Space chick with the electric hair

My absolute favorite post--it's further down with the archive date 7/11/05

2011-04-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

.Sometime in the late 1980's Lucia, Noel (a male friend who no longer lives in New York, and yes he's gay) and I were walking up Lafayette Street, in Nolita, a section of Manhattan that was called Noho then. Nolita stands for north of Little Italy, and Noho for north of Houston. We were walking on the east side of the street where there's a fire station.

We had just left the architectural studio and store that Lucia managed and was the scene of many parties, and occasionally ended up sleeping there when we were too wasted to make it home. It had a shower, bath and almost all the amenities of home except for a bed, but did have a huge table that we would have to clear the dust off, in order to sleep, but, uh most times, we would forget that step.

This is mostly extraneous to the story I'm telling, but good background, for something.

We were young and hot though we were the last two to believe that part. Don't know why; enough people told us, wanted to know us, or marry us. Lucia was a four by 40 girl. This story takes place before the fourth marriage.

I was a Maid (or Matron) of Honor more than most women; and I'm only counting Lucia's weddings. She used to compare herself to Elizabeth Taylor:
"I believe in marrying them, not living with them."
I'm more the let's live together, not get married type.
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It was a hot June night. Not hot as in oppressive, I want to die weather, but hot enough. In New York, the hottest part of the day is always dusk when the heat's had time to settle on the cement, and the buildings seem to ooze both heat and drops of hot water from the air conditioners. The steam rises both from the street, and subway gratings, and it can feel as if you're trapped in a manhole cover or a pot of not quite boiling water. One thing you learn in New York early and never forget: heat rises.

I was wearing a blue with little pink and yellow flowers bustier dress; the skirt flowed like a Marilyn dress. Here comes the big confession: sometimes when I would a dress like that I wouldn't wear underwear. But, and this is a big but, I had a two piece bathing suit that almost exactly matched the dress; only the flowers were a bit larger. That morning in a burst of clothing creativity, I decided to wear the bottom as underwear. To make the dress work appropriate I had worn a blue silk fitted jacket that I had left at the studio.

Noel was walking to my right, and Lucia to my right. The subway grating was right underneath me. The fire station bells began ringing as it did whenever notable people passed it. I couldn't understand why suddenly Lucia and Noel were trying to tame my dress that was whirling with the blast of hot air from the subway. Their faces had turned bright red, and not from the heat.

Something made me turn around, and face three very well dressed men who were trying not to smile. Two of the men were young, very good looking; "bodyguards," I thought before my brain had time to register exactly who they were guarding. Or maybe I really didn't want to realize this. I thought of something clever to say, but before I could say it I began laughing.

Real laughter; not girly giggles or shameful bursts of restrained laughter that turns into coughing fits. I knew that as long as I lived I would never forget this meeting. But I just couldn't stop laughing; the six of us were standing on Lafayette Street, laughing until tears came.

And that's how I met the man for whom the bells were tolling; the boss of bosses himself, John Gotti, shortly before he went to prison.

If Lucia comments, and she will, do not believe her version. I wasn't just wearing underpants, I was wearing a shield of armor, a belly covering bathing suit bottom.

No I don't approve of him or anything he did. Just getting that out of the way. But it's a hell of a story.

Daddy's Home 4/26/06

2011-03-12T10:01:00.000-08:00

Christmas break 1961
Daddy promises to take me to the ice skating rink in Great Neck later. My little sister is at her best friend Debby's apartment in our 40 family garden apartment court at the edge of North East Queens.

My best friend, Lori, lives two doors down, but she's away with her family, in their new Lincoln Town car with electric windows. My other friends are either away or they're not speaking to me or Iâ€™m not speaking to them. I'm in sixth grade, and I used to be the first girl anybody would call or call up the window to. Now hardly anyone does. Near the candy store the other day I heard my cousin, Ken, call me a goof to a girl he was trying to impress

Eleven is a very difficult age, I think as I look out the window at the deserted court. It's almost never empty. No matter what the weather parents sit on the park benches and kids play in the grass, but the snow's really more ice than snow, and it's freezing. Daddy's such a slow, careful driver he can drive in any weather but blizzards. It's about eleven AM. In our house that's early for a weekend or non-school day.

There's going to be a big football game. Daddy hates football, but he likes to make many charts showing possible plays. Then men bet on it. Mommy says it's okay.
Daddy's special. He likes excitement. Other men, they bet the rent or the mortgage, and food money. Daddy saves money each month and only bets extra money. Daddy will make sure we always live well.

Uh, mommy, we live in a four room apartment. I have to share a room with Elka.

We moved to the garden apartments, (up the hill as mommy and daddy call it) a huge community when I was four. We were supposed to live here for a year while my parents looked for a house in Great Neck. Elka and I love it here, but lately I really want my own room, and I let mommy know that at every opportunity.

Elka's half of the room is decorated with her own paintings. I had Fabian posters up but took them down for Warren Beatty ones. I can't keep the house argument up. I know that they are seriously looking. We'll probably buy a house when I'm away at college. Daddy likes to check everything out 200 times.

My parents take an hour to decide on what brand of toilet paper to buy. I've seen them fight over that. Then I watched them make up. I think that's one of the reasons adults fight. Elka wants to crawl under the table when they make out in a restaurant but I like it.

I wish daddy would get ready.

I'm sure he will be ready soon, sweetie, your daddy loves taking you the rink. He wishes he could skate.

I'm not a great skater but I love going round and round the rink while the loudspeakers play songs like What's your name? and The lion sleeps tonight. I'm getting bored looking out the window, so I go to the bookshelf where I take out a book I have looked at but rejected many times.

I take A Tree Grows in Brooklyn into my bedroom. Soon I'm in a world so similar and different from mine. Francie Nolan's eleven, and lives in Williamsburg Brooklyn in the early part of the century. Mommy's from Greenpoint which is walking distance from Williamsburg and was born later than Francie. Francie's Irish and our natural enemy as we're Jews, and the Irish and Poles in Greenpoint threw tomatoes and other things at mommy and her brother and sisters.

I love Francie. She's lonely and bookish, but loves her family and I have never read a book before where the heroine thinks like me. This is the best book I have read so far. Mommy calls us into lunch. I donâ€™t want to eat because the Nolan's have just moved to Lorimar Street which is right next to Greenpoint and I want to see what happens next. I have forgotten that daddy's supposed to take me skating. Mommy asks what I'm doing.

Reading a wonderful book. A Tree grows in Brooklyn.
Mommy's all excited.

Oh don't you love it? Isn't it a wonderful book? What are you up to?
I'm confused. You don't like Irish people.
It's different. Books talk about universal experiences.
Oh like how we're all alike.
Exactly.
But Johnny, Francie's father drinks. Half the time he can't even work because he drank so much. Francie loves her father anyway. I wouldn't love daddy if he drank.
That's the Irish curse. Every group has its own problems. That's why books are so wonderful. Girls love their daddies no matter what they do. Finish the book and we'll talk.

Mommy smiles her big toothy smile. She's five feet tall, with short curly brown hair, big brown eyes, a good nose, and is cute. Everybody likes her. Iâ€™m already taller than her. My body grows each day.

But I'm awkward and weird and want to look like mommy. I made daddy promise that if I continue growing so fast he will have my legs cut smaller when I'm thirteen. Mommy thinks that I'm very pretty and smart. But we fight all the time. She says that's because weâ€™re so much alike. I don't think that I'm pretty, smart or at all like mommy. She just says that because I was adopted and she wants to make me feel good when we're not fighting over my hair not being brushed properly and things like that.

Every summer right after my birthday Chloe and I go to Camp Spring Lake in Barryville for six weeks. It's a progressive Jewish camp where we don't really have to do anything except make pow-wow sites for camping, swim, have socials, and debates on Saturday morning at Oneg Shabbats.

We learn about civil rights and how we are responsible for helping the less fortunate. Most campers don't have a professional for a daddy, nor do most of the kids in Queens. I have to explain what an accountant does. I don't even bother trying to explain the difference between an accountant and a CPA.
Bubbe Ceila, my mom's mom just died. She taught me about The Scottsboro Boys, The Triangle Shirt Waist Fire and other important things.

When mommy found out that she had just died, she went running into my arms. I felt special and remember being surprised about how much mommy needed me. I bet I miss Bubbe almost as much as mommy does, and more than her younger sisters Faye and Elaine who are bohemian

When I'm angry at mommy and ride my bike through the huge back alleys I pretend that I live with my birth mother who is a real beatnik, lives in the Village, lets me grow my hair to my knees and walk around without shoes. Nobody told me this but I know it.

Mommy goes to get daddy. He hasn't shaved, and his clothes are old and in taters. I remember he's supposed to take me ice skating and I pout.
Just give me an hour Pia, and I will take you.
Okay.
We're eating a Saturday lunch. Mommy makes tuna fish salad with celery, carrots, a little Miracle Whip and a lot of lemon. We're only allowed to eat potato chips when we eat tuna fish. Mommy and Daddy have every issue of PM Magazine, and mommy knows all about the dangers of fat.

Max guess what book she"s reading?
He shrugs.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
For the first time since daddy came in for lunch he looks excited.
Great movie. Daddy reads accounting journals, each issue of Mad, and parts of four to seven newspapers a day, but he doesn't read books. Mommy gets The New Yorker. I read them both. After lunch he goes back to his spread sheets, and I go back to my room.

Mommy calls us into supper. Francie's father, Johnny has just died. I want to finish the book. I don't want dinner. I'm beginning to understand why girls love their fathers even if they're drunks, and what mommy means by a universal experience. I don't want to talk about it. I just want to read and think. I'm glad we didn't go to the rink, but I have to remember to pout. Daddy comes into the kitchen.
I'm sorry Pia, Iâ€™m really sorry. I just got carried away.

He's never said that he's sorry to me before. I can't let daddy know that I'm not angry. He broke a promise, and I tell him that.
I know, sweetie. How about if you watch A Tree Grows in Brooklyn the next time it's on TV even if it's on the late show on a school night?
Okay.

Christmas Week 1962
Last summer at camp my parents sent me a letter saying that we are going to move in October. Nobody has ever heard of this town on Long Island. It sounds biblical. We all think my family's moving to the Mid East. I wonder if they have Special Progress classes in the Mid East so I can do seventh and eighth grade in one year like I was supposed to do in the city. I wonder why we are moving to the Mid East. The furthest we've ever been from New York is Miami where my father's sister and family live.

This doesn't make sense. Spring Lake doesn't allow phone calls so I have to actually write them instead of sending one of the pre-addressed post cards mommy addressed and stamped. I wish I could just call and find out why we're moving some place so far away.
Our new town turns out to be fifteen minutes north east of Queens. We had moved there the year that the expressway came out to it, and now the expressway is built, out to here, and there's an exit just a few blocks from our eight room, four level house. It's cheaper than Great Neck, almost all Jewish, and the parents are building a school district from scratch.

I hate our new town. When my records finally came they asked me if I wanted to be in the honor class. I was doing so badly I said no without even thinking. We change teachers but go from class to class with the same kids. My last name starts with S and I'm with the through A--M's. My life's not fun. How could I have ever thought that eleven was a horrible age? Twelve's much worse. I haven't made one friend in school.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is going to be on the late late show tonight. Daddy said that he would wake me. Daddy stays up working until two or three most nights, but he doesn't get up until 9:30 AM. I can't wait to be an adult. I just reread A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and have decided that I will read it every Christmas for the rest of my life. Daddy wakes me before the movie begins.

Daddy and I go into his red burlap wallpapered office. He sits on his swivel chair next to his huge mahogany desk, and I lie on the red plaid wood framed couch. The carpet's red with some black. A tree Grows in Brooklyn is a hundred twenty eight minutes long. It starts at two Am and won't be over until almost five AM. Daddy's been muttering all week about how he thought it would be on the late show during a school night, and how he's only good until four AM these days.

We watch the movies in silence only getting up when absolutely necessary. It's a perfect night and as daddy and I twirl our hair almost in tandem, I think about how Francie's father always makes promises that he doesn't keep, and daddy doesn't make many but when he does he always eventually keep them.

Pia and Zachary show their true colors 03/01/06

2011-03-12T09:59:00.000-08:00

I had my abortion nine years after they were first legalized in New York. It wasn't an easy decision but my boyfriend Zachary was on the road to self-destruction and was trying to take me down with him.
I was an adult. Zachary and I were living together. I worked; I supported us, but Zachary was the man of the house. He was emotionally abusive to me, once was physically abusive and I didn't throw him out as it was just once and I was bitchy and maybe, I deserved it. It was just a punch.
I would have needed witnesses to report it. My next door neighbor had once screamed for somebody to call the police. I did. Her lover was a scion of two household name families. The police rang my bell and lectured me about the dangers of making a false report.
I lived in zip code 10021, the richest in America, and domestic abuse just didn't happen.
I was adopted, and had always believed that I was blessed in my choice of family.
Deciding to have an abortion wasn't an easy decision. But I knew from the beginning, it was the only decision.
I had my own problems, and can't deny that they played a part. But my "verbal abuse" consisted of "Zachary, clean up," "Get a job." "How can you stay in bed all day smoking pot and drinking Dixie Beer?"
Happened to be fairly well known in the New York club scene, and was going to become fairly well known in the New York alkie bar scene, because people would call to ask me to pick Zachary up as he was so drunk. I had to get up at 5:30 to go to work so I would tell them to keep him.
Didn't happen that often. I had been married and been with other men; this had never happened once with any of them. It felt wrong.
Just as it felt wrong that Zachary wanted to be with me every minute. When weren't together he would call constantly. It felt wrong. Everybody thought that he was so in love with me. Every woman was jealous. There was nobody that I could talk about this to.
I saw a dark sick side that scared me. There's much more. This is all that's important.
There was no way in hell that I was going to have this man's baby; and adoption wasn't an answer. Love's not rational, and I loved Zachary very much.
I had a legal abortion.
Yes I was adopted, but the anti-adoption movement was in full frontal mode then.
I thought about adoption for a hot second. I didn't really know about obsession then but I knew that Zachary felt something for me that wasn't pure love; something strange. Something not good.
When I got him a job at the company I was a supervisor in, he immediately became a union organizer. Zachary could have easily become involved in the birth father. movement.
He had no desire to become a father, but had I gone through with the pregnancy, he would have quickly become a member of that movement. Only to fuel an obsession.
I couldn't verbalize this then, but I intuitively knew it. An abortion was only the sane answer. It was my choice; I did it, and have never regretted it.
Everybody who knows me well knows how guilty I can feel. Never, ever have I felt guilt over my abortion.
It's a woman's body and a woman's choice. I chose abortion because it was the right choice for me. I was 29 years old with a responsible job, and a boyfriend who spent most of his time bemoaning his fate in life. He blamed his failure to make it as a singer/songwriter on me.
A part of me bought into that; a part of me truly believed that if I could only be a better partner, if I could only keep our apartment clean, if....
I worked ten hour days to support us, but to Zachary that wasn't enough. He was the important one; he was the brilliant singer/songwriter who had two albums out by the time he was 25. I was supposed to work, keep house, cook, and nurture his genius. Damn it, I tried.
But I have a great survival instinct, and a bigger part of me knew that Zachary was living in a fantasy world that was becoming more warped every day. In order to save myself, I chose abortion.
I chose survival.
Everybody adored Zachary. He was a charmer.
I, and I alone knew that I lived with a truly deranged man who I loved.
I chose to make my future safer and more secure. It took awhile.
Sometime later when I finally threw Zachary out for good, he stalked me. Let him in one day while I was studying, and not thinking. He broke a window, with his bare hand, and a table filled with huge plants. I had to leave New York for awhile. When I came back, he continued to stalk me. Not sure why he stopped. I chopped off my hair and no longer was "Princess Perfect." My father paid him to leave, we think.
When I met my birth mother, eight years later, it was to specifically thank her for having had me.
My family's filled with eccentric people who love me. I'm a writer and the family I was adopted into gave me both the tools and the material to write with/on.
Adoption is a wonderful choice. So is survival. I chose to survive.
There's going to be a new Supreme Court. Alito is known for his stances on abortion. He's not going to soften them. It's time for every person in this country who believes in the sanctity of the already alive to stand in solidarity against people who will allow women to die in illegal abortions, and in extreme cases kill abortion workers.
Zygotes aren't fertilized; they have nothing to do with this subject. Fetuses aren't people.
The already alive come first.
If a woman doesn't want to have an abortion, she doesn't have to have one.
If her partner tries to force her to have one, and she doesn't want to she should seek help. Abortion being banned won't stop men from making their partners have abortions; it will make the abortions less safe.
Please lets not go back to the days women tried to abort with coat hangers, by falling down stairs, or any of a hundred other things. I don't believe that abortion is ethically wrong. What's ethically wrong is denying women access to safe legal abortions with counseling.
Zachary killed himself on January 4, 1989, in Nashville.
I chose survival. My life went on to be a full and rich one. In this crazy world, I must say one more thing. My life is one hundred percent Freyable. I don't tell stories like these that can't be fact checked. Trust me I didn't begin life asking "will Oprah believe me?" But I have always made sure that when I write these type of stories they could be verified. It's part of the guilt gene thing.
Crossposted at BIO where you can get out your moral outrage if you want. This isn't the place to.

Zachary and I; for the first long while. 03/02/06

2011-03-12T09:57:00.001-08:00

To better understand this post you should read the one below it first.
Zachary was from New Orleans and had the big easy charm. I would say that I'm a sucker for men in cowboy hats but truthfully I can't stand them. My great uncle owned a Western shop in Mobile and I had never been impressed. I look horrible in hats, and the Stetson and I just didn't agree.
I liked tall lanky Byronic men. Zachary was about 5'9" with brown hair almost the same color as mine. We looked alike. It was disconcerting. He liked to look in the mirror and point this out to me. I didn't want to picture us in 50 years looking and acting exactly the same.
I read somewhere on the Internet that Zachary was a lousy musician and a great friend. I disagree. While Zachary was in New York his friends were mainly my friends. I had many, and I was willing to share. Just not all the time. Okay, he wasn't the best musician, but his lyrics were powerful, and he had a better singing than speaking voice.
Bothered me that he didn't have real friends in New York. It felt as if all of downtown was our age, and everybody was friendly. Maybe they were to me.
My girl friends adored him. Oh he had her of the gravely voice who was to become a major star some years later, but she soon moved, and he had Alan, but I cost him that friendship for reasons I'm not ready to go into.
I'm cursed with a good memory, but I can focus the lenses to always make me look bad. It's a gift; one that continually gives and I guess will stop with death or dementia.
Usually I can turn my thinking around and be rational, but I had to research my BIO rant, and linked to an anti adoption site that can skew figures like nothing I have ever seen. Have been depressed ever since linking it; as if I'm responsible for people reading it, and maybe agreeing with it. Damn, who says you always needs cites?
Couldn't sleep much last night because I hadn't been ready to go where I went with Zachary on my blog. Obviously I gave away the ending. Obviously I took it to places where it hadn't been.
Zachary and I used to go to the 89 Saint Marks, smoke pot, and watch Preston Sturgis or Thin Man films. Then we would eat somewhere and go to the Grass Roots, an exact dup of The Maple Leaf in New Orleans. It had one of the five best jukeboxes in New York, and Zachary could pontificate for hours on why the oil shortage was manufactured.
I couldn't understand why somebody who could write such magnificent lyrics could repeat his sentences constantly. Tried to be nice about, and usually was.
I just loved the way we would could sometimes meld into one person. No man had ever wanted to protect me before, except my father. Left home as soon as I was able to; didn't want my father's protection.
Every man had assumed that I loved being self sufficient. And I had, and I still did. It was so unlike me to let a man cater to me, but I let Zachary into places in my head I had let nobody before. Damn if it didn't feel good, much of the time.
Yes I supported us. Small price to pay for the way he wanted me. We would just look at one another, and be overtaken by something more than lust, and desire. With one small flick of an eyebrow, he could put me somewhere not there, and I could do it to him.
He wanted to please me more, or knew how to express it better than any man I had been with previously. I found it enchanting.

The third time that I said yes 1/23/06

2011-03-12T09:54:00.001-08:00

Not that I would ever tell people how to read my posts, but if you haven't read the one below, it's good. Really trying to wean myself of the daily blogging thing. Not because I don't love it, but because I love it too much. And when I love....Will read blogs tomorrow, and try to keep some sort of blogging schedule.
Just don't want to wake up some morning and realize that I spent my life blogging, because I would be very poor and very very boring
I am not now, and never have been a Jewish whore to the best of my recollection. Just want to clarify that as it was a Google search term used to find Courting. Didn't look it up because I could have used Jewish and whore in the same post. Hate it when people don't use quotes; just a personal quirk.
Did look up "Gary Null gossip" because I know I have never talked about him. Met him at one of the few singles things I have ever attended; brunch with Gary Null. He's boring, arrogant, pompous, and I could go on but why? Had I been interested in talking to anybody I couldn't because Null never shut up.
Every time I pass his picture at GNC or one of those places, I remember going to a museum opening with my parents who were friends with the curator's parents. Talked to a really nice girl who was sick of meeting artists and asked if I wanted to go to the Null brunch with her.
As Zachary was no longer following me everywhere, I was beginning to desire something more than a one night stand. Yes I did them and liked them. Tough I had heard of AIDS and was sure that Patrick had it, people were just learning how it was transmitted. Nobody thought straight non drug users could get it, or nobody wanted to think that.
Patrick wasn't diagnosed until the summer of 1984 when I would be engaged to brilliant lawyer/PHD in AI/musician.
We had met three months before when I began working at my company's headquarters. This time I waited three weeks before I began to date him, and three more weeks before we began to live together. Three weeks after that he asked me to marry him.
It was my fifth serious proposal and I had only been legally married once. How many proposals does a woman get in her life? Why did marriage talk always have to enter into a relationship so quickly? I knew in my heart, while I wouldn't be unfaithful, I would do everything possible to sabatoge it.
He loved talking me to expensive restaurants. I wanted to go to downtown scene restaurants; he wanted Windows on the World. At the time there was only one really great table with views. The maitre de gave it to us every time we were there. We looked very much in love.
This was the sweetest relationship I had ever been in. We went out almost every night. He made his own hours and could sleep until noon; I had to be at work by 8:30. Since we usually came home after two he was amazed by this and would tell everybody. I smiled and said little. He and his friends had all gone to undergrad school at the University of Chicago. His friends bothered me as they assumed that I wasn't their intellectual equal. I had graduated from Boston University which was third rate by their standards.
I was eight year older than him, and wanted to write down answers on index cards to questions I knew his friends were going to ask me; geared I guess to my lower intellect. I wasn't about to be that overtly rude, or to possibly entertain them.
"No, I had never been to Woodstock."
Dirt, mud and no toilets. Though I turned down an offer to dress as a nurse and fly in a helicopter there, where there would be toilets. Why? I didn't want to fly in a helicopter, and I didn't want to have to pretend to be a nurse. What if something happened to somebody and I would have to take care of him? But I wasn't about to explain that.
His friends learned that I just might be brighter than most of them. I could out talk them when in the mood, and give the snidest most clever answers to their late night philosphical discussions. They were drunk and/or stoned; I was cold sober. It was the only way I could go to work in the morning, and function.
I had never been the older woman before. I came to this relationship used and wary. It only showed on the inside.

Incident at Ramrod 12/14/05

2011-03-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

First yes, my friend CJ figured out how to do a sticky. Next "pages" where with one click you will be able to find all my "who am I" posts among other things; too much info some think, others think not enough.
This is an absolutely true story. For years I thought it happened on December 8, the night John Lennon died. I was wrong. The Internet makes it possible to look everything up; however, when I find obviously biased sites Number One in Google searches, or me, I worry a lot, about the state of everything. Though I did love the time I came in second out of 144,000 in a "James Spader, William Shatner" Google search. Actually it was a personal triumph which is very very sad.
There is, or was a Gay bar in the Meatmarket called The Ramrod. It was there when John Lennon died, so it predates Restaurant Florent, or any parts of The Meat Market's gentrification. It's skeevy; I was taken on a tour of gay bars one very weird night, and it wasn't as skeevy as The Anvil which had toilet areas in public. Well okay, enough. The Meat Market of today is an entirely different world than it was in 1980.
On November 19, 1980, Zachary didn't come home until very late. I must have been watching the news when I heard that two men had been killed and twelve injured at The Ramrod. I was convinced that Zachary was the murderer. The real murderer I believe was captured immediately. Zachary was homophobic. That surprised me as he was a singer/songwriter very much in the Steve Earl vein. I was the one with Black friends as he was also prejudiced. Though he adored all my girlfriends and tolerated the boys who tolerated him.
Patrick, my best friend, gay category at the time, was also a bit jealous of Zachary, and didn't like me having lived with a man for a year and a half, exactly. Several months later my friend Cassandra was at a church function with Nadine, my former assistant and some of her cousins. Cassandra teased Nadine about having the same last name as the Ramrod murderer. Nadine ran out of the bathroom hysterically crying. (Her name isn't Nadine, and I'm not giving the last name here.) The murderer was her brother; their father, a rather well known pastor had a stroke and was incapacitate; Nadine's 11 year old son was being constantly teased. Nadine and I had been good friends. We saw each a couple of times between the murders and the incident in the church ladies room. I knew her last name; she had been my assistant supervisor for almost a year. Just didn't connect it.
Which is why she could still be friends with me. After I knew she felt too much shame. That was plain stupid as I thought my own boyfriend was the murderer. Knowing me I probably said something to her; knowing Nadine she laughed.
Nadine and her son changed their names and moved. I have always been known for having beautiful girlfriends and Nadine was one of the most beautiful. She had huge laughing doe eyes that even remained happy looking after the murders.
I have been told by both psychics and psychiatrists that I have a psychic side. A psychiatrist, a buttoned down analyst who I was in semi analysis with years later told me that I had the most highly developed intuitive skills he had ever seen and it could be called psychic. This man was the epitome of stuffy intellectual...I just wanted him to say "no, of course you can't be psychic...." And maybe go into the reasons why. But he went into the reasons I was.
It's scary and I have spent the ensuing years trying to be just intuitive enough.
Have a post on Bring it on! Wednesday that I like a lot. Should have cross posted it, but this is fun. My next post might be on my love for good true crime books.

My rape 12/04/05

2011-03-12T09:48:00.001-08:00

I have never considered myself a rape victim though I was. It was the late 1960's; I was seventeen and had gone into the city to break up with my first boyfriend. His friend, a carpenter, asked if I wanted to get stoned, and I went with him to the store he was renovating on Sheridan Square. I did willingly.
I was seventeen with the face of a thirteen year old, the body of a grown woman, and the maturity level of a ten year old. He was big. Tall and in condition; I was 5'6" 128 pounds, and not exactly powerful. Before I knew what was happening, he ripped off my Indian print dress, unhooked my bra and tore my underpants. Yes it happened that fast. I screamed but he wouldn't stop though I kept on telling him to. I wasn't a virgin but this wasn't sex it was pure violence and I knew that then.
I was a mess afterwards and ran to Macy's to buy some new clothes because mine were torn. I passed regular people and police and felt deep shame. But I knew that the police would look at my Indian print dress, leather sandals, frizzed out hair, and call me a "dirty hippie who deserved what I got."
I felt better after I bought new clothes, and while I didn't equate being raped with sex because it had been so violent was turned off sex for awhile, and only dated boys who were closeted Gay for several months. I was young and resilient but I did carry that shame for many years. No, not the shame of the rape; the shame of not being able to tell a policeman.
Soon after beginning college I met my on again off again college boyfriend. We ran into HIM, in a coffee shop in The East Village on Second Avenue near 6th Street. My boyfriend didn't believe me because I acted too normal. I didn't know how else to act.
When I was 23, I got a job as a salesgirl in a high end store in Boston. I heard tales about the crazy in a good way carpenter. One day he walked into the store. I began screaming and ran downstairs. My best friend then, Jasmin, worked there also and knew about my rape. She told our boss who was "connected," and the carpenter never worked there again or other places.
I got my revenge in a strange way, and made a conscious decision not to let this rule my life. But we can't control our subconscious, and I probably wouldn't have ended up with Zachary who did psychologically abuse me if I had let myself feel as I had that day in the store or had worked it out in therapy
I didn't want to write about this now but I was reading my buddy Ally's blog, in England, and The Heretik's, and knew that I had to say something. It's a very different world yet it hasn't changed at all.
Rape is rape; an act of violence not sex. No woman ever asks for it; no matter how provocatively she's dressed, or if she's drunk or stoned. Sex is the most natural thing in the world but if it's not consentual, it's not sex.
While I acted as if it didn't change me much, it did. The hard earned confidence I had spent my last several years of high school pursuing fell a bit. Luckily I met nice boys in college where I did develop a reputation for turning them gay. Except for he who..., who still is one of the truly nicest people I know in a very warped way.
By beginning college several months later, I was given a second chance. Not every woman is. And I truly saw the rape as being pure violence though I had never heard the feminist theory on rape then. It wasn't sex; not even close.
Shakespeare's Sister has an amazing article where a 17 year old young woman reported a rape by three men; including her boyfriend. She was found guilty of filing a false report in part because she didn't act traumatized enough.
How is a seventeen year old supposed to act? At that point I couldn't, or thought I couldn't tell my parents. I had to go to school; I had Regents to pass before graduating high school. It did begin or intensify a pattern where I would shut feelings off during arguments with certain people, usually male.
Incidentally Ducking for Apples, Ally's blog is one of the best written on the blogosphere. It's one of my comfort blogs where I go when I want to read very English stories about home renovation, Polish lodgers, and a zillion other things
If bloggers who were raped speak out we can show the world that we come in all age groups, and every other variable. Rape is an act of extreme agression. Rape victims should never feel ashamed; rapists should always be ashamed. Rapists attempt to have their power affirmed. By speaking out we take away the power, and show how weak they really are.

Back to NY in 75--job etc 12/07/05

2011-03-12T09:44:00.000-08:00

I am going to be working on my book intensively from now through the new year. Might add posts to Courting that are really blog entries and not book material. Will try to comment as often as I can.
If you're here from Michele's welcome! Thanks for stopping by and this post is a bit long even for me, but it's worth it.
Ever since my parents had discovered that I hadn't actually graduated from college as I hadn't applied, our relationship had been frostier than usual. I had an advisor, took all the classes and did an internship; I had even excelled in school for the first time since elementary school.
At first I had assumed that I wouldn't be accepted as I had done miserably at my first college, and never completed a semester during the year I went to NYU. It was easier to hide from the admissions office and myself, and go to school non-matric. In 1970's Boston people could do things like that.
I had completed all the course work, and Boston in 1975 was a city undergoing major racial problems, and really it wasn't home. Two years earlier, at 22, I had visited my sister, Elka for the weekend. at her shared-for-the-summer, Cambridge triple decker, met the people in the duplex on the other side, moved in with them, began waitressing at a diner Elka worked at, and accidentally moved there.
Cambridge no longer felt exciting to me, and I found the Boston school desegregation to be profoundly depressing.
I needed to be back in New York with my friends from my first college. I needed the New York sarcasm and sensibility, even if my parents lived on Long Island, and officially I was living in their house. Hell I even missed Waldbaums, in the strip mall near the development, where my mother had taught me to pick out fresh fruit years before, as I hadn't lived there since high school.
It hadn't been difficult for my father to find out that I hadn't graduated from school. Though I had been living a lie for two years I wasn't very good at important lies; and my parents had always been able to see through me. Sometimes it felt as if my body was transparent to them; they always say through the part of my brain that wasn't covered in moss muck.
My father, Max Savage, CPA, investor, store owner, high stakes poker player, and professional father had arranged for me to be matriculated, after the fact, and get my diploma the following spring. It helped that the professors in the department had liked me; I had even been accepted to the grad school in Urban Studies and would be given nine of my undergrad credits. Max had arranged the acceptance and begged me to go..
As all my friends had left Cambridge which had become filled with hippies who were at least six years behind the times, Boston was plain unacceptable, and most of my friends were in New York having a great time, I refused Max's offer to pay for both school and living expenses.
When I had been living in Cambridge then Boston, he had paid for school; I paid for everything else. Since I still had the money from my very short marriage which basically consisted of the wedding, worked, and paid little in rent, it had been almost affordable.
Courting Destiny Pia Savage
My best girlfriend from my first college, Shelby, had been a waitress at Max's, and was now an assistant art director at a large publishing house. She quickly found me a job at Wondrous Wearable Art where her boyfriend, David was the sales director.
Wondrous Wearable made airbrushed and sequined tee and sweat shirts of the great divas of the day including Barbara, Liza and Diana. The cotton was good but the fit was loose. I neither took nor owned one as I couldnâ€™t understand why any straight woman would want to wear a gay icon on their chest, but as quickly as we could make them they flew out the door and into New York's better boutiques.
For somebody who had been living a lie for two years I was amazingly honest. The one and only thing I had ever stolen were books in Junior High. My mom had soon discovered that and her disappointment in me had been punishment enough.
Wondrous Wearable wasn't exactly a career move. Minimum wage was two dollars an hour; most of my friends made a dollar or two an hour over minimum wage in assistant management positions, where they were learning careers, at reputable publishing houses, department stores and movie studios. I made $250 a week; off the books which made my father even more angry.
As Assistant to the President, Neil, most of my job consisted of answering the phone and telling people that Neil was in a meeting, out to lunch or a variety of other stories. In reality he was in his office shooting heroin and having sex with a wide variety of classless girls who were my age or younger and already needed extensive dental work.
There was nothing charming about Neil. His long hair was greasy and stringy; his face was pockmarked and if I had met him on the street I would have considered him a bum who could easily try to pick pocket me. At my first college I had known people who died from heroin overdoses. I thought heroin was a stupid loser drug.
I spent most of my day with the art director, Phil, who drank brandy, smoked joints and bad mouthed Neil. The smell of the brandy would make me want to puke but I would smoke with him. Phil and David made sure that the company ran; I made sure that people thought Neil was really running it.
My job wasn't demanding but I was scared to look for a real one. I was afraid that any real interviewer would look at me and see that I was a fraud. How was I supposed to explain why I didn't yet have a college degree?
I couldn't even work a mimeograph machine, answer a switchboard, or type on an electric typewriter without making a mistake a word. I wasn't fat, but I had breasts and hips when my girlfriends were lacking in the breast/hip department, and had long legs that went on forever. I wanted their bodies. They wanted my nose
The one thing that was perfect about me was my nose. Having grown up in a Jewish/some Italian world, this failed to impress me. My face was supposed to be angelic; I wanted character. My eyes were deep set and changed color with my mood
and or clothes. My cheekbones could be Slavic or Irish. I knew that men found me to be appealing but I couldn't understand why.
Shelby was one of my ideal beauties. Shelby had perfect round check bones, huge eyes and a generous mouth. She had a Dr. Rose nose job, the previous spring; though I thought she had been even more beautiful before it.
In our Junior year of high school half the girls in my class had Dr Rose nose jobs. They had gone in with pictures of my nose and ended with slightly too short nose bones with perky tipped nostrils that flared upward. I could always tell a Dr. Rose nose as they looked nothing like a natural nose.
I almost never snorted coke as I didn't want anything ruining the one perfect thing about me. Shelby wasn't really into David; she was a girl who always needed a boyfriend, and had been slightly jealous of me since my on again off again college boyfriend had insisted that we get married shortly after I had arrived home from traveling in Europe with people I met on the plan and a six month stay in Israel, in what should have been my Junior Senior years at school.
There was one problem. We didn't marry each other; we married our idealized person. Wasn't either of our faults. It's easy to be in love with a dream but not easy to be married to it/

The first time I met Rafe 07/15/05

2011-03-12T09:21:00.001-08:00

Rafe came over tonight. Some of you know that he's one of my two best friends; straight, married, owns a Madison Avenue hair salon. Something about me attracts Madison Ave hair stylists as I've been friends with many since I was eighteen. Might have something to do with my very thick almost unnameable hair.
We talked about the first time we met. Lucia was working as a temp hair salon receptionist while she waited for her job as manager of an architectural plaster company and store in Nolita to begin. She called to tell me about an incredible hair stylist who had to cut my hair.
Rafe was adorable, but his hair slid down my back and began touching me. I slapped him. He was shocked as no woman had done that before. He's Colombian, macho male personified. He's also one of the most sensitive caring people that I know; if I had only seen his macho side I would have missed out on one of the best friendships that I have ever had.
Twenty years ago, I taught Rafe that, yes, you can respect women, and yes you can be platonic friends. We almost slid once, but laughed too hard. His wife is my friend; it would have been incest. Yick.
At first my mother would ask many questions as she found it fascinating and unusual. Of course, she understood my friendships with gay males.
Did point out that both she and my father had friends of the opposite sex, and what made that any different? I did stay at Rafe's house, and he visits until very late. We spur each other on, and are always there for each other during good and bad times. Think people need more friendships like ours.
Could be wrong.
Last night I was groping for this sentence: do most people think platonic friendships can work between men and women when both are in couples?
I have just been given some very interesting gossip about my building that explains why nothing in this luxe Upper West Side coop makes sense. Now everything does. My confidential source is extremely reliable. Will not name this source though said source got it straight from Fernando the doorman--no source isn't Rafe or Lucia. This will be my weekend post. Can't wait to put it in!
Oh yes, Lucia accused me of being a platonic man stealer. Did say she met him first, as she called me to tell me about him. Am going to do a series on Lucia, Rafe and Pia sit around and shoot the bull. Actually much more exciting than it sounds. Really.

Riffing on Max's letter to me on my 16th birthday 10/23/05

2011-03-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

My sister reads me two letters that she has found among our father's papers. One was a letter to me on my 16th birthday. By the end, both my sister and I were crying. He loved me so purely.
My sister must tell me that he never wrote a letter to her like that. I respond:
"since he never gave it to me, does it count?"
Both of us know it does. The letter is very beautiful; my dad talks about the joy I have given my parents, and how wonderful I was despite our differences, because of my compassion, caring and generosity.
He talked about what a beautiful wonderful baby I had been.
As I was perfect up to the age of nine, it has always been hard for me to compete with Pia, the very early days in family lore.
My rebellion against my dad had begun in earnest two years earlier and would last nine more years. My father's temper was fierce; he was always right.
It's hard for a daughter to admit that she's the person her father most loved in the world. He loved my mother very very much. He never tried to do anything yucky to me. I don't know why I feel compelled to add the last two sentences, but if I don't...people might add that to the list of my immoral acts.
I was almost forced into rebellion by his raging love; and have never regreted a moment of the rebellious years. Despite myself at times, I was independent and strong. In order not to be swallowed by want to live my life for me and to protect me, I had to maintain my distance. My dad understood.
Even in high school I had a whole other seperate city life. My parents didn't try to keep me in the suburbs. The Village beckoned and greeted me with open arms as it did so many other teenagers. I knew my dad was secretly proud that I fit in so well there, and had stopped caring what the people in our suburb thought of me when I finished Junior High. Actually I cared too much but wouldn't let anybody know that.
We always stayed in touch, and saw each other. When I lived in Cambridge, and took statistics during the summer so that it would be shorter, I would fly to New York almost every weekend so that he could tutor me.
Somehow statistics made sense to me. We would talk about them in the larger context of life. For the first time, my dad, the CPA, investor, large stake poker player, and owner of four successful stores, saw that I had a good business head. Statistics helped our rapprochement.
My father wouldn't have been suprised that I breezed through the statistical part of my full year grad research course, and did even better in post grad statistical research. It's all done on computer and is a matter of knowing what figures to plug in and why. My dad had given much more difficult assignments years before that weren't done on computer.
My sister seems to remember his temper more and more now; I never forgot it so it was easier for me to confront my feelings about it. Uh, therapy on and off my whole life until ten years ago helped also. As does the knowledge that my dad helped make the world a more fun, nicer place.
My father was compassionate, caring and generous. When people asked him for help he almost always complied; and if he didn't, there was a damn good reason.
I realize that I'm talking in abstractions. It's so easy to record the fights; and so hard to record the good times. For several years before his death I asked if I could video him. He always said no. Now I understand that though he was in good health he wanted to stave off the kinehorah (evil eye) by not recording his memories.
I will explore our fights. There were some great ones

Electric Haired Chick--same piece again, but first an intro that is longer than most posts, and very classic ramble around the world with Pia 10/24/05

2011-03-12T09:13:00.001-08:00

After the longest intro in the blogging world is the post that I had written last weekend to keep in all week while I read books, watched TV and did other totally superficial and horrifying home things. But life never turns out as planned so I did none of that, and took this off the first page as soon as possible because I didn't want to see it. However, I do like it. And in writing it, I worked out what was bothering me, and got to thank a few people with shout outs and some more with just names because I'm too tired. But duh, to summarize, what was wrong, a week ago Friday was the fourth anniversary of my mom's death which was just a month after that day--and I got it through and wrote the story that follows late Saturday night and y'all know the rest.
If there is anything wrong with being vain and wanting to retain youth, as in being able to travel, exercise, go out to restaurants, museums, beaches, and walk many miles a day until I am really old, do leave a comment.
Just realized why this upset me so much. I had gone through the fourth anniversary of 9/11 which also serves to remind me each year of the day that is coming 10/14. Felt really good about myself. Had the oral surgery and came home to crash...
Who the hell thinks they have a right to come onto my blog and to ask me what my purpose in life right now is? Then he smugly retorts his purpose is to take care of his son and support his wife, and he doesn't have to look any further.
So because I'm not married nor have kids am I supposed to devote my life to higher nobler purposes? Maybe I have. Or am I still supposed to be searching for a purpose? I explore life in my posts and maybe look for some things bigger than myself in some of my posts. In others I don't. That's my right. It's also my right not to brag about things I do that directly help other people because that's personal. If I sound vague, it's on purpose.
Not every Mitzvah has to be talked about; but if you look in my categories....I left a lucrative career in private industry to become an SSI Claims Rep. Didn't think I was doing enough so I went to grad school--paid for it all by myself too--and became a geriatric social worker. Or is that devoid of purpose and meaning?
Should we just throw old people away? And what was that about me not be able to face the passing of my youth? Hey when you work in ancient non-renovated nursing home give me a holler. Because I faced aging and death every damn day. Didn't include this before because it's all over my blog. Please tell me again how superficial, self serving and devoid of meaning my life is. Maybe my blog is my release; maybe I like to be multi-faceted. Maybe it's you noble right wingers who really live the shallow lives. I sure don't. Picked the exact wrong person at the exact wrong time to insult, and you did insult me. Threatening me with "I have friends," was funny. Because so do I; but I don't go around saying that; they just show up
I feel that this person was insulting all people who don't have a spouse and children. That angers me because it doesn't mean that we're devoid of purpose or of beliefs.
I am a "popular" blogger. I didn't set out to be one. I began my blog for writing practice. My blog just grew on its own. Unlike the very popular radical right blogs--and I'm not saying that I'm in their "popularity league," nor would I want to be, a wide variety of people read me. Maybe this is a higher purpose. Yeah I would want to be as popular as my friend, Mrs. M., but I'm not willing to do all the work she does, and our blogs are very different. That doesn't mean we don't like or respect each other; quite the opposite actually. She would have kicked "G" where it hurt, and just gone on.
No, I'm not warm and fuzzy, and have a cute blog with cute sayings. Though most people find me empathatic when they know me I don't try to be on my blog. One of the things that I like about Mrs. M is that she invented a new blogging genre, warm, fuzzy and edgy
I did let this affect me more than it should have because I was in pain until Saturday, and let G's comment affect me too much as I totally forgot that I had been through much the prior week.
Writing the following story made me happy and was part of my getting over my sadness at my mom's death which as too many of you know was very sudden and very sad. This year the anniversary was the day after Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish year, but also a time for new beginnings. I wasn't in the mood to reflect this past week. I wanted to celebrate despite of the surgery, or perhaps because I braved it.
It's difficult for me to understand how people can think I'm shallow when so much of my blog is devoted to causes--and I'm not talking politics. But aging ,well it's just not cool; neither is wanting to see people in America unite. Because my causes aren't your causes they're just not important to you. Myopia is very sad.
It's weird because I never actually thought of vanity as an issue particular to Democrats; I do remember Pat Nixon, and Nancy Reagan doesn't look bad. Betsy Bloomingdale, I can go on with a list of influential Republican women who think you can never be too rich or too thin, but that might upset "G's world view. And they're had children, and are usually the right religion, so they mean something.
No I don't have issues about not having children. I made that decision a long time ago not because I'm selfish but because I'm not. I won't try to explain that--the reasons are all over my blog. Excuse me, if analyzing decisions and coming to them after much thought seem to be self centered. And anybody can get married, and most people can have children. Said most people not all.
Seems to me that takes little thought; Ally is one of my real heros because I know how much she wants a child, and how much she is willing to sacrifice for one. Her child will be very very lucky.
You see when you read blogs that aren't just political or aren't political at all, you get to know a person, and his or her aspirations. Dan, too tired to shout you out now, will soon. You, Jane, JC have over come problems that are almost beyond my comprehension. Almost. Have to stop all the shout outs now. Okay will continue tomorrow or Wednesday as Marinade Dave, Bone, Fat Lady--can't call you that; it's like calling TB the Bastard, you have all helped so much--and many more people. Have to comprise a list and check it twice. And Cranky who I could never call anything but Cranky or the Crank for short, going to get you to debate Doug and a few other people I mentioned--because they're not all "liberal."
Actually I always thought we liberals were supposed to be frumpy, wear old odd clothes and always carry a PBS bag. Maybe it's only middle aged Democrats who aren't supposed to be vain nor have a past that they don't hide.
I also thought and will continue to think that vanity helps a person age better. This ensures taking care of yourself. Aging is an issue we don't talk about enough nor do we have enough middle aged heros on TV, in movies or even in most best selling books. When people give their age and call me narcissitic for not getting with the program and embracing being older, I have to ask them what they've done to help age being embraced? I am writing my truth; not getting older is so much fun, as it presents problems and challenges that were once unimaginable to me.
I don't write about menopause; I'm not a red-hat society type lady. Also I prefer writing about my past with only glimpses into the present as I don't like writing about people who are currently in my life with a few notable exceptions.
As I'm not married nor have children, I must be looking for immortality through my writing. Truth, every writer looks for immortality through writing. It rarely happens. I understand and accept that. Most people look for immortality through something. I have written as to why to expect it from your children is silly.
We usually live in memories as long as there are people around to talk about us. Might not be your kid who can't stand you, but the kid around the corner who spends 50 years talking about how mean you were one Halloween, and the story goes from his child to her child to somebody who knows your great grandson and tells him a funny anecdote about the mean neighbor his great grandparent couldn't stand. Life's funny that way
I do feel blog shy right now, and no, am not looking for comments backing me, nor am I feeling blog shy because people picked up on my "issues." I am feeling blog shy because I have written in my blog every day for the past year, and am tired of the whole blogging thing. Need some perspective. Will really get around to comments, really!!!!!!!!!!!
Understand this: I will never be ashamed of who I am or who I was. I have banned one person from commenting for being an overt racist. I have been trying to get away from politics in Courting, sometimes I just can't help myself. Let me also say that I don't care about cursing. I't's so over used that it lost all meaning to me. I do believe in not being judgemental or nasty in comments in a personal blog. It serves no purpose but to gratify the commenter's ego. I am very tired; have eaten one yogurt today, and still have much to do so I don't know if I'm making sense.
That all said: This is one of my personal favorite stories, and I hope you like it. If you have read it please pick something from the Courting archives, though knowing me I'll be back on Tuesday . Wow, if I weren't so in need of food with some bite to it I would be feeling great. The funny thing is that I only get angry on the Internet.
In real life I'm the smiling person who tries to make people's lives easier. I have been staying away from politics on purpose. Fall used to be my favorite time of year after summer, favorite in a different way; now it's tinged with memories that I had finally come to terms with. While my blog might be public; comments shouldn't be malicious.
I just can't deal with it right now. I really wasn't expecting a personalized attack on my character. I wrote a damn story; didn't think I had to put a disclaimer on it.
All you people who still believe that I'm superficial, not working for a higher purpose, live only for myself and my own happiness--do leave a comment. Because I'm not in pain any more, and don't know why I expected myself to be productive when I wasn't supposed to be. Bad work ethic. Much as I miss my mom, that horrible pain began dissapating last year, and she now occupies the space in my heart next to my dad.
No matter how much this rambles, I like it, I really like it. Thank you all. And I promise that I won't change a thing about me.
One day it hits you; you are truly middle aged, and rapidly getting older. But you can't be you think, you're a baby boomer. You're vital, you're healthy, you're funny, you have disposal income or income you dispose of anyway.
You don't have to put a kid through college; only save enough for you. Problem is you like to spend money. You do believe that living well is the best revenge, but you are saved from being put into the museum of conspicous spending by helping people when they're having a tough time without being asked.
You realize all the absurdities and rationales in your thinking. Face it you're a middle aged single childless woman who in a Barbara Pym novel would be wearing cardigans, wool skirts, wool stockings or something that they darned themselves. You're a goddamned spinister; though you are divorced so probably technically not.
Darning socks or sewing anything is something that you have never attempted as you failed sewing in Seventh Grade even with your mother's help.
Your mother had hated to sew because her mother made all her clothes. You thought that she should have hated to cook but she loved it, and assigned you and your sister to permanent salad detail. You have to admit that you make the best salads anywhere.
It's just that ten years ago they made fun of baby boomers in a VW Bug commercial. Okay they always make fun of baby boomers; everything is blamed on baby boomers.
When you were 30 everybody was getting married or remarried; you were living with Zachary and wouldn't keep knives in the house for fear that you would use it on him.
You think about this as your friend Nick comes over. He's dressed in a fitted exaggerated pin strip suit and looks very good, with his short hair slicked back. A man's hair has always been very important to you. You freely admit to being shallow when it comes to men which is why you really don't trust yourself with one.
He manages a good restaurant in the neighborhood and is young enough to be your son. Actually he manages the restaurant for his Uncle Albert who was your friend years before you met Nick.
Albert's gene pool is half Irish half Italian; he would have been good breeding material for the baby you never had. It would probably be better if he were half Greek half Italian as you're half Irish by birth and think it's great to mix the gene pool up. You just heard today from your half Turkish, Half East Indian friend, Jasmin. She is no longer working in Katmandu; but in New Dehli, as Director of another UN agency. She and Per had the most handsome, intelligent sons.
You and Jasmin often talked about how mutts made the most intelligent people as you partied the night away. She was the biggest pary animal you ever knew and that's saying something. The Cambridge years were pure fun. When you think of them now, there were so many more hours in the day. You could work full time, go to school full time, actually study and go out at least five nights a week.
Once at Zeldas, a disco in Boston, some glitter from a hot sock became embedded in a blister that you got from your sandal becoming too tight as you danced the night away. Hot socks were great, but unlike boots you couldn't keep your money, cigarettes and keys in them. Though some hotsocks were very thick and seemingly made to be a pocket book.
You ended up in the emergency room at Mass General several days later as you only had a gyn. For some reason the other women in the room all seemed to be prostitutes so when you explained that glitter from your hot sock had ended up in your toe and it was infected, you didn't sound crazy. You had the same last name as a prominent surgeon at Mass General and for some reason all the nurses assumed that you were his daughter. You let them assume this as the prostitutes were talking your head off. Most of them knew you by sight as they and the transvestites seemed to be the only women who could afford the gowns in the store you worked on.
The store was on Boylston near Saks and on the other side The Public Gardens. It was a very easy commute from Harvard Square. You and Jasmin would laugh at the world known distinguished Harvard Professors, who were friends of her father, and would meet at the entrance to the Red Line to wait until ten AM when the subway fare went down to a dime. Was it only for senior citizens? You think not but can't remember.
Yes during your glitter rock days you had a glitter hot sock emergency. You're damn proud of it. And you won't be eligible for senior citizen discounts for a long while, and damned if you're going to look like you're ready. After you finish your very extensive dental work, you'll have your lip plumped. You don't really need botox; even doctors tell you that. You're perfect home micro dembrasion material, and you've been doing that forever. It just seemed right.
You haven't seen your natural hair color in three decades; it's something that you can't believe you used to do for fun. Every shade of red known in the universe, and many that had never seen nature until they met your hair which had always been a force of nature. Now it's brown with almost beige hilights. Suits you.
In your first college, almost everybody but you went to the same psychologist. The first time he saw you, he dubbed you "space chick with the electric hair." Even at nineteen you knew there was something sleazy and not ethical about a psycholgist who discussed you with his patients, telling one what another had said. It all came back to you through the student body president and coffee house founder, who had a bad thing for you, and originated the conversation.
When you told your off again on again boyfriend or he who played a bazillion roles in your life about this several years ago he strongly disagreed with the "space chick" part. Funny, you had always found it funny because you know you can appear spacy. You both agreed "electric hair" was too perfect.
No you're not going to go into older middle age gracefully. You're going to be damn vain; it's going to all be about you. You'll make your mother's ghost proud.
You're a baby boomer which means that you both played by the rules and rewrote them. You can take care of yourself; you only need men for fun. And with that you look at Nick, smile, and ask what he wants to drink.
Put this in because I felt like writing it and then of course need an audience. Please don't hate me if I don't read blogs for a few days; please! Was a bit tipsy when I wrote it

The Gambler's Woman 09/06/05

2011-03-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

When she first appeared on the recording I gasped. She was the woman I had imagined when I read Dorothy Parker's Big Blonde. When Virginia Madsen played the girlfriend then wife in Raging Bull, my mind instantly made some minor adjustments to fit the picture embedded in it.
All my life when I had seen blonde, buxomy, big framed, big teethed with even bigger smile mobster's molls, my mind would make similiar minor adjustments. Sometimes I was even aware that I was doing this, and would wonder why for a half second or so.
My great-uncle Izzy died when I was five. Apparently I was fond of him, and would run to be picked up and deposited in his lap. I have absolutely no memory of Uncle Izzy. That is strange. He's a blank canvas in my childhood diaroma which was filled with vivid brightly colored images.
My mother's mother was a Communist, feminist, designer, amazing cook, candy store owner, the marrying type, and altogether fabulous. Her three daughters all embodied her various aspects. On the surface, my mother was the most conventional; she was a cute bright suburban housewife who followed her strong husband in everything, but inside she was almost as radical as her bohemian, intellectual middle sister; their youngest sister is a Jewish, Buddhist, Beatnik-hippie, new age, artist, craftsperson, conceptual artist--if it's been in vogue over the past 50 years, my Aunt Elaine's either been a member or participant in it, or has five friends who had been.
All three sisters married strong men who thought that staying home with kids was a pleasure and privelege. (We were all great kids, ;-) My mom's middle sister, Belle's husband Harry stayed home, painted, cooked and took care of the kids while she worked. Even my dad, a CPA, worked from home one or usually two days a week while my mom would go out.
My mother's aunt managed The Marlin Hotel on West Eighth Street. When I was in high school my father took me to meet her; the meeting ended quickly as she invited me to move in. Omigod Bob Dylan had lived there; it was so tempting. As much as I delighted in finding ways to flaunt my parents's few rules, running away from home wasn't an option.
One of my mother's cousins was a gay accountant who had to flee the country. I assumed that he fled because of sodomy charges, but, my mother laughed when I said that. He had embezeled money from his employer to pay a gambling debt. I always knew that some men were gay and assumed everybody else did and accepted it. I would have been surprised if nobody was gay, in my mother's family
Gambling run in both my parents families though it seems to have bypassed almost everybody in my generation and the subsequent one. We're perfect; no we have other bad habits and problems.
Uncle Izzy was a gambler who would go away; as in gone back upstate but not to the horses. The horses seemed to be integral to my paternal grandfather's family. I never remember hearing "going to the track." It was always "going to the horses." For the four or so months a year my grandmother lived in a bungalow colony in Monticello, it was off the road and about half mile up from the horses. My paternal grandmother's weakness was penny poker. She wouldn't let me play, the summer, my punishment for being caught with pot in the house, was a long visit with her. I didn't even think about defying my parents and going to stay with my aunt in The Marlin. My dad hated the horses; he was high stake poker and the stock market; he only liked things that he felt he could absolutely control.
Some of my father's family had lived in Monticello and surrounding smaller towns forever. Though my family only went up once or twice a year for weekends, everybody knew me. If it weren't for my grandmother, I would have felt very comfortable there. But she was determined to save me from a life of sin.
I don't really remember the three summers my family stayed in a bungalow colony. I turned four the last summer. I only remember being surrounded by laughing people most older than me and feeling very loved. I have specific memories but they mainly involve laughing at my little sister for trying to put blueberries back on the bush.
We moved to a garden apartment complex in Northern Queens that was filled with baby boomers, and we never spent the summer in the mountains again.
Uncle Izzie died when I was five. My relatives think he was married to Sophie, the blonde I have always put into books, movies and TV shows as the perfect mobster's moll; my sister and I had been told that they lived together. Maybe my father thought it was more romantic that way. Though my sister refuses to believe this, he had been known to change details for the sake of a good story.
Gambling was part of the fabric of the community when my dad was growing up in East Harlem and the mountains in the summer. Nobody thought it was a sin. During prohibition my dad would ocassionally go to Montauk with the bootlegger to pick up cases off the ship. I was enamored with that; and a bit jealous as a child that I wouldn't have that opportunity. Supposedly the floor I lived in on East 63rd Street was a fancy speak easy from the time the building was first built until the end of prohibition. Don't know if that story is true or not but I like to think it is.
Last night I began to tell my sister and family, my John Gotti story. We had stopped by an amazing looking restaurant with a psychic in the window, a beautiful deco prohibition motif, an incredible area outside in back where you don't have to look at the traffic on the street. Yes I mentioned this restaurant yesterday. One of my newly discovered cousins is the chef/part owner; and he's adorable.
I don't know how the speakeasy theme was picked but I love it; it's perfect for a member of my family. We had all been brought up to have a bit of an outlaw personality in us. I think John Gotti was horrible and would never want to romanticize him. But I was in love with the images of the mob from stories my father told or books. My sister also has a romanticized notion of that era; most people I know do. It was more glamorous, more dangerous, mostly poorer yet somehow better. People enjoyed each other then. They talked, went out and weren't home glued to one monitor or another.
I never really got into the John Gotti story, because fave niece who will be eleven in a few weeks asked if he dressed poorly.
"No," I said, "actually he was called 'the dapper don,' because he dressed so well." I went on to describe his suits, and she looked confused. I finally understood.
"Most gangsters don't look like Tony Soprano."
"Oh," she said, 'I thought they did."
My niece is a milenium child. Thanks to The Sopranos which she hasn't watched yet but has heard the sountrack and read articles, my niece and her generation won't refrence Elliot Ness, The Godfather, Goodfellas. The stories won't be from our fathers and grandfathers who had actually been kids then but from us who knew them through the gauze that somehow filters our memories so that we remember the most mundane or the most spectacular events never the ordinary.
I don't ever remember meeting Sophie, but I have known her all my life. She is my idealized mobster's moll.
I needed to write something not hurricane related at all. This is very raw, and in classic pia style, all over the world, or Manhattan and the Catskills. I had a wonderful day today and hope to have another day outside tomorrow, because this weather is a gift. It's a cliche to say we have all learned so much. I really do appreciate the people in my life much more now. I hope that lasts.

A prequel and a sequel to Zachary--Ft Greene Park 08/08/05

2011-03-12T09:01:00.000-08:00

We never had to punish you, you always punished yourself my mother at least 10,000 times
The only person or thing holding you back is you my mother even more often
A year or so before I met Zachary in May 1979, my company moved to downtown Brooklyn. Those were bad times for New York; the subway schedule was erratic. It often took me an hour to get to work where before it had taken 25 minutes. Since I was basically paid to socialize I couldn't complain. The job would become more serious later but then we were on a holding pattern. I was often picked to work directly with the client, but the Friday I'm talking about I just had a few documents to code.
During lunch my supervisor and close friend Elena went to Fort Green Park with another group member, Dwayne. He had a joint and offered us some. I knew that many of my coworkers got stoned at breaks and lunch, but I had never joined the morning devotional services outside of St. Paul's Church when we had worked on Broadway. I wasn't morally repelled; I just wasn't interested. That afternoon I had a few tokes.
When we went back to work I was still stoned. It didn't affect my productivity; I just didn't enjoy it, and never did it again during working hours. Long after the statute of limitations was over I was to pay and pay for my one afternoon of decadent behavior. Elena and Dwayne forgot about it, and both went on to become lawyers. I'm cursed with a memory that forgets nothing I did wrong and am my own judge, jury and executioner.
Three weeks before lie detector tests were made illegal for pre-employment hiring, in December 1987 I passed a drug test and failed a lie detector test. The job was a glamorous one at a now defunct brokerage house, but I had my first interview on October 17, 1987, Black Monday, the day the stock market went down and wasn't to go up again for four years. My would be boss went through hoops to have the position opened for me. The HR person would call me almost daily and beg me not to go on other interviews. She would beg me not to tell my head hunter certain things. It felt messy and wrong. I wanted the job less and less as time progressed.
The morning of the drug test/lie detector test I woke up to the news that the brokerage house had merged with another. Felt weird. I went downtown, peed in the cup, and then went to the lie detector office. I was a very guilt ridden person who woul apologize to another person when the person bumped into me. That usually led to the person cursing me out.
Zachary had tried to cure me of feeling guilty. As I felt guilty about everything to do with our relationship that only made it worse. I'm not going to try to explain or rationalize my extreme feelings of guilt; it just was and sometimes still is.
The lie detector test office was old and on Wall Street. The tester looked like an ex-FBI agent; he didn't try to put me at ease. I had been told to answer the pre-lie detector test questions honestly. He began with questions about pot. Yes I had smoked it; no, I had never smoked at the workplace, but I explained about the day I smoked at the park. Stupid, yes very stupid.
He then began asking questions about other drugs. I couldn't stop looking at the antiquated lie detector equipment on the desk in the middle of the room. Had I ever done heroin? He pointed to his arm. I understood that meant had I ever shot up. Memories began flooding through my brain.
When I was in high school my boyfriend was a 28 year old hippie truck driver. One day he was going to introduce me to the wonders of heroin. I stood in his kitchen with my arm tied in a rag; I looked at the needle. I didn't want to do this and untied my arm and ran out of the apartment. He followed me out.
"I can't do that."
"Why not. It will make you forget everything."
That was just it; I didn't want to forget everything. I wanted to feel alive even if it meant feeling pain. But I didn't know how to explain it to him as I went back up. I felt as if I came from the land of spoiled princesses who didn't know how to appreciate the total hippie experience. But until I had met my boyfriend I hadn't been aware that shooting up was part of that experience.
Five years later after a megasecond marriage to my off and on college boyfriend I moved in with some girls I had known in school. I was going to my second college, working full time, and doing volunteer work so I was hardly ever home. It took me months to realize that they had turned into junkies; we had known junkies at college, some even hung at our house, I guess I was in denial until one day my friend Shelby who lived down the block and I entered my house unexpectly. They were all in the living room nodding out; a Cat Stevens album was going round and round on the turntable. Though the lease was in my name I moved out that day.
I had spent a lot of time avoiding heroin, and here I was taking a lie detector test, and the tester kept on going back and back to it. I don't know how long the pretesting interviewing lasted, probably just ten minutes or less though it felt like hours.
When he actually put the cuff on my elbow I was more scared than I ever had been in my life. Though I knew that if I just answered the questions honestly....
Then he asked "if you had ever done any drugs at the workplace?" No I hadn't; though I had seen enough people get high at various jobs, but I felt so confused and guilty, of course that I said I had done drugs at the workplace. I blew the interview and lost the job. If only they had waited three more weeks, the lie detector test would have been illegal. Many people who had really done drugs at the work place would have breezed through the test. I was innocent but convicted myself.
Even my parents found it funny. The company that had sent me on the interview offered me an assistant director job. I had been offered three other jobs and the president of the company thought that somebody who failed a lie detecter test must be somebody with substance. Never really did understand that, but took the job.
Most of the stories contained in this one will be explored in greater depth.

A night at the 140 Club 08/05/05

2011-03-12T08:58:00.001-08:00

Before Lucia and I were friends we hung with the same crowd of about 60 to 120 people who did most things together. One Friday night we were at The 140 Club, a dingy gross cheap smelly bar across the street from our office.
I should explain that we worked for a company that employed 240 people then; we were all basically the same age; single and this was 1978. The company then laid off half the staff; then hired about a thousand more people.
Neil was leaving to become a mailman. Most people left our job to go to grad school, become computer consultants, a Fortune 100 company or for adventure. Neil wasn't the brightest bulb in the place; he was so dim that he barely registered on my screen. He was in his mid 20's as were most of us. For some reason Marla, a 60something still beautiful supervisor was in love with him and they had been going out or doing whatever people did in 1978. I was one of the few people Marla approved of completely.
She liked my clothes. While they were funky they were good. Laura Ashley had opened around the corner from my apartment. At first her clothes didn't all have small flowers on them but were deep shades of red, blue, greens and other vivid yet subtle colors. The tee shirts were amazing; they were an incredible very thin textured cotton with thin satin piping around the neckline and sleeves. The three tiered skirts were made of a different cotton than the tees, and today would be called twirly skirts. Madonna would have loved them a few years later.
I had heart shaped sunglasses in red and purple, and a complete other wardrobe of all black with metal jewelry. My mom had given me a heavy necklace that looked like it was made of giant paper clips, and I had a watch made of safety pins. I was the most expensively dressed punk around.
I had won $1700 in an accident settlement and spent it all on clothes; it was the most amount of money I ever had at one time, then.
Joelle was at The 140 Club. Her father was president of one of the largest corporations in the USA; as she was always reminding us. I had been to Joelle's apartment. Over her bed she kept a pair of handcuffs, a whip and yes a chain. They weren't for show. On another wall she hung a white garter belt that looked too used and dirty. I never really understood why she considered that art, but my hippie Buddhist aunt made soft sculptures from girdles, so I believed that anything could be considered art.
Joelle was another one of my projects. It was an era when everybody had one night stands and I certainly did. But Joelle never dated anybody and had no real friends. She went from one man to another and I knew because they would laughingly tell me, not in detail because I was too nice, but I sort of got the gist that Joelle, willingly and often, did threesomes and anal sex. In the long ago '70s, if you did those things you did it with people who would be discreet. Joelle didn't realize that people were laughing both behind her back and in her face. Maybe she did; and I just didn't realize it.
My friend Elana and I accepted her dinner invitation. We were going to talk to her, and make her see that she could have friends without being everybody's screw. Only then we saw the handcuffs, whips, chains, garters, a dildo next to her bed and other sex toys. I had to explain to Elana what a dildo was and I only knew because when I had lived in Israel, a group of my friends stayed in a dingy hotel in Tel Aviv and we found one under a bed. We spent the evening in silence trying to pretend to eat the rancid food that might have been exposed to we had no idea what, but...I might have had a punk warddrobe and hung out at CBGB's and other punk clubs, but my punk world consisted of basically nice kids. Joelle was a nymph. Knew a few who all came from big bucks but none had Joelle's sleaziness.
I don't remember who I had come to the 140 Club with; I was drinking too many straight vodka shots and smoking too many cigarettes when Lowell, the timekeeper called me over. Lowell was ancient, an ex-army career sargent who seemed to spend his entire life screaming about people being a minute or two late to work (at a time when the subways were very undependable) or falling off bar stools. We didn't like each other and neither of us pretended to. While I was walking from the bar stool I wasn't falling off, I saw him motion to Lucia to come over. I was tipsy enough for nothing to surprise me. Or so I thought.
Lowell put his arms around Lucia and me, and in a very slurred said:
"You girls are crazy; but you're classy. You'd neva do thiss..."(I'm bad at drunk dialogue.)
He pointed to under a table.
I think Lucia and I stood there with our mouths open. We had never seen two people doing what Neil and Joelle were doing under the table. Their tops were unbottoned; their bottom clothes were at their knees, and they were humping.
I didn't know what to do. Lowell wouldn't let go of Lucia and I as he continued telling us what wonderful girls we were. Somehow I knew come Monday morning, both Lucia and I would be late and he would scream at us again.
I got away from Lowell, said good night to a few dozen people, got my coat and wondered into the cold dark night to find a cab on Broadway. Neil walked out after me and offered me a ride home.
"Uh, no, I'll find a cab thanks."
He followed me and tried insisting but a cab stopped and I jumped into it. I thought as little as I could about that night. But three years later I worked at a new company that Marla was part owner of. I couldn't understand why she wouldn't talk to me for years as I remembered how much she had once liked me. She had people beg me to work there, and somebody snuck me a copy of a review of my manager that said the only thing saving my manager from being fired was me.
One day my boyfriend (the one who took me to the spot where his father killed himself) asked me if it were true that I had ever slept with one of Marla's boyfriends.
"What?" My face crunched up in disbelief. He began to tell me a story and I realized that it was of that night. Apparently Neil had said that he wanted to sleep with me and ran after me as I left. Marla had never seen him again.
I was very insulted. I would never ever sleep with such an ugly stupid twerp and told that to my boyfriend. Marla began speaking to me again but after so many years we could never say more than hello and good bye.
I still feel weird knowing that there are people in the world who think that I might have thought of sleeping with somebody who was not only ugly and stupid but had just finished humping somebody in a bar with at least 20 people watching and 200 more people standing around. Yick.

Love, lust or something like that 08/06/05

2011-03-12T08:57:00.001-08:00

When Zachary would look at me or just touch my shoulder my body would forget that it was part of a larger world. He wanted to protect me and I wanted to be protected. Most of my life people had considered me too independent; now I wasn't.
He would take his hands and push his fingers together to show how we were two people, seperate but better together. My body believed him; I had never been so willing or compliant before. Though I disliked public displays of affection, I would let him kiss me on street corners, in stores, on the entrance to our apartment. We were forever entangled together as one.
Then he would call me "pum'kin." I would shudder; the mood spoiled. Terms of endearment were just so many words to me. I tried to explain how meaningless I found the verbiage, but he would never listen. Or maybe not understand.
I had never been easy to read. I wanted to be. Most women I knew wanted to be as loved as much as he loved me. People thought that we were the perfect couple.
I couldn't explain nor did I try to tell the feelings that had flooded over me the first morning when I tried to leave to go to work:
"Stop," he said not once but at least five times as he barricaded himself at the door, "you're a prisoner of love."
Was I the first woman to feel repelled? Was it normal to feel that way? As hard as I would try I couldn't bury the feelings. But when he touched me my body responded as it never had before. I felt somewhat distant from myself; and somewhat more in tune than ever. Was it normal to be schiziod? I felt as if I had never been in love or lust before. It was amazing; it was a gift. And I wanted to run; but I needed to stay even more.
Lowell, the timekeeper, glared at me as I came to work a half hour late. My manager couldn't stop smiling:
"You're in love, finally."
"Lust, I think it's called."
That night Zachery and I spoke on the phone for four hours, and the next day somehow seamlessly we moved in together.

Hey Good Lookin' 08/7/05

2011-03-12T08:56:00.000-08:00

Hey good lookin', what you got cookin,' how about cookin' somethin' up for me
While I'm walking on the Boardwalk, I hear somebody singing that and it still makes smile so many years later. Zachary would sing it to me and it would send chills up my spine. Boys and men had been looking at me forever, but nobody had ever seemed to pierce my soul before. It humbled me, and excited me, and made me forget that other people existed.
He would always sing it during one of his very infrequent public appearances; usually a pity performance somebody arranged for me. For some reason I knew many club owners, managers, bartenders and/or bouncers. Thought that every sorta pretty girl did. While I took my status for granted, I never understood it, and spent endless megayears analyzing my appeal. That couldn't have been a very attractive trait. I analyzed everything to death and beyond, and even then knew I was wasting my time.
When I was in a bad mood or had a cold, Zachary thought that I could be ugly in the way only beautiful women could be. That wasn't very helpful.
Most people I knew turned to EST or Life Spring or some other new age miracle method in a quest to understand their inner selves. I turned to my inner self, pot and sex, especially once I met Zachary. In sex we were equal or more; in sex Zachary didn't endlessly repeat sentences, in sex I didn't lecture and/or analyze.
hey good looking All it took was that one phrase, and I was his.

Zachary drove a cab 08/16/05

2011-03-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

Zach was a cab driver when we first met. He told me this almost defiantly as if he expected me to recoil in horror.
My uncle and his brother were cab drivers. I loved going to The Paradise cafeteria on Park Avenue South which was a cab driver and punk hangout. They gave you a ticket when you first entered and each item you selected was punched on the card. I liked cab drivers they were part of my world and my history and I took one almost every night from some place or another.
In the New York of the late 1970's, college graduates couldn't get jobs commensurate with their abilities and skills. I was a supervisor at Summit then but no coders were working there out of a love for coding large scale litigation documents.
Almost everybody was really something else: an actor, a writer, artist, or waiting for a professional job to come through. I had no ambitions past doing well in my job. It was stupid because I was bright and should have had a master plan, but I couldn't see past the day. If I had been capable of long range planning my life would have been completely different. But none of the very expensive psychiatrists I saw were able to diagnosis or totally understand my problems aside from acute anxiety that manifested as hyperness, an inability to organize my surroundings or my person, and a myriad of other problems that should have stopped me but spurred me on.
The flip side of my problems was an ability to see other peoples strengths and weaknesses and to organize them so that they worked both willingly and beyond expectations. The irony didn't escape me. I was always waiting for another me to come and tell me what I was great at.
While Zachary believed that his life was over because the two records he made before he was 25 hadn't been big sellers; I thought that my life was just beginning. Only I wasn't sure what was beginning aside from Zachary and me.
He told me that when he drove, he didn't stop for all passengers. I found that unbelievable; his songs were all about oppression. How could he write one thing and be an oppresor himself? Yes I knew that there were unbelievably bad neighborhoods, but didn't all people deserve to ride in cabs? When I would see Black people, especially old ones, or women of all ages and anybody with kids, I would insist that they stand on the street, while I got the cab for them. Cab drivers raced to pick me up.
I made $16,640 a year plus overtime. Since my rent was only $325 a month and my father insisted on putting money in my bank account each month I lived very well. It was difficult for me to accept my dad's help. It felt like he was trying to buy me though the only decision he directly influenced was my acceptance of the apartment on 63rd Street off Fifth.
My father didn't believe in introducing me to potential employers, backers or rock stars. He had this strange belief that as long as my sister and I were working we were entitled to be parentally subsidized. It made me uncomfortable. I wasn't so uncomfortable that I refused to spend the money or saved most of it.
Though I knew he loved me much and was proud of me because he talked about me a lot, and did introduce me to clients, including some incredibly famous ones, he never helped me get a job. That he thought was my responsibility. I thought he must have been ashamed of me on some levels. After the fact, I learned he had refused a production job a friend had offerered on a long playing Broadway rock musical. That angered me. But did I seek jobs like that out myself? No of course not. My father was forever dropping hints about reading manuscripts for films in slush piles at film studio's. I felt too old to do it.
Though I yelled at Zachary for feeling life was almost over; I couldn't conceive of starting over again at such a low rung. No way could I picture it. That's probably horrible as I have an ear or brain or sense for what's going to be trendy. My sister still tells me that I should get a job with Faith Popcorn. And I always knew if a book could make a good film and picture a film manuscript as a finished product.
But I resented my father from coming between me and so many opportunties. It wasn't as if I were working for a Fortune 100 company. My company's client was very powerful. My father urged me to apply to work for them. But I was the fraud from outer space so I didn't think that they would hire me; even after two of their top employees told me, seperately, that my application would be a formality. I had a hard enough time believing that I had actually graduated college, let alone a good university.
I had accepted the apartment on East 63rd Street because I wanted a good relationship with my father. And we had a great one. But I resented being the daughter of a man who cared too much and was still trying to determine what was good for me. I can't say how much I resented him not telling me about the job for the musical; I would have given anything for him to introduce me to somebody he knew and say:
'This is my daughter Pia. She's exceptionally bright, quick to learn, and has a great head for business."
I know he knew all that for he was forever telling me about his business problems. I could size up a situation quickly and had much common sense. He loved my answers. Then why did my dad who knew so many famous people not let me interview with them? Did he think I would screw it up? I would at times become angry at moving to a neighborhood that really belonged to the world not the residents. Most people had at least one other home. I needed a vibrant neighborhood; and I never considered the business district to be one, just crowded beyond comfort.
An apartment in the Upper West Side or The Village would have been so much more me. I couldn't conceive of living in a loft in Soho; they all needed much work, and I'm about as handy as my father who spent 40 years waiting for the super to magically appear in his suburban manse. Tribeca was just beginning its ascent and while I loved the area more than Soho, there was the raw space problem, or worse, having to convert it from a factory space. While I had spent all of high school waiting to graduate so that I could move to the West Village I have never desired living there in my adult life. It was a father approved part of town.
He had gone to NYU and took us to The Village often when we were kids. I had been encouraged to go to the city and hang in The Village unlike most of the girls in my class who went to The Miracle Mile, in Manhasset, on Satudays. Since there was no bus and we were too young to drive, they had to be driven. At thirteen I found that childlike and boring.
If I hadn't been a rebel rock chick would I have been at the club that beautiful Sunday afternoon?
I wasn't particularly idealistic; politics had stopped feeling meaningful to me, but I worked in a neighborhood that wasn't particularly great. I wondered if growing up in New Orleans had made Zachary prejudiced in a subconcious level. We didn't have our first fight over his refusal to pick certain people up. I was too in love with the way he made me feel.
Long before I met him I would get cabs for Black people and others who had trouble getting one. Cabs would almost get into accidents with each other in their haste to pick me up. I was the universal uptown/downtown girl. Though I was shorter and more curvy than most models, I was forever being mistaken for a model or soap star. While I didn't really notice everybody else seemed to. Some told me about it then; others much later. I never really understood it, though I had to believe it.
Zachary would call me between fifteen and twenty times a day to tell me about his latest plan to get rich; or to complain about how life was out to get him. He had talked Lucinda into sending a demo tape to a music publisher/producer and now she was almost hot, and he was cold as the ice in my defrost it with buckets of boiling water, refrigrator.
My company was hiring coders; I got him a job. I thought that it might help center him; he would have interesting people to talk to. And he wouldn't have to drive a cab anymore.

Grassroots 08/18/05

2011-03-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

This took place circa late 1970's early 1980's. It is about the worst thing that I have ever put in. It's what happens when your typing fingers go faster than your mind. My mind needs a blogging break. Zachary is very difficult for me to write about because for so many years I cast him in the role of the horrible person and me as not really good but anxious, (an immediate family trait), not naive or innocent but something approaching that; insecure--yes, and for some reason that boggles my mind I did have many friends. Perhaps in a pre Internet; pre large screen TV era, when everything didn't cost you your inheritance it was easier to have many friends. I didn't have aircondtioning; neither did Zachary.
Zachary and I had a favorite bar. The Grassroots's on Saint Marks Place, which was an exact replica up to the tin ceiling of The Maple Leaf in New Orleans. Owned by the same people also. I know this to be a fact as Zachary was constantly talking about it.
The bartender had long stringy hair tied back in a ponytail; he always wore unbuttoned flannel shirts over tees. The juke box was one of the best in the city; it played music from all eras, and it was always hard to know when to put the money in, so that the songs I wanted to hear would be played before we left.
I had been there many times before I met Zachary. My girlfriends and I were plotting the revolution at Summitt Inc, until we found out that management wasn't allowed to be part of a worker's union. Okay we were clueless, but our hearts were in the right place. We had romantizied notions of unions and strikes. I wanted to be Emma Goldman but with my looks, and without condoning violence.
Zachary and I would meet our friends there; really my friends. He had two in New York; no that's not fair, maybe three. I say this and it sounds so cavilier but the reality was that most people we knew had delayed marriage and babies. I had my first college friends; my third college friends; my friends from the job before Summit, the friends from Summit; the friends I met through people who worked at Summit; I even had high school friends.
For some reason I hadn't made any in my second college. That might have been because I went to school in the city, worked full time, did volunteer work, and lived in a house on Long Island with girls I had known at my first school
All my friends lived in the city; some in tenements; others in large groups in luxe doormen buildings; others in Queens; some in the Bronx or Brooklyn.
In the back of my head it bothered me that Zachary had such few friends in New York; it seemed to me to be the easiest place in the world to meet people. I didn't factor in the hometown edge. I didn't factor in the lack of need to have so many friends, or the want to be with just one person. Honestly I didn't understand the last two.
Zachary designed a bumper sticker that said something witty about the oil embargo. I don't remember exactly what it said; but it might still be up on the wall near the bar at The Grassroots. I haven't been there in many years.
Be careful what you wish for had been my mantra since beginning college. Now I first understand why it was my eternal slogan.

I finally tell the joke Zachary told me the day we met 08/20/05

2011-03-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

My world in the 1970's, up to the mid 1980's was different than it is now. Today I live a quiet life; one that has far fewer people in it. I haven't begun to write about many of the people. Lucia and I had many mutual friends before we became friends. Patrick and Bethany were two that you will read about soon.
It was a world with boundaries or limitations simply because we didn't know what was going to happen next. I'm not a person who regrets my past. I wish that I had been more confident and simply enjoyed my life. But I wasn't.
I keep on coming back to the day that I met Zachary. All afternoon the soon to be owner of the club would come up and tell me that so and so wanted to meet me. I would ignore him and go back to my Perrier and book. So and so's consisted of record company executives, producers, working singer/songwriters, all there to hear Lucinda. I was just an image, nothing more, and too scared to let people know that the person behind the image was very mortal. It took me many more years to understand that being mortal was good. Nobody wants an image that could come crashing down with the first thunder.
He who knew the real me; the quirks and the insecurities. He cared anyway. We had known each other forever. I tell him now that I was his first great PR project; the freshman girl who should have been one of the girls who sat in the dorm every night. My hair was very frizzy then and untameable. But I somehow knew how to use it to my advantage.
Even I realize that I wasn't somebody's PR project. But it felt much less scary to think of myself as one. I knew since I was in college that an older guy was working in the college bookstore and saw me there during August Freshman Orientation. I hadn't seen to many hippie boys in our freshman class yet and remember thinking that though he was a hippie he wasn't a possibility. Not good looking enough. I was incredibly shallow. Oh I enjoyed the myths that spun about me, but I was a fraud. Most of the other girls who hung out with the same boys seemed so self-assured and pulled together. What was I doing in their leagues or ahead of them?
The day I met Zachary I had come to the club without my usual quota of friends to protect me. Though they thought they were getting into a club with good music for free, and the drinks were comped. And, he who, they were triples; it was the only place where one screwdriver would knock me on my ass.
I was good at getting into clubs; I had even worked with Marc, the doorman at Studio 54. My friends loving going out with me. I loved making myself up and getting dressed. Hated most discos, except for Area at times, and a few others at different times.
Which is why I was drinking a Perrier at about six PM, Sunday May 20, 1979.
No I didn't even have the excuse of being tipsy when Zachary came over. This was the joke.
"You want to see the Polish disco?"
"Maybe."
He put his left foot out.
"Dis go here."
Repeated it with his right foot.
"Dis go dere."
Wasn't in the slightest high or tipsy and I almost fell off my seat, I laughed so much. It had to be instant lust. It was the absolute worst joke anybody told me until last year.
I'm sorry but that doesn't happen often. Knew that then, and went with it. He who had the doorman/bouncer bar us from leaving as he went to Lucinda to learn Zachary's life story.
She gave Zachary an impeccable reference; Zachary borrowed ten dollars from he who and we went to Kenny's Castaways on Bleeker which had a half decent punk/folk act, and we sat upstairs and made out for two hours.
Just had to write this. Will really be the last post until Monday or Wednesday; I will be making my grand return to Bring it on! on the 23rd, and have no idea what I will write on. Should be interesting.

And his name is 07/31/05

2011-03-12T08:48:00.000-08:00

Thanks for all your suggestions. I'm not using my favorite name which is biblical and not often used because I would like to save it for a future hero of my dreams, imagination and lustful thoughts.
It has to be a name that I like much, and I like strange or unusual names, or names that are common now but weren't then. So I chose Zachary. Everyone but me will call him Zach because I have a weird dislike for nicknames. I don't know why; it's not something I have spent much time analyzing but obviously am now. So I will stop.
Zachary wasn't the last man I lived with, loved or was engaged to. While I found it easy to love again, I found it difficult to trust, and was never sure if it was me or the man or both.
I promised myself that in writing our story I wouldn't let new knowledge, wisdom or thoughts play a role. Am not sure that is possible so I might look at it from all angles. Maybe my only true talent lies in memory; in remembering how I felt at a certain second in time, and why. It is a talent that I hate as pain is remembered as much or more than happiness and in truth my life has had many more happy minutes than painful ones.
I am doing the thing that my writing teacher tried to wipe out of me; I am writing outside and around the story rather than diving into details. But in this new blogging medium I feel a certain peace and a certain knowledge that I can work outside of so called acceptable parameters.
Confusion races through my mind. Why are stories supposed to be told in a certain format? Who set that rule? Then explain how in one country in one century we could have a Faulkner, Steinbeck an Updike, , Capote, Thomas Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and so many others who broke rules with gusto and love. Yes, love for form, beauty, charm, ugliness, detail, a million little and a thousand big things.
Words enchant me; words terrify me; words fill me with longing for other places, other people, other lives; anything not mine. I'm not an adjective person yet I remember the first time I read John Updike's Rabbit Run and was blown away by feeling that I was with Rabbit at the basketball court. While I'm in the state of Pennsylvania (metaphorically) and on the subject of John's; I remember John Ohara's stories about boys becoming men, and their mother's, younger than I am but oh so much older and dowdier, feeding them breakfast, and not giving great doses of wisdom. Dorothy Parker, how could I have forgot her? Big Blond has always been the most perfect story to me. Yet I'm not home, haven't read it in years, and all I can really remember is the woman sitting at her dressing table. But the image of her making up and brushing her hair has stayed transfixed and fixed in my mind forever.
Do we live in an era when everything is supposed to be homogenized, easily digested, and from the same formula? If that were true than why is there room for so many different style blogs to be popular , and why do people seem hungry to read and learn from one another?
Maybe these are questions that will be laughed at by people who think that they know what makes good and/or sellable writing; maybe they seem juvenile. But I have spent so many years being told how to write that I sometimes forget to focus on why I write. I love the written word.
On this wordy note, I will end to spend tomorrow walking on the beach, not really thinking about anything and thinking about everything at the same time.
Then I will find a bookstore and hope that it has some books by Will Cather because I need a Southern woman writer fix. Maybe it should be Joan Didion because I am in California. Sometimes even reading is confusing.
Zachary didn't read many books; he was more the alt newspaper type. But he was proud that I did.

Reasons I fell in love with the bum who really needs a new name 07/29/05

2011-03-12T08:46:00.000-08:00

Just heard an ad for Moses Asch's Folkway Collection. Every recording he has made is in the Smithsonian and can now be downloaded. Omigod I lived with a man who made two records for Folkways and can be forever downloaded. The future is here. Soon all our lives will be available forever somewhere.
Should think of a good name for the bum. After all this time, I no longer blame him for every problem that's happened to me, or to the world.
Things I loved about the bum, in the beginning:
He cared about the world
He was compassionate
He had a sense of humor--though not the best sense of humor I have known in a man I lived with
He was adorable
We looked like each other
He told me the worse joke that I have ever heard, and I couldn't stop laughing
He was filled with schemes and grandiose plans.
He borrowed $10 from the first man I had ever loved to take me out
He had two albums out before he was 25
His song lyrics were exceptional, she thought when in much lust
The first man I had ever really loved and a singer then just called Lucinda played matchmakers.
He adored my family
He made me see The Jerk
Underneath it all, he was the sexiest man I have ever known
He made me feel like the most beautiful sexiest woman in the world, ever.
He loved my friends, especially Lucia.
He tolerated double dating with Shelby. This wasn't usual.
He introduced me to some really cool people.
He was from New Orleans, and he was Jewish. This was very important to my parents.
I knew a girl he had gone to high school with. We both hated her. My dad knew this girl's father and grandfather and hated them.
He loved my family, and liked spending time with them more than I did.
He was very sexy.
He was a rebel rocker/folkie
He introduced me to the music of Tom Waits, and actually exchanged phone calls with him
Sex was magical.
He so believed in me.
He cared about my opinions.
He made me feel safe.
We could spend days alone together and never get bored
He tried to make me stop feeling guilty about everything.
We looked like we belonged together.
Sex was incredible.
He let the world know how he lusted for me.
I'm trying to put this story together in a coherent narrative because it deserves to be told languidly and with truth. He has a name. I can no longer call him the bum because I only called him that as a defense.
When I found out that he had killed himself, I went around for days, maybe weeks or months boring everybody with "I'm the bitch who killed..."
I wasn't of course. People kill themselves out of a despair I can't really imagine. Intellectually I understand that, but when you loved somebody, almost had his baby and then devoted a good part of your life too hating him, it's hard to seperate yourself.
Bear with me while I work this out. This story is long,and I feel a responsiblity to tell it properly.
I might take breaks from it, and finally tell the story of how I became a charm school dropout. A couple of weeks ago I demonstrated for Lucia the proper way to bend down. Both knees creaked. Yeah we're getting older. But we have had more interesting lives than Britney and Lindsey. Really.
I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks, but will have laptop. Then there is the first ever Savage family reunion. I just know that fave sis will tell everybody I have a blog and it's called Courting....And then I'll feel funny talking about them. But I will.
I'm trying to think of a good name for the bum; it has to be a '50's name; and suitable for a New Orleans Jew. This is the kind of detail that bogs me down, and stops me from actually getting to a second draft and submitting my work places. Open to all suggestions.

Nice girls go to heaven: Good girls go everywhere 07/28/05

2011-03-12T08:45:00.000-08:00

Nice girls go heaven; Good girls go everywhere was embroidered on one of the pillows in the store on Madison. It was red with white lettering. Yes, I still can picture it perfectly, many years later. Even remember where it was in the store window. Didn't want the pillow; it would have looked stupid in my studio, with archway that was really a room, and huge kitchen with medieval appliances. I'm not the embroidered pillow type.
But I promised myself that I wouldn't turn into a nice girl when I turned 30, or worse, in my 40's. In the burgeoning Korean groceries on Lexington, I would see shriveled women in their 40's buying one can of tuna. I was sure that they shared it with the cat.
But after the years of the bum, I didn't want to be in a relationship. One night stands had lost their luster; and I should have known better in a world where AIDS was first being known. But every six months or so I would be in a club; usually the original Lone Star on lower Fifth Avenue, dance the night away, and meet some handsome stranger who would be a stranger again in the morning.
Lucia and I went out often together. Our favorite restaurant/bar was One Fifth where the drinks were pricey, the appetizers very good, and the men exceptional. Since Lucia and I loved to talk to each other, men flocked to us. Sometimes we would acknowledge them; we would always let them buy us drinks. We really weren't looking for men and that was the sole reason that they liked us, I think. But we weren't unfriendly.
Okay I was much of the time. I have made up a list of the bum's good qualities which I will post. Really need to give him a name. He's been dead since 1989 so I could use his real name, but I would rather not. Blogging's good for the bum and me. It's letting me tell our story slowly and not in order. For years I could only write about the day we met: endless variations of one story.
It took a long time for me to realize that day was so perfect, so filled with life and hope, that I almost had to fixate on it. Ironic that I talk about the hours before we met the most. When my friend who was buying the club where a thousand careers were launched would approach me to tell me that this producer or that musician wanted to meet me, I would just look at him blankly. No wonder his pet name for me was Idiot. At work it was Princess Perfect, because I would tolerate imperfection in anybody but me. Sometimes I would think of myself as the Perfect Idiot Princess.
Of course I am talking about a boy (the soon to be owner) who recently asked me, which bridge he pretended to drive over with his eyes closed, when we were barely out of our teens. He's still proud of that. Yes, it sometimes makes me laugh. Okay it can crack me up. When Little Luce was ten, she tried to pull that on me when were crossing Broadway, and I didn't make her hold my hand for the first time, I didn't fall for it. Her mother would do things like that too. Gawd, I must have auditioned my life long friends, in a past life, for stupid brilliance in playing practical jokes.
Lucia wasn't in the club, on Sunday, May 20, 1979. She had moved out of town several months earlier though she would pay frequent nocturnal visits to New York during her away years.
Lucia and the bum liked each other a lot. Everybody liked the bum; he was charming. Charmed the pants right off me that first night; Gloria Vanderbilt jeans to be exact. I had stopped at Macy's on my way to the club and had bought them, changed in the store, and had my Williewear Lavender tiny waisted, flared pants in the Macy's bag along with the lavender tee with purple leather strings and beads around the piping. So I even had fresh clothes to wear the next morning.
I was a supervisor at Summit then, and we ran into my assistant who couldn't stop laughing. He had suspected I was more than this ditsy but bright girl who could train anybody. We had hired over a thousand people in the past few months. Almost anybody who wanted the job could
have it. I was literally given the brain damaged and the not quite on this planet people to train; anybody decent would then be taken out so that I could have the next herd. While I was paid more money, I was held to the same standards as every other group, and trained all the supervisors in my division on new methods . Plus the normal supervisory duties. Still I loved my job; I felt like I was helping society, and many of my best friends still worked there or had worked there.
When we had been coders, a bachelor's degree was the minimum requirement. We were all really actors, writers, and artists waiting for the big break. Hell, James (Angie Ralph's husband) was waiting to be called to be a fireman. Fortunately he was laid off from Summit, and took the NYU three month computer course with some of the other guys. All are now computer consultants.
The bum belonged in the world that was New York in the late 1970's. I have always blamed myself harshly for loving him when in reality I have been trying to rewrite history. Not just our personal history, but the history of our time. It's something that I always accuse other people of doing.

Walking down Madison on a late July afternoon, Pia thinks about the past 07/27/05

2011-03-12T08:43:00.001-08:00

Whenever I go to Rafe's hair salon, I feel a tinge of nostalgia. His salon now is just off Madison in the 60's. I lived just off Fifth in the East 60's. When I lived there I never thought of it as my 'hood. It was the world's hood, and I merely occupied 450 square feet of it. Yes, for anybody who reads me regularly, I am more into square feet than most people. Many of us don't say how many rooms we have but how many square feet.
I was walking down Madison about five this afternoon, after having my hair colored. It was in the 90's, and the avenue was empty. Took me right back to the late 1970's when I was a fresh faced girl, already almost divorced, with a penchant for getting herself into trouble. But I had a baby face and a slightly ditsy manner; like a younger, brunette Goldie Hawn. I could hide behind my face; people always mistook me for innocent.
Madison Avenue was filled with old ladies stores then that closed for the month of August. There was a woman's hat shop that made me laugh as the hats were so pricey and even more ugly. Another store made pillows; the kind of living room pillows with cute messages on them. "The queen sits here." I laughed even more at that store. There was a store that sold everything you would need to ride a horse, except for the horses. I'm sure that the owner could have helped you with that one. On my corner was an art gallery that was managed by two older twin sisters who dressed and wore their hair identically. Their bouncer/everything else employee was a large imposing man with a shaved head years before it was fashionable.
Madison Avenue was quiet then; never busy at night, but in August it was as deserted as a European city was then. Though I had only moved off Fifth to placate my father, I was charmed by the old fashionedness. It was so not me, yet I had quickly become a part of the fabric of the neighborhood. Everybody loves young girls, though I didn't quite consciously understand that. I did understand that it was the end of an era; my generation was beginning to leave its mark.
We were going to be the trendsetters and the leaders. all of our lives we had been told how special we were. We were baby boomers who had never known a depression. The people I knew experienced hard times from a distance. No, our hard times were different; or maybe talked about more. I had grown up with at least three kids who had killed themselves. Maybe that had always been covered up before.
I was actually thinking all this while looking in store windows. Don't know if I could have lived there if Lalique had been there then, though it's not my favorite glass at all. When I'm on a glass quest, I will find beauty in almost all glass
Though I was engrossed in memories, I am a New Yorker so I'm always looking at the people. Norm saw me first; he look bewildered as if he knew me, but wasn't sure from where. I change my appearance bimonthly; my hair has a life of its own. There was a reason somebody had once called me electric haired chick. My face has never changed; but I constantly change the amount and type of make up I wear.
Omigod, that's Norm. Sheet, he must have only been in his 40's then; always thought he was old. Right he had white hair, and daddy who must have been much older didn't. My father had a moustache; always thought that Hal Linden would be perfect to play him in The Savage Family Chronicles, or Pia tells almost all, but only about herself, not really.
"Hey Norm, it's Pia Savage."
"Oh it is you; you haven't aged a day."
"Liar."
If I had to run into my former landlord, it was good that we met when I came out of the hair salon. His face was doughy. for the first time I realized that he had once been magnetic looking. Though it was way too hot, he was wearing a summer suit of raw silk without a tie, and obviously soft black Italian loafers. I was wearing an orange Talbot's tee, a blue denim pencil skirt, and blue with orange Merrel's sports sandals. What can I say? I live on the Upper West Side, and Talbot's does make the best tees. We talked for awhile, but all I could think about was how my life has been defined through my hair and my clothes. When I had moved into Norm's building, I wore vintage 30's and 40's dresses, and almost the complete Diane Von Furstenberg line for work; at night it was vintage or all black with metal jewelery for the complete punk look.
Now almost half my wardrobe is from Talbot's; the other half is way cooler, but I always find myself putting on the Talbot's clothes. I like the quality; it does feel right. But it's Talbot's.

Lucia and Pia finally become friends 07/25/05

2011-03-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

September, 1978
Ellie invited me to dinner at the studio she shared with Lucia. I didn't really like Ellie. She was a project: recently separated diabetic from another planet, badly in need of friends. This was a typical conversation.
"Hey Ellie, how are you?"
Ellie, eyes glazed over, hair in need of brushing, stooped posture would then mumble.
"How do you mean how am I? Physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually?"
I would then put my fingers through my hair, split a few ends and try to think of a witty yet appropriate reply. As there was none that I could think of, I would move onto a less open-ended question:
"What did you do last night?"
Ellie would actually think about this for awhile before mumbling a reply. When she coherently invited me to dinner, I was so shocked that I accepted on the spot. Then I spent the next week trying to think of a way to get out of it. But....
The apartment was a top floor walk-up on West 94th Street between Amsterdam and West End. It was Lucia's; while tiny it was brightly decorated with posters of yellow cabs going up one wall, and on top of the bottom bunk bed. There was a loom and weaving Lucia had done. Though I had worked in the same room as her for a year, I had always been a bit star-struck in her presence.
The bright colors, minimal but nice furniture, the weaving, photographs, and hand painted objects suddenly humanized Lucia. it turned out that she had made dinner; fish in a tomato sauce. Being a good guest, I brought some pot, and Lucia rolled them into the most beautiful joints I had ever seen. That was a feminine art I had never been able to master.
That, and some wine, began us talking:
"Lucia is it true that you dated Mike O'Byrne last spring?"
"Yes..?" Lucia looked perplexed.
"Just broke up with him. We were keeping it quiet since he got his big promotion. "
My friend Shelby had moved back to Miami for a couple of months and the girlfriends I had made at work weren't soul-mates yet. But something in Lucia's eyes told me that I could talk to her.
"You were dating him? for how long?"
"Since June. Waste of three months."
"How come nobody knew?"
Rumors traveled faster than I could chug a 48 ounce glass of Diet Coke when hungover, at Summit. Once when very drunk the prior March, after the layoffs, I had found myself in bed with the project manager. Yes I had blacked out. Nor am I proud of that or what I did. I looked at him, screamed, found my clothes, quickly got dressed, and ran out of his apartment. While I didn't tell a person, he told at least ten. I gave up trying to understand men after that. Lucia knew of that incident of course.
I decided that I could tell Lucia the truth.
"He should come with a sign that says 'hi, I'm Mike. I'm beautiful and smart. I hate kissing and love to dress up in ladies lingerie, but I'm still the worst f--k in town.' Not that wearing ladies lingerie should make him good."
Lucia couldn't stop laughing. That was the first time I was to hear:
You're so funny; you're so funny," as Lucia waved her perfect arms. The perfect exterior was just a facade. I could tell from how hard she laughed, while waving her arms in a strange sort of disco duck dance. I loved this girl; my line wasn't that funny.
Ellie went to bed while Lucia and I talked until the sun came up. Mike was the most significant of the guys we had dated in common from our job, or friends at work. We went through the list giving each points for things that I would rather not repeat.
Turned out that she was giving Ellie a free place to stay, while she got herself together. Thus began one of my biggest motto's. "Others talk; Lucia does."
A few months later after Ellie began turning tricks at Under the Stairs, a jazz restaurant a block or so away from their apartment, I coached Lucia in the "you have to leave, Ellie, speech."
Lucia is truly a good person, and sometimes that really angers me because gives everybody who needs a place to live a space during the most desperate hours, unless they would begin turning tricks, which isn't too likely among our age group now. I often still call her Saint Luce. What saves her from sainthood? Many things that I will eventually get to.
It feels like we have had one continuous phone conversation for almost 30 years, and another in person conversation.
While I was in awe of her looks and aura, she was in awe of mine. We should have learned then to appreciate our selves. But no. We had to learn the even harder way.

Pia and Lucia meet but do not become friends, yet 06/23/05

2011-03-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

This Fish needs...and I share a birthday. Until I began blogging I had only known one person, Katie Ralph, who shares my birthday. Katie was born six days after Live Aid, in 1985. Katie's dad, James, Lucia and I had worked together; Angie his wife and Lucia had been best friends since sand box days. Then I came along.
James, Lucia and I worked in an office that took up a floor, in a large building that overlook St. Paul's Church. We knew it for its beauty and some other things I have mentioned elsewhere, and will not repeat today. We had no idea that it would one day become a symbol of hope for the world; then it was our personal devotional center no matter what our religion.
Self: make up another 100 categories and actually put all the posts in all the pertinent ones and I can have Courting Destiny: The Index Honestly that would make me very happy. Then I would know exactly what I wrote ,and how to order Courting Destiny: the series. I want fiction indexed because if I read something about a character on page 5, and on page 222, there's a flashback to that scene, but a discrepancy, I will not only remember it but be bothered enough to look for it. This is a strange characteristic for somebody who never filed a paper correctly in her life until plastic file envelopes came about. A plastic file for everything! And everything on computer!
Back to story please. Lucia worked across the floor from me. People kept on telling me that the two of us had much in common and I should get to know her. Lucia's tall; her hair was long and perfect; she was lanky with legs that went on forever, and breasts that our friend Patrick said "looked up to god." I'm shorter and curvier. Nobody ever believes it but I really am shy. People would have to come to me.
Our work room was divided into groups of fifteen with a supervisor. It was a temp job coding documents in a mega series of lawsuits. Thirteen years, two companies and many promotions later, I would leave the industry, but I had no way of knowing that it was anything more than getting paid to make new friends then. Everybody was around my age. It was college redeux, and once again I was a star.
I would walk around the room often and stop to visit groups filled with guys who thought I was hot. Even I believed it sometimes. James was a guy' s guy. Still is actually. We both thought the other was hot.
Now that we're family; we laugh about it. We're not family as in blood relations, but as we've known each for so long, we're never not going to know each other.
Summit Inc, our company, was a straight girl's dream. While James was living with Angie, the seven other straight guys in his group were all very single.
I had never dated so much in my life. As in college I felt like a kid in a candy store with too vast a selection to chose from. While I have always realized how lucky I was, I never quite understood why. I was constantly telling myself to be extra careful about what I wished for.
part two: will be a story about how I became friends with Lucia.
As often as I have had times of extreme popularity, I have had times of who is this girl? Why is she so weird? Not talking about Junior High and not afraid to talk about it.
I did a special weekend post for Bring it on! It doesn't sound like anything you would expect from me. Maybe the later part. Read it please!

Lucia and Pia walk up Lafayette Street and can't even do that without one of us getting into trouble 07/19/05

2011-03-12T08:08:00.000-08:00

Today's my birthday, and I don't know how old I am! So don't ask. Thanks Sally for reminding me that I have one.
Thought that I was sheltering Lucia by not talking about our younger days; you know the usual, nights and days where we would do whole football teams in a...kidding; we did whole rock groups, oh no that was me and...that's a joke, maybe....Really. For the record, I was...let me stop before I dig myself into holes I can't work myself out of.
In a very weird mood; thought that I was adjusting to the mold farm in my mind, and yes Trine, you were the first to call me "moldy" though probably not the last.
Lucia left a comment on my post about Rafe that made me realize she really really wants to be talked about. GAWD. Fortunately for Lucia's pristine reputation, the only person I'm ever hard on or make fun of is me, because it's just so darn easy.
Sometime in the late 1980's Lucia, Noel (a male friend who no longer lives in New York, and yes he's gay) and I were walking up Lafayette Street, in Nolita, a section of Manhattan that was called Noho then. Nolita stands for north of Little Italy, and Noho for north of Houston. We were walking on the east side of the street where there's a fire station.
We had just left the architectural studio and store that Lucia managed and was the scene of many parties, and occasionally ended up sleeping there when we were too wasted to make it home. It had a shower, bath and almost all the amenities of home except for a bed, but did have a huge table that we would have to clear the dust off, in order to sleep, but, uh most times, we would forget that step.
This is mostly extraneous to the story I'm telling, but good background, for something. We were young and hot though we were the last two to believe that part. Don't know why; enough people told us, wanted to know us, or marry us. Lucia was a four by 40 girl. This story takes place before the fourth marriage. I was a Maid (or Matron) of Honor more than most women; and I'm only counting Lucia's weddings. She used to compare herself to Elizabeth Taylor:
"I believe in marrying them, not living with them."
I'm more the let's live together, not get married type.
Okay, now that's out of the way, are there any other deep dark secrets that I can waste time saying: I once voted for a Republican for president; that's about it. Oh no am I becoming prudish on my birthday? Can't happen; no I won't allow that. Here it goes:
It was a hot June night. Not hot as in oppressive, I want to die weather like today, but hot enough. In New York, the hottest part of the day is always dusk when the heat's had time to settle on the cement, and the buildings seem to ooze both heat and drops of hot water from the air conditioners. The steam rises both from the street, and subway gratings, and it can feel as if you're trapped in a manhole cover or a pot of not quite boiling water. One thing you learn in New York early and never forget: heat rises.
I was wearing a blue with little pink and yellow flowers bustier dress; the skirt flowed like a Marilyn dress. Here comes the big confession: sometimes when I would a dress like that I wouldn't wear underwear. But, and this is a big but, I had a two piece bathing suit that almost exactly matched the dress; only the flowers were a bit larger. That morning in a burst of clothing creativity, I decided to wear the bottom as underwear. To make the dress work appropriate I had worn a blue silk fitted jacket that I had left at the studio.
Noel was walking to my right, and Lucia to my right. The subway grating was right underneath me. The fire station bells began ringing as it did whenever notable people passed it. I couldn't understand why suddenly Lucia and Noel were trying to tame my dress that was whirling with the blast of hot air from the subway. Their faces had turned bright red, and not from the heat.
Something made me turn around, and face three very well dressed men who were trying not to smile. Two of the men were young, very good looking; "bodyguards," I thought before my brain had time to register exactly who they were guarding. Or maybe I really didn't want to realize this. I thought of something clever to say, but before I could say it I began laughing. Real laughter; not girly giggles or shameful bursts of restrained laughter that turns into coughing fits. I knew that as long as I lived I would never forget this meeting. But I just couldn't stop laughing; the six of us were standing on Lafayette Street, laughing until tears came.
And that's how I met the man for whom the bells were tolling; the boss of bosses himself, John Gotti, shortly before he went to prison.
If Lucia comments, and she will, do not believe her version. I wasn't just wearing underpants, I was wearing a shield of armor, a belly covering bathing suit bottom.
No I don't approve of him or anything he did. Just getting that out of the way. But it's a hell of a story.

Saturday--thinking about Shelby 06/11/05

2011-03-12T08:05:00.001-08:00

Will return with So you think you own your life on Monday.
Uh, it's Saturday, and for the first time in almost a week I don't need the AC and or Sharper Image fans on. Only mention the brand because I'm really a shill for The Sharper Image which has the coolest fans with all kinds of modes, no blades, and ionizers. Live on the street closest to the Hudson River--though I have the city view, which I love because it reminds me of a tres chic European hotel view. Since I can't afford to go to Europe now, my view will have to suffice.
It feels sultry in my 600 square feet of prime Manhattan real estate, and I love feeling sultry because then I get to speak Southern, or more realistically Blanche Dubois speak. My friend Shelby and I used to make up our own lines from A Streetcar Named Desire always embellishing on the "last night...usually I have one, but last night...." line.
Last night I had none as last Friday I had enough for the next ten years. I haven't spoken to Shelby since she wanted me to take ten years off my age to date her boyfriend's best friend. Lately I have been missing her as we went through our late teens to late 30's either getting along incredibly well, or not speaking. We had that down to an art form.
My one and only cat fight was with Shelby. We were living in a small North Shore, Long Island Sound town that virtually all of our friends lived in. We're supposed to be smart but it took us months to realize that my roommates were Junkie Lesbians. The later part would have been cool had they told me, and had the amazing Ro (dead, can use real name) bought her own damn bed instead of insisting on sharing mine. The junkie part was not cool under any circumstances.
Shelby's boyfriend had recently moved out of their very modern, all windowed apartment, and she asked me to be her roommate. Only Shelby had a new boyfriend, she was never without, and The Rat as he was called by everybody including Shelby, as he was so sleazy moved in. Only he didn't pay rent, never bought groceries and ate a lot of steak--I hated meat, and never contributed a cent or did a thing around the house.
I went to Cambridge for a weekend, met some truly great people, and was offered jobs. Went back to the Island to get my things and Shelby went nuts because I was leaving her to pay the rent by herself. The Rat wasn't working and he had to pay back money he had stolen from a fund he was supposed to be in charge of.
Shelby accused me of deserting her.
"You know Shelby I'm your only friend for a reason, nobody can stand you."
"You think you're so pretty. You're not."
"The only good thing I have to say about you is that you are beautiful. But don't worry, Shelby, soon as people get to know you, your beauty disappears."
"You think you're so goddamned superior because you were married for a hot sec, well, you're not."
"Never said I was. You f**kin' know how hard the decision to get married was for me."
That's the only part of the conversation that I can repeat. We threw steaks at each other; books; clothes; and Shelby was reaching for my crystal ashtray when we both realized that she could break something fairly valuable. We didn't speak for another six months but Shelby made sure that I knew her new phone number in the city and that she was a waitress at Max's.
My parents came to Cambridge to visit me. They were acting weirder than usual; we were stuck in a traffic jam near Harvard Square. I asked them why they were so sullen when that was my role.
My parents hesitated for a long time before my father spoke:
"Richard Markowitz was found dead in Bayville Bay." (Not his real name--too many worlds collide here)
I had known him since seventh grade when he ruled the world. He had been the first boy to look at me when my family moved to our North Shore Nirvana. Then a girl, the first kid to actually speak to me, told me that her best friend who was sitting next to Richard was his girlfriend and if I dared speak to him, the girl who spoke to me, would deck me. She also told me that it would probably be best if I didn't speak to anybody because she didn't want me making trouble for anybody.
I was too shy, too scared, too weird to understand what she was really saying. I was good trouble; the type of Seventh Grade girl, boys liked to look at. Often in later high school years I wished that I could go back and revisit that day. Life would have been so different had I just smiled and kept on smiling. I went to a combined junior/senior high school, and to further complicate things, we were in the same classes with the same kids through eleventh grade. Don't know why our last year was different. But that day in Seventh Grade I wanted to die.
Instead I went home and made sure that no boy would look at me again. I gained 35 pounds in record time. By the end of tenth grade I had lost the 35 pounds plus more and Richard looked at me again. We became friends. I knew that Richard was messed up; I had other friends who had died. But Richard Markowitz? No way. I was sure that my parents were playing a sick joke on me.
I jumped out of the car and went to a phone both to call Shelby. She said that nobody had wanted to tell me, that Richard had been found dead in four feet of water, since he and I were friends from way back. I had called collect, and we talked for about fifteen minutes, as the car was still stuck in the traffic jam.
When I got back into the car my parents were much nicer than they had been though I kept on screaming at them for not telling me. The next weekend I took a few days off from my job as a sales girl at a once very chic store on Boylston Street and went to visit Shelby. My memories of the weekend itself are hazy: they mainly concern Max's, dried chick peas (on all the tables), musicians, and I guess music.
Don't miss that time of my life. It was great but also very crazy. Never had a Looking for Mr. Goodbar experience; but if I didn't have a great survival instinct, I could have. Maye I have been deluding myself all these years. Maybe I was just lucky. Though I usually traveled in a pack and that did give me better odds.
Do miss my first really good girlfriend Shelby. She was a bitch, but she was my bitch.

A tale of two stores: Tiffany's and Alexanders 06/19/05

2011-03-12T08:03:00.001-08:00

Don't remember when my mom first told me about Tiffany's second floor. I had already moved into my apartment in the 60's off Fifth, handpicked by my doting dad who when he wasn't driving me crazy was my favorite person. I must have needed a wedding gift. In the 1970's people still gave gifts instead of money if they were young, not relatives or parental best friends.
My mom told me that this was a secret passed on from mother to daughter. I believed her because I believed everything that my mother said, though her mother was an immigrant. She was sophisticated and had good taste, so this might have been true. Several years before my mom died I asked for dispensation to tell other people. My mom couldn't stop laughing at my amazingly gullible nature--only where my parents were concerned.
Tiffany's second floor was a place where you could pick up cheap(er) wedding and hostess gifts, and they were always in good taste, and welcomed because of the blue Tiffany box. The gifts weren't original, but I have a huge multi-faceted crystal paperweight that had been given to my parents, and they gave to me as I collect glass and crystal. Know it's from Tiffany's because I then bought a much smaller version--for my fave gift recipient--me.
I stopped going to Tiffany's in the early '80's when many unique gift stores opened on Lexington Avenue that were much more funky and to my taste. Once my last fiancee and I brought champagne, crystal glasses, and strawberries to Tiffany's so that we could have breakfast at Tiffany's as the sun rose. That's my idea of a great date.
Alexanders, oh how do I get from Tiffany's to Alexanders?
Well the Manhattan Alexanders was just a three block walk but it was a world apart. When fave sis and I were young, every year the night before school began our family would drive to the Alexanders in Rego Park. There would be a five mile back-up on both sides of the Long Island Expressway. I never understood this ritual, nor liked it, but the parents seemed to love it.
This family trip might have something (or everything) to do with my hatred of shopping in department stores. Alexanders had everything: from school supplies to winter coats. I thought that everybody bought their clothes there.
When we moved to real Long Island, as opposed to the edge of Northeast Queens, I quickly found out that fave sis and I dressed all wrong. The girls in our new school had worn clothes from Best & Company in elementary school, and now, in Seventh Grade, wore Villager clothes and Papagallo shoes from The Miracle Mile in Manhasset. We begged and begged for our mom to buy us clothes from some store other than Alexanders but she refused. But I was allowed to buy my own clothes the next year so it wasn't as much of an issue as I made it into. My decades of black and purple began, and yes I'm personally responsible for beginning the black clothes trend in New York. Sure!
Later, in the 1970's when I moved just off Fifth, and my parents had seen much of the world, my mom finally realized that the depression was over and had been over for sometime. As in, long before I had been born!
"So, why didn't you tell me that you didn't want clothes from Alexanders?"
"We did."
"No you didn't."
This was a long oft-repeated conversation that went nowhere but was fun. It was also amusing to see how many "so's" my mom could get into a ten sentence conversation.
When I moved into the city I found that there was no place like Alexanders for pocketbooks, pantyhose, underwear, and some clothes. It was worth the half hour wait on line. No matter how many salespeople there were, and how few customers, the wait was always half hour. Think they hired from the Howard Johnson interstate hiring hall. But in Alexanders defense they did hire people nobody else would.
However, I did form many friendships while waiting on line at Alexanders. The lines were so slow; I could know a woman's life story and she could know half of mine before even reaching the register. When I wasn't in a good mood, and was crazed over the lines, I could scream like a crazy woman at the sales people and the assistant to the assistant assistant manager. This was considered normative behavior at Alexanders. At any one time half the line would be screaming:
"What's going on?
"That girl's so stupid..."
"I could be halfway to Europe by now..."
"Do they only hire retarded people here?"
"Why am I standing here with 20 pairs of pantyhose, 30 pieces of underpants, a pocketbook..."
The voices would all be on top of each other. I thought that were I to decide to have a nervous breakdown, I could have one at Alexanders and nobody would think anything of it. It was a good safety valve.
In the world before designer bags became the norm, Alexanders had exceptional pocketbooks that looked like they cost a fortune, were unusual, and so great, rich women would stop me on the street and ask where I bought my bag. Other girls would lie, not me:
"Uh, Alexanders?"
"No it can't be from Alexanders. Look at the detail on the leather and the velvet. So intricate."
"Really. Alexanders."
"But I want that pocketbook, and, well you know, Alexanders...."
"I know but it's worth it."
"Oh dear, I'll have to send Laverne." (Or whoever the housekeeper was.)
This was one of my favorite street conversations with rich East Side women I didn't know. While I was in many ways a recovering hippie, I had a look that could fit in anywhere. My inner soul didn't want to be accepted as a young woman who lived on the East Side and looked it; my less inner soul was screaming with joy: "I can fake it; I can really fake it."
Took me many years and a move out of Manhattan to realize that I had never faked it; I was the real deal. It's just that when you spend your childhood shopping at Alexanders-well, that ended up costing my father a lot more in therapy bills than if they had just gone to Best & Co., like the rest of Long Island.
When I was 26, in 1977, Fred the Furrier had been opened for a year. This was before PETA, and the animal rights movement. So give me a break, okay?
My then best friend Shelby had a raccoon coat from Fred's. Because Shelby had bought a raccoon coat most of our other girlfriends bought one also. Never one to follow the crowd, especially my best friend, I wanted something more luxe, something that signified I had arrived and was no longer a hippie. Though to be honest at night I was a post glam rock punk princess which did entail much black, lurex, and makeup.
One day my dad and I met at Fred's so that he could buy me my 25th birthday present a year and a half a year late. This was not only expected but accepted in our family as it meant we would get much more lavish presents such as a trip to Europe, or in this case a fur coat. I wanted Sable but would accept Mink.
We began looking at coats. It took us less than two minutes to realize that neither of us knew anything about fur.
"So, do you like that one?" (Any conversation with my parents involved many "so's." For a long time I thought that it was really a Yiddish word and the only one my parents would use in conversation with us.)
"Yick, it's too fluffy, and I don't know, there's something...let's look at the minks."
We began looking at the minks. My father started asking questions of the sales people. He had an amazing shtick that always worked: (this was pre PC days, too.)
"Pretend that I'm retarded and no nothing about fur."
Okay it usually worked. My dad did what he always did when he was confused; he would run to call me or my mom. Since I was confused also, he took out the dime collection, went to the nearest pay phone and called my mom.
"So she like a mink..."
"So is it full skin?"
"Uh, what's full skin..."
"Wait right there. I'm coming in."
Of course we couldn't wait there while she drove to the train station in Hicksville, took the next train, a cab (because it was a special occasion,) and went up the slowest escalator in the world to Fred the Furriers at Alexanders. Yes even the elevators and escalators were slow at Alexanders. We went to a restaurant next door in Bloomingdales. My father had an unnatural love for department store food. He insisted that the food was better, fresher and that there were less calories. I was always meeting him for lunch in one department store or another.
Bach's which was on 34th Street was his personal favorite. Orbach's! It was less classy than Alexanders, didn't have as good stuff, but did have better lines. All the waitresses knew him by name:
"Hey Max, you haven't been here for two days. That your daughter?"
Actually a walk through many department stores with my dad was an incredible experience. Wherever we went the sales people knew him by name and would rush from their customers to greet him. My dad was a successful CPA with an office at home, and one in the city, but he would go to his client's offices. I could never figure out where he had the time to meet so many sales people, in every store from the old Barney's to Bergdorf's.
"Well, Pia, in life you should always take the time to meet as many people as possible." Then he would make a facial expression that was somewhere in between a grimace and a grin. "Look, most of them don't make much money, and people treat them so rudely...."
Omigod, he's heard about me in Alexanders Then I would remember that I had learned my shouting techniques from my dad. Though he tried to limit his shouting to bank and airline employees.
"Oh, Max, you just love the attention they give you." I never called him "dad" or "daddy" in public. He insisted that my sister and I call him Max.
By the time we finished lunch, my mom was waiting for us at Fred's. We spotted her deep in conversation with a salesperson. Oh no, it wasn't a salesman. It was Fred himself.
"So where did you eat lunch?" translation: I told you to wait for me here. We finished the chit chat that had many layered meanings and went onto the business at hand. My mom was nothing if not sweet and blunt. She held the patent on sweet and blunt; I have somewhat mastered it but could never be like Marian.
Supposedly Jewish girls are taught about full skinned furs in the cradle. This was another part of my education that my mom had overlooked. She had been too busy teaching us values, and why people like my parents should be called "progressive," and never "Communist" or the dreaded "Socialist." My mom's family had been Communists; my dad's had been Socialist, which is why it was the dreaded word. Though she did love most of my dad's family. By now my dad was a neo-con while my mom was becoming progressively more progressive. I thought that the mink would be an easy sell as my mom's had cost $10,000 and had been especially made for her at a furriers. Fred's minks averaged around $2,500.
She looked at me bluntly and said:
"You can't buy a mink coat.'
"Why not?"
"You have to be 35. If you're under 35 you have to be married with children."
"But I've been married. I never want to be married again.'
"Don't say that." We weren't religious but knew every superstition. I could hear a silent Kinehora.
"Minks are classy. They always look good."
"You're only 26. People will think the wrong things if you wear one."
"What things?"
"You know, things."
"Ma, uh Marian, I live off Fifth. People already think the wrong things. Do you know how many doormen at the hotels ask if I'd like to earn some money?"
Oh god, why did I say that? Why did my mom have a singular ability to make me say many things that I would regret in the morning?
She shot me a look that was filled with both disdain and pride. My mom was short and cute. I wasn't tall, but everybody thought that I was. In the dressing room at Loehmann's she was always making people admire my breasts, waist and hips. I wanted her legs. She still wore mini skirts, and looked darn good in them.
"So, you see?"
I knew when to accept defeat. My always talkative father had remained silent throughout this exchange. Fred kept on smiling. We fit his target market: Successful parents; young daughter on her way up. He told me that I would be back with my next husband within a few years to buy the most expensive Mink or even a Sable. A pretty girl like me
I finally settled on a dyed Nutria with a huge Opossum collar. Nutria's are swamp rats found in some Southern States and in South America. It was a beautiful coat. I wore it with everything for the next fifteen years. It looked especially good, I thought with straight legged jeans. Though I hated winter, I loved being able to throw the coat on over my jeans and sweater, put on some lipstick, sunglasses, and walk around looking all high cotton.
People who didn't know fur thought that it was a Mink. My Nutria was, of course, full skinned.
When I moved out of Manhattan for awhile in 1991, I gave the coat to a neighborhood homeless woman. If it didn't make her as happy as it made me, I hope it kept her warm.

My dad's story about my parents feelings upon adopting me. 6/22/05

2011-03-12T07:56:00.000-08:00

My dad wrote the following story sometime right after I was adopted at not quite four months. My sister (yes a girl was born to our parents almost two years and two weeks later). She found this some months ago. Selfishly I held onto the print copy as I wasn't ready to even scan it in. Now I have the print copy, and many copies thoughout my computer. Couldn't format properly; left everything in my dad's words. I left in most small errors. Hope you enjoy it!
****************
I don't know exactly what to call this story, or really where
to begin. Suppose that I start near the end which is a
new beginning,--- for Marion and me.
The phone rang at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, November l5th. It was
our caseworker. We were waiting 4 years for this call at
last it came. She told Marion that there is a little baby girl, who is ready for adoption. Marion gripped the phone tighter,
her heart beat faster,-- she let out a soft "oh", I gathered
what the call was about, we had to sit down to control ourselves. Marion whispered "It's a girl" we smiled at each other, and words were non-existent. But we both knew that we were glad that it was a girl. As a matter of fact, we realized right then and there that we really preferred a girl. The agency had asked us several times, at different interviews, whether we preferred a boy or a girl but we never gave a definite preference.
The caseworker told us that the baby is about 3~2 months old, weighed 7 pounds, 4 ounces at birth, and had fair features. She asked us if we would like to meet the baby and get acquainted with her. We readily agreed, and arranged to meet the caseworker, tomorrow at 10 a.m., at the New Rochelle office. The whole conversation lasted a minute, her voice sounded as if she was very pleased in giving us this news.
That night sleep was out of the question. We knew that something great was going to happen to us. Our thoughts were
about the baby. The night dragged on and on it seemed
endless.............. Several times before, during our
married life, we had important events happening the following day, parties, weddings, our wedding, examinations, vacations, funerals but somehow, this event appeared most exciting and called for more meditation. Marion and I were married for 11-g-years. We have been very, very, happy with each other and, have felt that we will always remain that way. Now, we were in the process of adding another to us. What could this baby add to our happiness? could there be more happiness than we have experienced? Perhaps we are inviting heartaches or aggravation! Do we really want a baby? We did not have one of our own - so we applied to a child adoption agency. This was almost 4 years ago. After filing applications, having many interviews, and having our home life studied by a caseworker, we have finally been accepted as suitable people to adopt a child. The phone call told us that they have selected s possible baby for us. Now,,, that the process of waiting and interviewing has ended, and the adoption appears close to
reality - the question on our minds, was do we really
want to go through with it? This question and others kept us tossing from side to side all during the night.
Morning finally came. It was a bright, sunny, fresh, Indian summer day. We had breakfast in a hurry. We stopped at the drug store, and bought a large rattle for the baby we felt that we just had to bring something for the little girl.
Our car ride to New Rochelle was slow and thoughtful â€” at one moment glad, and another doubtful. Question marks began to fill our minds again. What kind of a baby is she? fat, skinny, funny looking, good looking? Will we like her? will she like us?? How will we be introduced to each other? Where is she kept now?” perhaps in a hospital or in an institution. When will we have to make up our minds whether or not to accept her?
We arrived at the office promptly at 10. The caseworker greeted us pleasantly and made us comfortable in a small room. She brought in a file, and using its contents as a guide, told h us more details about the babys background.
Some of the physical and educational details of the baby's father and mother were told us. Also, some information about the grandparents, and the brothers and sisters of the parents. Then, we were told about the baby-
The baby is in good health, lively, completely bald, blue eyes, chubbyish, very fair skinned, â€” and a special comment was made that on back of the baby's head, is a large birthmark which may go away completely, or be covered by her hair. She informed us that the baby has been kept in a private home since birth, and was kept by a very capable woman, who has two teen-age children of her own. We listened intently. We felt fine hearing
all this, -- and our anxiety to see the baby was reaching the
point of impatience.
Marion, I and the caseworker left the office at about 11, and in 15 minutes we arrived by cab in front of the house. It was an old, large, pleasant looking wooden house, situated back on a beautiful lawn of grass and trees. There was a porch along the whole length of the house. Marion and I always liked a porch on a house. The woman of the house came to the door and invited us in. The caseworker introduced us to her and the usual formal greetings were exchanged. The house was well kept and clean. It was really homey, neatly furnished with pretty curtains. The large foyer had a stairway leading upstairs, and a spacious living room adjoined the foyer. The foster mother went upstairs to prepare the baby while the caseworker ushered us into the living room.
------------- The seconds seemed like years, our hearts began
to beat fast we were excited. The question marks be;-an to haunt us again. What will we say to the baby?/ Will we meet her in the crib? What could we see through the bars? Is she
asleep? Will she cry? smile? What should we do???----
Our mental gymnastics were interrupted by the footsteps of the
foster mother coming down the steps - and as she came into
view -- we saw her carrying the baby. She was walking towards
us ---- Our hearts stood still.... Nothing in us moved....
we were frozen--- the baby was starring at us.............
.... Her caseworker broke the silence, telling us to take the
baby. Vie dazedly looked at each other Marion took the baby
in her arms --- The caseworker ad foster mother left the room.
............................ We were alone.----
She was a beautiful baby, - her blue eyes pierced our hearts.., she seemed like such a good baby. We loved her immediately, â€” we were thrilled by her â€” she smiled at us, - and we cried inwardly. Such joy we have never experienced, or ever anticipated. The baby was in complete command of the situation, and
was at ease. She kept on smiling, kicking, and gooing WE
were frozen with happiness afraid that anything we may say
or do will melt some of it........ She finally made us smile
back at her, coo to her, and play with her. We were warming up
to each other â€” and a little more at ease. I took the baby
from Marion and held her in my arms an exquisite sensation
went through my body â€” she was so warm, easy to handle, so Clean, so smooth, so very good. We talked and played with her and she seemed so pleased,., she smiled continuously. We remembered the rattle, and gave it to her. She looked at it, but was not able to grasp it we realized that it was too large for her that she was only a little baby we laughed heartily, and, she laughed with us. We were having such a good time. We were
enjoying each other immensely we held her on our laps, then
over our shoulders, then we held her together, we patted her, we squeezed her, she was so wonderfully cooperative she,
knew that we were inexperienced.... but, she tolerated us
we were positively sure that she approved of us Time appeared
to have reversed itself,â€” the minutes seemed like seconds.
We kept on admiring the baby, What a good little baby] What a nice little baby What a wonderful little baby
Finally, after half an hour, the caseworker and foster mother entered the room, and they seemed pleased that the 3 of us were absorbed in each other. We told them what a wonderful time we
were having. The foster mother took the baby, and we
squeezed and patted the baby good-bye ----- our eyes followed
the baby up the stairs. The caseworker asked us what we thought
of the baby and, in no uncertain terms we said, that we
liked her very, very much... that she was a cutie-pie.
She suggested that we go back to the office. Vie took the rattle and left.
All the way back to the office we were remarking over and over again, what a happy baby she was, and that she seemed like such a good baby, also, that she was such a pretty baby even without any hair -- simply a picture of a doll. The caseworker asked us what we thought of the birthmark on the baby's head. We admitted that we did not even look for it it seemed so unimportant, and that we Here so busy playing with the baby.
Back at the office we were asked if we would like to see the baby again, so that we could get better acquainted; and thereby,
help us decide whether she is the baby we want...... Marion
and I answered at the same time "We only want that is baby, and we feel that she wants us." The caseworker asked us if we are
sure of it --- and in a chorus we gave a definite "YES", and
that we want her as soon as possible. She wanted to know if – Here prepared to have things ready for the baby over the week-end.
We replied "That we were impatient and would prefer taking the
baby the next day, if possible." "That we would spend the next
2h hours concentrating on getting things for her."'- ......
....................... The caseworker smilingly agree d, we
could have the baby tomorrow- at 10 a.m.
We left for home at 12 o'clock noon,- we were happily excited.
The next hours were spent in making room for the baby, for her crib, chest of drawers, bathenette, carriage. We also, had to run around buying these things, for immediate delivery. All of this getting ready and buying things gave us a lot of pleasure. Our friends and family gave us excellent cooperation. Everything and everybody was wonderful.
All night long we kept thinking of the baby we talked abound
her into the night,. What a happy baby. What a good baby. Such
a nice baby......................

Friday was a brighter and sunnier day,, the weather was beautiful, Our breakfast consisted of orange juice, and thoughts of the baby
----- that was nourishment enough. V/e took the suggested things
for the baby,, clothes, blanket, and bottles for formula--
we also took along a new, pretty little rattle.
Our car ride to New Rochelle was fast and impatient we were
anxious to see the baby to hold her again, to smile at her
-- to pat her--- Oh just to be with her again.............
We wondered! will she "be the same as yesterday will she smile at us maybe she will cry babies do cry! we could not imagine her crying.
We arrived at the office again promptly at 10. She had us sign some papers and went with us in our car to the baby. We , arrived at the same time as the doctor did.
When Marion and I entered the house and saw the baby again,
----- the thrills came back, - she gave us a broad smile,

raised her eyebrows,-- kicked her feet, - and, waved her
hands excitedly,----- she hypnotized us.
The foster mother undressed the baby and the doctor examined her. She took the examination so well, cooperated so beautifully,

not a whimper out of her,-- it was a pleasure to watch. Everything
was all right with her. The doctor showed us the birthmark, and told us that it should go away in time it was really a very insignificant mark. After the examination the foster mother dressed the baby and wrapped her in a blanket. Marion took the
baby,------- and,------- such a thrill could not be explained

-- it seemed like a dream.
The ride home was one of ecstasy. The sun was shining its
brightest on November 17th, 19^0 ---- it will so be recorded
in our diary..... The baby lay quietly on Marion's lap, all
bundled up,--- with her little face peering at us.........
Slowly and peacefully, she fell asleep. We rode very slowly, -
â€” such pleasure an we felt should not be hurried. We were both
pleased, contented, and very, very happy. Everything around us
appeared calm and beautiful,--- we spoke in quiet tones, â€”the
baby was sleeping. We discussed a name for her, and, decided
both to name her after/our fathers P and T, we felt so
proud. All the way home we kept saying "She is such a good little
baby" â€” "Such a nice little baby" - "Such a wonderful little
baby" --- ............... "When we arrived home, ----------
we were a family of 3, -- Max, Marion, and PIA TANYA SAVAGE.,

New York Doll 5/07/05

2011-03-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

I've been downtown five days a week recently and thought that I was hallucinating for a sec when I saw a poster for a New York Dolls concert. Wow, man, groovy--David Johansson is not performing as Buster Poindexter. It was a name he used when under the spell of his big band persona.
Lucia and I still call him Dexter Coinbexter. We first called him that one night when we were very stoned on some very good pot, found it very funny and still do. Maybe it's just us but we like to think that anybody who saw David Johannson perform as Buster...would.
Once Lucia and I actually paid to see him perform under that name. However our drinks at The Bottom Line were paid for. Later we were taken to One Fifth--our favorite hangout in 1982, our calamari was paid for as was our martinis and then champagne followed by desert, coffee and Sambuca--it was the decade of sambuca. At the end of the night, 4:00, we properly thanked the men who had been hanging onto our every word and went to our separate apartments. Lucia called me and we spoke until seven.
Lucia and I had known each other for five years and had been friends for four of them but she had lived in Atlanta for several years and it felt as though we were just really getting to know each other. I had been with the Bum for most of those years. Lucia and he had been friendly and she was just learning about the Bum's dark side.
Lucia and I couldn't stop talking. It was a never ending gush of words; one long phone conversation that went on for years, and another in person one. Lucia and I were enchanted with one another. Angie Ralph was Lucia's best friend and Shelby was mine, but it was inevitable that Lucia and I became best friends also.
Though we worked long hours, we went out at least four nights a week. As we were both in recovery from good love gone bad, we really didn't need men to complicate our lives, though at One Fifth one night Lucia met The Kangaroo Kid, an Australian TV star, and I met Derek, a Soho art dealer.
I had issues dating somebody named Derek; his pants while obviously expensive were too short, and he lacked a personality. The last was his saving grace. After the Bum I was in desperate need of somebody who could blend into the bar stool. Neither the Bum nor I had ever been able to blend in anywhere.
Derek was more than willing to double date with Lucia and The Kangaroo Kid, who would spend the evening explaining to anybody who listened that he was a big TV star down under. Lucia and I would then be free to talk to each other, as we had the evening's dinner and drinks paid for, and we had dates so we didn't have to flirt. When we felt the urge to flirt we would go out without them.
Though neither Lucia nor I owned a VCR, our mutual best friend, gay category, Patrick owned two, so were able to see The Kangaroo Kid on Australian TV. He was who he said he was.
It's strange that seeing this poster brought back memories of David Johanssen, because I have much earlier memories of The Dolls which I will share tomorrow

New York Doll 5/19/05

2011-03-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

Papa don't let your daughter 5/13/05

2011-03-12T06:19:00.000-08:00

Ever since the Countess went on her first date with the Count to a Stones Concert I have been convinced that the key to youth is seeing the Rolling Stones every several years. I will be at their concert in New York. No way will I miss that. One major problem with that. Didn't see a concert in New York or New Jersey listed. Better be an oversight.
If anybody wants to hear the story about how my father kept me from meeting the Stones not once but at least three times, I will tell it. He thought that a father's job included protecting his daughter from ever coming within five feet of Mick Jagger.
I was upset when I was seventeen but could understand it. However when I was 20 something, he still thought it cute. Not!
In the department of making me feel ancient: Today is Stevie Wonder's 55th birthday. I happen to know that more than a few of you remember when he was called: "Little Stevie Wonder," and will always remember "Fingertips: Part Two."
Just looked it up--was only called "Fingertips," but what happened to Part Two. For that matter was there ever a "Fingertips: Part One?" Just a question to ponder.
Some people might notice that my mood is considerably better than it has been recently. Only six more Grand Jury Duty days!!!!!
My faith in Mankind has been restored. No not thinking about justice or anything dealing with anything legal or serious.
There are some seriously nice guys sitting around me: Rico, who I've already mentioned, the personal trainer who is just the sweetest person around. He looks like a much better looking Carlos Leon (father of Madonna's daughter, Lourdes) and is always offering me food and vitamins. Then of course there's Bob Newhart's much younger twin brother--and a few other really nice guys who are really friendly, and make those three tortured hours a bit more palatable.
I was in an awkward social situation the other night where I had to make up a boyfriend very quickly and very in depth. Used the personal trainer because I could honestly say we're together in very tight quarters often. Did imbue him with Rico's name and personal charm. It feels great to be back to making up boyfriends! Not that I do it to make me great, but sometimes it stops a potentially awkward situation dead in its tracks. Yes I should be at an age where I don't need to do this because I'm so secure--but I would rather have somebody make up a girlfriend than toy with me all evening.
Slept for about an hour last night so I'm pretty giddy and sleep deprived. Better stop before I spill my guts and say that last Saturday night's dream...well, I would never put him in the made up boyfriend category. Won't jinx a definite almost certain possibility.

26 years ago a boy went missing, and coincidentally I fell in love 5/29/05

2011-03-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

In the post below, Mrs. Mogul points out my age in her comment. Thanks, appreciate that.
She had known when I figured out what high school she went to. It's for people with much talent in art. Lucia, my best friend, is another graduate. Mrs. M and I play the New York game. You can find out almost everything about a fellow New Yorker with just a few good questions.
Every city must have the "who are you, in five questions or less," game. Not needed in small towns. In New York it's essential to survival. Though I met The Bum at the club, and the owner, my friend, asked many questions of The Bum and Lucinda, the unkown gravely voiced Louisiana singer who was his friend, back on May 20, 1079.
We didn't consider it strange that The Bum's friend was a woman, and mine a straight male. We've played many roles in each others lives. Neither of us had ever expected him to play matchmaker. That was unexpected, and the owner asked the right questions. But we knew nothing about New Orleans; we were New York. He was downtown cool and I was uptown constantly slumming, because I was too cool for the East Side. there was a club or two on each block on First Avenue and almost as many on Second Avenue but they had the appeal of of riding a bike with the training wheels still on. Men had gold chains, polyester shirts, and hairy chests. Even if they didn't I think they'd paste some on.
It sounds strange to say that I didn't live to be hit on. I found it to be gross, intrusive and why wasn't I home reading? Men, boys, guys, don't care what you call them, were like giant gnats to be swatted. And I did.
I was a supervisor for a long term temporary document coding project. There were hundreds of men: straight and gay; it didn't matter. I spent my days secure in the knowledge that I was liked and many times longed for. At night I wanted to be alone with my friends, or with my friends downtown where men wouldn't run up to me, and I would feel the whirl of being caught in the spin cycle of the washing machine. Don't know how else to explain the anxiety my body felt then.
But then The Bum entered my life, and on that Friday a six year old crossed the street to go to school by himself. This week was the 26th anniversary of Etan Patz's disapearance. I think about him every year at this time. Downtown streets were covered with posters; he was so adorable. May he better somewhere better, and his family have found some peace.

One Ring (my depression era parents) 4/13/05

2011-03-12T06:08:00.000-08:00

Every night at exactly 11:42, a phone would ring once. The ring might have come from my building; it might have come from some other building in the courtyard. I know the exact time because after the fifteenth or so time I began checking it against my TV cable clock.
As I know, for a fact, (five words that never made sense to me together, but since everybody uses it, I will this once, ) that Time Warner Cable is never wrong, I have to assume that their clocks are always correct.
I began to wonder about the ring. Why was it only one ring?
I imagined a very old couple who couldn't go to sleep until they heard from their Social Security aged daughter. They were all living off measly Social Security or SSI checks with no added income, so instead of speaking to each other, she would ring once to let them know she was alright.
I hated this fantasy, really a nightmare. I had to change it. I didn't stay up waiting for the phone to ring, but I like silence for the hour or two before I go to sleep, and frankly would forget about it, until it rang at 11:42.
But what other possible scenarios could it be? Local phone calls are usually unlimited, now, and long distance is relatively cheap.
Whoever was making the call had to be old as did the recipient's. I can't remember when the phone company (and there was only one phone company--Ma Bell) stopped making long distant (and maybe regional) phone calls considerably cheaper if you waited until after 11PM.
My parents would wait until after 11, as they were ~~cheap~~, no, thrifty, and they didn't like people to know that they had more assets than most of their family and many of their friends.
Though my father stayed up late, and my mother tried to, but would fall asleep immediately if she was watching any TV show she liked, they quickly got out of the after 11 PM phone call. Perhaps my sister and I shamed them into making calls earlier. Shaming them sometimes worked.
"Uh, ma, the depression's been over forever. You don't have to buy ketchup by the case." Especially since my sister and I had both left when were eighteen, and nobody in my family liked ketchup much anyway. Salsa, mustard, yes, ketchup, no.
By 1980 they weren't old, yet they couldn't learn how to use an ATM machine, so the phone rates must have gone down sometime before that, while they could still adapt to big changes.
While I love my parents very much, I really didn't like thinking about them before going to sleep. That meant that one or both of them would pop up in my dreams and I really don't like dreaming about dead people, especially my parents. No offense, mom and dad, I know you would understand. My parents never peered too closely into my life while they were alive; there were parts of it even a parent didn't want to know--and shouldn't.
I like my dreams to be like romance novels, light and fluffy, and parents, dead or alive, sort of hinder that.
But every night at exactly at 11:42 the phone would ring once, and I would begin wondering, who were those people?
Was it a young girl's parents calling to make sure that she was safely at home, and she would pick it up, right after the first ring? I didn't like that fantasy either as every young girl should have the opportunity to stay out as late as she wants. Eventually she would learn that she had to get home at a reasonable hour in order to get up in the morning.
But when I was in my 20's and 30's I could stay out until 4AM and still make it into work before 8:30, in good shape as long as I had limited my drinking and inhaling. Afraid I'm not talking cigarettes here. Though I craved one incredibly the other day, I had never smoked more than four a day, and my butts made other peoples' cigarettes.
So I got really angry on behalf of this young girl who probably only existed in my imagination. And wouldn't a young girl--or really anybody, who could, answer the phone during the first ring. She had to know the exact time the call came. Most people have a digital clock somewhere in their bedroom.
There were endless possibilities, and I thought of many of them.
I hated this intrusion into another person's world, and began keeping music on, or staying in the living room where for some reason I wouldn't hear the phone ring. While Rafe was planning his new hair salon, he would come over once or twice a week and we would talk until far into the AM hours.
Several months ago I forgot about the phone call, and reverted back to my old schedule. About a week or two
About two ago I realized that I hadn't the one ring in all that time.
I miss it. It was warm, inviting even. It meant that somebody cared about another person.
Now I am haunted by the endless possibilities as to why the phone calls stopped.
It's much more depressing. And my parents still invade my dreams at exactly the wrong time. Just last night...not telling the rest, it's too personal. Though I will say that I was once engaged to the man in my dream, and almost glad my parents decided to drop by. Though next time, will you give me some notice?

When Shelby was my best friend (in the girl category) 4/21/05

2011-03-12T06:06:00.000-08:00

I was jaded. When I had first moved to 63rd Street I was very young and ashamed of living in the richest zip code in the country. It seems so strange now, but then people didn't parade money or riches around.
The world was changing. Soon Rupert Murdoch would buy The New York Post; People Magazine would be first published--or maybe it already had been. (Have to say that I love People, and seem to have a lifetime subscription. Also think that nothing beats the Post's horoscope.)
I was a downtown girl living uptown, and my life took place downtown. But I soon realized that other people liked knowing a girl who lived at my address, and it gave me a certain edge.
I lived very close to Regines, a club that was very hot then. I was a non-club person trapped in a club life. My memories of Regine's aren't very vivid. Like most people then, (not that's an excuse) I drank and drugged too much. Yes it was an excuse.
Regines was supposed to be very glamourous. I didn't think so. For somebody who didn't like the club life, I had very high standards. Most people who went to Regines were older than me, and while I should have exploited my youth I felt funny.
Other people enjoyed my stand-offish behavior. They thought it was Pia playing Ice Princess. Shelby, my best friend then, who had been one of the two most beautiful girls in college; the other being my other best friend, encouraged me to be icey in public, and in private would lecture me about it.
Shelby never had a shy day in her life, though she pretended to be modest about her looks. An editor during the day and a club person at night most of her men were married. She hated my no married men rule; and was always slightly angry that I had real boyfriends, and had already been married. That last item supposedly enhanced my status in the world.
I would spend winter and spring breaks at Shelby's parents house during college as they lived in Miami. One Passover her mother served a half cooked ham that nobody ate. That was the year her mother called Shelby in hysterics and told her that we were supposed to be very nice to Janey, Shelby's younger sister, boyfriend.
Mike was a convicted felon who had just gotten out of some Florida state prison. Shelby and I thought no problem, we knew many guys who had been in jail. They were fresh faced and just like all the other boys we knew.
Mike wasn't. He had long, stringy hair. While most boys had long hair, they washed their hair more than once a month. His skin was bad and he had a prison pallor. Even his jeans and tee seemed less than...but the second worst part were all his tatoos. We didn't know people who had them then.
The worst part was his speech. He mumbled and couldn't or wouldn't speak in sentences of more than three word. He also had horrible table manners.
That was the the Passover I first confronted my inner snob. I had never realized that I was one before. It was a big revelation. I didn't like it.
Shelby and I ran from her parents house to meet some friends at the Polo Club, a club that was hot in Miami then.
It was so familiar; I knew I belonged in this world.
Hating that I went to Coconut Crove where I picked up a really hot guy and spent three days with him; I pretended that I didn't have a boyfriend at home. It was an easy pretense as we were constantly breaking up.
The guy I picked up was a record producer. I only had things with guys in music. Sort of limited the category to half the straight males in New York and Miami. They were the only places in America I knew well.
He was older and owned his own home. The garden was lush with fruit bearing trees. When we weren't in a club or in bed, I pretended that I lived there. It was a nice fantasy, but when Shelby and I went back to Florida again, I found too many things wrong with him.
As people were always telling me, I was my own worse enemy.

The oldest child on the LIRR 4/23/05

2011-03-12T06:05:00.000-08:00

Why is this night different than all other nights?
Because I have to go out to Long Island as it's so much easier than coming to my apartment in Manhattan. LIRR is the acrynom for Long Island Railroad. I hated with a vengance the first ten minutes of the Jim Carrey/Kate Winslet movie, because it took place on the railroad.
I will never know the joy of celebrating a family holiday in my own apartment and I have resented that for a long time.
" Your apartment is too small," "Too much work." "We don't want you to go to any trouble." "Where are you going to put the turkey?" Oh wrong holiday--"the matzoh kugel."
I admit that my sister, who I love so much, is a great cook with great dishes, and does wonderful presentations.
So do I. Hardly anybody cooks anymore, and I'm so practiced at the art of presentation, or taking food bought and cooked at some of the best take-out establishments in the world, and making it look really pretty.
Now there are great take-out places on the Island, so my only real argument is moot.
Tonight it's at my sister's in-laws.
Tomorrow it's at my sister's where I will sleep tonight. I'm usually a first night, no day person, but I promised fave niece. Actually I promised her mom--but a promise is a promise. This brings up many other issues.
My sister's house used to be my parents house; we moved there when I was twelve--which would have been child abuse--had they have been aware of the consequence of their actions.
The house looks great. It no longer looks like the house I spent the most miserable five years eight months of my life in. Not that I counted the time or anything like that.
I love visiting the house now.
But holidays always make a single womanwho is not the host--or the mommy--feel demeaned. They're designed that way.
It doesn't matter what you've achieved or not achieved in life. It doesn't matter what people are really thinking or that once you actually get to the dinner you have a good time. It's the day leading up to the dinner that's a bitch.
You think that people who have known you all or most of your life are going to silently nod their heads (and later discuss with spouse) "she had so many opportunities; was such a knock out--how could she have let them all slip away?" As if success in life is measured by first the amount of marriage proposals one has had (I've had many,) and then by being and staying married.
You think that the people who are going to meet you for the first time or have met you once or twice will think: "She's a great conversationalist; not bad looking--actually almost pretty. What could be wrong with her?" You know that they're going to spend the next two hours dissing you. Though rationally you know that you're not worth two hours of their time. They have kids. They have really important jobs. They have a 5600 square foot house; your entire apartment could fit into their master closet. Though your apartment is worth as much as their newly married daughter's 2800 square foot house.
Who cares about your accomplishments? Or that you've traversed much of the globe by yourself; have never been a single/divorced/whatever person to sit home and pout over your single status. Since it was by choice you really can't.
Oh that's a lie. Not the choice part; the pouting part. I have sat home very very occasionally and pouted, because I will do almost anything to get out of taking the LIRR on a holiday.
It's me, the 20 somethings, a few people in mismatched plaids (who aren't making a fashion statement,) and some couples of all ages who whine at each other.
Passover happens to be my favorite holiday, though I have no idea if I believe in God or not, and don't want to hear about how a belief in
God would make me a person who doesn't complain and is much happier. I even find reading the Hagaddoh comforting. Though I didn't go to my first real seder until I was fifteen, and we visited relatives in Mobile Alabama.
Yes my father found his religious Jewish identity in the deep South.
Holidays were fun then; I felt secure and loved. But both my parents are gone now, and holidays bring up every unresolved issue in my life. As soon as I get to where I'm going, the issues become resolved until the next time.
I am a happy person who loves to complain in print. I know many singles of all major religions who do believe in God, and complain twice as loudly as me about how unfair holidays are.
Two major differences: They only complain to other singles.
Second differernce: I don't want to get married so that I'll have a Saturday night and holiday date.
Boring. Stupid.
I really would rather read a book, or travel where I want to.
I mastered solo dining in swank restaurants many years ago. If I want to, I can always find somebody to take me or go with.
Truthfully I'm more satisfied with my self and my life than many married people I know are satisfied with their lives
But on the day before, or the day of a major family holiday I turn into a disgruntled childlike idiot.
Excuse me while I go pout.

freezer burn 3/11/05

2011-03-12T06:03:00.000-08:00

Five seconds ago it was snowing; now the sun is ~~trying~~ to come out.
Even the weather moves fast and is slightly schizzy in New York.
Mrs. Mogul had a post yesterday on the difference between sandwiches in London and New York.
It began me thinking about how I'm probably the only New Yorker, maybe American, who hates bagels. My mother had a thing for buying perfectly good bagels, freezing them at once, and waiting until they had freezer burn to serve them.
I could never understand that as she was an excellent cook who froze everything, yes, most women of her generation did, but bagels were the only thing that she'd freezer burn. Since she liked them toasted until they were burnt. We had an ongoing debate about bagels.
Just wondering what foods people are supposed to like but don't. And if it was your parents who started you on the road to not loving it.

Met him at the Limelight 3/14/05

2011-03-12T05:59:00.001-08:00

It's 29 degrees but sunny and looks like spring.
On Friday I'm going to San Francisco--unless we get a bad nor'easter--which is currently forecasted.
I go to California often but was in San Francisco once with my sister.
Sometime in the 1980's, my friends Lucia and Helena wanted to go to The Limelight on Christmas Eve. The Limelight's a club in an old Catholic Church, and I felt strange. I wouldn't go into in an old converted Shul to dance on Passover--even though it's a holiday where you're actually allowed to do things. It would just feel strange. But Lucia and Helena are Catholic and assured me that you can do these things.
They came over around 12:30. We indulged in some pre club enhancements, found a taxi and went. I still felt strange, though there was a long line. I felt as if were committing some sin against humanity.
I never thought of myself as a club type person but I seemed to know many club owners, managers, doormen, and bouncers.
We didn't have to wait on line and a group of French people stopped us and offered us some coke. I said no, and went up to the balcony, and began dancing by myself. Soon I wasn't. Lucia came up, and said that the really cute Frenchman wanted to meet me. Told her to send him up.
He came up. We danced.
The next night we met for dinner. Dinner turned into a night; the night turned into...
Lucia was going to visit her brother in Manhattan Beach for New Years; the French people were going to LA. I hooked them back up.
Two weeks later, they met me at the San Francisco airport. We went for dinner in Chinatown, and then drove to Sonoma
This is a bare outline from a series of stories I'm writing: working title--met him at a club

Sam's Summer: Summer of 77 02/05/05

2011-03-11T11:30:00.000-08:00

Who are you? He asked me in a perplexed but flirtatious voice.
Who are you? I asked the older man who had been waiting outside my apartment door when I came home from night classes at The New School.
My long brown hair was up in a ponytail; I wore a thin cotton summer dress, not too revealing which wasn't usual for me, and brown platform sandals. That summer of Sam, no girl wanted to stand out or look anything like a potential victim. It was hot; it had been hot for weeks and my apartment lacked air conditioning. But I was young and didn't feel heat like most people did. No matter how fast I walked and I walked like I was dodging bullets because maybe I was, I never sweated.
The man's suit jacket was off as was his tie. His thin white shirt glistened from sweat. "Let me in," he said.
I looked at him, confused. "Why?"

You're one of Reba's girls. I can tell. You have that sweet school girl look.
Oh, her. She retired down to Florida last year. Sorry, don't know anything about her. I live here now.
I wasn't sure if I should say that last part but didn't know what else to say. Nobody had schooled me in the art of telling men that I wasn't what they thought I was, in this particular situation or others.
Sure you are. I can always tell who Reba's girls are.
I was getting angry. I wanted to go in; it had been a long day. I worked in a store in Queens, prime Sam country and the temperature had hit 90 long before noon. My nose was stuffed; I needed a shower.
He put on his glasses and examined me from head to toe.
â€œEven if you're not one of Reba's girls; you must have sublet the apartment from her. She'd never give it up. Reba's too smart to give up a rent controlled Fifth Avenue apartment.
â€œLook, sir,â€ I said, emphasizing the sirâ€”a title I would never use in real life. â€œThis isnâ€™t quite Fifth Avenue, just off it, and the apartment's no longer rent controlled. It's stabilized and my husband and I live here now.

I was wearing a wedding ring though I wasnâ€™t married anymore. Anything to make me look unavailable; anything to ward off the evil that ran through New York that hotter than hell summer. I waved the ring in his face.
My husband should be home any minute and he's the jealous type. Lying didn't come naturally to me, but lying about men was something that did come easily that summer. I had put on my street face; the one that could turn men into stone, and he looked at me with a little less arrogance.
Nobody lived in the apartment right next to mine then, and a crazy psychiatrist with hair that stuck out all over his body and a look that could frighten Sam and frightened me lived in the other apartment on the first floor. The man who lived above me walked into the building.
â€œOh honey, you're home, I screamed to my perplexed, older WASP neighbor. He had recently been listed as one of Manhattan's ten most eligible bachelors. Frankly I thought he was gay because he was always smiling when he saw me and was usually with another man that I thought was his lover and the reason for the smile. Boys and men and anything in between had been smiling at me since I was sixteen. There was something about his smile that almost engaged me. It was more real; more something, than most males. But I did think that he was gay, and I wasn't the short haired male with Docksider shoes on, type.
My neighbor, Roger, began to understand, stopped heading for the stairs, and came over. He kissed me, a wet passionate icky one that I forced myself to endure.
â€œHoney, this man thinks that I'm one of Reba's girls. You know the madam that lived here before us.
Roger was a bit tipsy. He put his arm around me, and said in his lazy WASPY voice so different than my fast somewhere in the North East one; "honey, I keep telling you we should put a sign on the door, Reba doesn't live here anymore.
Oh Roger, I keep telling you that's so classless. People will learn eventually.
I unlocked my door; Roger followed me in. As I closed the door, the man said;
I don't believe you. Reba would never give up this apartment. You two don't look like you belong together. Is he your appointment?
I almost lost it. I'm not one of Reba's girls. We've been living here for a year and seven months almost to the day. And Roger and I are very happy. Arenâ€™t we sweetie?â€
I knew that was overkill but couldnâ€™t stop myself.
The man handed me his card.
If you ever change your mind.
He was a vice president of an oil company. Years later he would become world famous in some now forgotten scandal.
Okay Roger, I said, you deserve a drink for saving me. God, just thank god it was you and not, the shrink, or Al or that useless cab driver.â€ Al smoked cigars and looked almost old enough to be Roger's father.
The cab driver had been born in the building; well, in a hospital I assumed, but close enough. He lived in an apartment two floors over Roger's, and was famous for bringing in garbage to the building. Stacks and stacks of garbage: Newspapers; magazines; empty boxes; half-filled ones; anything metal. Once I passed his apartment when the door was open, and went into shock. I'm not the neatest person in America but his apartment defined the word Collyer Brothers. I had lived in tenements in The East Village with my boyfriend, and had never seen one that sickening. They had all been very clean. Unless I lived in them; I wasn't exactly a natural housekeeper. Though I aspired to be.
I passed the cab driver's apartment while on my way to sleep with a local TV talk show host who lived in the larger apartment next door. He would talk about me to his shrink on the show. My ex-husband, who wasn't working would call and tell me all about the show. It was kind of flattering as he never said anything bad about me. Quite the opposite actually.
Megan lived above Roger. Periodically she would turn the gas on and try to end her life. She always managed to try just before a delivery was scheduled, and just after the piano player she liked to think was her boyfriend dumped her. She was really in love with Roger, and whenever there was a break-in, in the building or a New York Times was missing from an apartment door, she would tell the super that I had done it.
He would laugh as he knew I had separation ideation problems over The New York Times. I was clueless when it came to housekeeping but I liked having company over so it would always look good.
Roger accepted the drink. When I had moved in my father, the almost tea toler, took me to a liquor store and insisted that he buy me a full bar worth of liquor. It was the proper thing to do in 1976 when most people drank hard liquor and smoked. My family, except for me was perfect. Fun, sociable and never smoked nor drank.
I poured Roger a glass of Stoli from a bottle in my ancient almost ice box freezer. It was gross and had to be defrosted every three months with tons of boiling water. After that summer, I bought a new refrigerator. That would have been sad had it not been so necessary, because I had to take out the wooden Pullman doors. When you walked into my apartment, you walked straight into the kitchen and saw the refrigerator, sink, and ancient stove with an oven that seemed not to have been cleaned since Reba had first moved in. I bought a new convection oven, and never used the real one.
Roger asked where I got the Hunter Ceiling Fans as he had never seen them in the city before.
The Bowery, near where I got the butcher block table and chairs.

I walked through the kitchen, past the huge archway into the giant studio, and went to a silver case on the coffee table filled with joints. Years before, while seeing Jane Fonda in Klute, coming home from work, (yes like Reba's girls), going to sit at the kitchen table with her legs up, and smoking a joint, I thought a woman who could offer people joints and who seemed so satisfied with her own life was the height of feminist sex appeal.
Though Roger was in his late 40's, he would occasionally buy drugs from the super, who was the building dealer. It was much cleaner that way, and you never felt like you were doing anything illegal. The Rockefeller laws had gone into effect the year before but it didn't affect people like us. The Rockefeller's lived across the street, but I never saw them. I must have passed famous people each day but I could have bumped into Woody Allen in a phone booth and not noticed.
They were my streets and the only place I could get lost in thought was while walking, so I walked everywhere, in all seasons. That summer I had promised my parents I wouldn't walk much by myself at night, and would take cabs everywhere.
All my girlfriends had long brunette hair, and we all felt vulnerable. While we sat at my kitchen table, Roger asked me what if felt like to be a young, brunette girl in the city I'm not going to stop going out. I have to wear my hair up; it's too hot not to. No girls been killed in Manhattan and I work in one of my parents stores in Queens, and they wouldn't let me work past six. It'ss just a summer job. I'm going to visit my college roommate in Geneva for six weeks in late summer, and fall/
Roger and I talked through the night and then didn't socialize again for twelve more years. Just before I left for Europe there was a black out with much looting. My sister lived on West 72nd, and it was very rowdy. People threw beer cans at the apartments all night, and I spent the night on the phone talking to her.
The next day my best friend Shelby and I hit the Second Avenue Upper East Side bars about noon. They were afraid of food going bad, and both food and drink were on the house. It felt like a snow day in the summer; we didn't think about the neighborhoods that had been looted; we didn't think about much but ourselves and the boys we were dating. We forgot to feel scared about Sam that day. Like most people we staggered home somewhere around midnight Al's next door neighbor, Mrs. Herrick, passed out in the tiny elevator. She did that often.
While I was in Bern, Sam was captured, and Elvis died. I couldn't really care about that old fat man, but Son of Sam. My god, he looked familiar. He wasn't; just had a look.

Who's your daddy 01/03/5

2011-03-11T08:56:00.001-08:00

Two hour Fox TV program tonight: an adoptee wins $100,000 if she guesses which man is her "real biological" father.
In my vocabulary "real biological" is a cruel oxymoron when used in conjunction with adoption.
When I was a child adoption issues were swept under the carpet. Except that my parents could never get with the program and made being adopted seem like the greatest thing in the world to me and fave-sis who wasn't.
You know what? Being adopted was great. I lucked out in my family choice.
But I had multiple problems that grew worse with puberty. I went into pre-menstrual hormone rage at age nine two years before I got my first period. I was clumsy; I was the last to be picked for a team; I was shunned by former friends. It was no longer enough that I could make up games and had an imagination.
I won't go into the myriad of therapists I saw or how they all focused on one factor--I was adopted. I'm sure that I have writings about it in my blog somewhere. (I will archive according to subject on my new site.)
The point is that they were wrong and instead of focusing on how I could learn to spell, be organized, not care about being able to sing, not care that I was awkward and much more, they tried to get me to admit that I hated being adopted and resented my parents for having adopted me.
I couldn't admit to what wasn't true. Even as a child I knew that. But so much time was wasted because my family was more honest than other families, and therapists weren't used to a very verbal child who refused to give them what they wanted, but still wanted them to like and respect me.
Then the adoption movement began: Some facts I learned. I had never bonded with my parents that was impossible--I imprinted with them. I didn't have true learning disabilities or ADHD--I chose to have these problems as a way of resolving my inner anger.
Would any bright kid who had always been happy have chosen to be the kid the teacher picked out as the most disorganized, the sloppiest, the this, the that? I don't think even subconsciously I picked these problems.
I learned that meeting my birth mother would immediately solve all these problems. Then I learned that of course I needed time to heal and spend with her.
You know what I really learned? That many people are incredibly unhappy and want to push their unhappiness on others. They develop "schools of knowledge,' to back their absurd hypotheses. At one point "The official dictionary of Adoption" defined "adoptive parent's' as slave owners. I rest my case.
It took me many years to understand that i had real problems that I hadn't chosen subconsciously and therefore didn't have to feel guilty about them. "Guilt" is something else that adoptive parents are supposed to make their child feel. Doesn't every parent in someway or another?
I stopped feeling guilty after I bought my first computer and realized that the playing field was more level. With a computer I can spell, organize my thoughts (somewhat), keep files and my life in order.
I have horrible hand-to-eye coordination. Another problem that was supposed to have been caused by my being adopted. Amazing the problems you can get from the mere act of being adopted.
Computers have improved my hand-to-eye coordination immensely. I refuse to play the if only computers had been around in their present form when I was younger. I know that there was no limits to how high I could have flown.
Guess what? I'm still relatively young. I can still soar. I'm just learning how high I can fly. It's fun and I love almost every moment of my life. Sue me if I'm happy in a horrible time. It's fun to feel in charge of my life. I could never feel that way before I never felt organized enough. Though I seemed to be at work and other places.
But when something Like Who's your daddy comes on TV I regress. This isn't choosing a potential mate you could break up with. This is trying to idealize your biological father.
It's sick.
My daddy thought that I was brilliant.
My daddy shared child raising chores with my mom.
He changed his share of diapers.
He would take me into the city to show me his world.
He thought that I had unlimited potential, if I only knew it, and if I could be a little more organized, this and that.
My daddy wasn't perfect.
My daddy loved his family fiercely.
My daddy sought out challenges and adventures. He taught us to do the same.
My daddy mixed metaphors and made up his own:
"There are four burners on a stove for a reason. Live a four burner life."
My daddy never talked down to me.
He didn't believe in some of my beliefs, but he never tried to impose his views on me.
"If you weren't rebelling against me, you would be rebelling against the world."
He wanted me to see the world and made sure that I saw much of it.
He grew to talk to me as an equal.
I grew up enough to listen.
We were constantly giving each other advice.
He wanted me to stand up for what I believed in, and was proud of me for doing just that.
He thought that I was brilliant and that I was making too much of my problems.
I was.
He didn't believe that most guys in my generation were worth anything and taught us to be self-sufficient.
All he really wanted was for his daughters to be happy.
I am.
He was a "compassionate conservative" who believed in free speech, a woman's right to choose; and that I had every right to find my birth parents.
***************
I don't owe my parents anything.
They chose to help me become an individual worth knowing.
They were just doing what they believed was their job as parents.
They would have been gravely insulted had I acted like I owed them for the privilege of having adopted me.
Somehow they thought they were the privileged ones.
Thank you mommy and daddy.
I know who my parents are.
I will never go on TV to pick out my "real biological parents."
I might not share my parents DNA, but I share their thought processes.
They were my only real parents and I thank them for that privilege.
They would have said the second part of the above wasn't right.
Thank you my parents for thinking that.

Last night Central Park was grand 1/01/05

2011-03-11T08:55:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year. It's a beautiful day. I hope that bodes well for the coming year. Were my mom on this earth she would tell me to get out and take a walk. But I was in Central Park until one Am last night, so she might have excused me on those grounds.
We walked passed Tavern on The Green. Last year there had been ice sculptures and everybody was allowed into the grounds. This year it was balmy and Benny E King was singing outside in the courtyard of the restaurant. Remember him from early childhood "There is a rose in Spanish Harlem." and other great '50's song.
At the band-shell there was a DJ who basically played techno music when he wasn't playing Frank's version of "New York, New York." There was hot chocolate, tea, coffee, a mini-marathon, and the night reminded me of everything that's good about New York. The crowds were further downtown. We had our own fireworks in the park.
I'm the dodo who asked Lucia and Little Luce what time the fireworks would be. Glad I could be of some amusement value.
I had a bottle of Moet left over from the election. It was the bottle of champagne we were going to celebrate with. (Not the double L's; it was a school night and Lucia usually stays home when Little Luce has to go to school the next day.)
When I was growing up my parents would go out every New Years to a fancy dress party or costume party. My parents went out every Saturday and I assumed that I would when I grew up.
Well I got married without ever having been on a real date and we had known each other for four years so I don't know why I thought I would live a sophisticated life.
Okay, we had gone out on about five real dates, but even back in the late '60's early '70's we traveled in packs. Our idea of a big evening was sitting around looking at each other; our idea of a really big evening was sneaking into the Fillmore East before the main act. (I know that we girls passed for groupies; but I'm not sure what the boys passed for, probably roadies--I mean rock stars, of course.) Or going with a minimum of 20 people to Hong Fat in Chinatown at two AM and running into 40 more people we knew.
I'm thinking about this because the first time I remember meeting INYTBA (an affectionate acronym) was at the Band-shell though we lived on Long Island; and had met there many times. I think the Jefferson Airplane was playing.
The spring before, when I was still in high school, I had seen Country Joe & The Fish "One two three four what are we fighting for," there. I thought about those lyrics a lot last night. All these years later and I'm wondering again, and the country is polarized once more. I thought about the Band-shell, Central Park, the Be-In's, the many concerts I have seen there and all the other ways Central Park has been important to me.
I did end up living a somewhat sophisticated life for a number of years. When I lived across from the park in the East 60's I would have a small New Years Eve party every year for six to ten of my best friends. Then I would have a
First Saturday After New Years Party or Lucia's Annual Surprise Birthday Party for anywhere from 75 to 200 people. The parties would end somewhere about dawn. I don't pine for them or the times but sometimes think that somebody else was living my life. I couldn't have known all those people. Me? But I did.
My friend Patrick would have fancy dress dinners with five courses, and many forks. As my father had been a waiter summers during high school and college, I could set a perfect table by the age of eight.
But Patrick would get so crazed that Lucia or I would use the wrong fork, I would use a wrong fork on purpose just to see his reaction. Patrick and his lover would buy huge tins of Beluga caviar something I proudly hate, and I would feed Patrick my portion by slipping him my portion, by putting my spoon into his hand under the table, so I was never uncouth. It was fun watching Patrick being scared that we would embarrass him in front of his friends from Sutton Place.
I thought about Patrick last night and all the free operas and symphony's we had attended in The Park.
My Central Park history goes back so long I don't remember ever not knowing it. My dad would take fave sis and I to climb on rocks--just like the ones he had climbed on when he was growing up in East Harlem, and Central Park was his backyard. Only we wouldn't go to the northern part of the park then because it wasn't safe. It is now.
It felt great to be in a place that brings back pleasurable memories and to know that Little Luce was storing her memories in her memory bank to be handed down to still another generation.
It felt great to get away from the real world and its problems for a few hours.
Even the anti-war memories were filtered through a hazed over moon.

A story about the red ribbon 12/01/4

2011-03-11T08:52:00.000-08:00

When I began to work as an SSI Claims Rep in The Bad Old Bronx, I was afraid that I would be prejudiced against the first AIDS claimant. But he was a ninteen year old boy, some woman's son, who described his living conditions at The Palace Hotel.
In 1991, the city and state paid $2,000 for him to live in what was virtually a cage. This made me sick.
I had thought that I would be prejudiced because nine of my closest friends had died between 1985-1990. I'm afraid that I thought of them as the worthy AIDS sufferers. All they had done was have sex; and paid the ultimate sacrifice for doing a very natural act. Five more would die within the next two years.
Patrick was my first friend to die. He became sick sometime in the early 1980's and it took a long time for us to get a diagnosis. When I say "us," I mean "us," for he, Lucia and I researched hospitals and doctors, filled out some of the most absurdly personal but I suppose necessary forms:
"Did you ever have sex with a bird?"
I wasn't used to sick people then. But Patrick of the smoldering eyes, sexy body, mannerisms that would make me shudder with desire, biting wit and naive native brilliance was, along with Lucia, my best friend. Both Lucia and I had almost slept with him once, we found out when comparing notes, and had lived to feel good about our restraint.
Patrick was a shipping executive who wanted everybody at his company to think that he was straight. When I worked downtown I would meet him for lunch and then drinks on Fridays. Actually lunch was liquid--two Martinis for Patrick, diet coke for me. I'd match him Martini for Martini after work. It was easy to pretend to be Patrick's girlfriend. When he'd light my cigarette, I'd tremble with passion. Something kept me from sleeping with him and it wasn't lack of desire.
After Patrick was finally diagnosed it became increasingly difficult for me to see him. I was very aware that people called me Private Benjamin for I had a Princess sensibility. I couldn't even go to Chinatown in the summer for bad smells made me vomit.
Once I went on what became known as the Frank diet. When I was a mere coder of documents, in 1977, I sat next to Frank who would take out a huge submarine sandwich at morning break that consisted of about ten luncheon meats, liverwurst and other things that I had never been exposed to. The smells would waft up all morning from the brown paper bag that he kept his sandwich in, and by the time he finally took it out and had the first bite I would have to run to the bathroom. I couldn't eat for the rest of the day and lost 20 pounds (ten not needed) in record time.
The boys, straight and gay, for some weird reason found this endearing as they thought that almost everything about me was. I just loved boys, straight, gay whatever. My life until 1985 consisted of work, parties, clubs, and boyfriends without too many redeeming features.
I learned to take care of Patrick. It angered me that TV would show parents in Howard Beach protesting schools opening "without proper precautions." It angered me even more that in his last months when all he could do was watch TV, it would increasingly give into AIDS paranoia. By the next year, anchor people and reporters would act as if they had discovered that AIDS could only be communicable under certain circumstances:
1) UNSAFE SEX--AND THAT INCLUDES ORAL SEX
2) DIRTY NEEDLES
3) EXCHANGE OF BODY FLUIDS
4) BLOOD and PLASMA TRANSFUSIONS (much less frequent)
5) AN ORGAN TRANSPLANT (again this should be easily detected)
On October 9,1985 I was in Venice with my parents. We were staying in a hotel directly on a canal; for weeks the weather in Austria, Germany and Italy had been unseasonably hot and humid. That night it thunderstormed, lightening boldly attacking the water, and the hotel lost its electricity. I went up to my parents room:
"I don't have to light candles for Patrick anymore. He's gone."
The moment that I said that turned out to be the exact moment he died.
By the time Neil became sick in 1990 I spent a week helping him get his affairs in order. Neil had been a poor black boy from the Deep South who had become a successful software designer. When we finished all the work, we stayed in Neil's bed and laughed until my eyes turned red and my contacts came out; and Neil coughed up so much phlegm that I became scared. But it turned out to give him a second wind. He asked me:
If you had to give a eulogy at Roger's funeral tomorrow what would be the only positive thing that you could say?"
"Roger was a great dancer." We said in unison.
Roger was our friend Shelby's boyfriend. She deserved better but love's irrational. Roger had been a hot hair cutter in the 1960's, but now he couldn't handle a scissor if somebody bet him a million dollars. Though his death certificate would say that he died of a heart attack, all of us knew that he died of living a dissapated life--way too much booze, hard drugs and hard living.
Lucia was a new mother then; Shelby was in shock over Roger, and Helaina had to work in the suburbs so I was the only one who could stay with Neil. His lover, Doug, a WASP cable network executive had died two months of the monster that Neil was trying so hard to fight.
I would make or more often order dinner at night and Helaina would join us. That night Neil's friends from New Jersey came over. They acted like mice who couldn't find the maze. When they began ordering me around I decided to leave. As none of them had any sort of HIV nor any experience with people with AIDS they acted nervous and stupid. None of them would get physically near Neil just in case....This was in the last month of 1990. They should have known better.
When I kissed Neil good night, he whispered to me:
"I would come with you if I could only get out of bed."
He died the next morning while Shelby was eulogizing Roger.
More friends would die while I worked at my new career for the Federal Government. For the first time I met women with HIV. Many of them lived at the shelter across from the Social Security office. I found myself liking them. Victims of the crack epidemic many had slept with husbands and old boyfriends who knowingly infected them; others had shared dirty needles.
I quickly gained a reputation as somebody who would walk the extra mile for anybody infected with HIV. I also walked the extra mile for anybody who was sick with anything. Dignity matters to a sick person and all I did was treat them like humans, and I filled out the forms to show how sick they were.
It didn't matter how people were infected with HIV. It eventually killed almost everybody who had it. Death's an equal opportunity employer and it was the first time some of these people were treated as equal opportunity employees.
Though I would think about Patrick, one of the more bigoted people on this planet, yelling about his hospital roommates on Medicaid who were given free ambulance rides to and from the hospital. Though he disliked all Black people in theory, in reality he had many Black friends.

Lucia had married Patrick's lover, Hiram, a Mexican waiter who had made tons of money waiting tables at La Folie and Sign of The Dove. She refused any money but Patrick had made sure that her name was on his large one bedroom rent stabilized apartment.
She and Little Luce live there today. Ironically Gods Love: We Deliver was started in her building, and Lucia spent much time cutting up vegtables and delivering meals.
Big Luce (as I now call her) and I share an unbreakable bond. Together we are stronger than we are individually, and we have become strong women. Our sisters understand and appreciate this as we have become more thoughful sisters. Our true friends think of us as detached Siamese Twins, with differing thought patterns. People who try to come between us soon learn not to. We don't s
pend all our time together but we consult each on the most minute decisions.
Big Luce was the only person who helped me with my year long coop search. On the morning of 9/11 we would stay on our phones together whenever they weren't dead. We met at her daughter's middle school without having planned it.
We began our friendship as two 20something formerly married girls who were always up for a good time. A plague ensured that we would always be tied together Now in real undeniable middle age we appreciate it.
I shall always miss the boys. Think for awhile about almost an entire generation of young bright striving men who died long before they should have. I think about them at least weekly.
I think about how they could have contributed to the arts and the business world. I think about how different the world could have been now. Together they would have made a great impact.
Honestly, I find Will and Grace tiresome. Pretty desirable girl/woman has a gay best friend. How original.
I would never argue that every TV show has to have a message. But AIDS changed Lucia and my life almost as much it changed any sufferer, just differently.
I see many younger gay men who think that it's a poor African thing now. It is. It's also a revival of crack thing, an oral sex thing, a woman who doesn't use protection because it can't happen to her thing, and very much a gay man thing.
Take time today and think about how lucky you are. Think about all the people who could have contributed so much; the inner-city woman who was just getting her life together and would have gone on for a teaching degree.
This is the link to the government's site on how many American's are infected by HIV and AIDS, and the number that have died.http://www.whitehouse.gov/onap/facts.html Almost 439,000 American's have died in the past 20 years.
The figures about Africa are much more startling and heart breaking. They're not just losing a generational subset but entire generations.
Please remember that AIDS remains as large a plague today as it did in the 1980's--or larger, because we choose to ignore it.

Teenage girl without confidence desired life 12/03/04

2011-03-11T08:50:00.001-08:00

I've said that I was a shy awkward teenager. I was also clumsy, not coordinated and had zilch ability to laugh at myself or my problems.
But in high school I began working against the war in Viet Nam and immediately found a boyfriend. My freshman year in college I felt like a kid in a candy store with an unlimited supply of candies (boys). It felt weird and undeserved.
I didn't think that I was pretty but I was. My looks paved the way and opened doors that should have been closed as I had no personality I was willing to share with the world. I hated myself.
I could pick out and explain everything that was wrong with me in minute detail. I didn't understand why people wanted to know me or sought me out. I thought that they were confusing me with some other better girl. One who had worn Villager clothes and Capezio shoes in Junior High; one who had good legs rather than breasts and a waist. I hated having an hour glass figure in the time of Twiggy--long lanky no waist no breasts.
I thought that there was only one type of pretty and that looks were all that counted--well, wit and a good personality too, but since I didn't have any of that...
I didn't realize that people liked nice girls with good manners, and that I had a subtle or not so subtle wit and personality. When I had been nominated for a senior class "best" in high school, I thought that I was the joke candidate. I wasn't and lost by three votes but didn't really believe that.
My poor parents. They did everything and more to make me believe in myself and nothing worked.
I've always blessed the hippie era and its allowing strange people to take center stage for everything good that happened to me.
Cheerleaders hated me; and one tried to get me expelled from school freshman year as we were roommates and she was ashamed of that.
I couldn't wear my hair in a sleek style because I had no ability to keep my hair from frizzing. I hated my legs so I would never wear a mini skirt.
It turned out that the cheerleader was jealous of all the attention I got. Even her boyfriend liked me. Though I would have been the first to tell him that I wasn't worth it.
I never had a "eureka" moment where I realized how great I was. I still backslide at times. On women like me it comes out as being rude and stand-offish. It came out that way in high school when my mother would tell me that she knew for a fact certain boys had a crush on me.
She wouldn't give their names so I thought that she was just being a loyal mother. Turned out that she was right.
My other best friend besides Lucia, Rafael, a straight male hair stylist told me last name that I'm "hard,' as in the hardest women he's ever met to get to really know, to ask out, or to sleep with. He's married and I would die before I slept with him. But he said that he wasn't referring to himself.
I wish I had learned back in high school and college it's not all about looks and that ones personality and persona could be quirky and sort of early Goldie Hawn ditsy and people will love her anyway.
But when you're in junior high and the teachers tell the kids through example that it's okay to pick on you and make fun of you, it's easy to lose the path to happiness and self confidence.
I would listen to Murray the K, a New York disc jockey legend, and try to learn about music and everything else through his words. He seemed to know everything in the world. He gave me hope and made me happy several hours a night, and all night Saturday when I would make my little sister stay in her room, make tons of perked coffee and dance in the living room. Murray the K played golden oldies on Saturday nights then and I learned all about the music from the '50's and early '60's. I was convinced that the key to life was contained in at least one of those songs.
(Our parents would go out every Saturday until the wee Sunday morning hours, when I would run into bed and pretend that I had been asleep. I couldn't sleep anyway when they were out. Though they didn't really drink, and I knew that my father became more awake the later the hour, I was always afraid that somebody would hit their car and that they would die.)
I wish that I had understood how much I was loved. Not just by my parents but my first husband and others. I wish that I wasn't constantly second guessing myself. I come off assured now and in control, but I'm not. I'm really not!
Only recently have I started to become truly happy with me. I wish that it hadn't taken me 50 years to get to this place. I wish that I had known how good I was when I was younger. I wish I had the confidence I see in most 20 somethings. They feel entitled. I never did. Feeling entitled isn't such a bad thing.!
But I know many beautiful teenage girls who share the lack of confidence that I had. Little Luce is stunning. 5'9'' perfect figure, sharpest wit in the ninth grades, a brainiac who procrastinates. Everybody remarks on her beauty; all eyes turn when she walks down a street.
She does what I did: Puts on a street face and look that makes her look ugly. She has to do this; it's called street smarts. I hope that one day this won't be her natural face as it became mine for too long.
Though once I reached college I was a jumble of varied emotions. But I spent most of my time smiling as life was happening to me and I loved it.
Couldn't understand that I deserved it; couldn't make things happen to me but allowed life to take over and just happen. I wasn't proactive.
In retrospect that's simplistic. I achieved much, and was responsible for much of the good and the bad. But I didn't realize it then.
I'm writing a novel about something that happened in my late 20's but I keep on coming back to this subject. I seem to be an eternal teenager; and I still believe that I can find the meaning to life through music lyrics. And I'm very happy to have reached a place in my life where I can look back without anger--just some residual sadness, and much joy.

Something about daddy 11/09/04

2011-03-11T08:27:00.003-08:00

In my dad's last 20 years he turned into a political conservative. But he didn't understand why a woman's right to choose had ever been an issue; was good to all people, and loved nothing more than to teach people things--never accepted money or gifts for teaching my friends how to understand and do their taxes--he was a well known and respected Manhattan CPA who could have commanded monster prices but was choosy about his client list. For one thing corporations had to be ethical. individuals had to capture his interest and he loved being around people in the arts. So despite his love of rightist politics we decided to keep him. He died thirteen years ago. I have often felt and been comforted by his presence since then.
.
He met my mom when they were teenagers. He was dirt poor, too tall and thin, and all my mom's girlfriends would ask her why she stayed with him. "He makes me laugh," was her only answer. Her friends' handsome boyfriends turned into fat post office clerks and things like that. My dad grew better looking with age and my mom taught him how to shop at Barneys. Later he had a suit manufacturer for a client who would make suits for him. He seemed to have a client for everything. As a girl I thought that all daddy's did.
I didn't miss my dad after he died as much as I had expected to because I had to keep him alive for my mom. Also though his death was quick--he spent five days in a coma, and that gave us time to say our good byes.
My mom had developed macular degeneration. She became increasingly dependent on my sister and I.

City life in the last century 11/19/04

2011-03-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

Explanatory note for all who don't know New York: Duane Reade is a huge chain of everything stores that were named for two Manhattan cross streets. Duane Reade is always made fun of, but life was much more difficult before it.
I used to live on 63rd Street off Fifth Avenue; in a huge studio that had seen better days. I had been planning to move to the Upper West Side (UWS) where I fit in perfectly. My father found this apartment in The New York Times, and begged me to take it. I felt out of place until I realized most people on the side streets were more eccentric then me. Life was incredibly inconvenient then.
My first years were the heady ones of Ford to City: Drop Dead Subway service was erratic, at best. For weeks there would be a 7:55 A. M. Double R train, and then it would no longer be in service. When I worked in downtown Brooklyn, and had to be at work, promptly at 8:30 A.M., my commute took almost an hour.
Con Ed and the phone company never took special circumstances into consideration such as walking around with the envelope for a month. A person paid her bill or didn't. There were two ways to pay a billâ€”by mail, or at a service center. It helped to be unemployed to do the later as the hours were 9-5, and the lines were long. I wasn't unemployed, but I was young and disorganized and many times would fear coming home to the dark without a phone.
There were no Duane Reade's, and no Korean groceries. Back in the late 1970â€™s and early 1980â€™s I had my choice of an expensive Gristedes that stunk of roasted chicken, and the rip off store where they never got my phone orders right, but delivered what they thought I needed.
I was always standing on line. Lines were common at the pharmacy, and in those pre managed care days only certain pharmacies had lower cost prescriptions. Aspirin, Tampax and all the other necessities of life cost me more in 1985 than they I pay for them now. It wouldn't have occurred to me to look for Liquid Plumber in a pharmacy. That belonged in WG Lemmon or Gracious Home, the two neighborhood hardware stores. I love movies, but they were a hassle. Standing, on long lines, in the ice cold or bitter heat, and praying for a good seat, was never my idea of fun.
I was always trying to modernize and improve my space. When I moved in it had a refrigerator that was one step up from an icebox. The kitchen floor hadn't been changed since 1950, nor did it look as if it had been cleaned too often. My electricity was always on the blink, and I lost the little light I had to the shadows of the (then) new ATT and IBM Buildings
The nearest laundry was at my nearest friends building. I wasn;t above taking a suitcase to my parent's house on Long Island. No, my mom wouldn't do it for me. I dreamed of owning a washer and dryer.
No matter how good the apartment cleaner was, it never seemed clean enough. I would paint, and then paint again. Still dust settled everywhere. I called it Trump White in honor of the person who was causing so much of the dust.
Whenever I bought something that had to be delivered from a store, I avoided giving my address until the end of the transaction. I had learned early that the price of linoleum, bought in Astoria, would be jacked up ten percent as soon as the sales person heard the names of the cross Avenues. The first time I saw a Home Depot I cried. It was inconvenient for city people, but Home Depot spelt equality to me.
I grew to hate all parades equally. It began with the St Patrick's Day Parade. I lived a block from the grandstand. My block would always be cordoned off. Every old lady, in a lime green polyester pants suit, would be waved into the street by the police. My hair was usually one of forty shades of red. By birth Iâ€™m half Irish. I never wore orange, but I always wore black. I was your average American IRA terrorist, just waiting for the opportunity to bomb whoever the Cardinal was.
I would be asked for ID. My ID would never be good enough. Even a passport. I didn't like being treated as an interloper on my own block, and would tell the police that. They would escort me to my building, to make sure, I really lived there. Once at my building things would go from bad to worse. Most of the people in my building had never learned to use the intercom and would buzz everyone in. Thatâ€™s when the police would smile and tell me that getting into my apartment was my problem.
During the worst years people would be in my building lobby smoking anything, drinking beer, and peeing. Most of my neighbors were ineffectual characters who had learned years before that St. Patrickâ€™s Day was an occasion to stay home and drink and drug themselves into even more of a coma than they were usually in.
When I brought up the idea of hiring a security guard for the day, they laughed. I lived on the lobby floor, they didn't. My first floor neighbors then were a crazy psychiatrist who later killed himself, and the first kept woman I had ever knowingly met.
One year a woman rang my door bell. â€œCan we use your bathroom? Weâ€™re with the parade.â€ Did I care? I looked out the hole and saw a woman with at least ten kids in full marching regalia. When I said sorry, the woman cursed me out.
I hated leaving my building during a parade. Every Sunday for about three months a year, I would walk out to my stoop which would be filled with people who really didn't want to move for me. Then I would try to cross Fifth Avenue with my bike. Give up on the bike, bring it into the building, and then try to cross again. I would have to wait for at least three minutes as people in the parade took precedence over neighborhood residents. It sounds stupid, but I felt violated. This was my neighborhood, my house and I had fewer rights than people who didn't live there. One year, at exactly noon, I woke up to hear Telly Salves sing God Bless America in Greek. I would have enjoyed that had I not been incredibly hung over and in need of much more sleep.
Don't get me started on production shoots. It was my street, and some P.A. would stop me from entering my building. Usually I really had to go to the bathroom or was waiting for an important phone call Producers learned to never cross a woman who needs her bathroom.
I knew as soon as I saw my first Duane Reade that my life would be changed forever. Unfortunately, my Duane Reade was on 58th Street between Madison and Park. Leaving my quiet street for midtown was never one of my favorite things. The crowds grew larger and more obnoxious, every year, and each street seemed closer to midtown. Every man acted as if he had a direct link to Donald Trump; every woman acted as if she owned the street when it was obvious I did.
I learned the best time to go to Duane Reade was eight AM. Saturday morning as it wasn't open 24/7 then. I couldn't believe the things I bought before Duane Reade I would have to go to four stores to buy the necessities of life. And I would pay three times the amount.
Then Korean groceries opened. They were open 24/7. Madison and Lexington had been dead at night except for some restaurants. The brightly lit Korean groceries made the neighborhood feel safer. They sold fresh flowers, and other nice things. Life gradually became much easier in New York.
In many ways my â€˜hood was extraordinarily convenient. I could walk almost anywhere in Manhattan within an hour. Nobody ever refused an invitation to my apartment. My womanâ€™s group would meet there every Saturday because it was equidistant to the Village, the Upper West Side and Queens. Biannually, I had huge parties. It was the perfect party apartment. Drinks in the kitchen, food in the large archway, and dancing in the big room.
The doormen at The Pierre would ask
me if I wanted to come in and make big money dating a resident. At the time I thought this was horrible. I never even asked how much money I would make, what type of resident I would date or what I would have to do. When they finally stopped asking me years later, I would spend hours at the mirror looking to see if I had suddenly gotten fat, and wrinkled.
My neighborhood was on a short downside when I moved. I was the first person to go to work in the morning and there would be people sleeping in the lobby. If I would wake them I would apologize and tell them to go back to sleep. One day I realized that they could have been crack addicts or just crazy and this could be dangerous. I would count the cheap ale bottles on my way to the Lexington Avenue Subway. I didn't leave because I was ready to leave.
I left because the new owners had succeeded in making it truly inconvenient. My new next-door neighbors presented themselves as models, but everyone thought they were cheap prostitutes. I thought that the doorbell rang too often for three women to actually have the time to begin and complete any act. Since then I've learned more about prostitution through films, ($10 hookers, Monsters Ball) and have come to realize they could have been prostitutes. Whatever they were this wasn't a healthy place for me to be living.
My hair cutter moved to 64th Street between Fifth and Madison less than a year after I left the neighborhood. I have watched my building become a showplace. I walk up the street and thinkâ€”I lived here, I really lived here for sixteen years.

Back in the 80's Daddy was in an MTV commercial

2011-03-11T08:13:00.001-08:00

From the Archives: I hope to be back tomorrow with something fresh! Then again maybe I need to clear my head.
Sometime in the mid 1980s
My dad, Max, a CPA calls me one day from his client/friend's studio penthouse at One West 47th Street. His client's a cartoonist and graphic artist who I have known since I was a child.
Max sounds perplexed but proud:
m going to be in an MTV commercial.
That's too cool, daddy. What are you
He interrupts before I can finish my question.
So what's MTV?
It's a TV station that only plays music videos. It has VJ'ss instead of DJs. Get it?â€
I have forgotten for a second that this is my father I'm talking to. He likes the world to fit his perceptions. If his perceptions don't fit, he changes the facts around until they make sense to him. I know that he's a brilliant accountant with the ability to quickly read, say a balance sheet, see the whole picture, and explain it. He calls himself an accountant. My mother, Marion, calls him a CPA. Most of his personal clients call him my business adviser or my business manager. He's in his 70â€™s and each time he thinks of retiring a new and more prestigious client drops his way.
Yet I wonder how he can be so brilliant at his work, and still perceive ordinary life so wrongly. He also believes that Nixon and Reagan are the two best presidents ever. Except for some Russian emigres he hates conservatives. Trying to understand Sam is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing. It just can't be done. Yet.Of course he didn't get my explanation of MTV. If my parents would get cable he could see for himself. But on principle they wonâ€™t. Donâ€™t ask what principle. They're a two person household with four TVs.
He sighs. No, you're wrong. There can't be a station that only plays rock music. An hour a day, I can see. But no station can survive by playing videosWhy don't you ask?
He won't. Admitting that he doesn't know what MTV is would mean that he's not in tune with pop culture. If Max doesn't like the answer he can't tell his client he's wrong. Max only tells his clients theyâ€™re wrong on matters relating to business and politics. I don't want to get into a fight over this
What are you going to do?
He told me that I was just going to hold a sign that says MTV and stand in for the real actor. But when the people from MTV saw it they wanted me.
He sounds a little incredulous. I smile because I'm sure that his client planned this the whole time. Max doesn't look or act shy but he is. Sometimes he's amazed at how his life turned out. He did the whole early 20th century, poorer than a Shul mouse Jewish boy bit. Marion and I are the only two people to realize that he's always on poverty alert. In his head he's still a boy in East Harlem.
Max's a handsome man, I guess. He's my father so it's a little difficult to see him objectively. In 1969 he grew a moustache, and itâ€™s remained black as his hair is graying so he kept the moustache. He has deep set eyes that are remarkably like mine though I was adopted, a small mouth like mine and large Slavic cheekbones that are also like mine. Only his nose is different; larger and with a bump. I have heard all the jokes, and no he definitely didn't sleep with my birth mother. My friends think that they're so funny.
Daddy's going to be in an MTV commercial and he hasn't even invited me to the taping. I gave up relationships with men in music a few years ago for attorneys with Doctorates in math or science. Now I seem to be going through a character actor and men who produce or are cameramen on TV stage. Once again Max tops me. Not that weâ€™re in competition or anything. He doesn't even know that Iâ€™m dating or who I'm dating. But I'm too happy for him to let this be anything but a passing thought.
Whens the shooting?
Tomorrow. They told me what suit to wear, and to bring two shirts one in pink and one in blue. Know what the best part is?
The hunky cameramen, I think.
I have no idea.
They're paying me. $250. I would have done it for free.
Did you call mommy?
She's not home.
I'm not home either. I'm a project manager for a litigation support company. It's a stressful job, and I used to be always reachable by phone for family members until I stopped answering my own line. I talk if I have the time or it's a real emergency.
The commercial turn out to be part of a series. Max's client's younger son plays the teenager or the expected viewer; Mrs. Havasi, the client's mother-in-law plays the â€œold lady;â€ and Max's the â€œsuccessful middle-aged businessman.
I know this because Max calls one day to tell me to look at The New York Times. Thereâ€™s a fawning article about the series. (Canner does op-art and other cartoons for it.)
â€œMrs. Havasi is younger than me.
I can't resist. As a child I was taught to read The Times with a skeptical eye. Max's a rabid newspaper reader who thinks that The Times distorts the truth. When he was â€œprogressive,â€™ it was regressive; now it plays fast and furious with the facts.
You know to never believe anything you read in the Times. Except maybe the obits.
Well, Pia, sometimes even they are right.
The commercials are nominated for Clio's. (They don't win.) Somebody from the TV show PM Magazine interviews Max. Itâ€™s in every market but the New York metro area. Nobody we know anywhere knows how to program a VCR.
â€œI was horrid in it anyway.â€
â€œWhy?â€
â€œThey asked if anybody followed me around asking for an autograph. Nobody ever has so I said â€˜no.â€™â€
I feel for Max I really do. But I would have said â€˜just my daughters. They run down the street with blank checks for me to sign. Then I would have held up pictures of me and Cara. No I wouldn't have been that tacky but
It's not that I'm in need of a job or a man, but just once I would like my father to introduce me to somebody who has a great job to offer or has a great job, is single, straight and looking. He loves to give us money but he would never introduce us around, and he knows so many people. Is he ashamed of us or just shy as Marion claims?
I don't have a VCR so I lend my copy to my mother's younger sister, my hippie Buddhist aunt Adele. If I have one adage in life, it's never lending anything you want back to somebody who has slept at the Dali Lama's feet. Being Max's daughter entitles me to be quirky, and while not anti-New Age (I'm sure that Yanni has some good qualities)I'm too New York, too cynical, too fast, and too in love with my own life to need Marianne Williamson, the Dali Lama, Gary Null, and everyone in between to tell me how to live my life.
Obviously Max knows that. People are always telling him how much they love my fierce independence. Many people assumed that I was going to be a daddys girl. I fought it, and now our relationship is one of equals. I know how much he needs me, and I'm beginning to believe that I need him also.
I meet rock stars like Iggy Pop; Max knows (and has kept me from meeting many times) Mick Jagger. True I have given up musicians but there's a part of me that is and shall always be star struck. It's Max's fault, of course, he brought me up
to expect the moon to fall into my hands if I want it badly enough.

How Diana Ross Changed My Life 11/29/04

2011-03-11T07:56:00.000-08:00

Diana Ross stands on the driverÂ’s side of her limo with her mouth frozen in a huge smile, and her right arm soldered into what could be construed as a wave. Her office is down the street from my mini-loft, and I see her most nights on my way home from work. I can never decide whether this is her way of recognizing me.
Perhaps she is standing giving a mass greeting, or she suffers from some syndrome that freezes her body. I ponder this each time I see her for the thirty seconds it takes me to walk to my building. But I would have heard as IÂ’m tuned into New York and/or music gossip.
I hate Diana Ross. Her friend, Ed Koch, the otherwise occasionally fabulous mayor has let her put Â“no parkingÂ” signs on either side of her building. 63rd Street, between Madison and Fifth, is a deceptively quiet street where nothing ever seems to happen. ItÂ’s a great place to live partially because people who insist on driving everywhere could always find parking, and canÂ’t bitch about the hour wait. Secretly, they love the hunt. IÂ’m a big proponent of banning private cars from Manhattan, but enjoy having company more.
Diana Ross is ruining my secret parking street as she almost ruined my birthday when she insisted on having that infamous concert in the park during a thunderstorm when young boys ran to Tavern on the Green to overturn tables, and frighten people. A new term will enter the lexicon that night wilding.
The boys wanted to take me to a club on the East Side that features Maria Montejo, a singer in drag, who looks almost as good in gowns as I do. Actually she looks better as she knows how to walk in stiletto's. She has tried to teach me but I'm hopeless.
We've agreed to go to the club the next night so that the boys can come to my surprise birthday party. It's going to be at my girlfriend, Lucia's apartment, and I've planned almost every detail as one of my talents is planning parties. If only I had planned to get to the Upper West Side earlier, but how was I supposed to know that people wouldn't be allowed to go from one side of the park to the other. Both Central Park South and Central Park North are cordoned off to traffic for too long.
My boyfriend has to work late, but IÂ’'ve seen pictures of the ring heÂ’s going to give me. ItÂ’s immense.
I canÂ’t get to the West Side until sometime in the wee morning hours. EverybodyÂ’s blitzed; IÂ’m shown PolaroidÂ’s of my birthday cake so I can see what I missed; my boyfriendÂ’s making out with some unknown girl who he will impregnate that night and marry. He wonÂ’t give her that ring.
He will call me every night for months and beg me to take him back.
Â“It wasnÂ’t anything. She was there and you were notÂ’t.Â”
Â“Should have thought about it then.Â”
IÂ’m nothing if not principled. Later I will realize that he was a good boyfriend who actually had money, values (though not that night) and loved me. I hold Diana Ross personally responsible for all that happened that night. Too bad she wouldnÂ’t give a damn if she had learned about it.
I spend a long time lamenting not accepting the boys invitation. It was the last year that they were all alive; and the last year before people begin joining "A" groups enmasse.
New York will lose some of its glimmer; stars literally will burn a little less brightly, and for the first time I won't blame myself for everything that will go wrong. No, it's all Diana Ross's fault.

How I began to be an adult 11/29/04

2011-03-11T07:45:00.000-08:00

Tried to proof this but it's stuck somewhere in HTMLland that is beyond my very limited scope.
The studio had found me three years earlier, when I took my parents to see the apartment, I had found across Central Park in the West 70Â’s. The Upper West Side was the perfect neighborhood for me then filled with people my age (boys, lots of young single straight boys) I could easily meet in the Laundromat, coffee shops, on the street, in my building, anywhere.
I was trying to make amends with my father, who had suffered my long drawn out adolescence not with silence or mortar, but with exasperation and sarcasm. At 25 I had finished college six months earlier, and was officially living at my parentsÂ’ home on the Island while I worked and saved money for an apartment in the city. Â“OfficiallyÂ” meant that one or two nights a week somebody would drive me home at three AM, or I would take the railroad and fall out exhausted for twelve or more hours.
Banks gave presents for beginning accounts then, and I knew that it was time to leave home when my bleary-eyed father presented me a set of Teflon pots and pans. He didn'tÂ’t like the apartment on West 75th Street. It was in the front of the building; garbage cans lined the area near the apartmentÂ’s window, and worst of all it was in a neighborhood my father hated. He bought a Times and circled an ad for a Â“lg studio, East 60Â’s, wbf, sep kit.Â” It was $300 a month--$50 more than the apartment on the West Side. The last tenant had moved there the year of my birthÂ—1950.
She was a madam who had run a profitable business out of the apartment. Soundproofing was half on and half off the walls, there were more telephone lines than I had ever seen at an office, the kitchen had last been updated sometime in the 1940Â’s and the linoleum was tinged with decades worth of dirt.
But it was a large kitchen, the archway that separated it from the living room was large enough to be a dining room, the ceilings were high, all three bay windows stunning, and the architectural bones were good. Even I could see its inherent possibilities. I had never heard of crown molding; my studio had it both just off the ceiling and near the floor. The later was a bitch to keep clean.
We made an appointment to see the owner, a white collar criminal lawyer, who knew my father, a CPA. My name wasn'tÂ’t allowed to be on the lease which I found strange as I had been signing leases since I was 20. Â“But this,Â” my father said in an effort to explain, Â“"This is the big time.Â”
There were certain things we didn'tÂ’t take into account. I was disorganized with absolutely no ability to organize space. It was a difficult apartment to keep clean for many reasons and I had no cleaning abilities. While there were three large closets they weren'tÂ’t modern and totally overwhelmed me. The building didn'tÂ’t have a Laundromat, nor was there one near my block.
The only supermarket was a Gristedes where I would tell the men behind the checkout counter what I wanted, and they would get the food for me. Everything was incredibly overpriced, and when I would buy things for the apartment such as new flooring the price would be jacked up after the sale when the clerk or store owner found out my address.
None of that really mattered. As I didn'tÂ’t really live in a neighborhood, I considered all of Manhattan to be my neighborhood, and learned the city better than most people ever do.
My apartment was dark, and at night with candles glowing, it looked wonderful. As it was over 40 feet long it was the perfect party apartment, with distinct areas for food, liquor and dancing nobody ever refused an invitation to 5 East 63rd Street. I lived in the center apartment on the first floor and nobody complained when the 100 or more people at my all night parties spilled over onto the street.
I had qualms about taking money from my father; I didnÂ’t want to be his possession. He only offered when I was fully employed, and I took his money with much hesitation. It felt as if I were being bought.
But as he had insisted that I take this apartment, I felt less guilty than I had when I had dropped out of college, and saved my money for an open-ended ticket to Europe and Israel and back to Europe.
He had beaten me to the travel agency and the clerk was all aflutter over the longish haired older good looking man with a moustache who had picked up my ticket. It wasnÂ’t the first time and wouldnÂ’t be the last time that my father had been mistaken for my lover. It was totally humiliating.
The more I prove myself to be a worthy adult, the more my father wanted to be involved in my life. If I had allowed him to he would have bought my groceries, cleaned my apartment (well, he would have paid somebody to do those things), gone out on my dates with me, and decorated for me. Fortunately my mother made him see reason (sort of.)
Once he brought over a client/friend, a graphics designer, who had a written and produced a Broadway hit that was currently playing. I had been offered various jobs that I would have taken in a heartbeat if my father had only told me about them. The one thing that my father insisted upon was that I find my own jobs.
My father's friend was entranced by the way I had decorated the studio. A huge muslin screen embossed with a palm tree separated the living area from the bedroom. My couch and chair and a half were upholstered with pink flamingos. I had two deco swivel chairs that were upholstered in a more sedate blush with small mauve rectangles, built in shelves held my collection of Oaxacan pottery; many books were in the bookshelves. It had a decidedly undecorated but stylish look. I was proud of it except when my father came over.
"This is wonderful. I love it!" My father's friend had always been given to hyperbole but in this case it made me happy.
"She has good taste?" My father asked that in an astonished voice.
"Better than good. Clever, witty and interesting. Exceptional."
"Oh, just like me," I couldn't help interjecting.
My father left in a trance. He had to process this new information. An internationally known expert on design had just pronounced my taste to be exceptional.
I hadn't been using the money my father put into my bank account each month as I made enough to pay for my apartment and expenses and was trying to begin saving for something. He had noticed that and was a little sad and a lot proud. My credit card had a higher limit than his, though when he found that out he immediately applied for an increase.
When we would have dinner together once a week, he had gotten into the habit of talking about his business problems with me. I was a good sounding board with good answers. Now he officially found out that I had good taste.
I called my mother to tell her that he just might have a heart attack on the way home. I was no longer his wayward child.

hippi Princess 8/13/04

2011-03-11T07:35:00.000-08:00

At my first college, the fun one, I was officially anointed Hippie Princess one night. My vintage black velvet gown was from Bogie's in the East Village where if I let Bogie kiss me I'd get two dresses for ten dollars. Bogie was a gross wet kisser, and even in 1968 it wasn't worth five dollars to me. I don't know where my tiara came from. I probably owned it. I was into clothes and accessories as a way of expressing my various persona's. Now I wear clothes from Talbot's. It's weird even to me. I think that it means I'm finally secure in my own skin.
The idea of me being a princess anything was alien to me then. Though through the years I've been called every variation of princess: princess perfect; princess of the night; ice princess--you get the picture. Generally I didn't consider it to be a compliment.
I liked the idea of being a hippie princess. In high school the closest I had come to a cheerleader was sitting next to one in class. I was the school hippie; my friend Karen was the school belated-beatnik. Karen was respected because of her extraordinary intellect. I almost fit in.
In my first college, I couldn't understand why I was so popular. My friends were prettier. I thought that it had to be my hair. My hair was wild; so wild it took on a persona of its own. I think people mistook me for my hair.
I came from the in between world. Women who came just before me knew that they were going to get married just before or after graduation, teach for a few years and then stay home with the kids. Women who came just after me knew that they weren't going to get married until after law school.
But I knew none of these things. It was easy that first year at school. I had a boyfriend. We broke up and I hung out with his friends. (He didn't go to school that year.) We made up; we broke up. Gradually we developed a rhythm and became rather good at it.
I think I thought that I loved him very much. Like all the men who were to be in my life his hair was long but controlled. (More than I could say for mine.) He wore nice neat corduroy pants, tees and flannel shirts.
My nineteenth birthday was the weekend of the moonwalk. We were going to see Romeo and Juliet with Olivia Hussey. I was spending the weekend at my parents' house. My dad called me down to his red burlap wall papered study:
"I don't understand you. You used to care so passionately about the world and life. Now all you think about is that hippie boy."
He screamed until he got it all out and I went up to my blue flower wallpapered bedroom that was covered with the cut-outs from sergeant Pepper, posters of Lou Reed, and The Stones. I was angry at my boyfriend and angry at my father and all people who claimed to be straight men.
When I went back to school, for the first time, it felt like we might not get back together. I was inconsolable the rest of the summer. Didn't even go to Woodstock though I could have gone by helicopter and posed as a nurse. Actually I didn't really want to do that so my depression served me well.

I felt embraced by my friends who always brought me chocolate. In my memories my dorm room that summer was a large hand planked wood and glass studio that stood alone in the woods.
I wore out two copies of Tom Rush's "Circle Game," because it expressed my feelings as I couldn't. Or wouldn't because my boyfriend told me that I was a better writer than he was and I had stopped writing.
Now he's somewhat well known and about to become more so, and I'm not. I'm happy for him; I wrote only the beginning of our saga, and it was not at all explored. In this case I might vote for an unexamined chapter.
But when I walk into B&N or Borders or somewhere and see his name and a dedication to a woman I like who isn't me. She's his second or third wife depending on whether you count the time he told me we were married, my sophomore year, for reasons that helped him. You do have to count our marriage in what would have been my senior year had I remained in school. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
For the record, I bet with the side that said our marriage wasn't going to last. Yes I bet against my marriage at my own wedding. And not for pennies.
****************************************************************************
This is not the man in the next story.