the assertive, confident woman that Oprah insists I should be by now. I keep wondering when I'll stop worrying whether I'm pretty enough to have my picture taken. Whether I'm smart enough or funny enough to hold up my end of a conversation. Whether anyone will want to come out an play with me. When I'll stop needing someone to hold my hand.

This was not that day.

Later that night, I sliced "The Plucker" in half and shared it with my husband (the one thing I did reach out and grab--perhaps I blew my whole wad with that one act of courage). The icing was hard and completely separated from the cake, which was as dry as expected. It didn't really matter; at I ate, all I could think about was how I had come to buy the thing in the first place. It could have been the sweetest of treats and it would have left a bad taste in my mouth.

2010-04-27T09:27:00.001-07:00

A Good Hair Day

Chris Rock's documentary "Good Hair" is like the thing you never knew you always wanted. Except that I did.

For the longest time, I've been totally intrigued by black women's hair, which is odd because I grew up in your standard all-white Midwestern suburb. OK, there was one black kid in our sprawling subdivision, but she was adopted. By a white family. Some 20 years later, I can still name every black student in my high school, because there were only five. It being a Catholic school, I can also name the two Jewish students and lone Lutheran.

I think the fascination started in college, where I had an internship on campus. It was a pretty loose environment, as offices can be when staffed by kids with a minimum of adult supervision. We worked when we had to but we also just hung out a lot. There were a couple of African-American students in the office, as well, and one day the topic of conversation turned to hair. Terri, who handled administrative chores, happened to mention that black women get perms to straighten their hair. As someone who'd suffered through her share of bad perms to do the exact opposite--add curl and body to otherwise lackluster locks--I was mystified. And curious.

Ever since, I've harbored a secret wish to spend a day in an African-American beauty salon just to see what goes on: how hair is straightened and braided and what's up with weaves. But that didn't seem like a bucket list item I'd ever fulfill. If "separate but equal" is no longer the law of the land, it still holds true for hair salons. I'm hard-pressed to recall whether I've ever seen a black stylist at any of the salons I've patronized; I know I've never seen an African-American client. Thanks to Rock, though, I finally got my wish.

The movie begins with a simple premise. Rock's young daughter complains she doesn't have "good hair"--meaning hers is naturally nappy, not long and silky straight--so the comedian sets off on a journey (New York, L.A., Atlanta, India) to discover how good hair is actually attained. I didn't get nearly as much info on braiding as I'd hoped--someone else apparently will have to make "Good Braids"--but I did walk away with profound insights into the African-American culture of hair.

What I learned, without recapping the entire film, is that African-American women (and men, like Prince, at whose expense Rock makes a few jokes) willingly submit to chemical burns to straighten their hair. (Relaxer is made out of some sort of acid; Rock calls in a scientist to demonstrate how the substance can eat through an aluminum can.) Women with limited financial means will also spend thousands of dollars to purchase and maintain a weave--or expect their man to subsidize this habit, which Rock likens to cocaine addiction. Hair for these pricey weaves comes largely from India, where people participate in a religious practice called "tonsure," which basically means they routinely shave their heads. So some woman in India thinks she's sacrificing her hair to the gods, when in reality it winds up on the head of Vivica Fox.

How a weave is applied was easily the most astounding segment in the film. I'm not sure I completely understood the process, which goes something like this: the majority of a woman's real hair is braided and tucked under a cap. The weave (aka, Indian hair) is then attached to the head in sections/rows/"tracks," either by gluing or sewing. Sewing. I kind of watched this part through my fingers, like a horror movie. I'm 99.99% sure the weave isn't sewn directly to the scalp, but it sort of looked like it.

All of this to achieve what black people call "natural" hair--meaning white-people hair--by completely unnatural means.

On the one hand, I felt a little guilty and partially culpable for the lengths black women go to to achieve hair I come by thanks to simple genetics. On the other hand, I could sympathize with their efforts. I've never had particularly good hair either, at least not by Jennifer Aniston-Gwyneth Paltrow standards. Yes, my hair is straight. But it's also fine. And full of colics. It looks horrible when wet, to say nothing of my morning bed head. Seriously, one of the (many) reasons I've never tried out for the show "Survivor" is that I'm totally reliant on volumizing shampoo, thickening spray, a blow dryer and some sort of gel to look at all presentable. To minimize its many defects, I also keep my hair fairly short, so short, at one point, that a fellow customer behind me in line at the grocery store once tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Excuse me sir. Er...whatever." I started wearting more lipstick to compensate. When Oprah triumphantly grew her hair out to the point where she could wear a pony tail, I shared in her exhilaration. I want a ponytail too, one that jauntily pokes out of ball caps and swings back and forth when I go for a jog. I want to look like all the other Breck girls, too, but it's not in the cards.

More than anything, the movie got me thinking about standards of beauty. All these black women are chasing an ideal that an awful lot of white women can't attain either. And it's not just hair. It's height and weight and skin. For every dollar a black woman spends on relaxer, I suspect a white woman spends on wrinkle cream. All of us are trying to look like some more acceptable version of ourselves: the black woman trying to get her hair to look more white, the white woman trying to get her skin to look more youthful (the great irony here being the cliche "black don't crack." Black skin color might not be considered desirable, but it's elasticity sure as hell is).

It's long been held that women identify more with their race than with their gender; that black women have to deal with issues that white women couldn't possible understand. I don't doubt that's true. But I wonder if we didn't all spend more time together in the salon, if we wouldn't find more common ground. If we wouldn't all agree that we'd all be better off looking a little more natural, and a little less "natural." That we'd all be better off if we could somehow get the culture's standards to conform to us, instead of the other way around.

Rock interviewed a fair number of women--most of them famous or semi-famous--for the film. Only one of them eschewed relaxers and weaves, and for this she was labeled "brave." I thought she was simply beautiful.

2010-04-23T09:22:00.000-07:00

An Aussie and An Irishman Walk Into a Library...

In an article on the current state of electronic publishing, The New Yorker quoted Steve Jobs (circa 2008) as saying, "People don't read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year."

Far be it from me to argue with iJobs, but those statistics would seem to suggest that 60 percent of Americans read more than one book a year. How, precisely, does that translate into nobody reading?

Maybe I'm biased because I'm famous (well, at least with my husband) for once picking out a paperback at Borders and literally giving it a hug, so certain was I that I would love the contents within. Perhaps my perspective is further skewed because readers tend to attract other readers, and among some of my acquaintances, I come across as nearly illiterate. Or maybe, gasp, iJobs doesn't know everything.

If he had traveled to Chicago this week, he would have been hard-pressed to find a seat in the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at the Harold Washington Library, where hundreds gathered on a Wednesday night to meet the Irish author Colm Toibin. Toibin's novel, "Brooklyn," was selected for the city's One Book One Chicago program; his appearance was the culmination of months of events, performances and discussion clubs.

I first became aware of Toibin (pronounced COL-lum toe-BEAN; it's like Irish is a separate language) with the publication of his book "The Master" a few years ago. If he's not exactly a rock star of the literary world, he's like a well-respected indie band. "The Master" was a genius bit of work--a fictional account of a certain period in the life of Henry James--while "Brooklyn" is a quieter, more intimate affair. It tells the story of Eilis (EYE-lish), who emigrates to the U.S. from Ireland in the 1950s and was born, in part, out of Toibin's own feelings of homesickness when first traveling abroad. "You find yourself waking up and missing home," he said, "missing things you don't even like."

Homesickness is a subject I know well. I moved to Chicago (albeit from the relatively close environs of Ohio) in 1992, not knowing a single soul. Eilis at least has the advantage of a kindly priest who finds her employment and a boarding house filled with her fellow Irish immigrants. But she misses her family, nonetheless, and likely always will, in the same way that I miss never being able to meet my mom for lunch. "Home changes," Toibin noted. People adjust to their new surroundings. And yet he has the sense that "everyone in America comes out of a single individual arriving--and that haunts the country."

This isn't something we talk about much in America--homesickness. People uprooted from home and family. And not just those who cross oceans and borders in search of greater opportunity, but those, like me, who find themselves displaced within their home country. We take as a given--fairly pride ourselves on--our mobility and the dispersion of families from East to West Coast and all points in between. We have email and Skype and Facebook to compensate, but this hardly seems a fair trade for Saturday afternoons around the barbecue with siblings and parents and nieces and nephews. Yet it runs counter to the American mythology of the independent spirit, the pioneer, the frontiersman, to suggest that rootlessness and restlessness has a cost.

The next evening, the same auditorium hosted author Peter Carey, a two-time winner of Britain's Booker Prize, as part of the Writers on the Record program, hosted by Victoria Lautman. (Winning the Booker twice is liking winner the Oscar four times. Carey's the Katherine Hepburn of novelists, with a fraction of the fame or name recognition. One of those Booker's was for "Oscar and Lucinda," which happens to be the book I once hugged.) Carey has lived in New York for 20 years but originally hails from the backwaters of Australia, which he's never managed to shake. Or perhaps it's that Australia won't let him go; the country recently honored Carey with his own postage stamp, a fact Lautman lingered on just a tad too long.

Though I doubt the library purposely conceived of these separate author events as a one-two punch, they played well off of each other. This is the second time I've seen Carey. Where Toibin is the consummate storyteller (the gift of Irish gab is more than just a cliche), Carey is less polished, less overtly charming, but loads of fun in that off-the-cuff Aussie way. What they had in common--apart from their delightful accents--was using their outsider status to explore layers of American culture from a unique perspective. Turning their gaze on us forces us to turn our gaze on ourselves.

Carey was in town to plug his newest book (just out this week), "Parrot and Olivier in America." I haven't read it yet (did I mention, just out this week) but in short, the book is a fictionalized, imagined account of Alexis de Toqueville's tour of the New World. "I'm living here, I've got American children," Carey explained of his decision to tackle this particular subject matter. In deToqueville, he discoverd somebody who "really got America and American democracy." In reading through de Toqueville's seminal writings, Carey also found the present existing in the past, particularly in de Toqueville's concern over the dumbing down of American culture.

What I found perhaps most striking was Carey's comment that "the extremely radical notion of America is easy to lose sight of." True. We take our democracy utterly for granted--witness low voter turn-outs--when at one point, the idea of country without a king or queen at its head, was unthinkable. How on earth would a bunch of shopkeepers and farmers manage to rule themselves? We, who are lucky enough to have been born in the U.S., often forget how astounding our country appears to outsiders.

But we're not particularly unique in that regard. Carey noted that in his youth he was completely ignorant of Aussie writers, unaware that Australian literature existed. In similar fashion, Toibin stated, "I wouldn't have dreamt of reading an Irish book." Instead he was drawn to Hemingway and Richard Ford and Tobias Wolfe--only to discover that his idols were, in fact, reading James Joyce. We perhaps best appreciate our culture at a distance; too close and all we see are the warts.

Which brings me back to where I started. Perhaps Carey had also read The New Yorker item, because the decline in reading was also on his mind. (Or perhaps the decline in reading is always top of mind with people who make a living writing.) He likened it to global warming, as a potentially "life-threatening" condition. What he really meant was that we're all the poorer for an inability to inhabit other points of views than our own (to see Brooklyn through an Irishman's eyes, for example), for an unwillingness to explore others' experiences and imaginations, whether in novels or the other media we consume. And that, ultimately, is the more disturbing trend.

2010-04-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

Ladies Night

Chicago prides itself on its theater scene and I used to pride myself as a theater-goer. Over the years, we subscribed alternately to the Court, the Goodman and Lookingglass. Took in the occasional Steppenwolf show (rarely a pricey mainstage, but Steppenwolf nonetheless) and supported various smaller companies like Shattered Globe, packed into a cramped space with maybe 30 other audience members, nearly everyone within spitting distance of the actors. Some of these outings were more memorable than others--a musical, lesbian spoof of Nancy Drew springs to mind--but we always left feeling we'd participated in some worthwhile cause vs. simply lapping up the latest blockbuster movie. I suppose this is what Prius owners feel like when they pull up next to a Hummer.

And then we just stopped. Partly because we moved out of walking distance of most neighborhood theaters, partly because we acquired a mortgage and a night at the theater can get pretty expensive, but mostly because we're lazy. Following the theater takes effort: it doesn't come to you, you have to actively seek it out. Unless the show is "Billy Elliot" playing at one of the huge downtown palaces, it's not like there's any advertising. You're on your own and at the end of the day, it's a lot easier to sit in your living room and switch on "House" than it is to pick up a paper, scan the theater listings, comb through reviews, schlep to some tiny, hard-to-spot storefront building and hunt for parking. On a Monday night.

All this is by way of explaining why it took so long for us to get around to seeing the Neo-Futurist's "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind," which bills itself, at 21 years and counting, as Chicago's longest-running show and who am I to question that. TMLMTBGB consists of 30 plays in 60 minutes, with an ever-rotating cast performing a constantly changing "menu" of acts. We'd probably be ignorant still if my friend Craig hadn't called me up on Sunday and invited us to last night's special performance at the Biograph--a one-night-only, all-female presentation (TMLMTLadyGB) featuring current and past Neo-Futurists. This time, the theater had in fact come to us, so how could we refuse.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, or that I even understood what we were attending. I like Craig enough to follow him blindly. Here's what I learned (and could have sought out beforehand on that handy thing called the Internet): The thing about the Neo-Futurists is that they don't produce traditional plays. The actors appear onstage as themselves and they write their own "scripts," which are drawn from personal experiences. The difference, more or less, between writing an essay vs. a novel. In a round table, of sorts, after the show (there was no table, round or otherwise), the cast members noted that what they do bears little similarity to traditional "acting." They may take on a persona, but they don't put on a character. The result was dazzling.

Just to quickly set the scene: A clothesline runs the length of the stage, pinned with pieces of paper numbered 1-30. The audience is handed a menu, also numbered 1-30, with the corresponding titles of the various plays. When a performer says "curtain," audience members yell out the numbers of the plays they want to see. Whichever number cast members hear first, they yank off the line and away we go.

Craig was immediately obsessed with #23, "Bad Clowns, Really Bad Clowns." Because he is a clown. For real. I had a thing for #12, "Pride and Prejudice II." Because I am a geek for Jane Austen. I suspect my husband looked at #8, "Presidential Cunnilingus," and wished he had stayed home. I suspect he changed his mind after the opener, #6 "Just Give Me a Jamaican Accent and a Calculator," which, like the inaptly labeled round table, had nothing to do with Jamaicans or calculators. I have no idea what it was about actually--just an angry, rambling, hilarious tirade by Jessica Anne, she of the carrot hair, helium voice and intense eyes, that culminated in her yelling "I have one leg." You won't hear anything like this on TV or in film and you certainly won't see anyone like her. (A fact, reinforced later in the evening, when David Letterman welcomed Jennifer Lopez to his show.)

It was like that, play after play. There were oddities, including #24, "Cash for Cluckers," which had Kristie Koehler clucking at an audience member until he ponied up the titular cash. Or Rachel Claff in #26, "Trust Me. Every Single Sentence of Moby Dick Is a Life Lesson" thumbing to a random page and reading a random sentence of the Melville classic to prove her point.

But more were like #3, "One for the Ladies," a pointed discussion of toilet etiquette. (Ladies stop squatting over toilet seats and spraying them with the very liquids you're trying to avoid.) Or #5, "girlie girlie dum-dum game" with cast members' heads springing out of cardboard boxes like whack-a-moles to spout common female pleas--Do you love me? Do you love me? Or #11, "Cut 'Em off at the Pass," which pondered the genetic test that causes women to proactively cut off their breasts, and whether men would behave similarly if they discovered they had the gene for prostate cancer. Just asking. Or the breathtaking #4, "A Very Very Neo-Futurist Play," that had Noelle Krimm bravely wiping off her make-up, taking out her contacts, swapping her form-fitting top for a shapeless sweatshirt and trading her butt-enhancing thong for maternity underwear (behind a tastefully held towel). This is what a real woman looks like, stripped of all artifice.

It was exhilarating.

I think, as women, we get used to being interpreted by men and the media (which are really the same thing). So it was astounding to spend an entire evening seeing myself more or less accurately reflected back at me. It was like "Sex and the City," only without New York and the fabulous clothes and lifestyles to make me feel like crap. It was like everything we expect from Tina Fey--and only Tina Fey--that she can't possibly deliver. And you know what, there were lots of men in the audience, who were laughing and whooping and applauding as much as the women. Because they know what we're really like, and they think we're funny and amazing too, when we get the chance.

Not to toot my own horn, but the entire evening was encapsulated in my play of choice, "Pride and Prejudice II." Claff, Krimm and Chloe Johnston took to the stage, enacting a drawing room scene in the Bennett household after the weddings of Jane and Elizabeth. With no Mr. Darcy or Bingley to liven their day, the women sat down to tea, embroidery and reading, respectively. Not a word was spoken. Claff took a sip from her china cup, Johnston primly held her book aloft and gradually turned a page, Krimm gazed up and sighed, opened her mouth as if to talk but then thought better of it. Their ennui was palpable; in the absence of men, they had nothing to animate them. This, of course, was the plight of females in Austen's time (and "Mad Men"'s for that matter), but couldn't have been further from the truth demonstrated on stage last night. If the world were at all fair, and talent won out over image, all of these performers would have bigger careers than Jennifer Aniston. Alas and alack.

I couldn't help but think of "Saturday Night Live" and how it might benefit from the creative input of these gifted Neo-Futurists. Imagine actual, relevant satire and cultural commentary on "SNL." Instead of another pointless and grating Target Lady skit, we'd get "on playgrounds across the street from organic bakeries." ("My baby's half black and half Filipino." "My baby has autism but we're just pretending he's gifted.") Who's the second city now?

Note to self: Stop being so lazy. Turn off the TV. Get thee to the theater.

2010-04-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

That's the Spirit

After Spirit Airlines announced it would begin charging for carry-on baggage, I waited for the onslaught of consumer backlash. And waited. Shockingly, the opposite occurred. Judging from responses broadcast by our local television stations, a lot of frequent fliers are applauding the move. WTF?

One person seemed to feel less carry-on luggage would translate into faster de-boarding times (I don't know that he/she actually used the word de-boarding, or if, in fact, it's even a word at all). Puh-lease. The reason it takes so long to get off a plane, especially if you're in Row 23, which seems to be where I'm seated every single time I fly, is that a couple hundred people are attempting to exit down narrow aisles through a single door at the same time. It has nothing to do with people in First Class spending hours grabbing their suitcases from overhead bins. People in First Class don't even travel with luggage. They're rich enough to just buy everything they need whenever they get where they're going.

Another person thought that charging would teach a lesson to people with large carry-on bags. As if fines for texting while driving has eradicated that behavior. The thing is, if passengers had any confidence that their checked luggage would arrive with them at their chosen destination, they wouldn't be so obsessed with stuffing their entire closet into their carry-on, myself being one such individual. I'd like to point out that the one time our luggage did get lost, I had all my toiletries and several changes of clothing in my carry-on, while my husband, a carry-on non-believer had bupkiss. I felt incredibly smug and superior until I realized his misery would translate into my misery.

By far my favorite response came from a senior citizen. He/she was thrilled that us young 'uns would have to pony up for our carry-ons, same as the old-timers do for their checked bags. I wasn't aware of this phenomenon, but apparently seniors are incapable of hauling their bags into the overhead bins. And can't find a flight attendant or fellow passenger who will lend a hand. So they check everything. Seriously? I'm 5' 1"--the overhead bins are physically out of my reach too, and I always get someone to help me out. Granted, this is usually my husband, but others have offered assistance as well. AARP needs to investigate this ASAP.

Add the baggage charges on top of the full-body scanner they installed at O'Hare, and I've pretty much settled on never flying again. Not that I was keen on this particular mode of transportation in the first place. Sure, air travel covers a large amount of ground in a relatively short amount of time, but that's about its only benefit. You can't roll down the windows. There's never anything good playing on the radio channels. It's impossible to time a bathroom break--as soon as the sign says "unoccupied" someone always beats you to the punch. You don't even get honey-roasted peanuts any more. Mostly I just hate the whole hurry up-and-wait aspect of flying, which, come to think of it, resembles the whole hurry up-and-wait aspect of a doctor's appointment. You make every effort to show up on schedule--usually at an inconvenient time that they've dictated to you--then they keep you cooling your heels, taking off/calling you into an exam room whenever they see fit. We only put up with this because they hold our lives in their hands and we don't want to piss them off.

My disdain for flying (not to be confused with fear) sucks, because there are places I'd like to go--Portland, New York, Paris, New Zealand--that are difficult, if not impossible, to reach by car from Chicago. Frankly, I'm running out of Midwest travel destinations within a six-hour drive. Then the other morning I awoke with a flash--we could ride the train to NYC. I immediately e-mailed my brother for his opinion of Amtrak, which he'd taken from St. Louis to visit us last fall. He was enthusiastic, but only about those few hundred miles of track. The east-west rails, he reported, are notoriously ill-kept, outdated and prone to delays. (I trust him in these matters because he's an urban planner and listens to NPR.) He suggested a sleeper car to help pass the 20+ hours in unconscious oblivion, unaware that I am perhaps the lightest sleeper in the history of sleep.

So...I'm thinking there must be something cool to see in Iowa.

2010-04-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

"Lost" Love

Last night, I was planning on attending a lecture by starchitect Frank Gehry. But it was an unseasonably warm evening and I wasn't in the mood to sit inside an airless auditorium, so I went for a walk with my husband instead. In all honestly, I was also worried that I wouldn't get home in time from the Gehry chat fest to catch "Lost." (And yes, we are the only household in America without a DVR.)

I know that "Lost" is no longer the buzziest show on TV, hasn't been since Season 1, mostly because it airs on a broadcast network instead of cable. (And yes, we are the only household in America without cable.) I don't care. I still think it's amazing. I know a lot of people find it frustrating and confusing--some think it's too heavy on "mythology" and light on coherent plot. What they're missing, and what was on display last night, is that it's also wildly romantic.

You can see that in the show's larger themes: Jack's "live together, die alone" speech. The belief that people have the capacity for heroism and redemption. Sure, there's also a lot of stuff about electromagnetic energy and pushing buttons and smoke monsters, but the foundation of the series has always been its characters and their connections to each other. Ask any long-time fan of the show to name their favorite episode and 9 out of 10 will say "The Constant," which featured the star-crossed duo of Penny and Desmond reaching across time to declare their love. It sounds hokey on the page, but in practice it was an emotional stunner.

Lately, I've been more or less forced to read a number of novels with infidelity as their central premise. I find this depressing and discouraging and not particularly relevant to my personal experience, but I understand the writers' urge. It makes for good drama--soap operas have known this for decades. Falling in love is exciting, staying in love is a drag. What gives writers fits and starts, it seems, is how to make a successul relationship seem equally interesting. And really, why just single out novelists. Was "Access Hollywood" covering Tiger Woods before he became a sex addict? How many romantic comedies show what happens after the meet-cute and inevitable wedding?

In that light, "Lost"'s creative geniuses--Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof (aka, Darlton)--have managed something truly astounding. In contrast with, say, the Drapers over on "Mad Men," "Lost" presents its core couple--Desmond and Penny--with a total lack of cynicism and a complete belief in the power of true, enduring love. (Of course, there are still a few episodes left in the final season and they could blow this all to hell.) Darlton's real trick wasn't getting us to believe in time travel, it was getting us to believe in lasting romance and to find it utterly gripping. They didn't hide behind the "will they-won't they" that so many other shows rely on, but bravely said they are, they always will be.

I imagine "Lost" is the last place most people would go to find an affirmation of soul mates. But there you have it and I, for one, find it refreshing.

2010-04-06T08:13:00.000-07:00

Hoop Dreams

Now that March Madness is over, we can all get back to more important things, like whether, as Entertainment Weekly inquires, Jesse James is the most hated man in America. Most hated, really? When Glenn Beck is out there? Let's get some perspective, EW.

I've never quite been able to put my figure on what it is about the annual NCAA tourney that I find so intriguing, especially considering that I pay zero attention to basketball the rest of the year. Don't get me wrong, I love sports--baseball, football, bocce ball, I'm there. But not basketball, which is just too much running up and down a court for my taste. Perhaps that's the answer: March Madness isn't really about the sport, but more about the brackets (ie, a competition we can all play at home) and the scores. Particularly during the early rounds of the tournament, so many games are being played simultaneously that most match-ups are distilled by broadcasters to their final minutes or seconds, which is about how long I think these contests should last in the first place.

Maybe if my alma mater were ever part of the 64-team pool, I'd feel differently. But alas, I happened to graduate from the University of Toledo (Ohio, not Spain), which is not exactly an athletic powerhouse, though they actually used to have a pretty decent hoops team when I was a kid. My dad was a big fan, and I'd sit with him and listen to their games on the radio, keeping score at home with a pencil and pad of paper. The Rockets had a great run during the '70s and even made it to the Sweet 16. Once.

UT is largely a commuter school, and while its urban campus is actually quite pretty, affordability is its main selling point. If I found myself in possession of a hot tub time machine, I don't know that I would choose to attend today. Instead, I would advise my younger self to give Gonzaga a serious look, or maybe Robert Morris, or UTEP.

It's not exactly a secret that all American universities are not created equal. On one level, you've got your Ivy League schools and Ivy wannabes, which are out of financial or academic range for the vast majority of students. And on another level, you've got everything else. If you're stuck with everything else, you should at least pick one that prospective employers have heard of--and the NCAA tourney, or any big-time sports program, is a golden ticket to name recognition.

I have no idea what the physics department is like at the University of Kentucky, but I know that UK exists. Ditto for Seton Hall, Bradley, Louisville, North Carolina and UNLV. A Harvard diploma might seriously grease the wheels for you, but I'm betting that one from Butler will open a few doors now as well, or at least start a conversation in a way that a degree from UT or Eastern Michigan won't.

There's also a pride and camaraderie that surrounds successful sporting schools--a reason for strangers to gather together around a television with a common interest. I miss that. Mercifully, my brothers attended Ohio State for grad school, so I nominally have someone to root for during bowl games and the like. But it's not the same as being able to strut down the street in my UT sweatshirt (which I don't even own) and receive an approving nod from passersby.

The NCAA is mulling whether to expand the basketball tournament to 96 teams, a notion I initially opposed, largely because I'm generally against any kind of change. But I'm starting to warm up to the idea. With 96 slots open, the chance of UT sneaking into a bracket vastly increases. And if they manage to pull off an upset or two, hello Cinderella story, hello pride, hello no longer having to pretend I went to the University of Texas.

Go Rockets!

2010-04-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

Spring Break

It happens every year around this time. Temps suddenly turn warm and I'm caught off guard. Oh, mentally, I'm more than prepared to bid farewell to winter, if indeed it is farewell. (Chicagoans are notoriously suspicious of spring. I've got four words for you: Cooler by the lake.) But physically? Ugh.

I spend most of November through March swathed in wool and corduroy and scarves and hats. And bitching about it every minute of every day. Hat hair is not my friend. But then April comes along and suddenly remaining under wraps doesn't seem so bad. I mean, I'm totally cool baring my feet and arms, but my legs weren't meant to see the light of day.

I seriously can't remember when I didn't hate my thighs. Maybe when I was two but probably not even then. I do not have the gift of gams and there's nothing I can do about it; it's in the gene pool same as my brown hair and eyes. Seriously--no matter what I eat (or don't eat) or how much I exercise (or don't), my legs remain stubbornly stubby.

So I've never looked forward to shorts season, to say nothing of swimsuits. Then one day it dawned on me that I could just say no. To shorts. I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me before, that I had the power to wear whatever I wanted.

In the first phase following my conversion, I relied largely on capri cargo pants. The thing is, on a 90-degree day, they're kind of hot and not in a hottie way but more in a sweaty way. (Shorts, it seems, exist for a reason. How Jane Austen's heroines kept from melting in their empire gowns is a grad thesis waiting to be written.) More recently I've begun branching out to skirts and sundresses. Sometimes I feel a little over-dressed for the occasion, but mostly I feel prettier and way less self-conscious than I would in shorts.

I don't know that I would call this a trend, but a lot of women seem to have come round to my same conclusion. Maybe it just seems like that because I live in a large city where fashion is more of a priority. Or maybe we're collectively tired of seeing guys get away with wearing those baggy shorts that droop down to their calves while we struggle to fit into Daisy Dukes.

The odd thing is that the very style of dress that liberated me from years of poor body image feels a bit like a throwback. All these skirts and dresses seem very 1950's-ish--back when being "full-figured" or "curvy" was something to be proud of and not code word for "fat." (Unless you are Beyonce, where curvy is code word for sexy. She gets a pass but the rest of us don't.) Actually, most women I've talked to who've also discovered the joy of the dress would like to revisit not a previous era but a previous age. We're all ever so jealous of the adorable styles designed for young girls; the sweet and simple shifts that all but scream sugar and spice and everything nice. They're meant to be playful and fresh--like spring and summer personified. Who wouldn't take that over a pair of khaki shorts.

2010-03-24T07:43:00.000-07:00

It's Hip To Be Weird

Asperger's, as they say, is having a moment. I thought this the other night while catching an episode of "Parenthood," in which one offspring of the titular parents is diagnosed with the condition. In the original movie on which the series is based, the kid simply suffered from anxiety, but anxiety is so 1990s. As syndromes go, Asberger's is as trendy as they come.

"Grey's Anatomy" featured a cardiac surgeon with Asperger's, "The Amazing Race" cast a contestant with the condition, and Hugh Dancy played a young man with Asperger's in the 2009 feature film, "Adam." What is it about this syndrome that we find so intriguing?

For starters, Asperger's isn't quite as scary as the bogey man of 21st Century parenting: autism. We're happy to give the former center stage if it means we can stop fretting, at least temporarily, about the latter. Moderately strange we can deal with, the more severe disability leaves us troubled.

But there's more at play here. My personal theory: So many of us have had our public personalities flattened and filtered by the need to do and say the right thing that we have a vicarious admiration for people who go their own way--who say and do what they want, without regard for social norms. Not because they're acting rebellious in a 1960's hippie counter-culture kind of way, but because they can't help themselves, which makes their behavior perfectly permissable. They're like quirky characters from indie films, only they're real.

Baseball player Curt Schilling and his wife happen to have a son with Asperger's. They were on the "Today" show, pitching their book about what it's like to parent such a child. Schilling's wife (sorry, I didn't catch her name, which I'm sure she's used to) noted: "If he wants to play with sharks [I'm assuming of the toy variety], he gets to play with sharks." On "Parenthood," the equivalent is allowing the kid to dress like a pirate. Note, in Asperger world, it's totally acceptable to follow your bliss--again, because you have no choice. And aren't we all a bit envious of that.

My husband works as a special educator. He's come across a number of kids with Asperger's, whom he invariably describes as "fun." Compared with the average teenager, that's undoubtedly true. Which would you rather have--the teen who dresses like a pirate or the teen who texts naked pictures of herself to her boyfriend? No contest. But whenever I ask whether the Asperger's kids have friends, the answer invariably is "no." Adults might admire the independent spirit--it's so rare and refreshing--but the last thing kids, teens in particular, want is to be different, to stand out from the crowd.

Most of us carry that notion into adulthood--we want to fit in. Why do I fill out NCAA brackets every year when I don't give two hoots about the sport? Because everyone else is doing it and I want to be part of the collective experience.

We might look at people with Asberger's as fulfilling some sort of fantasy or wish--our true selves unleashed. But if we were given the option--Asperger's or not--which would we choose?

2010-03-23T17:08:00.000-07:00

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

What, exactly, does “vintage” mean? Bless Patricia Marx, the New Yorker’s resident essayist on conspicuous consumption, for coming up with a definition: “anything that was made more than a minute ago, needs a good scrub, and, if you squint, looks older than it is.”

To that I might add “crap from your childhood.”

There was much vintage on display at the Randolph Street Market this past weekend, held indoors during the winter months (and March still counts as winter) on Washington Street. Vendors hawked everything from purses to cowboy boots to cigarette lighters to door hinges. Lots of sparkly jewelry. And, almost inexplicably, school lockers, which, if we had a garage, would make excellent storage compartments for our purses, cowboy boots, cigarette lighters and door hinges.

I am not a huge fan of vintage, especially clothing. It just kind of creeps me out to have something touch my skin that spent most of it its life touching someone else’s. But the market offered something to do on a Sunday that wasn’t particularly conducive to outdoor pursuits, so I dragged my husband away from the NCAA basketball tournament, bribing him with the promise of the market’s advertised fancy food purveyors (more on that later).

I have nothing to back up this statistic, but I’d say that 90 percent of the people at the market had no intention of purchasing anything, perhaps because they’d already plunked down $10 per person for the entrance fee. We collectively meandered aimlessly, picking up random objects and setting them down hastily whenever a salesperson (ie, person operating the booth) approached, lest they think us a serious buyer. My modus operandi at these affairs is to make as little eye contact as possible and to completely disown my husband if he gets locked into a conversation about, say, a salvaged trestle table.

I was prepared to temporarily lift my embargo on used clothing, accessories division, to hunt for a suitable purse. Just the other day on the morning news, a fashion expert had recommended vintage handbags as an excellent way to update one’s wardrobe for spring without spending a fortune. The trouble with vintage bags, though, is that they all look worn out, like Lindsay Lohan after a night on the town. And they’re priced higher than $5, which is what I personally believe any and everything labeled vintage should cost.

I don’t mean to sound like we weren’t having fun. We totally were. Once we got past the purses and the lockers and, truly inexplicably, an assemblage of rowing oars, the market felt more like an amusement park: Blast From the Past-land. We saw the fondue pots and ashtrays our parents had used for entertaining. The Currier & Ives-patterned plates I had eaten off of as a kid. His grandparents’ barware. The frosted glasses, curiously embossed with prancing ponies, that my dad used to serve hi-balls. I don’t want to own any of this stuff—I’m quite content outfitting my home circa Crate & Barrel—but it was fun to visit.

That, at least for me, is the true appeal of vintage. It’s not so much the way these objects take me back to my youth—because some things, like my hideously-permed hair, are best forgotten—but the way that they take me back to the people of my youth. One look at those hi-ball glasses, and my great aunt Frances immediately sprung to mind—and she’s been dead since I was in junior high. I don’t really miss plastic pineapple-shaped drinking cups, but I do miss sitting around the dinner table with my brothers and sister, none of whom live closer to me than a five-hour drive. I suppose that’s why so many folks collect what frankly amounts to junk—they cling to objects because they can’t cling to people.

Like I said, a fun place to visit, but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy being constantly reminded of days gone by. Because you’re likely to forget about the present and important things such as the fancy food market.

I used to work in marketing, so you’d think I’d be immune to the totally bogus siren call of phrases like “fancy food.” But I’m not. Turns out, this “market” amounted to a handful on booths, one of them, a complete non sequitur, selling soaps. Dave’s Coffee Cakes was the only one with the brains to sample his goods—and good they were. We tasted chocolate and raspberry and caramel and by then we had nearly eaten an entire cake and felt obliged to buy. They were, after all, only $5.

2008-04-24T06:18:00.000-07:00

Save Money, Vote for Hillary

I, along with apparently Nancy Franklin at The New Yorker, often imagine how much better Hillary Clinton would be performing as a candidate if only she would hire me as her personal adviser/voice of reason from the Heartland.

While her campaign has yet to come calling--although they do keep in touch fairly frequently via email--I'm going to offer up the following slogan gratis: "Save Money, Vote for Hillary."

You see, Congress once again failed to pass "equal pay for equal work" legislation. Which means that if we hire Hillary for president, we can pay her less than Obama or McCain. Sweet deal! Given the current state of our national debt, we need to start pinching pennies wherever possible.

As a side note to all those twenty-something girls who've opted to support Barack Obama over Hillary because, you know, we've already totally reached gender equality in this country, I can only say, um...yeah.

2008-04-23T06:31:00.000-07:00

Chris Matthews Is Rooting for Barack Obama

Think the media bias against Hillary Clinton is a figment of the candidate's imagination? Think again.

On the eve of the crucial Pennsylvania primary, Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball," called Hillary a pandering liar. Well, not in so many words. But during the course of an interview with Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky (co-chair of Barack's national campaign), Matthews questioned whether Hillary could carry Illinois in the general election without Obama on her ticket as Veep. "Of course she would," Schakowsky replied, noting that Clinton is from Illinois. "I thought she was from Scranton," Matthews sarcastically retorted. "Or Chappaqua. I can't keep track." Implication: Hillary Clinton is conveniently twisting the truth in her greedy grab for votes.

Really, Chris, you can't keep track. Of where a candidate grew up, where they currently reside, and where their grandparents lived? You haven't done the research?

Because I know that Chris knows that Barack claims as his "home" states Illinois (where he currently resides), Hawaii (where he grew up) and Kansas (where his grandparents lived, or his mother was born. I'm not sure. But then, I'm not Chris Matthews.). Oh, and let's not forget the entire continent of Africa.

None of which Matthews mentioned in his broadcast. Which some might call "obscuring the facts."

2008-02-07T15:35:00.000-08:00

To Give Or Not To Give

Back in 2004, I received a letter from Nancy Pelosi. Much like Princess Leia’s “help me Obi Wan Kenobi” hologram in “Star Wars”—only without the crazy cinnamon bun hairdo—Ms. Pelosi implied that my assistance was urgently needed if the Democrats were to have a prayer of ousting Darth Vader in the coming election. I sent her $25.

My mistake.

For openers, if you recall the results, I got zero return on my investment. Even worse, the Democratic National Committee was convinced in me it had landed a tuna, when in fact it had hooked a minnow. Or a plankton. Or whatever it is that plankton eat. In other words, my pockets do not run deep.

Try telling that to the DNC. Ms. Pelosi’s missive has been followed by notes from John Kerry, Al Gore and Howard Dean, along with phone calls from some guy named Jeff who refuses to grasp the concept that additional funds will not be forthcoming.

I only have myself to blame. I got into a similar pickle when I donated $25 to the Sierra Club. Well, that opened the floodgates to the World Wildlife Fund, Amnesty International, the National Resource Defense Council, Habitat for Humanity, and Save the Plankton. The onslaught reminded me of those emails from Amazon, which make sweeping generalizations about one’s personality based on a single purchase: “Patricia [never mind that no one calls me Patricia except my credit card company], we see that you like trees. We think you might also be interested in whales. May we suggest Greenpeace. Buy today and you could qualify for Super Saver Shipping.”

It’s easy enough to toss these pleas into the trash with a mental “If I could, I would” to satisfy my conscience. It’s much harder to reject a live human being on the telephone; they all but require a faxed copy of my latest tax return before they’ll believe that I’m not hiding a fortune of Bill Gates-ian proportions. The genius of their technique is that they know no self-respecting American wants to look cheap, much less poor. “Can’t you just do twenty-five?” they challenge. And I appreciate that $25 has become the new $10—against the Euro, it’s more like the new $1—but no, I can’t. The last time Jeff rang me up, I finally worked up the nerve to say so and the phone calls, if not the letters, have ceased.

So I find myself at a crossroads. Hillary Clinton’s campaign coffers have run dry. The candidate has had to lend herself money; meanwhile Barack Obama is sitting on the sort of treasure chest seldom seen outside pirate movies. I think he has actual doubloons at his disposal. I feel compelled to help level the playing field, partly because I would like to see Hillary Clinton as our next president and partly because Barack Obama is really starting to annoy me.

First, there’s his support among “young voters,” which the Super Tuesday pundits mentioned so many times, I thought perhaps the audio had gotten stuck on repeat. I would have written, “like a needle skipping on a record,” but then it would be so obvious that I am just a bit outside the 18-35 demographic. I suppose now that you know the truth about my age, I might as well admit that I hate young voters and young people in general. Scratch that. Hate is a strong word, what I really am is tired. I’m tired of our culture’s obsession with youth and those Juvederm commercials, and I’m particularly weary of the way 16-year-old boys get to dictate the options at my local multiplex. Seriously, these are the people who made Paris Hilton a celebrity and have passing knowledge of Hannah Montana—and we’re trusting them to choose our next president?

Perhaps I’m being overly sensitive. I guess it’s just that I, and other like-minded Generation X-ers, have been locked out of the political process for the past eight years. And now that it looks like we’re back in the game, young voters have crashed our party.

That’s my first issue with Barack. My second is that as the first viable African-American candidate, he’s completely hijacked the uniqueness of the first viable female candidate. I’m sure that a number of black voters look at Hillary and they see “white” and they see “Clinton”—same old, same old. In the same way, I look at Barack and I see “man.” If we’re going to talk about change, how about electing the first president who’s never used a urinal? (I don’t know this 100% for sure, but I feel pretty safe in my assumption.)

When the 57 hopefuls vying for the Democratic nomination lined up at their endless parade of debates, Hillary was clearly the answer to “what’s wrong with this picture?” “But what about Barack?” you argue. And I would counter that a black man in a dark suit (which he may or may not have worn to the previous debate or, for all we know, on the previous day), accessorized with some version of a blue or red power tie, has more in common with his white, male counterparts than does the woman in the yellow blazer wearing the bra underneath. Than the woman who was the only person on stage to ever undergo a pelvic exam. Or use a tampon. Or fix a run in her pantyhose. Or become a parent the hard way…by giving birth.

I hate to raise points that are largely biological, as those are the very reasons used in the past to block women from higher office. But I bring them up to illustrate how much Barack Obama is, in many ways, like every other person we’ve ever elected president of the United States. And Hillary Clinton is not. Somehow this message, and the excitement it should be generating for Hillary, seems to be getting lost.

Which brings me back to my original quandary: I would like to contribute to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But I don’t want to be mistaken, again, for a big fish. I looked for ways to lend a hand, other than financial. Were there envelopes that needed stuffing? Stamps that needed licking? Files that needed filing?

Alas, my vision of campaign headquarters went out of vogue with the Truman administration. I could, according to the Clinton web site, host a fundraising party or make fundraising phone calls. There were other, vague tasks, such as “get out the vote,” but that sounded like it might involve a clipboard and standing outside a supermarket to register new voters. Which is an order of magnitude of effort above envelope stuffing. I said I wanted to help, not work.

So, a $25 charge to my MasterCard it would be. But I’m warning you, Jeff, don’t come looking for more.

2008-02-05T16:12:00.000-08:00

Keep on Picketing

Ah, the Hollywood writers’ strike: It’s been the worst of times, it’s been the best of times. Back in November, if you had told me that news of a possible resolution to this labor impasse would cause me anything other than unmitigated joy, I wouldn’t have believed you. At the time, I couldn’t imagine how I would survive without the weekly antics of the folks at Dunder-Mifflin, Mode or Buy More. Why, a person could starve on such measly rations as re-runs, reality shows and the complete seven seasons of “Gilmore Girls” on DVD, courtesy of Netflix. When your remote lands you on PBS’s Pledge Week and you choose to stick around and see if you can mentally make the phone ring for that guy in the third row, you know you’ve hit bottom. The situation has become so dire, the best comedy currently airing on network television happens to be a political ad.

And yet.

I’m not ready to go back to the way things were.

I don’t mean that I want to turn my back on the medium. After all, “Lost” finally premiered last week and “Masterpiece Theatre” is doing a bang-up job with those Jane Austen adaptations. I just mean that I found other things to fill all the time I didn’t spend watching my favorite shows or reading online recaps of my favorite shows or debating whether to jump on the “Gossip Girl” bandwagon. I never realized how exhausting it all was, this attempt to maintain my pop culture street cred.

The strike was my get-out-of-jail-free card.

It’s not so much the absence of television that I’ve enjoyed—because when I really want to veg out in front of the boob tube, there’s always “Wife Swap”—as the absence of celebrities. Admit it, the words “silver lining” crossed your mind when Teri Hatcher disappeared along with new episodes of “Desperate Housewives.” The cancellation of the Golden Globes was a surprising relief and the prospect of a world without an Oscar telecast no longer struck me as particularly bleak.

A lot of us have a love-hate thing with these awards shows. We love the pretty dresses, we hate being reduced to such shallowness. Love the competition, hate the self-congratulatory acceptance speeches. Love the illusion of glamour these shows inject into our lives, hate the way the fabulous honorees make our own existence seem so very small and pedestrian. Surely, I’m not the only one to suffer from that particular inferiority complex.

I mean, if I never saw another actress walk down a red carpet dripping in jewels, her “naturally” rail thin body encased in a designer gown that cost more than my condo, I probably wouldn’t mind.

So when the world continued spinning on its axis after the Golden Globes much-derided press conference, plenty of us award show junkies were given pause to question our drug of choice. What, after all, is the point?

During the SAG Awards pre-show telecast—hey, I might be trying to kick the habit but even heroin addicts need their methadone—I got my answer. “We really needed tonight,” said the actress Chandra Wilson, whom I generally adore or, more to the point, whose “Grey’s Anatomy” character I generally adore. “We needed to celebrate each other’s work.” Or something to that effect.

There was no mention of the fans. No shout out to the couch potatoes at home. No pretense that the viewing audience was even factored into the equation. Award shows boil down to actors gushing over other actors. (And I know some of these shows let cinematographers and make-up artists and sound effects editors come out to play, but let’s face it, even their mothers are saying, “Let’s get to Javier Bardem.” In fact, that’s why the Screen Actors Guild invented their own awards—sort of like a clubhouse with a giant “keep out” sign aimed at deterring all those dorky set decorators and screenwriters.)

Before I completely lose my train of thought, I remember responding to Wilson’s comment—and I hate to keep singling her out for what is undoubtedly a common opinion—with a “Well, what working stiff doesn’t need a pat on the back? Why are actors more deserving of it than the rest of us?” And why are the rest of us expected to care?

My former employer used to hold an annual Rewards & Recognition Week. I’m sure versions of this take place all over Corporate America. Banquet halls or hotel ballrooms are rented out, some sort of mystery chicken is served, assorted plaques and/or other blunt objects are distributed as tokens of appreciation for a job well done, often accompanied by modest sums of cash or the occasional gift card.

None of this is televised. Which is actually how the Oscars ceremony got its start—as a small dinner party for Cary Grant and friends. I’m starting to think maybe the Academy got it right the first time, and has mucked it up ever since. Would it really be so terrible to wake up on a Monday morning, hear who took home the golden statue the night before, view a few pictures of the fashions and then move on with one’s day and, dare I say, one’s life?

I was hoping that the writers’ strike would last long enough for us to find out.

2008-02-04T11:45:00.000-08:00

It’s Not Polite to Ignore the Girl Who Brought You to the Dance

I’ve been following the presidential campaign so closely for so long, it hardly seems real that I’m about to cast a ballot tomorrow.

For months, I’ve watched with anticipation and envy as other primary voters basked in the glow of the national spotlight while candidates courted their favor (or was it the other way around?). I saw some New Englander in a flannel jacket boast that he’d shaken each contestant’s hand and “looked ‘em in the eye.” I heard second-hand reports of Barack Obama delivering inspirational speeches to Iowans on the subject of ethanol and wondered when he might turn his attention to the mass transit crisis in his home state.

And now, as Super Tuesday approaches, the wait is over. My time has come.

I spent the past week or two haunting various locations where candidates seemed most likely to congregrate—diners, coffee shops, hot dog stands. I wore my puffy down parka, which is how the media likes Chicagoans to dress in the winter. My friends and I threw informal gatherings in our homes—you know, those intimate tete-a-tetes where you bond with Mitt and McCain over spinach-artichoke dip and really connect on a personal level. I had my sound bites and questions prepared. I would be so passionate and eloquent and camera-friendly, I would look and sound so much like a Real Person with a Real Grasp of Real Issues that the campaigns would enter a bidding war for my services as a special policy adviser. (No way I was going to pull a Maria Menounos. The “Inside Hollywood Access Tonight” reporter sat down last week with Laura Bush and actually asked the First Lady, “Would you like to reach out to Britney Spears?” No, Maria, I’d like to reach out to you and revoke your license to interview.)

Overall, I had the right idea, just the wrong location.

Barack’s glamour train, with Oprah and a gaggle of Kennedys on board, pulled into L.A. Hillary headed to Connecticut and NYC. Romney stumped in Massachusetts. Granted Mitt did make a stop in Glen Ellyn, Ill., but to a Chicago resident, that’s as good as Iowa. I have been, so it seems, ignored.

So I never got my one-on-one time with Mrs. Clinton, which is too bad because I had some vital strategic information to impart. “You know, lots of people don’t feel comfortable wearing their hearts on their sleeves,” I planned to enlighten her. “We’re called introverts. Embrace this long-ignored demographic and the presidency is yours.”

I never got the chance to walk Mike Huckabee over to the Field Museum, where I would show him Sue, our really, really, really, really old dinosaur.

I never had the opportunity to tell Obama that it’s not polite to ignore the girl who brought you to the dance. But if you can’t be bothered to campaign in the city where you live, and you still insist on hammering home your message of change, you might think twice before sending out Richard “Mayor for Life” Daley, scion of American’s longest-running political dynasty, as your substitute.

Mostly I’m sad that candidate Romney will soldier on without benefit of my sartorial assistance. “Mitt,” I would say, pulling him away from prying ears, “what’s with the cheesy blue Men’s Warehouse suits? You look like you’re selling vacuum cleaners door to door, not running for president. Let me show you something in black.” And the hair? Well I would let him go on thinking he’s fooling us with that.

2008-01-31T10:09:00.000-08:00

Taking a Bite out of Apple

One of my favorite episodes of “South Park” skewers Prius owners, who, in the throes of their low-emission, fuel-efficient smugness, create a toxic cloud of self-satisfaction that threatens to destroy the very environment they claim to be saving. Oh that the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, would give Apple fans the same satirical smackdown.

Where the Prius owner silently demands that the rest of us bow down to his sacrifice—he’s given up cargo space and seating for seven in order to slow the melting of the polar ice cap, thank you very much—the Apple owner demands we acknowledge his superiority in all things cool, hip and trendy.

We get the message. PCs are bland and humorless—and so are the people who use them—the electronic equivalent of meat and potatoes and a suit and tie (or suit and sensible pumps). Apples are colorful and quirky—and so are the people who use them—the electronic equivalent of farmers’ market-frequenting vegetarians turned out in graphic tees and Converse All-Stars. PC means Bill Gates and the Evil Microsoft Empire. Apple users create subversive videos on their nifty software and post the results on YouTube. Simply stated: Apple is a lifestyle, not a corporation.

This is one bubble in need of bursting. Please, allow me.

If you haven’t seen the TV ad for the Latest Greatest Computer Ever, the Macbook Air, you will. As we learn in the commercial, this laptop is so light and thin, it could model at Fashion Week. Seriously, that’s the main selling point of this product—it can fit into an envelope or a Versace gown without the aid of Spanx.

But the real point of the spot has nothing to do with the Air and everything to with getting the catchy background tune stuck in your head. Let me hum a few bars: “La, la, la, la…la, la, la, la, la, la…la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.” These might not be the actual words but who cares. All I know is that every time I hear it, a voice in my head says, “Must. Have. That. Song.”

I am nothing if not obedient so I googled “song from apple commercial.” I struck gold with an entire web page devoted to the topic—it is, no lie, part of Canada’s Mac support site (official Apple affiliation not determined). Remember “Channel Surfing” by Feature Cast in the iPod Breakdance ad? Yeah, neither did I. Thank god for the Canadians; you can see how not invading foreign countries frees them up to focus on other things. It goes without saying that they were totally aware of the “la, la, la, la” song, which is not, it goes without saying, really called “la, la, la, la.” It’s “New Soul” by Yael Naim.

All that remained was for me to log onto iTunes where I could browse for my “New Soul.” Once there, I discovered I hadn’t needed the assist from our neighbors to the north after all. Because the iTunes home page already had a convenient little click-through box for the “Macbook Air song.”

Now some of you (Apple fans) might say that this is just Apple being thoughtful and nice. Gosh, they had no idea “la, la, la, la” would lodge in your cranium. But since it has, heck, they’d hate for you to waste your time googling “song from apple commercial” and bothering Canada when there’s really no need for you to ever leave the Apple universe.

Others of you (everyone else) might say that this is Apple being crafty and opportunistic and Bill Gatesian, if you will. Creating a demand for a product, “la, la, la, la” (I still can’t think of the song as anything else), pretty much monopolizing its distribution and, I’m just guessing here, pocketing a nice little share of the sales. All of which sounds suspiciously like a corporation, not so much a lifestyle.

Which isn’t to say that I didn’t go ahead and purchase “la, la, la, la.” It’s just that I’m afraid to listen to it. Because if I do, I have a feeling a voice inside my head will say, “Must. Buy. Macbook. Air.”

2007-12-20T09:50:00.001-08:00

Rush Limbaugh Is Bald and Fat and Ugly

Any minute now, I’m expecting news that Rush Limbaugh has been fired. After all, if Don Imus was canned for making a racial slur, shouldn’t Limbaugh receive equal treatment for proving himself an ageist and a sexist?

I refer, of course, to Limbaugh’s recent comment that Americans aren’t ready to elect Hillary Clinton as president. Because we won’t want to watch her age on a daily basis—getting all gray-haired and wrinkly on us.

There are so many things wrong with that statement, I don’t even know where to begin.

How about with the notion that, to a certain extent, Limbaugh has a point. Women in our society are no longer allowed to grow old. I mean, the fairer sex has always been held to a higher standard than men in terms of personal appearance, but the extent to which this is now true would be laughable if it weren’t so frightening. Women in their 20s, 30s and 40s are having their fat sucked, tummies tucked and their boobs boosted; their foreheads are frozen, their lips are plumped, their cheeks are injected with collagen. A Ginsu knife commercial has nothing on all the slicing and dicing that goes on in the plastic surgeon’s office these days.

Why? Because we’re deathly afraid of not looking 18. Of being betrayed by un-taut necks or that flabby, flappy skin under our arms—or anything else that indicates we’ve lived a life.

I look in my medicine cabinet and I see under-eye cream and upper lip cream and regenerating serum and age-defying moisturizer and good-bye cellulite gel, all in an attempt to shave a year or two off my age. So that I won’t be marginalized or labeled irrelevant. And sometimes I think, “This is insane.”

But then Rush Limbaugh says that regular appearances by an older woman on our TV screens is almost too horrific to contemplate. It might scare the children. And there’s no hue and cry to tar and feather the sort of idiot who would make such a disgusting, prejudicial comment. So I have to assume that people agree with him.

Pass the Botox.

2007-12-19T10:07:00.000-08:00

People, people who hate people

Oh, let’s see, what’s going on in the world today:

Britney Spears’ sister is pregnant at 16. Lynne Spears’ parenting book on hold. Some stories just write themselves.

Roger Clemens denies steroid usage. I believe him, yes I do. But in case I didn’t, I would always have the following technicality to fall back on: Baseball didn’t agree on a steroid policy until 2002, and Clemens’ alleged abuse took place between 1998 and 2001. So there.

President Bush signs bill boosting fuel standards. The legislation also calls for higher efficiency in light bulbs. Incandescents are out, compact fluorescents (CFLs) are in. Call me a cynic, but what are the odds that Dick Cheney, or Al Gore for that matter, owns a stake in a CFL manufacturer? These bulbs are being pushed on us like clear coating on a new car buyer. And they suck. In an “Inconvenient Truth”-induced moment of environmentalism, we purchased a number of CFLs. Yes, they’re a bit pricey, but hey, they last forever, right? Wrong. They all burned out faster than their global warming brethren. We replaced them with incandescents. I’m pretty sure that Greenland then melted and flooded Iceland, causing the entire country to evacuate to Newfoundland, which was ill-prepared to handle the influx of refugees, who got tired of living in tents and crossed the border into Maine, which welcomed them during the cranberry harvest but now wants to deport them back to Iceland, which no longer exists. Our bad.

Candidates asked to name their favorite electronic gadget. Hillary Clinton says iPod. Barack Obama answers “BlackBerry.” I love my iPod; I quit my job when they threatened to give me a BlackBerry. The former says, sometimes I need to take a break from the crazy world around me and rock out to Modest Mouse. The other says, yeah, I’m that irritating guy who can’t even walk down the frozen food aisle without texting my BFF.

Finally, most of you likely missed this headline: “‘Pigeon Man’ struck, killed by van.” I feel so conflicted, especially this close to Christmas. On the one hand “Pigeon Man,” a 70-something retiree who lived only to squat on a hydrant and have pigeons land all over his body thereby blocking an entire stretch of sidewalk that leads directly to Walgreens, is dead. :( On the other hand “Pigeon Man,” a 70-something retiree who lived only to squat on a hydrant and have pigeons land all over his body will no longer block an entire stretch of sidewalk that leads directly to Walgreens. :) I believe that Chicagoans fall into one of two categories—people who feed pigeons and people who hate people who feed pigeons. The Chicago Tribune falls into the former camp. For a completely biased, one-sided propaganda puff piece on the life of Pigeon Man, go to www.chicagotribune.com.

2007-12-18T08:52:00.000-08:00

Average Joe

So I took one of those online quizzes that asks a bunch of questions on various social and political issues, and based on your answers, tells you which presidential candidate lines up most closely with your own opinions. I discovered that Joe Biden is the man for me. Curious. I took the test again. Same result. And I thought this was odd, because who knew Joe Biden was running for president.

I jest of course. I mean, I’m perfectly well aware that Mr. Biden has tossed his hat in the ring. And that he’s actually fairly well qualified for the job. But he’s been pretty much ignored by the media, I guess because he’s not new and shiny. Or it could be his name.

Every year, I look at the list of the most popular baby names because I’m always on the prowl for something to mock, and every year Joe is loitering somewhere in or near the top 10. It survived the Scott craze of the ‘70s and the whole Tyler takeover of the ‘90s and continues to hold its own against Noah and Henry and Jayden. Yet not a single U.S. president has ever been named Joe.

This does not bode well for Mr. Biden. Or Mr. Huckabee. Mike, or Michael, is another perennial crowd pleaser that never seems to go out of fashion. But, like Joe, also a no-show on the list of Chief Executives.

During his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama was fond of calling attention to the improbability of his candidacy—who, the thinking went, would vote for a guy with such a “funny” name. (And this was way before we knew “Hussein” was part of the package.) Yet in the current contest, Barack might actually have an advantage.

If the American public has demonstrated a certain reluctance to elect a Joe or Mike, they have no problem with more exotic appellations. The role call of Commanders in Chief is littered with Millards and Rutherfords and Grovers (twice). We even elected a Ulysses. Why, Barack seems almost tame by comparison.

As for candidate Romney, well consider him doubly blessed. On his campaign buttons he’s Mitt—his middle name—which isn’t quite Ulysses, but then again President Grant’s mama named him Hiram. On his birth certificate he’s Willard—shorten to Will, sounds like Bill, and you’ve got yourself a president.

2007-12-14T17:04:00.000-08:00

Making a List, Checking It Twice

Naughty: “The Office.” “Lost.” “Once.” Judd Apatow. Smartest Man in Hollywood, maybe. Funniest? Not according to the Golden Globes. None of the aforementioned was nominated.

Nice: Madonna. Newest inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. She. Does. Not. Belong. Even Santa makes mistakes.

Naughty: Roger Clemens. The biggest name named in the Mitchell Report on alleged steroid abuse in baseball. I say alleged because I adore The Rocket. Maybe he had his stool pigeon of a trainer shoot him up with various banned substances from 1998 to 2001 or maybe his stool pigeon of a trainer is a liar, liar, pants on fire. What else you got for evidence? Those side-by-side photos of a whippet-thin Clemens in his rookie season and the St. Bernard he now resembles? A) Everyone’s metabolism slows after 30 and B) when you’ve got a multi-million-dollar contract, you can skip the ramen noodles and go straight to steak. Does it sound as though me doth protest too much? Am I defending the indefensible? Perhaps. But I’m not ready to toss out a man’s entire career (including the awesome Mike Piazza bat throwing incident) based on a single error in judgment. Oh my god, I’m like those mothers of serial killer sons. Not my Roger. He was always such a nice boy.

2007-12-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

The Grammy nominees were announced yesterday and Plain White T’s “Hey There Delilah” is up for Song of the Year.

I’m not sure how to respond to that, except to say…

Hey there songwriter
I can not stand your stupid ditty
I am disgruntled with the lyrics
And will tell you without pity
Get a clue
No one can rhyme as bad as you
I swear it’s true

Hey there songwriter
Do you own a dictionary?
‘Cause you might not sound so sappy
With a broad vocabulary
Close your eyes
Pick random words to memorize
That’s my advice

Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Rhymes are killing me

Hey there songwriter
I know poetry is hard
But I have to tell you boy
That you would never catch the Bard
Doing what you do
You made a couplet out of “good”
With the word “good”

Hey there songwriter
Can we talk about your grammar?
You wrote a line that sounds like Yoda
I want to hit you with a hammer
What did you do?
Skip every English class in school
That wasn’t cool

Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me

I know you think you’re pretty smart
Your single topped the music chart
But one-hit wonders always fade away
4 Non Blondes and Bow Wow Wow
Ask yourself, where are they now
And could this be the future you will face
So if you want a long career
One that lasts beyond this year
Next time write a tune that’s not so trite
You know I’m right

Hey there songwriter
Feels great to get that off my chest
Your song’s been driving me crazy
Now I can give my angst a rest
I’ve had my say
Don’t make me waste another day
Trying to find all kinds of ways
To escape the song you play
Just go away

Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Oh your rhymes are killing me
Rhymes are killing me

2007-12-06T09:18:00.000-08:00

Pay Attention to Me

We just watched “Superbad” on DVD and I didn’t think it was funny. I’m not saying I didn’t find a single laugh in the entire movie. I just thought that an hour and 40 minutes of teenage boys mimicking blow jobs and hand jobs and anything else that passes for sex was perhaps an hour and 30 minutes too long.

Clearly there’s something wrong with me.

Entertainment Weekly just proclaimed Judd Apatow—who didn’t write, direct or act in “Superbad” but somehow gets credit for it anyway—as the Smartest Person in Hollywood. “This year, he didn’t just bring the funny; he changed the whole funny business,” raved EW. “Apatow is defining humor for this generation.”

So I had better get on board.

It’s not like I didn’t enjoy “Knocked Up,” Mr. Apatow’s other big hit in 2007, though if you think about the movie too long you start to wonder why you’re rooting for an intelligent woman to settle for a doofus. But at least the film was populated by adults, albeit not necessarily grown-ups.

I guess when you get down to it, my problem with “Superbad” is that it was all about teenagers. Who I try to avoid whenever I can. I didn’t much like being one and I certainly don’t enjoy their company now. Especially not on an “L” train when they’ve just been released from school.

I know they can’t help it, but teenagers are annoying. And stupid. And loud. And annoying.

And almost every movie in America is made with this audience in mind. Except end-of-the-year Oscar bait, and frankly, I’m tired of being depressed every holiday season by joyless fare like “No Country for Old Men.” I haven’t seen it yet, but I believe at the end, Javier Bardem kills Santa. It reminds me of the time I spent the month of December slogging through Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” I should have just gone to an animal shelter and watched puppies being tortured. Same effect.

So what’s on my wish list this Christmas? For Mr. Apatow to make a movie for me. Something that snaps, crackles, and pops with witty dialogue but isn’t set in a high school locker room. Think Jane Austen without all the accents and costumes (but not “The Jane Austen Book Club”). I’d offer more suggestions, but if I could come up with a plot, I’d write the screenplay myself.

C’mon, Mr. Apatow. You’re the Smartest Person in Hollywood. How hard can it be?

2007-12-04T07:25:00.000-08:00

The Biggest Losers

Enjoying the holidays so far? Sitting around the yule log, are you, sipping hot cocoa with loved ones? Gone caroling? Ice skating? Had cause to wear something with sequins? I know it’s only December 4th, but already the month feels like it’s slipping away, and so far the only deviation from my regularly scheduled activities is that I watched an episode of “Life” last night.

The worst is yet to come, and by that I mean the inevitable question of “What are you doing New Year’s Eve?” I have no idea. But I know what I’m not doing New Year’s Day. Watching Ohio State play LSU for the national championship, surrounded by fellow Buckeye fans.

Back in the day, the college football and holiday season culminated on Jan. 1. Back in the day, most of my family lived within a 10-mile radius and would gather to watch the bowl games and try to figure out a way for Notre Dame to wind up with the #1 ranking. That this actually happened once was enough to keep us delusional for the next 20 years. (We weren’t alone in clinging to this fantasy—just ask the programmers at NBC.)

While it may not sound like it, this was great fun. And then somebody went and invented the BCS. And now the college football season culminates on Jan. 7. Which is a Monday and not even the holidays anymore. I mean, even teachers have gone back to work by then.

So, as the perfect storm of sporting events took place this past weekend—West Virginia and Missouri choked, OSU vaulted to the top spot—I found myself cursing a system that should have been cause for joy.

I guess moving the BCS title game away from all the other lesser contests makes sense from a ratings perspective. After all, my extended family, lolling around my aunt’s living room as the Orange Bowl merged into the Sugar merged into the Fiesta, only counted as a single television set. Now that we’re spread out over several states, with no chance of traveling to watch the Big Game together (on a Saturday, maybe, on a Monday, no chance), why that’s about a 10-household gain for the network. Multiply that by millions of geographically-challenged families and the increase is exponential.

A big win for them. A big loss for us.

Happy holidays.

2007-12-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

The Case of the Mysterious Pepper Spray

News: 1. Information about recent events. 2. New information of any kind.

It’s the oldest, most hackneyed trick in the book to start a piece of writing with a definition of the topic at hand. Which makes perfect sense when talking about “news.”

Did you know, for example, that holiday traffic—both on the road and in the skies—is a nightmare? Or that in December it might possibly snow? Thank goodness every television station and newspaper was on hand to report these stunning new developments.

We live in an Information Age, and this certainly has its benefits. For example, at any given moment, the news crawl at the top of my computer screen can distract me from important work at hand—like typing this delightful blog—with eye-catching headlines about surgeons in Rhode Island who keep operating on the wrong side of people’s brains. That’s good to know.

As with “The Facts of Life,” you take the good, you take the bad. In the case of the 24/7 news cycle, the bad boils down to an awful lot of repetition and the fact that Ann Curry can pop up on my television morning, noon and night. Anyone else had it up to here with Election ’08—way back in ’06? Or the disappearance of Stacy Peterson (who, by the way, is not the only missing woman in America, and not even the only missing mother from the Chicago suburbs)?

There are too many news outlets with too much time to kill, er, I mean fill. Everything is treated as vitally important, which means that news of actual substance gets buried between reports on man bitten by shark and woman who survives lightning strike. If you’re at all familiar with the tale of Miss Puerto Rico and the case of the mysterious pepper spray, you know what I mean. If you’re still trying to figure out the difference between Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia, I feel your pain.

Maybe we get the news we deserve. For whatever reason, we’re mighty intrigued by the gazillionth Power Ball winner and less so by the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. Not necessarily because we have the attention span of a squirrel or the empathy of a tree frog but possibly because it’s not in our nature to seek out ways to depress ourselves. It’s an interesting phenomenon, one that I’d like to examine in greater depth. But right now, I’m dying to learn more about “Giant Truffle Auctioned for $330,000.”

2007-11-30T12:40:00.000-08:00

Funny Money

I’ve been looking for a villain in the current credit/sub-prime mortgage crisis—stupid borrowers or greedy lenders—and I think I’ve finally settled on the culprit: Hasbro.

Perhaps you’ve missed the toy company’s ads for the new Monopoly Electronic Banking edition. Allow me to fill you in. “Wheel and deal your way to a fortune even faster using debit cards instead of cash!” the promotional copy exclaims. “Collect rent, buy properties & pay fines—with the touch of a button!”

Not only does this take most of the fun out of the game—raise your hand if you always wanted to be the banker—but it also eliminates the game’s underlying common sense. Remember the sick feeling of landing on Boardwalk when the property was still available, but you couldn’t swing the purchase price? Aargh—Mediterranean Ave. is a crappy consolation prize. Or maybe your brother owned this prime piece of real estate, and you couldn’t afford the rent. Either way, you knew exactly where you stood just by looking at your dwindling pile of funny money—too many pink and white Monopoly bills, not enough gold.

No more. Nowadays, pretty much every transaction has gone cashless—I’ve seen customers at Walgreens pull out the plastic for a pack of gum. It’s like not spending money at all until people suddenly discover they’ve been living well beyond their means. Apparently Hasbro believes this is a fantastic habit to promote among children.

2007-11-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

Crazy Like a Donkey

In the current issue of the New Yorker, political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg paints a not altogether unflattering portrait of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

My first thought was, “Hath hell frozen over?” Normally, I heart Hendrik, who I’m pretty sure still hasn’t conceded the 2000 election to George Bush. But this current missive had me reconsidering my affection and/or fearing for his sanity.

Just as I was about to cancel my subscription, an alternate explanation entered my head. Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute.

Is it the tiniest bit possible that Hertzberg is bolstering Huckabee’s credentials to distract voters from the Republican frontrunners? I mean, if you’re a fan of Hillary “Unelectable” Clinton or Barack “Approved by Oprah” Obama or even Chris “Will Someone Please Notice I’m a Candidate” Dodd, who would you rather have as an opponent—Huckabee or R&R (Rudy and Romney)?

After all, America is the land where people once feared that John F. Kennedy would play puppet to the Pope. An ordained Baptist minister like Huckabee should set off way louder warning bells—I’m talking worse than the most obnoxious 2 a.m. car alarm—and send voters straight into the open arms of the Democrats and far, far away from the slightest whiff of theocracy.

You know, theocracy. The kind of state where religious beliefs take precedence over common sense—like imprisoning a teacher for allowing her students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, or punishing a rape victim with 200 lashes because at the time of the attack she was in the presence of a man to whom she wasn’t related. (The logic behind the latter is even more convoluted than the structure of that sentence.) And if you think I’m being absurd, let me remind you that pharmacists in this country feel free to refuse to dispense medication on religious grounds.

Oh, that Hendrik. Crazy like a Democratic donkey.

2007-11-26T15:14:00.000-08:00

That’s What I Call Reality

After about Season 2 or 3, every reality show settles into a predictable pattern. “The Amazing Race,” Emmy-winner though it may be, is no exception.

That’s what made last night’s episode so shocking. Kudos to the producers for resisting the, um, urge to leak the scene in promo ads.

I’m not talking about the introduction of “The Yield,” which is basically a “U-Turn” in fancier clothes. No, I’m talking about the moment when one of the racers, Hendekea, stopped to pee. Absolutely unexpected. Totally unprecedented.

I’ve been a fan of this show since it first aired and this question has stumped me for years, even more so than “Why must all dating couples refer to one another as ‘Baby’?” You know, you see contestants carrying around giant containers of bottled water, and then getting in taxi cabs to drive 100 miles to the next challenge, and no one ever has to relieve their bladder. It was uncanny, I tell you, and ironic for a show that so prominently features the words “pit stop.”

So my hat’s off to Hendekea for solving one of the great mysteries of the modern age—yes, Amazing Racers answer to the same bodily functions as the rest of us; yes, there are public toilets in African villages. Whether they’re well-stocked with toilet paper is still up for debate.

While we’re on the subject of Hendekea, can someone, preferably her partner and brother Azaria, tell me why the girl doesn’t have a nickname? In my family, we don’t even have the energy for Holly, which we shorten to Hol. What kind of brother spends his life grappling with four, count ‘em four, syllables every time he wants to get his sister’s attention, when he could have easily spent his youth taunting her with “Dek.”

There’s something wrong with these two. But thanks to Hendy’s detour, at least we know they’re human.

2007-11-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

DWTS: Rehearsal Time

I’m sorry, it took me a full day to celebrate, I mean process, Jane Seymour’s elimination from “Dancing With the Stars.” My advice to the remaining contestants: Put a little more thought into your rehearsal segments. This is where viewers get to know the “real” you and mostly we don’t like what we see.

Exhibit A: Sabrina Bryan. It’s quite possible that what with her busy schedule of “not” dating her DWTS co-star, Sabrina didn’t have time to log onto the Internet and check out the television message boards. So that might explain why she inexplicably opted to give the folks at home a backstage pass to a Cheetah Girls video shoot. The haters said all along that the Cheetoh was a ringer. Footage of her learning new choreography as part of her job—granted some form of hippity hop vs. the jive—pretty much proved their point. Dumb and dumber.

Exhibit B: Jane Seymour. See Jane paint with her feet. See Jane shamelessly exploit her friendship with Johnny Cash. Hear Jane complain about her fused spine and old age. I guess she thought this was endearing. Instead it came across as A) weird, B) opportunistic, and C) the perfect excuse to put her and us out of our pain.

Exhibit C: Cameron Mathison. You know, sometimes during the judges critique, Cameron has a crazed serial killer look in his eyes. Yea, crazy like a fox. Here’s a guy who knows how to play to the audience. See, the soap star is well aware that his fan base is 99% female, and stay-at-home moms at that. So what does he do? Shows himself kissing his adorable little children goodnight (chicks dig good father material), while conveniently keeping his wife out of the picture (chicks don’t dig guys who are already taken). Genius.

Exhibit D: Marie Osmond. Oh Marie, please tell me that you aren’t going to try to use your father’s death as a way to win votes. Please tell me that a camera crew won’t be accompanying you to the funeral, catching that single tear as it rolls elegantly down your perfectly made-up face (and fainting, let’s not go there again). Please tell me there won’t be any footage of you and Jonathan practicing the tango between eulogies at the wake. Now, here’s what I would like to see: You telling Donny that this is your comeback, not his.

2007-11-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

Amazing Race: Get Your Ass in Gear

The Race is back! Goths. Lesbian minister life partners. Hyper-competitive siblings. Dating couples on the verge of implosion. Let the fireworks begin.

In a television season that’s been disappointing to date—writers’ strike, bring it on if that means fewer episodes of “Carpoolers”—it’s good to have an old favorite back, particularly if it means a return to classic early form.

The first episode of every Race is always a challenge to viewers: too many teams, too difficult to distinguish between matching sets of overly emotional needy girlfriends and their commitment phobic boyfriends. (Apart from the lesbian ministers, this season is noticeably lacking in wedded couples. Are married folks inherently boring? Too busy raising kids and paying mortgages to go globetrotting? Afraid, like my husband, to even audition because he’s convinced the Race would lead to divorce? Discuss amongst yourselves.)

I’m not even going to attempt to handicap or recap at this point, until I figure out who’s who. (And I’ll probably never know which obligatory blonde team member is which, especially if they continue to dress exactly alike. One day, I expect the show to just feature a blonde and her clone.) But last night’s standouts were Kynt and Vyxsin, the afore-mentioned Goths, simply because it’s impossible not to notice them in a crowd. The other teams have already cleverly dubbed this pair “the freaks.” Seriously, they couldn’t come up with a better Satanic or Marilyn Manson reference? I’ll admit, I was surprised these two could actually ride a bike and I’m particularly keen to see how their eyeliner holds up over the course of the competition.

Another team to watch: the father-daughter duo of Ronald and Christina. Ronald says he was largely absent during Christina’s childhood. I think he was in sales and traveled a lot, or he might have been a government spy. Not important. What Christina would like us to know is that her dad’s about to turn 60, so she wants to make the most of the “time we have left.” Which, according to life expectancy charts, is another 20 to 30 years, unless the long-neglected Christina has something more sinister in mind. Keep on eye on these two. If Christina coerces Ronald into taking on the more dangerous challenges, we might want to alert the authorities.

While the Race typically lives and dies by its casting, the inventiveness of the Roadblocks and Detours are crucial elements as well. As long-time watchers of the show can attest, the airport is always the great equalizer. Who knew donkeys fit that bill as well?

Last night, a fairly simple challenge—get a donkey to haul a specified number of peat logs over a pre-determined distance—proved the undoing of Ari and Staella, and nearly one of the random dating duos, who literally couldn’t get their ass in gear. Hence the phrase, “Stubborn as a mule.” (I know, mules aren’t donkeys, and don’t get me started on burros, but close enough.) As late-arriving teams trotted past the intractable donkeys, the frustrated teams responded by yelling at their animals louder and louder, an effective management technique taught at all the best business schools and “how to win friends and influence people” seminars. The donkeys dug in further.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the show for me was that for the first time ever, except for the season where the show kicked off in my hometown, I’ve actually been to a race location. Teams’ first instruction had them flying to Shannon, Ireland, where we touched down ourselves back in August. Clearly we need to start planning a return visit, as our guidebook failed to inform us of the whole bicycling-on-a-tightrope-over-a-gorge tourist attraction the first go-around.

We did spend a lot of time in the car stressed out about driving on the wrong side of the road, negotiating “roundabouts,” and wondering why two-lane highways were only wide enough for a car and a half. This didn’t seem to bother any of the Race contestants, which, come to think of it, might be why more people like us aren’t on the show.

2007-11-02T10:31:00.000-07:00

Trick or Treat

This is what happens when political campaigns drag on for years before the actual election. Pundits run out of things to say and begin questioning the obvious. Like, is Hillary Clinton playing the gender card? Um, duh. And why shouldn’t she?

So she called presidential politics a “boys club.” I don’t know if that’s pandering, or simply stating a fact. Correct me if I’m wrong, but an unbroken line of 43 male leaders of the free world pretty much proves her point.

I remember, back in the day, when women first started acting like they thought they could be president—sometime in the 1980s—and their opponents made a big deal out of whether a female commander in chief would have the balls to launch a nuclear attack against Russia. (Prompting some of us to wonder, “Well, would it be such a bad thing for a person to think twice before annihilating the planet?”)

That, in my book, is pulling out the gender card. So if Hillary Clinton is attempting to beat the boys at a game they invented, I say turnabout is fair play.

But I don’t really want to talk about Hillary Clinton today. I want to talk about Halloween. Am I the only adult who’s glad as hell that this holiday is over?

I’ve got nothing against candy. I love candy. In fact, one of the great joys of being a grown-up is that I can buy as much sugar and chocolate as I want, whenever I want, without having to beg for it house to house once a year.

It’s the costume part that I hate. And I don’t mean that I have a phobia about people dressed in costumes, the way some people fear and despise clowns. I mean that I can’t stand the pressure of coming up with something creative to wear.

As a kid, I would say that my costuming career peaked at around age 6, when it was still acceptable to don one of those suffocating plastic masks and accompanying robe. I usually went as a Princess. Or a cat. And what, besides the fact that I nearly drowned on the sweat droplets that collected on the inside of the mask, was so wrong with that?

The older I got, the higher the stakes were raised. I was supposed to conjure up a hobo or a little old lady or Wonder Woman out of the scraps in my closet, which was not, unlike apparently every other kids’, overflowing with golden lassos and granny wigs. The trouble is, I wouldn’t even start to think about my costume until trick-or-treat night, having used up most of my brainpower devising the ultimate route through our subdivision that would result in the maximum haul of sweetened plunder.

So Halloween went something like this: I would rush home from school with only hours to spare before the official start of the candy rush and stare at my options—slacks, blouses and dresses—and wait for them to reveal their true magical nature to me. Never happened.

Inevitably I would panic and just throw on a sheet, the costume equivalent of giving cash as a Christmas gift. Both basically say, “I have no imagination.”

Frankly, I was glad to put those days behind me. As far as I was concerned, adulthood meant never again having to answer, “And what are you going to be for Halloween?”

Except for that through the wonders of marketing, Halloween is now as much for adults as for kids. And I’d be totally on board with this turn of events if all it required of me was to work my way through a bag of assorted Hershey’s miniatures. But instead, I keep getting invited to costume parties.

Costume parties, as seen on TV, are wonderful affairs. And if I had an entire wardrobe department at my disposal, I’d be having a good time, too. Not a bedsheet in sight. The trouble is, all this televised foolery (or should it be “ghoul-ery”) has trickled down to the rest of us. Hoboes and little old ladies are out. Increasingly elaborate get-ups are in. Picture Princess Leia in her skimpy chained-to-Jabba-the Hutt bikini. Ironic statements are even better. And just to prove how pathetic I am in this department, I can’t even muster an example for you of what such a costume might be. If I could think of one, I’d have worn it.

Luckily, when it comes to Halloween, my husband is of the same mind. We got engaged before we had spent a single holiday season together, and it didn’t occur to me to ask about his stance on costumes before I accepted his proposal. That could have been an irreconcilable difference.

But we’re tired of feeling like boring, old, sticks-in-the-mud. We’re ashamed of our inability to get into the spirit of things. Don’t we want to be like all the other grown-ups and relive our childhoods?

So next year, I’m marching into wherever such things are sold and I’m buying one of those plastic mask death traps. (You just know some company in China is still be making them.) And when anyone asks me “What are you going to be for Halloween?” I’ll answer, “My six-year-old self.”

2007-10-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

The Pope and the Pill

A brief digression from my usual pop culture musings…

Yesterday, Pope Benedict called on Catholic pharmacists to not only conscientiously object to dispensing emergency contraception, but also to educate patients about the moral and ethical use of drugs.

What I would like to know is whether the Pope is also urging members of the same profession to treat their male customers with equal disdain. When they refuse a woman her legally prescribed drugs, will they also demand that she haul in her male partner for a good old tar and feathering? When a man steps up to the counter to pick up his Viagra, does the Pope insist the pharmacist inquire as to whether the gentleman receiving the pills intends to use them solely for procreational sex with his wife?

Let’s forget about the Pope for a minute. Since when did pharmacists become the morals police? It’s their job to fill prescriptions. Period.

I have, in the past, held positions where I did things I didn’t particularly want to do. I used to work as an acquisitions editor where my boss basically expected me to screw writers and photographers out of a decent wage. I also served time as a corporate mouthpiece, where one person’s “spin” is another person’s “lie.” When performing those tasks—which were inherent in my job description—became too much for me to stomach, I quit.

If certain pharmacists feel similarly conflicted, I suggest they start looking for a new career.

2007-10-29T07:54:00.000-07:00

Not Ready for Prime Time

Sometimes when I’m watching the Oscars, I stop and ask myself, “Why?” Not why am I watching—I know it’s for the dresses—but why do movie stars deserve all this attention. More to the point, if we’re going to honor a group of employees or an industry for their outstanding annual efforts, why not throw a bone in the direction of people who aren’t pampered and fawned over daily and don’t get invited to spend the weekend at George Clooney’s Italian villa. People like, say, teachers or social workers or long-haul truckers.

I got my answer on Saturday, when I happened upon the Quill Book Awards.

The Quills are sort of the publishing world’s equivalent of the People’s Choice Awards: the general public gets to vote for the Book of the Year and everyday people—booksellers and librarians—decide the winners in all the other categories. The Quills are unlike the People’s Choice in that they have no entertainment value. (Hence the 6:30pm-on-a-Saturday graveyard timeslot.)

Granted, I tuned in near the end of program, just in time for the Mystery/Suspense award. (*If you’re dying to know who took home the Quill in this category, act like this is a book and scroll to the end of this posting.) By then, I’d missed honorees Al Gore, Amy Sedaris and Cormac McCarthy, assuming they were in attendance. Who knows, Business winner Robert I. Sutton, PhD, might have brought down the house with his hilarious acceptance speech. Or not.

All you need to know about the Quills is that they were hosted by the “Today” show’s Al Roker and Hoda Kotb (subbing for Ann Curry, who opted to ship off to Antarctica rather than endure these proceedings). The Quills web site (www.thequills.org) claims the awards “pair a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz.” Yes, nothing says Hollywood glitz like a semi-rotund weatherman and his fourth-string sidekick.

If I had to put my finger on why this show was so dull, I guess I would say that while writing is actually considered a fairly glamorous profession (mistakenly, I might add), writers in general are not particularly glamorous or gregarious people. (If you think I’m being harsh, answer me why the producers opted to show nominated book jackets rather than nominated authors’ faces during the Quills telecast.) The same could be said of a lot of people in the movie industry—cinematographers, costumer designers, F/X wizards, etc.—which is why we all hit the snack bar or take a bathroom break when these awards are handed out during the Oscars.

The answer to my original question is that actors, even the lesser ones, know how to shine in front of the camera. That’s not a more notable or deserving accomplishment than teaching a child how to read, transporting a load of artichokes from California to Minnesota, or penning the book of the year. But I can attest that it does make for better TV. The rest of us are not ready for our close-up.

*Laura Lippman

2007-10-26T07:14:00.000-07:00

The Big Chill

I’ve just discovered the U.K. celebrity website heatworld.com, thanks to an article in The Atlantic, which mentioned heat as one of the biggest offenders in the sizing down of celebrities. Sample content: “Guess whose freaky knee this is….” (Answer: Kate Moss.) Of course, I googled the site post haste. And then immediately found myself in the curious position of sympathizing with Posh Spice.

“Don’t you own a coat Posh?” heatworld’s headline screamed, accompanied by photos of the Spice Girl tottering around London in a couple of sleeveless ensembles. Shocking!

Now, I’m as guilty of gloating as the next person when it comes to celebrity foibles. I love me a good “stars without makeup” feature or “look who has cellulite” expose. Mostly because I’ve read enough interviews where Cameron Diaz or Jennifer Aniston or insert any female star has attributed her glowing skin to nothing more than a soap-and-water regimen or credits her highly toned body to good genes and a high metabolism. More like Photoshop.

But I draw the line at scolding Posh for choosing fashion over warmth. In fact, I admire her for it. And wish I could be more like her.

This week, we reached the point in Chicago where autumn finally beat back summer and temperatures went from the 80s to the 50s. We know that the 30s and the sub-zeros won’t be far behind. Sweaters and coats came out of the closet (or for those of us operating out of more cramped quarters, released from storage bins under our beds). It’s all so depressing.

I hate being cold. I also hate being hot, but I hate being cold more. I hate it more than cilantro, I hate it more than telemarketers, I hate it more than technical support personnel who don’t understand that to me, all wires are called “thingy” and “magiggy.”

So unlike Posh, I usually opt for comfort over style. My arms won’t see the light of day until next June. As the bitter winds of January blow ice off Lake Michigan, I’ll be waiting on an El platform for a train that’s never going to come—swathed in countless layers of long johns, wool and down—and I’ll look at my fellow females, outfitted in adorable skirts (no boots or hose, natch) and the flimsy sort of overcoats that J. Crew passes off as winter wear, and I’ll think a) “I hate you.” And b) “I hope your toes fall off from frostbite.” and c) “Teach me your ways.”

2007-10-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

The Death Of A Tragedy

I now pronounce the California wildfires officially over. Or at least our interest in them. We gave it three days, time to move on.

Sure the flames are still burning and smoke is still swirling, but Matt Lauer has returned from the field to the studio. And we all know what that means—a story has just been downgraded from “major national tragedy” to “slightly more important than the segment about the convenience store clerk who fought off a gun-toting robber with an axe.”

We return you to our regularly scheduled programming: Where’s Madeleine McCann?